feat(data): Afterburner/Accessory slot system #9968
Conversation
All afterburners take 1 afterburner slot, all thrusters provide 1 afterburner slot. Nothing else.
Zitchas
added
balance
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(Since there is no code this is only my personal opinion)
I really like the idea of this, I dont feel like it makes sense to have an AB without a thruster, we could push it further with bigger AB taking more slots and bigger engines giving more, but that could be left for later.
This makes it harder to spam AB without consequences, making the cost a little bit higher, which is a good thing, but doesnt make it too restrictive either. There could even be a special AB that doesnt require a thruster
We should probably update the desc of ABs to include that they need to be attached to an engine, and if ppl still get confused a later PR could make this outfit attribute be shown
| @@ -141,7 +141,7 @@ help "navigation" | |||
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| help "outfitter" | |||
| `Here, you can buy new equipment for your ship. Your ship has a limited amount of "outfit space," and most outfits use up some of that space.` | |||
| `Some types of outfits have other requirements as well. For example, only some of your outfit space can be used for engines or weapons; this is your ship's "engine capacity" and "weapon capacity." Guns and missile launchers also require a free "gun port," and turrets require a free "turret mount." Also, missiles can only be bought if you have the right launcher installed.` | |||
| `Some types of outfits have other requirements as well. For example, only some of your outfit space can be used for engines or weapons; this is your ship's "engine capacity" and "weapon capacity." Guns and missile launchers also require a free "gun port," and turrets require a free "turret mount." Also, missiles can only be bought if you have the right launcher installed. Afterburners and other thruster modifications require a thruster to be attached to.` | |||
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@endless-sky/writing-patrol
This line is the only user-visible text change. I'm not set on the wording used here, I just feel that there should be an addition regarding it.
Alternative:
"Afterburners and other thruster modifications must be installed after the thruster they are attached to."
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One option would be to write some kind of "afterburners require an installed thruster" boilerplate text and stick it on all afterburners, like the "this ship requires a bay and lacks a hyperdrive etc" boilerplate on fighters and drones or the "this is ammunition, you can't install it unless you have something to fire it from" boilerplate on missiles. That's probably better for clarity than just appending the extra line to the tutorial popup.
Something along the lines of
Afterburners cannot be installed on their own. They require a thruster to be installed first., but possibly slightly more eloquent.
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Yes, as per Hurleveur's comment, already planning on adding such a line. Do you think that would be sufficient?
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I think that would be sufficient to communicate the idea to players, yes. If it isn't, then we aren't communicating missile capacity or the concept of a fighter/drone well enough to the players currently either.
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Yes, as per Hurleveur's comment, already planning on adding such a line. Do you think that would be sufficient?
As a player I think it would be sufficient.
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Agreeing that the boiler plate is best way to go, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also include a reference in the tutorial teaching about it.
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Alright. I have added a boilerplate to all the afterburners except for the asteroid, which received an addendum noting that unlike regular afterburners, it does have the capacity to be installed by itself, as described in its description.
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Good point. I will add a line to the afterburner descriptions. |
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I'm not necessarily opposed to this change.
I do think though, that if afterburner-only builds are too strong, the approach we should be taking is to look at what the issue with afterburners' stats are that's making them overperform in a niche in which they aren't intended to, rather than simply imposing an artificial limit on them.
That aside, I'm not entirely sure it makes sense to simply have all afterburners take one slot and all engines give one slot. Does it make sense that you can mount a stellar-class afterburner on the end of an X1700 ion engine? Does it actually solve the problem of afterburner-only builds if you can circumvent the restriction just by adding a small thrust module or another similarly small thruster?
Maybe it'd be better to have some kind of afterburner capacity provided by thrusters, based on their size, and have afterburners consume an amount of afterburner capacity based on their size. That'd also provide a new dimension in which to differentiate both thrusters and afterburners - a thruster set could be relatively poor, but a better base to install afterburners on, or the reverse, or a particularly good afterburner could require more afterburner capacity than its size would suggest.
