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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: The Mora  (Read 25857 times)

Megas

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #15 on: April 22, 2017, 07:43:06 PM »

@ The_Soldier: I have a life beyond games.  My progress is slow because I have not spent as much time as I wanted playing Starsector.
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Vind

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #16 on: April 22, 2017, 08:02:55 PM »

 Damper field was already nerfed and no longer such a good ability. Mora is huge and using DF not helping very much as it deactivates weapons then used. Instead of using some tactics people complain.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #17 on: April 22, 2017, 08:05:14 PM »

@ The_Soldier: I have a life beyond games.  My progress is slow because I have not spent as much time as I wanted playing Starsector.
I agree with Meso: Dampener field needs to be kicked in the a**. I don't think people realize why it is so OP: It reduces damage BEFORE armor takes the hit.
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Cyan Leader

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #18 on: April 22, 2017, 08:12:21 PM »

Damper field was already nerfed and no longer such a good ability. Mora is huge and using DF not helping very much as it deactivates weapons then used. Instead of using some tactics people complain.

Mora's weapons are its fighters, those are still active during a dampener charge while you are increasing your flux trying to overload it. I've killed them before and there are (a few) tactics to do it effectively, but I'm not particularly found of fighting them.
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TJJ

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #19 on: April 22, 2017, 08:43:10 PM »

Yep, ridiculously OP.

Try fighting a fleet with 5 of them in it.
Killed everything else in their fleet, but the endless stream of fighters they could pump out meant nothing could get close enough for long enough to deal significant damage to any one ship.
Granted I didn't have any capital ships, nor was I particularly spec'ed against fighters, but this was the most frustrating fight in Starsector I've ever encountered.

You know the age-old 'harpoon spam deleting the ship at the head of your fleet' problem?
It's that level of frustration.... but with virtually unlimited munitions; whichever ship is at the front of your fleet gets focused down by a dozen wings of fighters - rinse and repeat.

Turns out OP fighters aren't fun to fight against; there's little satisfaction in destroying them, and whether on the giving, or receiving end, their very nature disempowers the player.

Oh and the frame rate in fighter-heavy battles compounds the frustration; very nearly dipping into single digits.
« Last Edit: April 22, 2017, 08:50:16 PM by TJJ »
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Vind

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #20 on: April 22, 2017, 08:57:46 PM »

So enemy ships now must be pleasant to fight? People then mora will be nerfed you will complain about next "hard" ship and before you know it game combat part will be walk in the park. It is not hard you know to focus fire - commands now regenerate over time, disable auto targeting which prefer fighters and just destroy the carrier.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #21 on: April 22, 2017, 08:59:47 PM »

So enemy ships now must be pleasant to fight? People then mora will be nerfed you will complain about next "hard" ship and before you know it game combat part will be walk in the park. It is not hard you know to focus fire - commands now regenerate over time, disable auto targeting which prefer fighters and just destroy the carrier.
Hellllllo Slippery Slope Argument!
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Voyager I

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #22 on: April 22, 2017, 09:04:55 PM »

So enemy ships now must be pleasant to fight? People then mora will be nerfed you will complain about next "hard" ship and before you know it game combat part will be walk in the park. It is not hard you know to focus fire - commands now regenerate over time, disable auto targeting which prefer fighters and just destroy the carrier.

Yes.  It's a game!  The whole point of the combat is that it's supposed to be enjoyable!  Fun doesn't mean easy and the best fights are usually the ones that are challenging in an interesting way, but the corollary to this is that harder does not directly imply better.  If players are consistently finding a fight to be tedious or frustrating that's a likely sign of a design problem that should be addressed (examples: domain drones are trivial challenges with simple AI that are boring to fight against, phase ships in 0.72 essentially got to cheat at positioning and the player had no real tools to counteract them other than huddling their fleet in a ball and waiting for their CR to run out).
« Last Edit: April 22, 2017, 09:07:54 PM by Voyager I »
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goduranus

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #23 on: April 22, 2017, 09:07:31 PM »

I've countered the Dampening field pretty effectively before, with the Afflictor's special ability that temporarily disables the other ship. Although Afflictors are pretty rare find, and it'd have to flush a full salvo of reapers to take down a Mora.

Toxcity

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #24 on: April 22, 2017, 09:12:52 PM »

The Mora isn't any harder to fight than other opponents, it's just extremely annoying compared to everything else. There are loadouts that can easily counter its fighters, but the Mora itself just takes such a long time to wear down. There's not even a window of opportunity to use strike weaponry due to how damper regenerates. While a nerf to the Mora's stats may suffice, a change to damper would definitely be welcome.

