Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Show Posts

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.

Messages - whoopWHAT

Pages: [1]
1
Suggestions / Re: Grappling Harpoons and Tethering(NOT BOARDING)
« on: March 30, 2018, 11:25:40 AM »
To all those who have responded:

1) I didn't know this was already a thing in mods, I looked and couldn't find then(may have just skimmed over them). Either way, the point is NOT to merely have it be a modded addition to the game, but to be an in-game mechanic. If this forum was a suggestion for mods, then I'd have talked about what kinds of mods I wanted, not things that I want in the base game itself.
2) I can see the argument for the shield piercing harpoon, but I raise you the fact that only omni-shields fully protect from grappling hooks, and we all know how easy those are to overload with sustained firepower. Making them pierce shields might be necessary at one point to balance them later-on, but for the debut, I feel like the idea is more kosher to the current gameplay by having them not pierce shields, like other ballistic style weaponry.
3) My point about putting them onto fighters was such that I'd assume that a full fighter wing with all hooks attached could pull around an average frigate. With this approximation as the starting point, the mass and engine power of the ships definitely matters. The goal was to introduce new build diversity to the game; instead of focusing 100% on guns and armor/shields, there's more a place for speed and taking into consideration the actual weight of the ships and the location of engines.

2
Suggestions / Grappling Harpoons and Tethering(NOT BOARDING)
« on: March 13, 2018, 07:42:15 PM »
Idea
One of the things that I have been thinking about in the back of my mind now is the idea of grappling harpoons, similar to the grappling hooks used in naval combat back in the golden age of sailing and piracy. However, instead of facilitating boarding like in the old days, for Starsector, the purpose of Grappling onto your opponent is to pull their ships out of position, and for the enemy to be able to do the same to you.

Design-wise, harpoons are a projectile-style weapon that does not go through shields, and deals downright pitiful shield damage. This makes it such that fully shielded targets are impervious to their effects. In return, if the harpoon hits an un-shielded target, they become tethered to the ship that hit them. Tethering comes with several inherent advantages and disadvantages.


Advantages: :D
1) Tethers affect the movement of ships involved in the tether.(see below)
2) Tethering allows for maneuvers and tactics that are not available in the base version of the game.

Disadvantages: :'(
1) Tethers affect the movement of ships involved in the tether.(see below)
2) Tethering fundamentally changes the dynamics of the game itself.


Design & Balance ???
I fully understand that instating tethers would be an extremely complex system to set up programming-wise and resource-wise, so allow me to guarantee (to the best of my ability) that the mechanic would be worth the hassle. Tethered ships(this includes the ship that fired the tether) would function in accordance with physics for as much as is possible. This means that fighters would be able to carry harpoons, but they would only be able to pull a battleship very slowly at best, and be yanked behind the battleship itself if it was in motion. This goes in both directions-swarms of harpoon fighters would be able to pull even the largest ships out of position, no matter how much momentum they have. This ties in with how powerful a ships' engines are in relation to how powerful the tethered ships' engines are, in addition to the mass of each ship. For the most part, these are already known values, so it should simply be a matter of calculating the angle of the tethers' pull and their force and using that to modify the movement of the ship in question based on the point of contact of the tether itself. This would have multiple uses beyond merely moving enemies out of position, tethers could also be used to move your own ships, using a vast number of tethered fighters or tugs to pull battleships into battle at an increased speed. Or even using derelict/destroyed ships or even asteroids as one-use sling bullets. This also makes ships with burn drive much more useful, as they can tether to an enemy, turn back towards your fleet, and burn drive to pull them back into the hornet's nest.

There are quite a few limiting factors of Grappling Hooks as well: The first and most prominent being that they take up weapon slots and are useless on shielded targets. Grappling Hooks would also not affect intangible ships; intangible ships cannot activate their intangible if they have active tethers. In addition, ships that can phase shift will instantly break any tethers(either on or fired by them) as soon as they use such an ability. These would be to prevent a vast majority of bugs, while still making sense in-universe and balance wise, as ships with phase-shift/intangible are meant to be agile skirmishers for the most part, and should have an easier time of escaping from situations where they would get locked down already.

