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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 - DeltaV_11.2

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1
General Discussion / Re: Neat Oddysey Build
« on: January 10, 2019, 03:48:24 PM »
The AI is really good at activating shields to selectively tank damage. It has perfect shot discrimination and very good control such that it can very easily shield tank HE while letting the Kinetic through.

That's true except for Sabots. For some reason the AI keeps the shields up in this case, and it's very easy to overload them. In my opinion the Sabot is one of the best missiles for this reason. I even have a Sabot Pod on my large missile mount on the Apogee.
The AI tends to fear the Sabot's EMP damage significantly. To be fair, 2k EMP damage is a lot, equivalent to several seconds of ion beam fire or a tachyon lance burst.

2
General Discussion / Re: Relative balance of cargo\fuel ships
« on: January 10, 2019, 11:25:02 AM »
I kind of think that there should be a bit more tiering in terms of how far out you can venture without resupply, so personally dropping the fuel efficiency of the tankers and the supply efficiency of the freighters would make me happy. Going all the way out to the edge of the sector should require investment in specialized exploration ships or a fleet that is weak in combat, it shouldn't be something that a dram with a couple of militarized freighters can manage.

3
General Discussion / Re: Lack of Fighter Control
« on: January 09, 2019, 06:32:31 PM »
Games are made of limitations, not capabilities. There's only 2 vanilla ships with more than 3 fighter wings anyways(Astral and Legion), both of which are very powerful already. Big carriers aren't very good at providing spread out fighter coverage, and ultimately using an Astral or Legion for mass fighter coverage wastes the ship's capabilities so it shouldn't be encouraged.

4
General Discussion / Re: Economy of Nonsense
« on: November 26, 2018, 04:45:23 PM »
I think the issue Alex hit with goods based economies was that each market was checking against all the other markets to try and find suppliers/purchasers. That meant that the economy had huge computational costs which weren't sustainable. You had lots of little trades happening(along with checks about success of shipments, overhead from Java, etc) which clogged the system up. RRT3 makes a really big simplifying assumption: each tile only sees the 8 tiles around it. That makes the RRT3 economy prone to slow adaptation to change(it takes a long time for prices to travel) and theoretically profitable industries going bust. Which is good for RRT3's design, because it lets the player react to economic changes and get ahead of the market.


I think any reversion to a goods based economy would need to use a similar sort of simplifying assumption. Markets shouldn't be free to search the whole sector for the best deals, not just for computational reasons.


Having said that, I think that the current sort of single-market economy is workable, but the way it is now doesn't really work very well. Having a summed supply/demand model would seem pretty possible now- each planet generates supply and demand curves for various goods and then those get turned into real prices and quantities at each market, using availability to modify local prices.

5
General Discussion / Re: Market - I jsut do not understand it at all.
« on: September 18, 2017, 04:11:03 PM »
In all fairness bulk goods trade being unprofitable without undertaking large risks for a small independent trader is very, very realistic. The price differential for goods is in economic terms a combination of the economically acceptable risks across the company, the opportunity costs of the company's assets, and the operational costs of moving the goods. A large firm can spread the risk across its entire operation(i.e. they have 10 ships with a 10% chance of failure, which means they will usually have 8-10 successful runs, while a small firm with 1 ship has a 10% chance of total failure if they run a narrow margin). Their assets are generally specialized, meaning that the opportunity cost of using them for shipping is lower, and they benefit from lower operational costs. Small concerns can try and eat back at the margins by taking more risk, in trading having fewer escorts, maintaining a smaller capital reserve, shipping more volatile goods, etc. But in general as a independent operator we shouldn't really be able to compete on a major shipping lane.

