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Vladimir

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New player feedback and intro.
« on: May 05, 2017, 02:24:33 PM »

Greetings capsul.... ugh.... wrong game...

Hello Pilots!

tl;dr: I have been asked by a friend who is a veteran StarSector pilot to write down my impressions as a first-time player. I will do so below, in the sincere hope that they will provide useful feedback. So far, I have 1 horribly failed StarSector play, and one game in-progress with a lvl 38 pilot. I figured that about now is the time to write this, while I have played a bit of it, but I'm still having that "new player" experience.
Be prepared for a wall of text.


Long version:


Let me give you a little bit of background about myself.
I'm an average 37 years old dude that has been wasting time around computers ever since games came on audio tapes.
I'm quite sure that wasn't such a long time ago...


While being just a "filthy casual", I am used to weird games with a rather steep learning curve. Among my obsessions, I am counting Space Engineers, Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm DDA, Unreal World (URW), Stalker, Homeworld 1,2 & Cataclysm.
Aside from the above, If it's a Sandbox, I've probably at least tried it.
I'd like to make a point that not only I did manage to successfully play Battlecruiser 3000AD (Universal Combat), but I managed to be quite good at it, and get quite far.

Now, compared with that game, StarSector should be a breeze, right?
Wrong.

Let me conclude by saying that yes, I do like the game, yes, I have some favorite things about it, but we're not here to sing praises, are we now?

So I'll dive straight in, and start with...

(woo-hoo, look at grandpa' using old normie memes!)

1. I'll be damned, I did not manage to pass the tutorial at first.
For some reason I was inclined to think that one is supposed to "mine" debris fields.
Fresh in the game, I ignored the size of my first salvage load, the second one got me a few metal plates, so did the third, and the fourth, and I believed that to be the normal outcome. I did notice that they are worth almost nothing, but I also did see the loading screen hint that says "trading is not profitable because of taxes, you have to take advantage of events"

And it made sense. Because in Freelancer Discovery you do the same thing. Fresh off the boat, you gather a load of crud, which is worth nothing in your starting system, but across the map, is in quite high demand.

And nobody told me "look, doofus, salvage once, okay?"

Thus I happily ruined my financial status hoping for a miracle at the end of the rainbow! (SS was already emulating RL too much at this point)
To make matters worse, I also noticed some derelict ships along the way, scrapped those as well, because not like I was planning to start an army right now.
And promptly got myself stuck, unable to beat the pirate fleets at the gate.

Quirky combat mechanics, concepts not really explained, plus the ruinous tutorial, if I did not have a friend already playing, I would have said "quite a nice game, has potential, I'll try it again at some point" and I would have uninstalled it, forgetting about it for a decade.

But I did have a friendly pilot in comm range, so I blasted his ears, rattled his brains and got a few non-spoilery basic gameplay concepts.

Moving on!

2. Thank God for the new salvaging system.
Because otherwise I would not be able to play this game, period.
I'm not talking about enjoying it, splurging on random useless ships, and so on.
Nope. Not able to physically play it.
There's quite a lot to manage for new players, mechanics are harsh, mistakes cost you dearly, and, well, the supply/fuel cost drives you into the ground. Still, quite grateful for the ability to take a breather, lick my wounds, rebuild my fleet, and fight again. To be quite honest, it's best to keep the fight hard as it is, to please veterans.
I just wish I had more non-combat ways to make some credits.

3. Being neutral is surprisingly hard.
While in other games, the hard part begins only after you have chosen a side, in SS, I find little to no combat while not taking any Commissions.
Not too many pirates to bash into the ground. The Path of Ludd are ridiculously hard to fight at first, due to their choice in ships, and because of said ships, the drops are low, and fighting them is not that rewarding for a new player.
A temporary non-combat salvaging fleet is also not an option, because it simply does not seem to turn a profit, at least not in the core systems.
I know, there's always the OTHER systems as well.
But if you want to take it slow, build a bit of a fleet before poking into dangerous systems (Like how the excellent Space Rangers 2 lets you do)... well... you're gonna have a bad time.

