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[errorgance]

Positive hyperspace, thin spots, an interesting idea! could you reduce fuel usage in those spots instead of a speed boost? It would be a nice way of economizing fuel and possibly a way to limp back to civilization if you’re low on fuel since technically it’d be trading supplies for fuel.

Also riding out a storm sounds like fun, reminds me of the American clipper ships running sail through them just for the extra speed, no matter the cost to the canvas. Could be a fun hull mod, solar sail/hyperspace sail, extra speed/reduced fuel usage in storms. If you make it useful enough, you could literally trade supplies for fuel if your short on fuel.

  
Alex, another thought on the storms striking random vessels, if you do that,  you could then animate a lightning strike or some other to visual show the player that somethings bad has actually happened.

[Cosmitz]

I never know what to realistically comment to these blogposts since they all make so much good game-sense. Really, great stuff here and that was needed. One of these days i'll log in and see 0.9a released and lose another few weeks with it.

[Regis_CZ]

Hello,
Thanks for the blog post, it is always nice to read those. Is salvaging entire ships/hulls still a thing in 0.9? I noticed a problem with the current system which I would like to mention but obviously not if it is no longer applicable.

[Gothars]

Hello Regis_CZ, welcome to the forum!

Yes, salvaging will still be there. What is the issue you noticed?

[Regis_CZ]

Thank you. I should have probably said concern, not issue. It is about salvaging ships vs max fleet size.

Normally after combat you are offered all ships that fulfill certain requirements for salvage. However the number of ships you are offered on the salvage screen only goes up to the fleet limit. So if you have 28 ships in the fleet, 2 ships will be picked at random (I assume) from all the salvageable ships. This means couple of things:

• Late game when you fight large fleets, rare salvage (big/rare ships) are even more rare as the chance you get them is divided by the number of other salvageable ships.
• It devaluates the salvage skills late game. In fact it may make it harder to get big ships as you get a lot of small salvageable craft which push the valuable ones out of the salvage pool.
• If you ever fall behind the curve and need to bring many ships to combat in order to win your chances of getting better ships (so that you don't have to win by numbers) are much diminished, creating sort of vicious cycle.

In my latest campaign I ended up at max level without any decent ships - the best hulls I had were two Eagles. In order to beat any of the bounty fleets (difficulty of which I think is based on your level) I basically had to bring everything I had, 28-29 ships. This with the mechanics mentioned above precluded me from gaining better ships. I thing I won some 20 bounty battles, each with 1-3 capital ships before being able to salvage one of them. I think I disabled (as opposed to destroyed) somewhere around 75% of the capital ships but with maxed out salvage skills I think even those can make it into the salvage pool. It took me about 3 hours of gameplay to realize I will get NO salvage at max fleet size and then afterwards some 10 hours at 28 fleet size to get the first capital ship. Extremely frustrating 10 hours.

This all eventually led to some very gamey and desperate tactics like me flying around the battlefield deliberately destroying disabled ships in attempt to push them out of the salvage pool, etc.

I would vote for player getting list of all salvageable ships regardless of the fleet size with the choices on the salvage screen being: salvage (up to the fleet limit), break up and leave be. Perhaps similar to the deploy/deploy left/deploy right on the deployment screen.

[Alex]

Solid points all around. It's sort of been on my TODO list for a while (offer all ships, limit number of picks to X) but just haven't been able to get to it. Thank you for sharing your experience; I wasn't thinking of this as an issue that would come up all that much.

(Welcome to the forum, btw!)

[Regis_CZ]

Thanks Alex and thank you for a wonderful game, which I am sure will become even better with time.

[Megas]

Normally after combat you are offered all ships that fulfill certain requirements for salvage. However the number of ships you are offered on the salvage screen only goes up to the fleet limit. So if you have 28 ships in the fleet, 2 ships will be picked at random (I assume) from all the salvageable ships.

This is why that one perk that increases chance of enemy hull recovery is useless, because after you have a big enough fleet, you have more than enough enemy wrecks left after a fight to fill or exceed the fleet cap.

In my latest campaign I ended up at max level without any decent ships - the best hulls I had were two Eagles. In order to beat any of the bounty fleets (difficulty of which I think is based on your level) I basically had to bring everything I had, 28-29 ships.

That was much like my first 0.8 playthrough, although that release had no level scaling.  I really dislike level scaling in the later 0.8 releases because the enemy upgrades faster than you can.

Solid points all around. It's sort of been on my TODO list for a while (offer all ships, limit number of picks to X) but just haven't been able to get to it. Thank you for sharing your experience; I wasn't thinking of this as an issue that would come up all that much.

Nice that it will be addressed.  When I went bounty hunting, I brought no more than twenty ships just so I have room to grab enemy hulls.  Hulls exceeding the limit happens all of the time at endgame.

[Deshara]

Solid points all around. It's sort of been on my TODO list for a while (offer all ships, limit number of picks to X) but just haven't been able to get to it. Thank you for sharing your experience; I wasn't thinking of this as an issue that would come up all that much.

(Welcome to the forum, btw!)

I was thinking about this yesterday WRT Total Warhammer 2's autoresolve design being borked (the game gives you the option to quicksave before a battle, so its design is actually forcing players to quicksave, autoresolve, and if the results aren't favorable load that quicksave and then actually fight the fight, which largely just punishes players with 10 minute load times (Hi! It me!) who have to do 3 loads (a half hour of loading for every battle) for every attempt at a battle, and 3 more for every retry) and how the game really just needs to tell you what the autoresolve result will be (since it is deterministic) up front and offer you the option of personally leading your troops into battle to force a better result
and while I was thinking about that I remembered SS tangentially bumping up against a similar problem and that another game I'd been following had too but I can't for the life of me remember what it was

[Megas]

@ Deshara: Pre 0.6 Starfarer/Starsector allowed the player to autoresolve every fight.  For the last 0.5 version with skills, the best build was the autoresolve build.  Get max Leadership and Technology, cram as many big ships in your fight, and autoresolve everything in Corvus.  If you wipe, reload.  If not, save and do it to the next fleet.  Autoresolving took seconds instead of minutes, and it was the only way to grind up to 50 in a reasonable amount of time for the 10-10-10 character.  Any other build was effectively a 10-10 character.

[Regis_CZ]

That was much like my first 0.8 playthrough, although that release had no level scaling.  I really dislike level scaling in the later 0.8 releases because the enemy upgrades faster than you can.

I see I am not the only one who has problems with the scaling (in principle, not with the rate). I'm going to start a topic about this in General discussion in order not to clutter this thread.

[Megas]

I see I am not the only one who has problems with the scaling (in principle, not with the rate). I'm going to start a topic about this in General discussion in order not to clutter this thread.

Alex has toned it down for the 0.9, so whatever problems we have in 0.8 will not last.

[Alex]

(... it's also fairly minor to begin with; I think much of it has to do with running into a higher-level bounty (of which there's usually one posted, and it brings in more credits) and feeling like it has to do with scaling when it doesn't ...)

[SCC]

The issue with limited salvage based on fleet size has been known for a long time, it's a part of the reason why I changed maxShipsInFleet to 100.

[Megas]

(... it's also fairly minor to begin with; I think much of it has to do with running into a higher-level bounty (of which there's usually one posted, and it brings in more credits) and feeling like it has to do with scaling when it doesn't ...)

That is hard to swallow when all of the bounties have the same elevated difficulty and reward (which is useless when they are too strong).  The only logical explanation is level scaling upgraded every bounty.