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

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Author Topic: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking  (Read 24634 times)

TJJ

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #45 on: April 06, 2019, 02:53:48 PM »

I haven't played it for a long time, but I think Transcendence did an excellent job of scaling its difficulty.

Gating off content (literally! behind jump gates!) really helped stop the player accidentally encountering something they were unprepared for, while simultaneously giving them a sense of progression as they advanced beyond the opponents of each system.
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RawCode

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #46 on: April 06, 2019, 09:38:08 PM »

in most games "beef gates" and area levels makes absolutely no sense and outright immersion breaking.

some games outright silly with scaling, Witcher 3 is outstanding instanse of absurd scaling, your legendary witcher who killed many powerful monsters will have really bad time with random highwayman just because that highwayman is "high level".

how damned roadside robber with rusty knife can be high level at all?
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Euphytose

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #47 on: April 07, 2019, 06:53:10 AM »

I only like "zone blocking" if that zone is a secret and you need an item to unlock it, and you find some really beefy enemies in it.
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Megas

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #48 on: April 07, 2019, 10:27:15 AM »

@ TJJ:  Transcendence has changed much over the years, including difficulty.  (1.01 is different than 1.5, and even 1.7 and 1.8 are different.)  Even now, a few more long-standing mechanics (like EMP) may get overhauled.  Also, many of the worst overpowered game-breakers (that I gleefully exploited) have been toned down or removed.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #49 on: April 07, 2019, 12:28:37 PM »

Getting access to new areas where you can fight new enemies that are stronger than previous enemies (with better rewards) is not immersion breaking or unfun imo. That feels like natural progression that you have control over in the sense that you choose when to go on and fight the stronger enemies, but you are also prevented from accidentally fighting enemies that are far too strong for you. I agree that weak enemies becoming stronger to match you without any explanation is immersion breaking and lazy game design. I really don't like how the derelicts scale right now, exploration begins to feel like a boring grind to try and find intel about better loot at some point.

With regards to bounties. I think the system could be reworked to be more interesting. I'd much rather see bounty fleets wandering around 'in the wild' rather than always orbiting around a specific planet. The player could accidentally stumble across them (giving the player a reason to interact with random fleets rather than ignoring everything), or the player could obtain intel that a bounty fleet will be in a certain place at a certain time. The the player has to time and ambush the fleet (while potentially avoiding authorities and such). It would feel much more like 'hunting' bounties and less like going to the bank to get money out of the atm. Instead of just having a list of bounties (and their locations) in intel, you could talk to people on planets and get hints and maybe there could be a bounty hunters guild that you can join to get better intel etc.
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diegoweiller

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #50 on: April 07, 2019, 12:33:07 PM »

Also, time scaling doesn't work well if you are building your fleet slowly, there is no way you can beat 3-4 cruisers with a destroyer.
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- And the lord poked his head out from the patron clouds, to look down on his followers in chaos and anarchy as the world was already aflame, out he tossed a canister of gasoline, and out from his mouth his words were: "Screw it."

dkuang

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #51 on: April 08, 2019, 03:20:16 PM »

I've honestly felt Starsector felt too easy after you've updated your fleet, both in size and types of ships. Throw in the fact that the other factions don't really upgrade their colonies at the rate the player does, once I've set up even one colony I can literally obliterate almost the entirety of the games factions with my fleet, let alone when I've established 3-4 colonies and amassed an immense assembly of ships. Don't get me wrong, some of the invasion fleets I've encountered when I had one colony were pretty crazy, size wise, but with an orbital station and me sitting my fleet along with my patrol fleets at the planet, it was defend-able.

I'm ok with scaling, keeps the game challenging, but would prefer it be done realistically such as the faction actually has resources to do such a thing. Like if the Persian League only has 3 colonies left, all of which are sitting at lev 5 with basically low market shares in most of it's productions, and no military colonies at all. They shouldn't be able to send a massive invasion fleet of like 120 ships with no D mods over my way every 5 months.

I understand some people are bringing up playing the game small scale, like having a small fleet with no colonies, etc. Which is fine I suppose, but considering Starsector is built on the idea of factions, fleets, and centered around combat for almost everything you do. It doesn't seem to make sense, gameplay wise, to not be establishing a faction or joining one in hopes of increasing your foot hold in the game.

Either or, after many restarts, replays, and faction choices made I do enjoy the game with all the mods thrown in but after a few hours of playing I still feel way over powered compared to the AI of the game. I just feel the AI needs to upgrade their colonies more and there needs to be other challenges out there instead of just being thrown invasion fleets day in and day out by the AI. Sure, Ludic Path terrorist cells, Kadur Remnant, and Pirate raiders throw in some spice here and there but after a while they're just minor hiccups that are easily taken care of.

I do like the idea of wandering fleets, bounties, and maybe even a massive invading enemy faction like they had in Stellaris as well that's triggered once the player amasses a certain amount of colonies or strength. *shrug* I'm down for more content and more variations in the games difficulty and challenging engagements.
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RawCode

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #52 on: April 09, 2019, 12:03:37 AM »

gates are stupid...

kill 10 rats before getting access to area where you must kill 20 wolves?
just to get access to area with bears?

if player have mad personal skills and want to visit big bad on level 1, why not?

just imagine if starsector prevent you from entering redacted systems before some silly quest or arbitrary level, is this fun?
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Gotcha!

