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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 - namad

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16
Mods / Re: [0.9a] Foundation Of Borken v0.2.4-RC3 (2019-1-19)
« on: November 29, 2019, 01:40:25 AM »
eyoo, does anyone know if this works fully in the latest 0.9.1a rc8? and/or if not, what is broken? is it badly broken or just a bit but still playable?
gonna be trying it either way shortly but i'd still very much appreciate an answer from anyone who already knows or has a good idea of what might be broken if anything.


nevermind just used the category index thing,, forgot how lovely that thing is :q ain't played or modded starsector for that matter for a couple years now it think :q cheers!!

I totally failed to find any threads about foundation of borken here http://boards.4channel.org/search

Do you have a copy of whatever was posted? I'm still playing 0.2.4 rc-3 in my current campaign so any update would be great.

17
General Discussion / Re: 8th Starsector 2v2 Team Tournament
« on: November 14, 2019, 04:44:34 PM »
No I'm sorry I totally forgot the timestamp, I just vividly remember three different HIL snipes that seemed to be a little derpy (I think those are the ones you mean). One of them was on a maelstrom I think and I forget the other one, I think maybe on a charybdis(sp) or whatever that one sra capital is?

18
General Discussion / Re: 8th Starsector 2v2 Team Tournament
« on: November 14, 2019, 02:23:46 PM »
I actually do not think that that HIL is a bug. Most of the time the HIL starts firing when the shield is already turned the wrong way, and maybe the ship doesn't think it's worth wasting a second without any shields to put them down and re-raise them on the correct side. Capital ship's with omni shields have really slowly moving shields and no one is running accelerated shields. Yes, it's bad fleet AI that the ships keep ending up in this trap, but it's more of a fleet trap than a shield bug in my eyes.

I also think some of the "worst" examples of the HIL dodging shields could've been due to the broken edith that alex didn't put in the game himself.

The fleet AI can't comprehend a HIL being given a range buff in the middle of the deployment. I'm not sure that's a bug, because it's not a feature in the first place. Paragon HILs weren't as good at sniping as those edith HILs. I think maybe the fleet AI calculates the range it wants to stay at to avoid the HIL without accounting for the edith? That would explain it entirely, and wouldn't really be a "bug". Although converted hangars, valkyrie, buffalomk2, and sabot's are all vanilla and might involve AI related bugs.

Maybe the edith buff could be changed to projectile movement speed instead of range? and then instead of being nerfed from 30% for capitals to 10% it could go up to something insane like 50% because projectile movement speed won't break fleetAI but could still be useful, especially if LoA is given a lot of long range guns that have slow projectile speeds (which I think it actually already has lots of).

19
General Discussion / Re: 8th Starsector 2v2 Team Tournament
« on: November 14, 2019, 08:54:40 AM »
You could just class buffalomk2 and valkyrie as frigates though and the ai would totally comprehend almost right away.

20
General Discussion / Re: 8th Starsector 2v2 Team Tournament
« on: November 13, 2019, 07:53:10 PM »
Feels like the fact that valkyrie's count as destroyers is almost a bug in vanilla. 3dp for a carrier is just not intended. Not sure which nerf would make the most sense. I feel like banning the valkyrie would just result in players using buffalo mk2's but 25 hangars is a lot less than 33 hangars.

Nerfing converted hangars itself could also work although it might unintentionally ruin some ships that are a bit more valid.

My personal favorite rule would be to do something like make it so that there's a limit of say 10 of a specific ship per fleet. Although then you just get 10valks and 10buffalos on every team.

Maybe instead make it so that you pay a 1dp penalty for every ship of the same hull type above 5? so the 6th costs +1 and the 7th costs +2? Which would let someone field 6 omens but would totally ruin valkyrie's and buffalo's above 5? You could also make it so that there's a 1dp penalty per identical hull per 5 matching hulls? so if you have 4 of one hull you pay a 0 penalty, but 5 of one hull is a penalty of 5 and 10 of one hull is a penalty of 15?

edit: Also might wanna ban the edith, if only because it's bugged and if there's an edith versus edith matchup it just flat out won't work. Not to mention even in that final matchup with only 1 total edith, the game crashed, and I'm willing to assume it's the edith's fault.



tl;dr
All of this sounds pretty convoluted so, maybe just charge 1dp per converted hangar hullmod added to your ships? (built-in converted hangars not counting?)

21
General Discussion / Re: 7th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« on: October 01, 2019, 01:10:53 AM »
Ever watch an esports tournament? they're almost all double elim 1 finals.

