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[FooF]

I think it'd be very easy to design a 0 OP "default" weapon for every slot type without breaking anything balance wise. It would probably even help to have a little more guaranteed PD, even if it's very bad PD, to aggregate together in bigger fights.

Eh, even if a weapon was 0 OP, if costs flux to fire than it defeats the purpose of why I'm leaving the slot empty. I leave slots empty for flux reasons far more often than trying to save OP.

Re: More flux/weapon numbers on refit

The number I'm most concerned with is flux use under "normal" circumstances. For most ships, that means primary weapons (not PD) at maximum range. Weapons that are in the rear or side that don't typically contribute against primary targets I tend to ignore. Likewise, if I have a bunch of 1000 Range HVDs/Maulers, the LAGs up close probably won't be firing under normal circumstances.

That number is what I try to build around because it's the most frequent use-case. If a ship is at/around 100-125% of its flux dissipation with its primary weapons loadout, it tends to win long-term (especially in AI hands).

[intrinsic_parity]

0 OP weapons do represent some flux savings (over non 0 OP weapons) in the sense that you free up OP to spend on flux related stuff like vents and hull mods. 0 OP weapons can be left not firing and only used in specific circumstances without any penalty: there's no downside to putting them on your ship (other than credit cost I suppose), even if you don't use them, which does solve the 'empty mounts' problem, albeit not necessarily in the most natural way.

[Megas]

0 OP weapons do represent some flux savings (over non 0 OP weapons) in the sense that you free up OP to spend on flux related stuff like vents and hull mods. 0 OP weapons can be left not firing and only used in specific circumstances without any penalty: there's no downside to putting them on your ship (other than credit cost I suppose), even if you don't use them, which does solve the 'empty mounts' problem, albeit not necessarily in the most natural way.

AI is not good at leaving weapons alone.  If it has them, it will use them.  (To be honest, there were times I wish I could rip out the TPCs from Onslaught because AI loves to max its flux bar by firing them with reckless abandon.)

For 0 OP weapons to be good, it either needs to be flux-free, or it needs to be a good deal like two Light Mortars instead of one Light Assault Gun.

Eh, even if a weapon was 0 OP, if costs flux to fire than it defeats the purpose of why I'm leaving the slot empty. I leave slots empty for flux reasons far more often than trying to save OP.

Varies by ship for me.  For carriers and phase ships, it is purely for OP reasons.  (I would gladly put guns on carriers, but lack of OP after fighters prevents that, and I would put PD on Harbinger and more guns on Doom if I had more OP.)  For Aurora and Odyssey, it is primarily lack of OP (to afford all among flux, hullmods, and minor weapons).  For something like Onslaught, it is mostly due to lack of dissipation.  For Conquest, it is a mix of three reasons:  1) not enough OP to fill all missile slots, 2) too much flux usage with medium energy weapon, and 3) energy and rear medium ballistic left empty to make sure AI stays within optimal range band with its three important guns (Mjolnir, Heavy Needler, and Mark IX).

[DatonKallandor]

Eh, even if a weapon was 0 OP, if costs flux to fire than it defeats the purpose of why I'm leaving the slot empty.

The solution to that problem is in your sentence. They shouldn't cost flux to fire.

[Hiruma Kai]

Eh, even if a weapon was 0 OP, if costs flux to fire than it defeats the purpose of why I'm leaving the slot empty.

The solution to that problem is in your sentence. They shouldn't cost flux to fire.

Zero cost things tend to be very hard to balance.  Either they're pointless from a combat point of view (having no effect on the outcome) and essentially just a prettier weapon cover, or they are going to shift the optimal loadout even more towards a couple high end/high flux weapons and fill out everything else with 0 cost stuff, meaning the low cost and higher flux efficient weapons get skipped even more. 

I will point out we already have a 0 OP cost/0 flux cost option.  It is called the empty weapon slot and there are already "optimal builds" using it.  This proposed option will simply make said builds even better and in fact push builds more towards that end of things (a couple high OP cost/high flux usage weapons, high OP cost fighters and nothing else).  Is that what we want in the game balance space?

