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 - sector_terror

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 13
31
General Discussion / Re: .95a feedback - fuel and supply
« on: April 05, 2021, 12:05:00 AM »
I wish core worlds had more fuel. My current fleet's fuel capacity is 4k at the moment and if I want to stock up without clearing several colonies of fuel, Nachiketa or Sindria are my only choices.

It seems that now we get little less salvage, and at the same time repairs cost more. I never bothered about the storms in 9.1. Now few storms can eat big chunk of supplies.
I also noticed this. Previously I always ignored hyperspace storms, even without Safety Procedures, but now they can easily halve my supplies. It hurts that big fleets take bigger strikes and are also tossed by the storms around more.

Why not just, not fill up to cap in one colony. Also, this is an excellent idea on how to banish mass capital fleets to the abyss, making it so the range of truely high powered ships is limited, meaning you can only go get larger bounties that are close by system deserters, not distant easy to hunt down pirates. Want to hunt priates? you cant bring a full militayr to bear, that's WHY they're in the outer room. Why didn't I think of this before it's brilliant.

32
General Discussion / Re: Essay and thoughs on missions.
« on: April 04, 2021, 11:37:21 PM »
Well spoken Roberts. I specially love the narrative context. It follows the idea I liked of the original Guild War 2 doctrine(back when they followed it). The fleets you attack are DOING something. They are midway through fleeing and will vanish if not chased down, and may even be cause -early- if fast enough. OR an attack is on it's way, intercept. Or maybe an ally has been captured and is being interigated, get him out before he gives out information. were have fleets spawning mid-way through travel with dead drops already. Plus it gives reason why a deserter has high power capital ships.

To explain the pirates, I think it's because the programing cant differentiate between a colossus Mk.II & III and a proper eagle class cruiser. Nor can it separate which D-mods are more or less serious. So the game thinks its "a capital and 4 cruisers" despite one being a paragon2, furys, and 2 auroras, and the other being an atlas MK.II and four Collusus.MK IIIs

33
General Discussion / Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« on: April 04, 2021, 11:11:13 PM »
Okay that is fair, but it only applies to leadership5, extra industry productions and extra 2 colonies is insane.

34
General Discussion / Re: Essay and thoughs on missions.
« on: April 04, 2021, 11:07:07 PM »
I have seen trade contracts as simple as getting small numbers of an item every month, cover numbers into over a million credits.
Those are not procurement missions, they are colony supply missions. You have to have a colony producing x amount of resources per month to complete them (I thought the same thing when I first saw them). Most of them are not completable until you have a quite large colony with the correct industry. I felt like they pay pretty poorly for the investment required most of the time. The millions of credit ones would require admin + alpha core + exploration item + story point boosted industries on a max size colony sometimes.

For my first play-through, I was almost exclusively funded by bounties and exploration loot. I know I felt a lot of logistics pressure until I took the supply upkeep reduction skill (and took a commission), and after that it was smooth sailing, so maybe that will help you? I also noticed an initial spike in bounty difficulty, but things leveled out a bit after, and I was reliably finding manageable ~150-200k bounties with only a bunch of cruisers. One capital with light support can actually be pretty manageable as well. Getting a good bounty contact to a high level also helps, since you can tune the bounty difficulty, but you have to put up with bad payouts until the reputation gets higher, which kinda sucks.

Fair point I'd forgotten about that requirement. I had it in my head you could fill it through normal trade. That was my bad, I'll fix it back to proper procurement missions. Thank you for pointing that out.

35
Suggestions / Re: Higher crew/officer salaries Instead of Supplies
« on: April 04, 2021, 10:39:14 PM »
just a bit input on the idea you suggested

1. Player don't have any skill to get discount on crew/officer salary, but we have skill on cut supply and fuel, also ship can have a 0.8x efficiency overhaul mod, on top is D-mod discount when it don't affect maintenance/fuel/crew.
2. Max lv Officer salary is higher than most heavy cruiser maintenance cost, and you can't put down your Officer like your battle ship when you want to go expedition. Consider the important of  max officer number and the ideal fleet size on 0.95, officer salary already higher that the fleet maintenance itself
4. In general, Low tech ship have a high crew requirement to maintenance cost, high tech ship have high maintenance to crew requirement, a salary raise mean low tech get nerf, high tech get buff, and carrier maned fighter is more expensive to use.
5. "Maintaining the challenge by needing a stream of income" , a stream of income is never a challenge, passive income like commission can already feed a ideal fleet if they don't go on battle, with colony income it is nothing even the salary go up 5x
6. Salary is a fix spending, the whole challenge of maintaining a fleet is the cr recovery cost from going battle after battle, which depend on supply

