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541

General Discussion / Re: What use are Marines?

« on: January 13, 2020, 05:29:22 AM »

You can space them. Apart from that and raiding the whole sector down into complete chaos to satisfy your avarice they are utterly useless.

542

General Discussion / Re: Thanks Alex

« on: January 12, 2020, 09:51:50 PM »

Wait... Thats not legal...

Can we put that 15 Atlas thingie in the black hole?

Please?

543

General Discussion / Re: Does collapsing planets can destroy factions completely?

« on: January 11, 2020, 02:54:19 PM »

This is the way.

Err.. Sorry.

In vanilla you cant get rid of the Path or Pirates. Logical explanation for this is very simple. Those faction's power base are decivilized societies.

544

Suggestions / Re: A few suggestions from a new(ish) player

« on: January 11, 2020, 01:42:04 PM »

4. Pardon if it's in the game already and I just never noticed, but make it so that the size of trade convoys (and their escort) are proportional to the two markets they're trading between. So, say, a Gilead - Chicomoztoc convoy could have multiple Atlas ships and a huge escort, whereas a Tigra City to Nortia route would use a few Buffalos and only a minor escort. It'd encourage early game piracy if there were small and relatively weak convoys to pick on, and it'd encourage lategame piracy if there were huge convoys one could make bundles of credits off of...if one can punch through the escorts.

This is very much how it is now.

545

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 11, 2020, 01:27:01 PM »

@ Megas

Since you can make it work with a lvl 20 officer its cleara that you dont need all combat skills.

This is why you make more armor. 100% CR, DC3 and IM1 turns your whole hull into solid slab of medium armor. Going for IM3 and EM3 turns anything but the powerfull HE into peashooters. And only either combination is fine. Taking all of it is just broken.

You dont chase small ships. They are obsessed with your flanks. Let them go for it. Right into HMG+AC battery. Typically, most of the time you simply ignore anything small.

You ended up without anything of use... Yes I know. You see that's the problem.

You have nine medium gun mounts to evaporate small ships.

Devastator is 900 flux per uninterruptable burst. How is it "not too flux hungry"?

Onslaught can use heavy weapons. The problem is that all other heavy weapons apart from Hellbore are worse than either AC or HMG. They all are longer range versions of them with the higher flux cost for the same or even lower effective DPS. You dont need it in the melee. Hellbore is not great in the DPS department but each shot landed on armor will save several thousands flux worth of the AC fire.

Yeah. Another self-invented problem. "I wanna to take my full battlefleet wherever I go even if I have to reduce its combat strength to the point of losing my capability to attack and will have to spend most of my time in battle hugging map's border". Sounds reasonable.

546

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 10, 2020, 07:51:58 PM »

Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

Well the problem there is that it does basically the same thing as limiting ammo, except it screws over shielded fighters entirely and also the AI wouldn't know that returning to carrier because of high flux is a thing - but the AI very much DOES know that running to carrier because no ammo left is a thing.

I'm completely OK with the problems of the shielded fighters. For me its a nice feature and not the problem.

If fighters will be used as an addition to the strike groups they will be returned with the rest of the group. AI knows that much. AI dont know how to intercept on its own so the capabilities of AI controlled carriers o intercept are of no concern without fixing that inability first.
On the other hand the ability to create the free roaming deathball of fighters is deemed as a problem in need of fixing. If someone is to do the good old Drover/Spark spam only to find that the only way to recharge Sparks is to get them destroyed... What can I say. Problem is fixed. No, its not an elegant solution but it gets the job done. And I cant help with anything what requires programming skills anyway. However if anyone will produce the better solution I'll support it.

547

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 08, 2020, 07:16:12 PM »

Ideally I would want the guns on fighters/interceptors to be weak to ships somehow. Also trivial, but others really don't like the idea of separate weaker weapons on fighters or hullmods improving damage to strike craft. Removing weapons to reduce damage has been suggested.

Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

It's the AI changes to interceptor attack orders that is the question on workload and I can't speak to that.

I dont speak Java so I'm of no help here.

548

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 08, 2020, 11:08:14 AM »

Overall, though, I think we are on the same page as far as design intentions. Now its just a matter of "can it be done and how much work will it be?"

You tell me.

549

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 08, 2020, 11:03:20 AM »

@Megas

You could use officers with the armor skills.

HNs are barely flux efficient against Remnants. And, as I said, they choke you.

Of course you dont have enough range. Because you cant use burn drive to close the range since you dont have hp to spend. But the trick is to get into melee. In a 5 sec burst, HMG deals about the same amount of damage to shield as HN. For half the flux and they require only 60 of it for their "burst". Compair that to HN's 1200. Melee variant will not stop firing only because it close to max flux.

It has three heavy mounts, but it does not have the dissipation to use them!

It has caps to use them. And armor to not waste it for protection. Oh... You dont havy any. Such a shame.

But Onslaught cannot.

It perfectly can. I'm typically running 3 Hellbores. Problem of the whole ballistic weapons system is the lack of 750 dps close range large HE weapon. Chaingun can do 600 and this makes everything else unneeded for Onslaught. Hellbores are good for widening gap made by the Reapers but thats it.

but that does not cut it for AI use

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17496.msg276083#msg276083

In some older releases, I could flux cap quickly, vent, kill a few ships, flux cap quickly, vent, repeat.

It works just as good. Just remember to keep vent time at about 5 sec or less.

550

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 08, 2020, 09:01:06 AM »

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16137.msg257132#msg257132

Onslaught
Capacitors: 0

Not the hullmods. Skills.

Under zero caps meta you just give an enemy 18000 lead and 10000 handicap to yourself. Its beyond reason.