Making it so that damper runs on a cooldown (instead of charges) opens up a predictable window of opportunity to do damage. It wouldn't hurt other damper fielders too much since they are already easily killed when focused by larger ships.
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Techhead

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #25 on: April 22, 2017, 09:15:00 PM »

Yep, ridiculously OP.

Try fighting a fleet with 5 of them in it.
Killed everything else in their fleet, but the endless stream of fighters they could pump out meant nothing could get close enough for long enough to deal significant damage to any one ship.
Granted I didn't have any capital ships, nor was I particularly spec'ed against fighters, but this was the most frustrating fight in Starsector I've ever encountered.
You fought five cruisers with no capitals, weren't specced to deal with them, and were unable to beat them? Can I ask how large your fleet was? Because if you only had a few cruisers yourself, I'm just going to squint heavily at you.
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Az the Squishy

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #26 on: April 22, 2017, 09:15:44 PM »

So enemy ships now must be pleasant to fight? People then mora will be nerfed you will complain about next "hard" ship and before you know it game combat part will be walk in the park. It is not hard you know to focus fire - commands now regenerate over time, disable auto targeting which prefer fighters and just destroy the carrier.

I think you're missing the point. Fighters are a weapon now essentially. A weapon that never dies and can move. The mora has that going for it as well as a system that effectively lowers damage to 1/3 of it's original damage (not much for small things, but it adds up).  So the Mora can effectively be a steam-roller.

Even if the fighters are taken care of, the CR battle is lost unless you have ships equal or better than the Mora to kill it. With multiple Mora's, you now have several groups of flying weapons that continuously pelt you, and forming a death-ball of your own limits fire-power from the AI working to not kill you or each other in the cross-fire.

So, the Mora can sit-back and get out of harms way with all damage being mitigated by 67% while you try to rush forward controlling your cross-fire and more. All while having flying weapons shooting reapers, harpoons, EMP, Vulcan, and Swarmer munitions at you. It is not easy sure, two or one is a good challange. But more than that and it becomes a case of Carrier Blobs of thousands of Pirate-fighters again from 7.2 where you ended up running a Flak-fleet to counter the fighter death-balls.

Case an point with Goduranus (nice name by the way).
I've countered the Dampening field pretty effectively before, with the Afflictor's special ability that temporarily disables the other ship. Although Afflictors are pretty rare find, and it'd have to flush a full salvo of reapers to take down a Mora.

In my own mod, I made a variant of the Damper field, three, that allowed Movement. To make it Reasonable, I've lowered and charged the system with slow recharge so the player doesn't end up with what happened with Nemo...

https://youtu.be/pIek4rL6IiQ?t=610

So... that's what we have now. A weapon capable field that is not balanced for being weapon capable.

(I've been trying to post this for 5 minutes and every time someone has posted! LOL!!!)

Andy H.K.

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #27 on: April 22, 2017, 09:17:53 PM »

Relax, it's all part of the testing/balancing scheme. If it's too weak nobody will use it and test it.

Let me quote David Sirlin's essay on game balancing:

Spoiler
Quote
The other psychological effect to know about is what happens when you increase a move’s power. I learned about this Rob Pardo’s lecture on balancing multiplayer games at the Game Developer’s Conference, and I tried it on all the games I balanced, and I think Rob is right. He said that if you have a move that you’re not really sure how to balance, make it too powerful. If you make it too weak, then you run the risk of no one using it at all. Then, when you slightly increase its power, none of the testers will notice or care. They already decided that move is weak. Then if you make it slightly more powerful still, they still won’t care. Even when you inch it up past the reasonable level of power, it’s hard to get it on people’s radar and that makes it really hard to know how to tune the move.

Full essay here
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Az the Squishy

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #28 on: April 22, 2017, 09:21:58 PM »

Relax, it's all part of the testing/balancing scheme. If it's too weak nobody will use it and test it.

Where's my tin-foil hat?!?

Thaago

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Re: The Mora
« Reply #29 on: April 22, 2017, 09:36:22 PM »

Have fought one - was tedious more than anything else.

If you focus fire on the fighters with appropriate weapons * cough beams cough * you can neuter carriers in a shockingly short amount of time - the regen rate goes down fast. However, the Mora just refuses to die. Multiple salvos of high explosives from my own bombers barely even dent the stupid thing.

This was just fighting 1 - I imagine multiple being even more annoying.
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