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1

Mods / Re: [0.95a] Captain's Log 0.1.4 - Note-taking and Reminders

« on: April 20, 2021, 11:53:56 PM »

Damn was looking for a mod like this! too bad its for 0.95a any chance of a way to port this to 0.91a or letting us know how we could? Awsome mod!

Not a fan of 0.95 or something?

I believe this mod existed on the Discord before it actually got posted to the forums here as of 0.95, I'm sure stormbringer951 has the 0.91 version around somewhere.

2

Mods / Re: [0.95a] Captain's Log 0.1.4 - Note-taking and Reminders

« on: April 20, 2021, 05:45:14 PM »

Just found this mod. Nice!

I really hope this gets rolled into the main game at some point, it's super useful for tracking things that don't show up in the intel log or in other places like:
- unsalvaged habitats / research stations / etc
- if there's a system you explored but still has a heavy [REDACTED] presence, especially battleships for use with the Automated Ships skill
- good colonization candidates (not necessarily a Terran Eccentric world, but a good combination of multiple other high-value worlds or simply a system with 4+ not-terrible planets)
- you've stored all your ships/items for free at an abandoned station

3

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 17, 2021, 12:11:44 AM »

Alex, what is the current direction of skill rebalances and skill system changes?

+1 for this, especially around the Automated Ships skill and being able to have [REDACTED] ships in your fleet in general as one of the newest major changes in mechanics learned from skills that affects gameplay and fleet composition.

Obviously it's quite early to tell, but if there's a general rough idea of areas which might be getting tweaked (even if those tweaks/changes aren't thought out yet) based on feedback so far and your own (and your dedicated playtesters') experiences with how games on this build are playing out...?

4

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 16, 2021, 01:49:40 AM »

2 RedHellion

You didn't find it. You was told by me. And if, for some reason, Starsector would be a game with the rail-fixed mechanics when any given skill or game feature was supposed to be used in a given manner, we would't be talking right here. Because I wouldn't even buy the game in the first place.

I said my piece and gave my feedback on what I felt could be better, and explained as much as I could why I felt that using the Automated Ships skill essentially as a vehicle for deploying more officers wasn't something I would agree with balancing around and instead saw it as a sign for fixing some of the reasons why it becomes such a stellar meta in the first place (same thing with the [REDACTED] battleship + Alpha Core being meta on the opposite end for the skill since most of the other [REDACTED] ships pale in comparison given the low DP cap for the skill). You obviously disagree, and we obviously have very different playstyles and the way we view aspects of the game, and if the way I explained my thoughts wasn't satisfactory to you then so be it - I said it to contribute to the community. No need to start getting hostile.

Ultimately Alex is the dev, and it's his vision and he will weigh all the feedback and feel how it is for himself as he moves forward with whatever changes he feels are necessary.

5

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 15, 2021, 11:52:26 PM »

The question was that the skill in question "has way too little of an impact compared to the alternative". Now we are debating two meta things about it. One is that it allows you to turn the ECM war the other way around and provide the option to achieve  -20 to range against any fleet you encounter. And the other is the overpowered battleship "tearing almost everything near it to shreds". How is that "too little of an impact" compared to a third SP mod and 10 caps and vents as a permanent choice?

I guess my point was that I don't find deploying a bunch of frigates with "officers" (cores) for the sole point up upping your ECM score (basically turning [REDACTED] and the Automated Ships skill into a vehicle to jsut deploy more officers at once) to be an interesting or imo intended use of that skill. At least having an "overpowered battleship tearing almost everything near it to shreds" is basically the intended use of the skill, as far as I would assume. I realize that might just be a gameplay style difference, but I don't find that to be an interesting impact compared to [REDACTED] and I don't think the skill should be balanced around that. As I said, if anything that means the ability to mount as many cores as you want or the ECM war mechanics (or total potential bonuses) need tweaking.

So I suppose ultimately, yes it has just as much of an impact - if you use it for what I believe is a loophole and not the intended purpose, and one which I (personally) find less interesting/fun for the investment I put into that skill. I want [REDACTED] ships in my fleet to do work in combat, not load up as many frigates as possible with cores and just group them all at the back of my fleet during combat so they don't get blown up (since they're hard to replace) by enemy frigates. Plus Tempests and even Wolves (and potentially other Sector frigates) can 1:1 outfight [REDACTED] frigates when equipped decently.

6

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 15, 2021, 05:53:46 PM »

AI cored ships do not count toward officer limit. You can have up to 10 human officers. And about five gamma cores in frigates with some combat worthy CR left. If you go full support that means +50 ECM rating. Where was a fuss about ECM wars and how you win them. This is how.

