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31

General Discussion / Re: Some (hopefully) constructive thoughts and comments on V0.9

« on: December 17, 2018, 03:54:07 AM »

The passivity of factions. Really kill the immersion for me. Factions should be able to do what you can do in the game, at least in principle, but probably not in mechanics. An example: player can colonize, factions should do so too.

They hands are already full and they cant even keep it together.

"decaying in the sector"

This totally fails as a rationalization. Why bother make it? Its so easy to start a colony. If that's the case Why doesn't anyone else do it? Why are you the only one who does it? These other factions can spawn giant fleets endlessly, but can't colonize a planet? it's not that kind of game. It doesn't make the game fun that you're the only one doing it.

Making a colony should be a lot harder for the player and the AI, but both should do it.

32

General Discussion / Re: Combat Readyness isn't fun..

« on: December 17, 2018, 03:45:32 AM »

Honestly, ships need to use METAL for repairs, not just general "supplies".

You can't plug a man-sized hole in your armor with space clothing, food rations, toothpase, spare screws and tools and similar.

Just rationalise it as supplies including hull patching material, space welding equipment, and lots of expanding spacebuilders foam.

Rather than having to rationalize yet another thing, it might be more interesting if the game actually gave you something meaningful to do with all that metal you hoover up from salvage, rather than just jettisoning it as you get better stuff. The way you can construct nav relays with it is a good thing. It could also be interesting for ship hull repairs.

33

Suggestions / Re: Ambushes are boring, make pursuer spawn closer in combat map

« on: December 17, 2018, 03:39:39 AM »

Pirates forcing a battle makes no sense.
After all, how pirates normally operate is in asking for bribes to leave you alone.
Going in guns blazing makes no sense for them.
Pirates that needlesly kill are bad pirates, since it just further ruins their reputation and reduces the chances of the pray stopping. If they know your word is worth nothing, then why not fight?

So yeah, pirates should ask for money or a portion of your cargo, and generally let you go if you comply.

Right, it also works from a "making sense" perspective. I consider the bribery essential to this scheme. Basically it just makes the combat interesting/fast if for some reason the player insists on it , or if they have absolutely nothing to pay with. The mind boggling consistency and lack of random, quirky stuff happening in combat is the reason I often avoid it in early game.

34

Suggestions / Re: Re-working command points and fleet command

« on: December 17, 2018, 03:16:37 AM »

Then, what about the problem of confused players giving tonnes of orders to a ship that it can't/won't carry out immediately, because there are other orders in the queue for that ship, or other ships? (thereby filling up their queue with  spam even more)

Maybe players shouldn't be able to give a particular ship an order until there are no more orders in the queue for that ship? Ponder.

35

Suggestions / Re: Ambushes are boring, make pursuer spawn closer in combat map

« on: December 17, 2018, 03:00:56 AM »

The main thing is, since most people reload/quit anyway, just let them pay bribes to avoid it. If they won't pay, then at least give them some quick, amusing excitement rather than the tedious fleeing.

Can you imagine you're poking along, and one of those burn 20 pirate scout fleets zooms in and catches you, and so then in the combat map, they also zoom in right in the middle of your ships and one of them hits a freighter and they both blow up? It would be funny at least.

36

Suggestions / Re: Re-working command points and fleet command

« on: December 17, 2018, 02:58:54 AM »

Well, you basically solved it in the other thread already; there's no opposing argument that can be made.

It's nice because there could be various hullmods, officer-skills (or sigh, yes even player skills) which could improve the latencies. You could even work in electronic warfare stuff that increases latencies for enemy fleets.

37

Suggestions / Ambushes are boring, make pursuer spawn closer in combat map

« on: December 17, 2018, 02:31:20 AM »

Getting ambushed is boring in starsector. I suggest some changes to make it less boring. Inspired in part by this thread http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=14105.0

In the early game, you often get ambushed by pirates. First, you click through a bunch of dialogues.  Ok, that's boring, but surely it leads to something exciting? After all, this is an ambush. No, it leads to you to one of the following outcomes:

a) "out maneuvering" them somehow by dialogue-fu.
I have no idea how this calculation is made, but you feel you earned it only as much as you earned fording the River on the Apple IIe Oregon trail. And it makes you wonder why it should take place at all if that's all that's going to happen.

If you can't do that, then one way or the other you'll have to spend several boring minutes fleeing up the combat map, at the end of which you get one of these:

b) escaping
the game divorces fleet combat speed from campaign map speed, so that you can get caught on campaign map, but then use maneuvering jets / burn drive etc to escape the "faster" fleet sometimes. Which raises the question - if I am able to escape the enemy fleet by flying up the map for 5 minutes, why couldn't I just "outmaneuver" them in the dialogue? What was the point of that 5 minutes? Then there's a bunch more text dialogues, and for some reason the pursuer fleet can't chase you again because hand-wave.

c)  getting chased down and inevitably killed,
This is often the case since the early pirate scouts are speedy.  Defeat is a foregone conclusion, yet  the game insists on dragging it out with the long "fleeing up the map" interlude. Usually this feels cheap because you got caught while  reaching for a glass of water next to your mouse, and you were just trying to go to some planet to do something else, but the game's punishment for this is death, so you rage-quit.

