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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - DatonKallandor

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646
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).

647
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: February 11, 2015, 07:59:35 AM »
The missile changes are a good first step, but they don't go nearly far enough. Every missile needs to work on the same ammo-regeneration system (either the Salamander fire-rate limited one, or the Pilums regenerating ammo - depending on role or whatever is easier to balance) - it stops them from being binary Overpowered-Useless and it's a great balancing lever.

648
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: December 06, 2014, 01:20:56 PM »
'vocal minority' has to be the most sickeningly overused buzzword lately. There is such a thing as a vocal majority, and guess what: that's what this is.

Prove. It.

The general statistics indicate that people on forums are the minority of consumers of a video game. That's just a fact. Is it true for Starsector as well? We don't know - only the person with access to the sales numbers and forum statistics does - but we can infer from the general trends.

Now that this topic has been handled the other big issue nowadays is the ridiculous entitlement of buyers of games brought on by the age of early access that somehow buying something means you get to be co-developer. It doesn't. The developer makes the game. You get to play what they make, not decide how it's made.

649
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: December 05, 2014, 01:33:32 PM »
Timers for destroyers and cruisers per se aren't a bad thing, but the overall supply cost for battles needs to remain reasonable. Fights are already very expensive, damaged ships prohibitively so, and I'd rather keep playing fleet battles instead of being forced into a cheap & lowball kind of scenario just to make a buck. I have a hunch this'll make Hardened Subsystems mandatory because it translates into money saved.

This is really a problem with CR recovery being extremely expensive in terms of supplies consumed  (especially when it's bonus CR beyond the standard 50%). That's an issue with every ship deployed, not just the ones that can run out of combat time and deplete extra CR - although as long as it remains a problem it can be countered by finishing the fight fast and/or retreating low combat timer ships. I'd rather see the supply cost (mostly?) shifted from CR recovery to repairs (which rewards you for better use of your ships instead of unilaterally punishing you for using them at all) but that's just me.

Now we got CR timer for all kinds of ships and only 3 orders per battle to order zero CR ships to retreat. How about ships with CR 0 automatically try to disengage and exit the battlefield? Also with CR for heavy ships AI ships CR can be easily drained down by some specially created fast cruiser with heavy PD. CR will hurt AI side more every time as AI prefers to stay away from battle being too careful. You can set battle timer at 5 or 10 minutes based on fleet size instead of CR with same result to prevent AI fleet kiting with solo ship. CR instigates fast battles with AI not willing to fight and running away if possible.

Standing Orders is hopefully something that's coming with the Officer system (or just a part of certain Officers - cautious officers retreat a low CR, etc). Being able to set over-all guidelines (retreat at x% CR? Use Strike Ordnance on Ships above size X if they are present in the battle? etc.) for your fleet is going to be needed eventually (and again a great place for skills to make a difference - unlocking new standing orders).

650
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: December 05, 2014, 11:25:50 AM »
CR changes... not so keen on this; I've eschewed frigates since the CR timers went in in the first place, since my preferred play style is to pilot a single ship.  Can we get at least a few specific vessels that - like the Brawler - don't have CR timers?  Will wait to see how it plays out, but right now not a fan; yeah, I can swap to flying a Conquest or Onslaught or Paragon, but I'd like to have a few more options than just those three.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from flying a ship with a CR timer solo. A single Wolf can kill a ridiculous amount of stuff if player piloted and that thing has a CR limit. What you probably mean is you won't be able to cheese the AI to win fights solo, which - yeah that's exactly the thing that should be stopped. Keep in mind that your flagship is going to have a higher starting CR anyway so even if you were fighting a mirror match, in most instances there'll be a window where your ship is going to be in perfect working order while the enemy is already suffering from CR related debuffs and malfunctions.
CR timers simply encourage people with low timer/high power ships to get in there and finish the fight and gives high timer/low power ships a secondary win conditions (outlast your enemy).

651
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: December 05, 2014, 10:20:36 AM »
All those changes sound good. Beams have needed a buff for years since not generating hard flux is a gigantic downside with no upside. Ballistic Ammo wasn't really a factor anyway and those few weapons it did affect it crippled. The soft limit on battle length (through Combat Timers even on bigger ships) would have made ballistic ammo an obsolete concept anyway - no reason not to do away with it entirely. Combat Timers on big ships is also a huge buff for Low Tech ships, since it forces the High Tech ships into a fight.

The missile change is a good start but doesn't go nearly far enough - every missile should regen ammo. That finally lets you start balancing them properly and gives you an additional lever to do it with: Regen time (also a great candidate for skills!). Slap some proper reload times on missiles (almost all of which are a joke right now or don't exist at all) to stop them from dominating and a lot of ship configs open up that were simply not viable before.

652
General Discussion / Re: How can you possibly profit from normal trade?
« on: November 13, 2014, 07:04:18 AM »
You can't and you're not supposed to be able to profit from non-shortage trade. Standard repeatable trade runs are boring. But if they're in the game people will do them even if they're boring. The only solution is to make them non-profitable and force people to do the stuff that isn't boring.

