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Author Topic: Starsector 0.65.2a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 325196 times)

Schwartz

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #105 on: December 05, 2014, 08:34:15 PM »

Short rant incoming.

You know that's not a bad idea at all. It'd simplify the whole deal without taking away any of its depth. Right now the CR-Logistics-Supply trifecta is pretty convoluted to understand and to tie in with various ship stats.
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kazi

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #106 on: December 05, 2014, 10:40:13 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.

Keep in mind that the deployment cost does nothing that a slow timer decay wouldn't. It's still much more economical to keep ships off the battlefield if you have the option. Also the rest of the way the campaign is designed punishes even fights. Due to the rarity of certain ships and weapons, losing a single ship can be devastating. Some ships are simply irreplaceable. I always deploy overwhelming force in every engagement (no matter how small) in order to minimize losses.

If you're dead-set on keeping the deployment cost, at least standardize it (and make it smaller if you implement always-on CR decay). But seriously, the current time limit of the CR timer, after which you lose all your CR and your ship quickly becomes non-functional seems very gamey. It seems like everything about it (the ticking timer/ the CR is being lost sfx/CR percent on the screen/etc.) is simply designed to panic the player. I generally try to avoid using "CR timer ships" for this reason. A slow, silent decay that happens for all ships as long as they're deployed takes away a lot of the stress because then the CR loss is just a normal side effect of them being deployed.

For the record, I still don't entirely understand the logistics system in game right now. Although I haven't been actually playing the game that much aside from testing my mod every now and then, there's probably a lot of casual players out there who are in a similar situation. It seems much simpler to just reduce many of the CR related mechanics to two stats: logistics (out of combat supply use) and CR decay (in-combat supply use).
« Last Edit: December 05, 2014, 10:48:11 PM by kazi »
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Venatos

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #107 on: December 05, 2014, 10:55:53 PM »

wow thats something i dont experiance every day.... practicly every single change is in the other direction i was hoping for....
CR loss during battle:
how and why would my crew loose combat readiness within 3 minutes of chasing a freakin frigate? why would they start to go insane and disable and/or damage vital undamaged shipsystems? i can understand that my crew is not at peak performance after batteling for what seems like hours and seeing half their friends getting ripped apart and sucked into space, but sabotaging a ship that doesnt even have a scratch doesnt make any sense what so ever.

instead of fixing this mindbogling mechanic it gets expanded....im flabergasted beyond believe.

beams at 1000 range? am i the only one that fought against 4 sunders in a refit battle? am i the only one that outfittet a handfull of frigates with graviton beams and advanced optics and never did that again, because it was gamebreakingly overpowered? now this is standard? as i sayed.... flabergasted.

ammo removal: i can agree with the notion, but not realy with the steps taken. my hope like so many others it seems was a reloading mechanism similar to the recharge of some energy weapons, just in chunks(magazines). a manual reload feature would have been a plus, but not expected.(example: weapon has a 2-3 magazin sized pool of ammo, where every 20-30 seconds a magazin junk gets refilled)
personaly i would even go so far as to extend the reload mechanic to missiles, just on a larger timeframe.(like 3 minutes reload for a torpedo) in combination with reduced magazine sizes this would eliminate the first minute of missilespawn followed by a onesided battle problem.

a simple and universal mechanic, everything that isnt a beam uses projectiles, projectiles get reloaded/generated. no spezial cases: "that missile can get reloaded, but these cant." the reload can absolutely be so long that you only get 1 or 2 shots in a 5minute battle, but the mechanic should be consistent.

circling back to the CRloss:
i do want a CRloss mechanic, the underlying idea is good! the crew needs to relax and unwind a little after a battel makes sense. while in a prolonged battle espezialy after taking some damage and loosing crew, the remaining crew will be rather shaken, sealing breaches, giving first aid, keeping damaged systems running and so on, will all keep em from performing like at the start of the battle. but the current mechanic doesnt reflect any of that, its an arteficialy imposed timer that has no sensible explanation.

when you think of realworld CombatReadiness, what does that effect?: aim of gunners, speed of reload crews, speed of repaircrews, ability of engineers to keep reactors and stuff at 105%, general reaction time to carry out orders. and probably some other stuff.

