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391

General Discussion / Re: How does armor mechanics warks?

« on: October 28, 2019, 03:58:18 PM »

A vast majority of PD hits for less than 100 damage, so +150 armor makes a HUGE difference in melee. My afflictor used to be made of tissue paper, but now it can survive a good handful of light hits. It's an incredibly strong talent for frigates.

The wiki says that armor is distributed according to a "tile" system. Each tile gets 1/15th of the armor rating worth of health, and all damage gets splashed across an area of tiles. I dunno how armor works outside the ship display. Some other forum goers say that their testing gives full armor distribution even with tiles that aren't normally visible. Larger ships obviously make more tiles accessible for absorption but tiny ships aren't completely left out.

The +150 counts fully for residual, yeah.

Wow, that's a lot of extra damage reduction for bare hull. Definitely worth a point.

392

General Discussion / Re: XIV ships

« on: October 28, 2019, 08:56:45 AM »

Cant find any XIV ship then playing with randomized start. Either im extremely unlucky 3rd game in a row or these ships wont spawn at randomized start option.

Do you mean that you can't randomly start with the ship, or that they don't exist in the galaxy at large?

393

Suggestions / Re: On supplies, fuel and bounties.

« on: October 28, 2019, 07:49:10 AM »

With mothballing, you don't have to repair ship immediately.
...
Combines with skills that grant you 50% repair for free, I don't see it detracting from exploration at all.

I'm pretty sure if you're instantly mothballing a ship, the free repair talents won't help. Mothballing nukes the CR to 0, you don't even get to keep the supplies.

I'd love for buy/sell multipliers to be less awful, but the current system essentially gives players a free pass on making a burnt out husk flyable again. The cost of making a derelict fly and immediately mothballing it is roughly zero, so any value of a husk ends up being pure profit for the ship. Granted, the current value of a 0CR husk is like 2% the value of a new ship.

Currently the vast majority of sale value comes from combat rating I.E. how many supplies you pumped into the ship. Spending 35 supplies to repair a double-D hammerhead boosted its value from 1040 to 5900. The supplies ended up generating profit, so I dunno what's going on there.

394

Suggestions / Re: More Realistic

« on: October 28, 2019, 07:07:58 AM »

And while it's unfeasable for a faction to impose order on the entire sector in the current state, they CAN impose order in their systems. Sure, you CAN find a wreck from an old battle floating somewhere in the boonies. You CAN restore it. But no sane power would let you keep it when they see you driving it inside their territory. They wouldn't care about Finders Keepers.

If I were to salvage and restore the Yamato, even if everyone in the world forgot it's history, so they are not sure who's ship it is, no nation would let me keep it just like that. They KNOW it's not part of their military and neither are you, and that's ALL they need to know. At the very least they'd demand removal of all weaponry.

There is certainly a case to be made for restricting player options more, but consider this. Dealing with red tape and bureaucracy isn't fun. There is an even higher order of rule in the galaxy, and that's to provide a fun game experience. So I'd recommend finding a way to give the player amazing loot from rare finds and difficult battles, and then confiscating it at the very next dock or risk getting into a sudden war with everyone, while making it a fun experience. Protip: You can't.

There already is a faction that refuses to have their ships confiscated at the drop of a hat. They're called pirates. If only outlaws can have battlecruisers, then the only battlecruisers will be outlaws.

395

General Discussion / Re: Hyperspace Storms: Unfun or Necessary?

« on: October 27, 2019, 07:23:18 AM »

Does the game lore allow for permanent emplacements in hyperspace? When a fleet runs out of fuel it drifts into the nearest gravity well, but warning beacons have no problem drifting around. So a hyperspace starbase may or may not be possible.

396

General Discussion / Re: End Game

« on: October 27, 2019, 06:44:41 AM »

There are multiple approaches to an endgame type of scenario.

Should it be some kind of campaign crisis/climax? Story happens, something hits the fan, and the galaxy reaches an incredibly dangerous state that the player has to resolve. Should the crisis be time based (like the Ur quan doom fleet), story driven (sequence of missions) or player driven (when conditions are met, crisis)?  There could be a disaster looming beyond the horizon, or a break down of political intrigue into full scale war, or maybe the player collected a few too many alpha cores and sparked another AI war.

