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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: Starsector 0.6a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 553430 times)

Trylobot

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #510 on: July 29, 2013, 02:42:38 PM »

I have a strong aversion to losing things due to circumstances outside my control.

Then you'd hate this GTA IV mod (probably the most fun I ever had with the game):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifTIuA8Dq58
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Uomoz

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #511 on: July 29, 2013, 03:30:53 PM »

I have a strong aversion to losing things due to circumstances outside my control.

I have a strong sympathy for events that make me lose things due to circumstances outside my control.

Excessive control removes the FUN (read it as a DF quote).
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Vind

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #512 on: July 30, 2013, 02:36:57 AM »

Planning is part of the game - removing fuel calculation and critical decisions for say ending game or scuttling half fleet for getting away with some fuel will be bad for gameplay experience. No magic fuel stations on galaxy edge please.
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Silver Silence

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #513 on: July 30, 2013, 02:57:08 AM »

I prefer knowing the risks of my Do's and Don'ts.

I hate FTL for it's almost luck based approach to winning the game. A random encounter with a ship with teleporters and Mantises can finish a game at any stage of the game. Not counting the fact that you may be unlucky enough that the shops you encounter never stock weapons adequate enough for the final boss, sometimes even leaving you with the weapons you had from the start of the game. Or you might find that one fire inducing beam of mass destruction that allows you to cackle maniacally while every strafe with the beam sets half their ship on fire. Maybe you decided to use drones to attack, only the last few shops and random events have offered you no drones, leaving you effectively weaponless. Those sorts of chance occurrences are just infuriating to me.
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phyrex

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #514 on: July 30, 2013, 09:08:49 AM »

I prefer knowing the risks of my Do's and Don'ts.

I hate FTL for it's almost luck based approach to winning the game. A random encounter with a ship with teleporters and Mantises can finish a game at any stage of the game. Not counting the fact that you may be unlucky enough that the shops you encounter never stock weapons adequate enough for the final boss, sometimes even leaving you with the weapons you had from the start of the game. Or you might find that one fire inducing beam of mass destruction that allows you to cackle maniacally while every strafe with the beam sets half their ship on fire. Maybe you decided to use drones to attack, only the last few shops and random events have offered you no drones, leaving you effectively weaponless. Those sorts of chance occurrences are just infuriating to me.

ah gosh, dont even remind me -_- i like FTL's concept but the amount of details left to randomness (or maybe just how apparent/obvious it was) made me just hate the game after a moment.
after a while i just downloaded a patch that took off some of those craps and the game all of a sudden became infinitely more enjoyable.

i feel like in general, random elements should either be in low amount, of relatively low importance or, if nothing better, be cleverly hidden so as to give an illusion of control to mitigate theire negative effect
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #515 on: July 30, 2013, 10:01:23 AM »

That's an interesting question overall.

Regarding FTL, I think it's mostly a matter of how you approach the game. If you into it with the idea that you're going to try a specific type of build, you're going to have a rough time. The game throws stuff at you and it's up to you to build a coherent whole out of it. If you've got it in your mind that you're trying to build a drone ship, you're likely to miss out on a lot of opportunities. Basically, I think it emphasizes adaptation over planning, and that if you approach it with that in mind, the random elements are mostly fine.

Will you lose the occasional game because you got no extra fuel ever? Yeah, you might, but that may only happen one in a thousand games, and it'll probably be fun trying to survive anyway. I'm also pretty sure that "letting you win every time if you play perfectly" wasn't a design goal, and the focus was more on enjoyable play sessions. For that, I think adaptation over planning is a good call, even if it'd be nice to play a more planned-out game of it every now and again.


... I feel like I've written out something very similar at some point. Ah, well.

I have a strong sympathy for events that make me lose things due to circumstances outside my control.

Excessive control removes the FUN (read it as a DF quote).

I pretty much agree there. The main thing is to give the player options to try to deal with things, and make sure that it's not DF-style FUN all day, every day.

"Hey, so you went into this star systems, and there are no exits, gg no rp" is no good. But other stuff random stuff can very much work, to whatever degree the rest of the design allows you to adapt to changing circumstances.
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Silver Silence

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #516 on: July 30, 2013, 10:44:56 AM »

That's an interesting question overall.

Regarding FTL, I think it's mostly a matter of how you approach the game. If you into it with the idea that you're going to try a specific type of build, you're going to have a rough time. The game throws stuff at you and it's up to you to build a coherent whole out of it. If you've got it in your mind that you're trying to build a drone ship, you're likely to miss out on a lot of opportunities. Basically, I think it emphasizes adaptation over planning, and that if you approach it with that in mind, the random elements are mostly fine.

Will you lose the occasional game because you got no extra fuel ever? Yeah, you might, but that may only happen one in a thousand games, and it'll probably be fun trying to survive anyway. I'm also pretty sure that "letting you win every time if you play perfectly" wasn't a design goal, and the focus was more on enjoyable play sessions. For that, I think adaptation over planning is a good call, even if it'd be nice to play a more planned-out game of it every now and again.

