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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 - PixiCode

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 6
1
General Discussion / Re: 2 Radiants & co VERSUS 5 ordos (2079 DP)
« on: March 06, 2024, 08:24:25 PM »
He doesn’t require support doctrine, bull restoration with no d-mods would do it, too.

Glad to see your 2 radiant play pop off like crazy SCC ^^ guess the conquest had to go, huh?

2
General Discussion / Re: How would you build a Wolf in 0.97a?
« on: March 06, 2024, 07:56:33 PM »
I use wolves with Ion Pulser, Phase Lance or Mining Blaster. If I'm facing Persean League, I would also give it Advanced Optics and burst laser(s). Or PD lasers+IPDAI+AO, Idk. DEMs scary.

I would give them S-mod Accelerated Shield, S-mod Expanded Shield, s-mod Flux Adjunct thingy (The capacitor hullmod) and make sure to max flux capacitors, then flux vents.


3
General Discussion / Re: Colony Crisis needs help!
« on: March 06, 2024, 07:39:25 PM »
In vanilla, every crisis has a permanent solution that requires no open war.

These *should* work in nexerelin too, but I don't know.

When you wipe out Hegemony's markets they usually do stop having fleets around in nexerelin, but the game tells you when hegemony has been wiped out. Maybe you have a different mod preventing this from happening. The Luddic Path never disappear, though. They exist in the fringes, it's impossible to wipe them out. They're more an idea among the people than a centralized polity.

4
General Discussion / Re: Obsessively Optimizing Wolfpack (Updated)
« on: February 26, 2024, 10:40:05 AM »
Throw in an antimatter blaster or two and scarabs start to chew through cruisers too!

I try to limit that to SO - non SO scarabs can’t quite react to the spike in flux fast enough and since temporal shell also costs a burst log flux, it can cause issues sometimes. Plus they cost an arm and a leg in OP.

Not that it’s bad, it’s just my logic for keeping to the ir pulsers and ion cannon.

5
General Discussion / Re: Obsessively Optimizing Wolfpack
« on: February 26, 2024, 09:04:24 AM »
I gotta call it small SO Fleet instead of wolfpack.
they play different.

only thing you can change could be switch from Bomber to interceptor.
main propose is to make clearways for your pack to prey.
lessen time to fought fighter. (mayb they just shrug it off since it's SO+reckless)
I think SO for a wolfpack is a requirement, +50base speed for frigates is insane. With so much speed, ships can dodge most incomming shots unless it's a hitscan and when that happens, they can quickly retreat behind other ships making it impossible to concentrate fire with so many tiny buggers flying around.

I tried a wolfpack without SO, but it just fails horribly against anything bigger, without SO, coordinated maneuvers, helmsmanship(+50base, +20%, +15% speed) frigates have a hard time dodging shots.

Although SO basically makes any wolfpack better, it’s not required. In particular, SO scarabs are the closest to the borderline of being better without SO.

The reason for this is partially due to their PPT, but largely because you can do some pretty good builds with just their default setup. I managed to make a flux neutral 4 ir pulser non-SO Scarab, and a 3 ir pulser 1 ion cannon flux positive non-SO scarab.

For extra spice, this build used smod IPDAI in order to make them annihilate fighters and missiles with the Point Defense+ skill, which also gives them all +200 range, making the scarab overall a bit safer besides against tachyons.

Having scarabs that actually last a fairly long time is nice. They don’t kill cruisers very fast unfortunately, but with the emp build they’re great support and can be paired with auroras and medusas. 

This scarab build is also particularly effective against the Persean league. The scarabs are fast enough to react to DEMs and long range enough to just barely hit DEMs past their activation range.

6
Custom order ships are made with the quality equivalent to if you had maxed out ship quality in the doctrine.

Yeah this checks out, with just an orbital works I get 0-1 d-mods per ship from the looks of it, even with quality set to 1. Kinda unfortunate, but it makes sense I suppose. Edit: just got a venture with 2 d-mods. Meh, well, this method at least helps.

So, Shade, to answer your question;



Do not use an orbital works or a nanoforge. Use Alpha Cores and build multiple heavy industries. This will maximize the d-mods of your ships.

