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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: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production  (Read 61338 times)

FooF

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #15 on: February 12, 2018, 06:10:04 PM »

This basically answers my questions regarding how building your own ships will function. I never thought it'd be "free" but half-priced is still pretty good. Is there any way to modify the credit cost of ships, weapons, fighters, etc. that you manufacture? I.e. higher efficiency via AI cores, getting better rates on raw materials, etc.

Also, are fleets that your colonies generate going to naturally assume whatever relationship you have with the other factions? Or is your faction going to operate somewhat independently from *you* the player? (I'm thinking of using a faction as a "front" while you personally backstab the other factions. Plausible deniability and all). In the same vein, will you have any control over these auto-generated fleets, such as ordering an invasion (if some end-game were to appear), or attacking a trade fleet, etc.

I really like the idea of packaging blueprints. As another poster said, it reminds of STC's from WH40k where a rare one can literally launch a billion-man crusade to recover it. I presume there may be some super-secret blueprints out there that are not currently in use by the major factions, hmm...?  ;D
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Alex

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #16 on: February 12, 2018, 06:50:26 PM »

Oooooo BOY! I can't WAIT for this update and to play with what looks like a new high tech toy? Maybe a destroyer or cruiser?

:) Which one are you looking at? I don't *think* there's one fitting that description but possibly I'm mistaken.

Hmmmm, since the Lasher is a thing and it's really our only current low-tech pure-combat frigate, I'm going to guess that this mystery frigate is a defensive counterpart. It looks like it's got quite a bit of armor on it, although from what I can tell it's a bit lacking in firepower compared to its sister ship (not that it's really possible to make out weapon mounts from that tiny image). It's decently chunky so I'm also guessing it'll get the Heavy Frigate classification, sort of like a low-tech counterpart to the Centurion and Scarab.

Barking up the wrong tree entirely, I'm afraid. I'll give you a hint: you already have the information.

Also, did you sneak in a couple of blueprints for fighters we haven't seen before? I think you did!

Entirely possible!


What. An. Update!!! The next patch is going to be epic.

I'm just so excited now to see more cool, well-thought stuff added to the game! I got no other words.

Thank you guys :)

I'm sure some of these are beyond the scope of the game, but I wanted to throw them out there for you to brainstorm/mull over.

Yeah - probably as you say, outside the scope, but there are some potentially very interesting levers to push. Half-thinking that just selling a blueprint to a faction makes them able to use it, but not entirely set on that.

Ship quality is another interesting mechanic. Of course, it was in the game previously, but now that the player can influence ship quality, I would like to suggest that there be a positive mirror to D mods. If quality is high enough, on rare occasions, perhaps something of exceptional quality could be built? This is similar to the thrill finding XIV battlegroup technology.

Hmm - I think feel-wise, the "d-mods to normal" spectrum makes more sense, what with the state of manufacturing in the Sector and all. Although, as you point out, some stuff - like the XIV and Hegemony Auxiliaries - do have bonuses. I think those are best kept as special, not something you can pile onto just any hull.


I threw together changes to the Composition & Doctrine segment to make each group more pronounced, spacing and dividers. How's this look Alex?

Edit: I should have added a counter for the number of free points to distribute. Perhaps 7 small boxes along the top of each subsection?

You know, that doesn't look half bad, let me give something similar a shot - what I was imagining (per InventorRacoon's suggestion) didn't look as good as the actual thing ended up looking. I like keeping the dividers roughly in the same vertical space as the text, rather than going straight across.


This basically answers my questions regarding how building your own ships will function. I never thought it'd be "free" but half-priced is still pretty good. Is there any way to modify the credit cost of ships, weapons, fighters, etc. that you manufacture? I.e. higher efficiency via AI cores, getting better rates on raw materials, etc.

At the moment, there isn't. I'm not 100% decided on that, but I'm not sure that as a mechanic, "how much you pay to custom order equipment" is developed/interesting enough to have skill or other tie-ins. It also opens the door to some awkwardness re: it becoming profitable to custom-order then sell if the mechanics are too strong.

Also, are fleets that your colonies generate going to naturally assume whatever relationship you have with the other factions? Or is your faction going to operate somewhat independently from *you* the player? (I'm thinking of using a faction as a "front" while you personally backstab the other factions. Plausible deniability and all). In the same vein, will you have any control over these auto-generated fleets, such as ordering an invasion (if some end-game were to appear), or attacking a trade fleet, etc.

I'd say that "plausible deniability" is what the transponder is for; probably simplest to keep relations the same. Otherwise it gets awkward when your faction fleets join/don't join to help out against an enemy, and so on.

