Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Megas]

Colony skills are a must this release, thanks to industry limits and increased demand of some industries.  The question is who takes them, you or alpha cores?  As implemented, cores are a no-brainer.  The worst cores do is force the player to watch alerts more so they do not get stolen by Hegemony if he misses the alert.

If I go colony skill route, I feel like a cheerleader like Midnight says, due to less skills than max level officer.  If I abuse alpha cores (as currently implemented) like any self-respecting powergamer, then I have enough points to max Officer Management and get more than seven max personal combat skills.

It is annoying that if I have to choose between Combat Endurance 3 and Officer Management 2, the better buy is Officer Management.  I get the benefits of more officers and Combat Endurance 3 on my flagship, provided I put an officer in my flagship as a benchwarmer (and put my character in the ship my officer should use in battle) and swap ships in every battle to get the boosted CR.  Real pain and inconvenient, but a price a pay to squeeze out more power.  A near no-brainer decision that is only discouraged by annoying inconvenience, but a real munchkin does not let inconvenience get in the way of power.

P.S.  Navigation 3 feels like a skill tax, given the extreme time wasted loitering in huge systems (especially if there is a hidden pirate base or you built your primary colonies there).  Transverse Jump should be the level 1 perk, similar to Neutrino Detector for Sensors.  Still makes it a skill tax akin to Electronic Warfare 1, though not as much.

[lethargie]

Colony skills are absolutely not required. They are fun and all, but all they do is increase the productivity of your colony who are already profitable. Same for core, you don't actually need more than 4 colonies. You should try it, I just did  a play through with absolutely not skills in industry and it is really fun. If your goal is create a huge empire of colony, then sure, you need them. If you only want a steady source of cash and some production then you do not.

You should also be careful when comparing skills, you end up having to do a choice I didn't need to make because of other unrelated choices. For example I'd rather take combat endurance because I generally have more skills than my officers and 6 officer is more than enough to cover most of my deployed ships.

I'll agree with the requirement of navigation though. Not only does it saves tons of time, but on top of that it helps not getting caught by enemies. Its always the very first skill I take in any play through. Even with transverse jump, the +1 max speed is just essential at the beginning, and a nice perk at the end.

[Megas]

Colony skills are very fun.  Without them, colonies are a miserable experience.  Again, who takes them, you or alpha cores?

Without colony skills and cores, you can only manage three worlds, and two of them need +2 resources to meet demand (because you do not have Industrial Planning).  Probably need to squeeze aggro industries together and suffer Pather cells, too.  You also have no spare slots for convenient pop-up temporary colonies like tech mines or just a simple waystation as a hub to launch from and explore or farm Remnants far from home.

I tried cores in a fork of my game.  They are an absolute no-brainer in this release, and makes me feel like I wasted points in Industry (and Planetary Operations) when the worst that happens is -1 stability from Pather cells.  If Pather cells worked like last release, I would be aggravated enough that I would avoid them at all costs.  Pather cells really were a miserable experience and a huge babysitter load last release.

If I wanted cores, four worlds are not enough.  I would farm as many alpha cores as I can and colonize the whole sector!  I want to be Ming the Merciless that rules the universe with an iron grip.  And if I had that many worlds for high income from population alone, I very likely would burn all of the core worlds to make them stop sending their expeditions at my colonies to eliminate some of the babysitting, then colonize their worlds to partially make up for lost income due to totally wrecked export market.

I only have more skills than officers if I do not take colony skills myself.  If I do, then the best I can manage with my remaining points is match a level 16 officer if I do not take any Officer Management.  Since fights against capital spam are big and long, I find myself wanting at least six officers.  If I forsake Navigation and Officer Management, then I can match a level 19 officer.

I like Combat Endurance 3, but I lack the skill points to get it and some Officer Management.  If I can only take one, the choice is obvious - Officer Management.  If I really need 100% CR, then I guess I need to play the swap game, annoying as it is.

[lethargie]

I think you are mixing 2 issues here, the skill balance and the hard cap on playerfaction colonies.

A brand new colony when you have no skills and no other colony is profitable.

How is that a miserable experience?

You dont need to handle all ressources in faction, you can get an administrator with industrial planning, and the hit of 1 to stability from having more colony isn't so bad if you take 1 or 2.
The only skill that affect planetary defense is in logistic, so if you just want to shore up that you don't need any investment in industry.

Your goal seems to maximize profit from your colonies. In which case, of course  skills are a no brainer. But that all they do: increase profit.

