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16

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 06:31:08 PM »

Nope, it does not. 

I was just curious from the "Can't please all people all the time" with a single game point of point of view.  You could at least imagine such a thing.  Probably can be modded.

Yeah, I did imagine it, and I asked in the miscellaneous modding questions thread if there's an easy way to dial down fleet size scaling. I took the lack of an answer as a "no".

17

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 06:27:37 PM »

I've never played dark souls, so I can't speak to it, but a solo frigate is already an optimal way to win a lot of easier fights, even with CR, so I can't really see how it would not be a dominant strategy. Why would you pay hundreds of supplies a month to have warships when you can get the exact same results with a single frigate? There's no benefit to using anything else.

Also, I can't imagine a way that playing a game without taking any levels would be optimal in any way. That sounds like a challenge run someone does just because they can. I don't get any enjoyment out of that sort of thing.

Optimal from what point of view? A single frigate may be optimal in terms of the amount of supplies used, but it takes a longer period of real-life time to fight that battle. There's no such thing as optimal, it's always a trade-off of one kind or another. There will still be trade-offs to be optimized if you take CR out of the picture. In fact, if you take CR and supplies out of the game, that single frigate ceases to be optimal from that point of view, since deploying a larger force is no longer going to incur a higher cost. It would do the opposite of what you think; rather than exacerbate the solo frigate issue, it would fix it.

I don't either, but I don't oppose that option being present in the game for those that do.

18

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 06:01:14 PM »

Re: difficulty - yeah, just one primary difficulty mode is hard enough to balance. I'd rather throw in more options that someone that's having a tougher time can make use of.

Does difficulty affect fleet compositions? The pop-up just mentions damage reduction, sensor range, and extra loot. Personally I'd much prefer a "enemy fleets are smaller" easy mode rather than "you take less damage".

19

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 05:52:39 PM »

I enjoy the optimization aspect of games on its own. If the game lets me do a thing, but it isn't a good way of solving the problems in the game, I still can't do that thing without losing my enjoyment of the optimization aspect of the game. If you get rid of CR and the optimum fleet becomes a solo frigate that kills everything, that whole optimization aspect of the game is lost. It's fine if you don't care about that, but clearly a lot of other people do.

I don't think that optimization would stop being a good way of solving problems, it's just that without CR, you'd be the one to decide what "good" means in that context rather than having it dictated by the game. I would never consider a solo frigate to be the 'optimal' way of playing the game simply because killing fleets with it would take forever, and likewise I wouldn't want to deploy overwhelming numbers of ships either because then I wouldn't get to do any fighting myself. To borrow an example from Dark Souls again, people don't stop optimizing their builds just because the game allows you to finish it with with a level 1 character or grind XP until you max out every stat (both of which could be considered 'optimal' from different points of view). People don't stop playing melee either just because casters are stronger and easier. As I said earlier, mechanics that enforce optimization in the way CR does are very rare, most games don't have them, and we play and enjoy them perfectly well regardless. So I think your fears are unfounded, I think if CR disappeared tomorrow, you'd still play the same way you do now and continue enjoying it just as much.

20

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 04:39:29 PM »

I mean... nothing stops you from doing it other than the supply cost. If you have the supplies to do it... just do it? There's plenty of 'fun' things in games that are not exactly optimal. Committing crimes in TES games like Skyrim? Probably not optimal, but plenty of fun. Is that what the game is about? No.

That's technically true, you can do that, but then you run out of supplies way quicker and have to go buy more. Or you have to take skills that increase the loot you get, at the expense of skills that enhance the core combat gameplay. So while playing in a way that the dev doesn't approve of is possible, the game does penalize you for it, and that's just not nice.

To borrow an example from one of my favorite games, Dark Souls does absolutely nothing to enforce 'optimal' play. You can use your Megasword of Genocide +15 to turn basic zombies in the starting area into fine paste as much as you want, and the game never goes, "No, no, you're doing it wrong, I'm going to penalize you by making your sword lose durability faster, so that you have to take more frequent breaks to go repair it." That would be stupid, yet in Starsector people defend it? And it works the other way around as well, Dark Souls never makes it impossible to overcome any given challenge just because you're using a 'sub-optimal' build. You can finish the entire game with a level 1 character using nothing but bare fists; people have. Sure, having a good build with good gear helps a ton, but it's not necessary. Good luck killing [redacted] or [super redacted] with nothing but a Hound. And yet I'm sure you'd agree Dark Souls is not a simplistic or shallow or easy game. I wish Starsector was more like Dark Souls.

