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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: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett  (Read 4292 times)

psychobarge

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Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« on: January 15, 2020, 08:49:42 AM »

I bought this amazing game recently and played it a lot.  ;D

I love it but since the beginning something feels weird to me.

I think it's weird because in most sci-fi universes, most of the time, ships travel alone.

There are number of examples, in star wars, star trek, stargate, battlestar galactica, and so much more, many protagonists travel alone. Bounty hunters (Boba Fett ?), lone smugglers (han solo ?), merchants, etc...

On the occasion, ships are temporary put together for a purpose like waging a war, defending a planet or exploring a distant distress signal And some fleets are of course permanent, battlestar galactica again, Wake, etc...

Now i'm not saying you should not be able to have a fleet or fleet should disapear from the game, not at all ! the current fleet mechanics are amazing !

I'm saying there should be a LOT more lone ships.

The game would benefit of encouraging the player to choose between fleet or solo ship. Now i know it is possible today in the game, but let's face it, you cannot do a lot with one tiny ship, and if you want to play Boba Fett, well you'll have trouble defeating the enemy fleet alone  :-[. Again if you want to travel anywhere, you need a tanker, so two ships (and thats a fleet !) etc...

This would require some adjustments, in the form of diverse bonuses when in solo mode :
  • massive decrease of fuel utilisation (which would be balanced by the lack of cargo space)
  • ridiculously low radar signature  :-X
  • massive bonus to ordnance points to fully customize your ship.
  • ...

And some new rules :
  • You cannot salvage a ship and add it to your fleet.
  • You could change from solo to fleet mode when on a colony but you'd loose all your bonuses and would have to refit your ships
  • You could change from fleet to solo mode when on a colony but you'd have to sell all your other ships !
  • ...

This would enable other mission types from contractors :
  • get right inside a fleet, dock on the flagship, assassinate the leader and escape.
  • get right inside a fleet, and sabotage the fuel tankers.
  • get right inside a fleet, and upload a virus or retrieve information for your contractor.
  • go in orbit of a base/planet and upload a virus or retrieve information for your contractor.
  • ...
these would not involve a lot of user action but could be only text missions with percentages.

I know its a lot and probably won't be a priority ever :D but i thought of it and wanted to share...

Imagine how great it would feel to approach a big pirate fleet, dock on a cruiser with your tiny heavily modified kite without being spotted, assassinate the pirate leader and leave unharmed while the fleet ships turns against one another  8)

Thanks for this game :)
Sorry for my bad english.




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SCC

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #1 on: January 15, 2020, 10:10:14 AM »

I think it's weird because in most sci-fi universes, most of the time, ships travel alone.
And this isn't one of them. With mechanics as they are currently, there are very few ships that could stand up to entire fleets, with clever piloting and proper skills, and none of them are any good at logistics (besides Odyssey, maybe? I don't remember). Current refit mechanics also wouldn't provide any diverse experience. Changing the gameplay to make it suited for a single ship would lead to basically remaking 2/3rds of the game into another game entirely... Which is a solution of sorts for you. Playing a different game.

Starsector takes after World War II-ish naval warfare, which evidently includes taking support ships. Some ships (called cruisers after cruising, which initially meant long-range, typically independent missions) could travel alone, but only for a time and, perhaps more importantly to Starsector, they couldn't do much, besides going somewhere and shooting that somewhere. Something like that is presumably the justification for why you have a fleet: because a single, multipurpose ship is impractical and inflexible and if no one designed such ships, there are none for the player to use them. Why you can't actually use your ships independently is another matter entirely (if I recall correctly, because Alex considers it not worth it. A shame).

Most of the time, you have a fleet, with the goal of destroying another fleet, hauling a couple months' worth of space rocks or going on a prospecting spree. Those things are complicating logistics a lot. Millenium Falcon was mostly a taxi for main characters to go around the galaxy. Enterprise, to my knowledge, was mostly an exploration vessel, not a "steal everything that isn't nailed down" one. Ferrying a dozen people or visiting the stars is something you can do with a single ship already! It just isn't what you actually do for the living in Starsector.
Another reason as to why those many pop culture entries constrain themselves to just a single ship is to make it more meaningful, to characters and to the audience, and to prevent the scale from growing above what an average Joe can empathise with, because he's the one that's paying for the book, movie, game, whatever.

