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Messages - Serenitis

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706
Suggestions / Re: We need some repairing modules for armor and hull.
« on: September 27, 2019, 02:22:35 AM »
If you want to repair in battle, the way to go about it is to look at adding that ability to the Automated Repair Unit hullmod.
That way you're at least paying some price for it, and have to give up some firepower/other ability to use it.

It might still need some kind of nerf to be acceptable though. Like can't repair past 50% or reduces peak time or something.
Or an awkward choice like the ARU reducing the ship's shield efficiency/stats or burn/combat speed.

707
General Discussion / Re: Overrated (overpriced) ships
« on: September 27, 2019, 01:39:42 AM »
Vigilance is a good platform for Pilum.
It's fast enough to run from almost anything, and has enough OP to fit several useful hullmods. And fast racks works really well with Pilum.
They are made of wet paper though, and must be kept away from the front lines. Either a single timid officer, with all other Vs set to guard them will work. As will just bandboxing the group and manually herding them away from danger.

It's babby's first artillery.
Works well enough to be useful, but has enough downsides that you want to progress to something better.

I'd only put 'close in' weapons like harpoons or reapers on a Vigilance if I had no other way to get those weapons into battle.
The only Vigilance that can reliably survive on the front lines is one controlled by the player. Do you want to fly a Vigilance?


Doom is a good ship, and it has a good system. But I dislike flying it because the system and weapons are 'fighting' for use of the cursor.
Guns aim to face cursor. And missiles home in on whatever was under the cursor when fired. Both complimentary actions.
But I need to move the cursor away from the target to effectively use the mines.

It's a similar problem to the Hyperion.
Extra micromanagement which requires extra thought and 'twitch' behaviour on top of everything else, while in a fast moving situation. Not a fan tbh.
Can't say I'm super disappointed by it though, as I have dozens of other options which suit me just fine.

708
Suggestions / Re: Resource management sucks
« on: September 21, 2019, 12:26:22 PM »
Missions could be used as resource sinks.

Have the player faction generate a mission for the player infrequently, something along the lines of "bring x amount of <resource> to <colony>"
Upon completion it would then give some kind of boost to an aspect of that colony. That could be a small permanent boost, or a larger temporary one.

Example:
Quote
Our Mining Techs have brought to our attention an interesting idea we belive could prove beneficial. They have come up with the rough outline of a machine which could increase our production of metallic ore on the world of Myrmidon. Sadly the device depends upon some unique local peculiarities, and so cannot be replicated elsewhere. A shame really.

It is estimated that the machine would require the following materials in order to be constructed:

2500 Refined Metals
1000 Machine Parts
250 Transplutonic Metals
250 Volatiles
10 Gamma AI Core
And would have the following effects:
+1 ore production (permanent)
x1.5 Mining maintenance cost
+1 Mining Pather interest

Gather the requested materials and take to them to Myrmidon within 60 days to begin contruction.

A benefit to completion, to encourage players to undertake the mission and burn resources.
No penalties for "failure" so players don't feel put upon by the random event and feel like they're forced to participate. (Just quietly goes away if the timer runs out.)

709
Suggestions / Re: Combining multiple debris fields into one.
« on: September 20, 2019, 08:57:02 AM »
Merging debris fields would be nice.
An alternative would be to entirely remove a debris field in one salvage operation - less clicks, tidier screen.

710
Modding / Re: [0.9.1a] Langly's Terraforming
« on: September 20, 2019, 08:12:48 AM »
You've got a fairly decent core feature right now. All that's really needed is to flesh it out a bit, and add a more fluid progression through the planet types.
The mirrors and shades are nice. Are they set to spawn at random angles? Sometimes they appear almost on top of each other, so they might need some kind of minimum separation.
And other times they appear on the 'wrong' side of the planet.
Spoiler
[close]
Not really a huge deal right now. But in the future, it would be great if shades appeared on the 'day' side, and mirrors appeared on the 'night' side.

Found something interesting when interacting with Unknown Skies.
Spoiler
[close]
Planets with 0% hazard default to *0.25 maintenance.
Probably a feature of the core game preventing divide by zero/overflow nonsense.

As for the gas giant I'm uncertain. You would think that people live in orbital habitats around them yet I'm certain I found plenty with ruins on them...
You did.
Spoiler
[close]
The thing about gas gaints, is that they're made almost entirely of gas. And they're huge.
Gas giants do not have a surface. They may have a rocky core, and so one might argue that a sufficiently advanced race might be capable of removing all of the gas and terraforming that core to be more inhabitable - but I would say that any society with the capability of doing that probably has the capability of building a planet from scratch.
In that case there’s no need to do any kind of terraforming.
Was the Domain "sufficiently advanced"?
Is the lost fragment of the Domain which is the sector "sufficiently advanced"?
I think the answer to both those is very much "no".

You're doing a great job though!