As far as control: I'm thinking about some things here; nothing specific I can commit too. I will say that part of the point of having your colonies launch fleets is for you to be able to fight alongside them, and if, for example, attacking another colony/invasions/etc became a mechanic, then it would make sense to have allied fleets to with you, whatever form actually making that happen might take.

I really like the idea of packaging blueprints. As another poster said, it reminds of STC's from WH40k where a rare one can literally launch a billion-man crusade to recover it. I presume there may be some super-secret blueprints out there that are not currently in use by the major factions, hmm...?  ;D

It'd be a shame if some pirates stole your Hyperion blueprint and took it back to their base, wouldn't it?

(There's actually one blueprint that's not in use, and isn't for a ship, weapon, or fighter, but no more about that! As far as unique ones for ships etc, yeah, that's another contenting nice-to-have; will see if there's time to get to this sort of stuff. Would be super cool, though, no argument there.)
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MajorTheRed

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #17 on: February 12, 2018, 06:56:13 PM »

Outpost are going to take a great place in the current gameplay. Have you considered an actual endgame, a clear objective that end the game when reached?
And would the new update (and the ones after) allow several types of gameplay or will it be only focused around outpost? If I take the present version as example, I tend to play exploration fleets, not looking for bounties, or zombie-fleets bounty-chasing, or faction provateer until I kill something big and scary in space. So, different play style, but all very funny.
So, will I be able to have fun without creating outposts? And if I build outposts, can they all be oriented toward, say, trading, or I will have to build a more generic outpost with a little bit of everything (trade, resource, fleet...) to make it work?

Anyway, wow, it getting bigger and better, you're really far from the beginning with just Tibicena, Jangola and Asharu around the lone corvus star (and it was already great at the time!)!  :D
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Megas

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #18 on: February 12, 2018, 06:56:43 PM »

Glazing over the details at the moment, but...  Hopefully, the next update will mean 1) more rare stuff are more common (no more reloading games the moment I lose a ship with any weapon not commonly available in open market or pirates' black market), 2) I can produce and acquire undamaged ships without paying a stiff restoration fee, and 3) ability to declare independence from factions by endgame.
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TaLaR

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #19 on: February 12, 2018, 08:13:18 PM »

Being able to customize my faction fleets is interesting and matters when I'm fighting along them, but isn't finer detail mostly lost on auto-resolved battles between AI fleets?
Are there any plans to make more complex/precise auto-resolve to make these things matter more?

Also on topic of player faction AI fleets - how interactive are they going to be?
I mean it's one thing when they just spawn randomly and you do not care what happens to them as long as colony does not get destroyed and you do not need them to support you locally right now. It's quite different if they have costs, maintenance, supplies, bring spoils, interact with local events, etc. That is something approaching 4x.

« Last Edit: February 12, 2018, 08:26:59 PM by TaLaR »
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Cyan Leader

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #20 on: February 12, 2018, 08:26:10 PM »

Amazing blog post, thanks for this.

You mentioned exploration to help us with colony gameplay, I was also thinking if exploration can help us in making our factions more unique too. Are there any blueprints in the game that aren't used by any factions at all? Such as Remnant blueprints or, say, an old Hammerhead design that was used by the TT a long time ago and has now been abandoned in a fringe outpost. I'm not trying to ask for spoilers here, I just would like to know if I can make my faction more distinct and unique instead of it being a weird mix between Hegemony and TT.

Also, I'm no modder but since you are very keen in making this whole system mod friendly, I suggest releasing the Photoshop files behind the blueprint icons so modders can easily make their own.
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Bribe Guntails

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #21 on: February 12, 2018, 08:46:42 PM »

I threw together changes to the Composition & Doctrine segment to make each group more pronounced, spacing and dividers. How's this look Alex?

Edit: I should have added a counter for the number of free points to distribute. Perhaps 7 small boxes along the top of each subsection?

You know, that doesn't look half bad, let me give something similar a shot - what I was imagining (per InventorRacoon's suggestion) didn't look as good as the actual thing ended up looking. I like keeping the dividers roughly in the same vertical space as the text, rather than going straight across.

Here's my updated suggestion. I threw in numbers in the trademark yellow, it may be clearer than using boxes in the same color.

[attachment deleted by admin]
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Alex

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #22 on: February 12, 2018, 08:56:05 PM »

Outpost are going to take a great place in the current gameplay. Have you considered an actual endgame, a clear objective that end the game when reached?

