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Author Topic: Hullmod thoughts  (Read 5904 times)

Serenitis

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #30 on: February 09, 2020, 07:45:52 AM »

For Recovery Shuttles, the way I see it is that if you are away from a source of crew, you are out exploring and shouldn't being doing any real amount of fighting.
Fighting is how you get enough supplies and fuel to stay out exploring for extended periods. Enemies are like fuel depots, and fighters are the key to turning hostiles into useable resources with the minimum fuss.
That it burns a non-renewable resource is inconvenient. But at least there's some way of mitigating it.

They stack. 
Yes they do. But it doesn't matter how good something is if you don't have the ability to use it because you're already using things which are more important (to you).
I don't consider what the ARU does to be particularly important because temporarily disabled things have never really bothered me. And the skill still gives me a boost to this anyway that costs nothing.
ARU is literally useless to me.
Different priorities etc....

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ARU never repaired hull
I'm fairly sure no-one has ever claimed it did.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2020, 07:50:15 AM by Serenitis »
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Megas

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #31 on: February 09, 2020, 08:26:27 AM »

In theory, ships would not need extra armor, hull, or other stuff like faster repair times if it was that easy to kill every enemy without taking hits.

Automated Repair Unit would be handy for those times when ships do get hit and lose weapons and engines.  I can always use ARU on the brawlers that will take damage, but ARU without Damage Control 2 is not good enough.  ARU plus DC2 for near-immunity to weapon and engine loss (through very fast repairs) is really nice.
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Igncom1

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #32 on: February 09, 2020, 08:40:14 AM »

I could see myself using ARU if weapons could be knocked permanently off-line in a battle.

But otherwise it basically only happens when you are being killed anyway.
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Goumindong

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #33 on: February 09, 2020, 11:14:00 AM »

ARU is very good for armor tankers and can definitely prevent you from dying.

Is important to note two things with regards to ARU.

1) weapon damage is continually dealt and repaired so an ARU may completely eliminate weapon/engine downtime especially in continuous fire situations.

2) having your weapons firing faster provides a lot of pressure to keep ships alive which magnifies the ability of armor in keeping you alive

I find ARU almost manditory on ships like the dominator and onslaught, which have alot of unprotected small slots*. A domi that gets swarmed dies, but a domi that gets swarmed with ARU can still do max DPS while its getting pummeled. 

*also good on the enforcer.
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bobucles

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #34 on: February 10, 2020, 04:39:44 AM »

ARU doesn't seem that important for primary weapons. A ship's main weapons typically overload its flux output, so they need to stop firing every once in a while no matter what. It does seem very useful for point defense. At least the ballistic PD weapons are supremely flux efficient, and they also provide a huge contribution towards preventing flux and armor damage. A disabled PD weapon can be fairly costly to a ship, especially when that disabled PD is letting annihilators or torpedoes through.

Plantissue

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #35 on: February 10, 2020, 08:57:12 AM »

For Recovery Shuttles, the way I see it is that if you are away from a source of crew, you are out exploring and shouldn't being doing any real amount of fighting.
Fighting is how you get enough supplies and fuel to stay out exploring for extended periods. Enemies are like fuel depots, and fighters are the key to turning hostiles into useable resources with the minimum fuss.
That it burns a non-renewable resource is inconvenient. But at least there's some way of mitigating it.
Losing crew as a limiter to exploring seems a bit odd as a concern. It is the very opposite of using fighters as a minimum of fuss.
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Serenitis

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #36 on: February 11, 2020, 01:40:49 PM »

Losing crew is technically no different to losing any other required resource.
Technically because you can't replenish it in the field, unlike supplies and fuel.

Fighting against large fleets is significantly easier and quicker when you have a force multiplier in play, such as fighters.
And large fleets are an excellent source of both supplies and fuel.
You are guaranteed to lose crew doing this, which is has the potential to put your fleet under it's CR threshold and render ships non-viable for combat, which in turn requires eventually abandoning whatever you were doing to fetch more crew as you can no longer use combat to recover fleet resources.
Mitigating fighter crew losses is a very useful ability for me because
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fighters are the key to turning hostiles into useable resources with the minimum fuss

Drones mostly remove the need for this. But you have to do this in order to get them. And you'll probably want to keep manned bombers anyway because they're just better.