7
Yup! Also in the fleet doctrine page you can turn quality down at the same time. That's a good method to get D mods quickly, they just won't be guaranteed to be the ones you want. Which, honestly, is fine.

I hadn't considered the colony crisis fleets - yeah that helps to get your own fleet blown up faster :D

Oh man, actually, I was just testing it in my save... it appears like all ships you produce via personal request are nearly pristine, even when I removed the nanoforge and set quality to 1. That's... uh. I didn't expect this...

8
Also, I highly doubt the above method could work in an hour for a full DO fleet. We're talking 20+ ships with multiple deaths per ship, even before reloads! That's going to be, what, 100 fights? 200 fights? And finding somewhere around 30-50 enemy fleets to punch as well, which is going to require multiple systems.

Actually with the advent of colony crisis we now have many big fleets to cause many deaths of your ships, funny enough. I'm not someone who likes reloading to get D-mods, but I'm able to naturally accrue 4-5 d-mods on most of my ships pretty naturally thanks to colony threat dealings. Doubly so when you can purchase ships with many d-mods or salvage them from the enemy/derelicts!

The spoiler below is apparently slightly inaccurate info, but I left it to keep the thread sensible since people responded to it. It's clarified in subsequent posts.
Spoiler
But yeah trying to create a new fleet that you want immediately, and with 4-5 dmods, can be annoying. This may sound really funny, but you could order production at your colony and not use any nanoforge. IIRC you can just have several Heavy Industries that help stack personal request production value, then also use that one skill that increases that value as well. You'll naturally get what, 3-5 D-mods or something per ship created?
[close]

9
Mods / Re: [0.97a] The Knights of Ludd
« on: February 16, 2024, 08:16:51 PM »
Now this is Luddracing!!! Thanks for the great mod ;D

10
I haven't tried a fleet with both, but I do know that all 4 SD skills are useful on vanguards, and they get down to 3 dp with support doctrine and 5 d-mods. Plus, rugged construction halves the d-mod penalties. You could jam 20 of them for a total of 60 dp and still have 180 to play with. This many frigates would get in the way of your own ships a lot, so you would want to support them with missile ships that can shoot over the swarm. The cool part is that missile ships can stomach d-mods better than other ships, making them a great fit for this fleet. That being said, you probably don't want to run them officerless. You are already getting a lot of value out of SD from the vanguards, while the extra 20% DP saving on your gryphons/pegasi isn't worth missing out on missile spec and target analysis.

What you could do is deploy your XIV legions/pegasi/etc first to draw fire and only a few vanguards to capture points. Then once battle is joined have the rest of the vanguards attack, minimizing the amount of aggro the vanguards take and surrounding the enemy. Hopefully any brilliants, novas or anything else with HIL/tachyon has been suitably distracted by then. The vanguards would keep high value targets from escaping and also mop up any glimmers a lumens at the same time.

11
Though I'm a Damage Control believer, for about half of ships they're already on death's door when their hull is taking damage, limiting its overall combat value.

However, the repair speed bonus is useful for every single ship!

Anyways, about SD+DO builds, here's my opinion.

The player can design a fleet with close to or even slightly above 30 combat ships worth 240 DP in totality. With DP discounts, the player can get the more expensive ships while still keeping to very close to the ship limit. This can create a defeat in detail on the scope of the whole battlemap. While the enemy fleet can outnumber the player 8-1 in totality, the actual participating ships are instead fighting 1-2 or worse, in favor of the player. Bonus points, the enemy admiral AI doesn't seem to consider how to change its play if the player has so many combat ships on the battlemap.

The challenge is to keep any of those combat ships from dying to keep this advantage while killing fast enough to not run out of PPT, which hopefully the DP discount assists with. Pretty much every ship should have CE too, so that's good. With both SD and DO you could have say a ton of SO Auroras mixed with Omens. Could even have nine (8 officer, 1 captain) wolfpack officers on the omens. Like someone else mentioned, you can also use coreless automated ships to stuff as many automated ships into your fleet as possible.