Many many years ago they used to give the winners bracket team a game up though, true, but they never required an identical finals rematch. Most of the people who think this are basing it merely on the words "double elimination" but 99% of the double elimination tournaments through time haven't worked this way. It's a name, not a ruleset. It's silly to think two words can describe a ruleset. Even the selected bracket making software had no option for an identical finals rematch because.... well no one wants that option typically.

Also I'm trying to get alex to change sabot coding (without actually nerfing them, just trying to see if he knows a way to improve the ai) https://twitter.com/amosolov/status/1178315457977360384

22
General Discussion / Re: 7th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« on: September 27, 2019, 06:28:52 PM »
1) Falcon is just a good ship to begin with. I'll admit that.
2) 50% missile reload. However something like a gryphon would get that 50% reload AND it's once per battle skill would also refresh
3) I was more pointing out that fortress shield (which is also on the paragon and a fairly rare ability) is "supposed" to counter sabot's but doesn't, using shield bypass only further proves how incapable the ai is of comprehending sabots.
4) It was not clear AT ALL that you were suggesting a DP cost penalty to the falconP purely for tournament rules. It sounded more like something you thought should apply always. Which was what I was disagreeing with. I 100% think it would be fine to nerf the falconP in any future similar tournaments. I just don't want to see an already average ship be nerfed into worthlessness in the base game. Also I think it might be better to change the rules so that ANY ship you stack heavily is nerfed in DP cost. Not only was 7 falconP's popular but so was 5 omens. The falconP also really relies on a certain critical mass. If let's say. The 3rd copy of a hull could +1dp and the 4th copy of a hull cost +2dp and the 5th copy of a hull cost +3dp...etc.. That would get rid of both falconP spam and omen spam almost entirely. Although it might just result in a lot of shades instead.

As for my ideas for how to counter sabot's or counter the counter to sabot's I can't really test them unless there's a large AI overhaul in a future game update. Since they were hypothetical scenarios in which the AI knew what it was doing and wasn't just confused.

23
General Discussion / Re: disable supplies
« on: September 27, 2019, 06:23:49 PM »
The ship screen does show you CR cost per deployment and supply cost per deployment. Which imo are more important stats than supplycost per CR. Since if you were only told supplycost per CR you would then have to calculate CR cost per deployment yourself which is the number you need more often. Although I agree none of this is really taught to the player. I think it's a great system, but well it could use a tutorial, but so could just about every game mechanic.

24
General Discussion / Re: 7th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« on: September 27, 2019, 03:22:26 PM »

I don't necessarily think blanket banning the Falcon(P) is the right tactic.  Assuming that many folks here at least vaguely have some working knowledge of EVE they had similar problems in their early Alliance Tournaments where 1 specific meta (Tinker tanking) or (Drone Swarming) completely dominated the meta.  They adjusted the rules so that you could field no more then 2 of a specific ship.  I think this principle alone would have a significant impact on the creativity of each composition.  It would still allow for multiple variants (FalconP, Falcon, FalconXIV) etc to be submitted but those other versions don't necessarily carry the same meta power as cheaply as the P version.  I agree with allowing more then 1 capital to 2, but limiting the capitals to only one of each type.  Otherwise you would end up inevitably with 30 double paragon fleet comps.  Just my brief .02


That's just super silly. Tournament in this rule-setting is essentially an answer to a question what are the most efficient ships and their combinations per 1 point of deployment (I'm aware it's a bit skewed by 15 ship limit). What do you do when you find out that some ship/s is the most efficient per deployment point? You increase it's cost untill it's price is adequate to it's efficiency. Gryphon is slower, less effective HP, less missile slots (less dps) than falconP and costs 20. Here is your solution, move falconP to at least 20 points. Repeat the cycle and soon you'll have a very very balanced ship roster (balanced to their DP costs). Double paragon fleets are absolute joke, normally paragon looses to just 3 Hammerheads, and some exceptional loadouts loose to 4.


Except of course in the campaign the gryphon's ability to have twice as many missiles over a long haul of potentially a 2or3 or4 phase battle matters. An ability the falconP doesn't have, also an ability that doesn't matter at all in this tournament. In the previous PvE tournament with 6 waves the falconP wasn't used once. Again most likely because it would've ran out of ammo after 1or2 waves and then been entirely useless.


