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

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Topics - Embolism

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1
Suggestions / Rugged Construction Should Also Reduce Crew Casualties
« on: January 25, 2022, 10:05:12 PM »
Knowing that your ship is likely going to outsurvive you when it blows up is cold comfort for the crew of a Vanguard. A rugged ship should also be a safer ship.

2
Bug Reports & Support / Prometheus Mk II's Engines Are Off-Center
« on: January 05, 2022, 04:49:59 AM »
Obvious when you compare base Prometheus to Mk II in the Codex. Its engine flares are slightly shifted to the left and down from the actual engine pods.

3
Eldfell's description talks about its "thin atmosphere" secondary to volcanism and the "rich ores" extracted from its crust.

... But Eldfell, in truth, has no atmosphere, no ore deposits and certainly no mining industry to speak of.

On a related note, Derinkuyu still has no resource deposits despite having a mining industry, doing... what exactly? No one knows.

Also, why does the Thulian Raider Base have "Cold"? No other space station has any environmental conditions. Does it have faulty life-support?

4
Suggestions / Mule should have Civilian-Grade Hull
« on: May 07, 2021, 07:56:51 PM »
If the Gemini and Venture has it then the Mule should have it too, so it can be buffed by the various civ-grade hullmods.

5
There is a "Damaged Weapon Mounts" icon in the files but the hullmod uses the same icon as "Increased Maintenance".

6
If you have say a generic agent extraction mission and a Galatia Academy ransom mission on the same planet, when you organise a marine raid to get your Academician back you can also choose to raid for your agent in the same raid; but choosing to do so does nothing except getting more of your marines killed (and deletes the option to raid for your agent in the actual raiding menu).

7
Suggestions / Fighters and Carriers have Lost their Way
« on: April 26, 2021, 12:05:38 AM »
See this old blogpost about a previous iteration of a fighter overhaul. This was back when fighter wings were another class of ship (like frigates and destroyers) rather than weapons attached to a carrier. In particular these paragraphs:

Quote
The first big one is that fighter wings no longer go back to a carrier as a single unit. Instead, individual fighters peel off when they need to repair or rearm, while carriers launch replacements for every wing that needs them. This does a couple of things.

Quote
Second, carriers stay busy. There’s almost always a fighter coming in for a landing, a few circling waiting for a free deck to land on, another fighter preparing to take off, etc. More traffic all around lends the proceedings a livelier feel.

What I'm getting at is damaged fighters should automatically return to the carrier for repairs. As it is only bombers in need of a reload ever return to carriers. In fact I'd even go further and limit fighter ammo (and decoy flares) so that all fighters have to rearm at the carrier after an attack run. It just feels right.

If this is too much, then at least in Regroup mode damaged fighters should land for repairs rather than fly around the carrier waiting to be shot down.

8
Suggestions / Cutting the Doom-class in Half
« on: April 17, 2021, 10:44:40 PM »
So there's a bit of chatter on the forums about how OP the Doom is right now, but as many people have pointed out the actual beef people have is with its system Mine Strike, particularly how it allows the Doom to confound Omnishield AI and effectively act as its own flanker (amongst other things).

For those who don't know, the Doom didn't always have Mine Strike: it used to have a system called Interdictor Array (and before that it had Fast Missile Racks). Mine Strike came about after this blog post that was actually about mines used by Star Fortresses. The Doom got the mines as a buff because it was underpowered at the time.

The reason the Doom was underpowered though was because it wasn't fast enough to take advantage of phasing on its own merits. This is no longer true with Phase Mastery's Elite bonus, and IMO Mine Strike always felt tacked-on to the Doom - it feels like a system that a ship needs to be built-around (i.e. a dedicated mine-layer), a ship that has to make sacrifices on other fronts; whereas the Doom seemingly makes no sacrifices with a impressive weapons package on top of an impressive offensive ship system.

I propose that we cut the Doom in half - create a new Phase cruiser that uses Mine Strike, but has a relatively weak weapons package (small mounts only), and give the Doom a different ship system (or its old system, Interdictor Array). This new Phase minelayer would be more of a support ship, creating flanking opportunities for other ships with its mines rather than being a one-ship flanking machine. It could of course still devastate fighters, frigates and low tech ships on its lonesome, but for a phase cruiser I don't think that's unreasonable.

... Or if creating a new ship is too much hassle, you could even make an argument for giving the Revenant-class Mine Strike! Thematically it fits - the Revenant would have plenty of cargo space to hold mines, and while sold as a "phase tender" you can't tell me that Tri-Tachyon has never used Revenants as cloaked orbital bombardment platforms...

9
Militarised Subsystems is more often than not used for its logistical bonuses than any will to use the ship in combat. And if I actually want to use a militarised civilian ship in combat then I'd also use Assault or Escort Package on it.

With that in mind, Militarised Subsystems is basically a big nerf to your fleet because it eats into fleet bonus limits. I propose that only ships with Assault or Escort Package count for these limits instead, including the Auxiliary Support skill.

On a related note, Phase Corps says it only affects "combat" phase ships, but both Revenant and Phantom are counted... to add insult to injury they're the only non-combat ships that have no weapons and can't use Converted Hangars, and therefore are obviously not meant for combat under any circumstances. Neither should count for Phase Corps' 30 DP limit.