6
General Discussion / Re: Sooo... Capital ships?
« on: July 26, 2017, 09:02:23 AM »
I don't think that the Odyssey needs to be able to stand up to the other capitals in a straight fight. 80 speed means it is faster than the majority of cruisers, and destroyers only just outrun it. Large energy mounts mean a lot of burst damage, so it can finish uneven fights quickly. That means even if it would lose a fight with most capitals and has a harder time with groups of cruisers, it can help a fleet more

7
Suggestions / Re: ideas for dynamic outposts, war, & economy
« on: May 31, 2017, 04:13:45 PM »
Personally, I'd treat "hulls" and weapons as their own resource for economic purposes. Then, when they player opens a market, however many are present in the economic system
get divvied up into the actual ships and weapons for sale depending on the faction preferences(perhaps there should be differentiation between classes of ships, i.e. high tech, civilian, etc). Spawning of fleets would be driven by the demand satisfaction of these items, along with crew and supplies. This might mean that a major fleet center could still spawn a lot of units even though you as the player don't see much stock, because it's a bit short so there isn't much stockpiled. That's a good thing though, and represents factions hoarding military resources for themselves.

Basically, we already have a pretty good economic system in place. That should be extended into how economics and fleets interact in a manner that preserves the underlying system.

As for invasions, it seems pretty simple down the line. Factions would try to gain space control with fleets directed to engage near a target, and then they would send in transport fleets to actually invade the planet/habitat/stations. Probably a more sophisticated NPC fuel/supply representation would be good to make wars proceed over time.

8
General Discussion / Re: Anti-Fighter Tactics and Strategies
« on: May 06, 2017, 09:40:14 AM »
Locust needs more missile speed, they just can't reliably catch up to even fairly slow fighters, and fast interceptors are basically immune to them.

Probably the best anti-fighter weapons are the support beams. HIL especially, HE means that fighters are killed within a fraction of a second by it.

9
Modding / Re: The Balance Beam
« on: May 01, 2017, 01:01:28 PM »
This ain't "armchair"; it's math; it doesn't care about what you want it to say.  You wanna argue about weighting, fine, let's have a grownup discussion.  Otherwise, go away, the adults are working here.
Spoken like somebody who has never been within 20 feet of a course on statistics and data analysis. Bad math is worse than no math, and how you analyze a set of data can have immense implications on the validity of your results. The math can't lie, but how you interpret and choose to apply it can, because your interpretations and applications are fundamentally subjective.

To start with, your presumptions totally ignore the value of alpha strike weapons, and single-shot damage in general. A gun that deals 2000 damage every 1 seconds is better than one that deals 250 damage every 0.125 second, because the first will both have a higher damage rate in any real situation except the limiting case(consider a firing period of 2.5 seconds, the first fires 3 times the second 21, for 6000 vs 5250 damage dealt), and is easier to employ as it doesn't require constant aiming and is forgiving of short periods of no shot opportunities.

In Starsector, single-shot damage is also very important because of how it impacts armor penetration. The thread you linked actually goes into a lot of depth about what this means for many weapons.

Your hit calculation is doubly flawed because it ignores the huge effects of ITU/DTC which appears on many ships, and it presumes that combat always takes place at maximum weapon range. Trying to arbitrary categorize how important weapon range is in order to apply fixed factors is also not going to go anywhere useful. The utility of range is fundamentally not disentangleable from the weapon's performance both relative to other weapons(having the most range in a category has a lot more value than second-best), and relative to itself- a weapon with a lot of alpha threat is much more dangerous with long range.

There's no valuation mechanism for turret track rate or projectile velocity, which are in practice more important than weapon arcs in a lot of scenarios. Energy weapons get a significant edge out of this because they come with higher velocities than all but a few ballistic weapons, making them easier to hit with. This also ties in with how good a weapon is against different types of target- it matters less on bigger weapons or on ships that are roled around fighting capitals and cruisers.

OP value is not linear and should not be. Slots are a finite balancing resource on a ship, and therefore OP must have diminishing returns to scale for the same mounts in order to make slot restriction meaningful. Having things otherwise results in optimums being single high-OP weapons, which is problematic in balance terms. From an abstract perspective, there's also the reality that some weapons should simply be better than others. All weapons being the same flavor is boring gameplay, and if there aren't any meaningful decisions to be made there's no play to be had.

In general trying to separate weapon performance from their platforms is not going to work. Weapons don't exist in a vacuum and trying to balance them as if they do doesn't work. Yes, that precludes analyzing things with a simple spreadsheet. Life is hard. Using math to analyze complex systems is harder. Deal.