Another thing the falconP has going for it though is it's high speed. Which is especially relevent when considering the low max range of sabot's compared to say harpoons. Although as I've already said I think sabot's are OP (specifically because the ai doesn't know how to handle them). In fact the fact that shield bypass is a counter to sabot's goes to show that the AI's ability to toggle it's shields when it sees sabot's is literally just bugged. If anything just ban sabot's until alex can patch the AI on shield toggling as it applies to sabot tanking. Shield bypass should not counter sabot's (because they deal pretty heavy emp damage). The fact shield bypass worked better than fortress shields against sabot's is again literally an AI bug. I reckon without sabot's falconP's will drop in powerlevel quite sharply.

Also removing the fighter limit would end up meanining something like the falconP can just be countered by someone who brings 14 wasp wings.


Something like hellbore cannon's plus sabot's would prevent effective shield toggling. However the time between sabot launch and harpoon hit's in this tournament was usually 6-10 seconds. Which would've made it pretty easy for the ai ships to turn off their shields, get emp'd to heck and back, see the harpoon's, raise their shields, live. The ai just didn't appear capable of thinking about sabot's much at all. Again as I've said before, my guess would be that the sabot mirv shotgun phase of 0.05 seconds or so is faster than a single AI cycle of thought. Requiring ai shield code to either plan ahead when it see's unshotgunned sabot's. Or a minor nerf to sabot shotgun speed up to 0.1 seconds or 0.2 seconds or however long it takes the ai to decide what to do about it.

25
General Discussion / Re: disable supplies
« on: September 26, 2019, 04:21:34 PM »
So what you say, almost makes logical sense.

However, I meant that when you had 0 command points you could still issue retreat orders. In other words if you had any command points they'd still be spent. Why? To prevent someone from using retreat orders as a pseudo rear waypoint order for "free". (By issuing it and then cancelling it later).

Although my suggestion is kind of confusing and finnicky. Another option might be to make it so that issuing a retreat order opens a BIG command window. Whereas all other orders creatures a small command window.
Right now you can issue an infinite number of retreats if you do it within ~roughly maybe 5 seconds or so. The same is also true for move orders and attack orders. Maybe this timer should be bigger for retreat orders, making it easier for a new player to include more ships without having to know they should pause while considering their retreat orders? I'm not sure.


I do agree something should be done, but I don't think the actual system is what needs to change. Veteran players who understand the system like it fine and the balance of the math is relatively good. It makes a large range of ships viable because often cheaper low tech ships that are "worse" also play this CR and supply game better. Elite ships often have very high CR cost per deployment. The problem really is that newer players aren't understanding the systems at play, and I admit it can be hard to understand what is going on because the system has so many layers and so often the activity that's occurring can appear hidden on one screen only to reveal itself elsewhere. I really love the fact that I can seek out elite ships, but that I can't actually deploy them into combat as often as? I can some of the more bland ships. It makes fleet management actually interesting. Without CR everyone would just use the best ship all the time and it would make 75% of the ships in the game nearly worthless.

I also think alex may have stated before he's reluctant to spend too much time working on revamping things like the tutorial because the game still has so many major changes coming that any tutorial he made would be rendered incorrect and obsolete before version 1.0.... for example skills and levelups are being totally reworked in the next major update.

26
General Discussion / Re: disable supplies
« on: September 26, 2019, 02:58:52 PM »
A huge amount of effort went into the math that makes CR work. It's ALREADY been radically overhauled since the days when the game only had 1 star in it. I think most of the people who are bad mouthing CR/Supplies in this thread.... just don't seem to actually understand how either mechanic works.

I think that's a legitmate problem. I see a lot of newer players not understanding CR at all. Even wadestar's first starsector let's play... it takes him maybe a dozen hours or more to start fully understanding how supply usage works.

So in conclusion, I don't think the math is wrong. I do think that communicating how everything is working to the player could be simpler though. Some sort of UI and/or tutorial change might be in order here. Or perhaps a more detailed breakdown of CR/Supply usage somewhere. DEFINITELY the ui could communicate how horribly you're suffering in a corona better than it currently does. I also think a lot of newer players don't seem to realize that you're meant to fight large battles in waves and that you're meant to retreat ships when you're out of PPT. On top of that the way the command point system works means you have to pause and issue a bunch of retreat orders at the same time.

