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1

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 14, 2024, 06:08:07 AM »

People calling me dumb because I can skillfully pilot my flagship and actually make a difference in fights, today I have truly seen everything.

And please drop the ridiculous notion of "unless it can beat 5 Ordos, it's bad", that's playing a completely different game and has no basis whatsoever in discussions unless the final mission of this game is going to be "kill 5 Ordos to get a You win screen". I won't be continuing this joke of a so called discussion when some have nothing to say except throw insults and do olympic mental gymnastics fit for a gold medal.

2

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 14, 2024, 05:32:03 AM »

I usually only put a single point in Leadership (Crew training) and I really don't feel my fleets are any weaker for doing that. Last playthrough I went with BotB, it honestly felt annoying always needing to get more SPs. Can't remember if that one was in the previous version or this one but it doesn't matter that much. The point is I can take almost any combination of skills and have a good run with no problems. Hell one day I'd like to do a zero skill run, just for the experiment. Well maybe grabbing Navigation just so it doesn't take too long.

There are no mandatory skills in Starsector. If you're having a hard time deciding which skills to get, and how to get everything you want with the limit of 15 skill points then that's great. It means Alex did a great job balancing them.

For those that think Combat skills are not worthy, give them an actual shot and pilot your ship, even someone that sucks at the game mechanically can at least do a much better job of clicking the left mouse button to fire the missiles at a more appropriate time than AI would do.

And finally, as someone who complained about a bajillion things on this forum, I can firmly say that the current skill system is far better than anything we had. Get your rose tinted glasses off, you're focusing on a single good thing in the past while there were 10 other issues you ignore. Can the skills be even further improved as of right now? Maybe. But I'm perfectly happy with them now, and would rather see the game improved in areas that it's lacking, rather than have a skill system rework #69.

3

Suggestions / Re: Decrease High Scatter Amplifier OP cost down to 3/5/7/10

« on: April 13, 2024, 01:35:01 PM »

Not very sound arguments I must admit. "People used Exp Mags before" has nothing to do with the s-mod bonus. You're giving up a bunch of OP (it's on of the cheapest hullmods there are) to gain a bonus you can't get normally.

Advanced Optics gives you more range on already long range weapons. That's a very potent power multiplier in a fleet setting so even if it was more expensive it would see uses.

Can't really compare anything to HSA, which could use lower OP cost as suggested by the original topic here, and with that bump the s-mod effect.

Shield Shunt also needs an s-mod bonus buff.

Basically, when there's more unique setups, there will be more choices and so some things won't appear too prevalent like right now. Exp Mags is common because it's easy to pull off, you just need a ship that's not terribly slow and charge based weapons. It's strong because you make deadly ships even more deadly.

4

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 13, 2024, 07:44:57 AM »

I also thought about the reduction of max officer levels, but to me the biggest downside would be the "feel" of the ships, some just don't give you enough bang for your buck when you don't have (or have little) skills for them. Easiest example to give is Onslaught vs Paragon. Onslaught being hot garbage out of the box, while Paragon is straight up strong and you could honestly have a single skill on it (Field Modulation) and it would be competitive against everything else. Not saying I would hate having lower level officers, I've just been so used to the current format, the game would feel too slow with that change.

5

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 12, 2024, 12:13:19 PM »

I would suggest that every level you get to put 1 point into a combat skill and 1 point into a non-combat skill (anything the officers can't get). This would make you feel like you get stronger personally along with your fleet and probably feel a lot better.

And this is why it's never going to work like that, since that makes for a boring rpg and general decision making process. You ALWAYS have to spend a point in combat, and a point in fleet, no matter how much you dislike flying your own ship, and on the other hand, not focusing on your own ship enough. This system makes those who split points near evenly feel a bit better (the whole point of skills in games is to have a tough choice), but screw over everyone else. And that's a lot of playstyles you shot in the foot.

At this point I need to bookmark threads like these so I can just link them the next time someone gets the same exact flawed idea.

6

General Discussion / Re: Are d-mods supposed to vary in severity?

« on: April 12, 2024, 11:53:46 AM »

Yearly reminder that all d-mods in the world can't stop a fleet built around missile spam.

7

Suggestions / Re: Hull Restoration is way too overpowered

« on: April 11, 2024, 11:16:32 PM »

Also: I am getting a very strong sense of deja vu from this thread. I swear I've read something very similar(and just as aggressively wrong) before.

Every new player goes through the phase of thinking Hull restoration is broken good. These threads pop us every so often.

8

Blog Posts / Re: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More

« on: April 11, 2024, 12:37:36 AM »

I'm all for this QoL update, salivating at the sheer amount of imporevements that I've been wanting since forever basically.

But can't believe I almost forgot to ask the most important question (sorry if this was mentioned in the blog post and I missed it), with the increased amount of saves that we'll have now, will deleting them finally be quicker? 3 autosave slots on default, and I reckon people will save more often now that there's descriptions and a faster saving speed. That become a larger number and if we're stilll going to need to write manually "delete" for each single one, then I'm going to be really sad.

