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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - Mattk50

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1
Blog Posts / Re: Skill Tweaks
« on: March 09, 2024, 05:32:10 PM »
It had been quite a long while since I played, but i recently went through a campaign and had a lot of fun. I had been very critical over well, the entire skill system for awhile. The current skill system is a massive improvement over those early implementations, the balance is way better, the available OP points on hulls are consistent now, story points provide a nice extra path for progression. I'm still not a fan of arbitrary damage bonuses and similar but it's not really a problem in the current balance i dont think.


However, i want to attempt an another appeal at tweaking the balance between combat and fleet skills. I have a lot of fun piloting my ship, my favorite being the odyssey (since apogee seems to have gotten a couple redesigns and doesn't really play well as a flagship anymore). Even piloting well, it usually feels much better to get a skill that benefits the whole fleet rather than only your flagship. If it were designed such that it was a power transfer between your flagship or your fleet, a choice between a single strongly buffed ship or many weaker ships, classic narrow and tall or wide and short, it would be fine. But instead of wide and short, it's wide and short but with a big power dip right where the player's ship in the fleet is.

As is, if you do not put a lot of points into combat, then it feels like everyone in your fleet except you gets to have a fun, competent ship. All your officered ships get to bleed off hard flux, have higher top speed, get more plasma burns, get extra flux, deal more damage, higher peak operating time, etc, except the one you're flying, because screw you, player. This blatantly sucks, why am i jealous of my own NPCs, alex! I suggest allowing the player to put an AI officer for skills on their own ship or otherwise be able to use the skills of an officered ship when in control of it.

Thinking about the kind of player who will want to specialize into the command style or who doesn't want to command a ship or isnt entirely comfortable with it, they might not be confident in controlling their ship manually. The very last thing a player who isn't confident in controlling ships manually needs is to be further discouraged from piloting! The knowledge that just by taking control of a ship the shields will get weaker, guns will do less damage, etc is a huge discouragement to players from engaging more with piloting. As an aside, the big 5-6 ordo kill fleets i see don't involve player piloting either, so at current it seems "Optimal" to not pilot your ships at all, which isn't very fun...

I think, if it became possible to put an officer on your flagship right now, it would certainly break the game's balance. If you could always use an officer for your flagship's combat skills, then even extra elite skills the player would be able to use would typically not be worth it compared to having a rank 6 or 7 officer then the player simply putting 5 more points into leadership (one of those points will give extra officers too, which would end up offsetting the officer you'd otherwise be losing by putting into your own ship. But it's not a balance change that would be incredibly far off from working. It's hard for me to say which direction would work for starsector, but reducing the base officer count and distributing more via skills (unlocking officer slots from combat skills anyone?), maybe having minor fleet bonuses on existing combat skills when taken by the player, maybe even giving the player a different combat skill pool than officers would be good here.



By the way, hull restoration might be my favorite skill in the game, it's a huge upgrade to the gameplay experience. It's always been annoying to me how AI are really stupid and frequently get your assets killed by random chance (did two friendly paragons really need to sandwich hug my shrike to death?) The actual credits cost of losing frigates, destroyers and other smaller ships this way was always dwarfed by the annoyance factor of having to find or order replacement ships and refit them. For big ships, the cost of dock restoration always being higher than the hull cost of the ship itself is also an issue (though losing them is way rarer), sure i could go find a new one instead of restoring this one, but that is such a drag on gameplay and the fun factor. Story point upgrades on ships help us not lose them as well now which is another neat addition, but hull restoration just helps me not care when an AI piloted ship suicides in some ridiculous way, which makes me want to play campaigns for much longer without getting bogged down in that feeling of tedium from attrition managing a late-game fleet.

Happy 420th post

2
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: April 25, 2017, 10:10:36 PM »
been awhile since i've played, in this new patch im still not a fan of the skill system existing despite improvements. in a game like this it truly just makes the entire experience worse. Hey guy, pick between guns that shoot straight, ships that dont lose readyness mid fight and ability to do fun industry stuff! whats that, you're bored already and don't want to have to mod the game because it messes up the balance? Nah, just remember your ships, weapons, hull, literally everything functons completely differently in arbitrary ways because you decided to spend a skillpoint in combat instead of somewhere else.

same with peak readyness, added to balance out gamey teleports and similar uneccassry ultra kiting abilities on ships that could already kite very well, just a chain of poor design decisions. This is alex's game to develop as he wishes of course im just so dissapointed at the direction it's gone in some places, while in some other places the game feels and plays fantastic and has come a long way.

3
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: December 04, 2014, 05:29:14 PM »
This is... why... why would you do this. I thought removing the flux bonus was a bit silly but then i kept reading. I don't know what to say that could convince you not to take this game down the road of other similar shallow games with the interesting bits ripped out to make things more "accessible". Maybe i'll try later but im just surprised right now.

