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1

Blog Posts / Re: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More

« on: April 10, 2024, 02:03:30 PM »

All wonderful additions here.

One thought for finding survey data, you could probably add planets with ruins of size 3+4 to potential discoverable data.  In addition to the high end plants, ruins, stations, and the Domain ships/motherships are the most useful/valuable breadcrumbs we could find from derelicts and Domain era objects.

2

Blog Posts / Re: Simulator Enhancements

« on: March 15, 2024, 09:56:20 AM »

Just give it a souped up version of our autoloader?

Could do something a bit like the missile autoloader mod?  I suggested something like this on a custom ship proposal and possibly that could be put on the Griffon as well.  While the ship system is active, flux (hard?) is generated while the system is running and it gradually replenishes ammo for your missile launchers one at a time.  The missile autoforge can be toggled on and off freely.

3

Blog Posts / Re: Simulator Enhancements

« on: March 14, 2024, 10:23:41 AM »

Very good improvements.  This will help a lot with testing fleets and loadouts.  I see someone else already brought up using commissions to unlock ships as they became available on the military market, so I won't get into that.

Instead, one thought I had was that being able to use blueprint ships in the simulator would be really helpful for the player if they want to test the new blueprint they just found and decide if they want to actually build it or not.  Being able to fight blueprint ships also means you can try fighting your own faction for fun.  If you don't want this to be something that just instantly unlocks the moment the player finds a random cartridge in some backwards ruins, it could require the player own a Heavy Industry building first to become available.

4

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 11, 2024, 11:15:37 AM »

There's a lot of ways that players can delay crises, not just killing the fleets but also agreeing to deals or getting Kanta's protection.  You can relatively easily avoid a crisis entirely right now if you're so inclined and know how the game's mechanics work.  New players don't really have that knowledge, nor do they have any clue how dangerous the crisis fleets are.  So the mechanic sort of winds up being a bit of a new player trap and big source of anxiety for anyone unfamiliar with it.  And an annoyance for experienced players given just how slow it is without you deliberately angering the Heg and LP.  Then suddenly everything will start happening at once as your colonies get big enough to attract PL and TT attention, and you'll have to drop what you're doing to run off to deal with your colonies until those two are sorted out.  Often by that point you've got overwhelming force at your disposal as an experienced player.

I stand by that crisis take too long to get started, then happen too quickly once they've all piled up.  Then they become too slow again once PL/TT are removed from the pool.  More frequent minor crises that escalate each time one triggers would help immensely with this.


Two side notes.  First, I don't think scaling threats based on the number of colonies in a system or even colony size is good design.  It makes spreading out your colonies the objectively correct choice and punishes new players who don't know to do that.  Especially for crises that demand a stand up fight against the entire crisis force to defeat.  You have to have multiple boosted military bases and battlestations for colony defenses to meaningfully fight off crisis fleets right now.

Second, TT's crisis had a few issues when I played through it.  The primary fleet with elite officers, 2-3 S-mods on all ships, and an extreme mobility high tech lineup were able to defeat any fleet I brought in detail until I respeced into electronic warfare.  Then I could capture enough objectives to get my larger fleet deployed to match their power.  Even then it was an extremely close fight.  Paying them the half a million credit bribe was an amazing deal vs losing like a 5+ million credit fleet to them.  The rest of the TT crisis fleets were non-threats and easily moped up even fighting many of them at the same time.  Defeating the crisis gave such a small bonus to the TT commerce raiding progress that it wasn't worth dealing with the crisis fleets.  While the commerce raiding retaliation fleet they sent was like 10 frigates against my 3 capital 6 cruiser fleet, nothing even close to the strength of the crisis fleet.

5

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 07, 2024, 05:54:45 PM »

Anything that ties into flux management is going to be a big problem with the AI.  It really likes to stay at high flux levels.  Steady AI is a slow wear down the enemy combat style that doesn't work well with SO and aggressive never really wants to go for opportunistic pulling back and venting unless the enemy has also done so or it's already fluxing out.

6

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 07, 2024, 01:22:41 PM »

Could the glitches and severity of them be somehow keyed into PPT or CR?  In order to limit how frustrating it is for the player, there's a 0% chance of random malfunctions for the first ~30 seconds of combat, then the ship will start experiencing periodic malfunctions to weapons that can be fixed for 30 seconds, then more frequent malfunctions that can apply to the engines, and only once PPT runs out the malfunctions start becoming permanent?  Essentially making the malfunctions predictable so you can plan around them and don't have feel bad moments when you randomly lose stuff in some fights but not others?

7

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 06, 2024, 05:23:53 PM »

Considering the recent writing from quests, wouldn't it make sense to make Luddic Church and Luddic Path hostile? Or, at least, neutral.

Hmm, probably not hostile, but neutral, perhaps! I think the recent writing makes it clear that the Church is not a monolithic entity.

It would make a lot of sense for any major questline involving the LC to be about undermining and/or removing the elements of the LC that are supporting the Pathers.  Completing such a questline would end the alliance between the two and permanently weaken the Pathers in some way, like removing some ships from their lineup.  Thematically, this makes the LC a far better faction to have around the sector as some of its worst parts have been cleaned up.

