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31

Blog Posts / Re: Colony Crises

« on: November 27, 2023, 04:46:24 AM »

My general expectation is that the player will want to cooperate in making the fantasy/story "work out" in their mind

But we're not even mainly talking story/immersion here but gameplay. Fleets that do this invalidate a clear and interactable element of gameplay related to jump points demonstrated in the game. I am not sure how this isn't clear enough...

the alternative - making every single fleet that you find anywhere get there in a "real" way - is considerably more problematic in various ways.

Right and no one wrote that they should here, so why that point again? If the player is in hyperspace near the system just use the usual "spawn fleet outside player's vision then fly there" mechanic already used. It forces the fleets to use the jump points and fixes the main problem. If the player was away and flies to a system it makes sense fleets would already be in and have spawned inside directly - but when the player is near the system in hyperspace that's the case where it's a big nono.

For in-system dynamics, like written by Wyvern, it would also help fringe cases be more believable if we actually saw NPC fleets use transverse jumps sometimes. It should be rare of course (since it's a "special" maneuver), but seeing a smuggler transverse jump into a system through a nascent well as we come in oursleves would really sell the idea that "some other crazies also do this". Could also be used to lead to new gameplay situations using the game's own mechanics.

32

Blog Posts / Re: Colony Crises

« on: November 26, 2023, 03:36:52 PM »

Ah, I'm sorry, I thought you'd meant the non-crisis fleets that are mostly just a hassle.

But the miscellaneous fleets where this isn't simulated to that degree don't really matter very much, right. It's not going to be the sort of thing you'd need to intercept.

I also meant these lesser "before the big crisis" fleets. Even if they are small and do small damage they still matter in the same way and how the same gameplay elements are treated. To better illustrate how scale doesn't affect gameplay breaking:

You're a big bulky space soldier aiming at a doorway in a first-person-shooter, knowing an enemy is coming. And then you get punched in the back for 1% damage by a cheater who just teleported behind you with a hack to troll you. It "doesn't really matter very much" - it's just 1% HP and you turned around and killed the guy - it still feels bad because it breaks gameplay, expectations, in-game logic. In the case here for Starsector, I think that it feels even worse because you can't blame an unintended cause like a cheater - it's the game suddenly ignoring something important and that touches multiple aspects of gameplay.

33

Mods / Re: [0.96a] System Marker 0.1.7-RC3

« on: November 26, 2023, 02:50:45 PM »

Weapon repair Marker - Shows offlined weapons' repair progress of your ship and the ally ship which you locked on.
Engine Repair Marker - Shows offlined engines' repair progress of your ship and the ally ship which you locked on.

Glorious

34

Blog Posts / Re: Colony Crises

« on: November 26, 2023, 02:41:06 PM »

Yep, same as it currently works! It tries to be not-too-obvious about it, but if you're doing something meant to expose this behavior, then you'd probably succeed. It's technically *possible* to make these travel etc but that has a performance cost (save file size, memory use, etc), which gets much worse if the player colonizes a bunch of systems, and I'd rather not close out that possibility, if only for the sake of mods. It's also more complicated, meaning it's more difficult for it to reliably achieve the desired outcome of "having fleets in the system that the player can fight".

If travelling from far/a specific location is an issue complexity-wise then they should absolutely at least spawn near the system then jump into it. I am writing the following from a vanilla perspective:

I think that invading fleets spawning directly in system is a big problem that breaks elements of gameplay and feels extremely bad. Defending a system by either protecting its jump points in hyperspace or intercepting the enemy at the jump exits in system is both a logical step for a player and in universe and the game itself demonstrates this by having NPC patrols defend jump points. If fleets break this by ignoring basic game rules it not only negates an interesting gameplay aspect of the campaign layer (the importance of jump points) but it also goes against logic the player learns from playing. If it's some special fleet whose leader is wise to transverse jumping and uses it to dodge defenses and surprise the player, it's one thing, but if it's an automatic thing from any fleet generated like this, it's another in a bad way.

To illustrate the problem: imagine playing a medieval game. And you see towns defending themselves from their enemies. You get notified that an army is coming to your city and the live battle starts. You rush to the walls expecting to defend against the invaders. And then you get a notification that your city is being sacked. What? You go back in confused and you find out the enemy army spawned inside your city. You think that the game is bugged, and you feel robbed from a natural and expected piece of gameplay. You even feel like an idiot for thinking that you were doing the right thing trying to stop the enemies from coming in - they did anyways because "they just spawned inside" and ignored what you saw elsewhere.

