Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

1

Suggestions / Double-tap shift to toggle invert follow-mouse behaviour

« on: March 15, 2024, 06:17:49 AM »

Simple enough - let us toggle between ship steering modes by double-tapping shift, instead of either having to go through to the options menu, or hold shift for most of the battle.

2

Suggestions / Weapon list search, and sorting/filtering by role, range and damage type.

« on: February 23, 2023, 07:34:18 PM »

If you're like me and have a ton of mods installed, and stockpile tons of weapons in storage to choose from, the weapons list in the refit menu can get extremely overcrowded, and it can be difficult and tedious to find one you're looking for, even if you know its name and OP cost.

The suggestion is simple - additional filters and sorting options for the weapon list. For example, this'd allow you to view Ballistic weapons doing Kinetic damage, sorted by Range. An "EMP" filter would hide weapons that don't also do EMP damage.
This would also include a searchbox - when you click on a hardpoint, you can immediately start typing to filter weapons by name.

3

Suggestions / Show/hide extended target info

« on: April 05, 2022, 04:47:37 AM »

The information presented about a targeted ship can be a bit much - taking a lot of screen-space, obscuring and distracting from other elements of the battle. Much of it's superfluous.

The suggestion:
When targeting a ship, the bare minimum info is displayed; Hull, Flux, CR and the armour readout - and an officer icon, if applicable.
Pressing a button (toggle or hold) - or a toggle in game options - shows the extended target info.

[attachment deleted by admin]

4

Suggestions / Weapon group modes - Fire vs Select

« on: November 04, 2020, 04:50:35 AM »

An optional mode, allowing the player to fire a given weapon group by pressing its corresponding control(s). This is my preference for Mechwarrior games, as opposed to swapping between the groups then firing them individually, and I think the same would be true of Starsector. It feels faster and allows for simultaneous manual-fire of multiple weapons groups.
 

5

Suggestions / More mount types

« on: June 01, 2020, 10:49:04 PM »

Weapon-mounts that imbue the mounted weapon with a given property or effect - some of these effects could be those of a weapon-related hullmod, or otherwise change its stats/behaviour.
The more interesting examples I can think of:
EMP-damage - Converts 5% of weapon's damage into EMP.
Ammo Reserve - Weapons mounted will have double missiles/charges/expanded magazines.
Twin-Link - The weapon is duplicated in an underside mount, increasing its OP-cost by 50% but reducing the weapons' flux/second by 33%.

6

Suggestions / Enemy AI fleets and retreating

« on: May 31, 2020, 12:33:59 AM »

Currently, enemy fleets will only ever retreat when the majority of their forces are wiped - essentially a rout.
I think it'd be not only more believable but also more forgiving at times, if NPC fleets were capable of recognising when a battle is in danger of being too costly for them.

 Say for example you're in a small fleet with a couple destroyers and a few frigates, and get caught by a large fleet. You manage to take out the majority of their frigates, a few destroyers and start eating into a capital or two. At this point, not all fleet captains and not all ship crews would realistically be willing to continue, even if they ultimately maintained an advantage.

Depending on the dispositions of both fleets, they may retreat off-map and re-deploy to regain initiative, or simply decide to cut their losses and fully disengage - giving the player the option of fighting a pursuit battle against them, and the chance to recover ships lost in a defensive fight.

This could be influenced by faction, the fleet's objective (ie. why are they fighting you), officers/personality/experience, whether you're in a system they have a market in or whether you're out in the middle of nowhere; the rapidity of enemy ships' destruction and their crew complements, remaining ships' CR - and more, probably.

In other words, players would more often be able to come out on top as the underdog in a given battle, depending on its context. It would result in situations where you might have taken heavy losses of your own but your fleet ultimately survived and recovered some of those casualties, without having necessarily won the battle decisively, or chosen to flee and fight a disengagement battle.
 Depending on the campaign situation, it might only amount to breathing room or it could be the chance to slip away - but the aim is to help reduce the incidence of situations where the player is so heavily outgunned that they can't "clean"-disengage without major losses, regardless of how much effort they put in.

I guess it's also another way of loosely simulating not only fleet-wide morale, but also the enemy's logistical and strategic concerns - to them, after losing so many ships, is wiping your fleet worth how many more you'll take with you?

7

Suggestions / Light Armour Hullmod

« on: May 30, 2020, 11:23:09 PM »

Speed/acceleration/maneuverability bonus for armour malus.

