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Feedback Space exploration is great, but

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by tehcavy, Jun 9, 2017.

  1. tehcavy

    tehcavy Ketchup Robot

    Mechs

    I'll say it straight: I'm disappointed with mechs. They require an incredible amounts of grind to afford, I can compare their handling only with piloting a spaceship in Space Engineers while holding the keyboard with your teeth, their stats ain't all that great, their hitbox is too large for their squishiness, you can't do much from inside of them aside from shooting or mining at incredibly slow speed, on ground they somehow manage to be both OP (high damage and health count) and useless (horrible accuracy, can't fit into most doors, even at top upgrade slower than player), and art team probably took a leave when they were designed (Human and Glitch mechs are skips on legs, Occasus, Miniknog, upgraded Glitch and Apex mechs are essentialy upsaled helmets, Lilodon and Shockhopper are copied from other mobs, and I don't even have a clue what Protectorate, USCM and Novakid mechs are supposed to be).

    I also want to mention that Chucklefish once again hinges your progression on a random event, where no matter how skilled you are, your advancement still hinges on a lottery. Of course I'm talking about randomly created mech blueprints, and holy hell, I already have two copies of Intrepid legs, two Zero boosters, one Lilotron and a bunch of other duplicates, can I finaly have a decent gun because I'm tired of running jetting around with Tommy Guns at tier 5 for hell's sake.

    As a conclusion, I want to point out that since mechs do not consider your armor, your augments and your buffs, it is actually quite possible to deal more damage on foot than inside a mech. Make all D.Va jokes you want.

    Space encounters

    Fights with space monsters actually reminded me, in a good sense, of fast-paced aerial dogfights with bosses like Skeletron Prime, Fishron and Moon Lord in Terraria. And I also liked the idea of a mob who's only job is to make sure you won't run away from fight (even if it's projectile walls for whatever reason cause my FPS to plummet). However, relatively small size of most mobs, mech's huge hitbox and the fact that most ranged mech weapons can't hit the broad side of space barn makes most encounters incredibly frustrating.

    Then there is also the fact that there is only 11 unique monsters, two of whom are different flavours of a turret (and are extremely small to boot), two are "melee" mobs that try to ram you and the only difference between them is that one of them splits into smaller mobs, three of them are specific to certain dungeon parts, and two are just different varietes of suicide bomber. This serves to make absolutely every encounter almost identical, and I can't help but think that Chucklefish design team is creatively bankrupt.

    Ships, stations and outposts themselves are a pretty standart microdungeon fare, I only wish they were larger and contained more varieties of loot and enemies. Though it seems that they managed to teach Tiled how to make colored blocks, and there are several uncommon dungeons to keep you interested. Have you seen cultist ship, for instance, or a Protectorate base?

    Trading system is lackluster, though. Five kinds of traders, five kinds of items, all of them cost 100 pixels, you can buy and sell them only one by one. You won't make a living off that even if you try, and actually earning any decent amount of money requires more effort than any other cash-generating ploy in game. Sid Meier's Pirates! from 1987 had a better trade system (to the point you can even stop pirating altogether and earn money by trading in cities), and it wasn't even the focus of the game.

    Stations

    So we finaly can build space stations, and even customise them. However, there is a major flaw in them. Their hull is not alterable.

    First, in the event of mishap, you can't replace an accidentially installed piece. Hell, you can't even edit name and description once you set up. So any mistake can basically ruin your station's appearance forever.

    Second, it basically acts as a straightjacket for building. Don't get me wrong, this modular structure is probably a godsend for people who don't have any ideas about external structure of their future base, but I'd frankly prefer a handful of indestructable blocks, teleporter, gravity controls and the rest of empty, unclaimed space to work with. Here, I can't even change the color of the hull. Of course, I could've set up shop in asteroid belt, but whoops - they have neither gravity nor air, and you lack ability to set them up, even within a really limited bubble.

    Another important factor is the price. Sure, I've already mentioned that 1.3 is full of grind, but the stations take it to horrifying levels.

    station.png

    Consider a station in the image above. It contains 1 Large Core, 4 Cross Junctions, 4 Corridors, 4 Shafts and 4 Corner pieces. Care to guess how many materials would be required for this station?

    1130 Titanium bars, 1480 Golden bars, 820 Silver bars, 320 Glass panes and 2600 spools of Copper wire, or, if you wish, 520 Copper bars. Let's put those numbers into perspective.

    Turning those materials into Titanium Panels (50 per bar), Golden (20 per bar), Silver (30 per bar) and Glass (10 per pane) blocks and Copper Roofing (50 per bar) would yield 139,900 blocks. Just shy of three and a half full inventories, and more than enough to cover planet's surface, and definetly enough to reach Asteroid biome several dozen times.

    The total worth of all assembled materials sans Glass is 184,600 pixels. That's a 92 thousand pixels you would recieve by refining them. And if you intend to buy materials from Ursa Miner, it would cost ten times the base cost of all items, so you would need to shell out 1 million, 846 thousand pixels. Albeit, using Foundry tenant to purchase your materials would reduce the cost to still impressive 1,661,400 pixels.