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I'm intrigue regarding such complexity suggested by having afterburner capacity, but I was under the impression that even the most simplistic 1 thruster, 1 afterburner lack of limitations was a long shot; never mind realitistic limitations based on size. I'm also dubious about the idea that 1 large thruster can stack, say, 4 small afterburners on it. An alternative option would be to ditch the current afterburner functionality entirely, and instead have it be strictly multiplicative. Afterburner A gives "current thrust" x 0.25 additional thrust, for instance. Install it on a big thruster, it gives bigger amount. Not sure if that's a good thing, but it is an option. For that matter, there's also the fact that chances are pretty good that an effective afterburner design for a plasma thruster is probably useless on an ionic or atomic thruster; and vice versa. As far as that goes, yes. I do think that imposing at least a minor cost on the pure-afterburner builds of requiring them to sacrifice a bit of engine space to get the requisite number of X1700 or small thrust module is a clear net benefit. It might not solve it entirely, but it tones down the extremes that can be reached by it. That's a positive for the game balance. In the same vein, I don't particularly want to completely eliminate things like this. Figuring out a clever high-performance with a bit of risk build is a generally a good thing, I just think that it would be beneficial to cap off the utmost extreme ends of it. As for the root problem: The entire purpose of afterburners is to enable expenditure of resources to enable an extremely high performance/space compared to standard thrusters. Most normal thrusters do not consume fuel at all, only energy and produce heat with moderate space utilization. Afterburners consume fuel and energy, and produce heat, with a low space utilization. Fuel is generally considered the main limiter of afterburners, and everyone regenerates that for free, it's just a question of how fast. Energy and Heat are the secondary limiters, and likewise everyone regenerates those, and they are pretty close to free (just some space costs) too. Looking at thrusters, they mostly all require energy and generate heat, too. And I know there's been talk of having a fuel-using thruster as well. Some people look at afterburners and consider all consumption aspects to be manageable regardless of magnitude, and only the actual thrust/ton matters. Others take it all into account in varying degrees. So to some extent, balancing is problematic because most of the goalposts aren't lined up. So at at first glance, afterburners vs thrusters is problematic because one is comparing "mostly constantly working thruster" vs "somewhat less constantly working afterburner." The only real difference is uptime: Which one can be run the longest before running out of resources? If one can get that to 100% for both, then the difference comes down to which one gives more thrust/space. If both can be installed infinite numbers of times without relation to each other, then they are both effectively just different kinds of thrusters. |
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I can't say I like locking afterburners behind engines. As someone who doesn't max my builds out, fuel tends to be a real concern for my afterburner-only ships. The only time I ever use afterburners is when I'm replacing an engine with them, because otherwise they take up too much space to be worthwhile since combat still tends to be a slugging match. An afterburner-only ship requires much more piloting skill than a thruster ship: you can't just trust autopilot to land for you, since it'll be really inefficient in doing so and might cause you to overshoot. Overall, I've never had the problem of afterburners being OP that more dedicated players seem to have. For me, installing an afterburner is a solution to give you more space where the trade off is having to pay more attention to how you fly your ship. If you remove afterburner-only builds, I can't see myself ever using afterburners, because I don't tend to max out ramscoop, and the afterburner doesn't accomplish anything that a thruster could instead. Sure, afterburners locked behind thrusters might be more realistic, but I think that would detract from gameplay. I'd be interested to see, actually, what percentage of the player base uses thrusters vs afterburners vs both on their builds. |
The intention of the AB is to be combined with a thruster and to give a boost in emergencies. You could make a case of the ionic AB being closer to an engine |
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I do very much agree that nerfing ABs into uselessness is not the proper direction; another way to limit them is the most appropriate means of keeping them actually viable at all. I also disagree that chopping large ABs entirely is a good move, as when -used as intended-, they do still deliver the intended result. At the same time, I also definitely think this should lean more into how @Quantumshark outlines it here, because, as proposed, this is a huge relative buff to small engines (letting you stack up AB slots) -and- really only a "smallest possible thruster tax" on AB only builds. I would go two steps further in this toned down middle ground alternative, though, and:
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My vision of an afterburner:
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*as an aside, this would also make more sense to do now so we can later include things like "turning boost" (or other similar alternative uses of these engine slots), which I'd love to see as an alternate competitor with reverse thrust for "back" functionality - let it kick in specifically with that key press for an extra tight turn around that could be utilized for kiting, jousting, and even landing in a hurry. |
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While this might make more logical sense, I'm not sure it solves the whole "running with only afterburners" issue. A Small Thrust Module is what, 9 tons? That's basically negligible when you're getting >50% outfit space gains by replacing your main thrusters with afterburners. |
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Thinking about what warp said in closing #9963, is there even an afterburner problem? Or do we just need to do a rebalance of the Korath and Remnant afterburners. Bellows definitely seems OP. I think the human afterburners tend to be pretty balanced. What if we increased the Bellows to 30 or so but actually decreased its heat and energy requirements? Then it would still fit with the Remnant's higher tier without being so easily offset. Not sure how to balance out the P/C class Korath afterburners, but I'm sure it could be done. |
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Bellows will be balanced in #9693 |
Not the ideal, it'd be better if there were bigger ones available for them, but such is life.