Yes, I have considered it :-X

And would the new update (and the ones after) allow several types of gameplay or will it be only focused around outpost? If I take the present version as example, I tend to play exploration fleets, not looking for bounties, or zombie-fleets bounty-chasing, or faction provateer until I kill something big and scary in space. So, different play style, but all very funny.
So, will I be able to have fun without creating outposts? And if I build outposts, can they all be oriented toward, say, trading, or I will have to build a more generic outpost with a little bit of everything (trade, resource, fleet...) to make it work?

It's hard to say exactly. In general, I'd like to support different playstyles. My guess is having at least one colony would be beneficial - maybe not required, but useful. I'm not sure that outposts are a playstyle in and of themselves, but more something you do alongside whatever else you're doing.

Anyway, wow, it getting bigger and better, you're really far from the beginning with just Tibicena, Jangola and Asharu around the lone corvus star (and it was already great at the time!)!  :D

Oh, wow, Tibicena in the Corvus system! That brings me back.

Glazing over the details at the moment, but...  Hopefully, the next update will mean 1) more rare stuff are more common (no more reloading games the moment I lose a ship with any weapon not commonly available in open market or pirates' black market), 2) I can produce and acquire undamaged ships without paying a stiff restoration fee, and 3) ability to declare independence from factions by endgame.

1) - probably, yeah 2) it'll take a bit of doing to produce non-(D) ships, but it's possible, and 3) I would imagine so!


R E M O V E   T H E   M A R K E D   T A R G E T   T O   A C C E P T   C O N T R A C T

Haha, yeah. Stomp an unarmed guy with a mech and then pretend you're one of the good guys.

Also love that we get WYSIWYG material for setting faction doctrine and other fun stuff previously only available by braving the .json files.

Cool! Yeah, I'm excited about the possibilities here, even if a lot of it is mostly flavor-fun.


Being able to customize my faction fleets is interesting and matters when I'm fighting along them, but isn't finer detail mostly lost on auto-resolved battles between AI fleets?
Are there any plans to make more complex/precise auto-resolve to make these things matter more?

Yeah, the finer detail is mostly lost for auto-resolve, but that's entirely the point! I'll have to make sure that the officers/quality/quantity options all produce fairly auto-resolve-balanced fleets, too. If some set of options was better for auto-resolve, then you'd pretty much have to always go with those.

Also on topic of player faction AI fleets - how interactive are they going to be?
I mean it's one thing when they just spawn randomly and you do not care what happens to them as long as colony does not get destroyed and you do not need them to support you locally right now. It's quite different if they have costs, maintenance, supplies, bring spoils, interact with local events, etc. That is something approaching 4x.

Honestly, not sure at this point. I don't imagine they'd have maintenance costs at a base level, but I could see, say, having to invest credits into larger fleet operations, that sort of thing. A lot of that is up in the air right now, though.

Amazing blog post, thanks for this.

Thank you!

You mentioned exploration to help us with colony gameplay, I was also thinking if exploration can help us in making our factions more unique too. Are there any blueprints in the game that aren't used by any factions at all? Such as Remnant blueprints or, say, an old Hammerhead design that was used by the TT a long time ago and has now been abandoned in a fringe outpost. I'm not trying to ask for spoilers here, I just would like to know if I can make my faction more distinct and unique instead of it being a weird mix between Hegemony and TT.

That's a possibility, but, as I mentioned a few posts up, I wouldn't necessarily count on it. I do think the doctrine controls offer a good amount of opportunity here with the base ships, as does being able to focus on a few specific ship types. For example, mostly-phase or mostly-carrier fleets would already be pretty different from what the vanilla factions offer. As do any of the doctrinal extremes, really. Will have to see how it feels, though. I think this categorization of ships into Hegemony and TT... well, it makes sense given how the game has been, but I don't subscribe to it, and I think the blueprint system takes steps towards clarifying why that's not the case :)

Also, I'm no modder but since you are very keen in making this whole system mod friendly, I suggest releasing the Photoshop files behind the blueprint icons so modders can easily make their own.

Oh, excellent - the icons are actually rendered using the ship and weapon sprites, with various effects and overlays, so no extra modding work is required. That it doesn't look like it at first glance is a good sign :)


Here's my updated suggestion. I threw in numbers in the trademark yellow, it may be clearer than using boxes in the same color.