    Bottom line is, I can't call station's material requirements anything other but an extortion. Some might point out that this property might make them good community projects for large servers, but I'd like to ask those people a question, if you're willing to go for community projects, why, of all possible things, you should choose a station that would require enough resources to make a convincing replica of Hive World from Warhammer 40,000? And that's not even considering how a station's indestructability limits your ability to build?

    Navigation

    Navigation screen takes the worst features of Mass Effect galaxy screen. Well, maybe not the probe mining, but for the rest resemblance is uncanny. Travel on average takes noticebly longer than it used to, ironicaly not in the least because of time spent navigating the navigation screen. For whatever reason I can't look at planet's moons untill I enter the orbit myself, thank Cultivator that's not the case for orbiting ships. And I can't bookmark planets/station I haven't visited yet, again for some unknown reason.

    Making cost of traveling anywhere flat 100 fuel simplifies the logistics slightly, but makes fuel worth even less, since in 1.2 ~200 fuel was about an average amount of fuel needed to go to nearby system. Engineers and mechanics are now nerfed into the ground, the former slightly increase your travel speed, which is all fine and dandy but you already spend more time digging through menus than flying, the latter now decrease your fuel consumption and have diminishing returns; first makes the engine 10% more efficient, the second adds 5%, the third - 2.5%, etc. Any person with a little knowledge in mathematics will say that it essentialy caps benefits at 20%, and using 90 or 80 fuel instead of 100 doesn't really do much (how much it saves, again? A hundred-ish pixels per flight?).

    Overall

    I constantly had a feeling that I'm playing some poorly tested mod instead of an official update. Honestly.

    Well, at least there is finally a fix of much needed sci-fi blocks and furniture, so here is that. Waiting for fixes and balance patches.
     
    Last edited: Jun 9, 2017
  2. MysticMalevolence

    MysticMalevolence Oxygen Tank

    Not to mention the time it would take to refine all of those ingots.
    I don't have the maths done off of the top of my head, but it's a lot of time spent staring at a smelter menu.
     
  3. Jerln

    Jerln Oxygen Tank

    I agree with almost everything you said, tehcavy, except for the controls of the mechs. I always use the Hammer Mech Boosters (which have the highest maneuverability) and can control it extremely well, to the point that the large hitbox has rarely caused me problems.
     
  4. Photoloss

    Photoloss Industrial Terraformer

    So basically /spawnitem, wait for mods and hope the space encounters never contain lamp posts. Wait, scrap that last one, the mech death explosion is barely large enough to tag YOU. At least those evil, evil exploiters on ilovebacons will be denied cool viable mechs and will have to stick to instakill levitation staves instead :nurutease:

    On the plus side the actual encounter structures are great, lots of new furniture and my lava-to-fuel transmuter actually serves a purpose now.
     
  5. tehcavy

    tehcavy Ketchup Robot

    Good point. Every ingot takes 0.15 seconds and other items are 1 second, so you'd need 1432.5 seconds total, or almost 24 minutes of smelting.

    It's a long way to best boosters. Sure, I don't have problems too since I made Zero boosters, but before that it was hell. And the fact that due to random nature of blueprints and salvage drops I for the longest time had the lowest tier booster didn't help either.

    Exactly my point, space stations are simply not affordable without admin mode, and mech parts are uncommon and needed in large quantities. New furniture, plating and (most) dungeons are cool, of that we're in agreement.
    And hacking overpowered items is actually easy and can be done in this version as well.
    What's the deal with lampposts?
     
    Last edited: Jun 9, 2017
    Blevruz likes this.
  6. Photoloss

    Photoloss Industrial Terraformer

    I'm just peeved at their implementation of mechs, which makes them virtually impossible to customise via admin commands. You know, the cool creative stuff, if you just need invulnerability and flight you can get that without a tin can anyway. Lamp posts
     
    kittentamer and Noobgalaxies like this.
  7. NiamhNyx

    NiamhNyx Phantasmal Quasar

    I dont really mind this to much since it is really easy to get all these resources. My only storage planet that did not get reset by 1.3 (stupid bugs) only has about 1/20th of what i originally had. What I have left is over 67 billion pixels compressed. over 70,000 of every refined material. 100 boxes (240 slots each) full of random decorations, the pixels were the only thing that took me a while. To get ore for the refined metals, you can easily get 100 bars worth of ore in less than 10 minutes.
     
  8. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    I will agree that the Navigation UI needs serious work.

    I made a thread about it here: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/navigation-ui-desperately-needs-some-tweaks.133910/

    Now, I don't agree with you about the mechs and mech combat, but... I will say something about parts acquisition:

    The RNG of the blueprints is mildly annoying, yes... but dude... have you seen the later mech parts and what they cost? some 40 salvage of one type PER PIECE? Dude, that's HOURS of grinding, I'm lucky I see 1-3 of any specific part per 5-10 minute run of clearing everything in the map. And I'm supposed to get 40... to make 1 mech part? lol.