Wyvern

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #2 on: January 15, 2020, 11:48:09 AM »

Solo ship captain (or nearly-solo) is a playstyle that worked okay for some of the very early versions of campaign mode (back when we only had the Corvus system to run around in), but has since fallen off significantly in viability.

I do miss it.

But the current game structure really makes it non-viable; when an end-game enemy fleet has a half-dozen capital ships, you're not going to deal with that on your own no matter what you're flying.  We've been told the in-development version tunes those numbers down some, so I guess we'll see where that goes.
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Cyber Von Cyberus

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #3 on: January 15, 2020, 11:55:34 AM »

If you want to have a single ship fleet so badly then try the Caliph super capital from the Kadur Remnants mod (you'll have to spawn it using console commands) still it's not really all that fun with the Caliph handling like a brick, although it can be funny to ram a star fortress to death and retake Oasis for the glory of the Theocracy. And having the entire game revolving around text events like you suggested sounds pretty lame, I doubt anyone would play that mode since the whole appeal of this game is the combat.
And even with some ships that would be considered the best of their faction (DME's Snow Goose, Tri Tach's Astral or Paragon, Blackrock's Nevermore and even the Caliph with all of its might)  soloing an entire fleet can be often impossible so you likely won't ever see fleet combat in this game mode you suggested.
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Megas

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #4 on: January 15, 2020, 01:00:55 PM »

Solo ship captain (or nearly-solo) is a playstyle that worked okay for some of the very early versions of campaign mode (back when we only had the Corvus system to run around in), but has since fallen off significantly in viability.
It was doable before 0.8a.  Did not mean it was as good as a big fleet (for hauling), but it could be done.
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shoi

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #5 on: January 15, 2020, 03:05:32 PM »

I think it's weird because in most sci-fi universes

Right off the bat, I would say that just because it's that way in x y and z, doesn't mean it should be in starsector..and even then, AFAIK the best those single ships would do is blow up a few fighters or shoot some weak spot to cripple 1 or 2 ships..

But besides that, this game is designed for fleet vs fleet battles, so this would complete upend that mechanic.

I can relate though because I prefer to play at a smaller scale, which can get difficult later in the game ):
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LordofFancy

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #6 on: January 15, 2020, 05:31:07 PM »

And having the entire game revolving around text events like you suggested sounds pretty lame, I doubt anyone would play that mode since the whole appeal of this game is the combat.

The "whole" appeal of the game is not the combat.  If that were the case everyone would just be playing the missions and not the actual game.  The game could actually use more text events, named characters and questlines.  But I don't think that should take priority as I think the whole appeal of this game is the dynamic freedom you have: Smuggling Lobsters, raiding convoys, waging war and exploring the Sector, and anything in between is possible and up to you.
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Megas

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #7 on: January 15, 2020, 05:41:32 PM »

The "whole" appeal of the game is not the combat.  If that were the case everyone would just be playing the missions and not the actual game.
Not in earlier versions.  I thought missions with unskilled ships were boring.  Combat was more fun (for me) with skills, and skills were much stronger before 0.8a.  Skills were only available in the campaign.

Today, ships are too OP starved without Loadout Design 3.
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Plantissue

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #8 on: January 16, 2020, 06:12:20 AM »

Star wars, Star trek, Stargate all have battles between large numbers of ships. Stargate doesn't really have ships as a method of travel anyways, with it's namesake rather unsuprisingly being the main method of travel.

Anyhow, you can play with one ship, it's just that in a hostile universe you will have to hide and run an awful lot. Which is fairly realistic. Boba Fett never had to fight off pirates. Starsector is not. Boba Fett never fight anything more than a single ship; in fact in the original trilogy, his ship doesn't ever enter combat. The Star Wars universe appears to be a rather safe universe. In starsector you can hunt bounties with a single ship, but you have to pick your targets carefully and play well. You can trade with a single ship. You can't make as much profit, but why should you?

I don't see the sense in forcing the player to choose to play a restricted solo mode or a normal mode, even before starting the game. Whatever happened to freedom to do what you would like?