Oh, hey, yeah - sorry I forgot to respond to this part of it! The "free points" display isn't necessary because the points just get reassigned as necessary, as you adjust the levels. There's some logic to make sure it doesn't do this in "annoying" ways, undoing things you just did.
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FreedomFighter

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #23 on: February 12, 2018, 09:14:17 PM »

I want to say that if i didn't know that SS is combat orientate before, i might think this is some kind of 4X game since the management UI look a lot like those. You fit in a lot of detail and info, yet, the UI itself doesn't look like complete pile of mess like Paradox's game. Impressive, Alex.
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CrashToDesktop

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #24 on: February 12, 2018, 09:36:29 PM »

Hey, a new blog post. :)

Out of curiosity, did you (or rather, poor David) go out of your way to create a new icon for every weapon, ship / fighter, and package blueprint or did you make it so the game does that for you?  I can see it becoming a bit of a pain in the butt for everyone involved if you had to make a new icon for everything, and automating the process with a pseudo-procedural generation of such icons might streamline that process.  Even using an outside program like ImageMagick would be a nice help compared to handmaking everything.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2018, 09:44:30 PM by The Soldier »
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Techhead

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #25 on: February 12, 2018, 11:58:53 PM »

Now that the terms are actually player-visible, have you consider renaming the "Low-Tech/Midline/High-Tech" classification system and/or reclassifying ships? eg. Having "Tri-Tachyon" with all the canonical TT-designed hulls and sliding the remaining High-Tech ships into another category.
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Cyan Leader

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #26 on: February 13, 2018, 12:57:25 AM »

Hey, a new blog post. :)

Out of curiosity, did you (or rather, poor David) go out of your way to create a new icon for every weapon, ship / fighter, and package blueprint or did you make it so the game does that for you?  I can see it becoming a bit of a pain in the butt for everyone involved if you had to make a new icon for everything, and automating the process with a pseudo-procedural generation of such icons might streamline that process.  Even using an outside program like ImageMagick would be a nice help compared to handmaking everything.

They did automate it, see Alex's last reply to my question.
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King Alfonzo

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #27 on: February 13, 2018, 02:05:44 AM »

So you can tailor your faction fleets in ship type and armament? That does sound awesome, but would it have a major impact on the campaign layer? Like, would having a high aggression fleet type be better in some circumstances than a cowardly fleet type? I feel that while the system might be cool from a lore-wsie standpoint, it doesn't really have  astrong effect on the campaign level.

Draba

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #28 on: February 13, 2018, 02:25:17 AM »

Ship quality is another interesting mechanic. Of course, it was in the game previously, but now that the player can influence ship quality, I would like to suggest that there be a positive mirror to D mods. If quality is high enough, on rare occasions, perhaps something of exceptional quality could be built? This is similar to the thrill finding XIV battlegroup technology.

Hmm - I think feel-wise, the "d-mods to normal" spectrum makes more sense, what with the state of manufacturing in the Sector and all. Although, as you point out, some stuff - like the XIV and Hegemony Auxiliaries - do have bonuses. I think those are best kept as special, not something you can pile onto just any hull.

I like the d-mod approach better.
Very rare things can be a pain since you really want to use them in battle, but losing them is frustrating.
Really liked when junkers/recovery were added for this exact reason, you get to shoot things without worrying about losses too much.

As always, really excited for the changes!
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WastedAlmond

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Re: Blueprints, Doctrine, and Production
« Reply #29 on: February 13, 2018, 03:05:29 AM »

Aww yeah! The next update seems really nice! And uh, excuse my excited suggestion but: As a big fan of really endgame upgrades/customisations, could it be possible to find object(s) similar to nano-forges, that would allow you to create your very own faction specific hullmod? Similar to what has already been suggested, but aimed at player fleets exclusively, as we want to keep "elites" special (and as we know the player is super special and they like to feel like it). Would be really awesome to push the envelope with a hull by just a few more percents towards your preferred playstyle. (An atlas with less OP but more cargo space? Load and pray indeed. Or a combat ship with a few more OP & speed, but less armor)

Imagine finding a domain era "advanced materials" database allowing you to design a hull mod, with some set amount of points OR selectable archetypes. Of course applying this hullmod would require an advanced shipyard and cause a significant price hike, as the factory would have to implement nonstandard advanced materials etc. As a final note on this, maybe they shouldn't be as powerful as XIV, as a trade off for that customization. Plus I'd hate it if XIV ships would end up devalued by player made creations, even if expensive. Could even tie it in with AI cores or some rare materials that would need to be bought from around the sector, to facilitate such exotic upgrades.

In the end, this is just me wanting to have more cake, but being able to finetune juuuuust a little bit in the end game would be very fun. Sorry for my ramblings and thanks for the update, very exciting!  ;D
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