[Grievous69]

Sorry I didn't go through all of the previous posts but I just want to say I agree it's dumb when the optimal build for a ship is to leave it almost naked and focus everything into flux and hullmods. Of course there's nothing terribly wrong with that, it just bothers me it's a thing on multiple ships. That said, I disagree with the OP, having any sort of arbitrary bonuses or punishing a player for doing something unique is bad and should be avoided. Honestly I don't know if there even is a way you could "fix" this.

0 OP weapons that don't cost flux is hilarious, you'll just end up in the same place as before, only now those weapons will replace empty mounts. Again, there's not much choice there. What I would like is more granularity between weapons. Currently if you want some token PD, it'll add up pretty fast on OP. And only ballistics have decent cheap assault options. Missiles are fine imo, you can leave them empty if you want but you lose a fair bit of punchyness for relatively low OP cost. Ballistics are also mostly fine, although I'd like to see a 1-2 OP option, because some ships just have waaay too many small mounts. And now energy mounts, dear god they desperately need something. Most of the ships with optimal "naked" builds have energy mounts that hurt more to fill than leave empty.

I'd still like to see some cool niche builds with few weapons but hopefully not as many as now. Actually now that I think about it, a huge amount of ships are horribly underfluxed and really need all the OPs spent on that just so they don't explode in a normal fight. I feel like even when you go with efficient weapons, you still end up being way over your initial stats.

[Megas]

I will point out we already have a 0 OP cost/0 flux cost option.  It is called the empty weapon slot and there are already "optimal builds" using it.

Only problem (to me) is that zero cost option looks ugly and feels stupid when about more than half of all mounts are empty, regardless of covers.  I use some of those builds (because they are optimal), but I do not like using them.  Nonsense like unarmed carrier or two blaster-only Aurora.

I do not feel like I am playing a cruiser or capital with two-blaster Aurora or two plasma Odyssey.  Instead, I feel like I am playing the fast starter gunship or slow starter light freighter or transport from other space games instead of their cruiser equivalent.

I do not have a problem with few select mounts (out of many) empty, like empty medium missile and energy mounts on Conquest.  For those, all of the biggest mounts and most of the rest are filled up, with few of the awkward mounts are left empty.

As for balance, I would not mind skills being restored to their pre-0.8a glory (and maybe the return of some fun exploits like vent spamming and burn cancelling) so that filling all mounts becomes a good idea like it used to be, thanks to generous OP and high stats.  As for carriers, bring fighters-as-ships back so that OP is freed for guns and flux (instead of locked up in multiple 8+ OP fighters and Expended Deck Crew), and carriers can arm themselves like a warship of a single class size less like they used to.

Sorry I didn't go through all of the previous posts but I just want to say I agree it's dumb when the optimal build for a ship is to leave it almost naked and focus everything into flux and hullmods. Of course there's nothing terribly wrong with that, it just bothers me it's a thing on multiple ships.

Totally agreed.

[FooF]

Zero cost things tend to be very hard to balance.  Either they're pointless from a combat point of view (having no effect on the outcome) and essentially just a prettier weapon cover, or they are going to shift the optimal loadout even more towards a couple high end/high flux weapons and fill out everything else with 0 cost stuff, meaning the low cost and higher flux efficient weapons get skipped even more. 

I will point out we already have a 0 OP cost/0 flux cost option.  It is called the empty weapon slot and there are already "optimal builds" using it.  This proposed option will simply make said builds even better and in fact push builds more towards that end of things (a couple high OP cost/high flux usage weapons, high OP cost fighters and nothing else).  Is that what we want in the game balance space?

I'm lol'ing at finding an optimal load out that maximizes the 0 OP/Flux weapons with a few "real" ones and proving, objectively, that it's better not to mount anything in these slots. (I guess I assumed that 0-flux weapons, even with drastic downsides, would be a weird precedent to set...)

I find it interesting that the detractors of "naked hulls," myself included, continue to appeal to the "feel" or "look" of said ships. Do we have any out there that prefer the "feel" or "look" of these ships when leaving a bunch of mounts empty? (The question behind the question: is this a balance concern, aesthetic concern, gameplay concern, or what?)

