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Author Topic: Starsector 0.65.2a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 325200 times)

Squigzilla

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #90 on: December 05, 2014, 03:49:43 PM »

I'm in favor of the upcoming changes. Beam weapons needed a change to bring them in line with other energy weapon options, and increased range is an easily implemented solution. The zero-flux damage boost was cool but produced some jarring mental images: "Gun decks three through eight, fire all energy weapons into empty space! We need our reactors at the brink of overload before engaging the enemy!"

Regarding people's concerns about not having the orders to retreat all low-CR ships, try investing in the leadership skill that grants extra command points. This is not meant to be condescending but rather a simple suggestion. I imagine a novice admiral with limited leadership experience would have difficulty managing all his ships to keep the fleet fighting at full efficiency, and I am glad to see this reflected in the game mechanics.
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Unicorn Face

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #91 on: December 05, 2014, 04:01:06 PM »

I think I like the sound of those changes! I never ran out of bullets unless I was trying to, missile balance is currently kinda abusable, and it always struck me as kinda odd that overheating would somehow help complex electronics.

I have a concern, which is "Tactical Laser, Graviton Beam, and Phase Beam are no longer interrupted by missiles." Does that mean they can't shoot down missiles anymore? Tactical Lasers with the AI PD module were my favorite 'point' defenses, because they worked great and stayed useful even if missiles weren't a problem.

If infinite ballistic ammo turns out to not work great, (imagination vs. testing) or feel quite right, maybe a finite amount that regenerates in chunks as crewmans refill the magazine from your arbitrarily large stockpile would be a middle ground option?

edit: Missed that. Cool, best of both worlds.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2014, 04:06:25 PM by Unicorn Face »
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #92 on: December 05, 2014, 04:03:21 PM »

Quote
I have a concern, which is "Tactical Laser, Graviton Beam, and Phase Beam are no longer interrupted by missiles." Does that mean they can't shoot down missiles anymore? Tactical Lasers with the AI PD module were my favorite 'point' defenses, because they worked great and stayed useful even if missiles weren't a problem.
From Alex on page 3: "It means they damage missiles, but pass through them and can hit other things."
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LazyWizard

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #93 on: December 05, 2014, 04:07:19 PM »

I agree that ammo limits never really mattered with a normal playstyle (outside of PD), but I also agree that they were very important for ballistic 'flavor'. Why not just, say, halve non-PD ammo and have all ballistics regenerate at 25% ROF? For the 'clips' idea, burst weapons could regenerate 1 burst at a time at 1/4 burst ROF instead. I think universal regen rules like this would be pretty intuitive.

Since weapons are rarely firing 100% of the time, there wouldn't be much difference in effective 'max' ammo. You'd still have the concern about running out of ammo, but instead of that weapon being useless it's instead temporarily operating at 25% effectiveness (for rapid fire weapons) or you need to back off for a bit (for burst damage). And it provides the mental image of your crew frantically hauling ammo from the autofac over to the weapon bays as enemy missiles are incoming.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2014, 04:10:49 PM by LazyWizard »
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Gothars

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #94 on: December 05, 2014, 04:10:55 PM »

@ Alex: I think nobody asked directly yet: What is your reasoning behind giving a CR timer to bigger ships?

Is it to deny kiting, even in it rarest forms? Or more about lore/game mechanic consistency? Or something else?
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #95 on: December 05, 2014, 04:19:28 PM »

About clips and regeneration:  Consider autopulse laser; it shoots ten per second (or more with Gunnery Implants 10), but regenerates one shot twice per second.  Thermal Pulse Cannon does something similar.
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Cosmitz

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #96 on: December 05, 2014, 04:23:09 PM »

@ Alex: I think nobody asked directly yet: What is your reasoning behind giving a CR timer to bigger ships?

Is it to deny kiting, even in it rarest forms? Or more about lore/game mechanic consistency? Or something else?