9

General Discussion / Re: Does anything genuinely benefit from the existence of story points and s-mods?

« on: April 08, 2024, 01:55:25 AM »

Not to mention Starsector has barely anything in it resembling a roguelite game, it's primarily an RPG. And in most RPGs, when you character or party dies, you reload the last save.

Because I assume majk meant a full fleet wipe. What can you expect from something like that, to have a mesagge pop up "It was all just a dream"?

10

General Discussion / Re: tell me few things about this game

« on: April 06, 2024, 12:23:07 PM »

From what I understand game is more a strategy / tactical than arcade?

I know this is a useless answer but honestly it depends.

Early game when you only have small, fast ships and are fighting similar opponents there is very little strategy and arcade skill can greatly improve the odds of victory.

Later on fights get much bigger and you have more to think about (fleet setup, each individual ship loadouts, etc.) so you could even say 50% of the fight is determined before it even begins.

And final factor is what kind of ship do you pilot, some don't require reflexes and fast thinking, just carefully picking and shooting at targets while not dying yourself.

But if we're looking at the whole picture and average playthrough, I'd say yes, there's more strategy involved in the game, albeit not the kind of strategy you have in RTS game, microing units and so, but strategy on a larger scale.

11

Suggestions / Re: Admiral Mode

« on: April 06, 2024, 08:26:56 AM »

suggested this a few years back, but figured it was worth bringing up again. always struck me as odd that for all the things you can do in this game, and all the ways you can play it... you MUST play as a ship pilot.

How is it odd to pilot a ship in a space RPG that started as a bunch of combat scenarios? If anything it's odd not piloting your ship because the entire game is built around that:
- combat skills
- orders that aren't really orders
- limited command points
- smart enough AI which is designed to follow the player's movement and actions in combat

I know it's basically a meme to say "You're playing the game wrong", but I firmly believe it's a sin to play Starsector without ever once trying to pilot your flagship. And I know a ton of players play like that and then express their frustrations online. The game just wasn't designed as an RTS in mind, that's the fact. And any amount of trying to cater to that playstyle will actively hurt the game design, as again, it was originally built as a pew pew shmup with AI comrades.

Just like how you can play through the entire Elden ring playthrough without ever once swinging a sword, doesn't mean that you should. You're free to prefer a certain playstyle, but sometimes you're just robbing yourself of game mechanics and gameplay that you just can't have if you're ignoring a big chunk of it.

Sorry for going so hard on a simple suggestion, I just want to actively cut any RTS ideas because that's asking for an entirely different game, and the development plus final product would be greatly hurt with it.

BUUUUT you bring up good points about more information when viewing your ships. It is bit of a hassle to check the status of each ship while looking around the tactical map.

12

General Discussion / Re: 0.97 IR Pulse Laser Thread

« on: March 28, 2024, 12:38:14 PM »

Ok maybe using the word bunch was a bad idea, didn't mean literally filling the ship with them. But 4-5 of them around to smack fighters and frigates is useful to have. Burst PDs lose their DPS after the charges run out, unless you're going for an s-modded Exp Mags build.

13

General Discussion / Re: 0.97 IR Pulse Laser Thread

« on: March 28, 2024, 12:29:43 PM »

I said similar and then explained how such a ship would look like. Why are you focusing on the Odyssey so hard when I immediately made it clear that such setups aren't good on it because of other weapons + fighters?

14

General Discussion / Re: 0.97 IR Pulse Laser Thread

« on: March 28, 2024, 09:52:57 AM »

I pretty much never use Tac Laser, and why would I spend so much OP just to have an IR Pulse Laser but colored green...

EDIT: Guess it becomes better when your fleet synergizes around beam spam, but that playstyle is mindnumbingly boring to me.

15

General Discussion / Re: 0.97 IR Pulse Laser Thread

« on: March 28, 2024, 09:44:30 AM »

Could it use a few more ships where it works well? Yeah, probably. But I'm not entirely sure what those hypothetical ships would look like. Maybe something kindof like the shrike but with a more general-purpose mobility system and extra small turrets instead of the medium? Maybe? I dunno.

Just spitballin a quick idea even if it's not super related to the thread.

Something with a similar setup of the Odyssey could see use of IR Pulse Lasers, Gigacannons and Paladins. So bunch of small energy mounts, zero mediums and then a couple of large energies so that it makes low flux weapons more desirable.

Odyssey is seriously nice with a bunch of IR Pulse Lasers but it kinda switched to a semi-missile ship with a few changes. Switched large energy to synergy, removed the tight convergence point, much more speed potential but also weaker shields. It wants to use missiles. And it also has fighters. So something without all of those boons should be ideally motivated to have a unique setup of weapons.

And for the love of god please no more "move only forward" ship systems, half ot the roster has that ability.

Back to the main topic now: IR Pulse Lasers have good DPS for their size but horrible damage per shot, you know what's the complete opposite? It's Gigacannon, bingo! Match made in heaven yet there isn't a single ship where this loadout makes sense.