Just had a thought about HSA.woah, boy...
As we all know, HSA is, at best, an annoyance, and generally just worse than using pulse weapons of the tier.
What if, instead of halving range, a similar system, in exchange for hard flux on shield, made firing the weapon generate like 15% hard flux?
First of all... The way how high tech ships work is that when they get close to fire their energy beam weapons, their shields are going to get overloaded quickly. Nearly all ships that utilize these kinds of energy weapons are glass cannons or too slow to get in close to utilize that. Also, another thing. There are ships that can fire a HSA weapon without problems, such as the Paragon. But with how Paragon works, it is capable of simply overwhelming shields with general non-HSA shots of a Tachyon Lance.
High tech are only glass cannons in a sense that there is no reliable second layer of defence they can fall back to, their shields are, however, universally durable, and lack of either baseline high top speed or mobility system is an exception not the rule. Generaly speaking almost entirety of high-tech line-up are strike ships. The damage increase you get from HSA, however, isn't enough to turn your regular non-burst beam into a strike weapon, neither its enough to give you an edge in out-brawling ballistic oriented ships. In my opinion its just fundamentally flawed and can't be redeemed with minor stat changes alone.
Yep, the most effective place I have found for it is on a scarab with burst pd lasers, built in expanded mags, and elite point defense. It works until fighting ordos, at which point it just dies because scarabs are terrible at managing their system and will try to 1v1 cruisers and above.Just had a thought about HSA.woah, boy...
As we all know, HSA is, at best, an annoyance, and generally just worse than using pulse weapons of the tier.
What if, instead of halving range, a similar system, in exchange for hard flux on shield, made firing the weapon generate like 15% hard flux?
U have no idea how hard I tried to make HSA work. There is an issue to it, not necessarily caused by the fact that it is weak, but by the fact of how ships are designed.
The Hyperion currently has a few AI bugs that make it a lot weaker. It teleports for no reason with reckless AI because the AI hints for the system say it's both a speed burst and an average speed increase, even though it's not a speed increase, it's a teleport. commenting out the average speed increase AI hint fixes a large volume of issues, but it still teleports at terrible times for silly reasons.
When people talk about high tech ships being durable what they tend to omit is that they have built-in like twelve hundred s-mods into them, and those are usually Hyperion. And Hyperion is not easy to kill. Not at all. But Omen? Omen is only good at surviving cause it has like... Good mobility, small profile, and works around enemy ships which are too slow to catch up with it. And lesser ships don't have a good loadout to deal with its shield heavy profile. But if you employ kinetic weaponry and rush it down, it is usually a freaking balloon of blood ready to pop open.
Any percentange of hard flux on long-range beams will enable a ship to kite and kill an enemy as long as it takes. I have seen it when I tried one of LazyWizard's quick mods years ago, which added hard flux based on distance, and even at max range with minimal hard flux, I was still able to endlessly kite, slowly grind down, and kill enemy ships safely.
What annoys me most about my NPC Hyperion, if I try non-SO, is it spends about a minute backpedaling away from the enemy instead of teleporting when it can, burning nearly all of its PPT trying to escape once. I have to use SO on Hyperion just so NPC Hyperion can run away fast enough without teleport (and also get enough dissipation to use three non-missile weapons). Since it now has Delicate Machinery, I do not bother using it anymore. CR decays way too fast. Even with all the CR decay reduction boosts, anything with Delicate Machinery decays faster than a normal ship without Delicate Machinery and without any reduction. There are better ships to use. Hyperion needs more PPT if it keeps Delicate Machinery.
As for enemy Hyperion, it gets squashed flat fast, compared to earlier releases.
Related, non-SO NPC Fury is a disaster. Fury gets in, but cannot get out fast enough when it loses the flux war. Fury gets locked into backpedaling then gets slowly picked off and dies. At least Aurora can avoid this with its Plasma Jets.
That's exactly what it does. A ship in panic tries to use any missiles it has to make enemies back off to give it space to vent.
