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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: [0.97a] Starship Legends 2.5.2 - Extra flavor for ships, crew, and NPCs  (Read 768311 times)

solardawning

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #45 on: May 04, 2019, 05:16:53 PM »

Maybe make the bad traits like D-mods; have them be able to removed w/high cost at a shipyard, while keeping positive traits.
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Sundog

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #46 on: May 06, 2019, 02:11:44 PM »

Ok, so I've still got a lot of work left to do before I can release an update, but I thought I'd let you guys know about the changes so far:
Quote
ADDITIONS
   New trait type: Dutiful/Obstinate Crew - affects chance of improving loyalty.
   Added support for ships with no crew requirement, including renamed crew traits (e.g. "Resilient Automated Systems" instead of "Determined Crew")
   Clicking the ship icon of a reputation change notification will now open up the refit screen for that ship

FIXES
   Fixed trait limit not being applied (by default there should never be more than 2 traits per tier). Existing ships with more than 2 traits per tier should be fixed automatically
   Fixed removal of pre-existing duplicate trait types not working
   Fixed trait effects not applying to ships in storage
   Fixed mothballed ships being able to earn traits
   Corrected spelling of "Volitile Flux Core" to "Volatile Flux Core"

REPUTATION GROWTH CHANGES
   Reworked calculation for chance of getting positive vs negative traits
   Ships that take less than 5% total hull damage in battle will not get a bad defense trait for that battle
   Ships that deal more deployment-cost worth of damage than their own cost-to-deploy will not get a bad offensive trait for that battle
   Civilian ships are now far less likely to gain new traits beyond "Notable" tier
   Normalized loyalty increase chances. It's easier to improve loyalty at low loyalty levels now, but still difficult to get max loyalty

TRAIT BASE EFFECT BALANCE
   Agile/Clunky increased from 1 to 3 (maneuverability)
   Fast/Slow Turret Gyros increased from 3 to 4 (weapon turn rate)
   Robust/Glitchy increased from 2 to 3 (EMP resistance)
   Durable/Fragile Mounts increased from 3 to 4 (weapon durability)
   Durable/Fragile Engines increased from 3 to 4 (engine durability)
   Skilled/Incompetent Engineers increased from 2 to 3 (repair rate)
   Removed Meager Fuel Tanks and Meager Cargo Hold traits, which should automatically be removed from existing games on load
   Changed Ample Fuel Tanks and Ample Cargo Holds to a flat bonus based on hull size


This is the new calculation for the chance of getting positive vs negative traits:

bonusChance = 0.5 + battleDifficulty*0.25 - damageTaken + max(0, damageDealt-1)*0.5
where:
bonusChance is the Chance to get a Good Trait.
(0 means 0%, 1 means 100%)
battleDifficulty is a ratio of total supply deployment cost for both sides (not including ships deployed during pursuit).
(e.g. 1.5 if the enemy spends 12 supplies deploying ships and you spend 8.  12 / 8 = 1.5)
(If
Ruthless Sector is also being used, the Battle Difficulty it calculates will be used instead)

damageTaken is a fraction of total hull integrity.
(e.g. 0.2 for a ship that starts battle with 70% hull and ends with 50%.  0.7 - 0.5 = 0.2)
damage Dealt is deployment-cost worth of hull damage destroyed, divided by the ship's own deployment-cost.
(e.g. 1.5 for a ship that costs 4 supplies to deploy dealing 50% damage to a ship that costs 12 supplies to deploy.  12 * 0.5 / 4 = 1.5)
(max(x, y) means that the lesser of x and y will be chosen.  max(3, 2) = 3)



Change 4
Ships will be more likely to get new negative traits the more positive traits they already have, and vice versa.
You guys brought up some good points about the disadvantages of this change. I'm no longer planning on adding it. I found stormbringer951's argument about how this mechanic would be perceived by players who don't know about it to be particularly compelling. If I can't think of a better way to accomplish similar goals I might add it as an opt-in setting.