4. As an aging, bitter old man, I am taken aback by the lack of...  
The ability to feel like an angsty, edgy teen again, and be a pirate. :)
This one is simple, I would like to have Pirates as a fully-fledged, playable faction.
I mean, the vibe is THERE, there are now incentives and mechanics put into place to actually be possible to haul around a fleet of barely-flying DHulled Rustbuckets.
(Yeah, I mostly played as a Junker in Freelancer Discovery. The quasi-neutral pirate, that could dip his toes into smuggling, occasional piracy, but mostly spent his days hammering debris fields and drinking artisanal space moonshine)

While I do realize this is not that game, or any similar games, eh, 'twould be nice at some point.
But until then, I am utterly confused by...

5. The structure of the menus and other UI-related things.
Don't get me wrong, it's not horrible, or unplayable. I did get used to it. But it could be so much better with so little effort.
For instance.

Shield/Armor/Hull.
That's the logical order. Thus, when typing descriptions for weapons, can we keep it the same please?
If one weapon does:
-200% shields and 50% armor, another weapon description should be
-50% shields and 200% armor, in this order.

Easier to compare. Easier to remember. A lot more friendly to the brain.
Yes, I know there's not too many damage types, yes, I know they are easy to learn, yes I know damage types have pretty icons.

But this wall of text, is about First User Experience. (I am a senior Beta-Tester at my job, and my focus is User Experience, thus my atrocious whining :) )

While we're on the same subject, while in combat, the top bar for a ship is Flux, and the bottom bar is Hull. However, after pressing tab, the Flux bar is invisible unless the ship is selected. Which is less-than optimal, I would like to see at a glance that on the right side of the field most of my ships are full flux, thus needing more attention, or support.
And the bars for the unselected ships are now Hull and CR.
At this point, I do Tab a lot, to check the progress of the battle, and the fact that those bars keep switching around is a bit annoying, despite eventually learning which is which.

If I may suggest, to have all 3 bars, permanently visible, for ships selected or not, and have them ordered as Flux, Hull, CR. (The CR bar can be a thin one)

And while still on the same subject...

6. The buttons are less consistent than my mental health.
I really do not know how buttons were chosen.
It would make sense tho have them either set as an usual gaming scheme with which we are all used...

Or if not that, then have them follow the same logical scheme as the buttons at bottom left, which are quite nice (Character/Fleet/Refit). Like:
Outposts, Resume Navigation, Abort Navigation. (S&A really hurts my brain even now that I know them).
While in inventory: Abort (Escape is just enough, it already does that, no need for T), Confirm (Space is already used as yes/ok/confirm in dialogues, no need for G).
It would make a heaps load more sense to use the T key for Take All in the salvaging menu, instead.

But I don't know, maybe there are programming reasons behind this, and the same key cannot be used for 2 buttons with different functions?
Besides, I find it a little bit weird to have to Gonfirm moving items. I mean, I've played a ton of games, once you ctrl-click something into inventory, space closes all, and we're done. Diablo does that amazingly well.

With all of this confusing buttoneering, I most often find myself in need of ...

7. More halp...
There's that wonderful "Press F1 for more" function. But in quite a few occasions it does really not help that much. (Or in the case of the Scavenging skill it does not do anything. Like telling you to scavenge once. Or maybe twice. But I know Scavenging is new and quite rough around the edges for now)

Still, it is nice that when I'm an old player, and I hover above fuel, to see some stats, then I can press F1 to see some less-used stats.
But generically, an interface should already show useful stats by default, then show the less useful stats on hover, and finally display the noobie info on F1.

True enough, SS does not get enough noobs to warrant wasting the nicely implemented F1 function with some information that 5 people will read once and then move on, because so few people rtfm nowadays.
But then again, if the Codex section could be expanded to contain basic information for new players, we could keep the normal/hover/F1 just as it is now.
And if externalized to xml (or similar), I bet old players would be more than glad to contribute to that, instead of the devs spending time on the Codex, instead on the game. Hell, I would do that!

Which takes me to ...

8. Codex not Codexing enough...
It would be extremely amazing if we would be able to compare two ships, side-to-side, in the codex. It really does not need to hold your hand like the modern games, and color worse stats in red, better stats in green, and calculate damage for you. All it could do, is to have the ability to split the window, and have the same tree-like menu also on the right side, so that we could open two ships/weapons at the same time.

Yes, not that many stats, not that many ships, and old players know them already. Still, new players do not, and with the addition of mods, comparing weapons or ships might be quite useful.