There's been a lot of mitigation around the cost of losing a ship so that even if you guess wrong, the punishment isn't so severe. Ability to passively remove D-mods, ability to build your own ships, more ability to recover own ships, etc. Yeah, I'd love if the AI was a bit smarter at times, but fixing that issue is a very difficult problem. The punishment for losing a ship is not nearly as bad as it used to be. Is good now? Debatable.

Eh... yes, it's been mitigated somewhat, but that d-mod removal skill is quite deep into that skill branch, not to mention that I have no clue if it's even worth taking. "A chance to remove a d-mod every two months"? How much of a chance? 90% 25%? 1%? The game doesn't say, and I'm sure as hell not about to invest four skill points and spend several in-game years to collect a big enough sample size to be able to figure it out. Even if it was guaranteed, 2 months is too long. If it was "remove a d-mod every week", yeah, I'd spend 4 skill points to get it.

As for dumb AI, the other way to mitigate the issue is to make the player stronger so that their AI allies play less of a role. I've been advocating that for some time now.

This is just wrong, you get DP back when you retreat a ship.

Yes, I realized and removed that part of the post. I could swear I've had battles where that didn't happen, though. Maybe I'm just misremembering.

Yeah, but at this point, it's no longer in the scope of this discussion and more about 'what issues still exist in Starsector?'. Late game balance isn't great right now. I agree there. The junker strategy needs better balance than "here's some unkillable ships because reasons." But CR and spending supplies is not really a lategame problem unless you want to talk about chain battles, which seems to be a Nexerelin issue more than a vanilla one (how many times do you really get forced into more than 2 back to back battles in vanilla?)

The thing with supplies is that it's not just the in-game currency cost that's the problem; you're right that that disappears as you progress. It's also the real-world time and annoyance cost. Having to go back to resupply is just tedious and annoying, especially because you have to deal with unresponsive, rubberbandy fleet controls and hyperspace storms that bounce you around like a pinball. If I was in charge, those would receive a major overhaul. The overworld map gameplay has never been fun in this game; from the very first version it got implemented, I considered it nothing but padding between the fun bits. The Hyperdrive mod helps a ton, but even that can only do so much to mitigate the underlying issue.

As for back-to-back battles, I don't need to be forced into them. I want to fight them. The less overworld travel I have to do to get from one battle to the next, the better. The issue for me is that the game mandates taking those breaks and doing that travel, or at least a lot more of it than I think it should.

At the end of the day, you are always going to want more features, more options, more everything, but there's only so much that can be done, especially with such a small team.

No, I've been asking for the exact opposite. Like I said, I think the dev is like a writer without an editor, and as a result the game is in dire need of trimming all the fat. He's created a wonderfully clever, complex, and interconnected system, but unfortunately that doesn't make the game more fun when all those mechanics just serve as restrictions against playstyles he doesn't like. I don't want more, I want less.

21

Suggestions / Re: * DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 02:47:56 PM »

Removing battle size limits lets the player overwhelm the enemy with pure numbers, which is fine if thats what is fun for you, but it is a severe handicap if the player does have an effective, concentrated fleet.

[...]

removing limits would make that player need more ships, rather than less, to take on the same fleet.

Surely that's why that battle size slider in the settings exists? So that the player can adjust this aspect of the game to their own preferred playstyle? (There could be more elegant, in-universe ways of doing that, but that's a tangent I don't want to get into here.) I'm sorry to kinda spill over this discussion topic from my own thread into this one, but this is yet another example of the dev putting too strict of a limit on what playstyles are allowed. The reason Linnis has to resort to editing files is that, as designed by the dev, the battle size slider doesn't go high enough to accommodate their preferred playstyle.

22

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 02:25:09 PM »

I think deploying your massive battleship to kill 1 frigate loses its fun value very quickly. You can do some 'fun' things once or twice, even if it isn't optimal, but while I smirk when my Paragon absolutely deletes a Kite, the game would not be better if that's all you did -- chew up outmatched opponents.

If you don't find it fun, then don't do it? That's no reason to support taking it away from people who do enjoy it. This right here would be the "screw you, I got mine" attitude I mentioned.

The game wants you to accurately estimate what it will take to win a battle. If you want to spend a bit more for a more secure victory, you can do that. To use a RL example, the US does not deploy a carrier group to deal with piracy off the African coast, when a few ships will do the job.

