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Author Topic: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.  (Read 16542 times)

Goumindong

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #60 on: September 12, 2018, 11:42:31 AM »

rest of the fleet is going to be clunkers on top of the “deployment reduction applies to maintenance” skill. That allows me to have a huge backing fleet without paying huge backing fleet maintenance. (Also looking to pick up ships with high DP/fuel ratios)

Interesting approach, but wouldn't pristine ships work not any worse here? If I understand correctly deployment cost reduction also reduces their contribution to battlesize distribution. Either way you pay for example 10 supplies/month for 10 supplies worth of DP. And there is no fuel cost reduction for clunkers, so DP/fuel-wise you are actually inefficient.


Deployment cost reduction does not reduce their contribution to battle size. All it does is reduce the amount of CR that you lose each battle. But if you check the values for "how much DP do i have left" it goes down the normal amount for the normal ship size. That makes sense from a design perspective (battle size is more about saving your CPU/GPU than it is about making fights even) even if it doesn't feel great from a player perspective. But at the same time if deployment cost actually reduced contribution to battle size then D-mod'd ships would be strictly better than non. Since you could get 2x the ship for about 90% of the ship quality. I once had that notion and then was like "I am going to rule with my clunker army" and then found out that I didn't have a deployment advantage

Edit: So you end up paying about 50% of the maintenance cost for DP. If you couple that with high DP/Fuel ships you're doing pretty well.

Edit: My ideal backing fleet is like... 10 hella busted Doom's. You can get to almost -70% reduction in maintenance due to damage so this will cost 30 fuel/ly... and have a deployment value of 350... and use 105 Supplies
« Last Edit: September 12, 2018, 03:17:17 PM by Goumindong »
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TaLaR

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #61 on: September 12, 2018, 08:01:17 PM »

Deployment cost reduction does not reduce their contribution to battle size.

I see, didn't know.

My ideal backing fleet is like... 10 hella busted Doom's. You can get to almost -70% reduction in maintenance due to damage so this will cost 30 fuel/ly... and have a deployment value of 350... and use 105 Supplies

30 fuel is enough for a capital-led fleet of decent size though. Considering that Aurora alone is only 3, that's serious amount of overhead.
Well, as long as it works for you.
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Goumindong

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #62 on: September 12, 2018, 10:33:34 PM »

It worked ok? Not great. It is hard to find enough high quality wrecks to make it work. Having fuel was never the issue even when I had relatively huge fleets because a red beacon fills you up anyway.

The main problem was finding high quality wrecks. You end up buying most of your ships anyway because the rate at which you can acquire good wrecks is super low even with skills.

But in terms of kill power I had no problem taking out high level bounties. I wasn’t big enough to deal with a redacted redacted though... I could barely even deploy one ship let alone me and my four officers.
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Lucax

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #63 on: September 17, 2018, 05:50:46 AM »

My opinion since officers exist is we need officers with (boring) fleetwide skills so we can afford the (fun) combat skills.

In a similar way, we need to have a combat skill that buffs (fun) frigates, or at least anything smaller than a cruiser, so we can leave the (boring) capital carriers of slow but certain Doom to the AI without feeling penalized for it.
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lethargie

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #64 on: September 19, 2018, 06:58:03 AM »

Fighting with capital can be a lot of fun, you need to plan where you will be, you need to selectively activate your weapon, you need to decide when to put shield on or off. If you can multitask you can even engage 2 target at the same time. For me frigate are pretty boring, as there's not much to do: find an angle, go in, go out, vent and repeat.

There's no way to keep the game balanced and to make a single frigate influence the battle as much as a capital anyway. You can get 6-8 frigates for the battle point cost of an onslaught.

Investing in combat stats have some really good boost that influence frigate (the flat armor and percentage based speed boost are probly better on frigate actually). On some fight I'd deploy mostly capitals and cruiser and personally pilot a frigate/destroyer to hunt early enemy frigates, then I'd order it to retreat and switch to the bigger target.

As I've said before, pretty much all of the leadership skills can be skipped, or kept at 1. Industry skills can be skipped entirely. This allow you to max a lot of combat and technology skills.
Spend 3 points to get 6 officers, +!0% speed bonus on all ship,
Spend 6 point to max combat and technology
Spend 7 point to get loadout design, electronic warfare 1 and sustained burn+5


That leaves you with 27 points to spend in combat and technology as you want. This is 9 maxed skills, compared to the seven your officers get. For 6 point you can get the lvl 3 fleetwide fighter skills and 2 more officers, leaving you with 7 maxed "combat skills" just as an officer.

Now why would you try to get more combat skills than an officer rather than going for fleetwide skills? Because you can pilot your ship a lot better, you are where you are needed when you are needed. You can solo gigantic fleet with only a Paragon, an Aurora and some support cruiser/carrier. You don't need the additional CR because you can plow through the enemy, retreat and clean the riff raff with fast ship in big engagement. Honestly, CR is only a problem in the early game, when you don't have much ship and in the endgame when you fight fleet that are several time the size of your own. And the latter can be ignored if you cycle your ships.

