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Author Topic: Ways of giving smaller fleets deployment bonus without lugging Paragons around  (Read 2448 times)

goduranus

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Right now if you want that sweet 50% DP bonus consistently you have to drag several Paragon hulls around. I wish there were some additional way to gain DP bonus at some cost, that could be used to turn disadvantageous battles around. For instance, telling the fleet to maneuver aggressively, which consumes CR but cuts peak time by 90 seconds; defensive formation which causes a strategic map speed penalty, or a fleet commander skill that reduces the skills points that can be spent elsewhere.

TaLaR

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Well, I'd say having no way to easily invalidate numerical advantage is very much intentional.
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Wyvern

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Well, I'd say having no way to easily invalidate numerical advantage is very much intentional.
Oh, sure, it makes sense from a "realism" perspective.  Does it make sense from a gameplay perspective, though?  Is it fun to lug around extra ships you don't expect to ever actually deploy?  I'd argue that, in fact, it is not fun.

That said, Alex has already said that next version should, in general, feature smaller fleets, and this is only really an issue when you're running up against the battle size limit.  As such, I'm inclined to wait and see how that plays out before saying this is something that needs to be fixed.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

Q8

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fregates are useless in general, since there is no reason to run ships with burn over 9.
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intrinsic_parity

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Abstractly, having ways of getting extra deployment points seems cool, but I don't think it works very well. A skill that does this with no downsides would probably be OP in the current skill system, although maybe it would fit better in the new skill system. Having the ability cost campaign resources (fuel/suppplies/burn speed) feels like it is similar to having more ships but without the actual extra ships. You would rather just have the extra ships unless it was significantly cheaper in resources in which case you probably always do it. Doesn't feel like an interesting decision, just a binary 'do it all the time or not'.

I think in combat debuffs, like a range or speed penalty for all ships (maybe the CR/ppt penalty fires here as well), could be more interesting, since you essentially get more but weaker ships which could hurt or help you depending on how you've outfitted/assembled your fleet. It still seems like more trouble than it's worth to balance. At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
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Wyvern

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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting.  I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

intrinsic_parity

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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting.  I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).

I mean you will have a DP disadvantage against tons of ordos, even if you bring 4 paragons (I think?). You're not bringing the paragons for the DP advantage, you're bringing them because you need a bunch of capital ships to win. I don't think you need to bring 15 paragons (which might give you a DP advantage) when you can just bring 4 and win the battle without a crazy DP advantage.

The idea is that you can make your ships be worth much more than enemy ships per DP so you win even though you have less DP, not necessarily that you can defeat any amount of enemy DP with a particular fleet. It's better to try and optimize your combat power/DP than to try and maximize the amount of DP you get via cheese. I personally find that I can win any battle with a very optimized fleet without cheesing to get more DP by lugging around ships I never use. Sometimes I might need 4 paragons to win, but I actually need them to fight not just sit in my fleet.

I also wouldn't bring mods into a discussion of vanilla balance. You can just as easily have OP mod ships in your own fleet as you can have OP mod enemies to fight against. It's not the job of vanilla to try and balance for mod enemies.
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Igncom1

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Yeah just recently I paired up a bunch of HIL Sunders with my onslaughts and found them to be great little assistants for the slow unwieldy battleships!
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Sunders are the best ship in the game.

Czyrek

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I found that the only way that I'd get at least my 150 DP later in the game that I'd have to have well over 300 DP worth of ships in my fleet (and even then if they managed to get two or more fleets together I'd end up with only 120 DP) the lower deployment total helps in that you're only facing half their ships at once, trickling in more as you blow them up, but by the end you've had to blow up 6-8 battleships plus assorted friends, even though they could not ever deploy more than 2 or 3 at a time. Having to continuously pad my fleet with more and more captials just to get a fair fight makes the game pretty bleh by the end, since the massive variety of smaller ships gets overshadowed by the necessity to pad (and use) larger ships. Allowing some sort of slider(s) for fleet composition limits might help in this case. (Have a slider for each ship size that designates a set maximum for each of them in the fleet from 0 to 30+, if you recover a ship above your limit it would be mothballed until you stored or mothballed another of that size).
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Wyvern

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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting.  I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).

I mean you will have a DP disadvantage against tons of ordos, even if you bring 4 paragons (I think?). You're not bringing the paragons for the DP advantage, you're bringing them because you need a bunch of capital ships to win. I don't think you need to bring 15 paragons (which might give you a DP advantage) when you can just bring 4 and win the battle without a crazy DP advantage.
If you bring four paragons, you will not be able to deploy all four at once, and you will not win that fight*.  If you bring eight paragons, then you -can- deploy all of those original four, and that swings it back to win with no losses.*

* Note that this is in general.  If you run into an ordo where all the Radiants are armed with paladin PD lasers - and I've seen this happen - then you can easily win with the smaller fleet.  And on the flip side, if you run into an ordo that's full of autopulse lasers and harpoon pods boosted by missile spec, then even when you can deploy four paragons, you will probably still lose one or two of them.  Both of these extremes are rare, but they do mean that you can't get an accurate judgement of "is this fleet good enough to win reliably" off of just one or two battles.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

intrinsic_parity

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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting.  I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).

