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[TrashMan]

So I ran into several Starsecotr discussion on various boards...here are a few interesting quotes

Problem is the game is balanced around you not instantly having lvl 100. I don't want it to be easy and i don't want my ships to magically have stronger guns, faster bullets and faster engines than 90% of the AI ships in the game, but i also don't want my bullets to be magically slower than a random other ship i run into.

Rather all ships and weapons just have their stats set, with no skill ***. AI commanders should only improve through their AI, maybe as they level up giving them less errors per minute, and you pick whether to increase aggression, defensiveness, etc each level up.

The trees should be tracked independently so you aren't forced to give up one tree for another.  You could get combat xp based on how much you fight while in control of a ship, logistics from commanding or doing *** with the fleet, science from fighting remnants and surveying ruins, and production from trading, salvaging, and managing colonies.

the skill system is a pile of hot steamy garbage that pollutes the rest of the game. No rerolling, optimal choices, and gating gameplay with skills… combat skills that make the game easy in the short term, but that you should ignore in the long term if you plan to scale up your operation, plus a hard cap instead of a soft cap in a system that is already way less flexible than mount and blade. Instead of encouraging player knowledge of the different ships capabilities, you have the same ships with wildly different capabilities depending on the random skills you or npcs have, and finding the best way to cheese everything though abuse of those skills. Instead of the freedom to decide "im bored of this profession, it's time to do something else in my 40 hour playthough" you're told "nah restart if you don't want those skills anymore and want to try something else", it's lazy game design to try to draw out your playtime. Spaceship games with flexible fleet compositions should always be skillpoint free or have respecs.

The game was better before they added that ***. Why do devs always have to ruin their game with pointless garbage.

The game really needs an "Era" system where the main factions fight eachother for a while and then after consolidate start expanding to the random generated planet systems, colonizing also needs to be waaay more expensive, you can set up a money machine very early and get 300k+ per month with no risk at all. Honestly I won`t be doing more runs with my own faction anymore it makes the game too easy

Why is this game so… boring? I was excited at the idea of colonies and AI ships not always conforming to two-three loadouts but the colony management is flash game tier and you're still going to see the same few ships again, and again and again. The diplomacy is non existent, the ai still can't take over a system from what I've seen and there's absolutely no life to the world. No comm chatter, no nothing. Just the same few snippets that pop up every now and then (((muh diggle reference Xd))). But the broken ***? Dear God. Trade in your own colony and pay tariffs, take resources from said colonies and pay 50x their value come end of month. Have said colonies absolutely decked out in every way possible and their fleets still use ramshackle *** instead of those supposedly hard earned unlocked ships. The hell?

DISCUSS

[Thaago]

Sounds like the internet, ie a bunch of people with very strong opinions but not much actual knowledge or skill.

The one thing that has a ring of truth is that we end up seeing the same ships over and over. In particular the high tech ship set is only used by one faction and they have never been aggressive towards me, so I've never fought any of their ships.

[TaLaR]

The one thing that has a ring of truth is that we end up seeing the same ships over and over. In particular the high tech ship set is only used by one faction and they have never been aggressive towards me, so I've never fought any of their ships.

What about TT deserter bounties? They may be not super common (and shouldn't be), but clearly not the point where I have a play-through without fighting them.

[Reinhark]

Problem is the game is balanced around you not instantly having lvl 100. I don't want it to be easy and i don't want my ships to magically have stronger guns, faster bullets and faster engines than 90% of the AI ships in the game, but i also don't want my bullets to be magically slower than a random other ship i run into.

Rather all ships and weapons just have their stats set, with no skill ***. AI commanders should only improve through their AI, maybe as they level up giving them less errors per minute, and you pick whether to increase aggression, defensiveness, etc each level up.

I would recommend this person to learn how to mod. Then maybe he could finally design alpha level AI we need for what he suggests.

The trees should be tracked independently so you aren't forced to give up one tree for another.  You could get combat xp based on how much you fight while in control of a ship, logistics from commanding or doing *** with the fleet, science from fighting remnants and surveying ruins, and production from trading, salvaging, and managing colonies.

This wounds good in theory, until you think about it for 4 seconds. So let us assume this system is in place. You still have to choose a skill in - say, logistics tree. But wait, if you choose a single skill then you are "forced to give up" one skill for another. So how detailed do we have to go for this. Skyrim-like skill system where individual skill tree is leveled by use? Or some sort of super hard core JRPG style skill system where every action(combat/logistics), item(weapon mastery), skill(passives I guess) and subset of skill(every sword swing variant).