[Megas]

I find it interesting that the detractors of "naked hulls," myself included, continue to appeal to the "feel" or "look" of said ships. Do we have any out there that prefer the "feel" or "look" of these ships when leaving a bunch of mounts empty? (The question behind the question: is this a balance concern, aesthetic concern, gameplay concern, or what?)

For me, it is mostly an aesthetic concern.  Balance and gameplay wise, naked hulls are probably mostly fine, albeit unintuitive since variants rarely have missing (or even undergunned) mounts.  Mostly because it is on par with fun minor exploits like vent spamming and burn cancelling, and Alex removed them because AI does not know how to use those exploits to even the playing field.  AI rarely has variants with naked or undergunned mounts.  Basically, most ships on the (enemy) NPC side are traditional lots-of-guns ships armed to the teeth.

Back to aesthetics, I just cannot stand the look or feel of the naked hulls.  I want a capital ship to fire lots of guns at a bunch of little ships or at an enemy battleship.  I do not want a capital ship to have one or two guns pretending to be a shmup fighter craft (like two plasma Odyssey or unarmed Astral), and being better or more optimal than a traditional lots-of-guns battleship because the latter does not have the stats (even after skill min-maxing) to support lots of guns.  I already played many other space games, starting with '80s arcade games and Atarl 2600 console, for fighter craft gameplay.  I got Starsector so I could pilot a big ship and mow down ships with lots of guns.

Similarly, when fighters were ships, carriers could arm themselves with guns and brawl in a pinch, much like Mules can.  Now, with fighters as weapons, carriers spend most OP on good fighters and hullmods (because guns and bad fighters perform worse), and any weapons they have are either PD or missile support.  Trying to brawl like a Mule is futile, except for Legion.  I do not like this.

[Hiruma Kai]

Personally, the aesthetics of mount covers doesn't bother me.  Perhaps because I view my fleet as a ragtag bunch of misfits, hand cobbled together instead of mass produced production line ships.  Especially the ones with D-mods.

Back to aesthetics, I just cannot stand the look or feel of the naked hulls.  I want a capital ship to fire lots of guns at a bunch of little ships or at an enemy battleship.  I do not want a capital ship to have one or two guns pretending to be a shmup fighter craft (like two plasma Odyssey or unarmed Astral), and being better or more optimal than a traditional lots-of-guns battleship because the latter does not have the stats (even after skill min-maxing) to support lots of guns.  I already played many other space games, starting with '80s arcade games and Atarl 2600 console, for fighter craft gameplay.  I got Starsector so I could pilot a big ship and mow down ships with lots of guns.

But you don't have to use a dual plasma Odyssey.  If you want lots of weapon spam, slap on Autopulse cannons, and fill in the small mounts with tactical lasers or something?  Assuming a tradeoff of 1 OP of 10 flux/second, two Plasma cannons cost like 225 OP, while Autopulse lasers only cost 90 OP (1650 flux vs 500 flux, 30 OP vs 20 OP).  That should be enough to mount like 12 tactical lasers (4 OP + 75 flux each).  Ideally, those two setups should be roughly as effective, or at least have reasonable tradeoffs against different enemies.

And if its significantly less effective, then we should be asking for buffs to Autopulse lasers and small energy weapons so it is closer to being true.  Fundamentally, I view the issue of people not wanting to fill out all weapon slots as one of balance, not aethetics.  If it is significantly better, that implies to me high flux/high cost weapons are over performing relative to low cost/flux efficient weapons.  If its only a little better, that is probably fine since really fine tuned balance is almost impossible with a system of ship outfitting as flexible as Starsector's. 

I don't like these one size fits all, global changes as they're not getting at the potential underlying problem.  Or making that underlying problem worse.  Dual Plasma cannons get even better relative to Autopulse lasers in the presences of 0 OP and 0 flux cost weapons.  If a front line combat ship doesn't want to use all its weapon slots, the weapons are likely not balanced with respect to the combination of OP cost, flux cost, and weapon mount cost.  I don't know much of that third factor, the weapon mount cost, is taken into account.