Looking at your sheet here's the major balance issues I see in it and why they exist. Gauss Cannon- high alpha, best range. Gauss is a very dangerous weapon and giving it decent relative flux stats is insane. With 800 alpha it armor punches like a 200 damage HE weapon, so not actually half bad. Bad DPS does not fix the issue that a Gauss that doesn't have serious flux costs can eventually pick any ship apart at range with little risk of retaliation even if it slips up. Advancing its timing cycle makes it even better, so no. Just no.

Hellbore at 1600 HE alpha is nuts. It will take out nearly any armor in a single hit(only thing that resists is HA Onslaught, and even that loses most of its armor). 800 shield alpha is also not inconsiderable for any weapon. Sure, you pay in flux and DPS. Doesn't matter in practice because the threat of it will force raised shields even if not fired, and the damage dealt over a long time is less important than the big punch right now(and the HAG can't beat the Hellbore spikes until 15-20 seconds or so).

800 range on energy weapons. Not a good idea. High-tech ships are faster and have better flux stats. An Aurora could nose into HB range, fire off a shot to cause hard flux, and back of to let it vent. The other ship can't safely drop shields because the Aurora can sprint back in with it's high velocity and excellent against armor HB to punish them. And lower efficiency means that the Aurora is penalized if it does anything other than play in an extremely boring way or for a player fighting it, a frustrating one.

All of the medium kinetics except for Heavy Needler: Worthless. Flux efficiency is great. It doesn't compensate for not dealing credible amounts of damage. Soft flux can be dumped with shields up, hard flux from hitting the enemy can't be. Also the tradeoff for 100-200 extra range over LDAC is not worth it for a medium slot and much more OP.

10
General Discussion / Re: Dissapointing Economy
« on: May 01, 2017, 10:40:25 AM »
Of all the things the number of commodities is what bothers you most? What I want from the economy is to be able to participate in it, as an active power, not a cog in the machine. When you try to establish your own markets, secure raw material for them and try to export their produce, when you try to boot out a competitor or ally with another, when your decisions can starve or elevate whole planets - then, I believe, comes the time to say if the economy is disappointing or not.

Having more commodities is relatively trivial in comparison.

Not just a matter of commodities, but their interaction and interplay + new events that drive that economy.

Example - ship components require electronics and metals, so a planet that produces ship component will require 2-3 resource to be delivered. More interconnections reliance means you can create shortage by targeting one resource - for example, electronics. If you keep intercepting electronics shipments, then there's shortage of ship components.
But shipyards require ship components. Now ship prices are going up and the faction replacesl sot ships slower.


I don't notices that resource production is tied to anything ATM (thus, no point in trying to starve anyone)
That isn't the case though? Resource production is tied to the fulfillment of market demands for the precursors to the good, defined in the various market condition implementations. The equation by which this happens is kind of complicated, but if for instance an Autofac has only .25 of one of its demanded goods and 0.75 of its overall demand, it produces 0.58 of its normal production.

11
Suggestions / Re: Fighter Balance
« on: April 30, 2017, 10:31:37 AM »
Missile HP is hidden.  How am I supposed to know that without pouring through game data files, or use the missile enough times to notice?  I fired both Harpoon and Atropos side-by-side, and they appear to have roughly the same maneuverability and speed.  I do not doubt that 75 is better than 70, but I did not notice a difference.  The splash would probably be a liability because I cannot use it point-blank, and the missile probably has that arming delay to prevent point-blank strikes.

I am talking about direct combat ships like the classic Scarab using Atropos instead of other missiles against other ships.  Fighters get what they get.  Scarab with 0.72 Atropos was great, and it did not need high Missile Specialization to make them good, unlike most missiles.
I mean it's not hard to notice that torpedoes take more hits to go down than missiles. The precise values sure, but it's always been clear that torps have more HP to point defense weapons.