The dept of the skill people want is arbitrary and will *** off anyone with any skill system. This person should perhaps talk to a person who want every ship, weapon, every mount slots, fighters and weapon mounts on fighters to have individual EXP bars. So moving on.

the skill system is a pile of hot steamy garbage that pollutes the rest of the game. No rerolling, optimal choices, and gating gameplay with skills… combat skills that make the game easy in the short term, but that you should ignore in the long term if you plan to scale up your operation, plus a hard cap instead of a soft cap in a system that is already way less flexible than mount and blade. Instead of encouraging player knowledge of the different ships capabilities, you have the same ships with wildly different capabilities depending on the random skills you or npcs have, and finding the best way to cheese everything though abuse of those skills. Instead of the freedom to decide "im bored of this profession, it's time to do something else in my 40 hour playthough" you're told "nah restart if you don't want those skills anymore and want to try something else", it's lazy game design to try to draw out your playtime. Spaceship games with flexible fleet compositions should always be skillpoint free or have respecs.

The game was better before they added that ***. Why do devs always have to ruin their game with pointless garbage.

This is somewhat true, although some people will argue otherwise.(presumably really hardcore original D2 and Path of Exile players)
But even those games have limited respecs, and as long as they are ridiculously expensive I would not mind.

The game really needs an "Era" system where the main factions fight eachother for a while and then after consolidate start expanding to the random generated planet systems, colonizing also needs to be waaay more expensive, you can set up a money machine very early and get 300k+ per month with no risk at all. Honestly I won`t be doing more runs with my own faction anymore it makes the game too easy

Why is this game so… boring? I was excited at the idea of colonies and AI ships not always conforming to two-three loadouts but the colony management is flash game tier and you're still going to see the same few ships again, and again and again. The diplomacy is non existent, the ai still can't take over a system from what I've seen and there's absolutely no life to the world. No comm chatter, no nothing. Just the same few snippets that pop up every now and then (((muh diggle reference Xd))). But the broken ***? Dear God. Trade in your own colony and pay tariffs, take resources from said colonies and pay 50x their value come end of month. Have said colonies absolutely decked out in every way possible and their fleets still use ramshackle *** instead of those supposedly hard earned unlocked ships. The hell?

Both of statements are true. Current vanilla factions could be better.

[nomadic_leader]

skills are a bad idea.

You should get better at combat by... getting better at combat. It's not abstracted, it's a thing the player does and should get better at with time. Skills make missiles go 30% faster? Lol.

Skills/XP people expect from other RPGs. it's a cheap way to drag out playtime and impart rewards. But they only make sense in abstracted games like tabletop RPGs. And even in nethack you only improved the skill for a weapon by actually using that weapon.

Things that the player doesn't do himself and are abstracted, like salvage, there should be a skill. But you shouldn't get better at salvage by doing combat. I'd do it like this:

-global persistent variable for the players salvage ability (or maybe an officer's?)
-every time the player salvages a debris field or ship size x, variable increases  by x .
-Every time there's an accident, the skill goes up by like x  * 1.3 (you learn more from screw ups, believe me)
-When you reach certain thresholds, your salvage skill in the character window goes up.
-You can buy an item- "An introduction to salvage" or whatever to help at the start but of course an expert can't learn anything more from these.

Navigation, transverse jump and going dark, sensor buffs etc on campaign map: All hullmods or special ships, or officers.

Maybe you need an officer with a giant alien skull to do transverse jump? Who knows. There should be a lot of options for how to do stuff. Hullmod to stealth ships a bit more when going dark. And/or a special ship in your fleet that lowers sensor profile by x amount. And/or a fleet officer that can lower sensor profile by going around and making sure everyone's monitor cables are insulated.

Its ok for officers to have skills that improve, since they are all abstracted, not something the player does.

I'd still make it so that using these abilities a lot improved their efficacy a little (like 10% maybe), but of course a significant cooldown between uses that grant XP gain to keep savant players from just transverse jumping a million times to get better at it.

So you could have ships/hullmods do like 70 percent of the improvements, and then to get another 10-15% you need a skillmaxed officer, and then the last 10% by doing the thing a lot maybe.