Probably 99% of people either quit as soon as they get caught, or quit as soon as they lose a ship, and then reload. So why bother even having the escape pod respawn thing? Why have the boring fleeing up the map sequence? Why is the game designed this why if 99% of people aren't even using it, or are erasing it from history (reloading) as soon as they can?


Here's what I suggest:

1. Get rid of the outmaneuver text dialogue outcome. If you're caught, you're caught.

2. Make your fleet and the enemy fleet spawn next to / on top of each other in the middle of the combat map, and on vectors/positions/velocities comparable to how they were in the campaign map, sometimes even colliding explosively with each other, which adds a risk to the ambusher. Only the ambusher gets to choose which ships to deploy.  Ships can retreat by reaching any of the edges of the combat map.

This means no boring fleeing, just an exciting furball as the ambushed ships tries to make it out anyway they can. New and different types of combat, and an actual reason to give your civilian ships something besides logistics hullmods.

Oh no you say! "It will be harder. I'm gonna lose my spaceships and then I will be unhappy since I play the game to collect spaceships and never lose them. I'm just going to rage-reload even more."

Yes, I've thought of that.  To balance the less forgiving but more exciting ambush mechanic, you should be able to payoff pirate fleets (and many other factions too probably) in the text dialogue before battle. Rep, respective fleet strengths etc being taken into account to determine how much the bribe costs. So you actually have a way to avoid death/reload just because you were eating a french fry.

Surely this is much superior to what we have now.

38

Suggestions / Re: Increase planetary stocks

« on: December 17, 2018, 01:51:55 AM »

We are living in an era of profound stability globally. Also most of us posting here are familiar with economic transactions only as consumers, not bulk commodity traders.

And the sector is supposed to be an anarchic and unpredictable place. It would make sense that bigger stockpiles are kept around, to cushion against the constant crises, unexpected deaths of buyers, loss of fleets, etc.

Why? From a game design perspective, what is the benefit to SS of allowing large bulk trading at will? Is bulk trading expected to be a fun activity that allows for player choice, risk management, and combat?

Starsector is bit overthought. The designers think a lot about trying to steer the player into a certain direction because it's "more fun." I like that they put so much thought into things, but in fact the result is a more uniform play experience. Combat is always the same. It's always two war fleets fighting each other voluntarily almost. In fact, if bulk trade was allowed, it creates a lot of interesting gameplay possibilities as I discuss here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=14324.msg237319#msg237319

Basically, if you had bulk trade, you might have more combats that weren't just two fleets of warships fighting each other. You could have more Battle of the Atlantic style convoy defense combats.

39

Suggestions / Re: Increase planetary stocks

« on: December 14, 2018, 06:38:46 AM »

Bulk purchasing shouldn't require some special shady deals.
It happens all the time in the world.
A ship full of goods is nothing. A drop in the ocean. That is partially why the economy is so borked. A single ship relieves planetary shortages, the player has way too much influence on the economy, while at the same time having way too many relaistic options.

I like that you can mess up small planet economies with thousands or 10s of  thousands of people. This seems reasonable. The NPC factoins should also colonize little words that you can disturb the economy of. Bigger planets with millions/billions of people should be more or less untouchable by the player (unless we decide to go full grand strategy with starsector.)

40

Suggestions / Re: Increase planetary stocks

« on: December 14, 2018, 02:32:39 AM »

if you up the amount of stock AI planets carry, then you're also upping the amount of market share AI planets have that the player must compete with for value. I think they got nerfed bc its the only way the economy system as-is works

The established NPC markets should be much much bigger than a new player colony.

There is a difference between what is available on the market at one given time and the production capability of the market. I doubt you can walk into a store (or even large number of stores) and buy 80000 water bottles, but Im sure many thousands of water bottles get produced daily and if you had the money and a legitimate demand, you could acquire that many water bottles on some time scale under contract etc. So basically the open market is a walmart with limited stock.

But it's obviously not a store. It's a commodities market where you can buy likes 1000 tonnes of food to fill the hold of a giant starship. Walmart isn't even in the game. Walmart is not a wholesaler/distributer, it's a consumer retailer, like its for your crew. The economy doesn't match with ship cargo capacities and is somewhat broken/underdeveloped in general.