I can only say that it causes Hyperion to fire all of its missiles much more freely, as if it is stuck in a state of permanent Strike behavior.
Any percentange of hard flux on long-range beams will enable a ship to kite and kill an enemy as long as it takes. I have seen it when I tried one of LazyWizard's quick mods years ago, which added hard flux based on distance, and even at max range with minimal hard flux, I was still able to endlessly kite, slowly grind down, and kill enemy ships safely.Yep, for NPC control, a Hyperion needs to have SO and a reckless officer, anything less and it will do nothing for most of the fight. The issue is that the Hyperion will always have low range due to the weapons it is forced to use, be over fluxed due to the expensive nature of the weapons it has to use, and not have enough effective combat time to be useful without SO.
What annoys me most about my NPC Hyperion, if I try non-SO, is it spends about a minute backpedaling away from the enemy instead of teleporting when it can, burning nearly all of its PPT trying to escape once. I have to use SO on Hyperion just so NPC Hyperion can run away fast enough without teleport (and also get enough dissipation to use three non-missile weapons). Since it now has Delicate Machinery, I do not bother using it anymore. CR decays way too fast. Even with all the CR decay reduction boosts, anything with Delicate Machinery decays faster than a normal ship without Delicate Machinery and without any reduction. There are better ships to use. Hyperion needs more PPT if it keeps Delicate Machinery.
As for enemy Hyperion, it gets squashed flat fast, compared to earlier releases.
Related, non-SO NPC Fury is a disaster. Fury gets in, but cannot get out fast enough when it loses the flux war. Fury gets locked into backpedaling then gets slowly picked off and dies. At least Aurora can avoid this with its Plasma Jets.
You partially stumbled on one of the better ways to balance the Hyperion without realizing it. For what it can do and what it can yield, the Hyperion has too much OP, but you don't want to just nerf its OP as that reduces the total number of viable builds. The solution is to give it omni shields and reduce its shield arc so that both frontal shields and extended shields have to be added to give it 360 degree shielding. This is of course assuming that delicate machinery is removed.SpoilerAny percentange of hard flux on long-range beams will enable a ship to kite and kill an enemy as long as it takes. I have seen it when I tried one of LazyWizard's quick mods years ago, which added hard flux based on distance, and even at max range with minimal hard flux, I was still able to endlessly kite, slowly grind down, and kill enemy ships safely.
What annoys me most about my NPC Hyperion, if I try non-SO, is it spends about a minute backpedaling away from the enemy instead of teleporting when it can, burning nearly all of its PPT trying to escape once. I have to use SO on Hyperion just so NPC Hyperion can run away fast enough without teleport (and also get enough dissipation to use three non-missile weapons). Since it now has Delicate Machinery, I do not bother using it anymore. CR decays way too fast. Even with all the CR decay reduction boosts, anything with Delicate Machinery decays faster than a normal ship without Delicate Machinery and without any reduction. There are better ships to use. Hyperion needs more PPT if it keeps Delicate Machinery.
As for enemy Hyperion, it gets squashed flat fast, compared to earlier releases.
Related, non-SO NPC Fury is a disaster. Fury gets in, but cannot get out fast enough when it loses the flux war. Fury gets locked into backpedaling then gets slowly picked off and dies. At least Aurora can avoid this with its Plasma Jets.
I've been redesigning Starsector a bit recently... Doing major changes. Things that cannot be really applied into the vanilla game without them being concluded and without drastically changing the face of the game, but one thing...
One thing made me wonder...
LP Colossus has this tag called "always_panic", I took it up, cause I assumed it causes the ship to be ridiculously aggressive and put it on Hyperion... The thing though is that I do not have this thing isolated in a vacuum, and I'm trying it on a modded version of the Hyperion, so I'm unsure what exactly it does yet...
I can only say that it causes Hyperion to fire all of its missiles much more freely, as if it is stuck in a state of permanent Strike behavior.
Take a lookSpoilerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=forNZkCfuEk[close]
On it's own though, I don't really believe it changes much. Hyperion seems to be afraid to teleport behind enemies as long as it is engaging more than one enemy. Which is reasonable considering the fact that it may have doubts about being surrounded or stuck out of place. Better safe than sorry I suppose.
