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Topics - Kothar

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Suggestions / "Quickfire" weapon groups
« on: May 03, 2012, 02:41:36 PM »
For certain weapons, most notably missiles and antimatter blasters, they are frequently used by quickly switching to them, firing, and switching back. This can get a little awkward, particularly if you want to continue firing some other weapon at the same time - right now you have to enable autofire for your current group, switch to missiles, fire, switch back, disable autofire. Why don't we add a setting that makes pressing the button to select the group instead fire it?

I know this has come up in the past, but I feel there was no good way to integrate the idea into the UI before. With the new weapon group UI, I think there is now a good way to use this idea - on the refit screen where you select autofire groups, you can add another row along the top called Quickfire, which would on a per-weapon group basis enable this idea: If Quickfire was enabled for weapon group 3, pressing 3 would fire off a shot from that weapon group (or multiple if the group was linked).

The AI could entirely ignore this setting for AI-controlled ships; after all, they don't have any problems rapidly switching between weapon groups like humans do!

There is already a little discussion of this idea (and some enthusiasm!) in this thread: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=2483.0, but I felt it appropriate to start a thread in Suggestions regarding the idea.

Any thoughts?

2
Suggestions / Rearming Limit for Carriers
« on: February 15, 2012, 02:22:36 PM »
Currently fighters can be infinitely repaired in battle by carriers, and at no supply cost; if they get repaired near the end of the battle, there's never any supply cost for repairing them. This also makes bombers extremely useful in large fleet fights compared to torpedoes on other ships, as larger ships cannot carry more than a few at once, while the torpedo bombers keep rearming and rearming.

I think it might be good to mix this up by essentially giving carriers a supplies bar for their flight decks; whenever the carrier rearms/repairs a wing of fighters in mission, it would use up these supplies, and once the carrier ran out of internal supplies, it cannot rearm or repair fighters anymore for that mission. Basically an ammo bar for flight decks.

After combat the flight deck would be re-filled with supplies automatically; the only new UI element would be the number of supplies the flight deck could hold (possibly increased by hull mods, everyone loves more hull mods!) and perhaps an indicator in mission showing how close to empty they are. I don't think this would introduce any additional hassle for the player, and add a little bit more depth to fighter/carrier interaction.

This would fix the loophole in fighter repair costs - currently, if you play your cards right with a fighter heavy fleet you have very little need of any supplies. It would also change the role carriers play slightly, as they would eventually run out of gas like almost every other kind of ship does.

This suggestion came from the perspective that the infinite rearming carriers can perform does not really seem to match the other mechanics in the game - everything has a limit, whether it's flux, ammo, supplies, fuel, marines, or crew...unless you're fighters with a carrier.

What do you guys think?

3
Bug Reports & Support / Ship Prices
« on: February 15, 2012, 11:10:00 AM »
It appears that which weapons are equipped to a ship doesn't modify the sell price - I can strip ships and then sell them for the same price as when they have their full load of weapons.

This can also be a minor annoyance when I'm selling a custom fitted ship that might have much more expensive components that a standard build.

4
I tried a bit of searching but was unable to find any information about whether or not this behavior is intended, so I figured I'd check and make sure!

If you accelerate to max speed (with engine boost), and then stop pressing any movement keys, you can fire your weapons / activate shields without your speed changing. Your speed falls to the standard max as soon as you start to accelerate in any direction, or if you hit a nebula. Since nebulas are described as interfering with the acceleration and not causing a drag effect, that didn't quite seem like intended behavior.

Also, if it was intended, I'd expect to see friendly ships use it as well, but they pretty much always keep their engines going.

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