The only legitimate problem i see, is that by design you cant control a faction the size of the hegemony without core because of hit to stability. At around 15 planet you hit like -8 stability, no matter your skills. And that's really the thing, the problem is unrelated to the current implementation of skills.

[Megas]

If my ultimate primary objective is to get a set of self-sufficient size 10 colonies, effectively declaring independence from all of the factions and building the biggest new major faction in the process, then I will need to get colony skills one way or another.  No core faction produces enough to properly feed a size 10 colony.  (The biggest is Chicomoztoc's 8, and most other faction capitals are only 7.)  Either I can get the skills myself or use alpha cores.  I also like to avoid Pathers cells too.  However, current release has practically removed Pathers as a threat (no need to go hunt Pathers and prevent them from wreckage colonies with sabotage when they cannot sabotage in this release), which means Pather avoidance is irrational and getting the skills myself instead of using cores is stupid.

But if I get the skills myself instead of using cores, I rob myself of twelve skill points that could have gone into combat stuff, namely max Officer Management and enough combat skills to exceed a level 20 officer.

I view colony skills more convenient than Navigation, and was a reason why I did not take Navigation if I wanted to match level 19 officer.  In 0.9a, no Navigation did not hurt enough that I thought Navigation was nice but not required.  But in 0.9.1a, it did hurt (in big systems where two week slogs interfered with babysitting mitigation), and now I view Navigation must-have.  Meanwhile, thanks to Pather bug, colony skills are practically free since Pathers cannot wreck colonies (with enough stability) anymore, and alpha cores are safe to use and have all of the colony skills that matter.

High colony income is nice in that I can afford to ignore bounties when they are inconvenient.  I want to be self-sufficient, not rely on the good graces of other factions to support my habits.

The only legitimate problem i see, is that by design you cant control a faction the size of the hegemony without core because of hit to stability. At around 15 planet you hit like -8 stability, no matter your skills. And that's really the thing, the problem is unrelated to the current implementation of skills.

I can say the same about trying to match or exceed an NPC officer in combat skills for better combat.  People like Midnight Kitsune do not like this, and I feel likewise.  There is no way player can match level 20 officer and three skill admins (like Baikal Daud, CEO Sun, and Kanta, the faction leaders who probably were level 20 officers in their prime) without giving up vital fleet skills or QoL like Navigation.

Player should not try to get stability penalties, they really hurt when stability tends to peak at 13 with Free Port on and all of the colony skills taken.  Without Planetary Operations, 11, which is very little room for sudden destabilization.

Colony skills were a luxury when player could get all industries on one planet with all the resources, maybe two or three if he wanted to avoid Pathers, and Pathers were dangerous last release.  In addition, player only needed zero ores and -1 everything else to meet demand last release.  Now, player needs +1 for ores and volatiles and a bit less for farmland and organics.  Colony skills are more useful than before in obtaining the bare necessities for building a new faction.

[Igncom1]

Is it possible to support a one planet faction if you are, say, commissioned and close to the hegemony without doing any of the stuff that annoys them? (Cores and Freeports, if I recall correctly?)

As I have never seen them expedition me over having too many resources, only AI cores. Other factions like the church have attacked me before over free port.

Is it possible to to get along sustainable with a major faction ally of some sort?

[Megas]

Luddic Church and Hegemony do not send expeditions at all if you do not use Free Port.

However, if you are have commission with a faction, they do not send expeditions at you.  For example, if you have commission with Tri-Tachyon, they will not send expeditions at you for mining too much ore.  In addition, you may colonize planets in the same system of the controlling faction you have a commission with.  If you see a planet in Corvus you want to colonize, and you have commission with Hegemony, you can do that without them trying to sat bomb it off the map, as long as you keep your commission.

[Eji1700]

I'm going to piggyback on this since I decided to do a vanilla run and ran into a lot of similar issues.  I haven't quite finished (and haven't done much of the story since my role playing has led me to have a fleet that really can't take artificial planet fleet right now).  For the record any example solutions I give are just that, examples.  Not saying they're perfect but just an idea to better demonstrate what we have vs what might be more interesting.

