The game flows really well now. Exploration mission being available from the intel tab means you don't have to land on a bunch of planets to find a surveying mission, and if you bring enough resources along to build a makeshift comm relay you don't even have to head back to the core worlds to get more; it's very convenient and good for game flow. Once you set up a colony, there's always a reason to go out and do things beyond taking bounties.
I think it's a bit weird that you can't buy blueprints from factions no matter how much reputation you have. Obviously they wouldn't sell any of the really good stuff, but would a basic blueprint pack be out of the question at cooperative level reputation?
The Orders tab in colony management doesn't seem to have any use. Am I missing something, or does it just not do anything?
I love how dangerous the Radiant is. Please don't nerf it; the Remnants really need something this scary to make farming red-beacon systems less easy for an endgame player. That forward battery is why you buffed the autopulse, isn't it?
The weapon recovery change and the ability to bulk-manufacture ships opens up a lot of possiblity space for weird fleet doctrines. Stuff like 20 SO lashers and a player cruiser, for example. I haven't played around with it too much, but I'm looking forward to figuring out bizzare cheese builds and maybe finding something useful I've so far overlooked.
The ship AI is a lot more aggressive now, you can make it even more aggressive through fleet doctrine, and I love it. This goes hand in hand with weapon recovery and player-manufacturing, because now I care a lot less if I mismanage the AI or it overextends and loses a ship. It's not nearly as big of a deal to lose all of your destroyers in a lategame battle if you can recover all of them fully equipped, and just need to feed them supplies to be completely combat capable for the next fight. You can just make new ones when they get too many d-mods to be effective, so who cares? They're disposable.
The changes in enemy fleet composition have also changed fleet design for the better. Building a fleet that can take out a dozen fleets made entirely of flying garbage is something you'll have to do now, and it's opened up new possiblities in fleet design space.
Everybody seems to focus their hate on the first colony you build and ignore all the others. I'd estimate about 95% of the expedition fleets are sent to my first colony, 5% to my second, even though my second colony is producing just as much stuff and taking up just as much market share. I've had a pirate base be built in the exact same system about a dozen times now to raid my first colony, and the only raid my second colony has ever gotten is from a bounty base that decided it was large enough to raid me from halfway across the map.
It's very annoying not being able to track down luddic path bases. Without any hints as to where they are other than "close by" or "far away", it can take a very long time to find one. And with how they can disrupt key parts of your colony's economy for long periods of time, finding them is a priority. Every time one becomes active again, I sigh internally, shove all my ships in storage, and resign myself to scouring the galaxy in a solo Dram for a couple of months again. Could there be an easier way to find these little ***? If I decivilize the luddic path planet, will they go away?
On that note, havng an industry disrupted is incredibly punishing and can last for an extremely long time, for both the player and the AI. Haing a key industry on your sole colony get disrupted can easily lead to near-immediate bankruptcy for the player. And on the AI's side, it's far easier than I expected, come lategame, to decivilize planets you don't like. Saturation bombardment is completely unnessecary; I decivilized Chizomotoc by accident just by raiding it enough times to get the Pristine Nanoforge. I'd suggest making it possible to mitigate industry disruption somehow, especially the spaceport, or that disrupted industries shouldn't cost money to upkeep. There should also be a cap on the amount of stability loss you can cause through raids; decivilizing a colony should at least require disabling key industries for a long time.
Non-player colonies seem very poorly managed. Almost none of them make any money. How do these factions afford their gigantic player-surpression expeditions? Late in the game, I was fending off 6 to 8 fleet task forces; that's gotta be tens of thousands of lives lost. At what point does the AI run out of people willing to commit suicide? Why don't they ever send expeditions to disrupt other faction's industries?
I (obviously) like most of the weapon balance changes. The only one I'm conflicted about is the Plasma Cannon change; it's much safer to put on an AI ship now, but it lost the massive armor penetration that no other non-missile weapon really had. On the other hand, Tachyon Lances and HILs penetrate armor just fine, the large energy slot was missing a sustained hard-flux weapon, and the new Plasma Cannon does sustain really well.
Heavy Batteries give stability, but the Planetary Shield doesn't? The shield costs less to maintain than the batteries, but more to set up, and stability gives you income so the lower maintainence cost is offset by less income. Seems like a sidegrade. Why bother?
Overall, a incredible content update that feels almost like an entirely new game. I complain a lot only because I love Starsector, and have enjoyed playing it long enough to find things to complain about. Keep up the amazing work.
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Topic: General Misc Feedback In No Particular Order (Read 2065 times)