This moves afterburner-only from "completely non-sensical abuse & OP" to merely "eyebrow-raising combination". And by that, I mean it drops the total performance from the realms of "Feels like I figured out how to break the game" to "I figured out a really powerful trick." As an illustration, I just took a stock Behemoth, downgraded its steering to X2200, sold its thruster, and filled its engine space with Bellows. This results in the max speed of 6410 and an acceleration of 2962-4373. Now, if I do the exact same thing, but I have to maintain a 1:1 ratio of small thrust modules to bellows, Which works out to 4 small thrust modules and 4 Bellows. I had to use Delta to see in-flight speeds to get the numbers, so probably not 100% accurate to vanilla as the physics is a bit different, but in any case, the final top speed I achieved was ~2734. And that took almost 2000 fuel, and a decent chunk of time, too. I don't know about you, but a 6410 down to 2800 for an afterburner abused Behemoth is much more reasonable. More than fast enough to make players happy with the loophole they found; but still limited to a much more reasonable level. And that's the extreme case for players that have access to two different alien outfitters. Replace the "small thruster module" with an X1700, which is bigger; and the Bellows with any of the other afterburners, all of which are lower thrust; and that number will shrink quite a bit more. Sounds pretty effective to me. edit: Just to see what it looked like, I sold the 16 fuel processors and re-equipped the 4 heavy lasers. So now I'm back down to "normal Behemoth" fuel levels. A constant thrust up to max speed, then thrust+afterburner until I ran out of fuel got me up to just a bit over 2400. |
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2800 is still very fast, especially for a slow ship like the behemoth. The shield beetle can go at >5000 max speed and 1800 acceleration using the same turning values of around 15 (X2200 ion steering) and with 6 bellows + 6 small thrust modules. This is assuming the bellows balance changes are made, otherwise it would be almost 6000 max speed and 2000 acceleration. The reason why this is balanced is because that would use 468 fuel in one second, which is almost all of the shield beetle’s fuel, at the cost of turning. Without slots but with the balance changes, you could fit 11 bellows afterburners, which has 9300 max speed and 3000 acceleration, at the cost of turning and using all of the shield beetle’s fuel in 0.58 seconds. That would basically be only good for sending your ship flying into space with no way of stopping. With the behemoth, you could stop thanks to the reverse thrusters, but you would still have to navigate by reverse thrust to land. Basically, afterburners are already naturally balanced by their fuel usage, and don’t need an artificial limitation. There are a few, like the bellows and korath afterburners, that are unbalanced in master, but the bellows is going to be looked at. The korath afterburners come in size categories, so you could just fit a small thrust module and a planetary class afterburner rather than just the planetary class afterburner by itself, or for the shield beetle, a stellar class afterburner and a small thrust module for 3000 max speed, rather than just a stellar class afterburner. So this only really works for “balancing” small afterburners, and only really the bellows in particular, as human afterburners aren’t too much of a problem, at which point you might as well just balance the bellows, which is what is being done. |
While this might have an outsized effect on the Bellows due to its tiny size, the overhead of an additional tiny normal thruster is almost negligible for the larger Korath Afterburners (which are the ones most likely to be used standalone). I think an afterburner slot system would make a lot of sense if afterburners actually modified the underlying engine, say by applying thruster / energy cost multipliers. Something like that might be unbalanced without a slot system, with the way multipliers work in ES. But with the current afterburner system that just adds a constant amount of thrust, I'm not sure it's needed if we just balance the few problematic afterburners that spurred this issue in the first place (and probably tuned down afterburners as a group). |
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Something I feel is warranted in mentioning is that there has been a desire to focus more on what's currently within the game and to work with that before adding more mechanics or facets to balance the game around. I'm not sure overall restricting how the engine system works is going to fix the perceived problem. That said, I don't have a strong opinion on this quite yet, but I don't think this is a stand-in to adjusting afterburners or outfits in comparison to one another, but another way to go about outfitting overall, if that's the intention here. (Moved the other part of this comment to the other PR, sorry.) |
