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2296

Blog Posts / Re: Phase Cloaking - a Deep Dive

« on: January 29, 2016, 03:25:09 PM »

The issue was, iirc, that it got really stupid with things like Salamanders. You could use a pair of Salamanders to lock down a phase ship full-time, or force it to take hits (which locks it down in another way, with EMP damage). It was totally safe and boring.

I'd assumed that dealing with that was part of why phase ships were designed the way they were; the Afflictor had flares to deal with missile issues.  The Shade had its EMP emitter.  And the Doom just had four small turret slots that were perfect for burst PD.

Now, with the Afflictor losing its flares, I could see missiles being more of an issue for it.  On the other hand, put a burst PD in its turret, and make it clever enough to use that 3x speed to put itself where those salamanders are in its firing arc when it decloaks... I'd expect it to be able to outrun even skill-boosted salamanders; is that not the case?

2297

Blog Posts / Re: Phase Cloaking - a Deep Dive

« on: January 29, 2016, 03:02:08 PM »

i doubt it's a good idea in general to "waste" the phase cloak on a frigate or something for fastcapping. capping means something but not a ton. probably not more than the peak performance time on something loaded for bear with antimatter blasters and reaper torpedoes, for instance.

better to just use a fast frigate that doesn't suffer 3x the peak performance degradation.

Well, if activating phase cloak at all makes it lose time, then you've got an argument.  But generally you don't start losing time until there are enemies in sight.

It did at one point, but I ended up making it not do that for... some reason. Could've been because it was ending up at high flux at bad times. Might need to take another look.

It *will* occasionally use it to chase down targets, though.

As a player, I expect I'd probably be cycling phase cloak up to ~1/5 to 1/4 flux, vent, re-cloak, until I got where I was going.  Should stay reasonably low on flux that way.

2298

Blog Posts / Re: Phase Cloaking - a Deep Dive

« on: January 29, 2016, 02:26:33 PM »

If the AI didn't have robotically perfect reaction time to the point where it can cloak before my own shot even goes off, there wouldn't need to be a cooldown.

I'm not so sure of this.  For example, with current phase cloaks, it doesn't take a ton of skill to, say, take a Doom, outfit it with too many reapers, uncloak on top of something, fire reapers, and re-cloak before you even take collision damage, let alone any return fire.

On the other hand, I've seen phase ships in mods that have a cooldown after coming out of cloak, and they just kinda go splat.  Of course, they didn't have that 3x speed thing to better pick where & when to de-cloak... guess we'll see how this works out.

Definitely going to be interesting, though!  Hm... Another question: will the AI ever use a phase cloak to speed up just getting from point A to point B?  I could imagine them being nearly as effective point capture vessels as a Hyperion, but only if the AI is willing to use the cloak for utility.

2299

Blog Posts / Re: Phase Cloaking - a Deep Dive

« on: January 29, 2016, 02:07:42 PM »

Question on "suppression fire" - will the autofire AI restrict rate of fire based on available flux?  I've seen in the current game the AI (especially lashers for some reason) will fire on phased-out ships - but they do so at their full rate, building up flux, instead of how a human would do it, firing just a few shots at a time - enough to keep the phase ship worried, but without cumulative flux build-up that would give the phase ship an advantage when it decloaks.

...For that matter, having some option like that would help the AI in general; the tendency to go gung-ho towards maxing out on soft flux is one of the big reasons I don't like to give AI ships heavy blasters; they don't have a grasp of the notion "These guns are really expensive to use, let's maybe cut back a bit rather than riding high flux".  (One of the casualties of the flux bonus to energy weapon damage; that used to be a viable choice.)

2300

Modding / Re: Spriters judgement thread [non-sprite art allowed]

« on: January 28, 2016, 03:39:10 PM »

Some of those ships seem to have hardly changed; others show remarkable improvements.  Here are a few things that stand out:

The Southpaw is vastly improved; it seems to have gained the most from this pass.  Well done.  (Though the right-hand engines seem to have gotten their highlight direction reversed?  Still looks good, just doesn't quite match other ships.)