I agree in all but 5. Maintaining money should be a challenge. I contend that colonies and commissions have already been mismanaged respectively. Colonies should be about producing ships and resources for active trade in missions, something we have now and I wish had more use. And the commission issue is putting too much pay into the passive generation and not enough into the bounty aspect, the active "task" which should be the main foci. The comments about the roll supply has in some ship balancing as well as the skill aspect is spot on though

36
No, it shouldn't. This is entirely against the ENTIRE design concept for skills. The whole design is built around that, rather good, idea of forcing players to pick where they want to specialize. Every skill has a "specialization" variant, and a common variant. Both shield and armor are general skills which close to every ship in the game can use(bar phase ships and heavily long-range builds). Making theme compete means that those general stats have to compete even though there is little to no reason at all to. Even an Onslaught can make use of shields, it's just less important. Same with armor to an Aurora. Putting them together would undo the whole point and be against every design concept this system was made to work with. This is a bad idea

37
General Discussion / Re: .95a feedback - fuel and supply
« on: April 04, 2021, 10:30:12 PM »
Well spoken Mordo. I may an essay on that itself. The issue is not the cost of fuel and supply. It's that there is no reward that justifies it. Trade is way too profitable with almost no risk, and ship battles are insanely risky and costly with no profit margins. Trade costs next to nothing in cost to operate, and gives money on part with most military missions as if they are made to be run by the exact same fleet. And sure there needs to be SOME ability to play trader with military styled fleets, but not to this degree, and certainly not to the detriment of bounties.

38
General Discussion / Re: Misguided Difficulty
« on: April 04, 2021, 10:25:50 PM »
The ECM problem is at least partly that (as others have pointed out elsewhere) it's too easy to get huge stacking bonuses that render sensor jammers and the enemy's attempts at ECM irrelevant.

I'd like to mess with reducing the EW skill's bonus to 1.5% per ship, and making the moved-to-elite-tier Gunnery Implants ECM effect be 4%/2%.
And/or cap the base range penalty at 10% or 15%, with sensor jammers increasing the penalty up to 20%. (I kinda feel that tying it to the ingame objectives is good because it makes the outcome of the battle more about things that actually happen in the battle rather than out of it)

The issues with ECMs are on the Gunnery Implant skill and Electronic Warfare skill, not the concept of all strategic play. Like I said in my post, there is little hope of full blown multi-layed useful terrain in a game where combat can happen anywhere and everywhere without restriction in -space-. Not to mention what it do to long-range and Safety Override style close-range builds in regards to balance. If you want tactical play, so play an RTS or TBS. starsector doesn't have the ability to operate this style of tactical play.

39
General Discussion / Essay and thoughs on missions.
« on: April 04, 2021, 10:22:22 PM »
This is has been a long time coming, and it's about time. I want to discuss the game's profit and rewards for jobs and the balancing behind them. I've seen people talking about the issues with pay, personal and fleet development and I think it's time I make my comment. I won't poison the well right away so forgive me for extending a bit. Because a lot of issues stem from this.

   Before we discuss this I need to define two key terms, and that is the differentiation between risk and cost. Put simply, cost is the base money I have to chuck away just to take on a task(Personal or otherwise); The time given to finding a good job I can reasonably complete, the cost in fuel to get to and from systems, the cost in supplies for the time traveled, and the cost in crew and officer pay for said time traveled. These are inevitable and irretrievable win or lose. I will take SOME damage and I will lose supplies fielding ships. If a mission can't overcome this is means outright nothing, as might as well be a punishment I have to take just to stave off losing entirely. Having a follow-up quest as "punishment" for failing or a quest given at negative relationship values to re-build a factional reputation would justify a negative price, but that's a punishment not a normal task.
   Risk is what I put on the line, what could be lost. I'm not ever going to risk a buffalo in combat, but I could lose the escort ship for it. I'm not going to lose the tanker that never goes into battle, thus it's not a risk. But the cruiser I send in to potentially explode is. Every missions needs to have some acceptable risk to justify putting anything on the table at all, to make a battle more than a math equation and encourage using instinct run decision making. Do I go overkill knowing victory is absolute and cut heavily into my profits? Or do I take the risk for the extra moneys in reward. Do I take things slow and risk losing CR before the battle is won, or do I rush and risk damage I don't need to take for that extra time I now have not destroying my melee target.
   With this in mind every contact should ask this question when they give a job: What is the cost of this contract even being operated, and what is the risk it's asking me to put on the table. It's not unlikely to lose a single ship in battle, especially destroyers and, to some degree, frigates. At some points in the battle it's almost out of your control entirely. It's a wager, a risk, and the stronger the encounter the more is put at risk. Starting battles may only risk a frigate. Later ones mean even the cruisers aren't entirely safe. The idea you can walk into every encounter with no losses at all and with limited damage every time and still win, or even the majority, is idealistic at best. It's both breaking immersions to have that assumption be the requirement since the game world would never reasonably assume it under most conditions, but its just bad design to assume your players must be perfect and overcome even the most insane cheating AI.