    And yes, the Space Station rooms are way too expensive, although... you can mine asteroids and get ludicrous amounts of ore, BUT you need one of two RNG spears that have a secondary that propels you through space. If you find one of those, space stations are easy. There's also a better mech mining tool, but again, RNG.

    Or, yanno, Frackin'Universe will solve all of your troubles. Either with Bees! or the craftable spears that have momentum skills. Especially Flightfire, lol.

    I think pretty soon we ought to change the name to Stargrind. But hey at least CF adds some really nice modding tools to the game, lol. It's kinda a shame that the vanilla iterations need mods to fix their problems. Ah well. Always was a modder's game.
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2017
  9. tehcavy

    tehcavy Ketchup Robot

    I've mentioned grind. And this always was a problem with Starbound either way, with this approach CF might as well make a MMORPG (see also: Figurines drop rate and RAM sticks drops). I might end up just making a mod that halves mech parts requirements, because I have better things to do that kill same six mobs a hundred-ish times.

    And FU just gives me a headache, I've always been of opinion that if I need a spreadsheet to play a game, it's either Dwarf Fortress or not worth the effort. I might try once again when I have some more free time though.
     
    STCW262 likes this.
  10. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    A spreadsheet for what....?

    Other than armors (there's a LOT of armor, lol) I never really thought I needed a spreadsheet for anything? But that's just me I guess.

    And RAM Sticks are super easy to get now thanks to mech combat, I've probably got like 20+ of them already in my newest playthrough and I'm barely at Titanium Tier. I don't even need them yet. But yes, they were annoying back in the day.
     
  11. Kidou

    Kidou Void-Bound Voyager

    A friend of mine suggested that perhaps it was intended for the Stations to be team efforts. And the large core is probably way more space than you'll ever need. I certainly didn't need it when I realized just how ridiculously huge they were.
     
  12. NiamhNyx

    NiamhNyx Phantasmal Quasar

    Well, I am building my station wrong then >.< I placed 23 large core that I am currently customizing.
     
  13. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    That seems kinda silly in a game that's mostly Single-Player with Multiplayer Enabled.

    That kind of thing would be more at home in an MMO or Semi-MMO.
     
  14. tehcavy

    tehcavy Ketchup Robot

    And no, Large Core isn't that big, I routinely make buildings three or four times larger than that.

    EDIT: And there goes another mod, this time for those who prefer extensions to building by hand - Cheaper Stations, which halves price of every extension.
     
    Last edited: Jun 12, 2017
  15. scaper12123

    scaper12123 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    I think the mechanics behind mechs are alright, although it takes way longer than it should to get to the end of an anomaly and, for all that effort, I expect at least a brass trophy. Plus I've gotten far too many duplicate designs. No, game, I don't need a fourth copy of the sleek mech booster. I know how to build a sleek mech booster, thanks. I don't need a reminder. The game mechanics don't require me to have a reminder. I have the blueprint. I have it. I HAVE IT!!!
    Also, it would be nice if there were more cosmetic options for mech components, just so I don't feel like finding older mech blueprints isn't such a waste.

    I don't care so much about how many mobs we can encounter. What really matters is what those mobs do. I think there's enough unique mechanics for space mobs for it to remain interesting, but more mobs would be nice.

    Stations are way too expensive and I don't know why anybody would bother. Pls nerf and, yes, pls let us customize hull. Also, expand the trading system? Like making deliveries between specified stations? That would be interesting.

    Navigation isn't that bad honestly but going from high orbit to low orbit around a planet either takes too long or uses the wrong animation (it looks like your ship should slowly reduce its distance as it orbits rather than going straight down). My only wish is that there'd be a maximum length of time you take to navigate across the system. Maybe upgrading the ship can make it move faster?
     
  16. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    @scaper12123 : Certain Crew (either Mechanic or Engineer, forget which) DOES make the ship go faster.

    And at least they normalized the time it takes to fly between systems, lol
     
  17. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    About using Mechs in planets, there's one big factor that was left out: ENERGY CANNOT BE REPLENISHED IN PLANETS.
    As for poor-looking mechs, there's also the Venturer mech body, which just plain looks really ugly.
     
  18. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    The venturer (Human) body is ... plain and basic but functional. Just like the Human ship, and everything else the humans have.

    That's a common trope in games that have multiple species -- the humans get the basic "boring" but functional stuff while everybody else is all flashy.

    And uh, the Felin mech body isn't that much different, and it's still good. I actually like the venturer body to be honest, compared to some of the other races lol. The avian one I thought was kinda weird looking.

    EDIT: Doesn't the Mech Repair Gun work? I've not tried it yet.
     
    MysticMalevolence likes this.
  19. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    I will say I don't have much trouble controlling my mech even in combat, since the jump/spacebar slams the brakes in any direction. Not a lot of drifting.
     
  20. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    I just figured that out the last time I played and my mind was blown. I was like "I DIDN'T KNOW/EXPECT THIS!"

    It's awesome. If I had only known that ahead of time.

    That, with Maneuverability 3+ Boosters... the Space Bar is your friend and helps you dodge, weave, and dance around stuff quite easily. I can only imagine what Maneuverability 5 boosters are capable of. *drool*
     

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