4
General Discussion / Re: Conquest, anyone?
« on: November 09, 2014, 09:02:18 PM »
For those having trouble finding ships: don't forget that the game divides ships into three tiers or epochs: Mastery epoch (high armor, low shields, ballistic focus, usually brownish colour scheme), Expansion (blended focus, usually grey colour scheme), and Modern epoch (high shields, low armor, energy focus, usually light blue colour scheme). If you are unable to find a particular ship, you may be looking on planets that normally sell the wrong epoch ship. If I recall correctly, Hegemony bases sell Mastery, Sindrian Diktat sells Expansion, and Tri-Tachyon sells Modern ships.

If you're having no luck finding a particular ship, you may just be searching bases that have the wrong epoch ships. Try adjusting your search accordingly.

Many high tech ships just aren't sold anywhere, period. Apogee, omen, aurora, astral, i have spent time searching every port in the game under various levels of stability, with a particular focus on the tritach military market. They've been effectively removed from the game.

5
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: November 05, 2014, 12:29:48 AM »
No fix/change for all the ships that are never sold :(

6
General Discussion / Re: So, what do people think of the difficulty?
« on: October 24, 2014, 04:14:14 PM »
Don't search for the exact same ship to replace it, make do with something else of a similar ship class, the game forces you to adapt and change your fleet configuration and tactics that you employ to win.

well, that was easy, i couldnt find any ships i wanted to form a solid fleet composition in the time it took to make a few million so i ended up just buying a paragon and now im "winning" whatever that means.

7
General Discussion / Re: Yay for missile AI
« on: October 23, 2014, 07:21:34 PM »
Some missiles are trying to curve around my Wolf's shields and hit my unshielded engines.  That makes combat way more exciting!
Those sneaky salamanders are my wolf's bane as it lacks PD. have to expend a lot of phase skims when a buffalo fires 10 of them at me at once.


Harpoon circus is such fun.

Relevant:

8
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: October 23, 2014, 07:18:58 PM »
i get the feeling a lot of ships and items have vanished from the world. I have 100 reputation with hegemony, tritach, and independent and access to the other 2 factions military markets and have yet to see an omen, an apogee, conquest, odyssey, hyperion, astral, venture, tempest, an aurora, affliction, or a doom. I stumbled onto a shade at the black market of a tritach non military planet, not a clue why it was there, doesn't seem to be any reasoning to it. Why have all these ships if you cant find and use so many of them, if you do manage to find one and it dies your fleet composition is screwed too, because you won't see another. Judging by the general discussion threads everyone's using mostly the same ships because they're the main things available.

Anyways my progress feels hindered more by lack of ship availability than by lack of money, jobs or exp. omg alex why do you do this.

9
General Discussion / Re: So, what do people think of the difficulty?
« on: October 23, 2014, 01:46:00 PM »
I still feel more limited by the lack of available to purchase ships than funds or money. Kinda a problem for fun gameplay, even if i do find an apogee one day, if it dies what do i do, search for it forever all over again? it's just annoying.

10
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: October 23, 2014, 08:31:43 AM »
Not quite sure on the "Shielded cargo holds" mechanic. Does having this one ship in my fleet mean all illegal cargo will be counted as shielded? Hows this work.

11
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: September 29, 2014, 07:48:38 AM »
Will this release before you have to live with not having released an update for a full year?

12
Blog Posts / Re: Faction Relationships
« on: August 14, 2014, 06:51:07 PM »
allied implies some kind of formal treaty. cooperative isnt great either.

nitpicks tho.

13
Blog Posts / Re: Faction Relationships
« on: August 12, 2014, 06:22:10 PM »
Sounds like a near perfect framework for these things. One thing i wonder about is why "independents" have a unified rating at all, though.

Also, how moddable do you think the specific actions and effects of relations will be?

14
General Discussion / Re: SSD Benefits?
« on: August 10, 2014, 09:42:05 AM »
A SSD rarely influences loading times significantly.

SSDs generally have excellent read/write speeds but most consumer SSDs are not much faster than a good hard drive.  Where a SSD's performance comes in is with responsiveness; lacking a seek time or physical platters, they have random access performance that a hard drive can never hope to match.

In conclusion there is rarely any benefit whatsoever to gaming on a SSD, but you would benefit greatly by running your operating system on a SSD.

On a 2d game like starsector, it is true that you are unlikely to see any benefit at all from an SSD. However, even the cheaper consumer grade SSDs can drastically decrease load times on any modern 3d game with large amounts of textures, and can even increase in-game performance on games which spend time loading and unloading textures and world data. Many open world games that lack any loading screens have to do this, and in those games it makes a significant difference. most modern games just at minumum store needed textures to the RAM, meaning it will only impact initial load time in those games.

15
Suggestions / Re: Justifying non-"instant" Battles
« on: August 02, 2014, 03:18:26 PM »
There is an issue with this concering fleet/multi fleet balance, that was part of mount and blade. The best way to expand your forces was to just have multiple parties/lords following you, you wouldnt get as bad a speed penalty for a huge party and whatnot. Depending on future officer/faction fleet mechanics this could be a nonissue or could be a big one. Just something to keep in mind.

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