And of course, having a manual in-game is amazingly useful, and if properly externalized (or at least made a little bit noob-friendly, so people without serious programming skills could contribute to it) I think the Codex could evolve in quite the useful guide, negating the need for a txt/pdf manual, or an internet wiki.
First thing I would do, like, right now, I would split the Ship Systems, make new branches, like for instance:
-Hull Mods,
-Ship Abilities.

And add more buttons like, say, General Concepts.
Fuel explained, Supplies explained. Dmods explained. Salvaging explained. Character abilities. Character skills.

It really, really, does not need to be new info.
But it would be nice when I click on fuel, to see, all in one place, that is consumed only in hyperspace, carried by tankers, needed for emergency burn, consumption can be lowered by skills, having an excess increases supply consumption, and so on, and so on.

Fine. Fine. Are you done bashing our favorite game? I see that you dislike quite a lot of stuff.
Do you even like something bro?


Matter of fact, I do.

The Art.
Major kudos to whomever made the art for this game. Especially the captain portraits. They look good enough to hang on the wall, and I'd pay to see more, like A LOT MORE, and I'd pay to have a custom captain portrait.
And I say this, while living in a third-world country, and being constantly almost broke.
I'm simply in love with the art style.

The Quirky mechanics.
The combat in this game is hard for me. I don't think I'll ever manage to be adequate, no matter how much I watch the AI play my ship, I mostly feel like I'm wasting a slot my my fleet. Nevertheless, thank the Lord for salvaging, which allows me to lick my wounds, and somehow... I like this difficulty. It is challenging, yet not necessarily causing me to click uninstall and move on.

The Modding.
This is simply a must, for me.
For instance, I find it extremely annoying that even me, a new player has already learned to estimate at a glance if I could take a fleet or not. I would like to have 500+ ships in game, even horribly imbalanced ones, so that I could still be surprised and confused.
Of course, I can't ask for this to be imposed on everyone, nor could I request this kind of a feat from the devs, and here comes the modding community into play.
So, thank you guys for implementing modding support, and thank you community for modding.

The fact that the AI is not a burden
Enough said. I think we've all had our fair share of companions running at a wall endlessly.
SS is the opposite of that. Not only the AI does well, is useful, can teach me tricks, but it does so without blatantly cheating. (a.k.a infinite resource injections kind of cheat)

Great atmosphere.
The art, the text descriptions, the mechanics, the way ships handle. I love it, it's spot-on.

The open-ended sandbox potential
My kind of game, not much else to say.

And now for a very generic wishlist. Not sure what it could be implemented and what could not, but here it is. I'll keep it short, and add only items that would make a great impact for me, no tidbits.

-The ability to make a trickle of resources from trading on black market, outside food shortages.

-More shortages, not as listed missions but like "Jangala factories are short of metal plates".

-The ability to make a flagship, well, a flagship. Maybe modules that can be mounted once per fleet. Or even once per game.

-More... fights? Somehow? I may be at the beginning of the game, but I spent time in all Core systems. Fleets do little but chase themselves around in circles forever, if somehow two somewhat-matched fleets meet. Otherwise it's just a Burn 9 fleet zooming the hell out of the way of a Burn 7 fleet, which moves around erratically until it is briefly distracted by another fast fleet. And that ruins my dream of being an atrocious vulture feasting on the sorry remains of great battles.
Salvaging the mess I have created myself has significantly less charm.

You know, kicking trash around after the Rio Carnival, hoping to find a wallet with a million dollars is fun for some people.
Cleaning your room, because your mom told you so, and finding your own empty wallet, damn, that's not fun for anyone.

The path evasion AI in this game works too damn well.

-More common missions, properly balanced. Of course, not every planet should offer to make a fortune out of metal plates daily. But enough to make an almost continued trading run plausible. Despite this game not being focused on trading at all. But to give a helping hand to players that can't excel at combat, some diversity to those that can, and some variety in fleet types. You know, like, having to actually field on purpose, as a challenge, 5 Atlases or 10 Prometheus, haul them around and defend them. Just because someone wants a million lobsters ... because of reasons.