I mean you will have a DP disadvantage against tons of ordos, even if you bring 4 paragons (I think?). You're not bringing the paragons for the DP advantage, you're bringing them because you need a bunch of capital ships to win. I don't think you need to bring 15 paragons (which might give you a DP advantage) when you can just bring 4 and win the battle without a crazy DP advantage.
If you bring four paragons, you will not be able to deploy all four at once, and you will not win that fight*.  If you bring eight paragons, then you -can- deploy all of those original four, and that swings it back to win with no losses.*

* Note that this is in general.  If you run into an ordo where all the Radiants are armed with paladin PD lasers - and I've seen this happen - then you can easily win with the smaller fleet.  And on the flip side, if you run into an ordo that's full of autopulse lasers and harpoon pods boosted by missile spec, then even when you can deploy four paragons, you will probably still lose one or two of them.  Both of these extremes are rare, but they do mean that you can't get an accurate judgement of "is this fleet good enough to win reliably" off of just one or two battles.

Or you can isolate the ordos and fight them a few at a time. I don't think there's anything in vanilla where the only way to get what you want, in this case cores and dead fleets, is to stack DP advantage. Sure if all you want is to fight an arbitrarily large number of ordos at the same time, then maybe you need cheese, but you can kill 2 or 3 ordos while only deploying 1 or 2 paragons (I can consistently kill 2 ordos with only 1 paragon and no losses). I don't see why you would need or want to be able to do more than that. There's no benefit to being able to do more than that.
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Wyvern

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but you can kill 2 or 3 ordos while only deploying 1 or 2 paragons (I can consistently kill 2 ordos with only 1 paragon and no losses).
This does not match my experiences.  At all.  Please provide more details - what is that one paragon armed with, what are your character skills, what do those two ordos look like?  I, frankly, do not believe you here*; one paragon on its own, up against even just a pair of Radiant-class battleships is unlikely to win - and that's what you can find in a single remnant fleet, nevermind engaging more than one at once.

* Or, rather, I do not believe that you're talking about the same sort of remnant fleet that I am.  Here's the thing you're probably missing: fleet size in red-threat systems scales up as you kill more of their fleets.  I could buy a single paragon taking down the fleets such systems start with, where they'll only sometimes contain even a single Radiant.  I do not believe you're taking on the two-to-three Radiants such fleets end up fielding, nevermind the four-to-six Radiants you'd find if you were foolish enough to engage two such fleets at once.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2019, 12:37:29 PM by Wyvern »
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

intrinsic_parity

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* Or, rather, I do not believe that you're talking about the same sort of remnant fleet that I am.  Here's the thing you're probably missing: fleet size in red-threat systems scales up as you kill more of their fleets.  I could buy a single paragon taking down the fleets such systems start with, where they'll only sometimes contain even a single Radiant.  I do not believe you're taking on the two-to-three Radiants such fleets end up fielding, nevermind the four-to-six Radiants you'd find if you were foolish enough to engage two such fleets at once.

You're right that I am not talking about ordos where each fleet has 3+ radiants, but I've also never even seen that and I have farmed red systems before (although apparently not that extensively). So now you're talking about an extreme edge case of combat. You can easily do everything else in the game without ever having to fight 4-6 radiants simultaneously (or even see them on the screen at the same time). I have filled multiple large colonies with as many AI cores as possible without ever seeing that (I also explore extensively so some cores come from there). If there is no gameplay reason to fight said fleets, why would there need to be a gameplay solution to fighting them without capital spam?

I don't see why it's such a big problem that major changes/mechanics have to be made/added to remedy it. A super specific and easily avoidable situation requiring DP manipulation to win just doesn't seem like a problem to me.

For reference, I am not talking about a solo paragon either, I also have other ships. My fleet would typically consist of a paragon and an astral and maybe 1 other capital (odyssey or conquest) + cruisers (apogees and carriers usually) and I usually fly a doom. That fleet will comfortably kill 2 or 3 radiants. I guess if I saw that fleets you are referring to, I would just kill them 1 at a time.
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Q8

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i just hacked my firefox to replace every "intrinsic_parity" with "mr.Status_Quo"
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Wyvern

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As an example, I've seen late-game red-system ordos with three battleships, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and eight frigates.  That is on the larger end, but it's still a single fleet, and if you bring just the ships needed to beat it, you won't be able to deploy all of them.  You have to bring extras just to get enough of your fleet on the field.

For another example, I've recently encountered a bounty fleet with a total of 533 deployment points; my normal fleet was quite capable of killing it... when I brought enough un-deployed backup to get deployment point parity.  And then there are expedition fleets, that come in large hard-to-separate swarms.

In short, fighting ridiculous piles of enemies is not a "super specific and easily avoidable" situation in the current game, it's just what you end up dealing with late-game.
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.
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