   This isn't limited to bounties either. What is the price tag of a procurement missions? You'll have to wager against some security force to handle incoming enemies, likely enough to handle the raids of an enemy military patrol who would siege the colony down, sure, but that's unlikely. The main risk is simply the difficult of obtaining the necessary goods in the allotted time while handling the price of going to get it. For starting missions it's almost nothing, you have more than enough time to get 100 volotiles from Umbra at dirt cheap, if not just raid it, and come back without penalty. Even with taxing it cost next to nothing, meaning your profit can be huge with minimal risk. Not try doing that with 2000 volotiles. You'll need luck just to get that amount for cheap without running half the sector and spend more in fuel that the discount is worth. But you can still take risk to keep the profit up. But, you can say: take the risk of smuggling, knowing that the time needed to wait for patrols to give you an opening into the right planets may take so long the mission fails before you get everything. You can risk smuggling openly and losing reputation but risk getting caught. More price, but less risk. Maybe you decide to pay the taxes that mean minimal profit? Or, do you take the riskier route for substantially greater reward?

   With all this set out, there are a few ways to balance the missions. You can make the cost of the mission almost nothing and give players a slow but inevitable growth, with risk being minor and rewards being simply opportunities with potential; However, you can also run full risk reward and make the final missions tremendous rewards with strict limits that make risk a necessity with the potential for fantastic rewards, if the players can follow through. Starsector can do both favorably, but it's -heavily- favored for the latter. Everything in Starsector is expensive. Frigates not withstanding(as if they are made to be more expendable, hmmm) ships cost tremendous amounts of credits invested to replace. Damage is astronomically expensive, costing thousands for even minor hits and maintainance is an extremely high cost between officers, supplies, and crew. Going without a mission for a month until you get a "safe" mission can cost you 10s of thousands for a military capable fleet with a decent numbers of cruisers. And hard late-game multi-capital fleets 100s of thousands on maintanance -alone-. That's not even getting into the cost of keeping up with the AI officers in both story point pricing and money(I experimented with raising the officer limit to 20, I didn't get to 10 before the price became too much to maintain.) You can store ships not useful to a job your taking, but getting them back for a later job might cost extra and officers can't do that, nor can you for supplies and fuel, you have to upkeep them. Not that storage is a free solution either. With all this in mind, the more viscerally exciting high risk gameplay, where your perfect victories adds a full cruiser and a lot of breathing room for your finances, and where loss is devastating and can cost cycles worth of profit to undo, is Where starsector would shine, given the tools and prices for it are already in play. If not just because making jobs low risk and a slow methodical buildup would require changing almost every financial cost.

   And in that I can finally get to my conclusion, no, jobs is not balanced. Trade is -far- too profitable and bounties a bad joke. I have seen trade contracts as simple as getting small numbers of an items like 50 heavy armaments or 100 luxury goods paying profit of close to 25k, or just receive those numbers for absolute free and get raw profit for nothing. Meanwhile the starting bounties of 65k for 2 or three destroyers with maybe 5 officers and a few frigates, can become an astoundingly strong 120k for a capital ship and 5 cruisers with 17-19 enemy officers. In trade contracts I get tremendous turnout with little to not risk, with bounties I risk losing massive amounts of money if I so much as lose a single destroyer, sometimes with fleets made mostly of capital ships. With bounties, even if I gamed the system to twist everything into a perfect victory, saving and reloading constantly for it, I have to take tremendous risk just to break even, let alone obtain a victory, against enemies who are outright cheating and screwing costs they in no way could afford, and greater than I could ever afford to counter. I have no issue with the former given I want that challenge to my growing fleet, but when anything but perfect lands me in the middle of space, needing to scuttle ships because I have no hope of mainaining what I have, and chucking my crew into cryo-pods in deep space because I can't keep them all, it's a heartbreaker in both gameplay and immersion that is entirely unearned.

