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1

Suggestions / Re: Alternative story dialogues

« on: Today at 04:19:53 AM »

I remember playing a game where if the NPC starts to offer a fetch quest and I have the item already, the MC says something like "I already have it", and the NPC says something like "Great..." and skips the quest altogether and proceeds on.  Although here, player may not want to hand the PK over to the Pathers automatically.

Yes, so in the PK quest, the NPC shouldn't KNOW you have it right away, so should go through the usual motions of asking for it. THEN the player can say he has one in his back pocket. Or nothing, the NPC can just assign you the quest and it's up to you to then immediately call him back to turn it in, as is commonly the case when this happens in other games.

Would be way funnier if the NPC actually reacted to "Already Got One", though.

I ended up doing the whole Galatia academy questline after resolving the PL colony crisis by joining the league with 2 "strong arguments" for Reynard. Doing the parts of the quest involving the League felt sort of jarring and weird, because PL officials were treating my character like some no-name spacer, despite my Commission, max rep with the PL, and being the leader of several colonies within the league!

Yeah, this is what we call a "sequence break". I don't think it was intended that you trigger and RESOLVE the League Crisis before completing the Galatia questline.

On top of that all, I had a strong relationship with the literal prime demarchon. My point is that in these scripted interactions throughout the game, the players reputation and the in-universe clout there name should hold isn't represented very well, and not just for the league.

It never seems to be, in games. The number of times a game acknowledges that the player has become somebody important is incredibly rare. It's all the more glaring in games where the player can change his stature significantly. Going from a random hobo to a king, for instance. You will never stop being treated like a homeless person.

2

Suggestions / Re: Give D-Ships Lower Chance for More D-Mods

« on: Today at 04:09:33 AM »

I suggest reducing the chance to add d-mods to disabled ships that already have d-mods because the junk spiral feels rapidly kills their effectiveness.

Honestly, if your ships gets D-Modded, you're either throwing it in the scrap heap or you don't care because you're going the junk fleet route and therefore want more D-Mods for D-Maxxing, and there's a cap on how many D-Mods you can get.

3

Suggestions / Re: AI controlled ships switch targets too often

« on: Today at 04:04:19 AM »

The AI should probably have a better understanding of what the axis of advance and the line of battle are. That way it would not constantly try to turn to attack targets far from the axis of advance, which should be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM. Trying to "avoid being flanked" by targeting a flanking ship that someone else can deal with tends to actually result in getting flanked.

The AI also likes to flank a little too much, even when this is counterproductive and results in becoming isolated and flanked yourself, or when getting behind the enemy is the wrong course of action, like a pursuit battle, where you don't want to be BEHIND the enemy, you want to cut him off by getting in front of him so he cannot leave, so the desired position should always be between the enemy and where he wants to go.

4

Suggestions / Re: Special rule for Persean League Crisis resolution [no spoilertags - so beware]

« on: Today at 03:57:55 AM »

Something that kind of obfuscates this is that the faction homeworlds' in-game defenses are a lot smaller than the story would imply, either as a gameplay abstraction to make smuggling viable or simply because they haven't been updated in a while, and power creep has occurred in the meantime. This makes the power gap between the player's colonies and the major factions look a lot smaller than the story treats it as. The final AI inspection, the League blockade, and the TactiStar mercenaries are what a small, cost-limited intervention against an upstart looks like, but only Sindria has anything resembling a proportionate level of security around its capital.

Well, Sindria is a busy place, but we can still manage to smuggle our way in. But I guess most of the fleets are probably landed, as we can see patrols landing on the planet and disappearing from apparent existence as a result. Since ships that have landed don't chew up supplies, this makes sense. They could, perhaps, scramble if a hostile force is detected.

5

General Discussion / Re: High tech feels like a wet noodle.

« on: Today at 03:46:52 AM »

Eagle looks like the most generic cruiser, but it's actually a beam sniper. Which is a terrible specialization in Starsector.

And why do you say it is a beam sniper? Something like the Champeen can pack a more impressive beam to snipe with. Hell, even a Sunder has a bigger sniper beam. And why beams? The Eagle has no particular aptitude for beams, having only medium energy slots. It can be a sniper, using the med ballistics to pack HVDs or Maulers, but it's not especially GREAT at being one. Once again, the Eagle shows its mediocre averageness in this role. Like it does in every role.

With IR autolance and phase lances in their current form, I'm not sure it is anymore! Just stay away from HVDs on an Eagle, those are a trap.

You think so? I would imagine HVDs go passable with an IR Autolance to knock down the shields at range before firing the lances.

