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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 - CrashToDesktop

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1
General Discussion / Re: How Do I Stop AI Theft?
« on: October 09, 2023, 03:40:55 PM »
You can adjust your colony's reaction to the AI inspection if you select the event in your intel screen. I'm not sure what the default setting is, but you can choose to actively resist it which will force the inspection to go past your ground defenses, but also puts you at war with the Hegemony once the inspection enters the system.

You can also not spam alpha cores on every building on your colony. It's hideously inefficient and it's not worth the hassle of dealing with the Hegemony. You can have a max of one alpha core on a planet (and no other cores) before the Hegemony starts taking notice, so just plop it on your colony's most profitable industry and move on.

2
Blog Posts / Re: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector
« on: September 08, 2023, 01:54:51 AM »
I imagined abyssal hyperspace to be much less dense than regular hyperspace. The lack of density could explain the reduced sensor range and the reduced speed, plus I feel thematically the total blackness of the place reflects a lack of density better than a higher one, as a nice foil to what you would normally associate with the blackness of the deep ocean.

3
General Discussion / Re: On SO Eradicators
« on: September 06, 2023, 01:09:37 PM »
I don't think SO by itself makes the overdriven Eradicators so overwhelming, I think it's a combination of SO and Shield Shunt. Shield Shunt cranks the AI's aggressiveness to 11 and actually allows the ship to take advantage of all the benefits of SO. If it has a shield, even with SO, it would try to back off and bleed flux in an effort of self-preservation, but with Shield Shunt it just gets in your face and unloads, only backing off after it sustains extreme damage or it's weapons get taken offline, both made more difficult by Shield Shunt and AWM.

4
Blog Posts / Re: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector
« on: September 02, 2023, 04:19:32 PM »
Well, that's good to hear. I'll keep an ear open for how to use wormholes in the meantime.

5
Blog Posts / Re: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector
« on: September 02, 2023, 02:43:09 PM »
I don't know, honestly, I have a hard time seeing how something that lets you travel literally across the Sector, instantly and almost for free, could end up being useless.

I think maybe what you're feeling is that you won't be able to stuff all of the new things into One Perfect System? Which, absolutely true. But the game has been moving away from incentivizing colonizing just one system, so you might consider this one small step in that direction, too.

But even colonizing one system, there are so many options. You might have 3 stable points and a gate and use a wormhole instead of a sensor array. You might have two stable points and a gate, and have a colony at a gas giant, so you can sacrifice a nav buoy since there's much less in-system travel time. You might not have a gate in-system and use a wormhole to travel to a system with a gate. You might have a gate, and place a wormhole in a nearby system *with* a gate; a two-step operation to get across the Sector to a specific destination seems worthwhile. And those are just the scenarios that come to mind immediately.
The question there is, how often do you really need to jump across the Sector? And cost isn't really an issue since Gate travel already minimizes fuel consumption, even moreso if you have Containment Procedures. The thought had occurred to me that you might just link one colony system to a Gate system for convenience, but you're making the assumption that you have at least one Stable Location to spare. In my experience, most systems have either one or no Stable Locations, those with two or three are rarer and tend to be completely empty. Which means, unless you were touched by RNG, you need bare minimum one for a Comm Relay in your colony's system, and then you'd have to eat the 5 story point cost to generate another for one end of the wormhole. Is there a change coming to Stable Location generation?

You also listed using sensor arrays and nav buoys. Nav buoys aren't needed for (most) systems, and sensor arrays can provide their slipstream detection bonus from up to 5 ly away, so you don't need those in-system either. I don't think anyone expects to have all the toys in their system, and most people would happily sacrifice one or the other for a wormhole - if they had them.

One important thing though, but can you realistically expect to acquire a Wormhole Scanner and both Wormhole Anchors before getting the Janus Device? I'm not asking for spoilers, but if I can get and use both before I complete the current extant of the storyline (at a reasonable pace), it could affect how useful they are, even if it means I end up picking them up and moving them later.

6
Blog Posts / Re: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector
« on: September 02, 2023, 03:52:08 AM »
Ah! I think you're making some assumptions about how easy it is to get a gate in a system of your choice, how long it might take, etc :)
True, though I feel the rest of my sentiments still stand about the wormhole. The use-cases feel much too narrow, and eating up a Stable Position on top of that just rubs salt in the wound. Maybe allow it, in addition to being placed in a Stable Location, to be slotted into the Population building of a colony which sets up an orbiting Wormhole Terminus like the Orbital Fusion Lamp? It requires a player colony in the system and using the Population item slot, as opposed to just a Stable Location, but it's much less punishing to use if RNG isn't in your favor with sector generation.

