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[Akura]

Tried to build a laser satellite. It's supposed to hover at around 1km, and has 6-axis ion engines to give it some mobility. Damage is alright, it can punch clear through a wooden ship(DWG-Marauder), but not very far through a metal hull(OW-Bastion). Accuracy is fairly poor, but I can only get deviation to 0.22°, and at 1km there's only so much you can do about it. It mainly suffers from sustainable fire, the batteries(which power the laser pumps) can't recharge from the RTGs quickly enough. It does only cost 12k, though, so it's potentially spammable.

The real problem is that it tends to tumble out of orbit, and I haven't been able to set the engines for proper roll/pitch control. I can get it stabilized using CapsLock while building, but that won't work in actual use.

[Greiger]

Tried to build a bomber plane.  Instead I built a SSTO, as it seems to have an obsession with flying straight into space after a bit despite managing relatively stable flight most times.

[LoSboccacc]

you need to increase the angle of roll while turning

[EnigmaticHat]

Tried to build a laser satellite. It's supposed to hover at around 1km, and has 6-axis ion engines to give it some mobility. Damage is alright, it can punch clear through a wooden ship(DWG-Marauder), but not very far through a metal hull(OW-Bastion). Accuracy is fairly poor, but I can only get deviation to 0.22°, and at 1km there's only so much you can do about it. It mainly suffers from sustainable fire, the batteries(which power the laser pumps) can't recharge from the RTGs quickly enough. It does only cost 12k, though, so it's potentially spammable.

The real problem is that it tends to tumble out of orbit, and I haven't been able to set the engines for proper roll/pitch control. I can get it stabilized using CapsLock while building, but that won't work in actual use.

From building a wooden spy satellite, I've learned that jet stabilizers work in space.  And they're a lot less of a pain in the ass than ion engines are when it comes to stabilizing.  I actually could not figure out how to stabilize it with ion engines no matter how hard I tried.

I have little experience with RTGs, but what I do know is weird.  First of all, the more batteries you have per electric engine, the higher the efficiency.  Not 100% sure what that does, except that adding more batteries appears to produce free power out of nowhere.  An electric engine on a 2x2 battery stack observably powers more systems than a 100% efficiency engine would.  The weirder thing is that an electric engine's power production rate seems to be multiplied by the attached battery's charge percentage.  Battery at 1/3rd charge?  Power output gets reduced to 33%.

For example: I have a mining rig with 4 resource gatherers (200 power draw) with 2 small RTGs (100 power produced).  Out of play on the caimpaign, it draws an unsustainable amount of power.  Put it into play, zoom in, and turn off the resource gatherers so it maxes out on power?  Suddenly with the resource gatherers back on it stays maxed out on power.  The engine displays 200 power used, 320 produced.  Somehow 4 batteries and an electric engine more than tripled the RTG's power production.

Edit: For example, here you can see a single RTG producing 35840 power.  Going to go out on a limb and assume that's a glitch.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[LoSboccacc]

rtg charge battery. battery power depends on battery charge. rtg is fairly linear, the batteries are the weird one: the more battery power you have stored, the more energy the electric engine can produce and the faster the battery discharge

if you let such complex run for a lot of time under high energy usage it'll eventually reach it's equilibrium point between energy production by rtg, which is constant, and energy consumption from electric engines, which is linear with power produced

what happens in the campaign is that you jump one combat to another using 10X time, which gives battery extra long time to charge up. out of play power production is however what you'd get at equilibrium

[Akura]

I think you're confusing terms there. RTGs don't produce power, they produce electricity which goes right into the batteries. Also, adding batteries to an electric engine chain doesn't increase efficiency, efficiency is a setting on the electric engine that reduces power output in order to also reduce the amount of electricity used per power(much like turbochargers on a fuel engine reduce fuel per power).


I did a quick test to see if I could figure out the formula for total power output per battery. With the electric motor set to 100% output, every 1x1 battery block, which has an electricity storage of 2000, adds 80 power to the motor output when fully charged, meaning every 25 units of electricity gives 1 engine power from the motor. It also consumes 80 electricity per second at 100% output. Using larger battery blocks makes no difference - two 1x1 batteries has the same effect as a 1x2 battery.

Lowering output increases efficiency, but not at a linear rate - at 90% output efficiency is 105% and change, at 50% it's 133%, at 5% it's 190%. At those same settings, power produced/electricity-per-second numbers are 72/68.4, 40/30, and 4/2.1 respectively. Not entirely sure on this, but I think the game multiplies the stored electricity by the output value(100% is written as 1.00), and still gets 1 power from 25 electricity, and gets electricity-per-second by dividing the power output by the efficiency value.

Since the amount of engine power produced by the electric motor is based on electricity stored, power output goes down as the batteries deplete. As for why it's based on power stored and not number of battery blocks, I don't know. Real life batteries do have less voltage when under-charged.

PRE-EDIT: Ninja'd, but I had to do a bit of research on how to irl batteries first.

[EnigmaticHat]

So it does seem like I was wrong about some things.  I think the REAL oddity that I encountered is that resource gatherers stop drawing energy when drawing from a depleted zone, but only when in play.  So in play it looked like the batteries were producing free energy but in reality the resource gatherers were drawing less.  Then when out of play that effect went away and it looked like the free energy was gone.  As for efficiency... I swear to god I put an electric engine on a 2x2 battery stack and it displayed 200% efficiency at max production once, but I was new to the game so I probably had the slider at the wrong end.