Quote
Also, I'm not sure if I had that bug in DW:U myself but I did hunt ships drifting around all the time ...
Spoiler
If you ever built a military ship with construction equipment and used that ship to build a structure of some kind on a planet, that structure would 'drop off' the planet (like the mag fields). But the planet would read as exploited forever. Even if the structure is destroyed.
Only pirate empires ever had to worry about it given they can't build normal constructors for most of the game.
Salvaging ships was entirely unaffected. Which is good, because salvaging ships is "always right".
[close]

[e]

Trying to figure out a possible process map for going through the planet types, and spent some time doing this:


Not quite sure how difficult the branching thing after the first mirror/shade would be to implement though.
If it's going to be to complicated you could just push all types through terran eccentric like now, and have the other cat3s just feed in to that.

I've tried to make it as simple as I can, with each 'tier' of planet feeding into the next. So all the harsh planets merge into the barren. And then into each successive hab tier after that.
The first mirror/shade placement could possibly be moved further back if needed, but the second mirror/shade needs to be after hab3 so it can pick up any hot/cold habitable planets.
All types are accounted for, but this is not stricly nescessary. Would definitely add some polish later on if you could randomise the results of terraforming to cat_barren, and to cat3 (where applicable).

711
Modding / Re: [0.9.1a] Langly's Terraforming
« on: September 18, 2019, 09:37:14 AM »
Having played with this a little bit I have some suggestions, which you may use/discard as you like.

Lore compatibility:
  • Disallow terraforming on gas giants
  • Don't remove gravity conditions

The Domain would probably struggle to build worlds from the core up, or manipulate gravity on a planetary scale. And we're just a forgotten backwater with barely any knowledge to start with, and most of that has been lost.
Imo if you do nothing else, not allowing gas giants to be redecorated would be the one thing I'd suggest as "do this!"

Gameplay considerations:
  • When a planet is terraformed, it might be worth seeing if you can also add resource conditions to match it's new habitability - addition of farmland / organics
  • Separate the mild weather condition from the final stage, so you have to really go all in to get the 'perfect' world
  • Possibly worth considering leaving the meteorites condition alone, as that's kind-of beyond the scope of a single planet, and also covered by the planetary shield mod (which is imo a more logical way of getting rid of that one)

I noticed the magnetic aura getting 'dropped' and laughed, as it behaves almost exactly like the "non-role construction ship" bug in Distant Worlds.
Also noted that decivilised doesn't get touched. Which is good. That's a social problem, not a terrforming one.
Might be worth seeing if you could randomise the barren textures you get, but it's not exactly a priority.
Overall: Impressed.
No crashes. The only weirdness is the magnetic field. Simple to use. Doesn't overface the player with "stuff".
Looks like the start of something p. neat. Looking forward to seeing how this takes shape.

712
Modding / Re: [0.9.1a] Langly's Terraforming
« on: September 17, 2019, 10:18:11 AM »
I have no idea what would be required for coding, but something that could take the hot/cold modifier of the starting planet and have the terraforming send it down a specific route.
This way you could keep the hot/cold modifiers in order to have separate projects for building mirrors/shades if you wanted to do that.

And you couldn't progress beyond a certain point until you build them, or those conditions are saved until last. So you might terraform a hot barren world as far as being arid or jungle, and then get stuck until you build a shade or terraform again to remove the hot condition.

It might also be worth considering a bit of randomness in the terraforming 'outputs'.
The type of a planet doesn't affect it's habitability ouside of the hab category it's assigned to, which is entirely invisible to the player.
You could use the original hot/cold condition to specifiy that a planet could eventually become A, B, C. Or X, Y, Z.

For example:

Your 'worst case' starting conditions would possibly be irradiated.
Terraforming might then change that to barren.
After that it might go to barren desert, and then on to desert.
There it could split depending on the hot/cold in to arid or jungle for hot. And tundra for cold. Terran Eccentric could be a 'wildcard' here.
After that you either get your shade/mirror building above, or just go straight to terran.

So basically: cat_irradiated -> cat_barren -> cat_hab1 -> cat_hab2 -> cat_hab3 -> cat_hab4
There exists a cat_hab5 for 'better than terran' worlds. Not sure if this is currently used or not, but it might be an idea to include it in the possible end results if you want the final output to be terran.

You could also slip in the various other planet types into branches leading in.
So a toxic, volcanic or cryo world might lead into barren, and then on down the chain.
While a frozen world might be a special case where you can't terraform it directly until you build some mirrors to melt all the ice etc. and turn it directly into a water world.

Another possibility to consider is to explicitly not have terran as the end result.
Instead having terran eccentric as the 'best' result to represent the imperfect technology of the sector.
Or even just stopping at the cat_3 worlds.
This would increase the variety of planet types instead of just having all terrans everywhere, and keep 'natural' terran worlds still being somewhat valuable.


This is all just text on the internet though. Hopefully some of it might even be useful to you.

[e]
Some candidates for the industry image pulled from GIS:
Spoiler




[close]

713
Modding / Re: Question about portraits
« on: September 13, 2019, 08:37:40 AM »
As for ensuring the game only uses those...I have no idea.