There are some scaling elements in the game, but they seem mostly centered around missions. Planets and such are pretty static. The player's growth will eventually surpasses those limits, and then they can start stomping across the galaxy burning everything in sight. The player's murder spree is an endgame crisis in of itself, at least from everyone else's perspective.

In the current scenario, the player grows until the game's scaling difficulty can't scale up anymore. Passing that limit is basically beating the game.

397

Suggestions / Re: Legendary officers

« on: October 26, 2019, 11:52:12 AM »

It might be best to keep a little bit of randomness in the unique officers. Otherwise players will beeline their favorites or choose them over every other option every time. Some random elements will help give a mix of good times and bad times, so that each game experience can be more unique.

398

Suggestions / Re: Gunnery Implant - gives additional weapons groups

« on: October 26, 2019, 04:02:28 AM »

Player can 'git gud'

Demanding  weapon grouping chores from the player is not a particularly fun idea.

399

General Discussion / Re: Can Starsector run on more CPU cores?

« on: October 26, 2019, 04:00:01 AM »

Threaded code does not imply concurrent code. Loading up dozens of threads will definitely burden your computer with the extra work needed to juggle dozens of threads, but not necessarily result in any benefit. If the job is very simple or highly interdependent on other threads to do its job, the thread load will cost more CPU time than the thread benefit gives.

Concurrent code makes more sense when you have very difficult tasks that provide simple solutions. Pathing algorithms are a huge example. Calculating a path starts with a large unchanging data set, can take a huge amount time to complete, and there's no real interaction with the game sim until the task is complete. When complete it spits out a sequence of waypoints, which is little more than a data sequence. It also makes more sense in codecs and video cards, because the job of "what color belongs on this pixel" multiplies very well when you have millions of independent pixels doing the exact same thing.

400

General Discussion / Re: Things that have no sense.

« on: October 25, 2019, 01:13:28 PM »

And as they are HE damage, they strip the armor from fighters allowing low penetration weapons like lmgs, vulcans, and pd beams damage hull faster.

Fighter armor already gets shredded in short order. Even if they have a very high armor rating, the extremely small ship size wouldn't give them enough armor tiles to provide actual armor HP. That is, if I'm understanding this tile system correctly. 30 points of armor HP is still a drop in the water against their hull points, so getting double damage against a tiny number doesn't do anything. The concept of HE weaponry is completely wasted against strike craft in this game.

401

General Discussion / Re: Things that have no sense.

« on: October 25, 2019, 12:04:05 PM »

Swarmers used to do 300 or so fragmentation damage.  Like Locusts, they wrecked big ships that lost armor.  Old Swarmers were lethal like today's Locusts, when old Broadswords launched them.  (Old Broadswords were nearly identical to modern Talons except for LMG replacing Vulcan.)  Swarmer were changed to low HE damage we see today.

I checked that out a bit. The SRM change happened in 0.65a. The permanent 5% armor value happened in 0.8a, around 2 years later. A hard set armor minimum changes fragmentation damage in a huge way.

When a jumbo ship gets stripped, it can still retain 50-100 armor for all sorts of incoming damage. Fragmentation damage gets 25% set before doing armor calculations, so every point of armor is super effective. Even if a missile hits for 300 frag damage (which is a LOT for a 50 pack missile), it should be getting cut in half by even the most naked capital ship armor. The flat +150 armor talent would push things even further, neutering frag damage. If the missile had a frag reduction to 100-200 frag damage, that final layer of armor becomes even more pronounced. The big takeaway is that the modern armor mechanic allows frag damage to be absolutely ideal for shredding small, lightly armored targets, while still suffering greatly against big ships. It may have been wrong back then, but it would make sense for a modern fighter killing weapon to use frag damage.

402

General Discussion / Re: Lore

« on: October 25, 2019, 11:42:43 AM »

With the gates cut off, any worlds that depended on gate travel would have quickly perished. Low habitability worlds and outposts would be the first to go, they would have lost their main source of supplies. Only worlds and tight planet clusters that could stay self sufficient would have survived, very hospitable planet clusters rich in resources would have a huge advantage in this area. Out of the survivors, there also needed to be a very high population and local level of technology so the faction could still retain space travel. Space isn't easy, and anyone who loses the thousands of years of civilization that went into making space a reality would be out of luck.