1. Fleet Strength scaling-

I really don't like how bounties scale throughout the game.  It feels very "gamey" and also seems to limit playstyle.  I get you don't want people farming super easy bounties the whole game ,but at the same time it feels silly that if I'm messing around with weaker ships that you can very quickly feel outclassed by the bounties, and it makes you wonder where the basic bounties went.  Combined with the logistics of travel (i'll expand a lot on that below) large bounties feel very limiting.  To add it's a little odd that I can get a 200k pirate base mission that's a level 2 base, and a 350k pirate base missions that's not even a full level 1 (and that happened in the late game).  Would be nice if more info was given on bases seeing as how vastly more expensive it can be to break a tier 2 vs a tier 1.

2. Trade-

While it is super nice to be able to see the best 5 places by item to buy/sell, I would very much like a feature that lets me see what a specific systems prices are.  One of the ways I keep logistics costs in check is by trying to make sure that even just traveling to find weapons servers a purpose, often by carrying goods that can be sold. This is easy when going to Askona as it's almost always in one of those lists, but going east especially led to me not knowing what I should stock up on because those systems weren't often in the top/bottom 5.  Maybe this exists ( i know it used to) and I missed it, but I did look for it and couldn't find it (mostly in the intel tab).

3. Outfitting-

It's always gotten to me that finding almost all weaponry is random.  Some of this is mitigated by getting a commission but often you're dealing with just randomly noticing that a location has something you might want down the line and stocking up.  That or salvage.  It feels a little odd, and takes some identity away from planets, that there's nowhere where you can say "yes i can get X here".  I'm not looking to be able to always find the best weaponry, but it feels a little silly when my storage is a walking armory but i'm rummaging through it like a lego bin and suddenly realizing i'm out of sabots/harpoons.  Colonies also help with this, but it seems like a very odd problem to be having in the first place.

Weapons in general though still feel off when you wind up with an apocalyptic supply that's worth pennies.  Maybe less salvage unless you skill into it and making weapons/hulls actually worth something is actually worth investigating because right now it just adds clicking.  If not, a "Store all weapons" button would be nice.

4 Travel-

This is probably what 70% of your playtime is spent doing, and it's in a kinda bad place of "not that interesting" mixed with "not easy enough to ignore".  I'm just going to rapid fire into this but I think you could do a whole patch on just making map travel better and vastly improve an already great game.

A. Active Skills(active travel)- Interdict was a good addition, but it's still mostly meh, along with the rest of the active skills.  99% of my travel time is spent in the following rules-

Turn on long range thrust
autopilot towards target
Turn off transponder if I can/accept prompt to turn back on if i need to (this should probably just be a fleet stance like toggle that's in the skill bar)
Hover finger over the  4 and 5 key, max zoom out, turn on free look and pan as far as I can in the direction i'm headed.

If it looks like i'll hit a storm and can avoid it while long range is on, start rapid clicking like i'm playing dota to get the ship to turn until the route is safe and then hit A to go back on autopliot, repeat.

If I CAN'T avoid, pause, turn off long range thrust, un pause, realign, pause, turn on long range thurst, un pause (maybe not always that bad but gets my point across).

This is not interesting.  The fact that I can turn off long range thrust instantly,  re point, and turn it back on basically instantly, means why bother having it make you less maneuverable?  It's just a nuisance tax.

My proposed solution for this is make long range no longer have a speed cap (or affect it much less, like 18 at the slowest) based on your slowest ship, just an acceleration cap.  The larger your ships the slower you accelerate, but if you can keep it on long enough you WILL hit 20 (or maybe 18/19).  This rewards players for smart planning and trying to keep the thrusters on long range for as long as possible, or even taking extra time in system to build up speed so you can get the jump on a target, and the "Stop and repoint" method will cost you much much more and now makes travel a slightly more interesting mini game of "how long can I keep the thrusters on to build up speed". 

Smaller ships/fleets will accelerate much quicker, still giving them the advantage, but you could get your all cap fleet to haul around at 18/19 speed without skills if you're willing to plow through things long enough.  Getting interdicted again ruins your built up acceleration and now a bigger deal, and in general your base speed will matter a lot more.

Likewise the idea of entering a system from a transjump to get past their patrols, with your transponder off, and then going dark as you get very close after hiding in a belt so you can smuggle/raid/whatever  is a really cool idea.  And you do something like that once in the tutorial, and then almost never again (i did it maybe 5 times my last run and I was looking for opportunities).  I think some of this is because going dark might need more depth to it in general, but also because the payoff rarely matters. 

I think it'd be interesting if you could have an "ambush" state where if you sneak up on a fleet from a nebula while in going dark they get a much lower deployment cap (maybe only for a certain amount of time, hell maybe even get to choose 2 ships the enemy must deploy?).  This could majorly change engagement strategy (can't beat them in a fair fight but if you can get the jump you might get to pick off some stuff and win).