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So I suppose I'll ask what the intention is then. From what I've gathered, it could be one of three (or all) things:
If it's the first one, I think that the purpose of small ships is subjective. Currently, we have a mass PR pending review that we're interested in, that makes small ships faster and larger ships slower, giving more weight to their speed differential. We may have the Shield PR too with higher regen on smaller, slower on larger ships (which I also think is good). So, the general idea seems to be that small ships have a purpose with their speed, which is what these changes are working on fixing. If it's the second one, I think this is moreso in terms of what specifically the player does. No AI ship (excuse me Tehhowch) has a build that unnecessarily stacks afterburners or uses them in a way that would make a large ship ridiculously fast. Now, it can be argued that some afterburners are notably strong, and can still be tuned down, and still be strong, if that's their intent. I will admit, however, I'm somewhat indifferent here. If you do want to use the EV comparison, the few engine tuning outfits in EV would never put a large ship past the speed of a smaller ship, yes. So I understand where you're coming from there. My question is, is this a major concern with player builds in ES? I feel like these types of builds are rather rarely used, and in most cases are more as something silly rather than an intended advantage. If it's the third one, again, I feel like that we can still adjust very strong afterburners and they will still be strong. The Bellows + Korath afterburners are good afterburners, they're meant to be strong. However, if their numbers are very far away from that of others in the game and in comparisons, they can still be adjusted. If the adjustments don't change their comparative strength to other burners in the chart, then they still hold the same value compared to them. This is separate than whether or not afterburners define a small ship's purpose. Edit: So I've read through comments and this is the issue described (would be good to put this in the PR description):
So my question is similarly, how much outfit space is this requiring? You can't install them an infinite amount of times, and one takes up resources, so it isn't correct to say they're different kinds of thrusters. If you have a mix of afterburners and thrusters, and the fuel to use the afterburners, is there a point where you can sustain the afterburners without ever losing fuel? If so, how many ships is this possible on, and how much does this affect their builds? These are genuine questions, not me asking them to disprove the PR's purpose. As a side note, part of me is almost in agreement with other comments that have been stated around here - Afterburners are, in most situations, an enhancement of an engine's thrust, not an entirely separate engine that replaces a thruster, so I do see merit there. Is it enough to restrict ship builds? Not sure yet, to be honest. |
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The real issue and what I believe to be the inspiration behind this PR is players are swapping engines/thrusters for afterburners. The why is simple, big ships are too slow, but that's a different topic. As I already stated ABs are not and should not be stand alone engines. They are a supplement to an engine designed for emergency use, plain and simple, and therefore their output should in direct relation to the base engines output. The simplest solution is a percentage based one. Has anyone tried using a percentage yet to see what it looks like? Come on guys, now you can fire up those spread sheets. 😏 Will this PR cause issues for those that want AB only builds? Yes, most definitely, but it will also allow for future growth in the form of other currently un-thought of uses, and to me, the Pros far out weigh the Cons. If the current implementation of ABs is crap, get rid of it and build something better. You can polish a turd all you want it's still a turd. |
It's worth nothing that afterburners are built with the intent that that they can be used instead of engines. We've explicitly added code and mechanics to the game in the past so this is feasible. I still haven't seen very many cases where players go out of their way to stack only afterburners for efficiency to the point where its breaking engine balance. Players avoid builds like this because afterburners, like other outfits, use a finite resource. At some point, stacking afterburners will require space for fuel or fuel generation, which is already making your ship less efficient than if you were to have thrusters. I don't find it appropriate to refer this to a "turd" (and that's not really an appropriate comparison to begin with). This isn't a comparison of something bad vs good, it's a discussion on an outfit's intention and ships' relativeness to it. |
Fine, I'll put it differently. Sorry, it was meant as a humorous analogy.
