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Author Topic: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty  (Read 7696 times)

Megas

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #15 on: April 23, 2019, 06:54:00 PM »

I like to see Loadout Design removed from the game and OP raised across the board for all ships.  Ships are OP starved without Loadout Design 3, and some ships (or most ships with Reinforced Bulkheads and/or campaign hullmods) are still a bit (or a lot in case of Shrike) OP starved with Loadout Design 3.
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SCC

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #16 on: April 24, 2019, 03:06:32 AM »

In the next patch Tri-Tachyon fleets will get to use Loadout Design 3, so there's that. This probably includes TT deserters.
I don't disagree! If it were a flat 5:6 ratio, always outnumbering the player by a modest amount (perhaps only for a higher-than-normal difficulty), I'd be quite happy. A scaling ratio that largely serves to add an additional 2:3 ship penalty to only the hardest fights while making the easiest fights even easier makes me rather less happy.
I like difficulty. If anything, the player should get access to ship spam strategy, not the enemy should have it taken away.

From a Faster Time

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #17 on: April 24, 2019, 07:20:22 AM »

What *hasn't* been really fun is beating back bombardment fleets, and there's a Luddic Path starbase that I haven't been able to crack since I started the game.
Not to mention I see red every time I have to go through 5 fleet battles on the way to the Luddic Path starbase that always has it's own deathstack in orbit, and then having the pleasure of trying to fight a starbase and reinforcements with one Capital and two cruisers.
Here is taking down a starbase "early" Note the lack of enemy ships due the fact that they were lured away to check out who is messing with their nav relays.(Maybe it's a new concept to you but you don't have to fight everybody in the system, you can bait enemies away from a position use hit and run to whittle them down in bite size engagements and so on. Absolutely nobody is forcing you to come stomping into the system and fighting through everything at the same time) Here is me defending against the first pirate invasion force on my colony
The main issue in defending a new colony is having absolutely no help, dealing with one or two deathstacks at once AND having to swallow a 40 DP strength deficit. I don't understand the balancing rationale behind the mechanic, the campaign already has CR and the smaller fleet will already decay in effectiveness and peter out in a battle of attrition. What this mechanic does is make fleet actions take hours and makes the battles supremely boring defensive actions where you camp a corner with your hardened subsystems carriers waiting for the enemy to decay in CR.
It's already in the favor of a weaker fleet, if deployment restrictions were removed the enemy would usually swarm you like mad. The fact that you only give up a small deployment disadvantage and get to fight only a portion of the enemy fleet at a time gives you as the player much better fighting chance.
It's time to rebalance combat deployment. I even came up with an in-game lore reason *handwave*a smaller fleet should be easier to organize and make battle ready than a larger one *handwave*
Yeah, which is why you are facing only a portion of the enemy fleet and not the entire enemy fleet at once.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2019, 12:49:45 PM by From a Faster Time »
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Gennadios

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #18 on: April 24, 2019, 01:45:01 PM »

The main issue in defending a new colony is having absolutely no help, dealing with one or two deathstacks at once AND having to swallow a 40 DP strength deficit. I don't understand the balancing rationale behind the mechanic, the campaign already has CR and the smaller fleet will already decay in effectiveness and peter out in a battle of attrition. What this mechanic does is make fleet actions take hours and makes the battles supremely boring defensive actions where you camp a corner with your hardened subsystems carriers waiting for the enemy to decay in CR.
It's already in the favor of a weaker fleet, if deployment restrictions were removed the enemy would usually swarm you like mad. The fact that you only give up a small deployment disadvantage and get to fight only a portion of the enemy fleet at a time gives you as the player much better fighting chance.
It's time to rebalance combat deployment. I even came up with an in-game lore reason *handwave*a smaller fleet should be easier to organize and make battle ready than a larger one *handwave*
Yeah, which is why you are facing only a portion of the enemy fleet and not the entire enemy fleet at once.

I mentioned the defending from raiding fleet context already, but I'll keep hammering at it.

The enemy does *not* have a bigger fleet. A planetary assault fleet does *not* have more combat ships, it has tons and tons of tankers troop transports. the two raiding fleets I had trouble with actually had about the same size number of combat ships that I did, they got a deployment bonus due to the large number of civilian hulls and actually got to field more ships in the battle despite the fact that militarily, two of their fleets were about the same in firepower as the one of mine.

