Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

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

Pages: 1 [2]

Author Topic: The Tyranny of Fuel: Exploration Vessels, Solo Fleets, and Vanity Projects  (Read 8519 times)

Eji1700

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 222
    • View Profile

The main reason to deploy civilians is auto-resolving pursuits, where it is completely safe and when player does not want to drain CR of proper warships.  The CR of civilian ships are untapped resources that are rarely used.

Aside from that, they can rarely be useful to boost initial Nav/ECM numbers, especially in a fight against a lone battlestation that is unable to attack anything beyond its reach.

That said, I agree that civilians are primarily stat sticks, which seems a bit annoying.  I like to call them loads for having less burn speed than most warships of their size class.  "But... burn speed of battlecruisers is faster than battleships!  Who cares?!  I need to bring this slowpoke superfreighter or supertanker slower than a battleship to a fringe system where killer monsters full of treasure are, kill them, then haul back lots of loot."

I mean hauling the loot makes sense, but map movement in general is...eh?  The framework for a really deep system is there (burn speed, different abilities, sensor range, etc), but right now is sorta just that..a framework.    Outposts will help a lot with this, but also make tankers even more pointless (small refuling stations and the like).  It's why i'm hoping trading is given a little more point, so that you wind up wanting to protect and move large quantities between two points, which would maybe make the super shippers more than just an in world AI thing.

Hell even pirating them feels pretty bleh (easy to catch, easy to kill, not that rewarding?)
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile

Anything that makes tankers pointless, or at least not required, is good.  Bringing stat sticks with your exploration or war fleet to function is annoying.  The solo explorers in sci-fi shows were not fuel tankers!

Trade broke between 0.7 and 0.8.

Pirating supply fleets is usually lame, but occasionally, they may haul something great.  I remember the one time I caught an enemy Atlas fleet that left about 5000 supplies as loot, and I brought two or three Atlases of my own precisely to loot enemies from chain-battling.  The big haul prompted me to abort my latest raid to stash the supplies for consumption later.  (No need to pay for supplies for months.)

Enemy supply fleets are targets of opportunity.  You should not go out of your way to kill them, but if one crosses your path and falls in your lap, and you have the cargo space to haul the loot, by all means take it out.
Logged
Pages: 1 [2]