So far, missions make sense only if you happen to have that amount of Bantunian Shrimps on your ship, right now, or at the very least, stashed conveniently nearby. Procurement missions are also quite rare compared to the explore/scan, and the materials that are required 5 systems away, are almost never available in the system where the mission is found, and the mission expires way before getting the materials.

It should be quite possible for me to see a mission for 500 Lobsters, pick it up, and have enough time to go around 2 bases to get 445, then sneak to a pirate base to get the rest, and then haul off to the destination.
And speaking of which. Do I have 500 Lobsters on Jangala? Or was it 347 transplutonic ore? And was it even in Jangala? I wish I could check, but it's 10 systems away.
I'm quite sure that my advanced ship computers could hold a list of what kind of crap I have, and where.
Could they? :)


-Something like a mobile base. Maybe like a ship too big to be attacked by casual pirates, or a base that can phase to another system of your choice, all this at obscene costs, maybe with some facilities/upgrades, giving you a reason and a need to now haul home thousands of metal plates, and buy food, and arm the marines with hand weapons, and keep worker teams productive with luxury goods, and volatiles to keep a long duration Neutrino Detector, and equip it with dozens of LPCs for defensive purposes, and dozens of Ox Tugs to raise its sustained burn speed to a whopping ... 2.

So there you have it.
A lengthy first impression.
I really do hope it can be at least a bit helpful.

Best Regards,

Vladimir.






« Last Edit: May 05, 2017, 03:35:42 PM by Vladimir »
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Alex

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #1 on: May 05, 2017, 02:44:45 PM »

Hi there - just wanted to say thank you for your extensive feedback :) Read it over, and will have another read through it sometime later - it's super valuable to have feedback from someone new to the game.

(Quick question: did you do the combat tutorials? A lot of the combat-and-fleet-command related mechanics are explained in those. Which, yeah, that's a lot of tutorials to go through...)
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Vladimir

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #2 on: May 05, 2017, 03:06:01 PM »

Oh, hello Alex :)

I did not go over the Combat tutorials, because I did play GSB quite a lot, even back in the days when ships did not have textures, so I'm a bit familiar with the style.

The combat itself is brilliantly made, crystal-clear, and quite self-explanatory, (for me) its difficulty stems from taking poor command decisions, and dealing with harsh supply consumption system, and not because of obscure concepts.
Again, I would not change combat, not one single bit, no matter how much curb-stomping new players may get.

A lil' bit of help from other sources would be nice tho, as mentioned above :)
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Ghoti

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2017, 03:10:17 PM »

I also noticed some derelict ships along the way, scrapped those as well, because not like I was planning to start an army right now.

reading through your post right now, but I just wanted to chime in that this is hilarious.  ;D

I can understand what lead up to it though.

Oh, hello Alex :)

I did not go over the Combat tutorials, because I did play GSB quite a lot, even back in the days when ships did not have textures, so I'm a bit familiar with the style.

The combat itself is brilliantly made, crystal-clear, and quite self-explanatory, (for me) its difficulty stems from taking poor command decisions, and dealing with harsh supply consumption system, and not because of obscure concepts.
Again, I would not change combat, not one single bit, no matter how much curb-stomping new players may get.

A lil' bit of help from other sources would be nice tho, as mentioned above :)

I tell this to anyone who asks, but starsector started with combat, it used to be that the only thing that was in the game was missions. There has been years and years and years of refinement here.
« Last Edit: May 05, 2017, 03:18:28 PM by Ghoti »
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Vladimir

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #4 on: May 05, 2017, 03:40:59 PM »

I know, I know.

Matter of fact, I had my eye on this game for quite a few years, but knew it was going to be too hard for me. Somehow I find it hard as a feat, to manage shields, their positioning, flux, and the other million things at once. Not because I do not understand them, but because I get overwhelmed. To make matters worse, even victories can cost you dearly.
When Salvaging appeared, I pounced on it like a madman.

However, concepts outside battle can be obscure.
As an example, I still have no idea what planting a bug on a comm array does, and while I could google it, I was kind of expecting to see the effects in game, and understand it like that.
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StarGibbon

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #5 on: May 05, 2017, 03:44:54 PM »

Oh, hello Alex :)

I did not go over the Combat tutorials, because I did play GSB quite a lot, even back in the days when ships did not have textures, so I'm a bit familiar with the style.