Then don't call them afterburners if they are just a different type of engine, because that's what they essentially are. |
This is actually quite common, in large part because engine space is usually much more restrictive on ships than outfit space. With ramscoops and refueling modules it's not very hard to satisfy a ship's afterburner fuel needs (as long as you aren't thrusting 100% of the time), and afterburners have an almost ludicrously higher thrust/espace than regular engines.
You can see here that even the Ionic Afterburner, the weakest afterburner in terms of thrust/space, outperforms a typical Korath engine by nearly a factor of 2, all in a much more compact size. Its fuel needs are almost negligible in comparison, and can be met with ordinary outfit space instead of the much sparser engine space a ship using normal engines would be limited by. |
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In response to @xX-Dillinger-Xx:
I am strongly against just about anything that stops the combining of tech, as that's an important part of the fun of the game for many, myself included. Stopping the combination of different race's afterburners and thrusters is a huge no-no, in my eyes. ----------||---------- The idea of making the afterburner add multipliers, as pointed out by @Azure3141 and @xX-Dillinger-Xx, is an interesting avenue which ought to be explored. Thas potential, albeit it isn't without issue, as also mentioned by @Saugia; the use of an AB as much more than an emergency-only short boost is an explicitedly intended feature. Don't forget, the Korath Asteroid Class Afterburner is used as a means of making 'olofez be hyperdrive-able in their Search and Rescue variant, replacing the conventional thruster. An AB being used in place of a thruster isn't an unintended combination, it is an intended use case and even included in their description:
I also disagree on it's emergency-only use even beyond the thruster-replacing builds, as one can have afterburners like the Korath's asteroids which are low cost and low boost, for much more regular use, at a much smaller benefit; i also disagree on the Asteroid Class needing to be larger than the Ionic, as it is using much more advanced tech (although it is, currently, very very small). As such, i am in strong disagreement with making ABs associated with thrusters as done in this PR. It takes away from the game more than it adds in it's attempt at fixing the unbalanced nature of AB-only builds by removing flexibility, hampering player creativity by establishing that afterburners must only and can only be used as emergency boosts and nothing else, ever. |
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Also, Oxford's definition of "afterburner" is as follows:
It's not like we're even using turbojets, and the engines in-game are way more OP than anything you could expect from the technology they supposedly use. So why do we care about matching the dictionary definition of afterburner as closely as possible? |
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As a system that injects additional fuel or propellant to increase thrust at the cost of specific impulse, you could argue that they both basically work in the same way (and physically, injecting additional reaction mass into a drive works exactly the same way as a turbofan producing more thrust than a turbojet by using the same amount of power to push larger amounts of air at a lower velocity, just with the caveat that you have to carry that extra mass instead of just using the ambient air. You can get this directly from the kinetic energy and momentum equations, where you see that KE scales with the square of velocity and momentum scales linearly with it, so for the same power you'll get much more momentum flow aka thrust by moving more mass more slowly). But realism aside (gasp), I think there's a bit of flaw in the way afterburners are set up in that they directly produce thrust while also being essentially engine sized, albeit smaller. You can more or less boil them down to just more space efficient engines that also consume fuel, which makes balancing them revolve almost entirely around how much fuel is valued. And the fact that they take up a significant amount of engine space in a system where engine space is already at a premium means that you might just be forced to downgrade your thrusters to fit an afterburner, so you're paying the double cost of both fuel and a reduced baseline thrust. While this last point isn't necessarily a problem (tradeoffs are good!) I think it was one of the factors that contributed to players not really using afterburners much, which led directly to the massive buff they got to both thrust and fuel consumption. I wonder if we might be better off with, instead of slots-per-engine for afterburners, giving them some sort of afterburner capacity equal to the amount of engine space they take up, and having afterburners use that instead of engine space (would probably want to shrink them all as well). That might mitigate the engine space bottleneck all ships currently face, but I'm not sure it's the most elegant solution As for the currently single (as far as I know) instance of a ship variant relying exclusively on afterburners, seeing as that's a fairly recent and isolated addition, I wonder if it might just be better to treat the Asteroid class AB as a fuel consuming engine, the way all afterburners are currently set up as. |