Further you could maybe make the black market not accessible unless you come in dark.

Of course neither of these ideas would work great in the current system (not enough straight lines to really get up to speed if you make it take longer and going dark is too slow to catch anyone in 90% of cases and most planets will notice you), but then that's where more passive skills could come in. Now that these systems have more depth you can have the "Pirate" character who's got skills in being faster during the going dark stance or whatever.

I really think that since we've got a skill bar that can have all these skills, I should be thinking about using them a lot more, rather than wondering if I should just make a macro.

B. Storms/Space(long range/passive travel)-

There's basically 4 kinds of space-

1. Empty (most of it)
2. Tedious (nebulas, deep space, asteroids)
3. Mostly frustrating (storms, corona, flare)
4. Outright dangerous (Pulsar, black hole)

Pulsars are kinda interesting if you actually need something from the system.  I hope colony mehcanics in general get expanded to where we see more colonies (or just stations) with reasons to exist in systems like that so I actually have a reason to explore them.

The rest...eh?  90% of the time there's no decision.  I want to be in empty or tedious space to the point that i'd ignore the game if i could.  Things in tier 3 exist so I can't just leave it on autopilot because it's absurdly expensive if your capital gets bounced into a bunch of storms.

The only way you interact with these are some passive ways (skills/hull mods) and if you want using your E burn to plow through them.   I think there's a LOT more room for depth in this, from having different storm types/severity (so i can actually make decisions on if i want to risk it) to just having it matter more overall.  Again this works into having more interesting active skills (maybe a batten down skill that lessens the effect of tier 3 and 4 things but slows you down so it's not just e burn everything), but in general it seems a waste to have such little variety in travel.

The other important thing here is that this can affect tactics.  If i can go through storms but the doomfleet chasing me can't (or will be affected by it much worse) that's something I can use.  Yeah i can kinda use that now, but I e burn, they e burn, and we're back to square one (barring the passive skills).   I don't have time for examples on this one and i've been putting this off long enough, but I really feel that just a little more depth to deep space travel would do wonders.


Going to cut it here due to time constraints, and as always if you stopped developing now the game would still be an all time favorite so please don't take any of this as "wow this sucks".  I will just add that while I agree that colonies shouldn't be heading in a full on 4x direction, it would be nice to be able to have "outposts" of some sort  that could give you a reason to care about some of the really interesting systems with no habitable worlds (like an expedition outpost you can throw up around a gas giant to harvest something or a black hole to gain something)

[Alex]

Thank you for your detailed feedback! Made a couple of notes; especially re: the Travel section. In general it's a bit of a tricky topic - it's easy to make things too punishing while intending to make them more interesting decision-wise. Definitely going to look through this again at some point, though; saved a link to it

Also: the "move slow" button I feel like has more of a role it could play. For example - and this ties into with your "pursuing doom-stack" example - one thing I'd like to try is having asteroids deal actual damage to ships on impact unless the fleet is "moving slowly" (and probably up the burn level of that a bit), combined with AI fleets mostly/always choosing to move slow through these to avoid damage. This should make asteroid belts/fields much more notable as far as "terrain you can use to make a risky getaway"...


(Btw, you don't need to rapid-click, you can just click and hold.)

[vorpal+5]

Same boat as others. I understand and concur that if you can get everything, then that's not good design. In theory. In practice, if level X (x > 50) takes a long long time to reach, then the strategy is not about 'can I get this skill before I cap' but more about 'How I prioritize things'. And that's a strategy too.

I know a designer (at Paradox or Slitherine, I don't remember) who said once that hard cap were bad. Soft cap are much better. Think about it. Don't put a brick wall before a player, only put disincentive (very long level up) ...

As for me, I would like too the story, but I would like also mini side quests. Lot of them.

[Megas]

I know a designer (at Paradox or Slitherine, I don't remember) who said once that hard cap were bad. Soft cap are much better. Think about it. Don't put a brick wall before a player, only put disincentive (very long level up) ...

It would be bad design if that means your player base does not stay hooked to the game, if the goal is for players to play as long as possible.  (Opposite of the old days where the goal was try to kill the player and get him feeding quarters to a machine.)  Gaming design has evolved over the decades, and I do not think all of it is good.  (I tend to enjoy older games more.)

