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.