Really the faster turn acceleration is more noticeable, at least to me. Atropos cannot be faked out like a Harpoon can be, it will just snap back onto the target. Also as I noted as well it's faster, the exact value is 400 vs 300, and it's launched at a higher initial speed. Both of those are very distinct differences to me. The subjectivity of it is what it is, but by the numbers the Atropos is faster to target and less likely to miss. If you want a tactical example, try one of the ships with 4 small missile mounts. They can throw enough to take down a destroyer or cruiser in a moderate flux state very suddenly, and the difference in the time it takes to do that with Harpoons is very noticeable.
I'm pretty sure nobody's bringing bombers to deal with frigates, so argument that frigates can't dodge atroposes isn't very important. I haven't seen destroyers dodging harpoons, so atropos's manoeuvrability isn't that important against them either. It may be just me not playing enough, though.
You're missing out then. Carriers in general mulch frigates very well, and especially with Daggers and Tridents. It's a great way of dealing with the [REDACTED] without losing a bajillion AI frigates to them or getting embarrassingly mobbed.
I'd argue that the Atropos shouldn't be able to hit frigates anyway. Bombers shouldn't be able to kill larger ships and frigates at the same time, and carriers are already the best at killing frigates using assault fighters.
Arguably yes. But ATM we have Atropos balanced in such a way that it's good at everything, and therefore Daggers can murder frigates.

12
Suggestions / Re: Fighter Balance
« on: April 30, 2017, 08:06:55 AM »
That made them useless for normal ships and ruined their original purpose.  Now, Atropos is a Harpoon with slightly more damage and half the range, and maybe arming delay too.  Might as well use Harpoons instead - almost as much damage, but more OP bang for your buck.

The Atropos in 0.72 was perfect, except maybe slightly too expensive for their power.  It was no Reaper, but it was a strike weapon.  If Atropos was weakened due to Astral and Dagger combo shenanigans, then give the Daggers Harpoons.
Atropos have 300 HP, Harpoon has 150. Atropos is also a lot more maneuverable than Harpoon, it has a max turn rate of 75 instead of 70, turn acceleration of 500 instead of 210, has more acceleration 1200 vs 1000, and is faster. Harpoons can be dodged by most aware destroyers and frigates, I've seen Atropos nail a Hound(only 1 out of a salvo, but that doesn't really matter for a Hound). They also have splash, if you're interested in that. Usually doesn't matter but it can sometimes generate a partial hit.

13
Suggestions / Re: Fighter Balance
« on: April 30, 2017, 12:35:17 AM »
Trident = 28 OP for 4000 dmg (~143 dmg/OP)
Dagger = 20 OP for 3000 dmg (~150 dmg/OP)
contrast
Khopesh = 10 OP for 2800 dmg (~280 dmg/OP)
Piranha = 10 OP for 4000 dmg (~400 dmg/OP)
Flash = 12 OP for 3000 dmg (~250 dmg/OP)
Suggest reducing Dagger to 15-16 OP and Trident to 20-22 OP which would put them in the approx. range of 200 dmg/OP.

Daggers and Tridents use guided munitions and therefore almost never miss anything except frigates or particularly dodgy destroyers. They also are a lot better at dealing with armor than the other bombers, even 1000 armor on a normal cruiser will take 6-7 hits from an Annihilator or 3 hits from bombs to remove the armor, while a single Atropos round will take out all of the armor at once. They were probably dropped from 1250 damage to stop them from taking out battleships and uparmored heavy cruisers in a single round too.

14
General Discussion / Re: Machine learning AI for Starsector?
« on: April 27, 2017, 03:45:49 PM »
You'd probably be better off generalizing the input parameters enough that you could train the AI once and then have it packaged in everyone's game in a trained state. Otherwise it'd be really dumb to start with, and it might also learn some bad habits from the player. It could probably figure the game out pretty well though, ML has come a long way. Being able to upload results in order to train the AI further would also help it.

15
Modding / Re: Restricting fighters to specific ships?
« on: April 26, 2017, 06:11:52 PM »
I don't think you can restrict it in the refit screen. I think you could penalize using a certain wing on a carrier that's not suited for it, which might work to at least make it not useful.

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