In the mod_info.json add the following new line:
Code
"replace":["data/world/factions/player.faction",],

This will overwrite the player.faction with whatever you create.
Note: You will need to define all the player flags and link to name lists plus a few other things as well, otherwise it may not work as intended (or at all).
The easiest way around this is to copy player.faction from core and alter that to suit, just to make sure anything you don't want/need to change is still being covered.


714
General Discussion / Re: level up administrators
« on: September 09, 2019, 09:52:05 AM »
They do not level up.
The less good ones are there as an option to expand your holdings 'on the cheap', or temporarily without commiting to paying a fairly large salary.

715
General Discussion / Re: How often do you undergun mounts?
« on: September 09, 2019, 09:48:06 AM »
Regularly.
Early / mid game this is by using 'cheaper' weapons due to lack of availability, and building for saturation rather than finesse.
Late game once blueprints have been found and caches recovered, ships will tend to become more specialised around a single weapon / role.

I generally don't downsize weapons if I can help it. But blanked mounts are not uncommon. Especially for assymetric builds.
Excepting some specialised loadouts missiles will always be fitted wherever possible because they are just too valuable a tool, and as pointed out above they (usually) don't generate flux. But they also allow ships to reach out and attack things from a distance.
Missiles are especially valuable for Safety Overrides ships due thier ignoring the range restriction.

Ships on the whole 'feel' like they just don't quite have enough OP to fit what you want on them. Even with loadout design. But iirc, sometime back it might have been mentioned that that was the intent behind the design - a perpetual feeling of "choose A or choose B, can't do both".

716
Suggestions / Re: Please allow the Dutch to buy your game.
« on: September 08, 2019, 02:55:00 AM »
So that's not an option for me.
Apologies, I had no idea such a requirement existed. I certainly doesn't here.
Curiosity spurred me to read about Dutch banking and payment options for overseas. It certainly seems like it could be easier....
The phone number could possibly be related to the SMS push notifications / 2factor validation things? But if you've been burned by something similar before I can understand your reaction.
I hope you can find a way around this.

717
Suggestions / Re: Please allow the Dutch to buy your game.
« on: September 08, 2019, 02:23:29 AM »
UK folk have the option to use a debit card.
Is there a reason this is not available to a wider range of places? It seems like by far the easiest and least circuitous method of purchasing things.

I don't know how much effort it would require to expand the availability of the debit option, but it will very likely not be zero.
Nor do I know how much return would be seen for doing so, and whether it would be 'worth' the effort.
All I can add is that if debit had not been an option, I would have never bought this game.

718
General Discussion / Re: Venture, why?
« on: September 05, 2019, 09:11:46 AM »
Id rather the removal of the fighter bay all together if it gives the Venture a Salvage Gantry

I'd prefer the greater flexibility of fighters, but the game really does need some more salvage oriented ships.
I could live with this tbh.

719
General Discussion / Re: Venture, why?
« on: September 04, 2019, 09:00:42 AM »
Venture needs Salvage Gantry and proper fighter slots, not limited to mining drones.

I think the salvage gantry might be a bridge too far considering this is the 'base' level cruiser in the game. It can already reduce survey costs.
But I very much agree that an unlocked fighter bay like versions past, would make the ship somewhat more attractive for general use.

One of the reasons the Venture exists in the fashion it does and is assigned to the default base_bp, is to give in-game factions without access to a heavy industry the ability to field at least something that does a passable job of being a fleet anchor.
With the limited ability act as a carrier, the Venture would be a little more effective in this role for the tradeoff that the OP cost of the fighters still has to come out of the ship's loadout thus reducing it's already limited combat potential. This incentivises the use of 'cheap' fighters, but still leaves the option to specialise in that direction if desired.

If this is still too unbalanced for your taste, you could also consider removing the fighter bay and giving the Venture a built-in converted hangar. This would effectively restrict it's use of bombers, and even further incentivise the use of the cheaper fighters.

720
General Discussion / Re: Overrated (overpriced) ships
« on: September 03, 2019, 09:53:19 AM »
A lot of these Oddy builds seem to rely on some kind of kinetic fighter support or missiles.

Which is tricky for me, personally, as in my current game my best weapons are the pulse laser and HE beam. So I can't really build a lot of these for my fleet.
Odyssey works reasonably well as a beam platform with HIL + Tac. But it really struggles against cruiser/capital shields without either Sabot pods or Longbows.
If you have them, Sabot pods are preferable since that allows you to fit 2x Xyphos for more beams and PD.
Without Sabot, you could use Salamander.
The AI loves protecting it's engines from heatseekers, which provides a convenient opportunity for shooting unshielded things. The Starsector equivalent of shouting "look! behind you!" at someone, and then hitting them when they turn round.

<Endurance Odyssey>
This is a neat build. If you took this down the beam route and used Tachyons instead, that might make the flux a little easier to manage, and give you a few extra OP for use elsewhere. But you'd lose hard flux damage from your guns.
You'd also lose the weird interaction the plasma bolts have with the drive system that flings them really hard in the direction of travel. Whether this is a gain or a loss is down to your preference. I imagine someone somewhere will have perfected aiming these things like sniper bolts.
You could also swap the Pila for Salamanders for the same reason as above.

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