Years ago when I played Diablo 2 on battlenet, I have seen obsessive grinding done to excessive and unhealthy levels, not just myself, but observing the behavior of other players too, how they like to plan and discuss the perfect builds that may take a long time to reach.  (Items, they probably duped, or if not, endless Mephisto magic-find runs to get started.  Levels, they flock to cows, Diablo, or Baal runs depending on the version, game after game.)

One way to discourage unhealthy grinding that some players feel compelled to do is to enforce hard caps during normal play.  Diablo II had a level cap of 99, but the grinding required to get there took months (in 1.10 and later).

That said, in Starsector, I do not think we have enough skill points now unless I abuse AI cores like everyone else (and put no points in Industry), and I reach the cap sometime after midgame begins, but before I reach endgame.

P.S.

Think about it. Don't put a brick wall before a player, only put disincentive (very long level up) …

He underestimates the drive and tenacity of hardcore players to reach perfection, if the only obstacle to reaching level cap is time.  (I hope that is the case.  I have very bad things to say if designing a commercial game to take advantage of compulsive behavior or addiction was deliberate.)  I have seen players spend entire days doing nothing but playing the game hours on end like a full-time job just to level up.  I did it myself a few times.  I took one full day to level up a character (lightning sorceress) in Diablo II from level 93 to 94 once, or was it 94 to 95?  But then again, if the design goal is to keep players hooked and playing as long as possible, mission accomplished.

Reminds me, how big are player colonies supposed to be by endgame?  My four colonies just made it to size 7 at about the moment my game progressed far enough to end (level cap reached, all blueprints collected, 20+ million balance, fleet can kill multi-capital bounties without much difficulty).  Could have reached 8 in five in-game years (even with max growth) if I messed around exploring and farming Remnants.  If I really wanted size 10 colonies... I do not know how long it would take.

[Paul_Kauphart]

On the matter of travel, I kind of like the current system, however, I do miss what the torchship mod used to do, and also I think sustained burn should be harder to use : I like Eji1700 idea on lower acceleration and unlimited top speed, and I would like to add to that a much longer startup cooldown on the ability, I used to mod myself a 1 day cooldown at burn 0 before the fleet starts going, so maybe not that extreme, but right now I feel like going to sustained burn is almost instantaneous.

I also love like the asteroid idea.


One last thing, to make Hyperspace Travel a little more involved, maybe give us a way to map the deep hyperspace. Initially you're going in the unknown, and as you explore the sector you can start using your map to trace routes and ways to avoid storms and deep space, and plan your travel. Right now, I find myself hitting TAB on hyperspace travel, looking for a way to avoid a huge deep hyperspace region, only to get remembered that ho, yeah, the sector map doesn't have that.

PS  : Also, I'd like to be able to make notes on systems or planets. Sometimes in my exploration I come accross a planet that might be interesting to colonize, in a good system, but I don't want to do it now. Except that 3 hours later I usually don't remember which one it was and where.

[Megas]

One last thing, to make Hyperspace Travel a little more involved, maybe give us a way to map the deep hyperspace. Initially you're going in the unknown, and as you explore the sector you can start using your map to trace routes and ways to avoid storms and deep space, and plan your travel. Right now, I find myself hitting TAB on hyperspace travel, looking for a way to avoid a huge deep hyperspace region, only to get remembered that ho, yeah, the sector map doesn't have that.

It DOES have the map, just not turned on by default.  Just press 1 or click the Starscape tab while viewing the sector map.  Instead of a pretty map, you get an ugly map with lots of blue haze that shows exactly where the clouds are.  Last release, there were so many clouds that it blotted out the map and it did little good.  Now, with somewhat less cloud density, it may be a bit more useful.

Unrelated, press 2 on the map instead of 1, and it draws current fuel range circles from your location.

[Eji1700]

Thinking a little more on travel-

Storm severity would be nice. 

Right now storms are often so frequent it feels binary (hit a storm or don't, equipped to do that or not) but modeling a little off reality there's -

1. Isn't so bad if you're in anything bigger than a rowboat
2. Someone skilled wouldn't worry but someone not so much would probably slow down
3. Specialized ships/cruise ships only
4. Hurricane/rogue wave

Now granted its fictional space travel so you can do what you want, but again to give the whole thing more depth I don't think it'd be too hard to have a variety of storms/other things to run into in deep space that might make me change how i path through an area depending on my fleet/skills. 

[SCC]

There is something like that already. If you hit just one bad cloud, you get one hit. Get stuck in a sea of thunder and now your fleet takes several hits, before it gets out of that situation.