Azure, that's a very elegant solution. Keeps current features (fuel-using engine), makes a (i believe almost entirely) "ungameable" limit to afterburner only builds, and as a plus, mitigates that bottleneck, making ABs use only the less valuable general outfitting space. Neat! |
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I'm not really too enthusiastic about it because I think another capacity attribute to worry about is a bit unnecessary. Honestly, just using thrust multipliers, thrust energy multipliers, etc, as well as maybe an afterburner fuel multiplier to go on top of the base afterburner fuel consumption (to discourage stacking) might be the better solution. |
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A) If an afterburner (such as the Korath asteroid one) are designed and used as being a thruster-that-consumes-fuel replacement for thrusters, then it should be reclassified as a thruster that consumes fuel. It is, in contrast to our existing thruster set, more of a rocket and less a motor, but that's fine. Diversity is good. There's nothing that says that all fuel-consuming-thrusters need to be classified as afterburners, after all. We could even leave it called an afterburner, and just adjust its description to note that it is called an afterburner due to its similarities and fuel consumption, but it is a fully self-contained thruster and thus is treated like one instead of like an afterburner. It introduces a bit of confusion, but it retains full compatibility; and doesn't break anything. B) Swapping from a slot system to a "accessory space" that the afterburner takes up a varying amount of depending on its size sounds quite interesting. It is more complex, but does allow for people to opt for using a smaller-than-maximum-size afterburner in conjunction with other sorts of thruster modifications if they so choose. Greater flexibility in that regards is good. c) Not so fond of the idea of allowing people to get a big thruster and then stack 4 afterburners on it, though. That brings back the problem we have with thrusters themselves, that bigger thrusters have to be better than small ones, because if this wasn't the case, everyone would just stack up small ones. That could be alleviated, however, by careful value assignation. For instance, have thrusters provide an accessory slot ranging from 0.76 up to 1.5 depending on size, and then give afterburners a value that range from 0.76 at the small end to 1.5 at the huge end. That ensures that they can't be stacked, but does allow smaller afterburners to be used as a tradeoff if the player wants that extra slot space to use for as-yet uncreated outfits. D) Removing afterburner's engine space requirement seems quite appropriate if the afterburners are explicitly attaching to a thruster instead of being a stand alone outfit. I could even see removing the outfit space requirement; or at least significantly reducing it. Probably shouldn't be removing outfit space entirely unless there was more of a thruster-accessory-ecosystem, though, otherwise it becomes a "Well, of course we have the biggest afterburner our thruster can handle? What else would we do with that space?" Of course, I would very much like to see such an ecosystem, and creating space for it could encourage it to develop. |
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The issues associated with stacking and space filling are why I'm leaning towards thrust multipliers and afterburner fuel multipliers as a way to balance stacking. |
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@Azure3141 |
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OK, as per earlier suggestions, I have added a boilerplate to most of the afterburners:
With the exception of the Korath Asteroid-class afterburner which specifically calls out being designed to be used stand-alone in its description, so it received the following addition in place of the above boilerplate:
I have also removed the slot requirement on the asteroid-class afterburner. |
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Unless there's a strong interest in actually renaming the asteroid class afterburner to reflect the fact that it is a compact fuel-burning thruster instead of an afterburner right now, I'd say that is something that can be left for a stand-alone PR. As for the state of things: Right now, this purely introduces an afterburner slot that is provided at a rate of 1 per thruster, and consumed at a rate of 1 per afterburner, with the asteroid-class being the exception. Azure has expressed an interest in ditching the engine space and slot requirements of afterburners in favor of having thrusters give a variable amount of afterburner space, which is consumed by the afterburners. This would restrict people from installing giant afterburners on tiny thrusters. There's a couple ways that this could be done. I personally like having this refinement, but I do not know the general sentiment is such that I should implement it, or not. I'm inclined to do so, as I both like it and it provides a mechanism for allowing people to deliberately pick smaller afterburners so they can use that extra accessory space to fit other kinds of thruster modifications. (while ensuring that the amounts are calibrated to prevent stacking multiple afterburners on one thruster) |
Hallucination, Asteroid, and vyu-Ir
This reverts commit bcac5e6.