The real problem is industry skills, they are generally very useless unless maxed, and even then are mostly equivalent to having more money.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2018, 07:08:11 AM by lethargie »
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Lucax

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #65 on: September 19, 2018, 08:17:10 AM »

I don't know, frigates are pretty fun to me, especially when you start picking up speed and maneuvering skills. Then you can dodge plasma cannon shots and feel like a god on a bike. This is the gameplay I always go for now, when I mod the game for myself.

When I started playing, I was all about getting the biggest, strongest beast to steamroll opposition with. Then after a while, I learned to pilot a bit better and dodge important shots, and the Hyperion became my favorite ship. This was before skills, officers and CR existed, there was no downside to it, just let the AI do exactly what you've been doing, give them orders once in a while to position them correctly, while you flank and distract their ships. Now it's terribly frustrating and ineffective as a player ship, since you want to stack combat skills on an already powerful ship. You just need the advantage, otherwise you'll just gimp your fleet and get shredded by enemy officers.

Which is why I like the Extra System mod. It's not perfect, but it allows me to have fun with combat in the endgame, unlike vanilla.

I've already made a topic about fleet wide skills officers, but basically, I think this game should take the Mount & Blade approach eventually.
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lethargie

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #66 on: September 21, 2018, 08:01:33 AM »

Mount and blade was pretty fun, but if I remember well, the skill system made it so the best and most efficient way to build you char was to pump all the army-wide skills at the expense of those combat related.
It was a combination of leader-only skill (like leadership) and the fact your follower could boost your own skill if they had it too. So that doesn't look like what you would like.

Frigate flying does seem like missing out a lot of power for those that enjoy it (even if I dont). However I do not think it is ability related. Even if you had more combat skills, they would "feel" more useful on the big ship rather than the small ship. Changing the way abilities function does nothing to alleviate the problem you have. In fact you would have the same problem on a game where there is absolutely no ability.

What could help you would be a faster "transfer command option" so you could more easily switch between your deployed frigate/destroyer and your cruiser/capitals. That way you could play with the faster ship more often while your capitals are moving from one place to another. Of course, I don't know how much that could help you. Maybe you could look at mod who makes more ships like the aurora, a decent compromise between the speed of the smaller ships and the concentrated power of a bigger/slower one.
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TaLaR

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #67 on: September 21, 2018, 09:58:36 AM »

Mount and blade was pretty fun, but if I remember well, the skill system made it so the best and most efficient way to build you char was to pump all the army-wide skills at the expense of those combat related.
It was a combination of leader-only skill (like leadership) and the fact your follower could boost your own skill if they had it too. So that doesn't look like what you would like.

Yeah, don't know about that. Killing 100+ enemies as solo horse archer was also possible. Bow + 3 quivers + more quivers in item box and enough riding skill to make armored horse fast (unarmored is likely to get shot eventually). Main problem was remembering where the god damn box is (since there is no minimap or anything like that)...
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Lucax

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #68 on: September 22, 2018, 07:32:56 AM »

Adding a skill that buffs small ships wouldn't do much by itself. I see value in it for RPing, and it would be a step in the right direction, but things would be seriously imbalanced if you could bring a frigate to the power of a capital simply through skills.

What the mod I mentioned does is add the possibility to upgrade a ship. Again, it's not perfect but it has the potential to really change the impact of a frigate and make it worthwhile to pilot. The biggest flaw is it doesn't increase the deployment cost or anything like that, only the upgrade itself has a cost. When I mod a frigate I give it the maintenance cost of a typical cruiser, so the battles scale properly. But this is not what this thread is about.

In m&b, you have to take a few charisma skills to make your army bigger, but the rest of the skills can be taken by companions. If you don't invest in intelligence, you'll have plenty of points to spend in combat skills, without gimping your army, because companions. Plus there is no level cap, but leveling takes much longer than in Starsector. The result is balanced, with the exception of the bow + riding combo of course, it's unbalanced no matter your skill build.

On the other hand, a skill maxed out at 10 on the player character gives a +4 bonus so it's actually 14, which is a huge deal and is why army-wide skills are a very viable option on the pc. In Starsector this could work as additional perks on fleet wide skills that only the player could unlock.
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TaLaR

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Re: Matching skills with NPC fleet commander... takes dedication.
« Reply #69 on: September 22, 2018, 08:10:24 AM »

Adding a skill that buffs small ships wouldn't do much by itself. I see value in it for RPing, and it would be a step in the right direction, but things would be seriously imbalanced if you could bring a frigate to the power of a capital simply through skills.

Afflictor can already delete any Capital in matter of seconds with 4x Reapers + extended missile racks, without needing any special skills to do so (removing Quantum Disruptor from Afflictor in next release won't stop this, though landing Reapers will become much harder). Then you just swap to other ship and retreat the empty Afflictor (there is no penalty for this, so why not?).
Hyperion/Shade or AM-based Afflictor with just 1-2 Reapers can defeat any Capital too, though it's not as easy or fast. Landing Reapers from Hyperion against omni-shields is especially tricky part.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2018, 08:17:55 AM by TaLaR »
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