I hope that this speaks to you in some way...

35

Blog Posts / Re: Colony Crises

« on: November 26, 2023, 09:26:27 AM »

Hostile fleets still spawn in your systems before that point, depending on the types of attention you’ve attracted

Will these fleets actually just spawn in our systems without travelling there from somewhere? Does that mean that if I'm over my system in hyperspace they'll appear behind my back inside without me being able to catch them, and bypass any jump points and anything defending those jump points?

On crisises having "permanent ends", how does that work if I'm hostile with the same factions again?

Fianlly, are crises related to the dynamics of the sector, beyond "AI cores attract Pathers etc" ? i.e Persean league being more likely to try to incorporate you by force if they've recently lost worlds and such.

36

Suggestions / Re: If everybody is special, nobody is

« on: November 19, 2023, 01:14:14 PM »

The player doesn't need combat skills to impact the fight. The player can always be the most effective captain pound-for-pound by simple virtue of being potentially better at using any kind of ship or weapon they're given.

I both agree and disagree about there being too many officers... kind of. Each ship necessarily has a captain - it's a whole ship, not a truck. A captain always has some impact on their ship, even in the civilian sector. But "officers" with high skills - or potential - should definitely be something special and not be just a thing that "gets spammed because endgame".
My take: whenever you get a ship, you need a captain for it - but run-of-the-mill captains, with one skill or two (to make each at least different and impact their ship), but little ability to progress or change skills (capped in levels etc) can easily be found in any market. Special captains on the other hand, be they already highly trained, or with high potential for growth, should be rare. Rarely available outright, tied to factions, rare bar events and so on. Like going around indie and pirate bars all over the place to find some promising captain who'll join for cheap early, and can grow far, or on the other side of the scope, being commisioned to the Persean league and well regarded allowing you to mingle with officers at Kazeron to find veteran professionals that would normally be out of reach.

37

Suggestions / Mod-oriented suggestion for AI use for INTERCEPTOR and FIGHTER wings

« on: November 17, 2023, 03:55:18 AM »

Hello, I have a small suggestion regarding AI carrier use of INTERCEPTOR and FIGHTER fighter wings - mod-oriented because the "use" case doesn't show up in vanilla:

In the present version of Starsector, if INTERCEPTOR or FIGHTER fighter wings with finite ammo are out of ammo and set to Regroup, they will land and re-arm - good. However, AI carriers don't Regroup such wings when out of ammo. If they've decided to engage/escort a given target, they'll leave these wings on Engage orbiting a ship futilely. This isn't a problem in Vanilla because all INTERCEPTOR and FIGHTER fighter wings have infinite ammo - even missiles and Stinger mines regenerate slowly - but it's an issue for designing such mod fighters with finite ammo.

Suggestions for solution:
1.Have an alternate pair of roles (i.e INTERCEPTOR_LIMITED and FIGHTER_LIMITED) that have the same wing behaviour as regular counterparts but with the BOMBER's "automatic return when empty regardless of orders" behaviour on top
or
2.Have AI carriers with wings in these two roles Regroup their wings if they have emptied out all finite ammo


If this could be added in either way it would be wonderful, thank you for reading!

38

Mods / Re: [0.96a] Kyeltziv Technocracy [1.10]

« on: October 26, 2023, 07:59:32 AM »

Good stuff. This is my favourite recent faction mod alongside Mags, I was scared not seeing any news for a while.

39

Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.33.0

« on: October 22, 2023, 11:51:11 AM »

Patch 1.33.0 is out!  Weapons that could 'bracket' a target with three shots around and one in the center to force it to move can now be fired when aimed a target radius from the center of the lead indicator and at any range.

I am having bugs with this. One is that if a target can be "bracketed" like this I can manually aim away from it and fire manually at infinite range at other targets. Autofire for other weapons also seems bugged, as weapons will stop autofiring at targets that are within their visually shown dynamic range.

40

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 22, 2023, 12:09:25 AM »

You're just setting a local variable (essentially a holder for data that you can operate on or reference later) here. This doesn't change anything about the values in the game itself. To do so, you must reference the value and alter it, like so:

Spoiler

Code

package data.scripts;

import com.fs.starfarer.api.BaseModPlugin;
import com.fs.starfarer.api.util.Misc;

public class StorypointMod extends BaseModPlugin {
    @Override
    public void onApplicationLoad() {    
	Misc.STORY = "placeholder";
    }
}

[close]

Thank you so much. I really need to start learning this stuff instead of winging it with reused code.