GSB is not really a comparison for this game, because that was all about loadout and watching the AI fight itself, correct?

This game is focused on real time combat, and is actually pretty excellent in that regard. Battles can be very exciting. But the game assumes the player will be in a cockpit contributing to the battle. There are a wide range of ships to chose from, each with its own piloting style, and you may find one more to your liking. Some destroyers tend to be much more forgiving to pilot, because they're more durable and hit harder, not requiring as much fast twitch skill.

I'm sympathetic to some of your points and disagree with others. But I think that the main crux of your problems is that you couldnt get a feel for the combat in the game, and therefore felt shut out of a lot of core appeal. The new tutorial isn't as clear in some points as it is others, and some people have missed either picking up the free salvage fleet, or the free weapon and supply storage the game gives you after that to equip them. If you get both of those things and equip your ships, the battle at the end of the tutorial should be within reach.

Some general advice. Pick the Wolf as the starting ship, no matter what you want to eventually do in your game, as an effective combat ship in the early outing is harder to come by than additional freighters. It will be much harder for a new player to kill anything in a Wayfarer.  Use the "run simulation" feature in the Refit screen to test out new equipment loadouts in a consequence free environment, and to just get used to how to fly a particular ship.

For non combat options for making money, be sure to invest in survey, stack survey mods on your freighters, and pick up some easy free money that way. About 1 in 5 planets pays off a class 3 or greater survey, which can be sold to a faction capitol for enough money to upgrade your fleet. Avoid surveying the larger planets, because they cost many more supplies to survey, but dont pay off at any greater rate than the normal ones. Prioritize picking up a tanker, so you can go on long range missions.

The game does have a learning curve in terms of combat mechanics and how to field an efficient fleet without bankrupting yourself, but I think its all the better for it. Your second try will be much better than your first.
« Last Edit: May 05, 2017, 06:58:04 PM by StarGibbon »
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Gothars

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #6 on: May 05, 2017, 03:59:12 PM »

However, concepts outside battle can be obscure.
As an example, I still have no idea what planting a bug on a comm array does, and while I could google it, I was kind of expecting to see the effects in game, and understand it like that.

That, and quite a few other things, are basically as of yet unconnected pipes and cabling. The game is very much still in alpha, and many systems that are supposed to interact with other systems later, have for now just a nice little crocheted cover attached to them. That means you can already interact with them, but not necessarily in a way that is representative of their final intent.


I BTW agree very much with your points about menu, UI and shortcut confusion. For example, I hope that stations have two layers of menu is a temporary solution.
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Vladimir

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #7 on: May 05, 2017, 11:27:54 PM »

Thank you for your advice, folks.

@combat
I did not exaggerate when I said it was somehow instantly crystal clear, at least as concepts.
It is quite true that I have played quite a few games that help understanding general concepts of space combat.

I blame the Homeworld series, Haegemonia, Freelancer, Space Rangers 2, Star Trader (old obscure Russian game), Descent 3, Terminal Velocity, Freespace 2, H[a]rdwar (dear Lord, I have wasted entirely too much time in that one), Starlancer. And maybe a few more. Like Sins of a Solar Empire.

While not quite similar, they do teach the same general concepts.
And I do find the combat in SS amazingly well designed.

It took me about 3 battles to immediately notice that...
-Shields towards where the pain comes from
-Ship goes faster with shields down
-Flux goes down with shields down
-Venting leaves you hopeless
-There's beautiful inertia, no need to keep pressing W. I can manage that well, thanks to all those "Moon Lander" type of time-wasting games.
-There's multiple types of shields
-The AI is amazing.
Absolutely amazing. I mean, in-fight collision avoidance, man, there's a lot of triple-A games, released by huge gaming companies, that should be prostrating on SS's shrine...
Seeing the AI speed away from your missiles, using special abilities, turn the ship around do dodge some, to minimize impact on shields? That's pure space poetry. 

Aside from that, of course that selecting a fleet ship and right clicking on the enemy means "ruin his jazz". Of course selecting a fleet ship and right clicking another of your ships means escort/guard.
So, it's all good man, all good.

I like to compare SS with Chess.