   And that's not even getting into the stealth missions where the high risk of being caught and losing 2-3 jobs worth of reputation if not failing the mission outright when you get caught and forced to turn transponder on(no job is worth going hostile) because there's not enough time to go back to being unnoticed.  Those are treated as even "Easier" than bounty contracts despite being possible to fail outright beyond your control. Not to mention setting you back cycles worth of work even if you success with anything less than a perfect run. And the difficulty doesn't scale to the size of your fleet either, which changes the difficulty of the mission entirely.

   I have my limits and as much as I was and still am in love with this update, I have to stop. I have for 2 games in a row now, ended up in space, helpless to do anything but start scrapping my fleet for supplies for the third time as I stagnate because any growth puts me in the range of bounty contracts way beyond the ability to make a profit without skyrocketing the difficulty to outright fake difficulty trash, and having to resort to abusing trade contacts. And I don't consider myself a bad player or pilot either, it's just that insane. I understand and respect Alex doesn't want players to grow so quickly they skip half the game or have such an easy time they start getting bored; But, this is becoming so ridiculous that maintaining a fleet pushes me to a level that isn't even fun. I don't want this to turn into an Atlas game where every fight only has "choice" as a blind lie because the only way to win is have X things, since anything but perfect gets you killed outright. The ships and weapons are incredibly balanced and Starsector has done an astounding job with making every possible option valuable, but when I see people saying the solution is to find the one unbalanced skill or ship and just abuse it to not end, I die a little inside. As it stands, the rewards are so underperforming, especially with bounties, that all I can do is abuse the -extremely- few jobs that are profitable to maintain myself until I have enough money to have some fun and enjoy the rest of the game.

     This can be fixed to. None of this is design element problems, they are just numbers. Cutting enemy officer spam en mass and just letting the cap be what the player can reasonably afford before the risk overtakes the reward so much that losing half the fleet is just a matter of time. Just like cutting the skill the ECM bonus of the gunnery implant skill would stop the ECM issue. If the rewards of the missions were adjusted to let a flawless victory be astoundingly rewarding, this would not be an issue. And if people want to rush into battle underpowered for the difficulty, let them do it, they will take jobs way below their requisite fleet "level" and grow faster than most as a reward. You can make quests and enemies with special NPCs that only happen at cap relationship level on the higher end groups, and are basically super-bosses where players are expected to lose without running the best of the best for the end-game if you'd like. But it shouldn't be put on every quest. And right now, I just cant keep doing this reload and play perfectly shenanigans.

40
General Discussion / Re: Misguided Difficulty
« on: April 04, 2021, 04:58:16 PM »
Furthermore, I don't want the enemy to get a big nerf to officer count (maybe just a small nerf). The AI has to be able to cheat a bit to make it challenging.


I'd have to agree with you here. But it'd prefer AI fleets to be larger, at the expense of them always outranging me. Challenge, not frustration.


I disagree heavily, in fact, that would just be frustration. The AI doesn't have to cheat to be challenging, they already are. The AI is excellent, it just lacks the ability to ever use the command layer. And that is fine, its your tactical advantage, which is heavily limited by the command point system, to cover the absolutely massive tactical penalty you, the player, has due to strategic deployment. A bounty fleet can go all in and fight to the absolute end. They can run their frigates to zero CR and thus for far longer than you. They can fight with extreme damage and down to the last man. I once lost a fight because I expected the tempest I let go to run with its 20% hull and 30% CR. I was surprised when it appeared at my back and destroyed my flagship cruiser. but the enemy doesnt have to worry about the aftermath of an encounter. They can be reckless, fight to the last, stay in beyond the point of reason, and stay for longer deployment time because of that strategic edge. The command screen evens that out by giving the disadvantaged player more control to manage their power while it's on the board.

So no, the AI doesn't need to cheat. In fact the mass officers is one of the issues causing even more disbalancing because it's destroying your fleet deployment due to the officer spam and overshooting the ECM bonus' to absurd levels. If you want cheap crap difficulty fine, but I will petition for smarter tactics and more use of the asynchronous gameplay.

41
General Discussion / Re: Bounty target trapped in event horizon?
« on: April 04, 2021, 04:50:17 PM »
I would also apply this to bounty fleets 3ft from a supergiant. Same issue, getting to them is impossible, just on a less severe degree. But yeah I've reported this one myself. I think it's outright an oversight.

42
General Discussion / Re: Phase slow time effect
« on: April 04, 2021, 04:54:53 AM »
Why? With elite phase spec C4R, you have 200% speed while under 3x time, which subjectively equivalent to 0.66 time. Not that low and considering that C4R only boosts max speed, but not acceleration, you need that time multiplier for phase ship to remain controllable.

