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Author Topic: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests  (Read 3988 times)

DaviBones

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A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« on: March 29, 2018, 08:29:25 PM »

First of all, as you can see, a wall of text follows. If you don't care to read it, feel free to skip to the tl;dr at the bottom. Secondly: this is meant to be a story of a new player followed by constructive criticism -- If at any point I come across as rude, that was not my intent and I apologize.

So, I started Starsector with a non-ironman playthrough, choosing normal difficulty -- after playing the combat tutorials, of course. I played through the campaign tutorial as well. The final fight took me a few tries, but once I figured out how to separate the two fleets, it was a piece of cake. I continued on for a bit, got my hands on a few more ships, went on a couple survey/salvage expeditions, learned the ropes, and eventually realized: This game seems to have enough tools for RNG mitigation that it is worthy of an ironman playthrough. So I restarted.

I had grand ideas for my new fleet: It would be solely composed of frigates, to ensure we could both pick our fights on the campaign map with 9 max burn, and have the top speed in combat to pick our engagements and run if necessary; Every ship expected to take part in combat would have either reinforced bulkheads, or an officer along with the first level of Fleet Logistics, one of my first skill picks, to ensure that ship losses would be rare; Our cargo ships would have sufficient combat ability to provide support in difficult, but winnable fights. Take note of the assumptions made in the preceding list -- nearly all of them turned out to either be wrong, or be associated with serious but obscure downsides.

The next 30-40 hours of gameplay were exciting, even sometimes exhilarating. I went on several long expeditions with varying degrees of success. In one particularly nasty turn of events, I was forced to run from a scavenger ambush that was a bit too powerful for me, with a cruiser I was not yet prepared to take on -- I lost many ships, due to (I suspect) not realizing I had to tell ships with non-PD weapons to "Direct retreat" in order to get them to not screw around with enemy ships and just RUN. I barely broke even that expedition, and lost all but one of my five Hypervelocity Drivers which was very painful. But I continued on, until the most recent expedition. I set off with the following ships in my fleet:

Afflictor (Flagship, Reapers + AM blasters)
Centurion (Reckless Officer, EMP + needler)
Lasher (Aggressive Officer, railguns + atropos)
Wolf (Steady Officer, pulse laser + EMP)
Brawler (Cautious Officer, HVD + Mauler)
Vigilance (Steady Officer, graviton beam + pilums)
Shade (Steady Officer, AM blaster + assault guns)
Wolf (Secondary Flagship, SO setup)
3 Cerberus (Kiting cargo ship, Heavy Needler or HVD when available)
3 Shepherds
Wayfarer (odd man out, never really found a use for this guy)
1 Buffalo (A)
2 Drams

This fleet may seem weak to some due to it's lack of destroyers and cruisers, but it proved itself able to take out fleets much larger than itself with no losses. After extensive practice in the sim-tubes, I was consistently able to take out at least 2 cruisers or 4 destroyers with my Afflictor alone in a single battle, thanks to 4 total reaper torpedoes from extended missile racks. Additionally, my wing-men were quite capable skirmishers, outmaneuvering basically everything thanks to liberal application of unstable injectors. But every fleet has a weakness. Mine was a scavenger fleet with 6-8 cruisers, 8-10 destroyers, and too many frigates to count. Hit me head on during a sustained burn -- by the time I paused, they were already on top of me, otherwise, an about-six emergency burn would have surely saved my hide. "That's ok. I can just retreat. I might lose some of my Shepherds and Cerberus, and the loot they are carrying, but at least we'll have our lives," I assured myself. However, much to my dismay, there was no retreat button. The text above my choices revealed the reason: my fleet, it appeared, was too large to disengage. My heart sank. The rare derelict ships I had excitedly recovered (including my first destroyer: the Medusa I had been looking for all campaign) had apparently put me above some unknown and unknowable threshold. We fought valiantly, but to no avail. The tide of the battle changed when I made a fatal mistake I had not made since early days in the sim tubes: Upon dealing the killing blow with my Antimatter blasters to the third Falcon, my flagship found itself too close to the resulting detonation, was engulfed and lost, along with a single unused Reaper torpedo that might have otherwise helped turn the tide. In desperation, I called in my secondary flagship along with the poorly-armed derelicts we had haphazardly armed upon recovery, "just in case," as they say. But it was too late. An enemy reinforcement wave arrived with two more cruiser and a handful of destroyers, unfortunately, right on top of several of my best frigates who were attempting to finish off a limping hammerhead. I tried to get them to disengage safely, but was out of command points -- the first time all campaign. It was over. I ordered a full retreat. The only survivors were my secondary flagship, the Shade who was able to phase cloak away, and my second-in-command's Wolf. We were now allowed to retreat, with a fleet under a quarter the size of before. We did so, losing only the Buffalo in the process, though that was a loss I was prepared for.

