[QUESTION] What is the use of ground vehicles in survial?

I was recently asked this on the discord so I wanted to ask you, Tsuna (and offer up a space for more constructive debate) what the purpose of mechs and hovers will be in survival.

I said that both could bridge the gap between on foot and ship that exists in survival mode but I couldn't really come up with why you might want to build them after you get spaceships (besides being awesome). I'd love to hear what you have planned for balancing mechs/hovers and making them actually effective in survival (one idea ive seen is nerfing some aspect of ships like fuel efficiency when in atmo encouraging the use of ground vehicles)

I always thought it'd work well if on planet it balanced out like

Wheeled Vehicles ((I've heard this mentioned, dont know if it's officially planned. if not we can merge it in with hover vehicles)): Pro: energy efficient as hell. Less concerned with weight. No need for thrusters (the wheels themselves generate their own push). Cons: terrain is an issue, how it has to steer can be restricting.

Hover Vehicles: Pro: Go over water, ignores a lot of terrain issue. Cons: Need thrusters to reduce drift. Too much weight = more hover thrust = more power use.

Mechs: Pro: Walks over small terrain issues. Strafe/run/jet dash/dodge? Something to make them maneuverable in a different way. Cons: Bit more consideration in building. Weight on joint rotors means need to be mindful. Tends to be larger and slower in comparison to other options.

Fliers: Pro: it freaking flies and alot of the game "meta" will be built around them. Cons: No special considerations to fuel/weight/power, is just the standard for all of them. Stacking debuff based on size class.

This gives each an important role without stepping on the others toes.

With regards to flier debuffs. We already have a "size class" things with ships based on actual size (though some are FAR more in favor of a mass system). Turrets can already use this to dictate what they shoot at. So piggybacking off that. What if size class 0 ships have no atmo' debuff and function as-is. But every size class up gets a 15%-20% thrust/turn debuff (not power use or heat so peoples ships dont just short out). So a "size class 1" is 15% debuffed in speed and turning. A "size class 2" ship would get a 30% debuff. So on and so on. This makes ground vehicles actually useful as people wont just take 300+m ships into atmo all the time (doing so opens them up to smaller fighters flying into their shield bubbles since they cant turn much. plus the time investment of moving that slow better be worth it). If people can bring larger ships in with no penalty or consideration, it makes ground vehicles and bases useless.

This also incentivizes orbital infrastructure and ferrying things to/from the surface but doesnt require it.

I always thought it'd work well if on planet it balanced out like

Wheeled Vehicles ((I've heard this mentioned, dont know if it's officially planned. if not we can merge it in with hover vehicles)): Pro: energy efficient a/f. Less concerned with weight. Cons: terrain is an issue, how it has to steer can be restricting.

Hover Vehicles: Pro: Go over water, ignores a lot of terrain issue. Cons: weight to thrust? so make it way too heavy the need for more hover thrusters and therefore power use?

Mechs: Pro: Walks over small terrain issues. Strafe, jet dash/dodge? Something to make them maneuverable in a different way. Cons: Bit more consideration in building. Weight on joint rotors means need to be mindful. Tends to be larger and slower in comparison to other options.

Fliers: Pro: it freaking flies and alot of the game "meta" will be built around them. Cons: No weight/power bonus/considerations. Stacking debuff based on size class.

This gives each an important role without stepping on the others toes.

With regards to flier debuffs. We already have a "size class" things with ships based on actual size (though some are FAR more in favor of a mass system). Turrets can already use this to dictate what they shoot at. So piggybacking off that. What if size class 0 ships have no atmo' debuff and function as-is. But every size class up gets a 15%-20% thrust/turn debuff (not power use or heat so peoples ships dont just short out). So a "size class 1" is 15% debuffed in speed and turning. A "size class 2" ship would get a 30% debuff. So on and so on. This makes ground vehicles actually useful as people wont just take 300+m ships into atmo all the time (doing so opens them up to smaller fighters flying into their shield bubbles since they cant turn much. plus the time investment of moving that slow better be worth it). If people can bring larger ships in with no penalty or consideration, it makes ground vehicles and bases useless.

