Multi-Class Ship Tree

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The Multi-Class Ship Tree (MCST) is a mod that works to expand upon the current Vanilla ship tree while tweaking and improving some of the original ships' stats. Its purpose is to recreate the feeling of playing Survival Mode back in 2016 and 2017. The ship tree also includes ships from Kleinem's Enhanced Ship Tree, the Original Racing Mod (vengar) and the current Starblast Racing Championships mod. It has 6 tiers, each with 4 different classes (Fighter, Support, Heavy, Speedster). The mod author is ThirdEyeMan, a member of the community that has his ships implemented in Battle Royale, the Original Racing mod and the current Starblast Racing Championships mod. It has a total of 252 ships that were made by ThirdEyeMan and various members of the Starblast community.

This mod was added on the 5th of February, 2021 (2/5/2021)

## Classes

### Fighter Class

The Fighter Class starts off with the well known Tier 1 Fly. It composes of ships that have a normal amount of every aspect of a ship. They have a moderate amount of speed, shield and mass, while having high fire power. They perform well at countering Speedster Class ships, but Heavy Class ships have a larger advantage over them. The reason being, Fighter Class ships are unable to completely out-maneuver ships in the Heavy Class ships and the mass of Fight Class ships are relatively too little to push back against Heavy Class ships.

### Heavy Class

The Heavy Class starts off with the Tier 1 Bee, a small but heavy ship. It composes of ships that are better at self defense rather than offense. These ships have a large amount of shield, fire power, and mass, but with the consequence of very low speed, and usually low agility. They perform well at countering Fighter Class ships, but Speedster Class ships usually have an good advantage over them. The reason being, Speedster Class ships are able out-maneuver Heavy Class ships using RCS and their high levels of maneuverability.

### Speedster Class

The Speedster Class starts off with the Tier 1 Mite, a small but fast ship. It composes of ships that are better at offense rather than defense. These ships have a high amount of speed, agility, and fire power, but with the consequence of low shield and mass. They perform well at attacking basically any class, but Fighter Class ships are usually able to destroy them. The Fighter Class has a high enough fire power and speed to stun the Speedster Class ships to the point where they are unable to completely out-maneuver them. Although, under the right hands, the Speedster Class is able to counter the Fighter Class.

### Support Class

The Support Class starts off with the Tier 1 Hauler, a simple ship with a rapid firing cannon. This class is the most unique out of all the other classes. There is really no set definition for this class, because it composes of ships that have hybrid features, ships that functions like a sniper, ships that are small tanks, ships that are large but light, and more. As a result, some ships may be a bit gimmicky to use, but are adaptable. The average Support Class ship will perform well against any other class, heavily depending on what ship you are using.

## Gameplay

When you first enter the game, you are given the option of choosing 4 different Tier 1 ships. Each option will show the name of the ship and the class type. The Tier 1 classes are as follows: Fly-Fighter Class, Bee-Heavy Class, Mite-Speedster Class, and Hauler-Support Class. Once you have chosen one of the 4 ships, you will find yourself in an extremely large map of size 200. Your goal is to mine asteroids or kill players to get yourself to Tier 6 as fast as possible, while also defending yourself from other players or teams who may attack you. You have the option to form alliances with other players, or go as a lone wolf. You have 30 minutes to prepare for the activation of Survival. Once Survival mode is activated, your goal is to be the last one alive. If you have the Standalone Starblast app do not press escape because it will bring you back to the main menu.

## Strategies

The environment of the games in Multi-Class Ship Tree are always highly unpredictable, so strategy depends on the type of environment you are in. We will separate this into 4 types of environments. The first type of environment being an environment where there is minimal teaming, the second type being an environment where there are teams everywhere, but none of them are large teams, the third being an environment where there is a large scale team, and lastly, the fourth being a clan present in the game to dominate the match.

### Strategies in Environment Type 1

In this environment, it is all about trying to not become a spotlight. Being the leader in this environment, or even being a highly skilled player, will usually lead to you having multiple people trying to kill you for your points, or simply because you are the leader. Even though the players in this environment are not teamed, they will compete with each other to try and be the one to kill you. To increase your chances of winning this match, you should attempt to form an acquaintance with a couple players to form a small layer of protection. Attempting to team with these players will usually lead to them betraying you for points, gems, or simply the fact they don't want to be around possible teamers.

Another strategy that may work is simply taking the risky path and dominating the match yourself. It is highly recommended you take a ship that has higher speed, such as a speedster, a light fighter or a light support. You will need to be able to dodge shots and partially flee battles while in this position. You will have many possibly furious players after you and it is entirely up to you to be able to fight off those players.

### Strategies in Environment Type 2

You have many options in this type of environment. You can choose to be a lone wolf, form a duo with someone else, or have a little team yourself. In the case you are a lone wolf, you will want to use a ship that is fast enough to flee. You may also need to form some acquaintances to lessen the pressure of teams going after you, or, to simply kill off a team. In the case you have formed a duo with someone, it really depends on the coordination and skill coming from the both of you. Your best chance at winning is to attack when other players don't expect it. If you both make it to the end, you two will have to decide who wins the match. This is why you should form a duo with someone you know you can beat in a 1 vs 1. In the case you are in a team yourself, it is really all about not becoming a large target. In a team, you can dominate the server and destroy other teams with ease. However, becoming too powerful in a game may result in having the entire server working together to kill you and your team.

