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Topics - XazoTak

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1
Suggestions / Stations should always have a defending fleet
« on: October 11, 2022, 01:25:35 AM »
Since Star Forts are extremely powerful, but any significant defensive force can easily be baited away, the obvious (and often only) way to deal with them is to deal with the defending fleet on its own and then the station on its own
Honestly, this just isn't fun. Star Fortresses have never been fun to fight IMO, because it's just hurling capitals at a ridiculously strong target and waiting, there's little for the player to do and not any role for smaller ships to play.

What's more fun is fighting weaker stations that have a defending fleet, because there's actually complexity and diversity to the battle.
It's also fun when you're fighting off a huge invasion fleet with a weaker station on your side, because the station won't carry the battle for you and it's likely to be destroyed, but it's a valuable asset if you use it right. A Star Fortress will just win the battle for you.

Personally, I think the doctrine towards balancing should be this this: Even the strongest orbital without a fleet should simply get steamrolled by any serious invasion, but it should never find itself starting a battle without a decent fleet backing it up.

So, what if orbitals couldn't get as powerful, but they also kept a sizeable defensive fleet in reserve?
By "can't get as powerful" I mean nerfing Star Fortresses so they're more like Battlestations as they are now (perhaps just Battlestations with the orbiting drones), and then nerfing Battlestations a little just to smooth out the strength curve so Star Fortresses are still decently more powerful than Battlestations.
And the defensive fleet they keep in reserve will always be there to assist the station in an invasion, they can't be baited away and fought separately since they don't actually exist as a visible fleet in space.

2
Personally, I've always felt like shields should be balanced with armour and hull, but shields feel more like they represent 90% of a ship's survivability while armour and hull are a last ditch measure that vanishes in just a few seconds for anything short of a dominator.
And as much as I love the idea of unshielded ships, there's just no way to make them work, they're incredibly fragile.
At the same time though, armour and hull shouldn't be too tough, it should feel like 1000 damage does something.
So, here's some ideas:

Hull:
I think this should be on a grid, like armour.
Total health across all hull cells combined would be much greater than current hull strength.
When a hull cell has no health left, it's destroyed and weapons/engines on that cell no longer function, but the cell can continue to absorb more damage before finally breaking off completely.
Like with armour, hits would spread their damage to hull cells in a 5x5 circle.
A ship is destroyed when a certain percentage of its hull cells are destroyed, which would vary from ship to ship, probably ranging from 30% to 50%. Hull health wouldn't vary as much with tech level, but the percentage of hull destroyed the ship can survive would be tied to tech level.

The gameplay reason for this is that currently, hull damage feels very unbalanced. Too little hull, and even rather big and tough ships will die just moments after their armour is broken though. Too much hull, and it feels like a ship is barely inconvenienced by a few thousand damage.
By allowing hull cells to be outright destroyed, and giving low tech ships less of a bonus to hull health but allowing them to survive more hull destruction, all ships can survive a quite a bit of hull damage and low tech ships can survive a lot more, but dealing a lot of damage to hull always counts since you're likely to destroy a weapon mount.

The flavour reason for it is that the idea of having a third of a battleship missing while it still fights on is pretty awesome.

Armour:
There's only one kind of armour, and it often doesn't feel like it's suited for the ship it's on.
Plus, the interactions between different damage types and armour don't feel quite right either.

For starters, there could be different kinds of armour with different properties, which can also be layered; so if a ship has 100 explosive armour and 300 metal plate armour, then while the health of an armour cell is 400-101 it'll be treated as metal plate of 300-1 thickness and while the health is 100-1 it'll be treated as explosive armour of 100-1 thickness.
The different armour types would have a different hardness, and possibly have special properties.
Metal plate would be simply have a high hardness, and equivalent to current armour.
There could be advanced alloy plate which would have extreme hardness, though generally be thin.
There could be ablative armour which would be soft but generally thick.
There could be explosive armour which would be soft but if incoming damage would penetrate the layer, it's reduced by a multiple of the layer's thickness and the layer is destroyed in that place.
There could even be liquid armour, which would even itself out over a hull.

As for interaction with different damage types: Instead of the 200% 100% 50% 25% damage multiplier, and damage reduction based on thickness, damage reduction would instead be based on the damage type.
Kinetic: Damage reduction is based on thickness*hardness
HE: Damage reduction is based on hardness
Energy: No damage reduction, but low damage to armour (it's melting through it after all)
Flak: Damage reduction is based on hardness*hardness

The reason for all this is to allow armour to be useful to whatever's using it, allow you to specialise and be more strategic, and make it possible to have decent protection against all damage types even without a shield. If you're bullying Tri-Tachyon as they deserve, then ablative armour would serve you well.