This also incentivizes orbital infrastructure and ferrying things to/from the surface but doesnt require it.

I love it! It also incentivizes orbital drops and shuttles.

Yeah this is a really critical question, beyond the mechs just being awesome it's pretty central to the kind of feedback we can give over in #5790. Like, if the mechs are meant to help us mine or transport stuff, or fight, they're probably going to need hands and some sort of system similar to the handheld weapons that players have - which would need a pretty resiliant set of procedural/IK animations. Otherwise they're only capable of walking around and being handsome which doesn't really fit in a survival situation

Well honestly hovercraft/cars will help player in the early game before the player get starship. Once you get starship honestly fuel wont be a limited factor, so a mini ship is always gonna be more practical I think. Honestly, I dont see how mech could me really that more practical at something. They look cool, but they seem more limited in storage compared to a overcraft at a given size, and certainly slower. I can see them being better to walk on crappy terrain though, and if / when I add mobs or surface threats they would also be better than hover depending on whether you want auto or manual fire. My plan was more to make them a super player: you get a bigger cargo space, gets a better weapon / mining beam, walking feels similar but a bit faster, you are better protected. So maybe for a short exploration trip on a new planet, where you just want to get a few rare resources and environment is a bit hostile. I still needs to add a bunch of things, like weapons or a jump.

@tsunamayo It sounds like you added things based entirely on how cool they were rather than how practical they would ultimately be. If you want the game to be more than just a glorified 3d modeling software then now would be the best time to truly sit down and think about rebalancing things for survival.

considering the huge scale of the in-game universe the thing that has the highest mobility will be the most practical and most used. Minding hovercrafts, mechs, and ships, if 2 out of the 3 are only useful in the early game then become extremely situational after the player has left the starter planet is bad game design. Once the player has achieved space flight they will never go back to using land vehicles unless there is either an extremely strong incentive to do so or they are forced to.

Why would I ever use a hovercraft or a mech for mining if I can just have a ship equipped with a mining laser and a collector hover over each deposit? I would have full range of movement, I don't have to deal with terrain, and if enemies show up I can much more easily run away. Ships can use lightcruise engines in atmosphere to travel across the planet in seconds where as even the fastest hovercraft would struggle to cover 1/100ths of the distance in a meaningful time.

@Gallt idea is very good. Nerfing ships in-atmosphere while giving each land vehicle some unique properties would help immensely with the practicality of vehicle usage in mid-late game. Personally I would add things like exclusive equipment/abilities to further differentiate them. Hovercraft/Cars can make use of stealth systems so they be used to sneak up on things while mechs will have a armored core style booster so they can skate across the ground in exchange for increased energy usage.

I mean I think people will be very happy with mechs almost entirely because of the cool factor lol, that's reason enough by itself. It's pretty much impossible to make a mech better than a flying ship in terms of convenience or capability, although nerfing ships using "space" thruster bricks like we have currently in atmosphere make sense.

Other things like increasing fuel consumption while flying in atmosphere could help (the ship needs to apply thrust constantly to keep flying after all), whereas a mech does not.

@tsunamayo I implore you to do a poll on how much people see ground combat/infrastructure as an important part of the game.

I really think people want the ground invasion fantasy too. Gundam, Battletech, mechwarrior, hell even star citizen style. I dont feel it will be too hard if we debuffed bigger ships in atmo (RP reason being its now fighting against gravity and air resistance so it slows down due to strains on thrust to compensate). Might be some other minor considerations and tweaks, but ultimately that will do it.

One of the most common ships on the workshop is a drop ship. The ground vehicles people make are mostly not hauling trucks, they are combat-tanks and APC's (or race cars for planned racing tracks).

I think you are underselling the benefits Mechs can have. They can start/stop on a dime unlike hover vehicles. Once they can handle rough terrain better they might be better at navigating than "cars". The height for mining might be better than the other ground vehicles (hard to make something non flying that is good for mining deposits due to angle unless a "lock hover" mode is introduced). If you give mechs the ability to run, jump, strafe, and also maybe a small jet-dodge/dash, they would absolutely stand out more than just being cool without invalidating the other vehicles.