I dont evenw ant to imagine an afflicter as full unaltered speed. Good luck controlling that

43
General Discussion / Re: Does anyone actually play with 120 DP?
« on: April 04, 2021, 04:15:34 AM »
Spoiler
[close]
default 300, can fight 2 retacted fleets at ones(4 stars), equal esm rating to remnants.

what kind of monstrosity are you piloting? Why, why does it exist and hwo to I destroy it

44
General Discussion / Re: Does anyone actually play with 120 DP?
« on: April 04, 2021, 02:18:32 AM »
Tactically it's fine. At 300 the battle line can extend pretty far, far enough that even fast ships cant cover the whole field, encouraging having an actual fleet and using proper numbers. I really dont see an issue tactically speaking. The managment is a different discussion but that's different.

45
General Discussion / Re: Misguided Difficulty
« on: April 04, 2021, 12:04:13 AM »
Okay I need to start from line 1. Sorry Linus but you've made a grave mistake right off the bat. You left out the melee. Tactics, the means in which you maneuver forces against your opposing formations and maneuvers is one thing. How well you handle your ship in a shield wall, is your skills in melee. How you manage your logistics and manpower is your strategy. ECMs are also a tactical play, they define the choice of "weapons" you equip your fleet when stacking up against the enemy. The disbalance around the gunner Implants skill is another thing entirely. And the issue you have with the capture points isn't strategy, it's tactics. In fact Alex put it in explicitly to fill this very concern, that they lacked importance in combat but couldnt be made stronger without outright breaking them.

A boss fight is a tactical encounter as well. If you want tactical difficulty, and make strategic depth limited....then you have to depend on things like boss fights, where the rules of the fight are -not- equal. starsector has always been build on the melee and the strategic however. The fleet screen's command point limits removed it from becoming a flat out RTS, focusing on your piloting and the resources you have to play more than how they are commanded directly. It's why fights are more "even" akin to an Xcom fight, over a more asynchronous fight of difference rules like RPG bosses or AI Fleet Command.

The campaign numbers and states -are- your strategy. to weaker or remove the strategy is to remove a large part of the context that make battles mean something. I am still writing my post on mission balancing so I'll save that for then, but to weaken is would make the battle weak. I am afraid to fight larger fleets and take appropriate precautions because the fleet losses I might take are severe enough to make me scream "no! Bastard!" in anger when my fellow man is lost and take 200k credits with him. I know my priorities.

Okay, I'm not getting into an argument on which is better, but boy....you have an uphill battle trying to defend a game whose tactical depth has been proven to have the same effect as chess(where amateurs and pros are not playing the same game due to seeing entirely different scales of moving resources) with an RPG series that has quite a few issues in horrid balancing and outright cheating AI. But the praise also undoes your demand. The AI cheats. It's also in a field, like starsector, where your opponent and you have the same rules....presumably. Starsector the enemy just has strategic difficulty for context to the fight, FFT, the AI cheats horridly to force you to be at such a disadvantage you have to play "find the exploit" to win. I'm being hyperbolic but....my point remains

I'm actually writing a post where I make very clear the issue should -not- be tactical weakness, but strategic difficulty. It should be hard to maintain your forces while keeping fair sane jobs you can complete without severe losses. It plays to the strengths of starsector, where loss is expensive and your logistic resources are proper to managing a fleet on part with an fully funded navy. The -last- thing I want to see if starsector go down the path of Etrian Odessey where the final boss basically requires you have X classes with Y abilities because anything else gets you killed and the choice of class is a total lie.

Now as for your "battle channels" fix. We call this terrain and geography. We are in space on a 2-d rendered plane. Please explain to me what kind of geography we could possibly have. The resources to make multi-layered terrain would be astronomical and would have to have been done during the period the strategic map didn't exist, since it would require entirely re-tooling every single ship and weapon without exception, and would -severely- limit the combat arenas. FFT, and RPGs like Fire Emblem for that matter, can have scripted terrain because the players can be forced to fight in that terrain by not having direct control of an avatar character. This would not exist for starsector and it run into the issue Mount and Blade has. How do you make a string of extensive complicated multi-level terrain when fights can happen in open plains in the middle of nowhere, like in deep space. You can't without breaking all immersion and just forcing every single fight to randomly be moved to some abandon star station littered all over the sector for no reason. And -none- of this plays to what Starsector has in it.

And when it comes down to it, none of this is about difficulty. I wrote this whole thing and only -now- realized it's about your dislike of the tactical field. You didn't even bring up strategy of any kind, or anything wrong with it. If you want battlefield terrain I can tell you why it's a bad idea in this game. But you seem to be misguided in the concept of what strategy versus tactics is, let alone the effect of and management of building terrain into the tactical map.

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5 ... 13