We now sit on the farthest reaches of the sector with 2 Wolves, a Shade, a Shepherd, and a pair of Drams, with more than enough fuel to get home, but the supplies count is dangerously low. Barely enough to get home, under the most ideal circumstances, but certainly not enough to restore any combat readiness on our three combat ships, who are all sitting below 30%.

Now that story time is over, allow me to discuss this from a gameplay perspective. My current position could be an incredibly engaging one to work out of, if not for two things:

1.) I have almost 500,000 in the bank, so beyond actually making it home, recovering doesn't really require much thought or strategic planning, just grinding. All I have to do is spend several hours traveling from market to market, looking for the ships and weapons to reconstruct my fleet. Not the most engaging gameplay. I'm unsure if this is due to a lack of balance in the player-centric economy, or if I just screwed up the balance by only using frigates; like I said, this is my first real campaign, so I have nothing to compare it to. Then again, if a brand new player can make 500,000 profit on normal ironman using an unorthodox strategy and taking a fair amount of losses while doing so... I don't know, maybe the game needs a harder difficulty setting. Or maybe money from Class 3-5 surveys needs to be toned down, that's where I made the majority of my money, with bounties, both named and regional, taking second place. Anyway, this is not the primary reason continuing with this save would likely be unfun, so let's get to that:

2.) I was screwed over by a unexplained, unexpected, and unrealistic game mechanic (the dreaded three U's of game design): If I had been able to retreat from the fight, I absolutely would have, but there is some obscure threshold (which I still don't know) of fleet "size" (which is also unexplained... does a destroyer count as 2 frigates? One frigate? Or is fleet size related to some other ship stat entirely? If so, which one? Fuel usage perhaps? No one should be expected to go to the wiki or forums for this info, when so much info is so well-presented in the game) past which you are not allowed to retreat. Why not? My ships were ALL faster than their cruisers and destroyers, both in terms of combat speed and max burn level. If they really wanted to chase me (talking pseudo-realistically here) they could potentially send their frigates, but there's no damn way they are forcing an engagement with their cruisers. They could maybe force an engagement with either their frigates or larger ships, if the admiral in question was extremely clever strategically. But I could have crushed their frigates with no issue. Actually, now that I'm talking about it, I just remembered -- I also had a Colossus I had recovered for the extra cargo space, so perhaps their max burn level was equal to or above my own. If I had scuttled that before the fight, my max burn level would have been 9, and theirs would have been 7 due to a Venture they had. Would I have been able to retreat in that case? I would love to know the answer to that if anyone knows. If it's yes, then this is my own damn fault for being greedy, which is a lot more easy to accept than it being the game's fault for not explaining a mechanic properly.

So now for the requests (normally I don't bother with feature requests, but Alex, you seem like a nice guy and pretty involved in the community, and I feel some kinship with you because I'm also developing a game in lwjgl!)
1.) Please integrate some sort of explanation of the fleet-size-retreat mechanic. It's fine for a mechanic to make no sense realism-wise, if it's explained properly. My personal fix would be to add a pop-up when buying, recovering, or otherwise acquiring a ship would put you over the threshold, warning you of such and allowing you to cancel your action. This popup would also have a "Don't show this message again" checkbox. Of course, there are other solutions as well, such as explaining it in the tutorial somewhere. This change would make the game much more accessible and less frustrating for new players that want to play ironman in my opinion.
2.) I counted my ship losses for combats I won over the course of the campaign. I recovered:
2/3 ships lost with reinforced bulkheads (no officer)
0/5 ships lost with no reinforced bulkheads, but with an officer and Fleet Logistics level 1.
0/2 ships lost with no reinforced bulkheads, but with myself commanding them, and with Fleet Logistics level 1 and Damage Control level 1.
I am willing to accept that I failed seven 95% chances in a row; I play XCOM, I know the fickle nature of RNG. However, it would be nice to know the percentage. The phrase "nearly guaranteed" is rather subjective. If it's 80% chance, I would never call that "nearly guaranteed", and that would make the skills far less useful. If the chance is any lower than that, the skills are borderline useless, and "nearly guaranteed" is straight up misleading. Listing the actual percentage chance makes it much easier for the player to assess these skills' value.
3.) Being able to abandon ships in the dialog before combat would be nice. As I mentioned before, if I had been able to leave my Colossus behind, I would have potentially been able to escape. Abandoning them would obviously lose the ships along with cargo/fuel just as if they had been destroyed in combat. Perhaps the AI would even do this sometimes, allowing you to recover the ship(s) without d-mods.