I know, but that's exactly my complaint. That's the one playstyle the game pushes you into. If you happen to like that playstyle, good for you, but the game could be so much more than just this.

Not to mention that it's not actually possible to make that estimation accurately due to the dumb AI and lack of command points issues I mentioned.

Nothing stops you from going with a chain flagship strategy, if it still works, where you deploy 1 ship until it starts running out of CR, then you deploy the next and transfer command, etc.

"Nothing stops you, unless something does." Good one.

You can also go with the other side of it now, with Derelict Contingent and try to flood the field with crappy ships that have relatively low supply costs to maintain.

Yes, I suppose you can still do that, but if the dev's comments on it are any indication, the nerf bat is rapidly approaching this particular strategy's face.

If you have actually reached the point where you have a big fleet with officers, then you are probably also at the point where an extra 100 supplies per battle is no longer a serious concern, especially now that you can back your fleet up with a strong economic base from colonies.

As a player, you are trying to assemble your super awesome fleet, but there's significant hurdles in your way, which is the game. It's perfectly achievable, it's rather trivial to set up 3-4 colonies to earn 500k+/month. Once you have that, you basically don't have to care about CR, just take like 2 Atlases and 2 Prometheis full of supplies and fuel, since the credit cost is immaterial at that point.

Yes, but at that point you run into this issue here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20344.0

I can't say I'm the biggest fan of how the skills are set up now, but the ideas are there. Combat = you are stronger, Leadership = Officers are stronger (and it seems carriers as well?), Technology = Ships are stronger, Industry = You have more stuff/your campaign layer is stronger.

That's a whole other topic that would be more suitable for the skill impressions thread that this got split off of, but let's just say I'm not a fan of the strict level cap. I see no reason to limit the player to less than half of the available skills.

In this respect also, I get the feeling that the game doesn't know what it wants to be. Are you supposed to play one character for three hundred hours? Or is it supposed to be like a roguelite where a playthrough is a couple hours, and then you go again with a different build? The skill system is set up as if it's the latter, but the rest of the game is the former. There's plenty of successful and fun games of that type that don't have any such limitation, like for instance Skyrim (and the entire TES series in general). Not only can you max out all the skills in that, the devs even realized that once you max a skill, you can't gain any more levels by using it, so they patched in the option to reset it back down to zero, just to avoid pushing players into unwanted playstyles. Starsector's new ability to respec helps a lot in this respect, but the dev could still learn a lot from good old Skyrim.

In the previous version, I used (a customized version of) the SkillUp mod that lets you keep leveling and eventually gain all the skills, and you know what? I still didn't feel overpowered at that point.

23

Suggestions / Re: *** DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 02:22:07 PM »

I really hope someone makes a mod to stop the enemy from cheating like this. I feel that would help alleviate a lot of this game's issues.

24

Suggestions / Re: Chicomoztoc (Hegemony colony) cannot be destroyed by saturation bombardment

« on: April 01, 2021, 01:10:59 AM »

Yes, but in morrowind saving was part of the lore and one of the critical characters knows the player has this ability.

Don't know if SS would benifit from such a thing though.

There was also the back-path through the main quest, allowing you to finish the game despite killing critical characters (contrary to what that message told you).

25

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: April 01, 2021, 12:09:26 AM »

Please don't put words in my mouth.

I do not do the 'obligatory frigate dance' that you have described. In fact, I often do the opposite and deploy my heavier ships first and send them to capture a point, then deploy my faster ships to catch up so that they all hit together. Or I hold back my fast ships entirely because the enemy has overwhelming fighter cover and/or hunter frigates of their own. Or, I deploy my fast ships and keep them around. But I've never done what you've described. My point is that the things that you are describing as immutable fact are actually opinion.

CR creates time pressure. If thats not for you, well I'm sorry the game changed in a way that you don't like. That is unfortunate. But time pressure is an extremely common and universal feature in many games.

It's not about putting words in your mouth, it's about taking what you said to its logical conclusion. I simply can't stand people who oppose changes that would benefit others without harming them in any way. This "screw you, I got mine" attitude is very common in echo chambers populated by fans. Which is part of the reason why my post count is so low; not a lot of point bringing up criticisms or suggesting changes in a place populated almost exclusively by people who are going to vehemently disagree. Admittedly I'm a dumbass, so I have to relearn that lesson every few years all over again.

I'm not sure why you seem to think that that somehow invalidates my point. Okay, so you do a different dance at the beginning. You still do a silly dance because the arbitrary lack of some abstract points is preventing you from just deploying everything at once. I don't see why anyone thinks that that makes the game better in any way.

