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1

Mods / Re: [0.95.1a][v1.0.2] Realistic Combat

« on: September 28, 2023, 10:56:35 PM »

well this seems intriguing but 'compatible out-of-the-box with all mods' is blatantly untrue from what i've tested

i should clarify- it doesn't crash and does apply its changes to every mod, which is where i have a problem with this being "compatible". i don't really think you can call it compatible with all other mods when it forces blanket changes to every other mod with zero preservation of those mods original designs or intentions.

the scy zone scorcher now has a refire delay of 0.07, for example

Fair enough: I'll say it 'runs out-of-the-box with all mods'.   I need help finding consistent indications of designer intent to convert weapon performance to Realistic Combat standards while respecting original designs.

Also I know that's an old quote, but - assuming you do make an in-game configuration menu, would it be possible to create an interface that enables the player to create individual config profiles for each faction, so that they could individually tune each faction to more smoothly integrate it with the mod?
Someone could then upload their configs here, maybe on the mod's front page if you find them to reflect the faction well.

Also, this is just a funny anecdote, more compliment of the mod than anything else, but on the subject of mod weapons behaving unexpectedly because of this mod - the Volley Gun (small, high-OP, short-ranged kinetic scattergun) from the Blackrock Drive Yards mod has become a superweapon. The first shot instantly overloads the target and the next instagibs it, and the weapon is no longer limited by range.
This is something I really love about the mod - it makes old weapons behave completely differently and scrambles any in-faction meta I might have established, and suddenly makes niche "flavor weapons" that were once a waste of weapon mounts and OP in practice, suddenly viable or even optimal. It gives every mod faction I've been using for years a whole new feeling, which I like. But, the magnitudes of the changes can cause many weapons to trend towards either "anemic peashooter" or "veritable superweapon that causes [REDACTED] to self-implement ohFak.Retreat(situation Nope)".

2

Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.31.0

« on: September 28, 2023, 10:36:59 PM »

This mod would benefit a ton from LunaLib integration. All the features of the mod are good, but I think most players will find the magnitude of some or all of them (like the increased projectile speed) to be excessive, so the mod would benefit a lot from in-game tunability, so that every player can get the mod to feel just right for them without needing to reopen the game every time they want to make a small change. I assume there is a reason the integration was not already made, so, do you have any plans to implement an in-game config UI of some kind?

Also, as a secondary suggestion - the increased range of missiles means that charge-based PD weapons (burst laser and many similarly behaving mod PD weapons) become obsolete as they have no hope of keeping up with the sheer volume of missiles being fired at any given moment. There should be a script that massively multiplies the charges of any applicable PD weapon to account for this.

3

Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Diable Avionics 2.64rc1 (2021/12/11)

« on: February 26, 2023, 04:19:12 PM »

How do you make it so that the virtuous is a selectable starting ship?
Since it appears as "diableavionics_virtuous_skirmisher" in the hulls folder, I tried adding ["diableavionics_virtuous_skirmisher"] to "super ship" and it doesn't end up appearing as an option - if I add it into the other options, they just don't appear anymore.

As for why - sometimes you just want to boot up starsector and shamelessly start a campaign with a seal clubbing machine to relieve stress.

4

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

« on: December 26, 2022, 11:10:53 AM »

Thanks!
Modifying the base CPs didn't seem to work. I may have a mod that overrides this setting. However, increasing the rate of CP replenishment did work, which largely solves this problem, though now I'm hearing that radio noise every 5 seconds, it's kind of hilarious lol

5

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

6

Suggestions / Re: Expanded command interface for fighters

« on: April 07, 2022, 09:36:51 AM »

Fighters before 0.8a were ships and could be commanded as such.  They could even be deployed without the carrier on the field, although they would not respawn in battle without a carrier present on the field.

Now, fighters have been reduced to another style of missiles, and the suck OP out of the carrier so that carriers cannot be warship-lite without s-mods and weaker fighters only.

Oh, don't get me wrong, mounting fighters directly onto carriers as equipment makes perfect sense. A carrier needs the facilities to maintain, rearm and replace fighters. The more advanced the fighter, the more advanced the facilities needed to field it. Thus, fighters being treated as ship equipment and having OP costs makes sense. It also adds meaningful choice to outfitting your carrier, requiring you to find a fighter/firepower balance that complements your doctrine.

How fighters are actually USED is a separate matter, and this is where the problems are. Your only meaninful choice with fighters is what types you field. How they are used is almost entirely at the discretion of their home carrier and you have very limited options for actually getting your fighters to do anything specific.

I think what could work is attaching the fighter command interface to the carrier. That is - you click on a carrier and a menu of its wings pops up, and you can then select wings and tell them to go do stuff. The fighters don't show up as ships on the tactical map, so they don't visually clutter it. As for telling what every carrier is doing with its wings, you could make it so that thin, dotted arrows extend from the carrier and point where its fighters are ordered to go, with a small shield, sword or arrow icon on the target designating the type of task.
Furthermore, as you select multiple fighters from the carrier, a dotted circle appears around the carrier indicating the shortest range of all the fighters you have selected, to indicate the range at which those wings could attack together. Incidentally, it you select multiple wings and send them on the same mission, you could make it so that they match speeds, so that you could, for example, give your bombers escorts or just attack a ship with one wave instead of fighter wings with different speeds getting slaughtered one by one. The last two points also add meaningful choice to what fighters you field. Do you want fighter wings with similar stats so that they can perform one role very effectively, or do you want a flexible loadout, with a wing for every situation, but stats that prevent the fighter complement as a whole from excelling at any particular task?