Traits with mixed bonuses and maluses
If I were to implement something like this, it would have to be by forcing traits to come in pairs; one good and one bad. Having manually defined bonus/malus combinations with an explanation-story for each one would be very cool, but it would require completely remaking starship legends, and it would take a great deal of time to make enough traits like that to create as much variety in trait combinations as there is now.

Purely bad traits being annoying, scrapping ships because of them, and suggestions to be able to remove them
I know it's annoying to get a debuff on a ship, but I think debuffs (real ones that aren't mitigated by buffs) are absolutely necessary for balancing out the potential power creep made possible by this mod. This mod will always support the option to prevent ships from getting negative traits, but I will always try to balance the default settings in such a way that most ships in the fleet of a player of average skill will be roughly equivalent in power to what they would be with no traits.

While basing traits on specific things that happen in battle would be better for the storytelling aspect of things, I think it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to make the gameplay work well.

You mean that when it becomes too granular, there would be incentives to do play in a weird way to get optimal chances at good traits, like all the Elder Scrolls player skill-levelling-by-usage shenanigans?
Yes, exactly. As well as the time it would take to track all the necessary data (I would basically need to re-implement most of the functionality of Combat Analytics)
« Last Edit: May 06, 2019, 05:00:15 PM by Sundog »
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Thaago

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #47 on: May 06, 2019, 03:40:54 PM »

These changes look really good - I especially like the incorporation of battle difficulty and damage dealt, as this supports getting positive traits with aggressive playstyles.

While I think mixed traits would be the best solution, I do agree that it would be a pretty enormous amount of work!

The issue with perverse incentives and scrapping ships with negative traits is more an issue for the first trait that a ship receives, not so much later ones. This is because: 1) its always the strongest trait, so will keep getting worse. 2) Little experience has been 'sunk' into the ship, so there is very little cost to scrapping in terms of building ships with good perks. 3) The ship is worse than a stock version, so replacing it is a net power upgrade.

Perhaps there could be a tweak to point 1, where which traits become promoted also depends on how things have gone? This introduces further complications, but might help.
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Ranakastrasz

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #48 on: May 06, 2019, 04:02:56 PM »

My views may be warped, and I haven't played seriously in a while, but I don't find ships so trivially cheap and easy to find that you can just scrap a ship and expect to get a new one. Generally cash is too tight for that. Also you can't often find a new ship of the same type, at least for the really good ones you want.
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Thaago

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #49 on: May 06, 2019, 04:39:11 PM »

My views may be warped, and I haven't played seriously in a while, but I don't find ships so trivially cheap and easy to find that you can just scrap a ship and expect to get a new one. Generally cash is too tight for that. Also you can't often find a new ship of the same type, at least for the really good ones you want.

To be honest its probably my views being warped by colonies and ship costs. I tend to have a colony early, pretty much as soon as I've found one of the three blueprint packs. At that stage of the game I'm still using a lot of destroyers, and replacing one of those is only like 20k-ish depending on model. Especially since you can strip any valuable weapons off the old one before relegating it to non-officered AI duty or sitting in port or scrap.
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TrashMan

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #50 on: May 07, 2019, 02:46:24 AM »

Must everything be stat-based?
Can some titles be simply for fluff/atmosphere?

If a tiny ship kills a big one and get "Giantslayer" does it need a +x% bonus damage agaisnt bigger ships? They very fact it has a history of killing bigger ship allready makes it valuable.

It's an interesting question, becasue when you combine all the mods, bonuses, EXP, skilsl and everything, the power creep is very real simple becasue its all adds up.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #51 on: May 07, 2019, 10:40:37 AM »

Must everything be stat-based?
Can some titles be simply for fluff/atmosphere?

If a tiny ship kills a big one and get "Giantslayer" does it need a +x% bonus damage agaisnt bigger ships? They very fact it has a history of killing bigger ship allready makes it valuable.