Another limiting factor is that tethers(in my opinion) should NOT have the ability to reel in targets. In addition to this making the process of coding the system vastly more complicated, this would also force players to rely on the coordination of multiple ships instead of allowing one ship to reel 'em in, chew 'em up, and spit 'em out. That being said, reeling in is still a mechanic that might be viable if that is desired, as it allows for single ships with harpoons to have a lot more power, and put a lot more emphasis on large amounts of high-damage short range weapons and long range shield damaging weapons, increasing build diversity at the expense of tactical diversity.

Conclusion 8)
Overall, I feel that grappling harpoons like this are an idea that should be implemented, but I'm not getting my hopes up. With a system this complicated, I feel that even if it does pose a large number of benefits to the game right now, it would not be put in simply for the amount of resources required to put into such a system to make it function.

Either way, I'm looking forward to what you all have to say about such an idea.  ;D

3
Mods / Re: [0.8a] Diable Avionics 1.82 (08/05/2017)
« on: May 09, 2017, 12:59:44 PM »
Really? I haven't seen them handing out any bounties, and not only that, they are ignoring the only open bounty they have posted, no matter how many Luddic Path fleets I kill. :l

4
Mods / Re: [0.8a] Diable Avionics 1.82 (08/05/2017)
« on: May 09, 2017, 12:52:47 PM »
Quick thing that might be an issue, with Diable they seem to start off suspicious towards you, and they never seem to post missions that you can do for them. This makes it very difficult to win them over as a faction because you basically have to wait for a random bounty to pop up(usually on luddic path) and grind out those guys in the hopes to get them favorable towards you. I think they should at least start off neutral towards you, or at the very least have more mission available to the player so that being suspicious isn't as much of a hassle.

5
Suggestions / Re: Improve game start?
« on: April 30, 2017, 02:58:56 AM »
I see your point, and I think it might be a good idea to limit the pool of ships available to players at the start(since yea, I didn't think about the Hyperion), but I feel a system like this would be perfect for the game. We don't exactly have character customization(for the most part) and the thing we interact with most(the fleet) we only have 4 options of at the start. Game design-wise, I say it should be one of two directions as far as the start goes:

1 - Make the starter ship 100% fixed.

This is a little counter-intuitive, so hear me out. With a single "fine-tuned" ship and loadout, you can craft much better scenarios and tutorials based around it at the start. This lets you LASER FOCUS on exactly how you want the start of the game to play out, and will allow you to go so far as designing the starter area around what the player has available to them, to show them how to learn the game and experience it without pop-up text boxes. Sorta like the starting area for Sid Meier's Pirates. It integrates seemlessly with the rest of the world, but it is a microcosm of all the things that you can do in the game, to the point were you can learn all the mechanics of the game without venturing out into the rest of the seas at all. Albeit, this is a lot harder to pull off game design-wise, it will work much better than my later suggestion if done correctly.


2 - Give the player as much freedom as possible in the bounds of game balance to customize how they start.

This is easier than the former by orders of magnitude, and it comes with numerous benefits, many of which I have previously stated. It allows players a lot more agency at the start, it gives brand new players a way to test the waters AND look at all the cool ship designs before they can access all of them together, and it doesn't have a lot of the issues the current system has. (IE, loads of people disagreeing on whether or not changing the starter ships is a good idea because it won't let them use THEIR favorite starter ship, none of the presets being fun or interesting to use for some people, causing them to quit when they can't do anything, ETC.)



Even if not the points system I'm advocating ~something~ should be done to improve the game start, I think that much is fair to say.

6
Suggestions / Re: Improve game start?
« on: April 30, 2017, 12:49:09 AM »
Well how about this. How about we give the players a certain number of points when they start the game depending on the difficulty, and then let them pick whatever they want from the points available to them. Don't let them change weapon systems, but have every ship available to the player at the get go. Like on Easy you could have the player start with the equivalent fleet power of a cruiser, or a destroyer and a frigate, or a 2 utility ships and 2 frigates, or whatever.

