r/spaceengineers

I think the combat meta would be more fun if spaceships acted more like real warships in the ocean.

Right now, every ship, tiny fighter or massive battleship, shares the same flat max speed. Bigger ships almost always win against smaller ships, so there's little reason to build a small one when you can build a large one.

Here's my idea: Top speed is proportional to a ship's thrust-to-weight ratio in a given direction. A higher thrust relative to your mass means a higher top speed in that direction, scaling from one hundred meters per second up to three hundred meters per second. On top of that, ship mass applies a debuff to the top speed, so very massive ships can't easily spam engines to max out the speed limit.

This does two things: it naturally rewards building smaller ships that have more specialised combat roles, and it makes shooting out someone's thrusters matter more in a fight. For example, if you were chasing an escaping ship, shooting out all its thrusters will stop it dead, which is what happens with real warships. It also incentivizes shipbuilders to place functional armour to protect their thrusters.

It also means fighters and bombers actually feel like fighters and bombers.

None of this is real physics, but neither is a flat universal speed limit, this is just a more fun, functional meta.

I anticipate this being a problem for large ships, weapon damage may have to be adjusted to favor armored ships.

I am a player who likes to endlessly build, for many years I played exclusively singleplayer creative. I'd build a boat, tank, plane or car, fantasize about being able to use them for something, then went onto the next project.

After my first 1000 hours of this, I wanted to try my builds in multiplayer. My builds would get blown up, I faced a ton of build restrictions/agressive auto-cleanup and in the end the servers were quite lifeless.

After trying a few more servers, I eventually ended up on the dock of a player built city. behind me was a cargo ship, with a massive bridge in the background. The leader of the city happened to be online, and toured me around the city with her car. She refilled at the gas station, showed the boat being built at the drydock and gave me some free materials to start building myself.

I had stumbled on my first nation server. People start nations by making a land claim on a (usually earth-shaped) planet, then build a capital city there. People can't attack claims unless they first declare war on that nation, while the cities give you places to visit (and show off). Grids are manually cleaned up for safety, there's no build restrictions and missing grids are almost always recovered by staff

I can't play any other way anymore. Its so cool building an airfield people will actually land at, or docking at a friendly nation with your ship. Everything you build pays off, and you can always expand more. Its laid back, theres no rules on how or what to build and combat is completely optional. I hope that this post can help spread awareness that these servers exist, and maybe get people just as hooked as I am myself

My current nation server, gas station in a town I bought a 2nd house at

Place I docked at with my ship, free hotel

Big developed city with an iconic duo

Old nation server, military runway and dock

Cool bridge house in the arctic

Got the whole server to visit the carrier

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3786219564

With Warfare 3 being the next update for SE1 we need to discuss the problems with combat starting with the most important one.

Combat is fundamentally flawed and there’s no way to truly fix it. Due to the fact that ships are built and destroyed piece by piece combat will always be flawed. So instead of trying to completely fix combat let’s look at the flaws and see what is fixable.

What wins combat: There are 2 things that win any combat scenario in SE1. Speed and volume. Speed means that you can outmaneuver any enemy fire. Volume means either more ships or more shots it’s much easier to hit a fast moving target if you’re firing hundreds of rounds a minute at it.

What defeats the enemy: There are two things that need to happen to defeat an enemy. They need to stop moving and stop shooting. There are a few ways to do this from destroying the guns and thrusters themselves to destroying the power, conveyor, or fuel systems to just destroying the ship outright.

What happens after combat: While there are a few things happen after combat there are 2 things that are required to be done before the next fight. Repairs and rearming. Both of which take time and resources.

The Flaws with combat:

1. Speed is so important that slow ships aren’t just bad they’re guaranteed to be destroyed making them a completely unviable choice.

2. Volume of fire is so important that anything besides gatling guns and auto cannons are just going to be missing their shots making them pointless.

3. Repairs are a pain just plain simple.

How to fix them:

1. Give guns different roles. Making each weapon have a purpose would go a long way.

2. Make repairs easier. I actually have a way to do this in the form of a new Prototech welder. Instead of repairing right in front of itself it instead repairs in a beam instead. However it can only repair one block at a time and is power hungry though in can repair through blocks as well. Maybe even a turret version could be added.

3. Reverse the decoy nerf. Maybe make in only able to mimic a single system type at a time or something but make them actually useful.

The controversial addition: A shield. Now before you sacrifice me to Klang let me explain how I’d add a shield. First it’s gota be Prototech. Second it doesn’t give damage immunity instead it reduces damage by a large amount. Third the damage reduction is tied to speed the slower you go your shield get stronger faster and it gets worse even completely failing at high speeds.

But what do y’all think? What changes do you think should happen?

I was watching a tutorial video and part of this guy was using a large grid hinge to create a small gird interface that parts not important what is important is he got rid of the original hinge part then looked at the hinge base, pressed some key and this emote wheel looking thing came up so he could place a small head on it like that instead of having to go through the control panel. Anyone know what this feature is im talking about and what the keybind is to use it? Im on pc

https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers/pc/topic/56426-npcs-open-doors-when-anyone-can-open-setting-is-disabled-airlocks-venting-at-trade-staions

Check out this rotary welder

Link to the blueprint -

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3765360454

Great job Aki2205 👏

I need help to designe ships, I don’t know how to make a good designe for pve