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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 - TaLaR

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1
Suggestions / Re: Change Harbinger's System to a Movement Disruption
« on: March 17, 2024, 11:21:01 PM »
This would purely an anti-player griefing ability. AI doesn't significantly rely on precise maneuvering. Player does. AI usually doesn't do the winning move even when one obviously exists and it's perfectly capable of executing it stat-wise.

At the same time rather useless to player as well - I can outmaneuver AI as is, a system that doesn't help me win the flux war (free damage/absorption/dodge otherwise unavoidable shots/etc) isn't good enough. Harbinger (with character skills) is fast enough to not need system to approach any fleeing target. Not fast enough to outmaneuver shields like a phase frigate, but proposed system won't help with this.

Hard to not waste charge of this system too. As player, you'd just bait this system by entering it's range with a safe movement vector, then start doing whatever you were actually intending to. But good luck tracking enemy cooldowns, there is no standard UI for this (maybe there is a mod?). Would be annoying as hell.

2
Suggestions / Re: An "always autofire" toggle for weapon groups
« on: March 14, 2024, 11:27:45 PM »
Imo, there is no need to keep obvious AI flaws just for balancing. It's always possible to just nerf enemy advantage in campaign to compensate for them being smarter (fewer ships/officers/etc), and the end result would be a better experience.

3
Suggestions / Re: Built-in Drones should not be Fighter Wings
« on: March 07, 2024, 02:26:45 AM »
I do deploy Shepherds a lot, even fairly late. They are easy to replace with pristine from every 2nd black market, not that sensitive to d-mod debuffs and reasonably survive-able.
If I want a pure cargo ship that never sees combat, I use buffalo/colossus/atlas (with augmented drive and/or militarized to reach needed fleet speed).

4
General Discussion / Re: new phase is absolutely horrible
« on: March 03, 2024, 09:56:10 PM »
It was always possible to catch any and all AI phase ships. Easiest with a phase ship of your own, otherwise with something like Medusa - just use burst of mobility from system to punish their vent (or with fastest ships just the unphase cooldown itself). Maybe even with an Odyssey, if you pre-position correctly and have 2 Tachyon lances.

5
Suggestions / Re: Better hard flux bar indicator
« on: February 28, 2024, 01:17:49 AM »
Yep, +1 to Nettle's offer. Clear yet unobtrusive.

6
General Discussion / Re: Termination Sequence continues to be terrible
« on: February 27, 2024, 12:56:00 PM »
Yeah, AI is definitely not smart enough to use a system with significant drawbacks. I thought we learned this lesson with Burn Drive (which finally became abort-able for AI not that long ago)?

7
General Discussion / Re: An analysis of SP sinks and some thoughts
« on: February 26, 2024, 07:58:13 PM »
You need to spend enough SP on refundable uses until level 15 to maintain 2x leveling speed and will eventually get these SP back after level 15 via 4x exp boost.

Ship mods are semi-refundable. Part of refund is locked behind having to scrap the ship, which is often not a practical thing to do.

But non-refundable uses are truly a sink. Officers are particularly problematic with up to 3 elite skills - you need to get all 5(6) skills first, to make sure officer doesn't roll anything wrong before committing points to elite anything. And even than, that's perfect officer only for particular kind of ship, so your fleet is locked into particular build one officer at a time.

8
Suggestions / Re: Plot armor should be handled more gracefully, if kept.
« on: February 25, 2024, 10:55:02 PM »
Why not adopt the starcontrol solution? If a planet doesn't survive, you should be able to loot whatever was necessary for quests from ruins on it.

9
General Discussion / Re: Has the AI become worse at shield flickering?
« on: February 21, 2024, 06:44:03 PM »
Unless this changed, here is 0.96 behavior:

AI only flickers at very high flux. It's flicker logic is also not same as player - as player I raise shield to catch incoming projectiles. AI raises shield as soon as flux drops below some threshold, whether there are incoming shots or not. In fact, it doesn't "see" projectiles other than mines/missiles, and whether there are gun arcs aimed in it's direction.

10
Suggestions / Re: Hellbore buff?
« on: February 20, 2024, 10:55:16 PM »
Hellbore is definitely easier to block for player, but AI doesn't flicker shield with that much precision. As long as you fire somewhat mixed HE + kinetics, Hellbore will do fine vs AI.

11
Afflictor P is under-valued in DP, but so is base Afflictor and even arguably Shade (worse flux stats and useless system, but it's just as fast and can fit 3 AMB just fine). At least in terms of what they get done under player control.

Though for phase ships, DP isn't really about portion of total DP max(typically 240), but phase DP max, which is only 40. Any number that doesn't fit in nicely would be just wasteful. Like for example a 15DP Afflictor.

12
I don't use SO. I pilot Afflictors to kill all the big targets, so as long as allied ships can stall and pick off small enemies, they are doing their job well enough. SO ships can't stall, they are useless for me.

13
I pretty much always put Unstable Injector on frigates. A frigate isn't going to out-range anyone (with hard flux weapons) except some other frigates. So just stack all speed you can.

The larger the ship hull, the less efficient UI is (OP cost vs speed gain) and the more important is the range that you give up to have it. For AI ships larger than frigate, UI is pretty much universally not good. Player can use it on some faster ships.


14
General Discussion / Re: New cheapest way to deal with Z-fella
« on: February 14, 2024, 10:48:54 PM »
It turns out I was actually wrong! You can achieve this with a level 5 Grendel as well.

While this is good piloting, the deciding factor seems to be bad AI. Zig never really needed to vent, it should have just dissipated normally. Zig easily out-damages your blasters and his phase cooldown is short enough to re-phase in case of Reaper launch. Zig also probably had effective speed advantage to stay away, and didn't use that (less base speed, but it can afford to spend much more time in phase).

Perfect behavior would be not to phase continuously at all, and just use cloak reactively vs blasters and reapers. Though AI isn't allowed to use perfect timing like this most of the time (with some exceptions, this sort of instant reaction is allowed for Damper Field use).

On a side note. Switching linked/alternating fire mode in combat should be a vanilla feature (there is a mod). Because switching to alternating is necessary to counter some of these tactics, but is sub-optimal most of the time.

15
Suggestions / Re: More new phase ships please
« on: February 14, 2024, 12:25:48 AM »
Phase ships and carriers aren't deliberately inefficient, they merely provide maximum benefit very quickly. I prefer it this way, since you don't need to make an all carrier/phase fleet to get the most out of those ships.

Phase Coil Tuning is qualitative difference for player phase ships.

+50% speed means that player Afflictor goes from being fairly dependent on allies for cover to free-range hunting. 180 sec PPT (combined with Wolfpack) means you don't care about PPT anymore, even without Hardened subsystems, because 30 shots from Expanded Mags run out faster.

AI can't do nearly as much as player even with optimal setup, but expecting AI to do anything worthwhile in nerfed state (that even player would struggle with) is unreasonable.

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