7
The "Doctrine & blueprints" tab under Command (where you access colony-related information) tells you exactly that. It states that without Heavy Industry, "...your colonies will use barely-spaceworthy junk exported by other factions. You can still view the blueprints you've acquired, but prioritizing them will have no effect." In fact, to be able to view your blueprints in the first place before you get Heavy Industry, you have to click through to acknowledge that.

8
Blog Posts / Re: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector
« on: September 01, 2023, 03:04:08 PM »
Very much looking forward to toying around with the new polarity reverse and slingshot mechanics - that'll make traversing hyperspace much more interactive.

Wormholes less so, the one cycle wait time means I'll likely have forgotten about the thing by time it's ready. Even if the instability period were dramatically reduced, I don't think it would make all modes of travel obsolete since you'd still have to retrieve one end of it the old-fashioned way, in your cargo holds flying through hyperspace, which means it would really only be useful in that very specific manner for exploration. Plus it eats up a valuable stable location, which makes placing it in your own colony system difficult, and difficult to set up in the Core as major factions really don't like it when you destroy one of their assets to plonk it down (depending on location and ownership, of course). But once you've got the Janus Device, finding a random Gate lets you do that without any of the hassle, and with the ability to build our own gates coming, it might invalidate the new item entirely for me. Hopefully you get these from Cyrosleepers or Motherships, but you need to defeat both [ALABASTER] encounters to get them, that's so far into the end game that I likely won't ever end up using them.

The abyss though, now that's the kind of mystery I like!
Spoiler
"You'd think from the name that abyssal hyperspace would have crushing pressure like Volturn's deep ocean. It's in fact quite the opposite, with nearly no medium to speak of and made of such pure blackness it's almost mesmerizing. But with that lack of medium comes some problems - it's like, uhh, like trying to use sonar in atmosphere, the quality of the return degrades excessively and you end up flying blind. Though, just like the deep dark of Volturn, there are... things out there that watch you, even if you can't see them."
[close]

9
General Discussion / Re: A Bombardment Predicament
« on: August 16, 2023, 09:23:31 AM »
Probably best to cut your losses here. Citadel Arcadia is an orbital and can't just be sneakily approached and tac bombed, so you're out of luck.

For next time: bombardment missions are best taken if you have a solid fleet and some marines already, or know the defences of the target planet by heart (bombing a planet like garnir is doable with a starter fleet, for instance, while something like chico is probably not.)
You need not know planet defenses by heart. While you're in the bar mission screen that shows the target location on the starmap, you can hit E to seamlessly enter the intel screen, then you can enter the regular map. From there you can check on local system terrain to see if it's favorable for a stealth approach, and by hovering over the target you can check if it has a station (if any) and whether or not it's military. You escape out of the map view and get put right back where you were in the bar encounter and make a decision to accept or not.

Very nice QOL stuff. Personally I'd make hitting E go straight to the map view rather than intel, since 9 times out of 10 the system map screen gives you the info you need.

10
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: August 04, 2023, 09:27:52 PM »
Two months with no blog post or even teasers on Twitter. Come on, man.
Speaking on this topic seriously, I do hope to see teasers / insight on progress posted on a platform other than Twitter. It's incredibly inaccessible now unless you have an account, which I have no plans to make.

11
In my experience, I don't find the Shepherd very useful in combat at all. If you absolutely need to use it in combat, you're still going to be in the early stages of the game where you won't be chafing against the fighter bay limit.

However, the suggestion to make the fighter bay limit based on deployed ships is a much better solution IMO. A basic status indicator like that for Nav or ECM representing the overall strength of the carrier skill(s) might not be ideal, but it's relatively easy to add.

12
Converted Fighter Bays does the job of removing the built-in wing and flight deck, plus some minor logistics benefits, and s-modding it even reduces maintenance costs. I slap that hullmod on just about every Shepherd I get.

Civilian ships with an open flight deck are another issue, though I don't know if just leaving the deck empty would sidestep it counting against the limit.

13
setDefenderOverride appears to work fine with derelict, remnant, and omega. If you specify any other faction, including vanilla factions like the hegemony, persean_league, etc., or any modded faction, it uses Task Force Safeguard instead.

14
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: May 09, 2023, 12:12:20 AM »
The Gigacannon turret sprite is off-center for me. The most glorious Sindrian strike weapon in the arsenal, and the engineers don't know how to center it on the turret ring!

15
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: May 06, 2023, 11:18:02 PM »
Wasn't Breach supposed to get a new "high tech" sprite?
The sprites did get tweaked, the formerly-grey sections on the launcher and rear half of the missiles now have a blue hue to them. Visually fits a lot better on most of the vanilla Midline and High Tech ships IMO.

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