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Messages - bobucles

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346
Suggestions / Re: Thinking Inside the Box About Hyperspace Terrain
« on: November 11, 2019, 06:09:44 AM »
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That seems pretty connected and related to me.
Related? Sure. Euclidean? No. There's no clear connection between flying in a straight line in hyperspace, and flying in a straight line in normal space. Not that anyone would want to take the long route anyway, since most stars IRL are separated by an order of lightyears. If a star system has no clear destination in hyperspace, it'd be nearly impossible to fly to.

Do all hyperspace hazards have to be stationary? It might be cool to have rare super storms that pop up every now and then. Flying through them would be harrowing and they might even isolate a system if they spawn over one.

347
Suggestions / Re: Activating Phase cloak woes
« on: November 11, 2019, 05:31:48 AM »
So it looks something like this, right?

The point I'm making is that battle is incredibly flashy and the visual phase coil feedback is not always clear or visible so when you DO attempt to cloak, it's a shot in the dark(hehe).

[attachment deleted by admin]

348
Suggestions / Re: Activating Phase cloak woes
« on: November 11, 2019, 04:52:53 AM »
You cant cloak then phase coils are lit. And you camera usually centered on your ship so you always see them. I cant imagine better indicator than ship itself.
Sounds good. Feel free to tell me when I'm ready to cloak.

[attachment deleted by admin]

349
Suggestions / Re: Reaper Interception - Underwhelming
« on: November 10, 2019, 06:38:42 PM »
It might be really cool if reapers always exploded. The lore description states that they're antimatter warheads, so once the warhead is breached they'd definitely pop.

350
Suggestions / Activating Phase cloak woes
« on: November 10, 2019, 01:19:40 PM »
Ship shields are extremely responsive to the mouse button, turning on or off with any mouse click. The phase cloak has a different behavior, due to its cooldown. If you attempt to cloak while on cooldown the attempt fails, essentially dropping the mouse click.

Battle is hectic and filled with bright flashes, so the visual feedback on phase coils is not always visible. So what do I do? I mash the mouse button. Bad things are happening and I gotta get that cloak up ASAP, after all. What happens next? The phase cloak goes up, and then it drops immediately.

The game is not always responsive to cloaking requests, but it is ALWAYS responsive to decloaking requests. Does this annoy anyone else? It's gotten me killed quite a few times.

I'd like to see a slightly friendlier system to phase ship lovers. A simple solution is to queue up the request. Once the player asks to cloak, the ship should do it at the next opportunity. This way the button request is always accepted, you click an odd number of times to be cloaked and an even number of times to be uncloaked. It's very easy on the muscle memory and it lets players get the most out of their phase coils.

351
Suggestions / Re: Gunnery Implant - gives additional weapons groups
« on: November 10, 2019, 06:39:59 AM »
You are over-complicating it. If some weapon grouping is unusable for player, it is unusable for AI that has same degree of control as well.
5 groups are not enough to setup anywhere near optimal control scheme for Onslaught and some builds of other capitals, player piloted or not.
But weapon groups don't actually work that way. All PD guns can be placed on the same weapon group, and they will all act as independent defense turrets. That feat is not possible with a player controlled weapon group, the player has only one mouse cursor to play with. The AI already has a native ability to treat all weapons as independent actors, regardless of whether or not they're in a group. So if weapons can behave independently, why are weapon groupings changing AI behavior to begin with?

352
General Discussion / Re: Cargo/Transports ship deployment
« on: November 10, 2019, 06:16:16 AM »
There's also a more important concern that deploying ships costs supplies. If every ship was forced into deployment first thing, you'd be paying the full fleet cost every battle. A single enemy kite would trash your CR.

It might be neat to combine combat and pursuit into a single larger battle, but one of the reasons they end up as separate fights is to protect FPS performance.  Fleet pursuits, by their nature, force the entire defensive fleet into battle. If you were to retreat with a full fleet, you'd have a gigantic lag ball of ships on the field. The game doesn't like that. It instead forces you to have a normal battle, where limited deployment points keep you from having all your ships active at once. You can either deal enough damage to score a free disengage (so the game doesn't have to place your full, laggy fleet into a pursuit), or die badly enough that a non-laggy pursuit battle becomes possible.

353
Suggestions / Re: Gunnery Implant - gives additional weapons groups
« on: November 10, 2019, 05:31:09 AM »
I don't see why the player being able to improve ship performance by understanding how auto fire AI work is a problem. Isn't the point of the game for the player to learn the mechanics of the game and improve their performance? Weapon grouping is a skill the player has to learn: it's just another part of outfitting. You can always improve the AI performance at weapon grouping to make the game more difficult, although I don't think that really a problem right now.
The main reason it's a problem is because the link between "switching weapon groups" and "altering ship behavior" is essentially black magic. There is no intuitive way to understand this and if you can explain it in less than 5 sentences you're probably explaining it wrong. I've been checking out veterans with years of experience, and they still spend hours twiddling with weapon groups because even they don't know how the AI will respond. They add weapons, remove weapons and play with weapon groups, because those are the player levers to interact with ship AI.