I want to end with the fact that this is an awesome game with tons of potential. The game was clearly created with a lot of love and hard work, which is how all the best (or at least my favorite) art is created, whether in the form of video games, movies, novels, or whatever else. Keep it up Alex and team, you guys have done a fantastic job, and my intention here has only been to help make it even more enjoyable in my own little way :)

tl;dr -- I lost nearly all of a lovingly crafted frigate fleet after a long ironman campaign, due partially to my own mistakes, and partially to the fleet-size-retreat mechanic being perhaps inadequately explained.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2018, 06:33:24 PM by DaviBones »
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Alex

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2018, 09:36:49 PM »

Hi, and welcome to the forum! I sort of skimmed because it's late and I'm more than a bit sleepy; will give it a proper read-through tomorrow :)

Just a couple of quick notes right now:

1) I added a quick indicator to the fleet screen a little while ago to show whether the fleet can retreat or not. It could probably use a tooltip to explain it in more detail, but, well, it's a start. Although I'm not sure how I feel about it being there; might be better to explain elsewhere.

2) Fleet Logistics 1 has a bug that makes the recovery chance 50% instead of 100% for ships that broke apart (i.e. "destroyed" rather than "disabled"). Fixed for the next release. Still doesn't explain the numbers you're seeing, though, they seem... unlikely.

If you have the maximum number of ships already (25 or 30? not sure; in-dev it's 30, but it may have been 25 for the release) then you won't be able to recover ships beyond that. I'm fairly sure it'll prioritize letting you recover your own ships, though. (Checked: looks like it should.)

So, hmm, the numbers seem weird. If this wasn't working to that degree, I'd have expected it to come up by now; I wonder if there is something specific to your case that's going on here.

("Nearly guaranteed" is in fact 100%; the "nearly" is just there to keep the player guessing a bit and not feeling *too* comfortable. Shhh, don't tell anyone.)


As far as being able to disengage: yeah, if you didn't have the Colossus, you'd have higher fleet burn and would be able to disengage w/o a fight, without the fleet size check coming into it. Could also deploy some stuff in a head on fight just to sacrifice it (i.e. roughly equivalent to scuttling, except by enemy fire).

The fleet size "can disengage" check is if your fleet's total deployment cost in supplies is larger than the smaller of 40% of the battle size (from settings) or 150. The only reason it's there is a retreat battle requires you to be able to deploy everything, and some fleets are too large to be able to do that, performance-wise, while still letting the enemy deploy more points than you - which is why it's based on battle size.

As far as spending 500k credits being boring etc - yeah, I think this is mostly a function of outposts not being in the game. If you want to check out how that's supposed to shape up, check out this blog post:

http://fractalsoftworks.com/2018/02/12/blueprints-doctrine-and-production/


Sorry if this is a bit disjointed; hope it makes sense. I appreciate your feedback and will see about taking a closer look tomorrow!

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DaviBones

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2018, 06:11:53 PM »

Hey Alex, thanks for the quick reply! Glad to be here on the forums, seems like a chill place.

Great to hear about the indicator, now after the next release new players won't have to go through what I did if they're attentive :)

Glad you understood I meant Fleet Logistics 1 instead of Leadership 1, silly mistake, I'll edit the first post so as not to confuse others. As far as the numbers I'm seeing, I realized that I actually did have one instance of Fleet Logistics working, I just forgot because I lost the ship immediately in the next fight (Damn reckless officer chewed through ships like no one's business. I eventually fired her out of rage when she lost a shiny new Harbinger I had found on the fringe of the sector). So, in fact the number is 1/6, not 0/5. I CAN however verify with 100% certainty that all six ships broke apart (destroyed, not disabled). Unsure how unlikely that is -- Is there anything that influences ships being disabled or is it a flat percentage? In any case missing the 50% chance 5/6 times is not terribly unlikely: 6/64 chance or about 9%. However, if you do think there could be something specific to my situation/install, I'd be happy to start up a non-ironman save and do some testing.

Interesting about nearly guaranteed -- never would have expected that, but it makes sense why you've done so. I think a 95% chance would be kind of cool, nothing wrong with very occasionally throwing a wrench in the player's seemingly impenetrable defenses. Perhaps on hard difficulty if you end up adding it.