When I can do the same thing by taking and holding points on the map and just having normal ships in play do the same thing (hell, I could use the extra hullmod from Specialized Modifications to build in an extra ECM hullmod to most of my capitals and cruisers if I really wanted), I don't consider that an overwhelming argument against it. Plus there are more interesting/fun things to do with [REDACTED] ships than deploying 5 frigates for ridiculous ECM ratings by stacking the maximum number of "officers" possible (especially if you're not playing a "wolf pack" style fleet). This is just as undesirable IMO as the other meta being "get and deploy a [REDACTED] battleship with an Alpha Core and nothing else matters". To me that sounds more like the "DP cost" of cores for the Automated Ships skill needs to be reconsidered, or have a separate limit on AI cores used as officers (e.g. 1 base, 3 by making the skill Elite with a story point) or something.

7

Bug Reports & Support / Re: 0.95a Automated Ships CR calculation

« on: April 15, 2021, 01:56:22 PM »

Thanks for the reply Alex!

Ah, I was assuming that the Automated Ships bonus was multiplicative, not another addition. The helper text for bonuses doesn't specify whether they're multiplicative or additional, so I thought this might be one of the multiplicative ones.

And I was thinking that the -100 was essentially being cancelled:
(baseline + crew training + reliability engineering) * automated ships
(70 + 8 + 0) * 0.6 = 46.8

When really you're saying it's this:
baseline + crew training + reliability engineering + automated ships - 100
70 + 8 + 0 + 60 - 100 = 38

8

Bug Reports & Support / 0.95a Automated Ships CR calculation

« on: April 15, 2021, 12:39:57 PM »

Originally mentioned this in the 0.95a announcement thread, figured I'd cross-post this bit to here:

With 2 Remnant Brilliant cruisers I'm at 50/30 DP for the Automated Ships skill, meaning they have 60% of their normal max CR. I would expect that means they have 47% CR ((70 base + 8 from my current Crew Training) * 0.6 from Automated Ships), but their CR is only 38%.

If I give them both Gamma Cores, my Automated Ships skill goes to 60/30 DP meaning they have 50% of their normal max CR. I would expect them to have 46% CR ((70 base + 8 from my current Crew Training + 15 from the core's Elite Reliability Engineering) * 0.5 from Automated Ships) but their CR is only 43%.

Not sure if there may be some weird interaction with the base -100% CR penalty for the Automated Ship hullmod (since that's the only other contributing factor listed for that calculation when hitting F1), or there's some other hidden math going on.

9

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 15, 2021, 12:14:30 PM »

A REDACTED battleship with an alpha core integrated is the second most powerful ship in the game (below singing friend encounter 1 and above REDACTED 2: Electric Boogaloo). Operating at 45% combat readiness doesn't even figure into that. The larger issue with the automated ship skill is that that is the best use of it and it makes every other recoverable automated ship redundant once you can get your hands on one.

Automated ships skill gives you free officered ships. Meaning free ECM and some other stuff. A lot of it actually.

I agree on the [REDACTED] battleship making all other [REDACTED] ships essentially worthless if you can get your hands on one, I feel like that needs to be tuned now that the player can have them all in their fleet rather than just being NPC-only ships. There should be some amount of decision-making involved in what [REDACTED] ships to keep and field based on your play style to make it interesting (like picking regular Sector ships for your personal fleet and to fly), rather than always being "[REDACTED] battleship + Alpha Core".

I disagree with the implication that Automated Ships is already overpowered or fine where it is. Given that it's at the end of the skill tree requiring 5 points of investment (1/3 of your skill points), it should be powerful; and it should also be a similar power level to the huge increase in combat power of potentially giving every ship in your fleet a free extra built-in hullmod plus more max vents (and capacitors). By contrast, even if [REDACTED] ships individually are more powerful than their Sector counterparts (debatable, at least for anything other than the battleship) they are not "free" and can't be made better by using story points: they still take a slot in your fleet, the still cost maintenance/fuel etc, they still cost DP to deploy in battle, and on top of that unless you have an extremely limited number of them (30 DP or less, which is one cruiser with a Gamma Core) they'll have such low CR that at least their accuracy will be affected or they could have a risk of malfunctions even at their max CR.
If we could spend a story point to add a special hullmod to them individually which has to be built-in and adds another +30% CR for automated ships (which maybe costs more than 1 story point for ships larger than frigates), at the very least, I would consider it on-par with Special Modifications. Right now, power level aside, I don't consider the Automated Ships skill to be rewarding for the investment beyond the (brief) initial novelty.