Changing AI with weapon groups is like trying to drive a car with a drum set. You can still drive, but you're driving with a drum set.
Even if you cannot imagine using more than 5 weapon groups, other can. Why say that you don't need 5? Why not any other number? You might be happy with 5, whereas plenty others see the opportunity to use more, so why try to deny it to others?

There was an example of the Onslaught. You can also imagine a Conquest with its two sides. Or Paragon. Or for a non-Capital example, even simply wanting Kinetics, High Explosive, missiles, Ion weapons, beam, PD weapons and an empty weapon group to pilot without bothering to aim weapons on something like an Eagle.  It is a restriction, and an unnecessary restriction.
Weapon groups don't solve AI problems. It is also crazy to expect players to solve their AI problems at all, no one expects their player base to be made out of AI designers. If there is a player solution, it needs to be a clear system that provides easily understood AI levers.

Commanding Officers are a good example of a useful player lever. An aggressive officer vs. a cautious officer changes ship behavior in a dramatic way, but it is still easily to understand. So for example if I want my ship to hold back, be conservative with its weapons and stick mostly to using PD, I pick up a cautious officer. If I want a ship to get close, fire ALL its primary weapons and generally run hot on flux, I pick an aggressive officer. That's not a very arcane topic to teach players.

354
General Discussion / Re: Cargo/Transports ship deployment
« on: November 10, 2019, 04:25:53 AM »
If you want the loot, you have to win the main battle and then score lots of kills in the pursuit battle. Fast destroyers and frigates are your best bet for a pursuit, frigates also have an obscure bonus of having additional deployment locations on the sides.

The pursuit battle has an autoresolve option that essentially ignores ship speed. So if you throw a bunch of beefy capitals into a pursuit and autoresolve, they'll score all the kills.

355
Suggestions / Re: Salvage Game Loop/Economy
« on: November 09, 2019, 05:44:31 AM »
I don't think anyone spams salvage to squeeze out those last 2 supplies, 4 fuel and 9 metal from the wreckage. The main reason to spam the salvage button is because a rare item still has a chance to spawn, even if it is remote. Even if the odds are one in a million, players are going to be tempted to play that slot machine.

I think if the salvage field quality is under a certain threshold, the chances of rare items should simply stop. You could justify it as the largest of items have already been thoroughly searched and picked up, so anything smaller than that is just nuts and bolts. Nothing left is big enough to be a rare drop. A good threshold rating might be between 5-15%, since that's already pushing the limits of ordinary salvage efforts anyway.

356
Suggestions / Re: Engine trails Flare based on direction of movement
« on: November 08, 2019, 05:45:23 AM »
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And what I'm saying is if you take a missile to one of those engines your top speed drops.
Does maneuverability get affected as well? It might be fun to put extra targets on ships. Although a ship already loses both speed and maneuvers when they flame out, more targets definitely means more problems for sure.

357
Suggestions / Re: More Active Moderation
« on: November 08, 2019, 05:42:30 AM »
making the forum a more toxic place.
*rolls eyes* I vote not this guy.

358
You can put a kill order on a ship "behind", they will "pierce" everything on their way and the retreat when the target is destroyed. Works well with "flickering ships" like the pandemonium from DA + support from LRMs and fighters, imho.
That sounds pretty close to how a phase ship should fight. Their exceptional speed and phasing system caters well to a "jousting" style of combat. Phase up, lunge in and unload. The only missing piece is knowing when to withdraw and remove hard flux before trying again.

359
General Discussion / Re: Raids make little sense
« on: November 07, 2019, 04:21:45 AM »
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Maybe have the ransomed ship mothballed and guaranteed to be recoverable or have it as a pristine derelict with the pirate fleet placed right on top of it in such a way that it is not recoverable without fighting. Oh and of course if you don't deliver the ship once you recover it the faction will send a bounty hunter to kick your arse.
How are mothballed ships handled on the battle layer? They obviously can't enter battle but they probably aren't allowed to retreat either. You'd basically be able to loot the ship after battle for free, unless it self destructs of course.

360
General Discussion / Re: Make the Core Worlds Larger
« on: November 07, 2019, 04:01:31 AM »
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Simply put, it would be STOLEN GOODS.
Perhaps, but as long as there's more meat than shiny blue balls behind the wheel they can't be THAT angry about it. Better Red than Hal, as they say.

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