What do you not want in a submarine?

[アンジェル]

From my previous threads

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What is your favourite submarine and why?

https://steamcommunity.com/app/602960/discussions/0/3199243752754119845/

Simple Survey: Reactor Controller

https://steamcommunity.com/app/602960/discussions/0/3199243752762845701/
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I have learned that there is a favourism towards vanilla submarine, which is very understandable as all the Steam Workshop items I have been interested in seems to be ~ "extraordinary".

I see that there is a mixed perception on reactor controllers which sums up in what I have expected: they make your life easier at a cost and most likely once used forever used.

People do not want their ship to be overpowered, whether in terms of weapons or management challenges. A ship too fast means nothing e.g. if it takes out all the fun of the journey.

Which makes me only getting confused of some very popular Workshop Items I have seen, like the submarine with the double hull which supposingly cannot break due to the exploit...

There is also the matter of the gameplay anomaly I have noticed among the replies - but that is for another thread.

What I like to know is: what stuff do you not want in your submarine aside from what I have already mentioned?

Are Fabricators and Deconstructors important, or do you consider them just extras?
Does the medbay needs a hospital bed?
What are your stance on drones and extra mini submarines which you can see often with Workshop items?

I am curious what you absolutely do not want in a submarine and why ~

I for once got often the feedback I should leave the submarine nearly empty and not putting any extra equipment or materials in the cabinets to make the start "normal", as you need to gather resources a lot at the beginning.

What do you think would be important?

[UCEY]

I don't like complicated subs with lots of remote controls and buttons and whatnot. I'm a simple fellow that likes to do everything manually, the old fashioned way. As for beginning subs, I like to give myself a bit of useful items, mostly the likes of crowbars for breaking into wrecks and handheld guns for interior defense.

[lordFrith]

it does come down to playstyle, what i want out of subs and make myself wont stand for others.

for example, i really enjoy non automated subs with complex systems to tinker with as i play a lot of solo and have time to potter about with that stuff. To do that in MP you need a team of like minded individuals or it'll be real boring for some folks and you'll get griefed or people will just leave.

like you i prefer to start with very little ammo, equipment and resources as building a personalised collection of gear is an enjoyable part of the process. my own sub has a varient that starts with only hardpoints and all the cabinets are empty! so before you start first mission you gotta budget for buying a gun. BUT again If someone is playing stand alone missions or PvP then an empty sub would be useless. I do think many subs on the workshop come with way, way too much gear on them

i guess there are 2 things i want potentially from sub builders.

1. varients; for example a version of sub with no gear and only hardpoints for the solo grinders like me, then another varient of same sub with full compliment of weapons and gear for use in more short term game modes. i think many builders don't realise its easy to pack multiple varients of sub in 1 mod

2. clear labelling of subs intended use. if its OP and packed to the gills let the user know on the workshop page.

stuff like drones/mini subs etc i enjoy and are inteded gameplay, being obviously supported by vanilla machines like drone control station. i don't use them as much in SP but they are fun

finally there are things, like double hulls which many people do without realising its game breaking nature. i had double hulls on my sub for a while just for aesthetic reasons till someone pointed out it was basically impossible for monsters to breach. so i guess builder familierising themselves with the mechanics of how the game works is important too.

[Buggy Boy]

Originally posted by Hanz:

I don't like complicated subs with lots of remote controls and buttons and whatnot. I'm a simple fellow that likes to do everything manually, the old fashioned way. As for beginning subs, I like to give myself a bit of useful items, mostly the likes of crowbars for breaking into wrecks and handheld guns for interior defense.

Agree with this, indeed I've previously put some thought into a fully manual sub (no easy nav terminal controls, just manual up/down forward/backward manually crewed physical controls, with the helmsman giving orders) and made a start on designing my own interface, sadly I stumbled and got a bit bored with it so it's been put on the back burner for now, my half-attempt is actually already present in one of my workshop subs although it just looks like a curious bit of scenery as it stands.