41

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: October 21, 2023, 11:59:04 AM »

While looking at how certain text is set in the game, I saw that most (all?) instances of "story points" have the "story" word set by Misc.STORY, leading to the following in Misc.java:

Code

/**
* Name of "story points".
*/
public static String STORY = "story";

This seems to allow their name to be easily changed across the game. I tried my hand at changing them with a small mod and the following:

Spoiler

Code

package data.scripts;

import com.fs.starfarer.api.BaseModPlugin;
import com.fs.starfarer.api.Global.*;
import com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.ids.Strings.*;

public class StorypointMod extends BaseModPlugin {

    @Override
	public void onApplicationLoad() {    

	String STORY = "placeholder";


    }


}

[close]

-but I am not seeing a change (although it's not crashing). My java knowledge is next to zero so I am most certainly messing up - or I'm not understanding when this is being loaded. Thank you if you can help.

42

Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.31.0

« on: September 22, 2023, 02:30:31 AM »

Someone really needs to make a fork of this mod
Every time i update instead of fixes the balance and bugs just gets worse

Crazy to read this sort of hostile stupidity when the recent updates basically fixed all the bugs, while adding the last few levers needed to balance everything as you wish.

Onto the last update, this is near perfection to me as a framework. It has gotten my creative juices flowing like never in my current rework of weapons. Naturally, the goofy designs of vanilla weapons no longer cut it, but that's expected.

43

Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.31.0

« on: September 09, 2023, 03:02:50 AM »

That makes sense, though I'm still curious as to why explosive damage is less effective than kinetic damage against armor according to the values. In many games (And vanilla Starsector itself) high explosive damage is intended to deal increased damage to armor, with the logic that the blast wave better penetrates armor to deal damage to the internals. On the other hand, plain kinetic damage should have issues penetrating armor unless highly specialized (Like sabot rounds in real life). From a gameplay perspective, this means that high explosive damage is less effective than kinetic against both armor and shields, which seems counterintuitive.

Considering that kinetic weapons are dedicated to that damage type, it makes sense that that they fire specialized rounds. Kinetic energy is more difficult to stop with even modern armor. Chemical/explosive energy, even when made into an anti-armor tool, is more easily defeated by composite protection. Kinetic rounds are thus generally better at penetrating the hardest targets, but deal less post-penetration damage. Explosive anti-armor rounds are inferior at dealing with the hardest targets, but cause lethal damage to anything they can actually penetrate. Only exception is very heavy explosive ordnance (i.e large anti-ship or air-to-ground missiles, bombs) which just obliterate part or all of the target.

RC currently appears to follow these points, which feels sensical. Some vanilla weapons are left to the wayside in the face of realistic armor/damage mechanics, but that's expected - I faced similar issues when giving missiles realistic speeds and having to rework vanilla PD weapons in my own old mod. On the subject of said mod I said I'd post when done updating it, I think I'll write up an explanation of how I've reworked certain weapons and my reasonings.

44

Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.30.0

« on: September 05, 2023, 08:09:50 PM »

I recommend a thorough readjustment and retesting of the damage type values, as it appears this fix patch has upended the previous damage system that, while flawed as pointed out by Helldiver, seemed reasonably balanced in combat.

The previous bugged values weren't balanced hehe - that's why I noticed the bug, because Thumpers would annihilate armored ships in seconds due to not having proper penetration reduction from being frag.
I agree that some changes are probably in order, but thankfully the mod provides us with the many levers needed in its well furnished settings files so there's that for us end-users to work our preferences in.

I think that there's a limit to what the mod can completely balance/fix without directly changing vanilla weapons on a case-by-case basis. I'm personally fine with that because we can change those ourselves easily, but perhaps that is a daunting task for most players.
I've long run my own set of realism settings and weapon reworks before Realistic Combat brought about its wonderful new mechanics, and I'm in the process of redoing them with Realistic Combat in mind. I think that when I'm done, and if Liral is fine with it, I could post a minimod here with just the reworks of vanilla weapons (gameplay, visuals, maybe I'll omit reworked sounds because I don't own rights to the sound effects I'm using). Could be helpful to some.

45

Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.29.6

« on: September 05, 2023, 10:15:26 AM »

I've been running tests with damage and observing some strange results.

The target is a blocky ship with 1000 armor rating.

Based on info, a 100 damage Frag projectile shouldn't go through even the outer armor - but it does, and deals damage.
Then, a 50 damage Kinetic projectile hitting the same area at the same angle doesn't do anything at all, when it seems that it should at least penetrate the outer armor.