In fact one good way to "fix" "broken" supply usage might be to for example make it so that in combat issuing a retreat order does not require a command point. This way when the player is out of command points they can still tell ships that have 0ppt to retreat. That might go a long way towards informing newer players how they should be playing.


edit: Another thing that might help is to rework the tutorial for mothballing, the ui popups for mothballing, and maybe even the fleet UI that controls mothballing, I've seen a lot of situations in which players who have played the game for ten hours or less don't seem to fully understand the massive benefits of mothballing a ship and how sometimes you're flat out REQUIRED to mothball ships in order to avoid running out of supplies while in deep space.

27
General Discussion / Re: Getting way outgunned
« on: September 26, 2019, 02:53:11 PM »
In your screenshot I can see easier bounties listed, just do those?

You should 100% absolutely be at the point where you can defeat pirate station's with ease. Even if you don't want to fight 2 legion's and 3 onslaughts. Then don't fight that bounty.

Bounties aren't even a main part of the game, you could also start doing more explorations.

28
General Discussion / Re: 7th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« on: September 26, 2019, 02:42:10 PM »
With a DP limit of 150, even if you allowed infinitely many capitals, you could still only field at most 2 paragons.

29
General Discussion / Re: 7th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« on: September 20, 2019, 08:01:03 AM »
I wouldn't really like to see falcon (P) nerfed or banned next tournament. I think a lot of rule changes could've made the falconP weaker, for example unlimited fighter wings (if 7wasp wings can't stop missile spam then maybe 13 could!) also the banning of a second capital. Two capitals that covered each other's back's could've in theory been pretty strong against missile spam too.

Also most tournaments include mods, even if the falconP was the best vanilla ship, a lot of mod ships I feel can compete with it. Additionally a lot of mods have worse ships, but better missiles.

Also, also, in an endurance fight the fact you don't fully refill missiles between waves would... as usual... render falconP's worthless (like in the previous tournament where not a single falconP was fielded despite them being allowed).

Another REALLY good rule change to stop falconP spam would be one that's been used in past tournaments. In past tournaments that were based on credit cost, sometimes fielding a large number of duplicate hulls had a cost penalty of oh I don't remember, maybe 5% or some such. While 7 falconP's were unbeatable, how would 6falconP's fair against 1falconP and 6 not-falconP's? I think all of these are really interesting questions. Although if for some reason you wanted to run another vanilla heavy 15 ship ruleset tournament, you could either ban the falconP or ban expanded missile racks, or ban sabots.

One thing that needs nerfed I think is the sabot shotgun effect. Specifically the AI doesn't seem aware of how fast a sabot shotgun occurs. In fact I don't think the ai even gets a single ai cycle to even consider raising or lowering it's shields in the duration between a sabot mirv'ing and hitting. So either the ai needs to be reworked to be able to predict when a sabot will mirv and consider the mirv shotgun effect.... OR the shotgun needs to take longer and be slower and as such a) give the ai a chance to think for 1 tick about raising or lowering it's shields or b) allow a greater than 0% chance for the shotgun to face PD. As is without a fleet admiral the sabot's gimmick of moving slow, until it hits PD range, then instantly applying it's damage, without taking time to travel the gap... it seems to trick the ai pilots quite badly.

I guess another another option in tournaments is just to ban sabots until they're more AI friendly (the ai is great at knowing when to fire them, but not so great in attempting to lower it's shields for 50% of sabot hits, in order to attempt to avoid overloads. Although the sabot is brilliantly designed to still emp out a ship that dodges the overload, which I don't really want it to lose, it's really cool, but watching this tournament's it's become clear that ai pilots don't fully consider this shotgun effect... really at all ever.

For example: consider how often the caster would refer to omen's or wasps stopping harpoons in their tracks? yet sabots? nothing ever stopped them except hardened shields, and then only rarely.
Look at Czar Nicholas II over here wanting to ban the technology he can't keep up with.  ;)
Fact of the matter is, Vayra just blindsided the field by finding a very effective ship layout. That's what you'd expect of a tournament, though, for players to find the strongest possible layouts and fleets. I am convinced this can be countered, it's just that before the tourney, nobody else seemed to have thought of it. Most players went with SO which gets shredded by missiles and most other fleets didn't have all that much PD.
Outright banning a succesful design midway through the tournament would be a bit harsh and shortsighted.
And nerfing Sabots would be just as reactonary.
In the same vein, one might ban the Apogee as well for being OP due its incredibly tanky shield and weapon mounts.
I would advise just chilling and seeing where this tourney goes.