Yes AI should be able to start colonies, and there should even be a few already existing when the game starts. Unless the story builds in some special event to explain suddenly why everyone is expanding right now.

Yea we're harsh on starsector but that's because we like some great gameplay, and a really cool feeling world, nice art, etc. We want it to reach potential.

[Cyan Leader]

The one thing that has a ring of truth is that we end up seeing the same ships over and over. In particular the high tech ship set is only used by one faction and they have never been aggressive towards me, so I've never fought any of their ships.

Yeah, happened to me too.

I also think that the Persian League and the Ludd should really be much more unique than they currently are.

[Draba]

Early game/colonies/economy
Yep, pace is very fast and the first working version of colonies is a bit too good.
Both boil down to 1 dev not being able to playtest as much as hundreds/thousands of players, things are obviously not finished and will improve wherever needed.

Factions/repetition
A more dynamic map and factions being able to expand/conquer would be nice(probably a shitton of work though).
Fighting against more hightech ships without attacking TT would be nice, after killing countless fleets and getting maxed character/colonies in 2 playthroughs I still didn't see a single Aurora in combat.
Didn't actively look for deserter bounties so not that bad when you only want to recover hightech ships though.

Skills
In general I'm not a fan of skills that change base numbers in these kinds of games.
Still, I think Starsector pulls it off pretty well: individual numbers aren't that high and officers are practically mobile, very strong positive hullmods.
The great part is that with officers player can possibly completely skip combat skills and not lose too much total power, really like that.

Do have some gripes:
- Very little to support economy playstyle(lower civilian upkeep, lower tariffs, start with a bigger lead when disengaging, whatever comes to mind). Starsector is about the combat but traders could still be about smaller pirate skirmishes.
- Some skills are too good. Hands up anyone not maxing: loadout design/navigation/fleet logistics/electronic warfare/coordinated maneouvers/officer management/fighter doctrine
- They discourage doing things that you see as weak even more. See missile spec, plenty of great piloted ships buffs to go around so I never get it. That means the few missiles I think are worth the OP (2 hammers for 2 in S slot, ...) are now comparatively even worse than the ballistic/energy weapons with gunnery implants/ordnance expertise. Certainly not worth a restart to see what minor difference changing the ~20 non-obvious skillpoints would do.

[TaLaR]

- Some skills are too good. Hands up anyone not maxing: loadout design/navigation/fleet logistics/electronic warfare/coordinated maneouvers/officer management/fighter doctrine

There is no need to max electronic warfare, level 1 is golden though. Level 3 is only good for seal-clubbing, proper enemy fleets are likely to counter your EW with their own (though this skill seems less common for enemies in 0.9).

[Draba]

- Some skills are too good. Hands up anyone not maxing: loadout design/navigation/fleet logistics/electronic warfare/coordinated maneouvers/officer management/fighter doctrine

There is no need to max electronic warfare. Level 3 is only good for seal-clubbing, proper enemy fleets are likely to have it too (though this skills seems less common for enemies in 0.9).

That's why I didn't include command & control but yep, electronic warfare 2-3 isn't always worth it(certainly not as good as the rest).
If you bring some Valkyries it's great, I usually don't bother with them but still like to have lvl 3.

Sounds like the internet, ie a bunch of people with very strong opinions

Missed this one, it does sum up the "end of the world" comments pretty well.
Mostly agree with the second part too but trying to be less abrasive nowadays

[SCC]

You should get better at combat by... getting better at combat. It's not abstracted, it's a thing the player does and should get better at with time. Skills make missiles go 30% faster? Lol.

Skills/XP people expect from other RPGs. it's a cheap way to drag out playtime and impart rewards. But they only make sense in abstracted games like tabletop RPGs. And even in nethack you only improved the skill for a weapon by actually using that weapon.

In general skills are supposed to simulate your character getting better at things you cannot get better. If Starsector was to base its skill system off this, probably majority (if not all) of combat skills would have to go.

[Megas]

I do not use Navigation.  It is useful, but not enough to sacrifice combat (and possibly colony) skills.

Only the last perk in Loadout Design 3 is good, but it is a doozy... well, more like mitigating a critical deficiency.  The rest of the perks are generally useless because ships are so OP starved if I want any campaign hullmods.  Without campaign hullmods, ships barely have enough OP, except carriers, who are extremely OP starved if they use anything better than Talons.

