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Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: February 11, 2015, 09:21:21 AM »While I'll concede that it's a valid way to balance a game, it would also turn SS into the most boring space shooter ever. The kind that don't reward the player piloting skills and situational awareness because it's a RTS balance mechanic: it makes sense when you have no direct player control, and the units fire everything all the time in all situations to avoid micromanagement. I sure hope Starsector won't turn into one someday.
Ridiculous - and easily disproven by the fact that non-missile weapons already work that way - and guess what? It hasn't turned into that. Flux, slow fire rates, fire rates higher than ammo regen rates, limit on damage spikes through special ability cooldowns - all of these things combine in the various combat situations the game provides to make "always fire" not the best option, and in many cases actively detrimental. Especially missiles benefit enormously from non-constant fire because a stream of missiles is less likely to overwhelm most (non AoE) point defense compared to a large single wave of them.
Proper meaningful cooldowns on missile fire rate also means rate of fire skills actually mean something for missile weapons, without breaking them since no matter how fast your fire rate gets eventually you'll be limited by the rate of regen (which by the way, opens up another tactical option - not to fire and build up reserves for a bigger damage spike later).
Incidentally, the regenerating ammo system also means there can now be skills and hullmods to speed up ammo generation (hell maybe even at the cost of extra supplies - it can all be tied together neatly). Oh yeah and +max missile ammo isn't the be-all end-all skill for missiles anymore - it simply opens up extra tactical options (bigger spikes, more benefit from longer pauses) instead of straight up increasing the amount of damage you can do in a fight with the OP you spent by a fixed value (that is, as long as missile rates of fire are meaningful - the current ultra-fast fire rates are bad, have always been bad and are made worse by regenerating ammo pools).