Actually I didn't want to ban sabot's ... you're agreeing with me. I guess the reason you think I want to ban sabots is that I defended them when no one was saying anything. Thing is? For the entirety of the past two streams everyone in chat has being saying the falconP is insanely OP and alex better nerf it, my post was sort of a replye to that. So, uh, yeah, I 100% agree with you. My main point was to say that I think sabot's are what's been OP moreso than falconP's (although the falconP is the best sabot carrier and the best sabot tanker both at once it seems). I don't think the sabot's need to be made less effective or worse, but there is straight up something wrong with the ai as it relates to defending against sabots.


I remember seeing the paragon trying to deal with sabots in the tournament. It took a hit on shields, then turned on fortress shield right after (while nothing was happening) and then turn it off just in time to take another sabot hit. It was totally out of phase with the incoming sabots. I wonder if there's some intentional delay (intended to make the AI react slower so it's less difficult for humans) that is causing this. This could be an issue specifically with fortress shield AI though, I'm not sure.

for reference
https://clips.twitch.tv/EnergeticThoughtfulShingleGingerPower

Interestingly, it is able to turn the fortress shield on in time to deal with reapers, and that saves it from a lot of sabots that were synced with reapers.

I'm not sure if it is better to ban/limit falcon p's or ban/limit sabots. Neither option seems great.

This is an even better example than what I was talking about. Straight up if an ai pilot is turning his fortress shield on, right after the sabot hit, when nothing is happening... yet properly manages to fortress tank reapers... That's a problem, a bug level problem. Either it's a mistake in the AI, OR the sabot's are literally just so fast the ai can't react (but like I said before, maybe it could pre-plan better for the moment the shotgun will go off).

Think about the retreat tournament issue. The tournament mod makes it impossible for ships to retreat, HOWEVER if a ship is within the retreat section of the map, and it decides it wants to retreat, it instantly leaves the battle before the code can use the next tick of ai maths to tell itself it doesn't want to retreat. It's possible a similar issue exists for sabots, or maybe alex did it on purpose, but I don't see why he would, fortress shield is really the only effective way to tank sabots and fortress shield is a rare special ability.

In my original point, I was just saying if a ship gets shotgunned two times in a row, ideally it would try to take one hit on armor and one on shields so as to avoid overloading (if that's how that math works and it would take two bursts to overload it for example).... but the fortress shield situation is much much simpler, it's objective, not subjective, the math is clear, it's not EMP versus overload, it's nothing versus disaster. So, yeah. The ai needs to be able to react to the sabot shotgun, the ai already knows how to react to most slow mirvs that I've seen in mods and such... so IMO if the ai cannot be improved maybe the shotgun effect needs to go from like 0.1 seconds to 0.2 seconds or however long is needed for the ai to notice (but ideally without ruining the cool shotgun effect).


tl;dr if fortress shield is the only counter in the game to sabot's, then fortress shield should work against sabots.

30
General Discussion / Re: 7th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« on: September 20, 2019, 01:36:02 AM »
Yeah I think sabot's were nerfed to be in a totally good place for players. However the ai doesn't seem to have the ability to predict the sabot behavior. That's why I'm loathe to say the sabot should be nerfed, but it's possible the AI just doesn't get to think that fast, it's really up to alex. The problem with these sabot shots, in these tournaments is that it's like 4 sabot's all shotgunning at once into an already high flux shield which is resulting in like some 15-20second overloads. IIRC overload duration is based on how far above max flux you go during the overload, and I think sabot's specifically exploit this increased overload duration effect. In that case having your entire ship emp'd out for 5-10 seconds would be a far better choice for an ai pilot to make (it could just do the math on emp duration versus overload duration). Yet the ai hasn't made this choice, even once. All tournament long I never saw this happen. (Unless it was actually ion torpedos which work entirely differently and aren't worth mentioning).

If the ai IS able to think fast enough to think during the shotgun effect, it must be unable to predict how long an overload will last? Keep in mind sabot's shotgun effect specifically was designed to be bad against armor. Now for a minimum length overload, taking 0armor damage and having a minimum length overload is likely ideal. This is a common 1 sabot shotgun choice the ai makes to not lower it's shields, but with 4 times as many sabots I think the choice's math starts to go the other way.

Basically, I want all this same stuff to happen again in a future tournament, I just want it to be more dynamic and interactive than, fire sabot, win. Dodging reapers, and shooting down harpoons with pd and such are both very interesting mechanics.


TL;DR I think sabot's are really fun, I don't think they're necessarily too strong. I do think though that the ai isn't evaluating them properly and in a pure AI v AI no admiral controls fight, they might need to have a rule that limits their use, to avoid dominance.

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