I find it difficult to enjoy making inefficient one-shot one-damage pulse lasers work when fighting the final boss in FTL. It simply doesn't cut the mustard. It's typically something chancing upon the firebeam (and actually being able to buy it), or finding one of the better missile launchers. Then just spend the rest of the game wasting stuff with the firebeam, or stocking up on missiles to abuse on the final boss. Fuel was never much of an issue for me, it was trying to build a ship that works beyond, what, the 5th sector? That seemed to be where I and a lot of the LPs I watched just spontaneously melt. If you haven't had a major improvement in arsenal by then, it's basically GG. And you have no control over that. The starting two-shot pulse laser will crack a shield, but you'll never do any damage with it in the later sectors. You NEED to have something more and if RNG doesn't give that "something" to you, you'll fail every time because you just become incompetent.
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Histidine

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #517 on: July 30, 2013, 10:16:25 PM »

Spoiler tagged for ramblyness:

Spoiler
I found FTL to contain several textbook examples of how not to do random elements. The Stealth B cruiser is easily the worst offender: fairly effective against typical enemies if you do it right, but there are certain enemies which you simply cannot do anything against, and which you can't choose not to encounter (Zoltan ships, drones, beam drones, Zoltan ships with beam drones).

Perhaps even worse are the random multiple-choice events where you run the risk of losing a crewmember through dice roll. This is typically a serious blow that would take far more potential reward than the events offer to match, so once you know which choices can lead to crew loss you just don't take them, ever.

As for adaptation vs. planning: YMMV, but it seemed to me that all successful ships, regardless of what they started as, have the exact same basic build by the end of the game - as much shielding and engine power as you can afford, enough weaponry to overwhelm or bypass shields, cloaking, sometimes a teleporter - because that is what is needed to win. That strikes me as being much closer to planning than to adaptation (and there is only one correct plan, to boot).
[close]

My philosophy is this: random bad events are fine as long as the game also gives you a way to prepare for or otherwise recover from them, i.e. your decisions affect how well you cope with the curveball. In poker, if you get dealt a bad hand, you can bluff your way out, gamble on the next card being better, or fold early and save your chips for later - deciding which of these decisions to take and executing it requires skill.

Imagine what poker would be like if the size of the pot was finalized before anyone saw any cards.
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Anysy

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #518 on: July 31, 2013, 12:38:53 AM »

Its odd you mention 'random events that can lose you a crew member through a dice roll'

A lot of those events can be completely mitigated by having the right gear for them (level 2 medbay is huge, for example), or by simply not embarking on those areas (pick the 'do nothing' option).

I dont really see how that is much different - If i ever encounter spiders without a fire weapon, I merely get up and leave. Not worth it. If you believe yourself unable to prepare for the events you are given, that is because you haevnt tried to prepare for them.
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Trylobot

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #519 on: July 31, 2013, 07:23:42 AM »

@Silver Silence, @Histidine: I think the answer here is very simple; you don't enjoy Roguelikes. Good thing Starsector isn't one.
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xenoargh

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #520 on: July 31, 2013, 10:36:17 AM »

I love Roguelikes. 

There's nothing like perma-death after the character I've put 4 hours of my life into randomly drops into a dungeon crawling with Acid Blobs and Flesh-Flensing Demons right around the entrance  ;)

That said, FTL provides a little more choice to get out of messes.  It really needs a Spider Solitaire-style method to take back moves and more attention paid to making sure that every game is potentially winnable, though :)

Anyhow, I don't think Alex would strand us without a method of getting back.  That wouldn't be Fun.  This is a game where even Iron Mode isn't perma-death, after all.
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Thaago

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #521 on: July 31, 2013, 02:13:53 PM »

I've been thinking a lot about how to make a procedural sector with the new API - is there any way at the moment to make a new faction from a script without external files?
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jeffg10

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #522 on: July 31, 2013, 05:33:48 PM »

will the launcher auto update? because every time i have tried to get my activation code back i fail because i can't remember the email i used at the time i bought it  ???
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"Someone else might have wept or screamed in frustration or even given up right there and perished. But I didn't have the right to do any of those things, not while my people were in danger. Like it or not, I would have to explore this harsh world on my own."

Silver Silence

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #523 on: July 31, 2013, 05:51:48 PM »

@Silver Silence, @Histidine: I think the answer here is very simple; you don't enjoy Roguelikes. Good thing Starsector isn't one.

I enjoy TBoI, I enjoy Teleglitch. I enjoy Terraria in hardcore mode.
It's just in FTL, there's practically no skill needed. It's just luck of the draw as to whether you get the stuff needed to win the game. Those random gain crew/lose crew events are the worst. When I played my first few runs, I thought there was a good choice and a bad choice. I think it's in the slaver one where a slave is running away. I chose to save the slave, only for him to be a member of the slaver's crew and suddenly I'm fighting a ship and there's enemy crew running ragged all over my ship. Fine. Next time, choose not to help slave who turns on me anyway and randomly kills a crew member ANYWAY.  Oh, there's a colony with a massive infection problem? S**t, man, I got more important things than disease, see ya. Now I feel like a ***, but if I don't have a hulking humanoid slab of rock in my crew, I ain't coming within half an AU of that colony. NOPE. IT NOT WORTH IT.


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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.6a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #524 on: July 31, 2013, 06:15:36 PM »

I've been thinking a lot about how to make a procedural sector with the new API - is there any way at the moment to make a new faction from a script without external files?

No, there isn't.

will the launcher auto update? because every time i have tried to get my activation code back i fail because i can't remember the email i used at the time i bought it  ???

Totally not the thread for it, but: send an email to keys [at] bmtmicro [dot] com with whatever order info you do remember. The launcher won't auto-update, but you can always grab the latest version here; also, shouldn't need to re-enter the key.

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