653
Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 2.0
« on: November 10, 2014, 03:40:35 AM »
The whole fuel change thing just stems from a wrong assumption anyway. The assumption is that tankers are pointless because fuel costs for traveling are too low. But that's not what tankers are for:
Tankers aren't for keeping your car topped off on a cross country journey - they're for transporting fuel in bulk to sell it. When there's a fuel shortage and you want to make mad bank off it you get a tanker. If there's a goods shortage and you wanna make mad bank off it you get a freighter. Different hauling ships for different jobs.

Why would you buy tankers just to sell fuel, when you can sell about 15 types of things with freighters instead?

Because 15 other things to sell don't do you any good if there's a fuel shortage somewhere or when you're intercepting a fuel-carrying pirate. Might as well ask why bother with flight decks if there's so many ships that have guns. They do a specific thing that no other ship does and that's why they're needed - in those specific cases.

654
Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 2.0
« on: November 10, 2014, 02:34:10 AM »
The whole fuel change thing just stems from a wrong assumption anyway. The assumption is that tankers are pointless because fuel costs for traveling are too low. But that's not what tankers are for:
Tankers aren't for keeping your car topped off on a cross country journey - they're for transporting fuel in bulk to sell it. When there's a fuel shortage and you want to make mad bank off it you get a tanker. If there's a goods shortage and you wanna make mad bank off it you get a freighter. Different hauling ships for different jobs.

655
Mods / Re: [0.6.2a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 1.11.1
« on: November 05, 2014, 01:22:35 PM »
Nice calculations, but I'm talking about the AI Dominators that show up in high-end bounty fleets and have combat aptitude. Some of them seem to have 10 points missile spec. They will just obliterate your destroyers at random with every volley unless you have flak, due to the raw speed and power of the missiles. I've seen an AI sunder at 10% flux just die to a Dominator that shot harpoons in the opposite direction (it was fleeing) Kind of an annoying side effect of the new 4 shot volleys.

So yeah, it's not completely broken but it feels sort of rough. And its not fun to pilot a ship, spam harpoons or reapers at a target with mildly high flux, and be rewarded with a kill every single time. Reapers are basically point and click auto-murder weapons now, whereas before a fast cruiser or destroyer could actually try to dodge it. The balance between pressuring a shielded target and finishing off a crippled target has been thrown out of whack.

So any balance changes to try to remedy all of this is completely fine in my book. The new anti-clumping missile AI in itself is a massive buff, causes way more harpoons to slip past omnishields and avoid flak.

So now you need point defenses on your ships. That's a good thing. Pre .65 nobody ran PD because missiles were on the whole crap. Now they're a proper threat and luckily the counter already exists.

656
Mods / Re: Project Ironclads TC 7.2 (7/8/2014) [for 0.6.2a]
« on: November 04, 2014, 04:13:47 AM »
I think its possible to set faction-controlled planets to spawn Independent fleets. From what I remember, Jangala does this on a regular basis (or maybe thats just from Asharu).

That happens by default with any market in the game and that`s why independents are now present in the mod.

Are you running a unified Independent faction like in vanilla or did you separate the various independent jobs like freight, smuggling and bounty hunting into their own factions? The vanilla method has the downside that hitting a smuggler fleet also ruins your reputation with legal freighters, mercs and everyone else who's grey.

657
Mods / Re: Project Ironclads TC 7.2 (7/8/2014) [for 0.6.2a]
« on: November 02, 2014, 05:37:28 AM »
I`ve noticed that pirates are somewhat too devastating to any market. Even markets of size 8 with military bases are suffering from pirate raids - they just shot down unloading/loading traders one by one while outrunning any patrols and defenders. Probably i should move pirate bases somewhere outside of any faction systems (currently there is a size 1 market with just criminals condition sitting on a distant moon in one of the richest RSF systems).

Do you have Mercenary and Bounty Hunter fleets set up for the Independents? I think that's what keeps the Pirates in check in vanilla .65.

658
Blog Posts / Re: Ships & Stories
« on: January 24, 2014, 02:04:42 PM »
The sheer amount of light energy slots seems like overkill too, considering it already has a point defense ability. Plus there's the fact that it's an energy-cruiser when it's in the Eagle-Falcon (Core Epoch?) line, which are more jack-of-all-trades a-little-bit-of-everything designs. Sort of expected some more medium ballistics/small missile slots. A small Energy PD grid with a medium ballistics punch with small missile support looks like the Eagle/Falcon/Hammerhead archetype.

659
Blog Posts / Re: Ships & Stories
« on: January 24, 2014, 12:22:22 PM »
Yes, but they exist in the Starsector spritework (to provide easy visual identification and identity to ships with flight decks), so they should at least be internally consistent.

660
Blog Posts / Re: Ships & Stories
« on: January 24, 2014, 11:54:35 AM »
I finally figured out what bugged me about the Heron from the moment I first saw the sprite:
The hole in the starboard flight deck. It's just...pointless. It defeats the whole purpose of a Flight Deck, it'd trip up strikecraft taking off and effectively cuts the useable runway landing ships have down to the same length they'd have if everything past the hole didn't exist.

Aesthetically it fudges with the cool asymmetry of the sprite because the post-hole runway is on the same horizontal line as the port flight deck. Cutting off the Runway at the hole would make the whole thing look a lot more sleek while still clearly communicating "this ship has 2 flight decks!".

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