In the end, it is really about watching the environment and trying to not make yourself a popular target.

### Strategies in Environment Type 3

This is an environment where you should not make enemies with the super massive team. Your best chances at winning is to join them. From here, you can choose to be malicious and kill off the rest of the server, or, you can try to make the team crumble from the inside. In a large team like this, there are always a few players that want to kill each other, or don't want them inside of the team.

Find out who these players are and keep track of the players inside your team. These large teams aren't usually compact in a giant ball, instead they are scattered out over an area. In moments where the large team is scattered, you can attempt to convince these players to attack some people within the team. Fair warning, this can end poorly for you, but once you have some conflicts started up within that large team, it becomes much easier to make it collapse. A scenario like this can usually turn the game into an Environment Type 2.

### Strategies in Environment Type 4

With a clan present to dominate the match, your chances at winning are very small. For the best chance at winning a match, you must attempt to gather as many non-clan players in one team as possible. It will be difficult to beat an organized group, even with all the players you have gathered, so you must do your best when fighting. Sometimes, another clan or group will be present in the match, and the two will occupy each other. In a scenario like this, your best chances at winning the match is to team up with a few people for when you face one of the clans in the end of a match.

## History

### Before the Beginning

The Multi-Class Ship Tree has a fair amount of history, which dates back all the way to 2017, when user ThirdEyeMan and his friends would talk about ideas for Starblast when they were bored. Many ideas and ship concepts were discussed and sketch during those days, but none of them were in the community at the time. Multiple ship concepts were drawn on paper, and these ship concepts were planned in hopes to have them in game. In 2018, ThirdEyeMan decided to create some of these ships in the Ship Editor and compile all the ship codes into a single file. As he was doing this, a ship tree slowly started growing. He then later on thought about a ship tree that would be over a 1000 ships, and started making more and more ships. This idea of a massive ship tree was posted on the Starblast Reddit, explaining that it would have 11 tiers. ThirdEyeMan did not know the actual boundaries of the amount of tiers you can have during this time, and later found out that the max number of tiers is 7, with a theoretical tier 8. In late 2018, he met user Nexagon. Nexagon was like ThirdEyeMan, where they both built ships for the sake of creating ship trees. ThirdEyeMan proposed again, the idea of a ship tree having more than a 1000 ships to Nexagon, which resulted in them working on combining their ships into a single ship tree. ThirdEyeMan also invited user KLEINEM and user Revenge Zerd to help create this tree. Unfortunately, due to real life circumstances, this tree did not make it past tier 4, and only had about 50 ships confirmed.

### The Construction

Fast forward to January 25th, 2020. ThirdEyeMan revisited the idea of a massive ship tree, except, he put a bit of reality into his thoughts. He first started thinking about how a ship tree can't just be a ship tree, there has to be some sort of theme to it, just like U-Series is based on the U-Sniper. An idea finally emerged in his head. "Why not have different class types in a large ship tree? You get to choose the gameplay you want" he thought. Then, he created the Multi-Class Ship Tree Discord server and started gathering many ship builders to join him on this project. On January 27th, he started off by posting tier 1 ships, and people gradually started making ships for the tree. For a ship to get into the tree, ship builders would have to post their ship into a vote-in channel, where other users can vote if they would like to see that ship in the tree or not. Once it is liked by other users, it would have to go through ThirdEyeMan to see the ship for himself and confirm it for the tree. In a span of 5 months, the Multi-Class Ship Tree team managed to construct a ship tree that consists of 220 ships, according to the scheme of 4-8-16-32-64-96. It was considered as a great success, and afterwards, 32 Tier 7 ships were also made, which would later be featured someday. This accomplishment came with an even bigger job afterwards, that being, balancing all the ships, making sure they have the correct name and model number. Many days and hours went into balancing the tree, and there were a few different parties helping with balancing the ships, except that did come with some flaws.

### Version 1.0

On February 5th, 2021, the Multi-Class Ship Tree mod was released to Modding Space as Version 1.0. Overall, the mod was working well, aside from bouncing lasers still being present. With the combination of new players, intermediate players and skilled players, the flaws started to show. The balancing parties used different ships as a control and there were different levels of skill in each party. A skilled player and a less skilled player balancing ships, will result in some ships being over powered. This showed well in Version 1.0. Ships such as the Light-Wing, the Alpha-Defender and the Hammerhead were extremely strong. Many players still enjoyed the large ship tree, and enjoyed playing with the many ships you can choose from.