You learn to move the pieces around pretty damn fast and instinctively.
That lets you get in the game, it allows you to try to "git gud scrub" without being prohibitively difficult and frustrating.
However, just like chess, it really does not mean you know how to play the game.
At least for a beginner, there are hard lessons which are taught swiftly, and harshly. Like "don't get approach a hammerhead frontally, with your Wayfarer".
So naturally, you do your best to obey this newly learned lesson, and then an Enforcer comes along and teaches you that staying away from a destroyer is not as easy as it seems.
And on top of that, there's always CR and supply consumption to ruin your day.
I mean, I think SS is the only game that has you worried like "oh crap, this fight is too easy!" preventing you to just roflstomp across the map.

In Homeworld, you were also taught not to deploy Destroyers without escort, but you still had options, in a lot of the situations you still had a lot of time to retreat, send help, hyperspace away.
In SS, in under a second, you get flux spiked and blown to bits before you can say "Ah. So let's not do that again".

Let me give you an example.
I was level 37, had a decent fleet by my standards, about 1 million in survey. I decided to take a Lobster hauling mission, pour all my resources into it, every.last.cent. and while I was at it, go sell the surveys as well.
Technically, at the destination, I should have handed the Lobsters in, receive a fortune, sell the surveys, receive a fortune, then go ahead, get some decent ships decent weapons, and really start playing, yeah let's do this!
Instead of that, a series of mistakes, panic, stupid decisions and bad luck, later found me wide-eyed, with my fleet disbanded, broken up, in a new Wayfarer+Shuttle, with 2000 credits....

In any other game, I would have quietly tapped F9.
Instead, in SS I decided to man up, own my mistakes and carry on.

So don't get me wrong, in SS hard does not equal bad... Thank God for salvaging though. :D
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StarGibbon

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #8 on: May 05, 2017, 11:44:55 PM »


At least for a beginner, there are hard lessons which are taught swiftly, and harshly. Like "don't get approach a hammerhead frontally, with your Wayfarer".


I'd like to think that one would have been fairly intuitive. ;)

But yes, combat freighters are useful mostly for their durability while running away. Otherwise they are best in a support role and will not fare well against dedicated combat ships, which is why I recommended picking the Wolf to start. A skilled enough player can make anything work though.

I spend hours in the Refit screen simulation menu, trying things out and learning what Im doing with a particular ship, and determining if it's something I enjoy flying.

Otherwise, remember that the game is still in active development and not yet feature-complete, so you can look forward to more rough edges being sanded off.  I hope you stick with it!

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Vladimir

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #9 on: May 06, 2017, 01:06:52 AM »

For now I feel that the Wolf is wasted in my hands. I still fly it whenever I feel like a challenge, but it does seem the AI makes a better use of it.

I did however notice that I make better use of carriers, and most certainly better use of missiles.

Matter of fact, I got to 38 with 2 Medusas, 2 Wolves and 1 Drover as a flagship.
Deployment cost aside, it was quite a nice configuration, allowing me to pick fights that I knew I could handle, and solve them with impunity.

Things went downhill fast when I tried to upscale my fleet by adding a Mora+Dominator.
I just could not make it worth the supply consumption, besides me and Mora really did not go well together.

Still got a lot to learn and tweak.
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StarGibbon

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #10 on: May 06, 2017, 02:22:43 AM »

The junk Hammerhead you get during the tutorial may be more your speed. Quick, but not too fast, doesn't require a lot of fast reflexes, not too fragile. Just attack from a safe distance with other ships until their shields drop, then charge in and hit your special, which increases the fire rate of your anti-armor weapons.  You'll make fast work of most opponents destroyer size or smaller.  Back off if you can't finish them in one salvo.

With fast small ships, it can be helpful to set their weapons to "autofire" in the weapon group menu, that way all you have to concentrate on is keeping them in your firing arc, and maybe letting a missle go now and then. Just watch your flux.

Conventional wisdom is that the AI does a good enough job with carriers most of the time, especially with a skilled officer,  but once you get more comfortable with combat, you as a player be able to make a bigger impact with a ship that can quickly remove other ships from combat.  Carriers tend to have weak weapons aside from their fighters.

