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2071

General Discussion / Re: why was sensor drones removed from Apogee

« on: January 18, 2018, 12:52:27 AM »

Which is why I specifically qualified

(at least straightforward ones, like Tempest's Terminator)

I agree that drone systems can have advanced uses for modders. Though most of things you've listed still seem passive-ish compared to phase skimmer (which I consider gold standard for a ship system: fun and flexible, yet not too overwhelming).

2072

General Discussion / Re: why was sensor drones removed from Apogee

« on: January 17, 2018, 09:29:57 PM »

* For the record, I maintain that both fighter wings and drone systems have their benefits and penalties, and it's tempting to write up a short "compare and contrast" thread somewhere, showing each ones' strengths and what they can/can't do. Potentially both for players and modders.

Problems with drone systems are that they duplicate fighter functionality (though having 2 separately controlled 'fighter' groups can be useful) and that they are boring to use (at least straightforward ones, like one Tempest's Terminator) compared to fun stuff like phase skimmer.

2073

General Discussion / Re: how to plot a conquest

« on: January 16, 2018, 08:22:19 AM »

Yep, as Megas described.
I also rarely control it's turrets manually - there are just no weapons on Conquest that would require manual control to same degree as Onslaught's TPCs, for example. Which leaves cursor just for shields and 'R' target marking.

2074

General Discussion / Re: Question on top speed, acceleration, and maneuverability

« on: January 15, 2018, 09:22:04 PM »

Among other questions, it would be nice to know when exactly is Acceleration vs Deceleration used.
Like:

Press W: acceleration. Press S or C: deceleration.

Much more straightforward than I expected. That's what I get for trying to analyze a problem in wrong terms .

2075

General Discussion / Re: Question on top speed, acceleration, and maneuverability

« on: January 15, 2018, 01:23:16 AM »

Among other questions, it would be nice to know when exactly is Acceleration vs Deceleration used.
Like:
1) Acceleration vector and speed vector directions are opposite - Deceleration
2) Acceleration vector and speed vector directions match - Acceleration
3) Acceleration vector is perpendicular to speed vector - ?
4) All of unmentioned in-between states -

2076

Suggestions / Re: Advanced Turret Gyros - Alternate Buffs

« on: January 07, 2018, 08:49:36 AM »

Yes, fighting effectively with Omni shield can be tricky, but that can be done.  I really miss Omni shield Wolf.  It was better off with Omni shield.

Quickly releasing face to cursor key and rotating/re-raising shield to meet (what typically is) a Salamander works, but so does last second phase skim. Both require setup and full player attention for a few moments.
AI may suffer a lot from losing the Omni, but as far as player piloting is concerned skimmer solves same problem well enough.

2077

Lore, Fan Media & Fiction / Re: Casual Gameplay Videos

« on: January 07, 2018, 02:50:08 AM »

Moving forward I'm finding that my frigates are becoming more and more of a liability. I'm still going to try many of them, but whether it'll be effective is unknown.

Of course, anything without an officer stands no chance vs lv20 officer on same ship. Yet has same deployment cost. Frankly, I don't see a good(in-game rather than role-play) reason to use more than 11 ships (10 officers + player) in one deployment. Your battle-size and finances just determine how large these 11 ships are going to be.

2078

General Discussion / Re: A few questions regarding the next version.

« on: January 07, 2018, 02:22:02 AM »

As a player interested in eventually playing full release version of Starsector (and it's expansions  ), I think that diverting developer resources to make some scaled-down version of SS would only hurt main SS game, and as such is undesirable.

2079

Suggestions / Re: Nav Buoys and Sensor Jammers should be more worthwhile

« on: January 07, 2018, 02:17:37 AM »

Does anyone else play with small battles only? Just enjoy fleets clashing into each other like in the movies? Capturing objectives seem so silly for me.

Not only, but small battles without objectives definitely have their own charm.

Overall, idea of points becoming more valuable over time is interesting. It avoids both pitfalls of "whoever gets them first, stomps the other" and being small enough to be ignored.

As for in-combat resources like derelicts, that's quite immersion breaking for me - why do I have collect them right now, when I could safely do it after combat instead? If it has been floating in space for ages, it could wait for me a few more hours. Also, why do they magically appear during combat, but not otherwise?

2080

Suggestions / Re: Advanced Turret Gyros - Alternate Buffs

« on: January 07, 2018, 01:48:02 AM »

ATG seems to be generally useful on Capitals, considering that they usually fight against multiple faster enemies in different directions that often enter/leave attack range.