Since Onslaught has only 1000 dissipation you have to choose weapons accordingly. Not stuffing it up with:

Weapons: 2x Devastator Cannon, 1x Mjolnir Cannon, 4x Heavy Needler, 2x Hypervelocity Driver, 3x Dual Flak Cannon, 6x Vulcan

Four HN require 4800 flux to shoot a volley. Two Devastators need 1800. Thats 6600. Third of your entire flux pool. You cant use them if there is enough flux for the full burst. This means that when you see your fluxbar at 2/3 you just lost some of your fancy weapons you've spent some much op installing. When less than 900 flux left you are as good as dead. Most of the guns will not shoot. Thats 100 op spent... for what exactly?

Onslaught is really a gambling glass cannon

No wonder. But this is exactly how you built it.

551

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 08, 2020, 05:22:02 AM »

In case of Onslaught, it is in part due to dissipation.

Its mostly because you are too much into the zero caps meta. Spend some points for caps and armor.

552

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 08, 2020, 05:11:49 AM »

@lucky33

Sorry, I mean't to say "strike craft" or "aircraft." I sometime use "fighters" as a catch-all to mean "things that come from a carrier." Its a bad habit.

Thats much better.

So mostly bombers and torpedo bombers are what I'm referring to here (edited the original post to clarify)- but that's related to the concept of the interceptors > bombers > warships kind of relationship.

Strike craft were op even before they learned how to fly. Torpedo boats forced the Dreadnought revolution and finally made line tactics obsolete. And the earliest examples of the torpedo craft were actually carried by the larger ships (the very first successful torpedo attack was launched in this manner).

Bombers could be stopped from dealing much damage if enemy fighters/interceptors caught them without an escort before they reached an optimal range because they had such poor mobility compared to fighters or interceptors. This has happened to my knowledge during both land based and sea based aircraft assaults.

Yes. Thats my whole point. Fighters are viable since they can stop strike craft. Before aircraft era that role was occupied by the torpedo boat destroyers.

But.

Here goes our game.

Real interceptors and destroyers were balanced by the fact that their guns although perfectly capable of destroying strike craft were too weak to endanger larger ships. In Starsector, strike craft once were ships. And still are. For example, Trident can survive the direct hit of the most powerfull guns supposedly designed to punch holes in the battleship plating. To cope with it you have to buff interceptor's capabilities. Making him dangerous to the warships. Here you go. Battleship eating fighters.

Probably from my wording error, but you are talking about mm cannons when the power of aircraft came from bombs and torpedoes.

Yes. Very limited ammunition. Not guns.

It was largely felt, at least according to what I have read, that warship based anti-aircraft guns were sub-optimal and rarely could stop a sortie from causing critical damage even if it caused a few losses to the wing in return. Smokescreens were actually far more likely to work in comparison due to the training issue you have already mentioned.

For the pilot without special training warship under way was almost impossible to hit with the bomb or torpedo. It was very difficult either way. It took about 100+ torpedoes to sink Yamato. As you can guess, most of them have missed. Thats why japanese introduced kamikaze tactics. Removed the need to keep certain bearing, speed and altitude for a weapon deployment. Without it... Only spray and pray.

Now, all of that said, I don't want "aircraft" (what I will use to avoid confusion) to be that strong, but they should be intimidating enough to warrant pursuit and priority of the carrier and force the engagement of the warship protective screen.

I'm completely ok with our current state of the attack capabilities of the strike craft. Since they have limited ammo their dps is limited too based on the range. Thats balanced. My problem is anti-ship capabilities of the fighters.

553

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 07, 2020, 11:26:11 PM »

Fighters, as a concept and historically have always been "OP".

They never were op. Especially against warships. The best strategic achievement of the carrier based fighters is the penetration of the Japanese defence system based on the land based long range torpedo-bombers (situation turned upside-down and the hunters became the prey). Have little to do with the warships. And for a good reason. Antiship capabilities of the early-mid war fighters were limited to luck as if hitting onboard unprotected ammunition storage. Latewar saw the introduction of medium caliber general puropse bombs on fighters however the problem was training of pilots. There was barely enough time to train fighter pilots and ability to hit a moving ship with a bomb required even more skill. This is why fighter-bombers were mostly limited to strafing (no need for complex targeting) and ground-support (fixed targets). While bulk of the anti-ship work was done by the specialized attack craft.

Situation didnt change much even after war and not taking into account the nuclear strike capabilities. Last Intruders were phased out in mid 90th. Super Étendards in the 2016. The main reason being the indroduction of the new advanced avionics with the mostly automatic anti-surface targeting and autonomously guided munitions. However even that cant fix the inability to change the aircraft's loadout in flight. Going full strike leaves only limited air-to-air options, mostly self-defence.

Going full gun-ho against large warship? Welp.

Thats modern 25-mm and 30-mm ammo. Against a boat.



25-mm had difficulties of penetrationg the shell plating (of the boat...) 30-mm did some local damage.

Using this to blow up an armored battleship!? Nonsense. Its still limited to lucky shots against unprotected ammunition storage. You can imagine how much sorties had to be done to dig through heavy armor plate with fighter guns. Even given the most capable APFSDS ammo.

554

General Discussion / Re: Best way to learn the game...

« on: January 07, 2020, 11:25:32 AM »

...is to play the game.

555

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 07, 2020, 10:50:20 AM »

Ability to fill all mounts with any weapons robs the player of the real choice. You can just remove fitting option altogether. At least now Onslaught is not some abstract "DP slot" (like carriers) but very distinctive melee brawler with the memorable character.