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #53 on: April 18, 2019, 02:27:04 AM »

Speaking of scaling:

If you ignore pirates long enough, are they supposed to grow out of control? And with out of control I mean: Getting jumped by ~6 full-sized pirate fleets when entering one of their sectors? (And having several more roaming around in that sector.) And seeing 3 of these giant fleets near the entrance of my own sector?

Reading through this topic, it's my understanding that this at least has nothing to do with my own level/size of fleet/income etc. But I am wondering how players are supposed to win against these kind of odds.
I'd expect that I could avoid their growth by destroying their stations wherever they pop up, but I feel like I'm the only one fighting them, and I feel I hardly have the time to explore due to having to put out small fires everywhere to stop them from getting bigger.

Sidenote: Will later versions of the game have some ability to make big jumps through the system, so you can get around faster to quench these fires? Perhaps through activating these inactive gates?
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goduranus

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #54 on: April 18, 2019, 03:52:22 AM »

The "Transverse Jump" ability you get from the technology skill tree helps significantly with getting around faster, I find, cuz you can skip slowboating to jump points and enter hyperspace directly.
And carrier spam takes care of the pirates, I destroyed 616 pirate ships in one battle, pretty proud of myself, been bragging about it all over the place :P

RawCode

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #55 on: April 18, 2019, 04:05:12 AM »

pirates have semi random mass spawn events, also game have lazy garbage collection, if you stay in same area for long fleets may accumulate, but when you move away they despawn.
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Megas

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #56 on: April 18, 2019, 05:51:40 AM »

If pirates are not dealt with soon after they cause "pirate activity" in a system, they will spawn a huge swarm of fleets and send it to the target system.  There are so many that small colonies in a system will probably get raided successfully and lose stability.

Six full pirate fleets?  It can get worse than that.  One time, my fleet got jumped by more than a dozen fleets as my fleet gated in, and it had to fight 300+ pirate ships.  Also, goduranus posts about his Drovers vs. 600+ pirate ships.

Raids and Pather terrorism cause unrest that slowly recovers (1 every three months).  If that colony gets hit too much and too soon, its stability can reach zero and may decivilize soon after.  If you do nothing to stop pirates and pather bases, they will decivilize some core worlds eventually.  You need to destroy pirate and pather bases (that target core worlds instead of you) if you want core worlds to have enough stability for you to raid yourself (for blueprints) or simply for peak income from exports.

And yes, the sector is always on fire, especially after you build your colonies.  You are the only one putting out the fires, and it gets annoying because there is not much time to do fun stuff (explore, do quests, raid for blueprints, or disrupt few choice industries) before player needs to rush to put out yet another fire.  There are plenty of fires to deal with even if you can ignore expeditions (due to gratuitous colony defenses flawlessly blocking major factions).  This is why I try to get burn 20 on even my multi-capital endgame fleet because the game wants the player to put out all of the fires.

It does not seem possible to wipe out pirate and pather bases.  It seems like another base will pop up elsewhere as soon as you destroy one.

What I like to see in later versions is to send autonomous fleets to deal with problems because the player is only one fleet, but there are always several fires to put out at the same time.  Player can only be at one of those fires at any given time.
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RawCode

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #57 on: April 18, 2019, 06:11:37 AM »

zerg pirates is confirmed bug that already fixed for next version, but, imho, this is cool feature that add attrition fights and non conventional means to defeat.
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goduranus

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #58 on: April 18, 2019, 11:05:01 AM »

Hey there's a game feature suggestion!
What if instead of pirates, occasionally you'd get massive invasion fleets of hundreds of ships, crewed by hundreds of thousands of innocent but heavily armed refugees that want to resettle on your planet? They left their own planet presumably because it got destabilize by some sort of natural disaster or terrorist attack, like the one that happened on Mairaath. If you shoot them down, it might hurt relations with the more humanitarian factions, but if they get through, they'll add a decivilized population modifier to the planet.

I got this idea because pirate raids are too huge, too vast and expensive to just be raids for resource. With a hundred thousand crewmen coming in over 500 ships, they'd rather look like desperate refugees trying to forcibly find a new home, but nobody wants them because all the colonies have finite resources. For the refugees, the matter is simple, their old world was gone, and either they force through or they die of starvation. For the target colony, the matter is simple too, the next food shipment isn't due for 3 months, if they let the refugees in, a hundred thousand of their own people will starve.

I remember reading Julius Caesar faced this problem of Germanic tribes trying to flee into Gallic territory(after a failed harvest or sth), but the said territory supposedly couldn't support more people, so Caesar had to battle a vast number of refugees to stop their migration.
« Last Edit: April 18, 2019, 11:33:57 PM by goduranus »
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Thaago

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Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« Reply #59 on: April 18, 2019, 11:34:38 AM »

Caesar's response was also fairly consistent with the more genocidal among us, only in real life instead of bits... ancient times were rough.

It is sometimes mind boggling the shear number of pirates being killed in those fleets, considering that the population of the sector really isn't that large.
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