Fire and repairs
Currently, cruisers and capitals can maintain a continuous frontline presence, and the above changes to hull would allow them to last longer and be riskier and still survive to fight another day.
Gameplay would be more interesting if large ships could be forced to back off, allowing destroyers to play more of a role in their absence.
So, what about fire? Taking hull damage could cause hull cells to catch fire, and while a ship would always have some firefighting capability, it can't handle fires nearly as well while in the thick of combat. If it keeps taking the occasional bit of hull damage and never takes a break from combat, it's going to be taking massive amounts of fire damage.
Frigates and destroyers would, of course, be much more easily able to back out of combat so this mechanic wouldn't affect them as much. And perhaps their smaller size could contribute to making them easier to manage fires on.

Repairs, meanwhile, would allow a ship to restore a little bit of health to non-destroyed hull cells over the course of a battle. Maybe 10-20% of its total health as a repair supplies that can be used over the course of a battle, and like firefighting is faster outside of combat? The reason is to give more tactical options for what you do when a ship is very close to death. Instead of retreating it, you might try withdraw a ship to a safe location, so that it can later either continue to fight or at least withdraw more safely.

This also means that pushing the enemy back is no longer strictly an inconvenience to you, as although it means reinforcements take longer to arrive and retreating is slower, you have more space to withdraw to for extinguishing and repairs while the enemy has less.

3
Suggestions / Few ships feel human-pilot friendly
« on: August 11, 2021, 03:06:38 AM »
As in, there's very few ships that I'd actually enjoy using as a flagship.
I always go for either a Tempest or a heavily armed destroyer.

Overloading: Definitely my biggest gripe with most ships in this game, I wish this mechanic didn't exist. Most ships require you to be able to carefully toggle your shield to absorb as many hits as you can without overloading, while still also returning fire. The AI is great at this, and can even toggle based on damage type. Overloading feels like it's a mechanic that almost exclusively affects you, the human player, because AI ships usually only overload as a panic response when they're screwed no matter what.

Flux dissipation: It's really slow, and a frontline ship that can't quickly disengage and vent will spend a lot of time just waiting for flux to go down. It'd be better if Converted Hangar was less awful, because then you could at least have PD while you vent like Tempest does.

Weapon mounts: Most ships go for many smaller mounts instead of fewer bigger mounts, which may still be effective (railguns and light needlers are excellent) but bigger weapons are more diverse and fun. Plus, there aren't enough missile mounts in general, especially medium/large ones.

Teleporting: A lot of frigates rely on this mechanic, and it's designed in a way that can make things tricky for a human player. Turning off the shields each time it's used is annoying and pointless, and the direction being based on velocity instead of acceleration is confusing especially without a good frame of reference for your velocity.

Phase Cloak/Temporal Shell: This makes the game feel really slow. Ships that can bend time are pretty slow from their own perspective. I think I'd like it more if it struck a balance between making everything else seem slower, and the ship seem faster. e.g. for a 4x speedup, everything else moves at half speed and you move at double speed.

4
Suggestions / Destroyer and cruiser equivalents to Tempest
« on: August 13, 2019, 05:05:08 PM »
I reckon in terms of being comfortable for a player to use, Tempest is the best ship in the game.
It's very responsive, has great automated defences, and due to the low weapon count doesn't require lots of micromanagement to use; just decisions on where to go, who to attack, etc.
Most other strong ships are slow and seem to often put the player in a situation where they're running at near-max flux using lots of automatic weapons, and having to quickly decide which damage to tank and which to absorb, a single mistake causing them to overload and explode. This kind of gameplay benefits little from the skill of a human (strategic thinking) and is harmed greatly by the flaws of humans (reaction time, making mistakes) causing humans to be on-par with AIs.

The things that makes Tempest so much more fun than other string ships are:
  • Combining extreme speed and damage
  • Being able to quickly decide your place on the battlefield
  • Having manual control of weapons be easy
  • Having combat be partly automated in a cool way

That means to make a ship Tempest-like, it needs to:
  • Be fast and have lots of damage
  • Pack almost all of its damage into one weapon group[/i]
    • Have a fighter bay

    Massive emphasis on that second one. It's just no fun using a ship that spreads the bulk of its damage across many weapon groups.

    In order for there to be a good range of ships that play similarly to Tempest, there needs to be one in each size class.