Lastly, to accommodate players that aren't interested in micromanaging their fighters, simply keep the current carrier behavior for any fighters they didn't give orders to, meaning the carrier decides what to do with them.

No interface clutter, no additional overhead (fighter AI stays the same), no significant carrier AI changes (carrier AI will ignore wings you ordered directly), no changes to game balance (unless you count giving the player more control as power creep) and no problems for players that don't care for tactics and just want to blow things up with their own ship.

7

Suggestions / Re: Beholder Station

« on: April 06, 2022, 06:55:49 PM »

Player should be able to wipe it off the map with a good sat bomb.

Besmoulder station.

8

Suggestions / Re: Actual warfare between factions

« on: April 06, 2022, 06:16:09 PM »

Nex already does most of that, and yeah, those are much-needed features, since the sector is constantly at war. You'd expect raids and stuff to be occurring constantly between hostile factions and some colonies even collapsing, and that does actually happen in Nexerelin when a colony gets raided too much or loses one too many supply convoys and ends up unstable for too long. The mod feels integral to the game, which makes me wonder why it doesn't get implemented into the base game (though market capture WAS a Nex-only feature for a long time, so make of that what you will)

9

Suggestions / Re: Some mechanics feel really outdated

« on: April 06, 2022, 06:09:05 PM »

I don't think it matters that the game isn't an RTS. It has RTS mechanics and, if you understand the peculiarities of the AI and your own ships, it can actually be really fun to play it as one, while also giving you the personal influence on the battlefield that most RTS games lack. It makes me feel like a Chinese general in space. That has to count for something.

And, regardless, the game has RTS mechanics. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

10

Suggestions / Re: The Hegemony Takes a Hint after Enough Inspections Go Horribly Wrong

« on: April 06, 2022, 05:55:06 PM »

I agree. I don't even think that the solution to this is that difficult. Calculate the hegemony's war weariness (from recent losses), the projected resistance in the target system, your standing with the hegemony and who it's currently at war with. Depending on how much the hegemony hates you, how many losses it took recently, how many wars it's waging right now and how many forces it would take to deal with the projected resistance in your system, the hegemony will decide if sending a sufficiently large task force is worth it. Incidentally, the Hegemony is constantly at war with at least a couple factions, so if it likes you enough, it will decide that picking any more fights might be a bad call, and give you a pass for the time being.

11

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).

12

Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Interstellar Imperium 2.5.2

« on: March 02, 2022, 02:21:22 AM »

A bit of an odd question, but how can I modify the mod so that imperial ships no longer use vanilla weapons?
The thing is, I love this faction's aesthetic to bits and I feel like vanilla weapons really get in the way of it. It also makes it harder to hoard imperial weapons and get them from industrial revolution requisition centers since the faction uses vanilla blueprints.
I assume I would also need to modify presets, too

Also, is it possible to make the AI use the ixon's magnum salvo less aggressively, or rather, prevent it from using it past a certain flux threshold?
It feels like my Ixons keep redlining even when they have 20/20 caps/vents and only ballistas and custoses, so it has to be overuse of its magnum salvo

13

Mods / Re: [0.95a] Volkov Industrial Conglomerate 1.3.2

« on: June 20, 2021, 06:41:21 AM »

I'm really loving the mod, both in terms of gameplay and the visual style.

It would be really nice if you could add some logistic ships (freighters and tankers or tanker/freighters like the kadur one), for those of us who like to keep our fleets faction-homogenous

14

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Interstellar Imperium 2.4.0

« on: June 12, 2021, 09:27:48 AM »

Alright, I'll be serious. I'm sorry I was baiting you, Alex, a little that last post. I just want to say I love the mod a lot, and I even donated to my man Revenant because I love his work, and I just want people to be able to simultaneously enjoy 0.9.5 and his work, and I'm sorry for posting an unofficial port. I didn't know it was against the rules to post such a thing or even allude to having such a thing.

Are people not aware they can play the old SS versions until mods have been updated?

I mean, I have an entire folder of unofficial mod ports, so I could reply with, "Aren't you aware that you can play the latest version with all your mods RIGHT NOW without having to wait?" I guess I could wait, but why would I want to when I don't have to? I suppose not everyone has that choice, but I guess that's because of the rule against unofficial ports? I just thought it would be alleviating work required by the authors and just be the best of every world, but I guess not? I really don't know.

Since you seem pretty experienced with faction porting, perhaps you could make a post that provides some general guidelines for doing it? There are no rules against personally editing mods as long as you keep them to yourself and no one doing it is going to report bugs they caused with their own edits to the author.
I'm suggesting this out of the assumption that there are major common threads to faction porting, so if someone knows them, they can quickly handle those edits first and then move on to the specific port work of each mod.
Alternatively, if there are no common threads or if it's simpler that way, perhaps you could simply post individual instructions on how to port each mod. You don't need to provide any specific numbers, you could just point to things that need to be modified to fit the current version and leave the specifics to other people.
Just my two cents, since you're willing to help other people get outdated mods on the current version faster.

15

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

« on: December 22, 2020, 10:17:47 AM »

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.

Audio Plus is a mod that does exactly that.

Oh! Excellent! Thank you!