Can't talk on his behalf, but i strongly think it's linked to why he's removing ammo. There always was a 'pressure' to perform in a certain timeframe. Ammo worked initially since you couldn't just use the most effective weapons and kite/avoid until they all died.. you'd lose punching power the more of your weapons go offline due to ammo. Then CR came into play and it worked really well with frigates and in the context of a huge fight.

Giving CR to most ships aside from caps unifies the pressure to perform and the concept of 'ships as ammo' instead of 'ships as guns', superceding the old ammo system. As he said, he might keep it more or less symbolically, but that'd just put extra stats in an already stat-filled game that won't have any real purpose aside from adding flavor in the new design.

Tl;dr, minus a name change, i think it's just a matter of unifying under a single system the anti-kite/no-solo-hyperion-killing-hegemony-fleet/restrained-play-leading-to-better-results types of situations while also allowing for tactical and logistical flexibility.
« Last Edit: December 05, 2014, 04:32:46 PM by Cosmitz »
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PartyAlarm

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #97 on: December 05, 2014, 05:28:29 PM »

Perhaps ballistics weapons should be given a magazine / reload mechanic or just give them all charges and a recharge rate on case by case basis or something?

I like the idea of a magazine / reload mechanic, especially if you can manually trigger a reload.
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Clockwork Owl

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #98 on: December 05, 2014, 05:52:05 PM »

I suggest not to be afraid about the changes, especially when it is reversible.
Though I'm not good at predicting these things, who knows, some of those change may turn out to be surprisingly better(by itself or unexpected synergy).
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Lucian Greymark

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #99 on: December 05, 2014, 06:04:38 PM »

I like the idea of a magazine / reload mechanic, especially if you can manually trigger a reload.

This looks fine at first glance, and maybe it would be for a smaller ship with 1-5 ballistic weapons, but what about something like the conquest, or the onslaught, or even the dominator, you'd need to spend most of your time micromanaging reloads for optimum play, I have hard enough time keeping my weapons firing in accurate arcs never mind have to keep them all optimally reloaded between fights.
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NikolaiLev

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #100 on: December 05, 2014, 07:31:21 PM »

If it's about ammo: like I said, in my view, it was not a meaningful balance tool or differentiator, except for extra-long battles, where it basically just means low-tech ships can't do those.

Arguably, CR loss was the balancer for high-tech ships.  Now that ammo is out of the question, the balance might swing the other way.

Maybe make it so that if a ship runs out of ammo, it reloads its magazine at the cost of CR.  Maybe 5% or something.
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kazi

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #101 on: December 05, 2014, 07:59:19 PM »

Short rant incoming:

The CR timer as currently implemented doesn't make sense. The fact that they're being expanded at the same time ammo is removed really worries me. Alex's reasoning for getting rid of ammo (certain weapons simply don't work for longer battles) is the EXACT SAME REASON you would want to get rid of the CR timer (certain ships simply don't work for longer battles). The only ships that really justify a CR timer are the Hound, Tempest, and Hyperion (basically anything capable of endless kiting). The CR timer as currently implemented seems completely arbitrary. 

However, there is one CR timer-like mechanic suggestion I have to rework CR. Get rid of CR deployment costs and the CR timer altogether. In place of that, simply have all ships lose a certain percent of CR for every second/minute they are in combat (percentage lost varies by ship). This makes sense from both a realism standpoint and adds complexity to gameplay (and gets rid of the needless CR timer stat).

