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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: make customizable orbital stations  (Read 4562 times)

Q8

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Re: make customizable orbital stations
« Reply #15 on: September 18, 2019, 10:31:18 AM »

[...]people would just put biggest ones with most guns anyway.
Ye, thx for crapping allover me, and then making my point exactly.
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Morrokain

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Re: make customizable orbital stations
« Reply #16 on: September 18, 2019, 10:46:58 AM »

although I'd like that to be separate from the fleets. For example I'd rather have AI ships use Autopulse, but I want Tachyon lances and Plasma Cannons on stations.

Yeah I agree - having fleet and station doctrine being separate would be ideal in Vanilla.
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sotanaht

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Re: make customizable orbital stations
« Reply #17 on: September 18, 2019, 12:41:12 PM »

Gotta love these newbs that seem to think they got it all figured out. So combat is boring because you have a ship with a build that can quickly kill pirates? Well great job, there is certainly no more choices to make, get 30 Paragons and melt through everything /s. Spoiler alert, that build is *** for 60 DP.

As for the stations, I don't see the need to have customizable modules, it takes away the feel of the station and people would just put biggest ones with most guns anyway. And for weapons, well as Alex said you could just prioritize what you want, although I'd like that to be separate from the fleets. For example I'd rather have AI ships use Autopulse, but I want Tachyon lances and Plasma Cannons on stations.
Yeah I really want finer control of the weapons (and hull mods!) for all ships and stations.  I'm not convinced modules are a thing we need to be adjusting.  If we did though, it might not come down to simply "more guns" either.  You'd probably have to balance things like Armor and shields as well, just like with ships.  Do you take the station bit that has extra armor plates, the one with fighters, or the one with more big guns?  I'd personally go for the armor because the station's number one role for me is tanking, but I think there's quite a lot of different strategies people would like to use.

The "fleet doctrine" based customization we currently have... sucks.  I can sort of see why we use it, not for balance but to minimize the micromanagement load.  I wouldn't want to individually customize the loadouts of a whole fleet of ships every couple minutes as the launch.  I do want to change more things though.  Hull mods are far more important than weapons, but we have absolutely no say over those.  We have no say over the balance of certain weapons, or putting them on certain kinds of ships.  There are some other suggestions of how to handle this with loadout configurations.  Fortunately, Stations are small enough in number that there's no reason we can't fully customize their weapons and mods
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Alex

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Re: make customizable orbital stations
« Reply #18 on: September 18, 2019, 01:32:41 PM »

Refitting a station is kind of a lot of work, and you'd probably feel obligated to do it before every fight in which you had one on your side, either to counter the specific enemies it's facing, or to update its weapons to match whatever latest blueprints you've got. If you couldn't refit instantly (i.e. it took some time for a new fit to take effect), then you'd have to proactively update the loadouts any time you got a better blueprint; that seems possibly even worse.

All this for a fairly limited number of fights where the station is on your side, and its loadout doesn't really affect that much, beyond making it weaker/stronger. I don't think the amount of player-hassle is justified by what you'd get out of it. Heck, I don't think it'd be justified even if you got a lot more than this out if it.

Kind of the same argument applies to colony-spawned fleets, really. They're ... not free, exactly, but they're a lot cheaper than the ships in your personal fleet, both in terms of credits and time invested. So they kind of get what they get; for auto-resolve it doesn't matter, and when you're helping them out in a battle, you don't really care if they sustain some losses, and the core of your fleet is customized and will do most of the work, so... there's just not much point to having detailed fleet customization for faction-fleets, imo - what's there is mostly for feel reasons.


Also, as far as stations go, Morrokain brings up a really good point - balancing modules for actual refit would be... a problem. Right now, they're not set up for this at all; e.g. under the hood ordnance points are virtually unlimited, flux values are more or less fixed, etc. So even if it were desirable, it's far from a question of "just" making station loadouts customizable. They're not built with this in mind.
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Sundog

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Re: make customizable orbital stations
« Reply #19 on: September 18, 2019, 01:57:17 PM »

^ This guy and his use-case analysis. What a nerd  ::)

Alex

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Re: make customizable orbital stations
« Reply #20 on: September 18, 2019, 05:11:02 PM »

^ This guy and his use-case analysis. What a nerd  ::)

... probably guilty :D
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