10
As per title. Apparently Derinkuyu's miners just break heavy machinery and inject space heroin all day without doing a lick of work, because there's no actual work to be had.

Derinkuyu should probably have ore deposits like Nova Maxios does.

11
Bug Reports & Support / [0.95a-R15] Missing player portraits
« on: March 27, 2021, 08:15:53 PM »
A few generic portraits are not available to the player.

graphics/portraits/portrait_hegemony08.png
graphics/portraits/portrait_mercenary07.png

12
Suggestions / Make Missile Autoforge Great Again
« on: March 12, 2021, 06:10:03 PM »
The Missile Autoforge is not a ship system. it's a passive bonus with a button attached to it.

For people who are not aware, Missile Autoforge is one use only. Why does it need to be a ship system? It might as well be a built-in hullmod that doubles your ammo capacity, it would functionally be almost the same.

Retreating from battle and pressing F once when you're out of missiles is not an interesting combat decision, especially since you'd retreat anyway when out of missiles even if you didn't have Missile Autoforge.

Therefore I don't think the current iteration of Missile Autoforge should continue to exist. The boring solution would be to turn it into a built-in hullmod that increases missile ammo by 4x (replacing and incompatible Expanded Missile Racks), and give the Gryphon Fast Missile Racks. If Missile Autoforge is to be kept however then it must be more than one use only. Balance it with a cooldown, or only regenerate a portion of missile ammo at a time, or whatever.

13
Suggestions / More Tri-Tachyon Variants!
« on: October 28, 2020, 09:29:46 PM »
The Brawler is the only TT variant hull at present. Now to be fair there's not that many other midlines that can be meaningfully Tri-Tachified, but humour me for a bit.

Brawler (TT)
It needs more! Instead of Insulated Engine Assembly, it should have Flux Coil Adjunct and Flux Distributor built-in so it can actually use lower-effiency medium energy weapons. And yes the Brawler is getting a flux buff in the next patch, but a variant reliant on energy weapons should still have better flux stats than a baseline ballistic.

Sunder (TT)
Yes it's basically a high tech ship already. Give it a blue paintjob, change the small ballistics to small energies, and make Advanced Optics built-in. Essentially this version of the Sunder is encouraged to use beams, particularly since it cannot use railguns to support the 700-range large energy weapons.

Heron (TT)
Change the medium universal to a medium energy and make Advanced Optics built-in. Yes it's almost the same change as to the Sunder, but it brings the Heron in-line with the Astral (which also has Advanced Optics built-in...). The overall idea is that larger Tri-Tach ships, if they aren't speedsters, tend to be more stand-offish. It's also an excuse to give a main Tri-Tach workhorse a blue paintjob.

As for other Tri-Tachable midlines...

Drover is the other major ship in the Tri-Tach lineup that can be painted blue, but there really isn't much you can do with it that would be meaningfully different from the base variant. Perhaps it could just have a paintjob and nothing else.

The Hammerhead, Falcon and Eagle are problematic to convert because they overlap too much with other ships in the same class. An energy Hammerhead would just be a weaker Sunder, and energy Falcons/Eagles would just be overarmed-yet-underfluxed Aurorae.

Other midline frigates (and also the Gryphon) suffer from the same problem as the Drover. Either there's nothing that can be changed meaningfully, or they're antithesis to Tri-Tach doctrine (the Centurion in particular).

14
Suggestions / Teleporting systems ruin the game - and should be removed
« on: October 13, 2019, 12:43:02 AM »
I'm talking about the Phase Teleporter and the Recall Device.

The problem is what these two systems do to the ships they're on. They completely railroad otherwise interesting ships into very boring loadouts.

Recall Device:
Based on Blog posts and Alex's Twitter feed, it's clear that different types of fighters are meant to be used in combination to achieve synergistic effects. The Astral spits on all this by having a system that strongly encourages equipping mono-bomber loadouts. Highly disappointing when it's supposed to be the epitome of carrier gameplay.

Phase Teleporter:
Because of this system the Hyperion has undergone drastic nerfs to encourage the player not to play with it: it breaks a dozen flux conduits with every deployment and even when deployed it sputters out like a candle-flame within two minutes. When not deployed it chugs supplies like a logistics black hole. To add salt to the wound, the system encourages this supposed pinnacle of High Tech ship design to use Mining Blasters.

.....

My suggestion for the Astral is to replace Recall Device with 'Secondary Flight Command'. When activated, this system takes control of the squadrons in decks 4 to 6, and sends them to either attack a targeted enemy ship or defend a targeted friendly ship. If there's no target then it defaults to defending the Astral. This effectively lets the Astral split its squadrons to deal with two targets at once.

For the Hyperion... I don't know. It could have something boring like HEF or Phase Skimmer, or it could have something else that's unique. Something to do with flux manipulation, maybe; to emphasise its modular nature.

15
I was wondering why my own ships are so cavalier about flying right into friendly mine range and die. Then I noticed they don't collide with friendly mines, much as they don't with friendly missiles - except mines can explode on a timer instead of on enemy contact, which messes with friendly AI.

As an aside, I was hoping Missile Specialization levels 2 and 3 would affect mines. Alas, they don't.

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