I always felt like Phase Lance should have been a weapon for Eagle and Falcon...

You can. I'm not sure why you would. I've seen the AI do it, but it seems to me that phase lances are for Dooms, so that you can fire all your damage in one short burst and then stop being there. Non-phase ships don't have the option to vanish after firing.

6

General Discussion / Re: armoured weapon mounts sets Enforcer's armour to 989???

« on: Today at 03:38:20 AM »

The Enforcer is tough, but not especially heavily armed, having nothing more impressive than Medium Ballistics. Its name implies its role: Bullying the weak. Unfortunately, by late game, it IS the weak. It is not terribly fast, having the speed of a typical cruiser, and not that well-armed, as mentioned. It is therefore not able to really contest cruisers, many of which are faster than it is, and can outrange it to boot (if you can be both outrun and outranged, you are automatically dead).

7

General Discussion / Re: why would Luddic majority increase production and stability?

« on: Today at 03:30:49 AM »

Why are you trading outside of shortages then?

I'm...not? You have to black market DURING shortages. Otherwise the run is just not worth making.

Some folks are so eager to opitimise everything into pretzels of effort when you can just do <x> and still get most of the benefit for considerably less hoop-jumping.
You do you tho.

That'd be the idea behind just unloading the intentionally created problem planet on the church and taking the passive income forever, instead of having to manually micromanage shortages and haul the cargo yourself, yes.

8

General Discussion / Re: How large was Opis?

« on: Today at 03:25:38 AM »

It's pretty difficult guess how many people were on Opis based off of the refugee crisis it created because we don't know how many people lived on the various worlds of Askonia before the crisis, and we don't know how much of a forewarning there was for refugees to be able to get off the planet, or how long it took for the PK to actually kill the entire planet - both of which would very drastically change the rate of survival.

Even if they had plenty of warning, there would not be much they could have done. Consider: The largest passenger liner available to the sector, the Starliner, holds a measly 1500 people. If the population grows at rate comparable to Earth at about 1% per year, and Opis was a size-8 planet, then anything between 2-15 fully loaded Starliners must leave every day...for the population to not grow at all. The numbers only get sillier if Opis was size 9. I've never quite seen this many Starliners anywhere.

Planetary evacuation is functionally impossible.

9

General Discussion / Re: why would Luddic majority increase production and stability?

« on: April 22, 2024, 09:58:31 PM »

Or, if you want to keep the colony - build Commerce.
The Indepedant market this creates will buy goods the same as any npc colony, and pay a premium if there's a shoratge.
This also enables you to create shortages by installing/building certain things, and get paid for supplying your own colony.
And any rng shortages can also be treated the same, but temporary.

The problem is that the Independent market this creates is useless as there is no black market, making the profit margin practically nonexistent. If you want to create a colony with a permanent shortage of everything, demolish the spaceport. Then since the colony is useless for you to own anyway, go ahead and let the Church have it, so it will now have a black market.

But you're really better off creating demand sinks rather than outright broken colonies, because this generates passive income rather than you having to haul the goods yourself. After all, where are the Spaceship Fights in this? None. Boring!

10

General Discussion / Re: High tech feels like a wet noodle.

« on: April 22, 2024, 07:35:47 AM »

The Eagle isn't really very specialized, unless you count "Being The Most Generic Cruiser" a specialization. In fact, most midline ships are extremely specialized. Except the Eagle. The Eagle can do everything you'd expect a combat cruiser to do, not exceptionally well, but not exceptionally badly.

Every other midline is very specialized:

Gryphon, Pegasus: Missile Boats and nothing else.

Conquest: Battlecruiser, a controversial ship type from the real world made for bullying cruisers, that costs as much as a battleship, but can't actually fight battleships toe to toe without going boom.

Hamsterhead: Gunboat Destroyer

Sunder: Big Energy Gun.

Monitor: Pure Defense, no meaningful offensive capacity. Extremely annoying when the AI gets obsessed with trying to kill one for no good reason since it is not real threat.

But the Bird Cruisers are the Genericest of the Generic for their Heavy and LIght Cruiser types. You can build anything from a standoff sniper to close assault brawler. They offer a bit of everytihng: Some energy weapons, some ballistics, some missiles, with no particular focus in any, so you can do a bit of everything. They're decently fast, but not fast enough to make speed a defining characteristic in their weight class.

11

General Discussion / Re: How large was Opis?

« on: April 22, 2024, 07:20:40 AM »

• Would Pathers lie?? In other words: people often say things that fudge numbers a bit, often for rhetorical reasons, and often they can work out a way to believe themselves. (Ah, these numbers include the casualties caused by infrastructure breakdowns and starvation in other places, and they include the war-dead, and, if you think about it....)