    Aurora could be made Tempest-like by having less but larger weapon mounts (the current number of small mounts is just silly), and a fighter bay (no built-in fighters, to make Aurora more flexible). Pretty much a mini-Odyssey.
    Aurora seriously needs a rework anyway, because in its current state it's useless. It's massively outclassed by Falcon(P), which is a much cheaper fast cruiser that is equal or better in every way except durability.

    Odyssey is already Tempest-like. Fast, lots of damage in one weapon group, has fighter bays.

    That means the Tempest-like list of ships is:
    Frigate: Tempest
    Destroyer: None
    Cruiser: Aurora
    Capital: Odyssey

    To fill the Destroyer gap, a new ship would have to be created. No existing destroyer is even close to being a Tempest equivalent, because for some reason the game has no expensive-high grade destroyers.
    I reckon a good design would be:
    Mounts: (1x Large Energy, 1x Medium Energy, 1x Medium Missile) or (1x Large Missile, 2x Medium Energy) or (1x Large Energy, 2x Medium Missile) or (2x Medium Missile, 2x Medium Energy)
    Ability: Damage amplification
    Speed: At least as fast as Medusa
    Fighters: A single large drone, with a frontal phase lance, two IR pulse laser turrets, and point defence AI so those pulse lasers target missiles
    DP cost: ~18

    Although it provides very little strength to the front line relative to its high DP cost, it poses an extreme threat to slow exposed ships.

5
General Discussion / Can't download game from NZ
« on: July 12, 2019, 03:45:11 AM »
Both download links give me extremely slow download speeds, with the download often failing.
How about an official torrent, like Space Engine had when it was freeware?

6
Suggestions / CR and OP boosts should be from modules, not admiral skills
« on: February 09, 2019, 03:19:58 PM »
CR and OP are really good stats to be able to boost, and being able to get a significant boost to them for an entire fleet is just crazy-overpowered and is a big part of what makes the late-game so easy.
I do think it should be possible to use modules to sacrifice logistical practicality for more combat power though, because I'm a fan of the idea of being able to overdrive ships to make them simply better in-combat.

Perhaps modules like this?

Intensive Care:
No OP cost
+50% recovery time
+20% maintenance cost
+15% CR

Compartment Refitting:
No OP cost
Cargo capacity reduced by up to -20/-40/-100/-200
+1 OP and 0.5 recovery cost for every 4 cargo capacity lost

7
Suggestions / Nothing should toggle off shields
« on: December 22, 2018, 02:46:47 PM »
If shields are disabled for any reason, they should still be considered as toggled on.
That is, instead of shield toggle attempting to set the shield's state to the opposite of its current state, it should instead toggle a separate on/off value that the shield will always match if it isn't disabled.

Having to keep turning shields back on makes it a pain to fight Harbringers or use any teleporting ship.

8
Suggestions / Blending drive field travel and in-combat travel
« on: December 19, 2018, 02:01:51 AM »
Lots of issues in this game relate to deployment and engagement rules.
What if the battle area was indefinite in size, all ships were fielded at the start of a battle, and those ships would be sent into and pulled out of engagements as necessary?
Ships are arranged into groups, and in battle those groups are commanded around. Those groups are like fleets, they are subject to burn levels and detection rules.
Ships interfere with each other's burn drives, weakening/denying use of burn drives in an area around them that increases with size and number of ships. This also means groups have to be spread out while using their burn drives.

A new way of viewing the battle would have to be introduced for this, one that shows all the allied and visible enemy battlegroups, and allows them to be commanded about.
In early battles, the player (and any realistically-fightable enemies) will probably only have one group, so this doesn't really matter much. Player's group moves to enemy's group, and then there's a fight.
In late battles though, it becomes very important: The player will want to be sending out fast frigate groups to raid logistics ships, remaining mindful the same doesn't happen to them.
The player can only command the area of the battle that their flagship is present in, and for the sake of performance only that area is simulated in real time. Other areas where battles are occuring occupy unused processor time, they tend to lag behind the player's battle but catch up in lulls.

So a few implicit gameplay changes:
-Fleet size limits are no longer needed, as the reason a fleet size limit is needed is that the restrictive retreating rules means in an unbalanced engagement the smaller fleet absolutely has to lose ships to get away from the unwinnable fight and will always just be left with a few logistics ships. This way, an unbalanced engagement can end with the smaller fleet retreating taking fewer losses than the larger fleet.
-Deployment limits still exist in a way, thanks to burn drive interference. A huge, 300DP battlegroup would have to be spread over a huge area of the battlefield, and for all the ships to converge on one site they'd have to do it with regular engines, and crossing such a large area without burn drives would just take far too long.
-CR would have to work differently. Perhaps burn drive interference and CR depletion could be similar? Maybe CR recovery could be a thing too.
-Retreating would have to work differently, since the battlefield no longer has borders. Not sure what the retreat conditions should be, but by bringing the gameplay elements of system exploration into battle, there's a lot to work with. What's important is that a pest cannot indefinitely prevent retreat.

