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1

General Discussion / What line do you edit to increase command points?

« on: December 26, 2022, 08:50:31 AM »

Title

Generally, you don't need more command points than what you get by default if you get into even fights, but if you try to always fight heavily outnumbered, heavily microing your fleet becomes necessary, so the limited command points get in the way. I want to get rid of this and turn starsector into the RTS it was never meant to be =D

2

Suggestions / Expanded command interface for fighters

« on: April 06, 2022, 05:38:03 PM »

As it stands, fighters feel extremely inflexible and lacking in precision. Ordering a fighter strike is equivalent to ordering a carrier to just continuously fling all of its fighters at a target regardless of their role until either the target dies or the carrier runs out of replacements. Apart from lacking gameplay variety and purpose, it also kind of breaks my immersion. While I imagine that human wave tactics are a staple of luddite doctrine, you'd think the more conventional navies could do a little better.

You can only really give a fighter wing orders indirectly by commanding its carrier, meaning that you essentially use them like any other weapon - you order the carrier to guard a ship, or you order a carrier to attack a ship with every single fighter wing. Except, fighters are easily disabled, so if you look at fighters like weapons, they feel very unreliable, especially at the start of a fight, or when you don't have overwhelming numbers of them.

You can't assign multiple wings to different tasks (this is especially felt on larger carriers). You can't order a carrier to engage a target with its weapons, and send its fighter wings to engage a separate target (this is especially felt on battlecarriers). You can't order a fighter wing to a particular position (for additional force projection during battles). You can't order a carrier to hold its fighters, leading to spectacular yet fruitless kamikaze attacks at the start of every single fight. You can't change the 'attitude' of a fighter wing, and their default behavior is suicidal and completely lacks the caution that the normal ship AI has, leading to what feels like unnecessary losses and downtime while the carrier rebuilds its lost wings. The result is that your fighters can't tactically complement the rest of your fleet because you don't have the commands to make them do so. At best, they only complement eachother, like a ship's weapons, which I think is wasted potential.

This lack of tactical options for fighters (despite there being many different types of fighters, especially if you use mods) feels like a real shame, since combat aircraft are a staple of naval warfare (and conventional warfare in general) IRL and their tactics are quite complex and diverse, and pilots generally receive lots of training. Even if munitions and fighter jets grew on trees like they do in starsector, skill still takes time to acquire.

At the moment, it feels like carriers are mostly good for sitting back and sending continuous suicide attacks against the enemy while the rest of the fleet keeps the enemy occupied. That's generally fine if you have superior numbers, but if you try to make things more interesting by fighting outnumbered (where you really need to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of every ship in your fleet), you will find that carriers feel extremely unreliable, spending most of the fight sending fighters to the wrong place, losing them in fruitless suicide attack after fruitless suicide attack and mostly serving as undergunned hulls.

So, my suggestion is this: add more options for commanding fighter wings. Allow us to command fighter wings separately from eachother and their home carrier, and give them options similar to what warships have - go there, attack that, guard that, the works. The AI for it is already there, you just need to think of a way to make a clean, readable interface for giving it orders directly, rather than the carrier's AI doing all the work.
About the suicidal behavior - I don't know if individual fighters use the same AI as proper warships or if it's some cut down version of it used for performance reasons, so I don't know if fighters can be made to behave more cautiously and opportunistically like the normal ship AI does, instead of suicidal drones. At the very least, being able to manually tell them what to do like you can do with the normal ships would allow you to tell them WHEN to conduct their beloved kamikaze charge, so you can at least send them in when they aren't guaranteed to get cut down by flak seconds later. In a similar manner, you can also order them back to the home carrier, which could automatically repair damaged fighters if they belong to it and are guarding it, allowing you to avoid unnecessary recovery downtime (and loss of life).

3

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Any way to make mod music mix together?

« on: December 16, 2020, 12:16:07 PM »

It seems like campaign music from mods won't play nice together - if more than one mod that adds campaign music is present, none of them will play, though encounter/market music seem to work fine.

Is there any way to address this? There's some really beautiful campaign music out here.

I've thought of pulling the campaign music out of all the mods I have and putting them into one "mixtape mod" (which I'll keep to myself, of course), but I'd like a cleaner solution if possible, namely since I don't know any modding.

4

General Discussion / Any edits that let you force doctrines/remove blueprints from your faction?