I just tested on my non ironman save trying to escape from a fleet with max burn 8, with mine at max burn 9, and didn't see the prompt to disengage. Do you need a +2 advantage to do so, or could there be other factors at play here? (sustained burn, emergency burn, terrain effects)

The blog post is very cool, I'm not the kind of person that keeps up to date with game development past downloading the most recent build, so I had no idea about outposts, though I suspected as much the first time I surveyed a planet; adding all those planetary modifiers to the procedurally generated planets would have been an odd move if you hadn't planned on making them colonizable at some point. Glad to hear my assumption was correct!

Thanks again for the well thought out reply, you are certainly a rare developer for taking as much time as you do to engage with the community. I will have to take a page out of your book when I release the alpha version of my own game!
« Last Edit: March 30, 2018, 06:32:44 PM by DaviBones »
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Alex

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2018, 08:20:16 PM »

The chance for a ship to break apart is about 50%, depending on the hull. Reinforced Bulkheads brings it down to 0. So, alright, let's chalk it up to bad luck plus the FL1 bug.

I just tested on my non ironman save trying to escape from a fleet with max burn 8, with mine at max burn 9, and didn't see the prompt to disengage. Do you need a +2 advantage to do so, or could there be other factors at play here? (sustained burn, emergency burn, terrain effects)

It actually checks the minimum burn level of any ship in the retreating fleet vs the maximum burn level of any ship in the pursuing fleet. If any of the pursuers have higher burn that any of the disengaging ships, they can force a battle. Otherwise, a clean disengage is possible. (This is indeed fairly deep in hidden mechanic territory. I really ought to clean this all up at some point.)

The blog post is very cool, I'm not the kind of person that keeps up to date with game development past downloading the most recent build, so I had no idea about outposts, though I suspected as much the first time I surveyed a planet; adding all those planetary modifiers to the procedurally generated planets would have been an odd move if you hadn't planned on making them colonizable at some point. Glad to hear my assumption was correct!

Cool, glad that made sense! On a related note, the value of survey data is way inflated in the current release, to make up for not having the "you can establish a colony" reward of surveying; I'd expect it to either go away entirely or come down in value.

... when I release the alpha version of my own game!

Good luck! Totally off-topic, but what sort of game is it going to be?

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Ranakastrasz

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2018, 07:27:11 AM »

Don't ships break apart if they take a lot more damage? Could that be related?

Also, Bulkheads prevent them from breaking apart immediately, AND ensures you can recover them, right?

Not 100% how that mechanic works, and some details could help.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #5 on: March 31, 2018, 07:31:50 AM »

I know ships have a random chance to break apart that is NOT based on the kill damage received (But they can be destroyed by too much damage afterwords)
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Alex

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2018, 07:50:02 AM »

Also, Bulkheads prevent them from breaking apart immediately, AND ensures you can recover them, right?
I know ships have a random chance to break apart that is NOT based on the kill damage received (But they can be destroyed by too much damage afterwords)

Correct & correct. If it has bulkheads, though, it should be recoverable regardless.
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DaviBones

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2018, 08:43:16 PM »

The chance for a ship to break apart is about 50%, depending on the hull. Reinforced Bulkheads brings it down to 0. So, alright, let's chalk it up to bad luck plus the FL1 bug.

What difference does destroyed vs disabled actually make, gameplay wise? Just whether or not it is recoverable? (And even then, it seems that Fleet Logistics and Reinforced Bulkheads make even that distinction irrelevant)
Then again, I suppose having both makes battles more chaotic and exciting ;D


It actually checks the minimum burn level of any ship in the retreating fleet vs the maximum burn level of any ship in the pursuing fleet. If any of the pursuers have higher burn that any of the disengaging ships, they can force a battle. Otherwise, a clean disengage is possible. (This is indeed fairly deep in hidden mechanic territory. I really ought to clean this all up at some point.)

Ok, good to know, though I can't really see a practical situation where it would come up, since basically all fleets have at least one frigate with max burn of 10. So maybe it's okay if it stays hidden, since the player can't really use it to his or her advantage... Bar doing something silly like having a Tempest-only fleet ;)


Cool, glad that made sense! On a related note, the value of survey data is way inflated in the current release, to make up for not having the "you can establish a colony" reward of surveying; I'd expect it to either go away entirely or come down in value.

Good, I think that makes sense. Far too easy to acquire money in this build and I think survey data is the main culprit. Maybe you still get a (reduced) cash reward for surveying, but only if you don't colonize the planet. After all, who cares about survey data for an already-colonized planet? Hrm... sounded good in my head, but now that I've written it out, I'm realizing it would be a kind of awkward mechanic to implement cleanly. Only way I can think is to make the player decide upon surveying whether or not they intended to colonize, which would be terrible.