It does still look like electric engines can break thermodynamics, just in working-as-intended way.  Perhaps the electric engine produces motor power that is somehow more easily usable by your ship's machinery than what a fuel engine produces...

Edit: Just did a test.  You could absolutely feed fuel generator power into a battery to make it more powerful.  Problem is that the motor power will only go to the battery if its in excess of what is needed, so even tho the battery *would* make the engine more powerful, it can't really do so in practice.

Double Edit: Hit Q on engine, now its putting all its power into the batteries.  Running a 300 power shield off a 200 power generator; power in batteries is 100% stable.  Now the only question is... is that better than just making an efficient engine in the first place?  The batteries are very heavy and expensive compared to an engine (although not to an RTG).

Triple Edit Combo: No it is not, I set an engine with a crapton of superchargers to .2 RPM.  Now I'm getting 330 power at 1 fuel per second, and the whole thing costs 538.  Weighs 17300.  The weight and volume could really be better, but... seems pretty legit to me.  If needed it can ramp up to 620 power/2.5 fuel per second or 1200 power/10 fuel per second.  I'm sure an engine optimized for a specific purpose could do even better.  Batteries on the other hand are far more expensive and don't make their own power directly... but they are lighter overall.

[Akura]

After a run of Tropico 5, I felt like making a paddle steamer, like the freight ships that you get in that game's colonial era. First, I looked up some data on paddleships, including a pretty good read of Confederate blockade runners.


I haven't really used paddlewheels much before. My main experience with them is the DWG's Marauder, which has a stern-paddle(actually, two that looks like one), and I was going for side-paddles. Ship does what it was meant for, that is, it moves with paddles and carries decent cargo. Using both propellers and the paddlewheels, it only gets to around 6.5m/s(most designs I make get at least 8-10m/s). I can increase the speed by using a faster setting, but it doesn't look as nice. The paddles aren't controllable by the player, only by AI/ACBs, since making them player-controllable would require a complex controller, and I hate those. Power is barely necessary, but is provided by a small steam boiler. Unlike most pictures I looked up, which have the steam exhaust pipes in the center, mine goes up out the stern. It is armed with 10 large simple-cannons for self-defense.

[Knave]

Quick little bump to say that Fantical has this on sale for the next day for less than 1 dollar. Guess if you were ever curious now is the time!

https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/from-the-depths

[nenjin]

That's a hell of a lot of game for $1 if you like building stuff.

[AlStar]

The crazy discount finally broke me down.
Wow, this game is complex - I'm sure that the build mode controls will eventually sink in, but for now it seems like I'm constantly fighting against it.

I've gone through some of the tutorials, and am now stumbling around on the 2nd mission, failing to kill the target ship. The game suggests to build a cannon to do it, but my cannon doesn't seem to be doing much damage, and tends to get shot right off my ship by my opponent. I had more luck by beefing up the existing missile armament... until I took a hit to the armory.

[nenjin]

I have put like 40+ hours in to the game...and I've never even started the campaign. There is just so much designing, building and most importantly, optimizing that you can do outside of the campaign that I figured, why struggle and spend time and get behind doing this during the campaign when I can spec out all the vessels I want to have and just plop them in to the campaign when I do start playing.

I think I was up to 6 or so ships/satellites the last time I played.

[Shadowlord]

I've had this for a while and the complexity just seems overwhelming. I did all the tutorials after I first got the game but now I can't remember how to build anything (and I'm constantly fighting the interface when I try).

[Ozyton]

I built a ship once. I thought it was pretty good for my first attempt but apparently it kinda sucks. I spent a lot of time trying to get the bow to be in the 'correct' shape and even then it wasn't as effective as just having it be a boring wedge.

The building controls are somewhat infuriating but a lot of that is because of the apparent input delay and the way the camera/cursor jitters around a lot when moving. Moving from one side of the ship to the other is easier once you get used to toggling freelook with F3, you point where you want to go and pushing F3 snaps your cursor to that spot again.

One thing I wish this game did (and a lot of block building games similar to this actually) is allow you to simply choose a block shape and material separately instead of having a menu option for every single different block in the game. That would make replacing things with different materials so much easier since you can just use the material tool instead of having to go select the correct block shape and rotation. It'd work like the paint tool actually...

There are a lot of things I wish this game did better, but from the sounds of it the most effective things are made using LUA coding and I can't code for squat. I was just happy when I managed to make my ship shoot flares when it detects enemy missiles.

[Zazmio]

The tutorial is shit.  Don't even bother.

It takes a long time before you get good enough to make a decent ship.  I have over 200 hours in it, and my ships still can't handle the tougher factions.

The DWG faction is stupidly weak.  You'll eventually make a ship that'll kick their ass.  If you haven't yet, here's a hint:  they can't handle subs.  After you conquer the DWG, you probably will overestimate the effectiveness of your ships and then attack another faction, get your ass handed to you, and then realize that, after all that work, you're still just a fucking beginner.

I suggest looking at the forum, downloading a few good ships, and studying them to see how things are done.

If the game dev is really selling this for a $1, I think he's probably given up on ever completing it.  It's one of those games that were too ambitious and will never leave early access.