I haven't seen any lore on the domain of man outside the main game area. It'd be fun to find bits and pieces of lore about it.

403

General Discussion / Re: Things that have no sense.

« on: October 25, 2019, 09:12:28 AM »

There isn't any particular need for unlimited missiles to deal with fighters. If the missile system clears the sky, then it only needs to keep the coast clear long enough to attack the carrier. A powerful front loaded massacre is all you need to win. At least that's good enough for a small battle, the situation will change and different weapons are needed for larger battles.

It might be nice to have access to a greater number of weaker missiles. The only issue is with fighter endurance. Most fighters have <50 armor, but a few rare pieces get pretty high. The broadsword has 100 armor, and the Venture's mining pod has 150 armor. That's the same as a Wolf! A smaller missile might struggle against armor ratings, unless the armor formula works differently on fighters somehow (they only have 2x2 armor chunks, and the wiki formula maxes out at 20 armor chunks). Shield fighters are also particularly nasty because their flux reserves translate directly into a rapidly regenerating health pool.

Perhaps swarmers could benefit from a change of damage type? There are still a good number of fighters with paper thin armor and most of their endurance comes from hull points. Fragmentation damage would excel against ordinary fragile fighter/bombers, while being nearly harmless to larger ships even with huge damage potential. Ships normally get down to 5% of their armor, but they can get a flat permanent +150 armor rating from skills which is huge against fragmentation damage. The big downside is the swarmer would end up useless against shield fighters, but excelling against a few types of fighters may be better than none.

edit: If I'm understanding wiki armor correctly, a 2x2 fighter with 100 armor rating will have 100/15 => 6.7 armor points x 4 armor tiles. Its full armor would be 27 points. A wolf on the other hand has 10 armor per section and at least 16 armor tiles, so at least 160 armor points. A broadsword would need roughly 3 fragmentation swarmers to slice the armor, then another 10 hits for the kill. The wolf would take chip damage instead (18.75 dmg vs ~60-80 armor zone => 3-4 damage), and need a dozen or more frag swarmers against its armor before taking hull damage.

404

Suggestions / Re: On supplies, fuel and bounties.

« on: October 25, 2019, 05:02:28 AM »

let recovery be a way to trade story points for cash.

That seems doubtful. Ships sell for pennies on the dollar. Capturing a ship requires stocking extra supplies, fuel and ships to make their transport possible. By the time a ship is recovered/repaired and dragged back to port, most of the profits are already gone. Mothballing a ship doesn't help either because ships with 0% CR sell for even less than a combat ready ship. The money simply isn't there. Chances are you could have dismantled the ship for a pitiful handful of supplies, yet still have been better off.

Recovery points would more likely let players pick up those rare ships from contracts, or to keep their legion XIV ships from being permanently lost. How many story points would it cost to recover a legion that already has 8 Dmods? There may need to be a limit on that feature, hehe.

405

Suggestions / Re: More Realistic

« on: October 25, 2019, 04:57:13 AM »

Auction on some hidden asteroid, perhaps. But again, you wouldn't be able to dock in any civilized port with a stolen capital ship on you.

"Oi, you have a loicense for that ship" is a very different question than "How'd he end up with a ship in a post war sector filled with wreckage, lost empires and entire planets with the population of a single village".

The former is a game mechanic that doesn't exist. Players don't have ship licenses and no one particularly cares about what ships you fly. Commissions would be more meaningful if players needed a government license to use some of their fancy ships. However in this era the rules of the free ocean override all. Finders Keepers. If hegies picked a fight every time tritachyon flew a captured legion they'd be back to war in seconds.

The latter is a question of setting. Just because the sector is kind of okay today does not mean it lacks a history of chaos or is incapable of chaotic behavior. There was a war not many years before the game start, and there was hardly enough time to clean up half of the mess. Ships blow up, ships get lost, ships change sides, and paperwork gets screwed up either by accident or deliberately. The truth of events is often stranger than fiction, *** happens. Just look at the number of wrecks scattered across the sector. If anything it's unrealistic to expect a setting where military ships aren't stolen, they're a hot item that everyone and every planet wants.