Similarly, when fighters were ships, carriers could arm themselves with guns and brawl in a pinch, much like Mules can.  Now, with fighters as weapons, carriers spend most OP on good fighters and hullmods (because guns and bad fighters perform worse), and any weapons they have are either PD or missile support.  Trying to brawl like a Mule is futile, except for Legion.  I do not like this.

To be honest, it's probably possible to create a mod which adds a hullmod which does the following:
1) Reduce the applied cost of all mounted fighters to zero OP
2) Increases the DP cost of the carrier by 1/2 or 1/3 or some appropriate fraction (rounding up) of the original base OP value of the mounted fighters
3) Increases the FP value of the ship by a similarly appropriate amount (1/4 or 1/6 or something)

It essentially separates the fighter and guns/missiles/hullmods points pools, while not restricting overall fighter mounting choices, and interfaces cleanly with current code without any major backend changes.  Just changing OP and DP.  It also interestingly seems to solve the Valkyrie + Converted Hangar problem, as now you've got a minimum DP associated with the fighter as well.  Valkyries at 6 DP using Sparks versus 18 DP drovers with sparks isn't nearly as bad as 3 DP Valkyries and 12 DP drovers with sparks. Ratio of 3 to 1 instead of 4 to 1 (assuming Sparks come out as 3 DP cost in this model).  Astral filled with tridents is something like 95 DP.  On the other hand, it'd be like having the current Astral (45) plus 150 extra OP, allowing the use of the Large missile banks and some beam spam, so maybe it is in the right ballpark?  It would at least provide an alternative option to the current carrier build paradigms. 

Although I'd be hesitant to apply such a mod globally to AI controlled ships since I don't know how the auto-fit code would interact.

[Megas]

Autopulse is little more than a more flux efficient pulse laser in the biggest fights - not good enough.  Autopulse is for alpha-striking weaker targets.  (Against a battlestation, mining blaster is better.)  There is no substitute for the plasma cannon.  Plasma cannon has excellent DPS, more penetration than a pulse laser, and better efficiency than mining/heavy blasters, and more range than both (700 vs. 600).

Same idea with unarmed carrier.  I could use guns and Talons, but they are suboptimal compared to unarmed carrier.

[intrinsic_parity]

I don't think that 0 OP or 0 flux cost weapons are a good idea. There's plenty of space between existing weapons and 0 cost stuff that can be filled out. I think the reason a lot of low tech and mid tech ships don't suffer from these problems is that there are good low flux ballistic PD options to fill out mounts. Frag damage beam PD could be a good option if you just wanted mount filling weapons, but I don't think that really addresses the underly problem of balance between energy weapons.


I think that carriers and warships have different reasons for empty mounts that need to be addressed separately. Carriers already have 0 flux cost weapons in the form of fighters and generally not enough OP to get both good fighters and weapons. There have been several posts about reworking carriers (flux cost to fighters, bay types etc.) that try to address this. There's also just a general issues of tight OP budgets on carriers that could be addressed (mostly for the astral IMO). I don't think there's anything wrong with  dedicated carriers that can't afford to equip powerful weapons though. It's just a different class of ship that didn't exist prior to the carrier rework.



Warships should be able to equip lots of weapons though. I think most of the empty mount set ups on warships (particularly high tech ships) are a result of energy weapon balance and the fundamental nature of the flux mechanics. Energy weapons pretty much universally have efficiency 1:1 or worse meaning that it's actively bad to fire into shields (you build more flux in your own ship than the enemy) unless you have enough dissipation to fire without generating flux in your own ships (or very close to that point). That reality of these mechanics naturally leads to 'empty loadouts' because you need to have enough dissipation to fire your weapons, otherwise you're hurting yourself (or treading water/not making progress in the fight). I know Alex was talking about making over-fluxed loadouts better, but I don't think it's possible to make those loadouts better using inefficient weapons without giving ships more dissipation (a straight buff that they don't need). No amount of inefficient damage over dissipation will help you in the flux war.

I suppose another option is to reduce the flux and DPS proportionally of all energy weapons so that you can fit more of them under dissipation without affecting efficiency, but that feels way harder to balance, and would probably cause issues with armor penetration.