how is CombatReadiness effected?: shooting lazors at an asteroid or empty space or an enemy that cant shoot back, probably has no effect at all or extremely little. getting your shields pummeld by enemy fire will probably make your crew nervous and overtime affect their CombatReadiness. taking damage to armor is a whole new level of nervous and hull damage will have a servere impact.

i think i just described a rather nice gamemechanic for CRloss, but if for some reason there has to be a "timelimit" for battles i highly recommend another singular and global gamemechanic without exeptions like the ammoreload:
Crew in Battle allways looses CombatReadiness by x/minute, offset by the amount of crew on board. more crew, more replacements(Mike take a break, Hank take over). stat would be -cr/minute at minimum crew. suddenly it makes sense to hire more crew than minimum.

i developed several games myself and i remember that its hard to see when your so close to it. parts of this post may seem harsh or insulting or whatever, thats not the intention, i simply dont have the feel for frasing things.

i actually dont care about the beamrange, that can get balanced afterward.

but bevore going forward and expanding and making exeptions for CR and Ammo. please consider changing the mechanic into a unifying singular rule without exeptions.
you realy dont want your players to have to memorice all the different odditiys and exeptions to your gamemechanics.

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Dri

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #108 on: December 05, 2014, 11:15:25 PM »

It's a game. Games have abstraction of reality. Please don't try and apply real world combat logic to a game...
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Zapier

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #109 on: December 05, 2014, 11:32:58 PM »

wow thats something i dont experiance every day.... practicly every single change is in the other direction i was hoping for....
CR loss during battle:
how and why would my crew loose combat readiness within 3 minutes of chasing a freakin frigate? why would they start to go insane and disable and/or damage vital undamaged shipsystems? i can understand that my crew is not at peak performance after batteling for what seems like hours and seeing half their friends getting ripped apart and sucked into space, but sabotaging a ship that doesnt even have a scratch doesnt make any sense what so ever.

The simplest way I've always looked at CR... it isn't all about crew readiness... it's combat readiness. Similar to how we often try to maintain aircraft (both civilian and military) and vehicles at maximum efficiency to help avoid critical component failures. We could debate the specifics on how much maintenance and how often various craft in Starsector would need it, but my point is just to offer another way to view CR.

So, I would say it isn't your crew disabling and sabotaging equipment all the time. Sometimes it's simply systems starting to run into issues when being operated at a combat ready performance level.

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Vind

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #110 on: December 05, 2014, 11:56:14 PM »

If player chooses to exploit the game mechanic it will do so and no CR timer and any "smart" game feature can help it. Forcing timer on player is worst game mechanic i can ever imagine and really is a crutch for masking AI deficiencies. Player is forced to charge on large (AI likes to deploy almost all ships as supplies is not an issue for spawned fleet) AI fleet in fewer numbers and with pressing timer. This type of play is boring at least and not enjoyable at best. I just hope this can be improved in the future by reducing CR loss timer mechanic or to script AI to actually attack and not sitting in the squad formation waiting for player to make an attack while draining player limited supplies with CR loss timer.
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Venatos

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #111 on: December 06, 2014, 01:42:40 AM »

thnx Zapier, that actually helps a little.... i still think its waaaay overboard with all the systemmalfunktions but at least i have a rough direction where it would be conseiveable that there are malfunctions...
anyway it bugged me that i was so fague about the CR system, so here are some more thought out suggestions:

with the current cr system i dont use frigates at all, because there is a hard limit on their use. if it was normal and universal, that over time i notice my ship gradually getting a little slower and more sluggish, i would be ok with that. if we take out the damaging and disabling of shipsystems and keep and even expand the gradual decline of the ships performance, i think most people would be ok with that.

lets say at 50%CR(green crew) the ship runs at 100% and at 0%cr at 50%(or 75%?)(speed, manover, rof, acc, fluxdis, etc.)
more than 50%CR will only have very small %bonus on shipstats, but prolong battletime at 100% performace or above

cr loss per minute can be tied to shipsize: i would say around 4min for a frigate to get from 50% to 0 which would double if you have 2times the skeletoncrew. 6min for destroyers, 8min for cruiser and 10min for battleships. (with less than skeletoncrew these times would be lower, with more crew these times go up,)
summary: more crew means slower decline, higher quality means you start with a higher percentage. so a frigate full with elitecrew is going strong at 105% performance after the same frigate with a green skeletoncrew would have hit 0CR

hull percentage limits cr percentage == start battle with 100% hull and 50%cr > first volley shoots your hull down to 50%, your cr plumets to 25%. shipdamage realy should have an effect on CR. one could also integrate armordamage into the equation. but point is that a extreamly damaged ship at like 10% hull should not have 100% combatperformance but rather steep penaltys to speed, manoverability, rof, accuracy, fluxdiss, and so on.