It's an interesting question, becasue when you combine all the mods, bonuses, EXP, skilsl and everything, the power creep is very real simple becasue its all adds up.
Yes because that would be a "negative trait" in many people's eyes. Hell, many would hate it more due to the fact that they are getting punished, by getting a trait without stat boosts, for doing something hard and succeeding.
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SCC

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #52 on: May 07, 2019, 01:24:28 PM »

Thanks for the option of preventing ships from getting bad traits. While some buffs are good, one critical bad trait can make a ship permanently tainted to me, cast into the darkest depths of colonial storage. It might be petty, but I can't helping. Having the perfect officer skills, fleet skills, (lack of) d-mods, hullmods, just to get one bad trait and trip yourself at the finish feels not good. I guess that I will just abstain from using this mod, even though it's a cool idea and implementation is solid.
Must everything be stat-based?
Can some titles be simply for fluff/atmosphere?
That sounds like a job for a mod that tracks your ships with some degree of accuracy, not this one. I also suspect that non-statbased traits would defeat the point of this mod as well.

BringerofBabies

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #53 on: May 07, 2019, 07:16:55 PM »

The issue with perverse incentives and scrapping ships with negative traits is more an issue for the first trait that a ship receives, not so much later ones. This is because: 1) its always the strongest trait, so will keep getting worse.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this mod and have only been following it via this thread.

An idea to specifically handle this issue with negative traits would be to make the first traits not always the largest, instead picking a random trait to enhance upon ranking up. To do this though, you would have to allow for traits to skip ranks, which may feel too unpredictable. I believe the logic for this would be:
  • For each rank with an empty trait slot to be filled (starting from the highest rank), pick any current trait of lower rank and enhance it (opening its former slot to be filled).
  • Repeat step 1 until no slots remain to be filled.

There would definitely still be a point where scrapping the ship is for the best, but it should be after a few more traits are added so that you get a better overall picture of what the ship would/could look like, instead of being sure of its one greatest flaw. A potential downside would be seeing a Paragon that you've been building up for a while have a minor quirk of reduced range turn into legendarily reduced range. Applying similar limitations from choosing new traits to choosing traits to enhance should make this more reasonable for players, but require more data tracking. Without knowing how your code is set up, I would guess that having "normal", "excellentOffence", "excellentDefense", and "excellentOffence/Defense" buckets of XP gained would allow you to track overall success with a ship for the current selection limitations.
« Last Edit: May 07, 2019, 07:44:49 PM by BringerofBabies »
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SapphireSage

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #54 on: May 07, 2019, 09:17:59 PM »

Must everything be stat-based?
Can some titles be simply for fluff/atmosphere?

Although like SCC stated earlier that it would require a mod that's able to keep better track of a ships actions in combat/campaign I certainly would enjoy a mod that gave titles based on actions without buffs/nerfs as it would prevent power creep and even a negative title for my 5 D-mod cannon fodders could be interesting to have in its history if I restored it and give it greater purpose as a reminder of its unfortunate history.

As cool and interesting as this mod is to create more unique story-based ships I do fear about the resulting power creep from giving straight buffs to the player with no compensation to AI.
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Sundog

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #55 on: May 07, 2019, 10:07:15 PM »

I've received a lot of suggestions about ways to reset/modify/respec traits, so I've been thinking a lot lately about the problems associated with traits being permanent, and trying to figure out a good way to make them more flexible without introducing too much power creep. After hours of pacing, this is what I came up with:
  • Under certain circumstances which I haven't quite worked out yet, traits would have a chance to increase or decrease in notability (i.e. their position on the list of traits).
  • An existing trait would be randomly chosen, with less significant traits being much more likely.
  • Whether the trait moves up or down is determined the same way as whether or not a trait is good.
  • If the chosen trait is positive, it will move up for a good outcome and down for a bad outcome.
  • If the chosen trait is negative, it will move down for a good outcome and up for a bad outcome.
  • If a trait on the bottom of the list is chosen to move down, it will be removed.
If all goes well, this mechanic would give players agency in 'fixing' their ships without granting too much control over trait outcomes. It would make it possible (although very difficult) to redeem even ships with 8 negative traits. It would also introduce a dynamic element that I think would reflect the reputation theme very well.