« on: August 08, 2020, 03:58:01 PM »

So, I spend like 20 minutes in the doctrine screen just messing around and customizing my patrols, and then I see these bastards using mining blasters instead of the plethora of options they can use for medium energy weapons.
It aeathetically drives me up a wall when I use mod ships as this mixing and matching thoroughly ruins the ship looks. I want to watch my beautiful blackrock fleets eradicate things with juicy, green plasma, not mine them.
It also irritates me when they use undersized guns.
They have no reason to do this as my doctrine includes low-OP options.
Also, they use weapons from other mod faction designs when they can use weapons of the same type, with the same OP as the ones I selected.
Anything to be done about this? =(

5

General Discussion / Colony in red beacon system with tri-tachyon commission in Nex?

« on: December 09, 2019, 05:37:38 AM »

So apparently a Tri-Tachyon commission makes Remnant neutral in Nexerelin. This is pretty convenient since I can just waltz into red beacon systems, scavenge around and bug out before anyone changes their mind, but sometimes beacon systems have habitable worlds. I wonder, if I set up a colony there, keep a hold of my Tri-Tach commission and refrain from fighting the remnant, will the remnant attack my faction, or will my faction have my immunity? And if so, does that mean that red beacon systems are the best colony spots ever, since you'll be protected from virtually any invasion by an endless swarm of remnant fleets?

6

Suggestions / Some suggestions about "foreign relations"

« on: December 19, 2018, 05:56:12 AM »

First of all, I'd just like to say that 0.9 is really great so far and has kept me playing a lot longer than the previous 0.X updates due to the perpetual (and perpetually fun) nature of colony establishment, management and protection.

The external threat mechanic introduced by 0.9 (expeditionary fleets, pather cells, pirate raids) along with colony establishment and management is really cool and is a great way to keep the game going even after you establish yourself as an economical and military superpower.

However, I feel like they could use some expansion. The external threats feel a bit random, and you can usually only deal with them reactively, after they've become a problem, unless you happen to stumble across a newly established pirate or pather base (and even then, pirate invasions and pather incidents can happen mere days after bases are established). This, of course, adds lasting challenge to the game which is made proportional by pather cells and pirate raids growing more numerous as your empire expands. As the de facto leader of your faction, it seems like you're the only one responsible for ACTIVELY dealing with foreign threats, as your colonies, left alone, will only defend against invasions. You're also given little in the way of dealing with domestic threats, again only being able to reactively deal with pather incidents through stabilization and destroying smuggler fleets.

I feel like you should be able to establish intelligence infrastructure responsible for dealing with domestic threats (pather cells, general piracy, smuggling, information about usage of AI getting out) aswell as foreign threats (pinpointing the locations of pather and pirate bases, tracking the current locations of existing invasion/expeditionary forces in real time, remotely disrupting the markets of other factions, remotely tracking and/or disrupting mercantile fleets, increasing relations with other factions, hurting the relations of other factions with other other factions). Similarly, I think you should be given an option to take direct military action against other factions that doesn't require you personally attacking and disrupting markets, instead organizing and dispatching your own expeditionary fleets.

Other factions could potentially be given similar capabilities, using their own foreign intelligence networks to prepare for your fleets or intercept them, remotely disrupting your markets, track and direct attacks against your mercantile fleets, fund smuggling operations in your markets, etc. This could potentially cultivate an entire intelligence-counterintelligence minigame, requiring you to invest credits and personally direct intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in order to maintain your stability and dominance as an ever-growing empire.

Of course, the option to directly attack markets, stations and fleets will always be there, but it will be nice to vary that up by also letting you step back and pull the strings instead. Since this game is already one foot in the 4X genre (which is great and seems to be the natural direction for the game since exploration and combat mechanics are fleshed out at this point, minus the in-combat tactical layer which still needs a lot of work IMO), I think this could be part of the next step.

EDIT: Regarding the subject of remotely locating pather and pirate bases, you could be given the option of establishing listening posts in stable locations in star systems. These listening posts would notify you of pirate and pather fleets passing through the vicinity of that star system in hyperspace, aswell as how recently those fleets passed said vicinity and a rough estimation of the size of those fleets. By establishing a network of listening posts, you could deduce the general location of a pather or pirate base by tracking the directions from which pather and pirate fleets are coming, even following individual fleets by looking for patterns that indicate that a fleet of the same size has passed by multiple listening posts, deducing that it's the same fleet and that it came from a specific direction. Of course, these listening posts wouldn't be free, and each would directly draw credits from your income (and possibly some resource units from your production like fuel, volatiles, heavy machinery, etc). There could be several tiers of listening posts, with higher tiers providing more information about passing fleets and having greater detection areas, but also having greater upkeep costs.