Time pressure is definitely not universal, that part is just outright false. As for being extremely common, I'm not sure I believe that either. In my experience, where they exist at all, time limits on battles are usually an optional thing that can be turned off in the settings. That's because most game devs recognize that a lot of people don't like them, so they make them optional to create a good experience for as many players as possible. The fact that Starsector doesn't do that is part of the "my way or the highway" issue I've been criticizing here.

It's bad game design to have an optimal strategy that's boring, and then expect players to not do the optimal strategy. Sid Meyers also mentions that "one of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves". The optimal strategy should be fun.

That's my point exactly. "I should hold back because deploying my awesome big battleship will eat too many supplies" may be optimal but it's not fun. I worked hard to get that battleship, dammit! Being able to curb stomp some small fry with it is part of the reward for all that effort, but the game discourages it because it's not optimal.

The problem with autoresolve is that it promotes skipping the 'fun' part of Starsector, the combat. You already have autoresolve for pursuits (which generally does better than actually playing it out, I find...), which prevents the classic autoresolve issue of 'your invincible unit randomly decided to commit suicide in this battle... somehow', or Total War's 'higher difficulty = super imbalanced autoresolve so it's a trap to press the button'. Starsector is still heavily a space combat game. The space combat is IMO the best part about Starsector. It doesn't make too much sense to promote skipping the space combat in Starsector.

Forcing the player to fight battles also promotes fighting fairer battles. Instead of just picking smaller fleets to constantly autoresolve against, it promotes actually finding more challenging battles, since it's a better use of time.

Eh... combat is the main source of fun in Starsector, that's true, but that doesn't mean every battle is fun or worth fighting manually. Starsector tries to get around that with the CR and supply mechanic, by pushing you toward making those fights more challenging for yourself. But that kinda makes it feel like a self-imposed challenge rather than overcoming a real challenge, and a lot of people (myself included, obviously) aren't into that. So they don't do it, take the CR hit, and then complain that CR is annoying. You could say that that's my own fault and that I'm playing the game wrong, and I'd respond that the dev failed in his responsibility to protect me from myself as per Sid Meier's words.

There's this weird incongruity that is difficult to put into words. It's as if the game doesn't know whether it wants to be stat-based or skill-based. Where does player power come from in Starsector, stats or skills? The management aspects of the game point toward stat-based: you scavenge and trade to get cash, you establish colonies, you accrue a large fleet, outfit it with big guns, staff it with officers, etc. When it comes to deployment, the game discourages you from using the power you've accumulated and instead pushes you to fight on equal footing, as if it were skill-based. But when it comes to the actual battle itself, most of your power is in AI ships that you have very little control over compared to more conventional strategy games, so the game has switched to stat-based again. Except you don't have your stats, because you held back in deployment. The game discourages you from using your stats to win (because if you do, you waste CR), and it doesn't allow you to use your skills either (because you can barely control other ships, and your own keels over and dies after a few minutes). The dev doesn't understand what fantasy the game caters to; being able to assemble a large fleet of awesome warships is a power fantasy, but then the game punishes you for using that power and tries to make you struggle and scrape by anyway as if it's some kind of survival game.

26

General Discussion / Re: Pet Peeves

« on: March 31, 2021, 06:41:16 PM »

1. New bar quest. Would it possible to hyperlink the system in question onto the galactic map? Just a name and distance isn't good enough if I just want to pick up a bounty or something on the way to a real job. Is there a search function for a particular sector?

Yeah, that one's really bad. Unless you have photographic memory, you have to decline, go to the map, find the system (no search box to type into, natch), then go back in the pub to accept the mission if it's in the direction you want to go. A link to the map would be great, but even just specifying direction in addition to distance would help a lot here.

4. Is it possible to check the price of items on another planet within the system you are in? I mean, you can see max/min prices of certain items from across the galaxy if you right click it but it can't show me the price of food on a planet next door?

And ships! If I'm shopping around to buy a specific ship, why make me go door to door like it's 1947? Does TriTach not run a spyware-laden, private-data-gathering search engine on their tablets that everyone is using?

27

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: March 31, 2021, 06:26:20 PM »

I don't do that and am still winning fights. Its not required.

So you wouldn't mind the removal, since it wouldn't impact you in any way? Cool.

28

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: March 31, 2021, 06:20:55 PM »

Players love to optimize gameplay. The classic saying is that 'players will optimize the fun out of the game'. If you can solo every fleet in the game with a solo Hyperion, there will probably be people that do exactly that. It might be fun to do once, or a few times, but not something people want to do repeatedly.