I feel like Zaizai summed it up really well:

One choice is to make my whole fleet stronger, doubling the vents on frigates [or easing flux pressure on flux-hungry capital ships], adding otherwise extremely costly hullmod to capital ships [for just the cost of a story point] etc; the other is to get a single strong ship that i can't even use as flagship [or maybe one or two cruisers] and has lower cr than the rest of the fleet [to the point where it has accuracy and other debuffs or suffers risk of malfunction while at max CR].

10

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 15, 2021, 01:04:05 AM »

I feel like the automated ships skill is extremely cool in practice, but has way too little of an impact compared to the alternative. Just 30 points means that with just 3 [REDACTED] version of the kite with 3 gamma cores, i'm already at full capacity... sure i could take a bigger ship with reduced CR, but as much strong a single redacted ship can be, other than the novelty, giving 10 to flux capacitors and vents, and an extra hullmod to every single ship is just too good to pass out.  My suggestion would be to raise the maximum points, even doubling it,  reducing the points cost of the gamma core while increasing beta and alpha cores cost. 
I think it would be balanced if you could have a single good ship with a good commander and enough leftover points for a couple of smaller ships with trash commanders, or a lot of smaller ships with trash commanders , or some medium sized ship with good commanders etc, opening up to various combinations that are impossible right now

Just wanted to chime in on the Automated Ships skill with my 2 cents as well:

Not sure if this is a bug (posting this in the Bug forum as well):
With 2 [REDACTED] cruisers I'm at 50/30 for the skill already, meaning they have 60% of the normal max CR. Normally I would think that means they have 47% CR ((70 base + 8 from my current Crew Training) * 0.6 from Automated Ships), but their CR is only 38%.
If I give them both Gamma Cores, my Automated Ships skill goes to 60/30 meaning they have 50% of their normal max CR, so I would expect them to have 46% CR ((70 base + 8 from my current Crew Training + 15 from the core's Elite Reliability Engineering) * 0.5 from Automated Ships) but their CR is only 43%.
Not sure if there may be some weird interaction with the base -100% CR penalty for the Automated Ship hullmod (since that's the only other contributing factor listed for that calculation when hitting F1), or there's some other hidden math going on.
Answered by Alex in the Bug forum, I was just assuming the wrong CR calculation for Automated Ships.

And on the Automated Ships skill itself:
I feel like 30 deployment points is too low a limit, with the speed of diminishing returns so that you get half the bonus if you double the limit. We already can't fly any of them ourselves, which is understandable both meta- and lore-wise. [REDACTED] ships are cool and specifically require this skill to even field in combat, and the skill is at the end of the tree: I want to field them as a not-just-token part of my fleet for that skill investment at a CR level where they're not instantly within malfunction territory as soon as I deploy them for the first time. Currently you can run maybe 3-4 frigates, 2-3 destroyers, or a single cruiser at full max CR.
Maybe the DP cap should be raised slightly to 40, or enough to field a single [REDACTED] battleship plus an Alpha Core while still getting the full bonus? Or if that feels too powerful for no extra cost compared to the story point cost for the additional built-in hullmods granted by Special Modifications, allow us to spend an extra story point to make the skill Elite to raise the DP cap or have the skill unlock a special "[REDACTED] Overrides" hullmod that has to be built into [REDACTED] ships that gives them an extra +50% CR or something to counteract the low-CR issue on a per-ship basis.

11

Blog Posts / Re: Writing Starsector

« on: December 29, 2020, 07:11:23 PM »

...Early game? The fleet guarding the cache can spawn with [REDACTED] battleships.

Sure, sometimes it doesn't - I've seen it as small as a single cruiser with supporting destroyers/frigates - but even a [REDACTED] cruiser isn't exactly a pushover.

Maybe I just got lucky, I don't think I ever encountered more than some destroyer-sized [REDACTED] with escorts. The couple of playthroughs I did on the latest version I went out to grab that quite early in my career, with a mid-sized survey/salvage fleet with at most a cruiser for myself and some escorting destroyers and frigates in case I ran into hostile scavengers or a bigger [REDACTED] presence than expected. Granted I could be mis-remembering, I haven't booted up SS in months since I finished my last playthrough.

I assumed it was a set difficulty of fleet (or one that scales with the player's progress like bounties) meant to be an early-mid-game quest to give you an opportunity to either get in with Tri-Tachyon or get an early jump on a colony with the Alpha Core.