Let me know what you guys think.

These changes look really good - I especially like the incorporation of battle difficulty and damage dealt, as this supports getting positive traits with aggressive playstyles.
Ok, I'm glad you think so. I think you've brought up some serious concerns, so it's reassuring that you agree with the changes so far  :)
Battle difficulty is already a factor in the current build, btw. It's just... not well documented.

The issue with perverse incentives and scrapping ships with negative traits is more an issue for the first trait that a ship receives, not so much later ones. This is because: 1) its always the strongest trait, so will keep getting worse. 2) Little experience has been 'sunk' into the ship, so there is very little cost to scrapping in terms of building ships with good perks. 3) The ship is worse than a stock version, so replacing it is a net power upgrade.
So all three of those points are actually by design. Here's my reasoning for thinking they're good things:
  • Because older traits have the most effect, it's easier to predict how they'll turn out, making it easier to make an informed decision about which ships to invest in. Also, if a ship you have invested in gets a bad trait later on, at least its effect is reduced, making it less likely that your investment in the ship was fruitless.
  • Similar reasoning as above; it's better to know whether a ship is worth investing in sooner rather than later.
  • The possibility of ships being worse than stock versions is the balancing force against the possibility of ships being better than stock versions. If I wanted ships to always be of equal or greater power than they would be without this mod, then there simply wouldn't be bad traits. Also, I think the decision of whether or not to get rid of a ship with a bad reputation can be an interesting one. That is, unless money isn't a concern, in which case it's an obvious decision, as you say. I'm hoping money will become more relevant in 0.9.1, however.

Must everything be stat-based?
I'm afraid so, for the reasons stated above, as well as others. I don't think traits would have enough of a point to them without effects. I do think a mod that keeps track of a ship's feats that way would be very cool, but I don't think starship legends is a good fit.

While some buffs are good, one critical bad trait can make a ship permanently tainted to me, cast into the darkest depths of colonial storage. It might be petty, but I can't helping. Having the perfect officer skills, fleet skills, (lack of) d-mods, hullmods, just to get one bad trait and trip yourself at the finish feels not good.
Yeah, I hear you. I know there are people who will hate mechanics that force sub-optimal stats no matter what. This mod can't be for everyone, but I do want to make it work well for as many people as I can (within reason).

@BringerofBabes
First of all; welcome to the forum! :D
I wish I had read your suggestion hours ago. It might've gotten me thinking along the right track. It does seem like a good way to prevent the oldest traits from always being the most significant, but I don't really think that's such a problem to begin with (see my response to Thaago above)

TrashMan

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #56 on: May 08, 2019, 03:38:53 PM »

I'm kinda torn. On one side I understand people who want everything to be PERFECT.
On the other, perfection is boring and unrealistic. It's like making a D&D character with 18 in every score.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #57 on: May 08, 2019, 10:28:27 PM »

I'm kinda torn. On one side I understand people who want everything to be PERFECT.
On the other, perfection is boring and unrealistic. It's like making a D&D character with 18 in every score.
If I wanted realism, I'd play a SIM or *gasp* walk outside.
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Sundog

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #58 on: May 09, 2019, 12:03:00 AM »

This should be an improvement over notifications, particularly for large fleets:
Spoiler
[close]
Pay no mind to the wonky outcomes, I cheated quite a lot win.

TrashMan

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Re: Starship Legends - Personality for Your Ships and Crew
« Reply #59 on: May 09, 2019, 03:57:24 AM »

I'm kinda torn. On one side I understand people who want everything to be PERFECT.
On the other, perfection is boring and unrealistic. It's like making a D&D character with 18 in every score.
If I wanted realism, I'd play a SIM or *gasp* walk outside.

Not an argument.

As much as I understand the desire for everything to be perfect (as my OCD kicks in), I feel that desire is a character flaw that prevents enjoyment of the game, and moves it further away from a challenge and more into a power fantasy.
The idea of a ship and crew without any flaws whatsoever is so Mary Sue-ish.
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