In case you want to do some testing for me, go to the ship.data, take up the "always_panic" hint and paste it in the Hyperion hints section. Then tell me if this has worked. If it did... Well... We might be on to something.[close]
You partially stumbled on one of the better ways to balance the Hyperion without realizing it. For what it can do and what it can yield, the Hyperion has too much OP, but you don't want to just nerf its OP as that reduces the total number of viable builds. The solution is to give it omni shields and reduce its shield arc so that both frontal shields and extended shields have to be added to give it 360 degree shielding. This is of course assuming that delicate machinery is removed.
Any percentange of hard flux on long-range beams will enable a ship to kite and kill an enemy as long as it takes. I have seen it when I tried one of LazyWizard's quick mods years ago, which added hard flux based on distance, and even at max range with minimal hard flux, I was still able to endlessly kite, slowly grind down, and kill enemy ships safely.
What annoys me most about my NPC Hyperion, if I try non-SO, is it spends about a minute backpedaling away from the enemy instead of teleporting when it can, burning nearly all of its PPT trying to escape once. I have to use SO on Hyperion just so NPC Hyperion can run away fast enough without teleport (and also get enough dissipation to use three non-missile weapons). Since it now has Delicate Machinery, I do not bother using it anymore. CR decays way too fast. Even with all the CR decay reduction boosts, anything with Delicate Machinery decays faster than a normal ship without Delicate Machinery and without any reduction. There are better ships to use. Hyperion needs more PPT if it keeps Delicate Machinery.
As for enemy Hyperion, it gets squashed flat fast, compared to earlier releases.
Related, non-SO NPC Fury is a disaster. Fury gets in, but cannot get out fast enough when it loses the flux war. Fury gets locked into backpedaling then gets slowly picked off and dies. At least Aurora can avoid this with its Plasma Jets.
I do care, however I also like the extreme dichotomy. It makes things interesting and more dynamic when the difference between extremes is massive.You partially stumbled on one of the better ways to balance the Hyperion without realizing it. For what it can do and what it can yield, the Hyperion has too much OP, but you don't want to just nerf its OP as that reduces the total number of viable builds. The solution is to give it omni shields and reduce its shield arc so that both frontal shields and extended shields have to be added to give it 360 degree shielding. This is of course assuming that delicate machinery is removed.
Yes, I have also removed Delicate Machinery, and gave the ship 180 peak operating time. I have also replaced its mounts with 2 composites and 1 energy. I have also overhauled its mobility stats and health stats. I've reduced the amount of flux it has and gave it more armor, at least on the level of a Cerberus vessel. Took down High Maintenance, increased crew amount (important as I am testing increasing crew salary to something like 0.5-1k credits). Etc. But you see, I have also done other things to nerf the Hyperion. I have buffed fighter numbers by giving them higher health and armor stats and better deacceleration and turning. Don't worry though, I was also planning to buff some and simply rework most PD weapons to make up for that fact, and overall the point is to rework the game so it operates on a completely different axis of existence.
The issue with Hyperion is very similar to the issue of Remnant ships. It belongs to a completely different game, so it has to have many drawbacks to justify its existence. Justify it against the fact that it is overpowered. Most vessels in Starsector are slow, immobile, possess extensive PD networks and they also have large range. You have ships like Paragon, Onslaught, Eagle, Retribution, Mora, Heron, Fury. Each of these ships has a large focus on their defenses. The amount of stupid useless PD slots a Fury has at the cost of actual good weapons, the fact that Eagle's medium energies are positioned in such a way that they are usually meant for simple support role. Ships of this kind do not kill their enemies, they exhaust them. They fire, and then reload and keep doing so until they finish. With the only way to actually conclude someone is to have excessive firepower, or access to ridiculous strike potential, such as a Paragon with Reapers and a Missile Autoloader. Quite effective.