Second, this is *not* realistic. What are the ships that I can't field during the battle doing? What they would logically be doing is attacking the unguarded civilian ships. How would the enemy fleet counter? By keeping some of their warships out of the main battle to defend the civvies. What the enemy fleets should be doing is sending in a main combat force to match my own, and then keeping the rest of their ships in the backline to defend their civilian grade hulls from the player's backline.
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SCC

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #19 on: April 24, 2019, 01:50:44 PM »

The first thing sounds either like an issue with the game considering some civilian ships as combat ships, or a suggestion worth its own thread.
The other thing falls apart in situations where you deploy all your military ships, but your enemy doesn't. What happens to your civilian ships in such a situation? Nothing, since entire fleets not fighting one another is because of limitations, not because that's the vision.

goduranus

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #20 on: April 24, 2019, 09:56:21 PM »

Actually, I think the deployment point balance is based on ship size or ship size class or something, cuz Once I brought just 6 capitals and 4 frigates, and the game gave me 240 points in a 400 point game.

TaLaR

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #21 on: April 24, 2019, 11:11:43 PM »

Straight ratio of deployment points, with advantage limited at 60% battlesize. So 6 capitals can easily get you to the max against average-sized enemy fleet.
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Linnis

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #22 on: April 25, 2019, 12:16:53 AM »

Straight ratio of deployment points, with advantage limited at 60% battlesize. So 6 capitals can easily get you to the max against average-sized enemy fleet.

That is the problem. By the time the player has 6 capitals that fleet can destroy every single fleet in the same at once.
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Megas

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #23 on: April 25, 2019, 05:48:45 AM »

The challenge is not against one enemy fleet, but many, either all at once (e.g., pirate swarm of hundreds of ships in one battle) or one after another in quick succession (attrition against never-ending Remnant spawns).  Also, fights against high-end battlestations, possibly reinforced by multiple fleets.

There are fights that can provide a challenge to six capitals.
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ThePollie

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #24 on: April 29, 2019, 03:13:36 PM »

Honestly, this is a situation that comes up way too often "late game".

Not shown; the seven Alastairs the ARS deployed. Overall, they hit me with about 22 Ventures, seven Alastairs, and close to eighty mixed destroyers and frigates, with an occasional cruiser. By the end, I'd only lost two ships - My flagship, after it CR'd out mid-fight and was swarmed, and a Falcon. But it didn't matter, since after nearly fifteen minutes straight, all my ships had CR'd out and retreated, and by the end it was four of my late-comer destroyers against their four Alastairs.

Honestly one of my most frustrating losses, because it really just didn't feel winnable. This whole fight just came down to the AI being given so much more than I am even allowed to have, resources be damned.

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Rap1d

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Re: It's time to do away with the smaller fleet deployment penalty
« Reply #25 on: May 04, 2019, 01:53:28 PM »

Quote
Honestly, this is a situation that comes up way too often "late game"....

I will preface this by saying that even tho I play with faction mods, I don't use any  balance altering mods and always only use purely vanilla ships and vanilla weapons in my own fleet. And honestly, I have the opposite problem. I feel like my ship is a bit too strong after I take all the combat related perks. You need to think about different approaches to combat and loadouts.

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But it didn't matter, since after nearly fifteen minutes straight, all my ships had CR'd out and retreated

The way to take on multiple deathfleets is to do it over multiple engagements. Just retreat, and redeploy again. You only lose 20% CR maximum on high tech ships, less on midline/low tech ships. That means you can deploy them 3 times before even getting to malfunction territory. Have multiple copies of your flagship in your fleet, and you can redeploy however many times you want. That's what I personally do, and I find this strategy to be a bit overpowered honestly, and I'm thinking about making a forum post about it.


My personal flagship of choice is either an oddysey or a Doom, and I always have 2 exact copies of my flagship in my fleet for this purpose specifically. I can do 6 deployments before malfunctions, and I have a spare if I mess up somehow. And I always take the skills that raise my CR to 100%. Against fleets like these I deploy my flagship solo, or with a very small carrier escort that stays way back, and I kill like 20-30 ships per deployment, and retreat before the CR decay starts.


Behold.

https://imgur.com/GTe1Of4

That's 5 remnant fleets in a level 3 beacon system, and 3 of the the fleets are the big ones. I purposefully pooled all those fleets together to fight them at the same time.


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