Good luck! Totally off-topic, but what sort of game is it going to be?

I appreciate the interest! It's an isometric sandbox group survival game (also written with LWJGL, if you missed that in my initial wall of text!). Think isometric Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld, but where you control an actual character, so it plays much more like an RPG than either of those. Also with turn based combat. The setting is a near-scifi colony builder -- you are leading the group of people who are setting up the first human colony, which was sent to a nearby star using slower-than-light tech, so no (timely) support from Earth. I have done a lot of work on it already, the gathering/crafting and medical systems are nearly fully implemented. Writing the AI is rough though, even though coding usually comes rather naturally to me; I have mad respect for the AI work you have done in Starsector.
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Bastion.Systems

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #8 on: April 01, 2018, 12:59:36 AM »


Ok, good to know, though I can't really see a practical situation where it would come up, since basically all fleets have at least one frigate with max burn of 10. So maybe it's okay if it stays hidden, since the player can't really use it to his or her advantage... Bar doing something silly like having a Tempest-only fleet Wink

You could install Augmented Drive Field to all of your burn 10 ships, that would make it work (not against Tri-Tach or Lion's Guard as they near always have Tempest's.
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Alex

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #9 on: April 01, 2018, 08:19:33 PM »

What difference does destroyed vs disabled actually make, gameplay wise? Just whether or not it is recoverable?

It halves the recovery chance (provided it's not 100% for various reasons), and always adds a "compromised structure" d-mod to the ship when it's recovered. To represent the copious amounts of welding required.

I appreciate the interest! It's an isometric sandbox group survival game (also written with LWJGL, if you missed that in my initial wall of text!). Think isometric Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld, but where you control an actual character, so it plays much more like an RPG than either of those. Also with turn based combat. The setting is a near-scifi colony builder -- you are leading the group of people who are setting up the first human colony, which was sent to a nearby star using slower-than-light tech, so no (timely) support from Earth. I have done a lot of work on it already, the gathering/crafting and medical systems are nearly fully implemented. Writing the AI is rough though, even though coding usually comes rather naturally to me; I have mad respect for the AI work you have done in Starsector.

Yeah, I did see you're also crazy enough to roll your own engine with LWJGL! The idea sounds cool. (Thanks for your kind words re: Starsector's AI; it's mostly held together by duct tape, but I think that's underrated when it comes to AI :))
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Techhead

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #10 on: April 02, 2018, 06:34:07 PM »


Ok, good to know, though I can't really see a practical situation where it would come up, since basically all fleets have at least one frigate with max burn of 10. So maybe it's okay if it stays hidden, since the player can't really use it to his or her advantage... Bar doing something silly like having a Tempest-only fleet Wink

You could install Augmented Drive Field to all of your burn 10 ships, that would make it work (not against Tri-Tach or Lion's Guard as they near always have Tempest's.
The other thing you could possibly do is engage, hunt down and kill each of those burn 10 frigates, and then escape the larger ships.

Fortunately, many civilian frigates that are less likely to be deployed in an engagement (like the Dram, Mercury, Hermes, and Shepherd) are burn 9.

Quote
(This is indeed fairly deep in hidden mechanic territory. I really ought to clean this all up at some point.)
One thing I could see to make this more transparent would be a "abandon your slower ships in order to disengage cleanly" option. But you'd have to make sure it has a confirmation screen with "These ships are who you're leaving behind. Are you sure?" and possibly an extra "Are you really sure?"
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Aieonae

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Re: A tale of loss, and a couple earnest requests
« Reply #11 on: April 29, 2018, 03:41:15 AM »

 ;) How funny is that I actually gotten tired of being big and manage reduce the size of my fleet to a fairly small entourage.

3xTempest, 2xIon Pulser & Reaper Torpedoes
1xOmen, 2xIon Cannon & Swarm Missile
1xHegemony Buffalo, 1xVulcan(Shhh don't ask)
1xSalvage Rig

And it is particularly attractive to any 1 to 10 triangles fleets wishing to see their early demise.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2436887475162002353/C92944F63CDCF2F2D1529F092D048BD44576A656/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2436887475162003362/0046120FECCEDA16C6F3704757A68CE1C225C7CF/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2436887313890091917/4B6B9DFED5CAA427F366AD17B1C76EE8DA04A5E2/
« Last Edit: April 29, 2018, 04:08:06 AM by Aieonae »
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