Today, ships are too OP starved without Loadout Design 3.
They are not. The point of OP as customisation is to make choices. If the opposing ships have the same OP then there are no difference between your ships and the enemy's ships so what's the difference?
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Grievous69

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #9 on: January 16, 2020, 07:36:22 AM »

They are not. The point of OP as customisation is to make choices. If the opposing ships have the same OP then there are no difference between your ships and the enemy's ships so what's the difference?
Difference being the number of viable builds. Many ships have horrible flux stats and not a lot of OP so they have pretty much only one or two safe builds. It takes away the freedom when almost anything you want ends up lacking.
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Megas

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #10 on: January 16, 2020, 08:16:29 AM »

Even with Loadout Design 3, I often need to skimp on something to make something effective.  Without Loadout Design 3, I need to skimp even more.  That is no fun.

Mounts are meant to be filled, and there is often not enough OP to do that (without giving up more important caps, vents, and/or critical hullmods).  Carriers are unarmed, some warships may leave most mounts empty just so they can use the few they have left well.
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Schwartz

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #11 on: January 16, 2020, 10:41:14 AM »

At the core of the game is fleet combat. 1-vs-fleet doesn't work well and shows you quite quickly why this 'storytelling' approach to lone 1-man frigate vs. the world belongs in fiction and not warfare. It's a nice idea but this isn't the game for it. There are enough other space shooters that pin your solo ship vs. a manageable amount of enemies.
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Thaago

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #12 on: January 16, 2020, 03:26:45 PM »

I feel like, except for a few outliers like the Heron, I can make good builds without loadout design 3. With loadout design 3 I can fill every slot with the best weapons, max out at least vents and often have decent caps, and install several of the best hullmods. I am looking forward to loadout design 3 being removed - its much more interesting to design ships when there are design tradeoffs, instead of just loading the best of everything.

@Megas
Are you making heavy use of logistics hullmods on warships and reinforced bulkheads? I remember that in that past you have. Thats a lot of OP.
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Megas

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #13 on: January 16, 2020, 03:50:59 PM »

@Megas
Are you making heavy use of logistics hullmods on warships and reinforced bulkheads? I remember that in that past you have. Thats a lot of OP.
On ships without officers, I use Reinforced Bulkheads because if I lose the ship, I immediately reload the game.  I have no problem using clunkers I pick up off the ground until endgame when I have all blueprints and the industry to crank out pristine ships left and right on a budget.  By endgame, once I can rebuild anything with rock bottom prices I do not care as much.  However, some ships are OP starved enough that I must forgo Reinforced Bulkheads, and those ships get priority for officers for the synergy with ship recovery perk from Fleet Logistics.

I use Augmented Engines on capitals so I can reach burn 20 without too many tugs.  With Augmented Engines on ships with burn 6 or 7 and Navigation 3, I only need two tugs to reach burn 20.  Without Navigation or without Augmented Engines, I need four, which is a bit much for comfort.  If I tried without Augmented Engines and Navigation, I would need six, which is too much.  Would rather put Augmented Engines on Onslaught, Paragon, or Astral instead of bringing two more tugs.  Conquest and Odyssey cannot afford Augmented Engines, but at least they have burn 8, so they do not need it (if I have slower ships in fleet).  Burn 20 is very important when the sector is constantly on fire (which is a reason why I often want to destroy all core worlds so there is nothing left to save from burning to the ground, aside from my worlds).

I really like Efficiency Overhaul for extending fuel range and faster CR recovery for faster chain battling.  Being a combat monster does not mean much if the ships break the bank or drink more fuel than core worlds can stock and replenish.

Thing is, some ships can fit campaign mods without much problem while others cannot.  If I cannot mitigate those on the more OP starved ships, they simply do not get used.  Shrike is one where I have a real hard time squeezing a campaign mod.
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Megas

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Re: Solo mode : What if you want to play Boba Fett
« Reply #14 on: January 17, 2020, 05:12:33 AM »

I am looking forward to loadout design 3 being removed - its much more interesting to design ships when there are design tradeoffs, instead of just loading the best of everything.
I bet by endgame of the next release, all ships in the player's fleet will have at least two built-in mods, which will probably be worth more OP than Loadout Design 3.
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