I mean, if it's not fun for you, then don't do it? Seems a simple enough solution to me. And if someone does do it repeatedly, then it must be fun for them. Why take it away from them when that removal doesn't benefit you in any way, since you wouldn't do it even if you could?

On the other hand, if there was no supply cost to deploy my entire fleet, then when I'm facing a weaker fleet, I'll just deploy the whole fleet, alt tab, come back to the victory screen. Fun. Might as well add autoresolve at that point.

Yes, might as well. There's a lot of games that have it, like Mount&Blade, Total War, and many others. There's a good reason for that, forcing the player to fight every single battle makes the game tedious and unfun. Making the player limit their own power is even worse. What's the point of having progression, of acquiring more and better ships with bigger guns, if the game is going to artificially enforce parity with weaker enemies anyway? Starsector doesn't even have the decency to just scale the enemies to match you like most games do, instead it makes you hold back with a threat of punishment. That just feels extremely unsatisfying and is part of the general problem of using negative motivation to push the player into doing something that's not enjoyable.

Using XCOM (EU/EW) Long War as an example, one issue was that the optimal strategy in most cases was to creep slowly up the map, spamming overwatch so that you never had a bad pod activation. I guess I didn't play XCOM 2 that much (didn't play LW or even WoTC), but I felt like they went too far in the opposite direction, where strict mission time limits meant that you were rushing around, combined with fairly punishing effects for leaving practically any enemy alive to take a turn.

Huh. I guess I was right to avoid every XCOM after Enemy Within, because by the sound of it I would like them even less than it.

Personally, I'd love to see more hull mods that interact with CR/PPT/recovery cost, (I know mods add some), such as something for fast frigates with low PPT to capture points quickly (you could use SO + UI for this, but that's a lot of OP when you often just want something quick that can stand its ground against another light ship, then leave the battle when larger ships show up (something like -75% PPT and -50% recovery cost would work). So far, there's just SO, Eff Overhaul, and Hardened Subsystems. Right now, you can argue that Efficiency Overhaul is a trap hull mod, but that's mostly because it's far too easy to make infinite money currently.

Ugh, don't even get me started. The fat trimming I mentioned? The obligatory frigate dance at the start of every battle would be one of the first things to go. Deploy frigates, capture points, retreat the frigates and deploy the big ships, rinse and repeat every single time in exactly the same way. It's just a load of boring busywork, but you gotta do it because guess what, there's a punishment if you don't.

29

General Discussion / Re: Does anyone actually try to path around hyperspace storms?

« on: March 31, 2021, 05:49:32 PM »

Yes, but only because I hate being bounced around like a pinball. If they displayed the direction they're going to accelerate you in, I'd try to plan my path and ride them, but since it's random, I try to avoid them when I can. Except during long journeys to the outer fringes of the sector, where you get those giant clouds of deep hyperspace littered with storms. There's no way to fly through those without getting hit, so I just set my destination and browse Reddit or something on my second monitor while the fleet does its Brownian motion thing (such riveting gameplay!). Neither the speed boost nor the supply cost has ever been a consideration, and I have never found myself in a situation where I had to meet a tight deadline and riding the storms was the only way to make it in time.

30

General Discussion / Re: Complaints about CR and game design

« on: March 31, 2021, 02:24:16 PM »

Console Commands:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=4106.0

The commands AddSupplies and InfiniteCR seem to be ones that would satisfy your current criteria.  Supplies becomes unimportant if you can add them on a whim, and using infiniteCR lets you solo a fleet in a frigate if you like.  Other commands can similarly make fuel and credits non-issues, as well as providing any ship in the game you want at any time.

Eh... I guess? But that's just cheating. Even though I think CR is bad, the issues it addresses are real and would be left unaddressed. I was hoping for something a bit more... comprehensive, but thanks for the suggestion anyway. I might give it a shot. I was also considering raising the level cap and/or increasing the number of skill points per level so that I could take logistics skills in addition to combat-focused ones in order to make the CR leash a bit looser.

I'd argue the dev is a writer with an editor (he gets plenty of feedback).  However the writer's later books are starting to mix different genres in a way that you don't like.  Nothing wrong with that on either side.  Tastes differ.  Everyone doesn't like every genre of book.

Getting feedback is not the same thing as having an editor. The players can't put their foot down and demand changes in the same way an editor can.