Hyperion, Radiant, Glimmer, Tesseract, Guardian on the other hand are very different ships. Yes, they are good at retreating, but they are also ridiculously mobile, impossible to catch up and they have weapons systems that de-emphasize point defense and emphasize the ability to kill their target. At least, in theory. Current theory. Imagine it this way. Onslaught fights the weather. Hyperion simply ignores the storm.. And proceeds to run through it in order to stab you in the back with a random level of success. But then, what does any of this mean? It means that offensive ships are way better than defensive ships, and before you say that Monitor is an exception, yes. Yes it is. Why? Because flux toilet is *** broken.
In order to deal with this issue the current solutions have been "who cares" and "plz, nerf". A ship like Hyperion vanished from existence. A ship like Astral is kept from existing in the first place. A ship like Guardian is inaccessible, also because it uses broken hullmods, like space station missile amounts. However a ship like Radiant is still accessible, however in order to pilot it, you must dedicate an entire character skill tree to doing so. There has never been any other solution. A ship that fires guns will also have an advantage over a ship that is meant to be universally protected against all kinds of threats, especially ones that aren't really that dangerous at all, such as reaper missiles. (Talking about Onslaught). The only way to solve this problem once and for all is to rework everything. Redesign all ships to posses the sort of aggression we crave from Hyperion. So that Hyperion finally is not the exception of Starsector, not the black sheep of the family, but just another member of these highly strange designs. Each a hostile raptor of its own.
But, you probably don't care about all that...
Fury isn't a strike ship in vanilla. It's a *** bruiser. Give it a large flux pool and a decent amount of PD turrets, then give it access to neat missiles like Sabots, Gazers or Harpoons. Rely on a singular Heavy Blaster paired with 2 irpulse lasers or 2 pulse lasers and 2 ion cannons. And if someone tells you to not put ITU on it, please, take this revolver and shoot them in the face for me, would you?I did not try to use NPC Shrike as a strike ship, but as a brawler, especially against peer cruisers (like Falcon, Eagle, and Apogee) if necessary. Basically, using Fury instead of something like Falcon, Eagle, Apogee, Mora, or especially (the overpowered) Gryphon because it wound up that way from making do with what was available. At first, with blaster and missiles (Sabots or Reapers) in the SIM, but NPC does not use the missiles optimally like the player can, then (if enemy does not get crippled from missiles) Fury gets outranged and/or outgunned because of blaster's inefficiency and forced into the backpedaling loop of death (at least in the sim between two unskilled ships). Later, I tried (red and green) pulse lasers and all the flux and shields I can get (and with limited OP, that's it - no PD, no other weapons... except maybe one missile) and NPC Fury still has difficulty winning flux wars reliably against peer opponents. (Or rather, it wins flux wars, but not by a landslide margin.) Yes, I used ITU on non-SO Fury. Things get better if I put SO on Fury, because then NPC Fury can backpedal faster and waste less time backpedaling.
I do care, however I also like the extreme dichotomy. It makes things interesting and more dynamic when the difference between extremes is massive.How old? They went a few big changes since 0.5. During 0.5, phase raised soft flux instead of hard flux, which made them useless. Cloaking did not have time shift and cooldown until 0.72. Old cloak made them better for brawling and (ghost/evasion) tanking instead of assassination. Afflictor had Active Flares, Harbinger did not exist, and Doom had Fast Missile Racks, then Interdiction Array before getting Mine Strike.
The Hyperion didn't use to stand alone with Remanents, Omega, and Gaurdians. It used to be right alongside phase ships in terms of power relative to its cost. The old phase ships weren't overpowered in my opinion. The issue from what I can see is that players don't want to adapt to dealing with something unconventional, and so they go straight for asking for the nerf bat.
Fair enough, my mistake, as long as there are some extremely defensive ships and offensive ships, I'll be happy. As for the rest part of what seems to be the issue for you is ships have specific roles they fill, there are very few generalist ships, and fewer that are good. That's why you view the Radiant as being the best ship, as the Radiant is the best generalist ship in the game, it has no role beyond wrecking ball.Spoileryou slightly misunderstood the suggestion. The point isn't to make every ship the same, the point is to give every ship something they can be good at in terms of offense. Currently, as it stands, most ships serve as target practice. Whether intentionally like the Gremlin or Cerberus, or unintentionally like Heron with Piranhas or Shrike.
