I was testing out the new bar missions in a relatively small fleet- (a couple destroyers and several frigates). The first mission I tried was the fairly common: "I need this shipment of X delivered to Y market." I will go on a tiny tangent here and point out that this alone has several difficulty factors: open market or underground transactions - hidden dangers, etc. For a new player, even if they understand all the elements there, it can be much harder to sneak in to some markets- and the random pick nature of the mission would make it impossible to reliably judge the overall difficulty of an underground transaction unless you are experienced enough to know what typically guards each market. Ok, tangent over. This time, its a standard delivery type and it goes smoothly.
Next mission(s). I choose a derelict salvage package mission and- hey! lucky me!- there is a weapons cache mission close by so may as well take that too while I'm at it! Since I'm going more into the unknown than last time, I beef up my fleet with a cruiser and another destroyer. I handle the derelict mission easily, and, to my horror, realize that the weapons cache is
deep within the corona of the star. Well... I can't take my current fleet in there without eating my supplies to a point that likely my completed mission was a waste (I think to myself). So, instead, I calculate that I have enough time and fuel to make a return trip with a smaller fleet and still cut a profit. I've played Starsector for a while at this point, so I know how to do this. A new player would likely not even be able to make that judgement call. They would dive into the star and learn the hard way the first time. Anyway, I bring back a smaller fleet, fly to the weapon cache... and get met with a guard group of remnants that includes 2 Brilliants who do not much care about the environment they are sitting in. Well, that's out. I reload and bring back the cruiser fleet determined to beat the remnants because "wow this cache must be valuable to be this difficult!" I will admit, I didn't even know about this after playing Starsector for a
long while before this update
, but I had no idea having a larger fleet made it more difficult to get deeper within a corona. The cache was right by the surface of the star, so even with E-burn I don't think I could
even make it there with enough available CR to fight the remnants. Impossibly difficult (to me) compared to the other two missions I had just completed. I'm not sure if this has changed since then, or, heck, maybe weapon caches aren't even supposed to spawn there and that was unintended. Either way, there were no differences between the way the missions were presented that indicated one was that much harder than the others, they were just "something to do." Imagine, for a moment, if this was a
brand new player's first bar mission.
Another example:
I suppose I should have brushed up on my astrology, but I was woefully unprepared for a neutron star. I got unlucky and was already within the blast area when I spawned from the jump-point. That cost me two decent battles because I was careless and hadn't immediately saved after (which is why, I think auto-save as a feature comes up so much even though it's impractical to implement for this game)
Then there was the first, and last, time I responded to a distress call
(whoa that pirate ambush is huge!)
Importantly, these kinds of experiences are
necessary to make the sector feel like a dangerous and exciting place. One might be tempted to think the way to go, then, is to warn the player and give them time to avoid the hazard through intelligent choices or good preparation, but consider the effect that has when that principle over-saturates the difficulty and everything is avoidable-
now it's boring! You never feel in danger because you can always pick your battles! That's a problem too... so what is there to be done about this paradox of design? I'll get to that soon, but first: (feel free to skip ahead, I know this is long, sorry)
Deep dive analysis of player incentives from a learning perspective:The primary thing to consider when thinking about difficulty and the scale of ship size is the hazard to the player. What does it do to make the game more difficult when you increase ship size? It costs more supplies to deploy fleets and maintain fleets (crew, maintenance, officers, etc). Essentially more credits required per month. This means from the player's perspective they must earn more credits than before to survive (inherent time limit to play without further risk by doing missions- remember this is before colonies and assuming no commission is possible right away because that causes further complexity or dangers). What does a player gain by larger ships (flavor aside)? Power to ignore hazards that include larger sized fleets.
Hazards. The secondary thing to consider here is that there are currently two category types of hazards whose lines would scale inverted in opposite directions if we were to graph them: Hazards that scale upwards in cost (again more credits) according to increasing fleet size (category 1) and hazards that scale in less combat difficulty by the same metric (category 2). The early game, and Core Worlds in particular, has far more category 2 hazards than category 1 hazards. Players, therefore, quickly feel incentivized to increase their fleet size- which requires more credits- which requires venturing outside the Core- which increases the likelihood of running into the category 1 hazard! RNG makes this even more difficult to calculate, and so the end result for an inexperienced player is often bankruptcy by trying to protect themselves from the category 2 hazard. Since the scale is exponential in this regard, it can make it all the more frustrating.
One special thing to note about this dynamic, is that it greatly increases the attractiveness of lucrative trading missions and Core World events such as food shortages or market commodity deficiencies to a large degree. Why? Because a player can avoid most if not all of the category 1 hazards and reliably predict the category 2 hazards. The only RNG comes from black market activities- which are generally a really light penalty overall considering the gain that can be achieved.
Since Starsector is about campaign elements funneling back to combat with meaningful player choices in between, it therefore makes sense in my mind to both increase the usefulness of smaller ships in trading missions (they are the most attractive early game options as a conclusion from above ) since decreasing the missions' lucrativeness could potentially create more grind without reducing the benefit of less risk/calculable progression at the expense of boredom- if that makes sense. Again, I'm not saying small ships shouldn't have a role all campaign long, but this is a current campaign mechanic that can increase their usefulness in direct way. Part of the way to do this would be to funnel trading missions back into combat by increasing their risk. Importantly this could scale to fleet size and make small ship-only group's have more interesting things to do early on and late campaign both- depending upon the Core's overall stability. This is only one example, ideally, but gets the general point across of the necessity, in this case, of creating additional options to increase the variety of things to do at each stage of the difficulty progression in order to prevent staleness at any particular level.
What I mean by "difficulty progression" is explained below.