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Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: June 05, 2021, 03:59:59 AM »Quote
I'm not really sure why this is an issue; in 0.9.1a we started out at 40% of battlesize, vs 60% enemy battlesize, against large fleets as well. Just that in 0.95a we have an option to get ourselves up to 60% early on now, rather than grind it out at 40% of battlesize until the end.
Personally speaking, it is an issue.
Not because it makes fighting [Redacted] harder per-say, but because it's artificially making it harder. Deployment Point balance now is modified the most by the amount of officers and their quality. While it was very much entirely possible to negate the initial [Redacted] Deployment Point advantage in battle during 0.91 and under by just having a lot of Deployment Points worth of combat ships, the simple nature of how Vanilla Starsector generates [Redacted] Ordos makes it impossible to do the same in 0.95a-RC15.
Picking both Officer Management and Officer Training skills (which implies spending 9 skills into leadership)can get you up to a total of 10 level 6 officers with 40 Normal Skills and 20 Elite Skills.
A really, really small ordo by comparison that, say, has 7 Alpha Cores, 3 Betas and 2 Gammas will have a total of 7 Level 8 Officers, 3 level 6 officers and 2 level 4 officers, with a total of 82 ELite Skills in total
Explain to me how that abomination of a mechanic is supposed to make the game more interesting, as opposed to (I don't know) having Vanilla Starsector stop spamming the moloch-cursed officers upon reaching a treshold (which would be difefrent depending on factions) and start applying INtegrated Hullmods on the bigger, badder ships instead?
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Rather than thinking about Radiant DP cost in terms of how it "should" be in terms of ship powerfulness relative to other ships, think of it instead in terms of how it affects gameplay.
If the Radiant is on the enemy side, then changing it to 60 DP means that 1) the initial enemy fleet spawning with the initial Radiant will be smaller and thus easier, and 2) fewer Radiants spawn together near the end of the fight. Endgame fleets capable of farming Ordos fleets can be as little as roughly 120-160 DP; assuming the player can get 2 objectives, getting to say 55% of battlesize, this means a battlesize of 220-290 or so, meaning the Ordos fleet might only be able to put out as little as 131-175 DP at a time. At 40 DP, this means there can be up to 3 Radiants on the map at a time, but at 60 DP, it would mean only 2 Radiants, which then makes the fight much, much easier. Undervaluing the DP is a way to preserve the challenge of the endgame fight.
If the Radiant is on the player side, then it's a matter of balancing if having an under-DP ship is too strong relative to the other fleet options (taking Special Mod instead, frigate spam, whatever), considering that the player had to take the Automated Ships skill to get it. IIRC if you're not using Derelict Contingent, then you basically get 1 Radiant at 60% CR or 2 Radiants at 30% CR each. The question is whether or not that's too powerful for the player to have relative to the other possible uses for 40 or 80 DP (and getting other skills instead of Automated Ships). Thus far (while it's fun to watch 2 Radiants running around) I haven't found it to be more powerful than other fleet setups. So I don't think it really needs to be weakened (i.e. by raising DP to 60).
Alright, fair enough, let me explain how I think the Radiant used to and currently affects gameplay then: It's a bloody crutch that kept the [Redacted] competitive before 0.95 because the faction was terrible that is now being used as a blunt object for Remnants to hit the player experience over the head with it in 0.95.
Nothing more, nothing less. The faction needed an absolute balancing abomination to stand a chance before 0.95 but now that the [Redacted] are the only faction in vanilla that consistently gets more fleet wide buffs and twice the amount of officers with elite skills than the player the ship DP is overdue for an increase.
Would it nerf the faction as a whole? Ludd yes, but there are much better ways to buff it back to be a proper endgame threat, I'll tell you that much. Speaking of which:
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I'm not sure how the game creates enemy ships (it can be found in the game files though, look for something along the lines of "fleet factory" I think), but I don't think it strictly adheres to the variants given in \starsector-core\data\variants\remnant\. I count 5 unique variants for the 7 Brilliants in my test fleet, even though there is only 1 variant file in that folder. Of those 7, only 1 has a plasma cannon, despite it being the large weapon shown in the file. Basically so I don't think you should put too much weight in the variants as given in that folder as what enemy ships will actually spawn with.
I wasn't sure about how that worked either until a few days ago with the help of a lot of people explaining stuff to me:
All [redacted] units have 1 or 2 Variants like "Standard", "Support", "Strike" and so on. Those are the targets the actual AI fleets try and aim at, you will sometimes see those exact same builds while playing starsector, but most of the time the game will "approximate" the variant with its own spin. It sometimes, very rarely works at the AI's advantage but, most of the time, it's a terrible "custom variant" that's even worse than the (decent at best, horrible at worse) "target" variants [Redacted] have.
In short, you don't only have a faction that constantly likes gimping their own superior ship stats with subpar setups, but that even mutates them further from the intended "target" most of the time.
Wouldn't it be great if the "Superior Artificial Intelligence" that gave the entire Persean Sector so much trouble during two Ludd-forsaken AI WARS at least had decent Variants of its own ships and an autofit option that would not butcher them even further more than half the time? Food for thought.
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Brilliants can already spawn with SO. Though in my case the SO Brilliant had a graviton, a heavy autocannon, a mining blaster, a PD laser, a pilum, 2 ion cannons, a spark wing, and ITU. So it clearly wasn't exactly optimized for SO...
That' a product of Autofit modifying the only Vanilla Variant of the Brilliant, which is the following brought to you by a shameless self-insert:
Brilliant-class Droneship Cruiser
Codex EntryBrilliant's Stats (above) compared to a Dominator (Middle) and an Aurora's (below)Spoiler[close]OverviewSpoilerPlease don't mind the "Low Maintenance" Hullmod on the Dominator reducing its maintenance, which is from a mod called "Low Maintenance" by Zym.
Or do mind it and install it from its official thread link over here, since it's really good!
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=21715.msg327897#msg327897[close]
This asymmetric Cruiser a mixture of everything that's Remnant and is the only ship in the roster (so far) that can mount ballistic weapons, two medium hardpoints worth of them in fact, along with 1 medium missile, 1 large energy, 1 medium energy and 2 small energy. It's the second most potent Remnant ship in their roster at 25 Deployment Points and it's one of the only three ships that generally deal the most damage to your fleet along the Fulgent and the Radiant. There apparently is no Overridden variant in the Starsector Variant files, so it must be a rare occurrence for when the stars align and Autofit does something good for once.
Vanilla Variants
Standard Personal Rating: Annoying Shielded Gaming Mouse
Armament : 1x Plasma Cannon (alternating), 1x Sabot Pod (linked), 2x Hypervelocity Driver (linked), 1x Heavy Burst laser & 2 Burst PD lasers (linked)
Hangar Bay: 1x Spark Interceptor Wing
Hullmods: Integrated Targeting Unit
Despite the rather terrible weapon range synergies, this variant somewhat works and poses a hassle when faced not because it does a lot of damage compared to other Remnant Ships, but because it's incredibly durable for the amount of DP it takes to deploy, especially when an AI officer with Elite Shield Modulation and possibly even Elite Impact Mitigation and Elite Damage Control is sotting at the helm.
I'm aware I've got to edit that thread a bit since the Brillian does not have a Medium Missile but a Medium Synergy Hardpoint on that top left side.
