Oh yeah, I was. Didn't realize that would cause problems. Thanks! The reply:
Since 0.8a, AI has become much more cowardly, and it did not get much better in 0.9a. Modern AI is still much more cowardly than in 0.7.x releases and before. It will stall until heat (or CR) death if given the chance. In worst case scenario (like lone starter Apogee), player may need to waste much time cornering the enemy before being able to kill it.
Yeah, that is incredibly annoying. 90% of my fights with a Radiant end with it backed up against the edge of the map. Way to go drawing attention to technical limitations, that kind of thing doesn't yank the player right out of the experience and destroy any semblance of immersion at all.
Map size.
What can frigates do late game?
Agreed 100%. I miss the good old days...
Well, being a wizard in Starsector means developer cheats, like giving yourself money, changing rep, giving yourself ships including normally unplayable ones like Radiant or Guardian, erasing enemy ships... or hijacking and piloting them yourself. Creating or blowing up worlds. Teleportation. Insert weird or spooky stuff. Basically playing god.
Eh... that's more like being the DM, or at least messing with the DM's notes and plans while he's on the toilet. I don't want to outright cheat (I could do that very easily), I want to play within the rules, I just wish the rules wouldn't strongly push me into the most unfun playstyle possible.
What I meant by early fighter is player progresses from personal power to world strategic power. One human is limited to so much, so the way for one human get more power than one human is to lead many humans to do what that one human wants, and not necessarily in a fight, but to build up an empire so you have a home, steady income, and maybe political power to do things like give quests to other low-level murderhobos to do your dirty work while you focus on you want to do.
I get that, but that's easy to do in tabletop roleplaying. In the context of SS you're talking about transitioning from a space shooter with AI allies to a 4X strategy, a complete switch of genre. And the thing is, if I wanted to play a 4X strategy game, there are many much,
much beter ones than what SS is or ever will be (because, being a hybrid game, it can never be as good as a specialist single-genre title).
The colony management aspect as it currently exists is little more than reskinned Cookie Clicker. You earn some cookies manually at first, then you buy an upgrade that earns them automatically, and then you have nothing to do but wait until you have enough cookies to buy the next upgrade that earns them even faster, and then you wait some more, buy the next upgrade, etc., etc., until eventually you run out of upgrades to buy, at which point you question why you even bothered spending time on this.
And the thing is, that fighter can still go and bash some heads in regardless of how many followers he has. By the time you have an empire under your thumb in SS, you can't very well just go out with two frigates and a destroyer anymore, enemy fleets are going to be way too big for that. That fun, dynamic early-game gameplay is irretrievably lost.
It would be nice if late-game Starsector has some ruler things to do instead of locking the player's fleet into meathead mode all game.
If it's fleshed out to let you do interesting things, sure, I guess? Given how anything interesting in meathead mode gets nerfed into the ground, though, I don't have high hopes. It's just going to be the same boring "+1% to whatever" kind of thing that character skills are saturated with.