by the way, i assume a cr system without cr loss per deployment and without a peakeff. timer. never liked to be billed 10%or more CR just for a 10second engagement where i blew up a lone tanker.
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Gothars

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #112 on: December 06, 2014, 02:45:50 AM »

This is really interesting. I'm liking the "reload in chunks" idea, if mainly for feel reasons, though it *is* an extra weapon stat.

I'd like that too, a lot.
You could just derive reload time and chunk size from the current ammo stat, then it would not add extra stats. Sure, rate of fire plays into that too, but it would suffice to find the lowest common denominator here. Meaning, choose a general chunk size/reload time to magazine size relation that allows even fast firing, low ammo weapons relatively unrestricted use. (I think it would feel best if irresponsible, continuous fire does run your magazines empty.)  The downside is that slow firing high ammo weapons would then be unable to run dry.

Although...it might be interesting if low CR could increase the time between reloads, to a level where you can easily run out of ammo temporarily. That effect could start much sooner than direct weapon malfunctions.



thnx Zapier, that actually helps a little.... i still think its waaaay overboard with all the systemmalfunktions but at least i have a rough direction where it would be conseiveable that there are malfunctions...
To maybe help you imagine it better, let me remind you that the game time does run much faster than real time. A three minute deployment likely represents an hours long battle. Same goes for the distance between ships btw.


- 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...
You get an info window if you hover your cursor over planets or stations. There's a lot of back-story to be found.


Keep in mind that the deployment cost does nothing that a slow timer decay wouldn't. It's still much more economical to keep ships off the battlefield if you have the option.
That is not true. It would be most economical to finish a fight as quickly as possible by deploying an overwhelming force. It would also greatly favor alpha strike load-outs.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2014, 02:50:30 AM by Gothars »
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BillyRueben

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #113 on: December 06, 2014, 06:06:04 AM »

I'd assume the easiest way to keep players from kiting endlessly would be very simple (if maybe a little iffy on the lore side of things).

After X amount of time, a new capture point spawns in the middle of the map, and whoever holds this point either gets some advantage or causes some debuff to the other fleet. If you actually had the advantage, you could ignore the objective and continue your attack, while keeping the enemy from grabbing it, or capture it and force them to engage or retreat. If you didn't have the advantage, you'd either have to finish the fight up quickly or retreat.

Kiting?
Not if the objective raises the other fleet's speed by 30% and cuts yours in half, or degrades your CR timer at a quick rate.
Hell, it could launch Pilum swarms and still be something that could help cut down on kiting.

Put simply, it'd be nice to have a fixed location you would need to control after a large amount of time, so you'd either have to "*** or get off the pot".
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #114 on: December 06, 2014, 06:07:42 AM »

Quote
Keep in mind that the deployment cost does nothing that a slow timer decay wouldn't. It's still much more economical to keep ships off the battlefield if you have the option.
As Gothars posted, "It would be most economical to finish a fight as quickly as possible by deploying an overwhelming force."

The reason for this is if you deploy a large enough force and finish the fight fast enough, you get the option of standing down to recover some CR.

In 0.62, the time count applied to each ship, not the whole fight.  What I did in 0.62, was deploy my Medusa flagship, kill everything, then right before the battle ends, deployed everything (usually my Atlas fleet, due to excessive loot at the time), so that I get the option of standing down and distribute the CR drain to everyone instead of my flagship only.  Doing so gave two benefits.
  • Lets my best fighting ships chain-battle more, and at higher CR.
  • Repairing minor damage (including CR) to all ships is faster than repairing major damage to one ship.

In the previous version, standing down meant you gave up pursuit, and let the flying chunks of XP and loot go.  Now, if you pursue, you can and will send relations to Vengeful, which hurts too much, making pursuit (by you) obsolete.