Several ships still have very flat-looking areas where the cyan color is saturated - most notably the rear circle-bit on the Shamash, some of the middle-ish areas on the Clade and the Solidarity - the new Solidarity actually has more issue with this than the old one - and the nose-tip of the Lambent (the area right in front of that one small mount).

The substructure of several ships has shifted to a more reddish hue; the Potnia and Charybdis pull this off the best, thanks to these sections being broken up by various details and spots of light.  Second-best are the Potnia-bis and Thresher, due to the complexity of the substructure regions.  Several other hulls (Enlil, Seski, etc) have substructure in small enough regions that there's no issue.  But the rear of both the Solidarity and the Mimir could use some work.
(The Clade would be on that list, except that it's got all those fancy vectored thrusters which, in actual practice, break up the area quite nicely.  Come to think of it, a vectored-thrust Mimir would be kinda neat...)

The Shamash's substructure could probably use some work, too; something resembling the machinery feeding the Mimir's main gun might help?

2301

Mods / Re: (0.7.1a) Shadowyards Reconstruction Authority 0.6.0.3

« on: January 27, 2016, 12:53:44 PM »

Huh.  I really don't see what you mean by 'clashing art styles' - Shadowyards ships are visually very close to the vanilla bulbous high-tech designs.

2302

General Discussion / Re: The Doom

« on: January 25, 2016, 10:43:29 AM »

Huh.  I've found the Doom to be one of the best cruisers; sure, you can't focus-fire with all four small universals at once... but that's why you mount things like light needlers or AM blasters that do burst damage; aim one pair, then the other.  And the mechanics of phasing means it's a good platform for heavy blasters, which ships like Medusa/Falcon/Eagle struggle to support.  (I've managed a pretty decent SO Medusa with Heavy Blasters.  The cruisers lose too much from SO, though, in part due to turret placement, and they really don't have the flux stats for blasters without it.)

I'd generally take an Apogee or a Dominator over a Doom... but I'd be perfectly happy with the Doom if that's what I had.

2303

Suggestions / Re: Drone Ship Systems Are Boring

« on: January 17, 2016, 10:14:38 AM »

Drones that only last for a small amount of time either fall into "use whenever enemies are close" or "use whenever it's available".

Maybe, maybe not.  Consider, for example, a system that launches temporary drones with light assault guns; you'd want to wait on launching them until your target was high on flux and their HE damage would be most useful.

2304

Suggestions / Re: Drone Ship Systems Are Boring

« on: January 16, 2016, 10:25:35 PM »

cutting through armor-plated hull more slowly so as to avoid damaging high-value ship systems (to improve the salvage value or make it less expensive to put the vessel into service within your fleet) is unlikely to be fast enough to have an appreciable impact on the battle and as such would significantly increase both the risk to which your ships were exposed and the likelihood that the crews of the targeted vessels would be able to mount an effective response of some kind to the attack.

Oh, that's a good idea!  Anything that gives you some more control over what ship(s?) are available for boarding would be a very nice improvement, and having it come at some significant risk is an obvious requirement.

It would seem to me that shield drones should have a reasonably high chance of blocking shots emanating from the drone carrier; unguided weapons fired by the drone carrier at nearby hostile ships have to follow more or less the same trajectories as those fired by nearby hostile ships attempting to shoot the drone carrier, and there's very little evidence in Starsector to support the idea that ships can coordinate shields well enough for the shots to not be blocked.

You're forgetting one key mechanic: friendly fighters (and drones) don't block your shots.  Shield drones work; there are several mods that have used them in one form or another.

With very few exceptions, the ideal use of a drone system is to set it on free roam when the battle starts and then forget about it

I disagree. Most drone systems make for reasonably effective point defenses for the drone carrier if kept in the holding pattern, die quickly if allowed to roam free, and usually have a limited number of available replacements. The better use of most drone systems is therefore to allow the drone carrier to put something other than point defense weapons into its weapon mounts.

Oh, okay.  So you set it in holding pattern and then forget about it.  That's one fewer button press; clearly a far more engaging option... wait.  No, it's exactly the same thing - the system isn't interesting to use in battle.