Try not to carry around too many more ships than you need for what you're doing, and you'll make plenty of money on missions. If you're doing mostly scanning missions for instance, the worst you typically encounter are smallish [REDACTED] fleets, so you don't need too much firepower (though you should always have a dedicated military ship for your own use).  The universe is a dangerous place though, so be ready to run if someone bigger wants to pick a fight. If you want to run bounty missions, get there with a medium sized warfleet consisting only of dedicated military ships, and however many fuel ships you need to get you there and back, and you'll make tons of money (note: the size of bounty fleets increases over time--you'll be able to tell by how much the reward is).

Extra ships you don't need at present can be placed into storage on the Fleet screen at any port you have purchased storage rights in, to save you upkeep on them.  So you could park your mora and dominator there until you need them.

Good luck!

« Last Edit: May 06, 2017, 02:32:37 AM by StarGibbon »
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arwan

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #11 on: May 07, 2017, 12:24:44 AM »


-More... fights? Somehow? I may be at the beginning of the game, but I spent time in all Core systems. Fleets do little but chase themselves around in circles forever, if somehow two somewhat-matched fleets meet. Otherwise it's just a Burn 9 fleet zooming the hell out of the way of a Burn 7 fleet, which moves around erratically until it is briefly distracted by another fast fleet. And that ruins my dream of being an atrocious vulture feasting on the sorry remains of great battles.
Salvaging the mess I have created myself has significantly less charm.


this does seem a bit silly in my opinion as well. having fleets just endlessly chasing around other fleets that are just fast enough to never be caught. and with no way to ever close the gap. i can think of a few ideas off the top of my head that i believe may be able to solve the cat and mouse game and at the same time be fun. such as

spoof IFF in your transponder to the same faction as the fleet you are chasing. (would only work if you were not already identified by the target) to allow you to close the gap before they get suspicious. and keep your speed at a decent level. down side could be that it has a limited time of activity until say the target sensors realize something is up and figures you out to be hostile.

also part of the problem i think is all fleets are almost always moving at top speed which creates the problem. and you dont slow down often. a fix could be that even minor course corrections (say more than 5-10 degrees) could force a significant speed decrease. (even 2-3 burn) allowing a following fleet to make a smaller course correction maintain speed and thereby catch up. so if your goal is to run away. you best stay going straight until your at least outside of sensor range then pop your silent running and change course. also would be nice if silent running had a semi long slow down period for your fleet, allowing you to somewhat drift down to the new much slower speed so that you can maintain that hidden status as a way of getting away.
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Alex
You won't be able to refit fighters and bombers at all. They're designed/balanced around having a particular set of weapons and would be very broken if you could change it. Which ones you pick for your fleet -out of quite a few that are available- is the choice here, not how they're outfitted.

SCC

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #12 on: May 07, 2017, 12:54:08 AM »

I'll write a bit later, but right now: technically you can be a pirate, all you need to do is to get at least "inhospitable" with pirates (IIRC you need -40 or more) and it's best you keep improving your relations. There's the problem, though, of pirates starting as hostile and it being difficult to improve your relations... I can't remember any reliable way of getting friendly with them, I have to check what ways work.

Vind

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #13 on: May 07, 2017, 07:15:42 AM »

Easiest path to become friendly with pirates is to use single combat freighter (like cerberus) and do simple 20-60 cargo missions. If you are intercepted just disengage and they will never chase you  - only harass. Harassing your single ship cost 4 supplies - it is nothing to think about.
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Burlap

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Re: New player feedback and intro.
« Reply #14 on: May 07, 2017, 03:40:05 PM »

Yeah the Pirates are a real faction, they even have a... erm... 'military' market? They post jobs like anyone else, but becoming friendly with them or the Pathers is a little against the grain of the faction system, avoiding bounty hunting and all that.

Wasn't there a character creation option that made you merely disliked by pirates (smuggler start, maybe?), it may have gone away in 0.8.

Anyway, getting those suckers to like you is actually quite seperate, in my mind, from *being* a pirate. Using sensor range and speed modifying terrain to your advantage and killing vulnerable fleets carrying valuables is surprisingly profitable.

Like all clandestine activities, you need to be good at running with your transponder off, which can be seriously tricky sometimes. There are also plenty of ports across 7 factions that are ill guarded and easy to sneak into if you need to buy or sell something. You can even engage in extremely casual piracy and keep relations up with the victim, just remember to leave no survivors and never let them identify you.
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