8

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 06, 2024, 08:58:59 AM »

If you stick with the can't vent aspect of SO, the vent key is free for an activated feature.  Such as putting the ship into overdrive with a risk of malfunctions as a consequence of doing so.

9

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: February 29, 2024, 12:41:11 PM »

I would be totally OK with Support Doctrine being lowered a tier and an “alternative” to the other two Officer Skills. Your choices would then be: +2 Officers, +1 Level/Elite Skill for existing officers or , -2 Officers but all unofficered ships are essentially generic Level 4 and they cost -20% DP.

The only problem is that SD wouldn’t confer all the deployment calculations that come with number and level of officers so that you can deploy your max fleet. It seems counterintuitive to have a skill that enables a wider fleet but unable to deploy them because you’re at a disadvantage on officer count vs. the other fleet (which is a hidden stat to begin with).

You’d also be stuck with BotB as the sole Leadership Capstone. I suppose that isn’t an issue in and of itself and it would make comparing SD to BotB less direct.

The two leadership capstones could also be the two different skills that dramatically increase the story point sinks you have for your fleet.  Choose either extra elite skill and level for officers, or extra S-mods for ships.  That way there's significantly less temptation to take both of them at the same time, making it that much harder to keep up with story point demand.

10

Suggestions / Re: Ship loadout save/load?

« on: February 27, 2024, 09:03:21 PM »

It's random which loadouts your ships get when spawning in either your patrols or when ordered from heavy industry.  Chosen from either the premade options or from the ones you've made and saved.  It is worth noting that you cannot prevent the default options from being chosen, even if they're not among the four quick swap loadouts.

11

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: February 26, 2024, 11:34:36 AM »

May be fine for strike craft or elite units, but for ordinary grunts or infantry, something cheap or at least not best-in-class is more appropriate.  We are looking for something basic yet functional for ordinary units to do steady damage.  Consider what a Wolf in a random Hegemony patrol would do, or what a player early in the game would find when assembling a rag-tag fleet of random ships.

Mining laser is not suitable for assault, but that is the only option for small energy if limited to Open Market or basic blueprint pack for your colonies.  At least pulse laser is functional for medium and maybe heavy size.  Ballistics have mortars, autocannons, and machine guns, all of which are functional.  And missiles have singletons, hammers, and annihilators.

Honestly, if pulse laser is good enough for medium, then IR pulse laser should be good enough for small size basics.  That said, I bet Alex would have preferred to keep pulse laser out of basics, but he had to do something after he changed mining blaster from bad generalist energy to extreme anti-armor specialist hybrid that cannot fit in heavy energy mounts, and moving pulse laser to basics was the easiest and fastest solution.

Adding the IR pulse laser to the common weapon pool would certainly work as a quick and dirty solution, though a true scrapper/frontiersman weapon that's either a really old design or easy to convert from mining/industrial equipment would be better.  Much like the mining blaster, hammer torpedo, and those cheap ballistics you mentioned.

12

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: February 25, 2024, 04:33:53 PM »

The exact weapon ideas aren't really that important.  The point I wanted to make was that there's still tons of design space for common small energy weapons that anyone could have access to and it's a very thin weapon group at the moment that could use expanding.

13

Mods / Re: [0.97a] Starship Legends 2.5.1 - Extra flavor for ships, crew, and NPCs

« on: February 25, 2024, 02:30:16 PM »

Got my first Legendary ship and read through the storyteller in the bar.  That's a wonderful reward, especially in that it actually pulls the highlights from previous fights and how you got the ship.

https://i.imgur.com/5pFJFEa.png

It did pick good highlights, like a fight against a high end bounty where I got a desperate kill on an enemy capital, whose explosion took the Daedalus out at the same time.  As well as the fight against the TT crisis mercs, which was the most difficult fight I've had in this campaign.

14

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: February 25, 2024, 01:47:25 PM »

A few random ideas off the top of my head that I don't think would be too out of place or step on the toes of other weapons:

• Tiny autopulse / needler / thumper: Very short range weapon that has a very large spread and can benefit from expanded ammo. Has a long reload time once the ammo supply is burned through, like the mining blaster.
• Scatterblaster: A shotgun like weapon similar to the sabot missile pellets, but intended more like an anti-fighter weapon that can double as an anti-light ship weapon.
• Carving beam: Short range high explosive beam for cutting through armor.  Effective over time, but requires the ship maintain close distance around shield cover and stay out of the line of fire to deal with larger foes.

I'd say that coming up with weapon designs that have their own niche isn't that hard, it's more about the desire and benefit from putting development time into refining, testing, and implementing them that is an actual obstacle.  Small energy weapons already have antimatter blasters, they can be a pretty strong slot.

15

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: February 25, 2024, 09:06:23 AM »

Ion cannon is pretty good on the aurora and centurion. A lot of emp damage for a small mount with a low flux cost.

Makes sense.  If you've got a whole bunch of energy slots already using similar range weapons and you can spare one to add the disabling effect whenever the enemy drops shields.