Thus, if you have enough ships to overwhelm and steamroll the enemy, you should do so.  If not, you should deploy the least number ships as possible (ideally, your flagship only).  If you need to raise the default battle size from 200 to 500 to get all of you ships in, do it!  Especially now that the AI can deploy overwhelming force against your solo flagship.  Might as well do the same to the enemy if you get that chance.
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #115 on: December 06, 2014, 06:16:41 AM »

Quote
I'd assume the easiest way to keep players from kiting endlessly would be very simple (if maybe a little iffy on the lore side of things).

After X amount of time, a new capture point spawns in the middle of the map, and whoever holds this point either gets some advantage or causes some debuff to the other fleet. If you actually had the advantage, you could ignore the objective and continue your attack, while keeping the enemy from grabbing it, or capture it and force them to engage or retreat. If you didn't have the advantage, you'd either have to finish the fight up quickly or retreat.

Kiting?
Not if the objective raises the other fleet's speed by 30% and cuts yours in half, or degrades your CR timer at a quick rate.
Hell, it could launch Pilum swarms and still be something that could help cut down on kiting.

Put simply, it'd be nice to have a fixed location you would need to control after a large amount of time, so you'd either have to "*** or get off the pot".
That would backfire in fights where I have a small ship trying to solo a few cruisers and battleships, where I have the speed advantage and big ships very rarely chase objectives.  Cruisers and up cannot go to objectives via Capture - they must do so via Assault or Rally.  Of course, if the AI has unlimited CP, they can cheat.

When I solo fleets, and have objectives, I try kill all of the small ships (saving frigates for last due to CR decay, if possible) until the cruisers and battleships are left.  Then I lure the big ships away from objectives, then capture them, then fight them away from objectives while my ship has all of the boosts.

Also, objectives can be prevented from spawning by have no more than 40 DP worth of ships in your fleet.  Until I am ready to steamroll fleets with many frigates or haul thousands of food in Atlases, I try to keep my fleet no more than 40 DP (because I really dislike the objective system).
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miljan

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #116 on: December 06, 2014, 06:20:31 AM »



with the current cr system i dont use frigates at all, because there is a hard limit on their use. if it was normal and universal, that over time i notice my ship gradually getting a little slower and more sluggish, i would be ok with that. if we take out the damaging and disabling of shipsystems and keep and even expand the gradual decline of the ships performance, i think most people would be ok with that.

lets say at 50%CR(green crew) the ship runs at 100% and at 0%cr at 50%(or 75%?)(speed, manover, rof, acc, fluxdis, etc.)
more than 50%CR will only have very small %bonus on shipstats, but prolong battletime at 100% performace or above

cr loss per minute can be tied to shipsize: i would say around 4min for a frigate to get from 50% to 0 which would double if you have 2times the skeletoncrew. 6min for destroyers, 8min for cruiser and 10min for battleships. (with less than skeletoncrew these times would be lower, with more crew these times go up,)
summary: more crew means slower decline, higher quality means you start with a higher percentage. so a frigate full with elitecrew is going strong at 105% performance after the same frigate with a green skeletoncrew would have hit 0CR

hull percentage limits cr percentage == start battle with 100% hull and 50%cr > first volley shoots your hull down to 50%, your cr plumets to 25%. shipdamage realy should have an effect on CR. one could also integrate armordamage into the equation. but point is that a extreamly damaged ship at like 10% hull should not have 100% combatperformance but rather steep penaltys to speed, manoverability, rof, accuracy, fluxdiss, and so on.

by the way, i assume a cr system without cr loss per deployment and without a peakeff. timer. never liked to be billed 10%or more CR just for a 10second engagement where i blew up a lone tanker.

I would actually be ok with this. After CR loss, the ship will slow down a lot so kiting will be impossible. But there will be no malfunctions and exploding of your ships, just bad aiming and slower moving.

Generally the time limit is the cheapest way of trying to fix anything. Making people be more pressured to do something, or to balance the bad AI, with arbitrary limitation  is just the worst possible way. I am really starting to fear where the game will be going, reading the thought process of the main dev, what he thinks is ok, and how to implement/balance things.
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Thaago

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #117 on: December 06, 2014, 07:53:25 AM »

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DarthWiki/RuinedFOREVER

Seriously.