Once you consider that you don't want to fire over dissipation, you can evaluate weapons by how effectively they transform your dissipation into damage. Odyssey leaves all it's small mounts empty because there's just no reason to ever spend any of your dissipation on the available small energy weapons when you have plasma cannons. The plasma cannon has pretty much the same efficiency, better range (with the exception of tac laser) and waaaaaaay better armor penetration. I think Hiruma Kai hit the nail on the head: plasma cannons are just better at converting dissipation into damage than other energy weapons. I think Auto Pulse is somewhat close to being as good as a plasma cannon because of .75 efficiency, but the sustained DPS is so low that it falls a bit short. A buff to the recharge rate would put Auto pulse right up there with the plasma cannon, and even now, I think auto pulse + plasma is better than 2x plasma for the AI because the flux cost is so much more manageable.


With regards to smaller weapons, they have worse range and worse armor penetration across the board so they really need an efficiency advantage to compete with bigger weapons, otherwise you end up with loadouts focused on a few of the biggest weapons the ship can mount because they are better in every way than the smaller weapons. I don't think there's any space in the game for a small energy weapon like the IR pulse laser because you don't want to fire it over dissipation (1:1 damage means it's doing close to nothing in the flux war unless the enemy has very bad shields), and you pretty much always have some other option with better range/armor penetration to use up your dissipation. IR pulse laser needs at least an efficiency buff (maybe a reduction in flux cost to ~100-115) to ever be useful IMO. Pulse laser could really use the same treatment IMO, although it gets used because there's just no other option on some ships. Alternatively you could add some new more efficient energy weapons and keep current Pulse and IR pulse lasers but I think you would really risk making IR pulse/ Pulse completely irrelevant by doing that.

[Megas]

I do not give hard-flux Odyssey to AI because it plasma burns into a mob, gets surrounded, takes hits in undefended areas, and dies quickly.  The only AI Odyssey I had some success with (that is, not dying early by stupidity) is a missile-and-beam heavy loadout, which is not what I want to use if I pilot it.  The loadout of playership Odyssey and AI Odyssey in my fleet is completely, radically different.  Thus, I generally avoid using Odyssey in my fleet.  That is unlike other capitals in my fleet where I can get away with the same loadout for both my use and AI use.

[Grievous69]

@intrinsic_parity
Agree with everything you said. Worth noting is that I think IR pulse laser may actually get an efficiency buff, I vaguely remember seeing a part of balance changes from Alex that were implemented into the previous tournament (everything is subject to change I guess). Small energy weapons truly are traps on bigger ships, you either get PD or not bother at all. Maybe Tac lasers if you're going for a beam loadout or something weird. And as you said, Pulse laser ain't much better, it's just used on ships that can't use Heavy Blaster easily.

Well Plasma Cannon is really the only reliable sustained dmg weapon. HIL is a beam that requires kinetics to be good (which most high-tech ships don't have), and other options aren't that crazy unless massed. It's only logical that people go all in with Plasma cannons and focus on doing as much damage as they can with them.

[intrinsic_parity]

I do not give hard-flux Odyssey to AI because it plasma burns into a mob, gets surrounded, takes hits in undefended areas, and dies quickly.  The only AI Odyssey I had some success with (that is, not dying early by stupidity) is a missile-and-beam heavy loadout, which is not what I want to use if I pilot it.  The loadout of playership Odyssey and AI Odyssey in my fleet is completely, radically different.  Thus, I generally avoid using Odyssey in my fleet.  That is unlike other capitals in my fleet where I can get away with the same loadout for both my use and AI use.

I've found that AI odyssey with 2x medium sabots in forward facing pods, locust, light PD, and plasma + Auto pulse is fairly reliable in AI hands. That very close to my flagship odyssey build. Beam odyssey is a waste of DP IMO. I wouldn't deploy an AI odyssey if the enemy has a big numerical advantage because of issues with the AI getting surrounded, but that's an issue with any maneuverable ship in AI hands, not just odyssey. In my experience it works fine for even or close to even battles.