8

Suggestions / Ship Livery Editor

« on: May 30, 2020, 11:20:56 PM »

In its most basic form, the ability to change a sprite's hue and saturation on-the-fly. In other words, a simple in-game skin editor.
This would allow players to give their fleet/faction's ships their own more consistent identity, distinct from the rest of the sector.
Advanced functionality could include application of decals, and the ability to change engine trail colours. In theory it could even include kitbash bits, but that's probably too ambitious.
These custom sprites would be applicable to individual ships via the refit menu, and to Custom Production/Fleet Doctrine hull blueprints, and would be accessible across saves.

9

Suggestions / Crippling ships

« on: May 29, 2020, 02:11:34 PM »

A ship status between alive and disabled/destroyed.
Currently upon a ship's hull integrity reaching zero, the ship will explode and be rendered dead instantly.
Instead, ships would have an "overkill" threshold - Upon reaching zero hull integrity, the ship would be crippled - its weapon mounts and shield emmitter are blown out, its engines are barely functioning, but it can limp back and retreat under its own power, just about. Essentially, its CR has been set to 0 with some accompanying fireworks.
A ship that manages to retreat in this state would gain D-mods.
To be completely destroyed as they currently are, the ship would have to take damage beyond that overkill threshold - leading to the possibility they are irrecoverable. Obviously, eating damage beyond the threshold in one hit would still kill them outright.
Different ships, their faction/tech-level, their size class, D-mods and hullmods would influence their fragility in this state. It would have to be values that necessitate a degree of luck in escaping after being crippled.


This would have implications on progression and campaign difficulty - Obviously, with ships able to retreat post-death you will have to replace ships less frequently. I find that desirable, as it makes difficulty more elastic. You can still lose a battle but crawl away with more than you'd be able to now - it'd also help avoid instances where you've won a battle handily but still lost a valued ship that RNG decided is nothing but dust now. That's the most important part for me - making a ship's survivability past its capacity to fight much less arbitrary.
It also adds value to Low-tech ships which typically have greater hull integrity, while high-tech tends to be more fragile, further distinguishing the doctrines.

TL;DR, a second health-bar before a ship is killed, which upon being reached disables a ship's shields and most/all their non-PD weapons, enabling a ship to be defeated as far as the battle is concerned, but give them greater opportunity to retreat and remain intact (with D-mod(s) as penalty for "dying") for the campaign layer.

10

Suggestions / Military Markets - reputation, commissions, blueprints

« on: May 28, 2020, 08:49:42 AM »

The player should be able to access the majority of goods, weapons and ships sold in factions' military markets with high enough reputation.
 If you're buddy-buddy with high-level officials of a faction as the description implies (or your two factions have such a positive relationship), I'm sure they'd be willing to pull a few strings to let their faction sell you high-end stuff - in practice largely eliminating the need for a commission to access equipment you can otherwise only get through salvage or by finding/raiding the faction in question for blueprints.
Speaking of which, factions' blueprints could and should show up on the market - especially on the black market, at penalty of relations. This could be influenced by the markets' stability, the lower it is the higher the chance of blueprint showing up.

11

Suggestions / Planetary Invasion - It's war, not a battle

« on: February 19, 2020, 12:21:09 PM »

Something that hasn't sat right with me is how trivial it is to take a planet. The only prerequisites are 1: Destruction of the station if present, 2: Exceeding the defenders' force strength with Marines and Heavy Equipment.

I propose that invasions be changed into months-long endeavours - You only destroy the station to deploy your first wave of Marines. Both you and the defending faction can reinforce and resupply their planetside troops throughout the course of a planetary invasion, with victory determined by control of simulated "objectives" both sides' troops fight over, those being industries, structures and a couple other things. Every few in-game days a battle can be fought to decide control of a given objective - both the native force and invaders can attack or defend. Fighting over an industry can result in varying degrees of disruption to it. Capturing all the objectives results in the invasion succeeding, but if the invaders are pushed back to their drop-zone they can no longer receieve reinforcements.

There's a lot of possibilities in the details of how it works. Things like investing supplies, crew, heavy weapons and machinery to fortify objectives. Determining the disposition of your troops, ie are they acting defensively because you're bringing them reinforcements, or are they launching assault after assault because your marines outnumber the civilian population? Launching an orbital assault wave from your fleet for a bonus against an objective, or providing fire-support throughout a battle increasing the risk of disruption. The capture of a planet, but failure to wipe its defenders resulting in an insurgency that reduces stability, increases demand for marines and heavy armaments. Mid-invasion tactical bombardments that risk damage to industries and friendly forces. Passively reducing the population of the planet via recruitment and collateral damage.