I really think everyone is blowing this whole CR thing waaaay out of proportion. How many fights are actually going to have 5-7-9+ minutes of engaged combat? My longest frigate fights (single frigate flagship vs 3 destroyers + escorts or a cruiser + escorts, I don't play as high level as Megas et al. so I don't take on defense fleets with them. Or I'm just not as good :P) will have me start to take CR loss, but not enough to malfunction.

Also, Alex has already implemented the suggestion (from this very thread, I believe) of the timer on destroyers and cruisers only ticking with sufficient forces around - no time limit from those pesky single frigates/fighters at all. I really don't think the time limit is going to be an issue.

Time limits may feel arbitrary, but they are also simple, which is a very good thing. Its really easy to understand: "This ship lasts X long in combat. You can push it by some, but it starts to degrade".

... Making people be more pressured to do something, or to balance the bad AI, with arbitrary limitation  is just the worst possible way.
 ...

I'd like to point out that every rule in every game is arbitrary. A game is the arbitrary limitations put together over some setting (which is just more limitations, though we don't usually think in that manner).
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miljan

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #118 on: December 06, 2014, 08:30:33 AM »

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DarthWiki/RuinedFOREVER

Seriously.

I really think everyone is blowing this whole CR thing waaaay out of proportion. How many fights are actually going to have 5-7-9+ minutes of engaged combat? My longest frigate fights (single frigate flagship vs 3 destroyers + escorts or a cruiser + escorts, I don't play as high level as Megas et al. so I don't take on defense fleets with them. Or I'm just not as good :P) will have me start to take CR loss, but not enough to malfunction.

Also, Alex has already implemented the suggestion (from this very thread, I believe) of the timer on destroyers and cruisers only ticking with sufficient forces around - no time limit from those pesky single frigates/fighters at all. I really don't think the time limit is going to be an issue.

Time limits may feel arbitrary, but they are also simple, which is a very good thing. Its really easy to understand: "This ship lasts X long in combat. You can push it by some, but it starts to degrade".

... Making people be more pressured to do something, or to balance the bad AI, with arbitrary limitation  is just the worst possible way.
 ...

I'd like to point out that every rule in every game is arbitrary. A game is the arbitrary limitations put together over some setting (which is just more limitations, though we don't usually think in that manner).

A lot of fights I have take a long time. And I do not play anymore with frigates because of the time limit as I often get lower CR.

Time limit is simple, do you know what is even more simple and easy to understand? Not having one, especially as it has some very strange rules when its on or off.

The point here is, because the dev doesnt know how to improve the AI, he is implementing a limitation in time. And he is doing it only because some people are abusing the AI and are playing a battle for 30 min and kiting *** of the AI. Because of them he is implementing something that will have a direct impact on my play style and how I play. If people want to abuse AI, let them. This is not a MMO where there is some player vs player competition, this is a offline single player game, you will not be able to prevent abusing mechanic (and if they do it for 40 min I dont see any problem with that), and trying to balance something like that with implementing very doubtful limitation is very bad in my book.

So it is bad, very bad. And if dev thought process is like this, I do not know what future arbitrary limitation will come if he can not balance some other mechanics.
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Histidine

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Re: Starsector 0.65.2a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #119 on: December 06, 2014, 09:17:28 AM »

The point here is, because the dev doesnt know how to improve the AI, he is implementing a limitation in time. And he is doing it only because some people are abusing the AI and are playing a battle for 30 min and kiting *** of the AI. Because of them he is implementing something that will have a direct impact on my play style and how I play. If people want to abuse AI, let them. This is not a MMO where there is some player vs player competition, this is a offline single player game, you will not be able to prevent abusing mechanic (and if they do it for 40 min I dont see any problem with that), and trying to balance something like that with implementing very doubtful limitation is very bad in my book.
A gap between "play to win" and "play for fun" does not stop being bad just because it's an SP game. SP or not, anyone who places a nonzero value on winning the game is going to have an incentive to sacrifice their fun for it, and many of them will do it (case in point). MMO developers understand this and exploit it ruthlessly.

The expansion of CR may or may not be a heavy-handed approach that creates more problems than it solves, but removing the prospect of doing unfun things in order to win can only be a good thing in my book.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2014, 09:19:39 AM by Histidine »
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