### Version 1.1

The night of February 21st, 2021, Version 1.1 of the Multi-Class Ship Tree was released. The update included many remodels for specific ships, such as the Pursuer and the Solaris. Many stat changes were made and the ship tree wasn't as big of a mess as it was in Version 1.0. It is possible to win with any Tier 6, but there were still some ships that were notable and abused due to their higher strength. The Luna is the speedster that is most notorious for having a fast fire rate for a ship that shoots a stacked pulse. This ship was by far the most abused out of any other stronger ship. Other notable ships that were stronger is the Solaris, the Buccanear, the Victory, the Eagle and the Enigma. Bouncing lasers were still present in this version.

### Version 1.2

A miracle. Version 1.2 of MCST is finally out on the 24th of November, 2021. This version introduces many reworks on almost every ship, whether it was stat changes or physical changes. It also introduces 32 new Tier 6s, making a total of 252 ships in the Multi-Class Ship Tree. There are no noticeable ships that are overly over powered or under powered, the Multi-Class Ship Tree now has 8 hours of playtime in the Modding Cycle, and the absolute best part of this update, is the removal of bouncing lasers.

Games flowed better, while also being way more intense. A constant variety of ships, with groups everywhere in the map usually having their skirmishes, and the odd solo player running away from a crowd with 0 shield and only 10 gems in his cargo. Although sometimes, there would be a super large team, a team of 20 or more. Those were always devastating for players who didn't want to be part of a large team. However, old Survival Mode strategies came back to life in the process. It is safe to say that Version 1.2 put the Multi-Class Ship Tree in a good state, especially with its increase in popularity.

### MCST Defence Force

With Version 1.2 being released, user ThirdEyeMan created an organization called the MCST Defence Force, or in short form, MDF. The purpose of MDF is to destroy any large or malicious teams in games, which is inspired by the one of the first organizations in Starblast, the Soloist Defence Force. Over the first couple weeks after the creation of MDF, it has gained a few loyal members that seek to destroy these malicious players at all costs, and try to make the game as fun for everyone as possible, by doing things like protecting and mining up lower-tiers, breaking apart large teams, and even occasionally teaming up to beat a bigger threat.

### The 1st MCST AOW

A huge mess, but a fun one. On the 18th of February 2021, it was announced that the AOW for February will be using the Multi-Class Ship Tree. It was exciting news to the community. Version 1.1 of the Multi-Class Ship Tree was used in this AOW, and it was the first time Version 1.1 was presented to the public. Fast forward to February 20th, 2021, the Asia AOW completely failed. It was noted that the **"Game Server and Client"** had its first win ever. The entire AOW event froze and stopped functioning once players were upgrading to Tier 5. This was because there was a model number limit that Team Mode couldn't handle, and some ships were exceeding that number. Europe and America AOW that month, just used the Vanilla ship tree.

An unfortunate event, that eventually led to the Multi-Class Ship Tree AOW have another chance. On the 19th of March 2021, it was announced that MCST AOW will be attempted again. Was still a bit of a mess. The Asia AOW was titled as the **"Most Broken AOW in the history of Starblast."** The Europe AOW did not face any issues, but the American AOW had a 2 hour and 30 minute delay due to technical issues. Due to the broken AOW Asia faced, MCST AOW was hosted once again, making the first month to ever have a double AOW event. Every region got to play their fair share of the event without facing any large issues.

These AOW events featured the 32 Tier 7s that were previously built, and 8 more ships that were built for the AOW. The stats on these ships were unbalanced, but in a large scale AOW, the impacts were not too severe. One of the more notable imbalances were the sizes of the Speedster Class Tier 7s.

### The 2nd MCST AOW

A fortunate event for the Multi-Class Ship Tree. The developers of Starblast gave the community an option to vote for a desired ship tree. On October 21st, 2021, a vote was opened on the Starblast Subreddit with the following candidates; the Vanilla Ship Tree, KEST, MCST, Nautic Series and U-Series. At the end of the vote, the Multi-Class Ship Tree was the winner with 36% of the community votes, followed behind Nautic Series with 22% of the votes.

October 23rd and 24th, 2021, were the days that the event occurred. This was the first AOW to have healing lasers set to 50%, meaning that it has half of the efficiency than it usually has in Team Mode. Version 1.2 was used in this AOW, adding 32 new Tier 6 ships, replacing or moving other ships, and many, many balance changes. This was the first time this version was presented to the public. This version presented only 32 Tier 7s, in which some were used in the 1st MCST AOW and the rest being new ships. The Tier 7 ships were noticeably more balanced, especially the Speedster Class Tier 7s and their size. The event ran smoothly in all 3 regions without any noticeable flaws. The North American region had a wild game that lasted over 7 hours, which mostly consisted of battles rather than base destroying. It took a long time for one of the teams to be successful in destroying some station modules, or even one station module.

## Ships

There are 508 ships in the Multi-Class Ship Tree, according to the scheme of 4-8-16-32-64-128-256 All of these ships are based on expanding the Vanilla ship tree and follow a simple and similar style. There is a large variety of firing patterns, shapes, sizes, and names, so it is difficult to remember every ship.

## Code

* Dueling Code
* Ship Exploration Code