You might not care about this because you have a different way of doing things.
And that's fine because sandbox.
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SCC

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #37 on: February 11, 2020, 02:04:06 PM »

Perhaps these differences come from different playstyles.
My exploration fleet is a Tempest and a dozen freighters and tankers (on the lower and) or a Tempest, a dozen big freighters or tankers, a couple of Apogees, Hammerheads and Drovers (on the higher end), with the single Tempest doing the most work in either case. Anything bigger isn't an exploration fleet, it's an (Remnant) extermination fleet and is basically a warfleet with additional tankers.
With a single Tempest doing the most of the work against all but biggest derelict fleets and contributing in pirate or scavenger fights significantly still, I don't lose much crew. Otherwise, I bring crew to burn, just in case I lose a ship or find a nice one somewhere along the way.

Serenitis

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #38 on: February 12, 2020, 08:48:53 AM »

Perhaps these differences come from different playstyles.
Almost certainly does.
Same 'mission', different ways of accomplishing it. And different tools (hullmods) used to achieve the same ends.

It'd be a dull game if there was 'one true way' of playing and nothing else worked at all.
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Igncom1

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #39 on: February 12, 2020, 09:11:16 AM »

Yeah I almost always take an armed escort for surveying runs so I can fight all the domain probes and weak remnant systems.

That can often include carriers with manned fighters, and so rescue shuttles is nice so I don't have to return to the core as often.
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Plantissue

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #40 on: February 13, 2020, 06:20:07 AM »

If you have to engage in combat so much that you are worried about running out of fighter crew, you aren't exploring, but deliberately engaging in combat repeatedly. There is a massive buffer for crew capacity. You can explore the entire sector before running out of crew, and you can explore the entire sector on minimal CR as long as you have the supplies and fuel, so the idea that you need to have recovery shuttles to prevent crew loss strike me as unrealistic.
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bobucles

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #41 on: February 13, 2020, 08:49:27 AM »

It does take a special effort to lose a large amount of crew on exploration. There aren't any events that drain crew, and there aren't many types of fights to worry about in deep space. There's even a few rare opportunities to pick up crew! Just stay away from the mean battles.

The biggest exploration fears come from fuel, supplies and overall cargo capacity. Starting off with a lot of fuel and supplies is good, but the long journeys are all about staying sustainable in deep space. A few key talents make the biggest difference here. Extra salvage, extra fuel, lower maintenance and lower fuel costs all provide dramatic boosts on the frontier. It's very easy for talents to be the tipping point between a gradual loss of supplies and a constant surplus. Having the right fleet also matters. Not too big that it eats all the supplies, not too small that it can't explore, and a lot of cargo space to boot. The salvage gantry and planet survey hullmods gain a lot of mileage for exploration, as well as extra cargo/fuel and efficiency packages. Boosting your slowest ships with military/adv. burn drive is also great to cover a lot of space.

 The rest of the hull mods don't really impact exploration in a directly useful way, other than keeping the fleet combat effective.

Igncom1

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #42 on: February 13, 2020, 09:16:35 AM »

I get what you mean, but that said not fighting domain drones when exploring does mean losing out of potential loot.

That and otherwise exploring is VERY dull otherwise. I'd not reccormend the hours it can take to fully survay a portion of the map without having anything to do other then basic navigational skills. But I'm straying.

What is the usual rate of pilot attrition from a fleet? I know it can scale massively depending on what you use, how much and so on. But I do recall suffering from lack of crew from survay/fighting from time to time when using carriers. Possibly not to the extent of needing recovery shuttles. But that you guys find it to be something so trivial or a non-existent problem is surprising to me. Otherwise yeah I don't suffer from crew problems either, but every now and then it does happen to me.
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Thaago

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #43 on: February 13, 2020, 09:23:13 AM »

If I'm playing an Industry build and recovering ships, I can run into crew problems during exploration if I hit a system with abandoned ships and recover them. Bit of a niche scenario, but it happens.
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Plantissue

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Re: Hullmod thoughts
« Reply #44 on: February 14, 2020, 07:04:42 AM »

Trying to survey every single planet and search for science stations and other goodies whilst avoiding remnant patrols in a red danger system can be rather exciting. Especially since class V planets tend to be there. But that's besides the point.

 Most ship have a buffer of around double the crew requirement in capacity no matter what type of ship you have, whether carrier, direct combat or logistical. If you have a thousand skeleton crew, you should have about a thousand crew spare to go through. To put things in perspective, 10 Drovers would have 600 spare crew capacity to go through, just by themselves and the rest of the fleet will contribute additional crew capacity. That's a rather insane amount of fighters to go through.

But most importantly, even if you are under crew capacity what does it matter? Being undercrewed only affects maximum CR, and CR isn't actually that important when you are travelling and surveying. It is only important for combat and even in the unlikely circumstance you are undercrewed, you can explore the entire sector whilst undercrewed as long as you have the supplies and fuel.
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