Long story short, the invading faction must maintain a presence in the target-system as if they already owned that planet, to prevent reinforcement of the enemies' troops and maintain open lines of supply and reinforcement to their own. Planets no longer change hands in the blink of an eye, their capture must be a sustained effort from the faction (or individual) conducting it - making invasions themselves dynamic; They take time to complete which affords both sides the ability to take actions that influence of successfuly capturing a market or repelling an invasion of one of their own. I know some of the ideas I have above are convoluted, but this paragraph is the ultimate aim.

12

Suggestions / Stations are rebuilt in stages

« on: February 17, 2020, 06:54:27 AM »

Right now a destroyed Star Fortress/Battlestation will immediately return to its full strength once its rebuild period has passed. It'd be more interesting if they rebuilt one section at a time, progressing from Orbital Station > Battlestation > Star Fortress over a given period, giving hostile factions/the player to kick it back down while in a somewhat weakened, but combat-capable state.

This could go even further with CR and damage to hull/armour of each component being tracked for each station, ie the station is repaired and recovered from 10% hull/armour/CR once it becomes operational again - obviously the time in which it's completely out of action would then have to be shortened.

13

Suggestions / EMP effective against Phase-cloaked ships

« on: February 17, 2020, 06:48:13 AM »

Simple suggestion to change up the combat dynamics of phase-ships.
The "issue" (matter of opinion) it'd solve how ruthless they are - The window in which opposing ships have to engage them (while at PPT and not in too deep) before they slip away is very short - they evade a hell of a lot of all return-fire, and make a joke out of range-management, making them extremely effective kiters. I'd like to be able to build ships with loadouts to effectively counter them - and for there to be more threats for players to account for when using them - and figured EMP would be an effective countermeasure that's already in the game.

There's a couple of ways this could work.
In both cases, the EMP projectile doesn't "hit", but passes through the ship while it's phase-cloaked, doing no physical damage.

#1 is projectiles/beams deal diminished EMP damage across all the parts of the ship they intersect - Electromagnetic buggery is transphasic - ships equipped with EMP weapons will have more success in catching phase-ships. Would make Automated Repair Unit, Resistant Flux Conduits more valuable on phase ships

#2 is EMP fire builds flux on the phase-ship while it's cloaked (Compensating for EM interference in their phase thingy), basically the same relationship between EMP vs. phase-cloak as kinetics vs. shields, enabling EMP-equipped ships to more easily flush them out or keep them at-bay.

These dynamics could be built into dedicated weapons of their own and/or combined within one, alternatively or in addition to imbuing EMP weapons with these effects vs. Phase-cloaked ships.

14

Suggestions / Salvage Bonus/Salvage Gantries increases Weapon/LPC/Modspec drop rate

« on: February 16, 2020, 06:57:04 AM »

It stands to reason that some surviving weapons, LPCs and ship systems from wreckages and derelicts would sometimes be irreperably damaged in the process of salvaging them. Having the proper equipment to do so should results in greater, more consistent success in recovery of this equipment.

I was under the impression that this was already the case, and was surprised to figure out that it isn't. This'd make salvage ships as valuable as I previously believed them to be.

15

Suggestions / Default Exposed Hull/Weakpoints

« on: February 16, 2020, 06:30:41 AM »

Logic:
In many ships' sprites, there are areas that aren't covered by armour and look like they'd be particularly vulnerable to frag weaponry. This is not currently reflective of armour coverage which is homogenous.

Gameplay:
Give ships some areas of "exposed hull" they have by default - the areas surrounding some weapon mounts, hangar bays, engine exhausts, that sort of thing. Adds a dimension to exploiting enemy ships' weaknesses and accounting for those of your own. Would make frag weapons more viable. Mainly the homogeny of armour makes the big picture of engaging a ship play out the same.

This could be compensated for with a hullmod, which applies 50% of the armour value for everywhere else on the ship, to those exposed areas. There could be different skins per ship to reflect this, in the same manner as Interstellar Imperium's Package hullmods (which is where I got the inspiration).


I'm not too invested in the concept myself, I'm not sure it'd necessarily make combat and loadout design more fun and rewarding, or if these weakpoints would just end up being a source of frustration, and if that'd be worth all the things it'd do for game balance. I'd certainly be interested to find out for certain though.