Thoughts?

7

Suggestions / Directly order a fleet ship to vent flux

« on: August 24, 2018, 02:06:31 PM »

I feel that one of THE most common ways my ships die in battle is the AI's sixth sense for refusing to vent flux when doing so would be ideal, quickly becoming a sitting duck as it gets surrounded and cannot defend itself. I think the root of this problem is that the AI rarely vents flux while under fire, when it's often better to take a few light hits to your armor to vent some flux to avoid overloads in the long run.
As I imagine it would be quite the undertaking to implement smart flux management in the AI behavior, I think an effective stopgap solution until you get around to it would be to give you the ability to directly order a selected ship or group of ships to vent their flux. I feel that it would spare players A LOT of frustration and encourage them to deploy fleets more often because it would be easier to avoid losing their expensive and extensively customized ships due to inefficient and negligent AI behavior.

8

Suggestions / Increase NPC fleet density

« on: May 01, 2017, 04:13:35 PM »

After 0.8, the core systems became strikingly desolate. All the fleets I encounter are small picket fleets, and there aren't that many of them. Pre-0.8, it wasn't unusual to see huge fleets with two onslaughts patrolling Corvus. Now, I'm lucky if I happen by a Dominator or an Aurora. Capital ships are an extremely rare sight.
Because of this, I have nothing worthwhile to attack with my enormous high-tech fleet that I spent so long building up, except for [REDACTED] if I go into a three ping system and make an effort to deliberately face multiple fleets simultaneously.
It would be nice to have more big things to kill.

9

Suggestions / The default ship behavior appears to be "reckless".

« on: April 30, 2017, 08:23:32 AM »

I like the new feature that alters the attitude of the ship based on the officer flying that ship.
Unfortunately, there's a limit to how many officers you can have, thus meaning that, in large battles (or early on when you have not acquired a large number of officers yet), you'll have to field many ships without officers flying them.
The problem here is that the default behavior of a ship without an officer appears to be "reckless", as they have an annoying tendency to break formation and charge head-first into large groups of ships with complete disregard for their own survival (even if they have no weapons equipped!). This is especially annoying with carriers like the Drover, which are supposed to be timid by default due to their poor defensive and offensive capabilities when using anything other than talons in their flight decks.
I think combat would be more enjoyable if the default ship behavior was made more cautious so that ship losses wouldn't be so illogical and unavoidable all the time.

10

Suggestions / Ballistics are weak: here's how you fix them

« on: February 13, 2014, 01:01:45 AM »

I think it's safe to say that the high-tech energy weapons in Starsector unfairly dominate ballistic weapons. They are simply that much better for prolonged battles and it's easier to manage flux than it is to manage ammo AND flux.
Most ballistic weapons are good at killing shields but not so great against armor (exceptions for that would be the Heavy Mauler and the Hellbore Cannon), whilst energy weapons (beam weapons not included) are decent-ish at both.
Problem is, ballistic weapons draw from a limited pool of ammunition, whilst energy weapons can fire indefinitely as long as your flux capacitors can sustain them.
However, here's the deal: ballistic weapons generate LUDICROUS amounts of flux. They generate as much, if not more flux than their energy counterparts. This is unfair: I think that by pure logic, the consideration between energy weapons and ballistic weapons should be:
Energy weapons have unlimited ammunition but require a lot of power in order to "generate" a damaging projectile/beam, and require even more power in order to keep them running at safe temperatures, as all of that power generation builds up heat quickly, additionally, energy weapons are very fragile due to relying on all of their complex internal systems in order to operate properly, and therefore, require tons of maintenance, and are easily damaged and disabled by enemy fire.
Ballistic weapons have limited ammunition, but require power only to operate their loading and firing mechanisms, and an additional bit to cool their systems down, their loading mechanisms are usually very simplistic and can withstand a lot of both damage and wear and tear before becoming inoperable. I understand that weapons like the Hellbore Cannon also have some energy weapon aspects to them, but it still doesn't make sense that a ballistic weapon generates more flux than an energy counterpart. 
Look, I understand that energy weapons are SUPPOSED to be superior to ballistic weapons, being more high-tech, but I think the fact that ballistic weapons generate so much flux is bogus. A dramatic reduction to ballistic flux generation would make a lot of sense IMHO.