The latter two ships can be made viable under most circumstances, but the thing is that in the end it always comes to extreme outliners on what is good and what is bad. Try to use a Guardian on Paragon and everyone will point and laugh at you, because fighters aren't threatening enough to justify using a proper PD network. And most missiles were comically ***. Mostly due to poor fits. I built that variant for the Better Variants mod where ECCM Squalls and Hurricanes were a constant threat. But no one really understood that reality, because in Vanilla most ships are like... Meh...
Another issue I have with vanilla game is the ridiculous difficulty curve. Most of the game you grapple with enemies that can barely hold their body together, if you expose them to too much heat, you'll see most enemy fleets turn out to be nothing but candle wax. Tri-Tachyon doctrine causes them to be awful. Persean League mostly relies on cheap tricks such as spamming missiles.SpoilerAnd you keep fighting these morons. Pirates with a spam of Afflictors with light mortars, and then you walk 2 meters to the left and are suddenly facing off against the biggest *** *** you have ever seen... It's just so frustrating. Starsector really fails to teach the player anything. Not because it doesn't have a way to learn it, but because it proves to the player time and time again, that it is not worth investing time into. Because first of all, most enemies you'll fight are trash, and second of all, most of the equipment and hulls you're given are trash.[close]
Hegemony is ridiculously proactive, only tanking most things, and being defenseless against an actual offensive strength. And also most of the fleets in game rely on large slow ships... These may be boring to fight, because in the end it's not about outskilling your enemy in a vicious battle of wits and circus performance, and more about who has the better counter to the enemy loadouts. Mostly caused by the fact that there are so few viable options, most of the designs are too binary... Etc.
Like... Think of most things in Starsector and how they are designed. Space stations are either indestructible, or blow up instantly. Capital Ships are either impossible to kill or you can just ignore them. Fighters are either unstoppable or all die in a microsecond cause they decided to fly directly into a mine, all of them... At once. Cobra torpedos either instantly kill enemies or don't hit anyone... Even though they have fired like 20 nukes already. Gremlin bad, Fury bad, Shrike bad, Centurion meh... Onslaught good. Use Onslaught. Don't bother using the Conquest I guess, unless you really really really want to. Not because it's bad or anything, but because it's frustrating to use. Unlike something like... Eh... You know, the whole game is just frustrating.
Everything is broken. Everything is imbalanced. Nothing works properly. Missiles always miss, ships are too slow, everyone keeps missing.Spoilerhttps://youtu.be/nr2GeWiDrdY[close]
No one bothers engaging. You just have a staring contest with a Radiant before it proves to you that it is the only real functional ship in the game... And that everything else is just there to be laughed at for being bad... And like 90% of the game's content is a noob trap.
:([close]
I want to say .9a, but looking at the dates, they don't add up so I'll be safe and say I started playing during the 0.9.1a update.I do care, however I also like the extreme dichotomy. It makes things interesting and more dynamic when the difference between extremes is massive.How old? They went a few big changes since 0.5. During 0.5, phase raised soft flux instead of hard flux, which made them useless. Cloaking did not have time shift and cooldown until 0.72. Old cloak made them better for brawling and (ghost/evasion) tanking instead of assassination. Afflictor had Active Flares, Harbinger did not exist, and Doom had Fast Missile Racks, then Interdiction Array before getting Mine Strike.
The Hyperion didn't use to stand alone with Remanents, Omega, and Gaurdians. It used to be right alongside phase ships in terms of power relative to its cost. The old phase ships weren't overpowered in my opinion. The issue from what I can see is that players don't want to adapt to dealing with something unconventional, and so they go straight for asking for the nerf bat.
Modern phase ships under AI are not too bad, but player-controlled phase ships can do evil things with most of them (i.e., not Harbinger).