Balance-wise, drones are fine as is; I have no complaints there.  I bring this up mostly because of the recent "it's boring to fight phase ships" thing; well, it's similarly boring to use any of the current drone-based ship systems.  They're just there, and they just do their thing, and in most cases they might as well be a passive part of the ship.

2305

Suggestions / Drone Ship Systems Are Boring

« on: January 16, 2016, 10:54:15 AM »

With very few exceptions, the ideal use of a drone system is to set it on free roam when the battle starts and then forget about it.  This does not make for interesting gameplay.  Here are two suggestions for ways to improve on that.

Option one: the drones are passive, and the ship system works with them in some way.  For example, the Tempest might get a system that dumps all its flux into an active drone - overloading the drone (and thus almost certainly exposing it to enemy fire and killing it), but leaving the parent ship flux free.  Or a Shepherd might get a system that just temporarily boosts drone damage output.

Option two: the drones are much more potent, but have a strict time limit once released (edit: either auto-returning when the time's up, or just blowing up where they are, or maybe even converting into missiles).  For example, the Gemini might get larger drones outfitted with flak and light assault guns - but they only last for 20 seconds after launch, leaving the system as a sort of super-sized "flare" device that's capable of shooting down fighters and missiles.

Or, of course, you could combine the two; for example, the Astral might get its current PD drone system as a passive effect, with an active system that launches a handful of time-limited versions of the Tempest's terminator drone.

Comments - and other drone related ideas - are welcome.

2306

Mods / Re: [0.7.1a] Starsector+ 3.1.2

« on: January 14, 2016, 11:11:47 PM »

It is possible to capture multiple ships from one IBB bounty, though doing so reliably requires a significant amount of save-scumming.  The trick is to get one of the secondary targets (i.e. not the enemy flagship) to retreat.  Sometimes they won't even if you push them down to 1% hull, in which case you're just out of luck, try again.  Once it has retreated, you have to win that engagement, let the survivors flee, and then use Emergency Burn to re-engage the fleet before it can despawn.

I actually discovered this by accident when I managed to acquire two Thunderstorm-class Tempests.

2307

Modding / Re: Spriters judgement thread [non-sprite art allowed]

« on: January 14, 2016, 10:40:39 AM »

[img]Got close to the point where I'm not sure how to make this sprite much better, so posting here for any thoughts.

Looks too clean and shiny - each section is essentially monochrome with a different tint to it.  I'm not entirely sure how to fix that, but that's where it could use some improvement.  In particular, I'd suggest having the blue-purple of the main hull bleed out into that small hardpoint slot a bit.

2308

Mods / Re: [0.7.1a] Starsector+ 3.1.2

« on: January 13, 2016, 07:28:38 PM »

No you were definitely using a kite ship if they couldn't pressure you at all. Any shorter range build will be dramatically outranged by a capital ship like the Onslaught and have to take some care to avoid being shredded.

Ah.  You haven't actually fought this particular bounty fleet.  These hulls come with Safety Overrides built in - which means that no, they don't outrange ordinary builds.

2309

Mods / Re: [0.7.1a] Starsector+ 3.1.2

« on: January 13, 2016, 06:07:04 PM »

If you don't fly kite ships they're fairly challenging - the onslaught anyway can take a lot of punishment and dish out quite a bit too.

"Kite ship" in this case meaning "Anything smaller than a cruiser, or most cruisers, or some of the faster capital ships" - it's not that I deployed anything that was meant to kite them to death, it's just that they were too slow to close with even my normal ships-of-the-line.

2310

Mods / Re: [0.7.1a] Starsector+ 3.1.2

« on: January 13, 2016, 05:14:22 PM »

Just got to the Luddic Path bounty fleet... and, err, it kinda felt like a joke.  Neither the Onslaught nor the Dominators were able to close, and were trivially kited to death without ever firing more than an occasional salvo of missiles.  I suggest removing the Degraded Engines hull mod, or restoring their original Burn Drive system, or perhaps both.

I mean, unless it's supposed to be a sort of a joke fight?  In which case it's fine.