12

Blog Posts / Re: Writing Starsector

« on: December 29, 2020, 01:54:21 PM »

My suggestion would be to change that pirate fleet to a pirate-flagged scavenger fleet that, critically, actually has some scavenged loot already in its holds that you can get if you beat it. Then you'd have a choice between an alpha core versus a chance at additional random blueprints.

That's still an objectively worse option to send it back than just keeping it, though, since you would have to fight the fleet to get those rewards at what is generally still an early-game point in time (unless you mean that in addition to being just a scavenger fleet, it's also not that large) while keeping the Alpha Core has no additional challenge/downside. My suggestions instead for this example would be either:

a) Keeping the Alpha Core now also spawns a fleet that will try to hunt you down (but it's Tri-Tachyon instead of pirate) to balance out the fact you got a free Alpha Core. And sending the Alpha Core back means the rep rewards you with some random blueprints (maybe specifically Tri-Tachyon ones) or something else high-value, to balance out being hunted by the pirate fleet.

b) Neither option causes the player to be hunted by a fleet: keeping the core just means you get a free Alpha Core, sending the core back means you just get some free blueprints or other high-value loot from the rep.

13

Blog Posts / Re: Writing Starsector

« on: December 29, 2020, 03:11:44 AM »

Love it! Really looking forward to seeing how this gets implemented.

I also want to throw my own weight behind the previous comments re: having clear and balanced narrative decisions made by gp0923 and Sundog, with that Alpha Core decision as an example. Essentially being forced into an optimal decision which is against how you want to play the character because the alternative is objectively worse by a large margin (e.g. no gain, or gain an Alpha Core), or realizing later that you've missed out on things due to your in-character narrative decisions which put you objectively worse off than a player who made different decisions, doesn't feel good (all options which are within the bounds of role-playing should be equally "right"/"valid" and provide similar if different benefits). Balance between decision rewards doesn't even have to be immediate: one decision could have an immediate benefit, while the other could provide a benefit or opportunity of its own shortly after. Consequences don't necessarily have to be clear at the time of the decision, but the player should be able to trust that they can role-play their decisions for the most part without making themselves objectively worse off.

Jamplier (and others) also made what I feel to be an interesting/valuable suggestion regarding allowing skill checks (summed up into skill category totals rather than individual skill checks) but making it so that there's always a way for the player to progress (including not making any of the checks), and the rewards for each different skill check option are at least roughly equivalent if not exactly the same.

Looking forward to seeing if my particular playstyle is represented in the story choices. Apparently that playstyle is smuggling huge quantities of weaponry, soldier and drugs to terrorists and black marketeers for money. And then using that money to fund expeditions into outlying stars to scavenge dangerous and prohibited technology. I honestly failed to realize I'm a sci-fi bad guy.

So... what I'm hearing is that you're Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg from The Fifth Element?

14

General Discussion / Re: How do you all manage your weapons inventories?

« on: February 14, 2020, 05:06:12 PM »

I'm finding a PITA getting them all in and out of personal inventory to look at upgrading loudouts

You don't have to do that. You can equip weapons from storage.

Ah! Part of my beef was that it seemed to me you couldn't do that. I'm sure you're right so I'll try that next refit session. Thanks.

The Refit screen 100% will show you both weapons in your fleet inventory and weapons in storage at the colony/station where you currently are. Just note that anything you dismount from your ships will go into your fleet inventory rather than colony storage, so when you're done refitting you might want to Ctrl+click all the weapon stacks you dismounted back from your inventory to your colony storage.

Anyway, I generally just stash every weapon I find in early-mid game at my "primary" colony once I get that far (or whatever my main base of operations is before I have my own colonies). After a certain point I simply stop picking up every single weapon I come across and only grab rare ones or ones I use a lot of. No point selling them since you won't make much money off them, they're only worth hoarding for personal use.

15

General Discussion / Re: Is there a mod that will prevent debris from disappearing during combat?

« on: January 07, 2020, 11:21:56 AM »

I believe the bits of wreckage from destroyed ships blows up after some set amount of time; or maybe if there are no ships in close proximity for 10+ seconds. Disabled ships (the ones that are still in one piece after dying, and you can still target their drifting hulk) never blow up and just drift off the battlefield.

This is probably both to reduce battlefield clutter (there would be quite a bit of drifting wreckage after a large fleet battle) and to improve game performance.

I'm not aware personally of a mod or setting which could modify how long debris stays on the battlefield. If there was though, you might see a performance impact in larger battles.