Would the ability to use a handful of small afterburners rather than just one on a large thruster actually be problematic? If you're using most of your engine space on a big thruster, you're already fairly heavily limited in terms of how much space you've got left for afterburners. I don't think the ability to install, say, two volcano-class afterburners rather than one with an A520 thruster would really be an issue. |
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We've already got the "bigger versions must be better in most if not all ways because otherwise why bother having them at all" problem with thrusters, we don't need to enable continuing to have that problem with afterburners. If the 1:1 ratio of afterburners to thrusters is maintained, that enables a wider variety of potential outfits. Likewise, once this mod space exists, people can create other sorts of things to use it. 1 thruster + 0 or 1 afterburner + mods that affect one or both of those is quite a bit more interesting than 1 thruster + 1 or more AB. Also, since we're already talking about scaling amount of space for AB/mods based on engine size, I don't really see any benefit to adjusting the values to allow multiple ABs. Not to mention, 2 smaller ABs instead of 1 is just kind of unimpressive, anyway. |
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Like I already said, being able to add more then 1 afterburner per engine doesn't make sense for real life technical reasons. This effects the immersion level of players that know that. I know how much people hate it when people like me bring up realism, but the more real, the more believable and that allows the player to stay immersed in the ES world. What breaks that is when well known real life technologies are used or described incorrectly. For me, and I'm sure others, my thoughts immediately go to "well that doesn't make any sense", and now I spend more time thinking about that then the game itself. Obviously we can't make everything hyper realistic or then it becomes a sim and not a game, but we should try our best to keep it as believable or explainable as possible without going to far in the wrong direction. If you want them to be additional rocket thrusters that can be stacked then change the name. "Rocket Thrusters" is a better fit for what we are currently calling afterburners. |
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last I tested it escorts do not use afterburners unless in an afterburner only build. so if my lest test is still true this change would eliminate the ability to use afterburners on escorts. |
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There are still some ships that will have negative slot space if this PR is merged, for instance, the ship you fight in the free worlds epilogue to unlock the plasma repeater is an afterburner only ship, along with the already mentioned olofez. As far as I can tell, those are the only two ships that will have negative slot space.
Balance
Summary
By request, this is strictly the afterburner section of #9963 , the engine slot PR. People have pointed out to me that while there may be some challenges with the overall engine slot system, they like and support the idea of the afterburner slot system as described therein. So, here it is.
Note: I have renamed it the "thruster accessory slot" to reflect the fact that while right now only afterburners use it, I hope that there will be other outfits in the future that take up all or part of these slots to modify the thruster they are attached to, just like the afterburner does.
Note2: This does not touch code.
Details
Usage examples
"thruster accessory slot" 1Negative is using up a slot, positive is adding a slot. Can be decimals, but this PR only utilizes integers. Smaller outfits that affect thrusters could be smaller.
Testing Done
Played the game with it.
Save File
This save file can be used to test these changes:
Any pilot, any ship, anytime, anywhere. Doesn't change any ship stats, so won't interact problematically with ships. Other than ships that start off with more afterburners than they have thrusters. Which exists, and will be resolved shortly.