Here are a few reasons why it would benefit gameplay and be easy to implement:
Spoiler
-Ships with higher CR can outlast lower CR in combat. There is now a very clear benefit to maximizing your CR and logistics capabilities (beyond just all your ships stop working after X number of consecutive battles/deployments). Elite and veteran crew can now outlast green and regular pilots in combat.
-There would now be two ways to do combat deployments: deploy a lot of ships and hope for a short, decisive battle (all ships lose a small amount of CR) OR deploy only a few ships and risk a longer battle (limiting a dramatic CR loss to only the in-combat ships). The player is still punished for drawing things out with their entire fleet/being inefficient.
-Instead of a ticking clock in the corner of your screen that is arbitrary and something the player has little control over, you have a similar timer that the player can control by managing their logistical capabilities better.
-You have reduced the number of CR stats that the player needs to watch in combat. Just show the player their current CR percentage and that's it. This also abstracts CR loss away from a ticking clock with the amount of playtime they have remaining in seconds (the current CR timer clock drives me absolutely crazy while playing).
-Hardened subsystems is now relevant for larger ships (it slows the rate of the constant CR decay). You could even give it several variants which slow CR decay by different amounts for different OP costs.
-CR timers are no longer something that only a few ships have. The CR decay rate is a statistic common to all ships, and gives you a good idea of which ships can outlast others in combat. CR decay becomes the ONLY stat you need, and replaces deployment cost/CR timer length, simplifying things for the player.
-Ships no longer lose an arbitrarily huge amount of CR for being deployed in combat (no matter how short of a time they actually participated in it). Instead, CR would now reflect how much each ship actually participated in combat.
-It gets rid of the annoying "our ships are now losing CR" sound effect.
[close]

Additionally, reworking the CR mechanic requires almost no new code (simply set the CR to zero for all ships, get rid of deployment cost, and dramatically decrease the CR loss per ship).
« Last Edit: December 05, 2014, 08:02:30 PM by kazi »
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akeean

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #102 on: December 05, 2014, 08:24:48 PM »

If it's about ammo: like I said, in my view, it was not a meaningful balance tool or differentiator, except for extra-long battles, where it basically just means low-tech ships can't do those.

Great change!

Changing missiles&ballistics to be slowly regenerating (aka "reloading") are the first mod I did for myself all the way back in... 0.35a perhaps? The concept of "ammo" is already covered by the generic supply-item that gets consumed for restoring CR.

Also this:
- Can we get some kind of info field when you click a system/station/planet in the map to enable a flavor texts in the campaign? It'll allow the possibility to add some Backstory to generic 3 planets orbiting a sun with some asteroids, Mass Effect did that to some effect and it did a lot for people who are into this...

- Can we merge the map view with the info-map & make the local system maps (sans ship-info) availiable while traveling somewhere else? I find myself switching between both maps all the time and it feels clumsy.

- Some hover info in the map would be useful... sometimes colors of fleets (esp with mods) to know if a feel is a friendly or foe. Just the name would be enough to avoid plotting courses like wild just to see what kind of fleets are surrounding me.

- Would it be possible to pause/unpause in the map view (like in the combat map)? Sometimes I hang out near star systems and wait for pirate fleets to approach to start intercepting if they get close. Chasing fleets through hyperspace is too costly (or dangerous with small fleets). Together with the info-map being separate this ends up to: Normal view while holding shift for 15 seconds, TAB, e, TAB, TAB, repeat.

Anyway.. it's great to see how far the game has come. Thank you for still being so invested in the game (and did not leave us for a new toy), Alex.
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #103 on: December 05, 2014, 08:30:31 PM »

The idea of removing deployment CR costs runs exactly counter to the main goal of CR, which is to give incentive to have more fair fights even if one side is stronger than the other.

Alex's reasoning for getting rid of ammo (certain weapons simply don't work for longer battles) is the EXACT SAME REASON you would want to get rid of the CR timer (certain ships simply don't work for longer battles).

That's not the reason for removing ammo - the reason is that it doesn't matter except for these types of scenarios, which get taken care of the the peak effectiveness mechanic anyway. It's a matter of rolling two things into one.


@ Alex: I think nobody asked directly yet: What is your reasoning behind giving a CR timer to bigger ships?

Is it to deny kiting, even in it rarest forms? Or more about lore/game mechanic consistency? Or something else?

It's a combination of things. The added sense of urgency, but mostly, yeah, removing egregious kiting strategies - such as using the now-infinite-ammo Salamanders, or perhaps dual light needlers on a Medusa - those types of super-slow-kill things. It's a way for the game to say that certain extra-low-damage kiting strategies aren't viable, and it helps open up the design possibilities of weapons.
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JohnDoe

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