I think a system like this would allow a lot of arbitrary gameplay restrictions to be done away with and make combat less about attrition.

9
If on the market share screen (not colony info screen), looking at production and availability will show "+1 null (Industry Name)" if there's an admin bonus.
This null bonus is not counted, it does not contribute to the total.

10
Bug Reports & Support / Disrupting spaceport disables ship quality boosts
« on: December 13, 2018, 01:06:29 PM »
Lost my megaport, and until it resumed normal operations I lost the the +50% from pristine nanoforge and the +20% from orbital works.

11
Bug Reports & Support / [0.9a RC9] Joining an assault on a station
« on: December 10, 2018, 04:41:43 AM »
Tried this with both Hegemony and Pirate attackers on a Persean League station, and it kept causing the station to retreat and the attackers would harry.
As soon as I left the station alone and stopped trying to join the assault, it got consumed in the vast cloud of pirates.
There was a second station in the system, and I joined the assault on it, and this time the attackers pursued meaning I could also pursue. Risk-free too, with my second in command.

In short, lone stations are allowed to attempt to retreat if the player joined in an ongoing attack, and what happens from there is up to the original attackers.

Also I think the pirate raids might be a little much, several hundred ships against a poorly defended system doesn't give me anything to do in the raid besides rain marines down on unguarded planets since all PL fleets are aggressively purged from the system.

12
Since TT sells drugs, and the population produces drugs, they intend to disrupt the population directly which isn't meant to be possible.
Not sure what would happen should they actually succeed.

13
Suggestions / Phase ships shouldn't have instant offence abilities
« on: December 09, 2018, 10:44:52 PM »
Everything in the game is fair and counterable, except phase ship abilities.
Absolutely no response exists to them, targets simply have to accept the consequences.

Amplified Entropy is a significant, long-lasting debuff. No way to stop it.
Quantum Disruptor is a severe, short-lasting debuff. Once again, no way to stop it, and used right it can do immense damage effortlessly.
Mine Strike is like being able to instantly land a torpedo or five on any target that is not shielding its trajectory, i.e. anything protecting itself while retreating. Neither players nor AIs can possibly hope to respond in time, and it's by far the most overpowered ability in the game. My complaints about Mine Strike extend to Star Fortresses.

Amplified Entropy just isn't a fun ability to play with or against, even if it gets a rework. Something else would be better.
Quantum Disruptor would be pretty neat as a slow electric pulse. Still unavoidable for large ships, but the issue with it is really that it can instakill small ships. When modding another game, I found that the ideal way to render a slow electric pulse is not to have visible things move but instead have a moving wave in which stationary (though still animated) sparks appear.
Mine Strike should have an arming time that gives ships and fighters a few seconds to respond.

14
Bug Reports & Support / [0.9a RC9] General pirate bugs
« on: December 09, 2018, 09:08:37 PM »
I'm finding that there's a lot of unfound issues related to being friendly with pirates, because no one actually plays as a pirate ally since there's no benefits and you can't do half the missions in the game.
Since making a thread for each issue is getting a bit spammy, here's a several at once:

Black market trade with transponder on
This caused a reputation loss the first time I did it, then nothing thereafter.

Pirate activity penalties
Two of my five colonies have -50% accessibility and reduced stability from pirate activity, which severely reduces income.
The defenders could easily destroy the pirates, but they won't because pirates are friendly.
These penalties occur despite pirates only attacking useless Independent fleets instead of my own fleets which represent the bulk of trade.

Transponder enforcement
I don't have free port status enabled, nevertheless pirates are allowed to have their transponders off without my fleets taking issue with it.
Which feeds into the severe pirate activity problem I have.

Reputation
It's capped at 50 in some situations, but not in others.
If I do a mission for pirates at 50 reputation, it will say my relationship is well established and not affected.
However, I got to 55 by saving them from a Persean League fleet.
Interestingly, a new relationship description exists for being over 50 rep, despite a cap of 50 being apparently intended.
Also, while on the subject of being friendly with normally-hostile factions, Luddic Path's unfriendly but non-hostile relationship descriptions are written with the assumption that the player started out neutral but got unfriendly, even though such relationship levels require a net increase in reputation.

15
You can't, it will say neither side trusts you.
At least, not with Pirates vs Independents, at 50 and 30 rep respectively.

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