And PD guns not turning fast enough is also a very real problem, that can be quite easily demonstrated by Salamanders (not that there are no other cases, these are just easiest way to see if you have enough turret turn rate or not).

Then there is Advanced Optics - using it without ATG is pretty much not an option, unless you already have only fixed hardpoints or want your turrets to be no better than that.

* Integrated Point-Defense AI:  The only weapon that this might be useful for is Tactical Laser, but LR PD laser is nearly as good and cheaper.
* Omni Shield Emitter:  Costs too much OP and halves your shield arc.

Agree on both.
* IPDAI tacs suffer too much downtime when switching targets (or being unable to rotate without interrupting fire). This gets to extreme where Paragon(using as many tacs as possible) vs Onslaught intercepts more incoming Annihilators by not having IPDAI, while also doing more damage to Onslaught with it's tac lasers.
* Omni Shield Emitter: SS does not allow to separately control shield, turreted weapons and precise ship movement(face cursor) at the same time (and I don't see what can be done here, beside auto-shield mode). Why would I install so overpriced hullmod with big drawbacks, when I don't even have chance of properly using it.

2081

Blog Posts / Re: Colony Management

« on: December 24, 2017, 09:30:45 PM »

At the same time, if the single ship boosting skills are too powerful it skews combat greatly towards just deploying ships with officers, max combat skills, and then always picking the same few 'must have' other skills (see .7.2 skill balance).

Unless personal/officer skill are nerfed into complete oblivion, deploying unofficered ships is always a wrong choice (unless your fleet is just random salvage and you have no control over it's composition whatsoever).
Correct fleet composition starts by taking battlesize and dividing it by amount of available Officers, maybe with some left-over in reserve (including CR bench-warmers).

10 officers limit completely invalidates compositions like frigate swarm (unless battlesize is ridiculously low). Considering that officers will cost upkeep in next version, even removing limit won't fix this problem (1 officer per Onslaught is way more efficient, than 1 per frigate). Synthetic solution could be giving single Officer's skills (including player character) to a pool of ships (A capital/cruiser + frigate/DE + DE or 2 frigates/ 4 frigates), but it seems hard to justify in fluff.

2082

Blog Posts / Re: Colony Management

« on: December 21, 2017, 09:48:03 PM »

- Can we put officers in storage to temporarily reduce salary costs, if we don't need them right now? (For that matter, how are crew in a Storage submarket handled?)

Can't put officers into storage. Crew will cost the 1% storage fee, same as cargo, no salary.

Can we get at least some form of going over Officer capacity (storage, or just unlimited number of *unassigned* officers). They are narrowly specialized and having to fire and re-train new officers when you want to change fleet composition (no carriers <-> carriers, high tech <->armor based, kiter <-> aggro) is wildly suboptimal.

2083

Suggestions / Re: All missiles should cost 0 ordnance points.

« on: December 14, 2017, 08:40:03 PM »

Oh, and that change to the way burst-damage was calculated meant that the Tachyon Lance gained enough bite to justify itself, sometimes.  I get that people think it's OK on a Paragon, but everything's good on a Paragon and usually the HIL's a better choice if you're not going Plasma Cannon.

So far, HIL is poor-man's damage half of Tachyon Lance.  HIL is what gets used if player has not found enough Tachyon Lance (and Tachyon Lance is very rare).

HIL can be quite ok, as long as you use it correctly. That is exploit the fact that enemies raise their shields from point that is exactly on line between center of their ship and your ships. So you can fire few seconds into their side, whenever they drop/re-raise shield. And AI tends to re-raise often even when not really threatened by flux levels (Paragon included).

Then again, TL can exploit same flaw in AI behavior.

2084

Suggestions / Re: Remove damage types to expand design space

« on: December 13, 2017, 06:25:52 PM »

There are already some modded weapons with effectively non-standard damage types.
Like Blackrock shard guns that do kinetic + chance of energy on armor/hull hit (but not shield).
Or Scy miniguns with combined frag + energy.

For cases like these, having tooltips present secondary/conditional damage in better way than just text description would be nice.

2085

Suggestions / Re: Safe'nSteady combat and player knowledge progression

« on: December 11, 2017, 11:58:16 PM »

Or just don't Ironman. I don't think Ironman works well for games with play-through longer than a few hours anyway. Just forces you to play boring/cautios instead of on the edge (which is ok to do with normal saves).