41

Suggestions / Re: Ceasefire negotiations

« on: December 14, 2018, 01:11:39 AM »

I like the idea of crossing into "hostile" reputation instantly giving you an extra -25 or -50 reputation to get you halfway to Vengeful, and then as long as you're in Hostile territory every fair battle you win gains you reputation ("respect"), so you can combat your way out of a war in a very lightweight way -- if you keep beating what they throw at you (and aren't running down their backliners or committing war crimes) they eventually go, "hey. We shouldn't be at war with this dude, it's getting us nothing", but without a super convoluted system

I  like this idea, and it could easily be implemented without changing the core mechanics of the game-- It could be done in a mod. You crush your enemies enough they should give up fighting you, it makes sense. But yea, having to fight "fair" probably makes sense, nobody surrenders if they think they're going to just keep being slaughtered. This, combined with some options for diplomatic resolution to disputes such as you paying off a faction or them paying off you, would go a long way to making the game much richer experience.

Wonder if it would be interesting/possible to also apply this to the disputes between NPC factions, which really need some kind of "budget" to track how well they are doing and how many fleets they can spawn, and how long they can keep fighting.

edit: when I keep thinking of it, it really does kind of mirror real life. By fighting your enemies, you can get them to a ceasefire, but then only way to get back to truly "normal" relations is to actually do something positive, like trade and aid.

42

Modding / Re: [0.9a] Tactical Map Screen Unpauser

« on: December 13, 2018, 01:48:18 PM »

Hey there, I tried this out on the random battle mssion, and it seems to work as long as you stay in your own ship. However when you start using the F key from the tactical map to view the video feeds of a ship (even your own) and then you tab back to the tactical map, it seems not to automatically unpause anymore.

Same thing in the simulator.

43

General Discussion / Re: where do all these people come from?

« on: December 13, 2018, 12:50:20 PM »

The game should require you to gather people for you colonies. Find a massive sleeper ship and tow it back. Pay the costs for transporting the downtrodden and training them.

and then all these passenger liner ships in the game might actually be good for something.

44

Suggestions / Re: Logarithmic Reputation Scaling Overhaul

« on: December 13, 2018, 06:11:27 AM »

I like what you're trying to do because there are problems with rep, but it's just too complicated as described. Don't think we need another confusing exponential/logarithmic thing  players need to grapple with (majority of whom probably not too familiar with logarithms).

I wouldn't go that far, aren't most XP/leveling systems in games logarithmic?

But the XP isn't really something the player has to babysit like rep. Anyway with XP, you end up fighting more powerful enemies who give more XP, so the overall progression is closer to linear. (e.g. you level up once an hour until you hit the falloff point basically)

Look at all the responses in the thread: Everyone is vexed because factions do not behave and dole out rep values that makes sense. They aren't complaining that it's arithmetic. Nothing in the OP convinced me that log scale can do much that more thoughtful implementation of arithmatic couldn't do. It's not the system, it's the values put into it. Forcing people to do logs in their head all the time won't help.

But maybe if the OP could refine their ideas more I'd be convinced.

So if I understand correctly:

nope.

Averting an expedition causes them to not start at all. -20 rep.
If the expedition arrives and fails, -10 rep.
If you intercept the expedition fleet before it arrives, -5 rep.
If the expedition fleet fails to gather at all(happens sometimes), no rep penalty, plus your contribution(not sure what causes it, but I'm assuming it involves attacking fleets).

I think they posted that Alex changed all this. Anyway, it doesn't make sense that averting it costs more rep than actual war. Give me a break.

45

General Discussion / Re: where do all these people come from?

« on: December 13, 2018, 05:58:18 AM »

just because the population of the sector at game start sits at ___ (I'm not looking it up) doesn't mean that's all the population that those planets are capable of having -- the planets could have just hit the break-even point that results from their social programs, and not material limitations -- and a newly colonized planet with room for people to stretch their legs that's a mere flight away from every planet in the sector might change that.

What is the point of concocting these convoluted rationalizations for things that don't make sense and aren't good? It may be a fun solipsistic mental exercise but I'm not sure it contributes to a discussion of gameplay that need to be changed.

Sure, the sector could be on the cusp of some tipping point, and you're playing as the first wave of a  renaissance of tonnes of new planets and colonies inhabited by basement-dwelling newlyweds but if so:

1: The narrative needs to firmly establish that's the situation.
2: Other factions and NPCs need to colonize planets, not just the player.
3: If player is going to be as big as other faction, the game has to be a fully 4x game, or it will have no internal consistency at all. It isn't 4x, and it shouldn't be.

Xan is right, the game shouldn't print new people like Zimbabwean dollars. They need to come from somewhere. If 1 planet gains an order of magnitude, another should drop an order of magnitude with stability penalties to each for a while.

The pop growth has to falloff after 10s of millions, or game has to be a 4x game in order to not suck.