The idea is to have a point system at the start of the game that lets players spend points to get a starting fleet they feel comfortable with. That way we don't have this one-size-fits-all thing that's been going on. It'd allow you more room to balance the start of the game instead of just picking what 4 possible combinations of ships they can have at the start, and it'd allow players more room to experiment on their own.





Hell, I could get into a whole 'nother rant about how the start of the game doesn't adequately teach players the combat skills they need to survive and thrive, but that's not really the point.

7
Suggestions / Re: Improve game start?
« on: April 29, 2017, 01:54:14 AM »
I think that having a selection of some of the lesser destroyers are the perfect middle ground. They aren't flattened by most starting fleets, they are by far the easiest ships to get used to in the game, and they pack a solid punch for any captain worth his salt. Starting out with a single paltry frigate ~as a bounty hunter~ makes it look like you're a pretty *** bounty hunter and kinda makes the early game into farming scavenging and surveying until you get the money to get a ship with a little punch.

Also AxleMC, I'm sorry if I came off a bit rude. It was uncalled for on my part. :/

8
Suggestions / Re: Improve game start?
« on: April 28, 2017, 11:48:38 PM »
AxleMC, I've been playing StarSector a lot longer than you have. A frigate with 2 swarmers, 1 pulse laser, a few PD lasers, and a phase jumper is only 'powerful' by 1v1 frigate standards. Any kind of fleet with any kind of bite can eat a wolf for breakfast. Also, I meant Brawlers, not Cerberuses(I'll making an edit fixing that shortly since it seems I've mucked up a bit there and gotten multiple people getting onto me about that.) Cerberuses are no problem, no matter their numbers(as long as its not enough to blanket the screen) simply because its lack of shield make it easy pickings for pretty much anything.

9
Suggestions / Improve game start?
« on: April 28, 2017, 10:43:10 PM »
I think there might need to be some adjustments made to the start of the campaign. Even on Easy, the game is frustrating to start; even the weakest of enemies can kill you in short work. You start of with AT BEST a Wolf class, which is far and away one of the weakest frigates in the game. 2 lashers? Dead. 1 bruiser and a shuttle? Dead. 2 Brawlers? Ded. Even the weakest of fleets can crush whatever you have, no matter how skillfully you play it because you don't have a ship good enough to take them on.

Coupled with that is the fact that purchasing a new ship from a star-port is a matter of blind luck as to whether they'll have something decent for purchase. 70% of the time, they'll only have crap ships or damaged ships, or both, and anything decent is gonna be black market 100% of the time. Anything not damaged/legal is too expensive or requires faction allegiance to purchase off the bat. Not only that, but most stations have a crap supply of weapons for purchase, making refitting into a good spec for your ship a pipe dream.

Plus, no joke, but Jangala is kinda dull starting out. There's a lot of stuff going on, sure, but not a lot of ~interesting~ stuff, unless you have a good enough ship to start some fun stuff off on your own.
Just my thoughts on it. Starting cash seems fine, and the salvage mechanic is good(if a bit on the unrewarding side) you just need a better ship it seems. Hell even a destroyer or just a better frigate or something, I dunno.

Edit: Fixed 2 Cerberuses to 2 Brawlers because I am bad with keeping track of the names sometimes.

10
I remember seeing a post like this ages ago, with the ability to target multiple enemies at once and then adjust your auto-fire to whatever you wanted it to target. Seemed like a good idea at the time, just like this, but I doubt it'll get implemented any time soon. :/

11
Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] The Mayorate v0.9.2 (updated 25/04/16)
« on: April 27, 2017, 07:26:02 PM »
Will there be an update for 0.8? :D

12
Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] Diable Avionics 1.71 (30/01/2017)
« on: April 26, 2017, 12:40:26 AM »
Speaking of the 0.8 update, how long do you think its going to be before the update drops? :)

13
Exactly as the name says. When I boot up StarSector with Templars, DiableAvionics, or the Ship/Weapon Pack loaded, it instantly crashes on the loading screen showing the above message. These mods are not out of date, as they were installed today, along with the latest version of StarSector, so I do not know what the problem is.

I have looked over the forum multiple times and I have not found anyone else that has run into this issue, nor have I found a solution.

Pages: [1]