Is this idea better than the 'elite fleet' concept (Officers+Mercenaries/AI cores on every single ship)? No idea. Just giving my thoughts of how to use SD+DO beyond carrier or missile spam.

12
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 13, 2024, 03:09:16 PM »
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=23745.105 Here's an older thread about the Vanguard, to show I did do some research on the forum's opinions of Vanguard before making the post. I had a few thoughts I wanted to share about the Vanguard and this is too small of a post to make for its own thread imo, so I decided to put it here.

VANGUARDS
(I striked out what is no longer worth discussing because it has been addressed via rugged construction change in 0.96)
I think they're actually just fine in battle; I've had good success using them against high-end Ordos, even. Just have to bring enough of 'em; they work in packs - if you deploy one or two, sometimes they'll do something and sometimes they'll run into a few HILs and fizzle out, but if you have a bunch it averages out into consistent good performance - and they synergize well with other Vanguards. It's just the recovery cost that's too high, making this a still-winning-but-too-expensive proposition.

I was thinking about the Vanguard recently and a thought occurred to me. What if the top speed of the Vanguard was higher, say 155 like the omen?

I think the vanguard still struggles a little too hard even when it is mixed with other vanguards or other ships that can draw fire or hide behind when beams are involved. Beam damage resistance would 'fix' this but probably open a different can of worms, and was already discussed before anyway. A top speed buff to the vanguard might be an interesting experiment, though. This would play into the use case listed by Alex here - packs that can move in and move about. Obviously they have burn drive, but burn drive AI is pretty cautious about using it to approach too much, the vanguard's burn drive is used more for point capture, rapidly redeploying on the battlemap and chasing fleeing enemies than offensive approaches when in AI hands. I think. A higher top speed would also improve its role as an escort, for those who like using vanguards as escorts.

I had this thought because I've been on a starsector hiatus for a few months and thought the vanguard already had a high speed for a frigate. And, it sort of does, but 135 was lower than I thought it was. Bringing its top speed to be similar to the Omen would sort of be like mirroring the sorts of roles an Omen can fulfill, but with a low tech variant that does it in a very different manner.

Well, that was all I had to mention, just throw that thought out there.

13
Not definitively relevant for this thread because it's just one build and a fairly narrow case, but this thread made me want to try it, and I put it on this Retribution build, instead of the Mining Blasters and the Thumpers, and added AWM. And - it's actually substantially better! (snip)

Replacing MB with HM on your build tracks with my own belief of Heavy Mortar; the low projectile speed and bad recoil has less of an impact for close-range builds. Same belief I have with light mortar, actually. And the Retribution is a king of needing to go (and reaching) short range. The longer range you try to use the heavy mortar at, the more the Heavy Mortar's issues become apparent.

What I don't know is if the heavy mortar should use a buff, though. It's very good for builds that can get close and can afford all the buffs to soothe its problems, there's just so few builds that actually want to get close to the enemy with heavy mortars.

Maybe it could be an even more 'budget,' a slight buff to its flux efficiency so that it feels even cheaper, maybe a corresponding nerf to its damage. This would leave it around the same strength for builds already good with the mortar, but buff it for builds that want a cheap HE option that'll miss a lot at long range.

14
General Discussion / Re: Wayfarer is amazing.
« on: January 04, 2024, 02:34:13 PM »
It's less that Wayfarer is bad somehow, and more that the stage of the game it's good at ends in less than 20 minutes.

If you do the tutorial, you come out of it with 2 destroyers, and plenty of money to buy another 2. At that point Wayfarer is already obsolete.

this exactly. Wayfarer fills the same sort of niche that the cerberus or mule do.

Very good at the early part of the game where their limited combat role is still useful + they are hybrid as a cargo ship. Pretty bad past the early game since it's more efficient to have dedicated logistic and combat ships. Usually.

Though, for a new player, the early game might last way longer than 20 minutes. I think it's good that there are ships that are just specifically good in the early game.

15
General Discussion / Re: Pre-Made Officer Loadouts
« on: January 04, 2024, 02:32:27 PM »
Hmm I like the idea of these special officers being RNG but from a preset that clearly favors one playstyle. Might encourage the player to lean to a specific playstyle if they so desire.

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