Electronic Warfare from the enemy seems much less common in 0.9, and it makes sense to min-max it today.  In late 0.8, Electronic Warfare was common enough (among major faction fleets) that more than one point was useless because the enemy's EW offset yours roughly equally.  Nevertheless, that first point is so must-have I consider the #1 perk in the game.

I only get Coordinated Maneuvers 1 for independence from Nav objectives.

Officer Management seems like a must-have if only to avoid paying the Reinforced Bulkheads tax on a lot of your ships.

Fighter Doctrine is (almost) must-have, more so in 0.9 than in 0.8 thanks to tweaked carrier and fighter mechanics that weakened fighters overall.

At least in 0.9, I have the option to have as many skills as officers and still have some for other stuff.  Unfortunately for me, all of the extra points goes to colony stuff, because exploring and setting up a powerful colony is fun.

P.S.  Now that weapons are guaranteed to survive as long as the ship survives, I consider Reinforced Bulkheads on ships mandatory, otherwise, I would reload the game the moment that ship is lost.  (Blueprints are too rare to produce your own stuff until endgame.)  Unfortunately, some ships cannot afford to spare the OP for that, and that is when I want the Officer Management and Fleet Logistics combo to remove that requirement.  If I expect ships to die and stuff, Safety Procedures to reduce the clunker penalty, or maybe the other industry skill (either Recovery Operations or Field Repairs) to sometimes recover pristine ships as they are, look very attractive.

During 0.8, Reinforced Bulkheads was useless because weapons were still lost, and they were rarer than ships.  Not anymore in 0.9.

[nomadic_leader]

You should get better at combat by... getting better at combat. It's not abstracted, it's a thing the player does and should get better at with time. Skills make missiles go 30% faster? Lol.

Skills/XP people expect from other RPGs. it's a cheap way to drag out playtime and impart rewards. But they only make sense in abstracted games like tabletop RPGs. And even in nethack you only improved the skill for a weapon by actually using that weapon.

In general skills are supposed to simulate your character getting better at things you cannot get better. If Starsector was to base its skill system off this, probably majority (if not all) of combat skills would have to go.

Yes, as i said in the rest of my wall of text, that's the way it hsould be. No combat skills.  Only skills for the stuff you don't actually do.

I'm even skeptical of combat skills for officers, though ok maybe if you have scottie in the engineroom your speed can increase a bit. However right now even the non-officer AI has like perfect flux management, maneuver, and aim and whatnot. The current combat/officer skills just cheese everything by increasing characteristics by 20% or whatever.

You could put lines of code throughout the AI that slightly weight the probability of the AI taking the incorrect branches of the decision trees a little more for officerless ships, making them more likely to screw up things like:
-flux management
-shield management
-knowing when to press the advantage
-flux management
-moving the ship

This would make combat officers basically necessary for bigger ships. And you'd see more funny results with newbie carriers trying to bomb tempests, or ships bumping into each other or shooting friends by accident.

[TaLaR]

@nomadic_leader

And you'd be mostly fighting against bumbling fools. Current AI is nowhere near perfect, I do not want less.

[nomadic_leader]

@nomadic_leader

And you'd be mostly fighting against bumbling fools. Current AI is nowhere near perfect, I do not want less.

in terms of twitch skills its pretty good. I think it would be funny/interesting to see some bumbling fools in the mix, but yea fighting against them might be kind of stupid. Basically officers would have to become more widely available so 80% ship would have an officer for it to work.

the main thing id want is to see is any combat skills for playere/officer that are just cheesy boosts to stats eliminated.

[intrinsic_parity]

I don't like the idea of getting rid of combat skills. Then you also have to get rid of officer combat skills (or risk optimal play being let officers control the fun/strong ships), so then there is no point at all to officers unless you also implement the suggested officer AI boost. But then I only see 3 scenarios: 1) officers are oppressively difficult to play against 2) normal ships are very boring to fight 3) the difference between officers and normal ships is not enough to justify using officers. Honestly, I like the sense of progression of your ship getting stronger (my head cannon is that you are making custom improvements to you ship that can't be bought based on your improving engineering knowledge). As long as the game provide progressively more difficult enemies to mirror your own increase in strength (which remnants/faction warfare seem to be starting to do reasonable well) I see no problem with the system.