I tend to leave it up to the game to fill lockers as it sees fit, though I will manually add a decent complement of things such as welding tools, diving masks, bandages etc as essential items. Cabinets will not be filled and there's usually no fancy circuitry (in my most recent sub I added 'open-ended' or 'unfinished' circuit points for people to discover and complete as they see fit, or dismantle).

I definitely wouldn't care for a sub that has a bang-bang controller already installed and hidden in a wall, nor do I care for subs that are too organised in terms of crew responsibility - security must remain on the gun deck, engineers in the reactor room / engineering, etc. I get that's how a real sub may be organised but it feels like less fun to me, I don't play this game to feel like I'm part of a 50 man crew with just one responsibility, other players generally don't play that way and it makes for a boring game for some of the roles.

Talking of things hidden in walls, in my more recent sub designs I've tried to simplify things and have all circuit items on show, aside from some ubiquitous ones such as automatic door control, which I expect most crews will not need to change (if they want to then it's floor cutting time!) With all circuits and components on show it would be much easier for crews to adjust them to their liking, much like on a real submarine where everything needs to be accessible in some way shape or form. So everything hidden away is a bit of a negative for me, no room for tinkering etc. I know my earlier subs have a bit of this going on, that's down to inexperience, although to be fair to myself I am still playing Single Player using that same early modified Humpback, currently just reached The Great Sea and the sub is performing very well, very smoothly, at least as well as any other I've joined in multiplayer (including those with bang-bang controllers).

I suppose idiotic / aggressive human factors are something I definitely don't want to see in a sub, there are game modes for that kind of play and I don't play in those.

[Greb]

Rainbow lights and an excess of cosmetic features that, while cool, ultimately add nothing to the submarine and just tank performance. I don't mind some dressing up, adding some clutter etc, but some submarines I've seen just take that too far lol.

If I wanted art I'd go to a gallery

[Buggy Boy]

Originally posted by Greb:

Rainbow lights and an excess of cosmetic features that, while cool, ultimately add nothing to the submarine and just tank performance. I don't mind some dressing up, adding some clutter etc, but some submarines I've seen just take that too far lol.

If I wanted art I'd go to a gallery

Haha! Yes indeed. I wouldn't want to get upset about another player demonstrating their knowledge about wiring up the oscillator circuit, maybe in the festive period it could be quite creative, but I agree - not really a good thing especially for people with lesser systems. I saw one player put the same disco light show in two separate servers, once was OK but if they waste campaign resources on doing it all over the place then it's bad.

[[Lemons] w!z@rD]

Immersion breaking mistakes related to sprite depth and not making entities non interactible.

For example I tested a submarine which had these very cool black bars and tank shapes which looked like they were in front of the player but not illuminated. Very aesthetic. Big immersion breaking issue though. The tank shapes were research containment tanks and if you hovered the mouse over them it would show the tooltip. Could've easily been fixed by just turning on non interactible.

On my own custom Dugong I had some sprite depth errors that would make items that were not supposed to be in front of the player be just that.


Furthermore I don't like OP submarines. The game is already too easy if you're playing with an experienced crew (although I haven't tried any of the difficulty+ mods).
I especially dislike subs that come with end or mid-game items out of the box, for example Combat Diving Suits or PUCS. Where's the progression aspect of the gameplay in that?

[Greb]

Originally posted by Lemons w!z@rD:

Immersion breaking mistakes related to sprite depth and not making entities non interactible.

This is a good one, yeah. Comes under quality assurance though, but yes. I have an example on one of my private subs where I made some really cool containers in a submarine that was supposed to be bought late into the game, but I forgot to actually test the containers themselves and sadly the objects I used to make them (literally just a large steel cabinet hidden behind a bunch of sub parts) turned out to have collision on them, so they blocked movement entirely. Kinda ruined that whole sub lol.

The biggest one is making sure you make decorative objects you have made non-interactable for decorative or embellishment purposes, or because you're hiding another device behind it, make sure you make them invulnerable to damage. Nothing sucks more to have a broken item billowing smoke that can't be interacted with to be repaired. I made that mistake once, I used the Medical Fabricator (Legacy) with a Large Steel Cabinet tucked behind it as a fancy medical cabinet thing, and within a round or two the non-interactable legacy medfab had hit 0% durability and was filling the entire medbay with sparks and smoke. It was awful.