I'm not sure if it's so much intentionally lying as it is that all large numbers seem about the same to people and so when someone means says a "billions", this may just be them saying "many".

• To that point, there is also a concept of people who are "real" according to official state bureaucracy, and people who haven't been counted.

This is sort of how Deciv Subpop works, too: Theere's an unknown number of uncounted people on the planet, doing anything from subsistence to Mad Max things, and this grants you a growth bonus because now that civilization has returned, they can rejoin it and become counted again.

This entire thing, of course, makes me think that there's a lot of benefit to making every single source about your fictional world's lore some kind of character or other not-strictly-reliable narrator. Deliberately make these stories conflict from very beginning. That way any future lore or update changes that don't align will be attributable to this and the players will never notice the inconsistency because everything they know comes from unreliable narrators anyway.[/list]

12

General Discussion / Re: why would Luddic majority increase production and stability?

« on: April 22, 2024, 07:13:29 AM »

Actually, I am now gaming the church by holding off on mining until size 5 and decently progressed to 6.

If you REALLY want to game the church, plop colonies, build only farming (on the worst farmable planets) OR light industry BUT NOT BOTH, build patrol HQ, but not military base, build cryorevival (Gives +10 organics demand), and anything else you have which doesn't discourage Luddics but generates resource demand, like ground batteries.

Then, when the Church comes for the planet...give it to them! (Untested: Demolish the farms and industry right before you do, and upgrade everything else that makes the planet more needy without producing anything of value) You have now created a money pit of a planet that imports a silly quantity of organics that only you can supply. If YOU own the planet, it's worthless to you. If THEY own the planet, it prints money.

13

General Discussion / Re: High tech feels like a wet noodle.

« on: April 22, 2024, 05:37:17 AM »

I'd say the same about high damage/shot HE against Low Tech. Reapers and Hellbores exist but Low Tech isn't made obsolete by them.

Well, Reapers are a missile, which are easily shot down in the face of any PD, and Hellbores are themselves pretty lowtech, being that they're a large ballistic, so few ships outside of lowtech even have access.

The main thing lowtech has going for it is that it is dumb. Lowtech ships are simple and dumb, making it relatively difficult for the AI to *** up (but it somehow manages anyway). Point guns at enemy, fire until one of you is dead. Hightech revolves around trickery and shenanigans, and the AI cannot into these. While some specific High-tech ships may still perform well, a high-tech fleet generally does not.

Left out of this discussion is Midline, of course. Midline has the most inconsistent performance of all. As many midlines are highly specialized, and the AI cannot into specialization, two kinds of AI Midline fleets perform well: Fighter/Missile spam compositions that simply overwhelm you in spam early on, and Champion/Bird spam. Everything else dies. Missile/carrier spam needs critical mass to succeed, and missile spam has no endurance, and the AI can't choose his shots well (which is why DEM spam is better for AI than the player), but if the AI doesn't deploy enough, it won't threaten you and therefore it is meat. Generic Cruiser Spam is pretty effective, mostly because midline combat cruisers have no real weaknesses, but if the AI dilutes its force with specialists that it can't effectively utilize, the line crumbles.

TT should mix in some AI officers on their most pristine ships.

But they shouldn't be blue balls like Remnants. They should be weirdly holographic officers with names like "Hugh Mann".

14

General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability

« on: April 20, 2024, 08:52:23 PM »

Yeah, the obvious solution would be to have you be able to print the Atlas and Prometheus II using just the Atlas print with no separate print for these. And probably not offer the merely painted versions as produceable by you at all, and just give the player the base option. Also, player-specific paintjob option so we can identify our own ships easily.

15

General Discussion / Re: Lion's Guard Sunder Availability

« on: April 20, 2024, 04:15:04 AM »

The Church may not have existed pre-Collapse, but Ludd did, and had a large enough following that the Domain decided he had to go; according to the "A True and Accurate History of the Persean Sector" blog post, he may even have lead an 'exodus of the faithful' to settle in the Persean Sector. It's plausible that the "Luddic Church" patterns originated with the pre-Collapse Luddic movement and have since become associated with the Luddic Church for obvious reasons.

But there are actually no unique LC ships at all. The LC does not have a single actually unique ship. All the (LC) ships are completely identical to their base counterparts, only painted. They shouldn't actually be unique blueprints at all, really, let alone found in pre-collapse ruins. There are a few ships specificallly used by the Chuch now (Invictus, Retribution), but they are not actually (LC) ships, nor are they found in the LC BP pack. And don't come with the green paintjob.