With cars: we had the chip system that could alter how blocks were calculated, so make anything with a "car" controller block have 15/25/30% better armor/hull value and there we go. Cars are at the mercy of the terrain (which means landers generally needed to get close-ish to a target, or player made roads being important), BUT now dont need propulsion past the wheels themselves, can be tankier than other ground vehicles (this is also fair if this is the first vehicle people make as it can help survive griefing early on), and carry more weight without further considerations (wheels able to carry more before hitting their weight threshold. maybe they slow down in proportion to a % of weight).

Progression really feels like "spawn in and blitz to ships as fast as you can and you basically dont need to touch the ground after that. In fact you're at a disadvantage if you do." which comes back to: why are we bothering having ground vehicles then? You're putting in a lot of work to make ground vehicles work well and its a shame to gloss over it as useful in the long term. I really feel there can be meaningful ground content that you dont need to do much to incentivize. Just make sure the person with the 1km+ super-titan cant just hover 500ft above the ground and hold W and delete an entire planets worth of bases/POI's with no drawback or risk and lean in to letting the ground vehicles do what they are already good at. If its useful, people will find a use, you dont really need to force it.

I can go into much more detail about all my ideas if you want, including some stuff about bases and game play loops/systems.

This is a super simple way to make ground combat viable without over-punishing anything. It's clearly something people want, and it makes sense.

For the record, I am interested in building ground-based haulers and train transport systems. 😉

In space engineers, ground vehicles maintain an advantage over spaceships on planets while spaceships remain strong in space. This is due to the fact that hydrogen-based thrusters are strong, they don't consume hydrogen if you don't use thrust, and flying in gravity drains hydrogen at a dramatic rate. This difference becomes more extreme when mining, as the weight of ores significantly increases the rate of hydrogen consumption on flying mining vehicles, and overweight vehicles can no longer fly.

In battles, if mechs have significant shield capability, they can wait for weaker spaceships to run out of fuel and fall out of the sky. The invading force can choose to either deploy ground-based forces at a safe distance or expend a massive amount of fuel and resources to power a larger flying force. In this case, ground vehicles have the advantage of resource efficiency.

Unlike (vanilla) space engineers, hydrogen is unlimited in SEVO once you find a planet with water. It only costs time to produce, and you can double the rate of extraction simply by doubling the infrastructure (number of blocks). On public SEVO servers in the future, your infrastructure can gather hydrogen while you sleep, negating the cost of the time component.

What if the rate of extraction wasn't constant?

Hydrogen is a gas. The more you fill a tank with it, the more compressed it becomes, and the harder it should be to add more gas to it. Refueling the large, end-game ships will then take a significant amount of time. The reverse is also true - a tank with very little hydrogen in it will not have the pressure to push hydrogen out very quickly, resulting in less output. Now there's a reason to have pipe valves and storage tanks to keep certain tanks full until needed.

This should prompt players to be much more careful with flying their larger spaceships in atmosphere. Larger ships remain a very strong option in all cases (albeit costly). Small spaceships can mine efficiently in planetary asteroid rings, but the types of ores available in asteroids are limited. Ground vehicles are free to explore and mine on planets with no time restraints.

If planets in each system had a rare ore that was not available in other nearby systems, then we can further incentivize ground-based mining, as well as the trading and transport of goods between systems. These non-standard ores could be used in the alloy mechanic you had mentioned earlier, giving bonus properties to your crafts such as "enhanced defense at the cost of weight", which continues to support mech use during the late game. Perhaps they could be used as additives to hydrogen-based fuels which encourages space-based players to visit planets or trade with planetary miners. This would imbue craft with bonus effects like the system chip mechanic, but it would not be based on random drops, and the performance of your ship is still based strongly on how you "build" it.

Note: It's important to balance this rate such that your first space-faring craft (with a small tank and low fuel requirement) does not take long to produce fuel for.

If spaceship thrusters in space do not consume resources when not in use, and the rarest/largest ore deposits are restricted to planets, then mechs and hovercraft can remain valuable at every level of progression. The trip between a planet surface and space (and back) should be seen as a costly and significant one.

tsunamayo / Starship-EVO

[QUESTION] What is the use of ground vehicles in survial? #5791