Depth issues too for sure, when dropping items causes them to vanish behind the sprite layers, or causing certain layers to appear in front of the player. Newbie mistakes which I made a ton of on my first sub. Don't want to be too harsh here, but you definitely want to thoroughly test your custom sub before putting it out there for these little things.

[Buggy Boy]

Oh yes, sometimes I've joined servers where it's pretty obvious the person hasn't done any thorough testing even in the editor sandbox, in those instances it's best to just end the server and go back to the editor to fix those things, often rather critical editor-only things like hulls or wiring that's hidden behind floors.

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by Lemons w!z@rD:

Immersion breaking mistakes related to sprite depth and not making entities non interactible.

One of the reasons why I am spending like hours with multiple people on my self-made submarines, and even those I just modify, with debugging. Not much of fun, but important before publishing.

Especially the sprite depths issue is easy to overlook.

[Fosty]

I don't want large bright labels that look tacked on.

[Rat Bastard]

holes

[DuckieMcduck]

I don't like diving suits at far ends of the sub or in rooms adjacent to water, because this usually means that there can be a leak (or worse yet, an invader) and the room with the suits will quickly become inaccessible. This placement can end runs more often than you'd think.

Granted, this can be completely negated by just wearing the suit 24/7, but it's quite a literal design issue.

[UCEY]

Originally posted by UnluckyDuckie:

I don't like diving suits at far ends of the sub or in rooms adjacent to water, because this usually means that there can be a leak (or worse yet, an invader) and the room with the suits will quickly become inaccessible. This placement can end runs more often than you'd think.

Granted, this can be completely negated by just wearing the suit 24/7, but it's quite a literal design issue.

Because of this I like to put emergency suit lockers in the middle of the submarine

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by UnluckyDuckie:

I don't like diving suits at far ends of the sub or in rooms adjacent to water, because this usually means that there can be a leak (or worse yet, an invader) and the room with the suits will quickly become inaccessible. This placement can end runs more often than you'd think.

Granted, this can be completely negated by just wearing the suit 24/7, but it's quite a literal design issue.

Originally posted by Hanz:

Originally posted by UnluckyDuckie:

I don't like diving suits at far ends of the sub or in rooms adjacent to water, because this usually means that there can be a leak (or worse yet, an invader) and the room with the suits will quickly become inaccessible. This placement can end runs more often than you'd think.

Granted, this can be completely negated by just wearing the suit 24/7, but it's quite a literal design issue.

Because of this I like to put emergency suit lockers in the middle of the submarine

Except for my self-made submarines I do not recall any vanilla submarine having diving suits not nearby an airlock...

Also, I used to store diving suits at critical rooms like medbay or bridge. Just got scolded by the captain that they are in the way, considering we never had a situation in which a normal diving mask would not suffice.

[DuckieMcduck]

Originally posted by アンジェル:

Originally posted by UnluckyDuckie:

I don't like diving suits at far ends of the sub or in rooms adjacent to water, because this usually means that there can be a leak (or worse yet, an invader) and the room with the suits will quickly become inaccessible. This placement can end runs more often than you'd think.

Granted, this can be completely negated by just wearing the suit 24/7, but it's quite a literal design issue.

Originally posted by Hanz:

Because of this I like to put emergency suit lockers in the middle of the submarine

Except for my self-made submarines I do not recall any vanilla submarine having diving suits not nearby an airlock...

Proximity to the airlock is not the design problem. Average crew proximity to the diving suits is, specially in the case of emergency.

The Humpback is an example of a terrible diving suit room. It is at the very bottom of the ship, far away from the stairs, with the hull adjacent to water. If gravity puts water on the way there or there's a leak and the stairs become flooded then it becomes very dangerous to traverse. If the remaining crew is suitless by the time the middle gets flooded, then the run is over.

The half dozen hatches that open when it detects water don't help, because this will add water pressure from every connected, possibly flooded compartment, killing people in rooms that would otherwise be too small to have enough water to crush anyone.