Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: goduranus on October 04, 2019, 05:50:53 AM
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Right now if you want that sweet 50% DP bonus consistently you have to drag several Paragon hulls around. I wish there were some additional way to gain DP bonus at some cost, that could be used to turn disadvantageous battles around. For instance, telling the fleet to maneuver aggressively, which consumes CR but cuts peak time by 90 seconds; defensive formation which causes a strategic map speed penalty, or a fleet commander skill that reduces the skills points that can be spent elsewhere.
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Well, I'd say having no way to easily invalidate numerical advantage is very much intentional.
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Well, I'd say having no way to easily invalidate numerical advantage is very much intentional.
Oh, sure, it makes sense from a "realism" perspective. Does it make sense from a gameplay perspective, though? Is it fun to lug around extra ships you don't expect to ever actually deploy? I'd argue that, in fact, it is not fun.
That said, Alex has already said that next version should, in general, feature smaller fleets, and this is only really an issue when you're running up against the battle size limit. As such, I'm inclined to wait and see how that plays out before saying this is something that needs to be fixed.
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fregates are useless in general, since there is no reason to run ships with burn over 9.
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Abstractly, having ways of getting extra deployment points seems cool, but I don't think it works very well. A skill that does this with no downsides would probably be OP in the current skill system, although maybe it would fit better in the new skill system. Having the ability cost campaign resources (fuel/suppplies/burn speed) feels like it is similar to having more ships but without the actual extra ships. You would rather just have the extra ships unless it was significantly cheaper in resources in which case you probably always do it. Doesn't feel like an interesting decision, just a binary 'do it all the time or not'.
I think in combat debuffs, like a range or speed penalty for all ships (maybe the CR/ppt penalty fires here as well), could be more interesting, since you essentially get more but weaker ships which could hurt or help you depending on how you've outfitted/assembled your fleet. It still seems like more trouble than it's worth to balance. At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting. I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).
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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting. I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).
I mean you will have a DP disadvantage against tons of ordos, even if you bring 4 paragons (I think?). You're not bringing the paragons for the DP advantage, you're bringing them because you need a bunch of capital ships to win. I don't think you need to bring 15 paragons (which might give you a DP advantage) when you can just bring 4 and win the battle without a crazy DP advantage.
The idea is that you can make your ships be worth much more than enemy ships per DP so you win even though you have less DP, not necessarily that you can defeat any amount of enemy DP with a particular fleet. It's better to try and optimize your combat power/DP than to try and maximize the amount of DP you get via cheese. I personally find that I can win any battle with a very optimized fleet without cheesing to get more DP by lugging around ships I never use. Sometimes I might need 4 paragons to win, but I actually need them to fight not just sit in my fleet.
I also wouldn't bring mods into a discussion of vanilla balance. You can just as easily have OP mod ships in your own fleet as you can have OP mod enemies to fight against. It's not the job of vanilla to try and balance for mod enemies.
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Yeah just recently I paired up a bunch of HIL Sunders with my onslaughts and found them to be great little assistants for the slow unwieldy battleships!
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I found that the only way that I'd get at least my 150 DP later in the game that I'd have to have well over 300 DP worth of ships in my fleet (and even then if they managed to get two or more fleets together I'd end up with only 120 DP) the lower deployment total helps in that you're only facing half their ships at once, trickling in more as you blow them up, but by the end you've had to blow up 6-8 battleships plus assorted friends, even though they could not ever deploy more than 2 or 3 at a time. Having to continuously pad my fleet with more and more captials just to get a fair fight makes the game pretty bleh by the end, since the massive variety of smaller ships gets overshadowed by the necessity to pad (and use) larger ships. Allowing some sort of slider(s) for fleet composition limits might help in this case. (Have a slider for each ship size that designates a set maximum for each of them in the fleet from 0 to 30+, if you recover a ship above your limit it would be mothballed until you stored or mothballed another of that size).
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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting. I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).
I mean you will have a DP disadvantage against tons of ordos, even if you bring 4 paragons (I think?). You're not bringing the paragons for the DP advantage, you're bringing them because you need a bunch of capital ships to win. I don't think you need to bring 15 paragons (which might give you a DP advantage) when you can just bring 4 and win the battle without a crazy DP advantage.
If you bring four paragons, you will not be able to deploy all four at once, and you will not win that fight*. If you bring eight paragons, then you -can- deploy all of those original four, and that swings it back to win with no losses.*
* Note that this is in general. If you run into an ordo where all the Radiants are armed with paladin PD lasers - and I've seen this happen - then you can easily win with the smaller fleet. And on the flip side, if you run into an ordo that's full of autopulse lasers and harpoon pods boosted by missile spec, then even when you can deploy four paragons, you will probably still lose one or two of them. Both of these extremes are rare, but they do mean that you can't get an accurate judgement of "is this fleet good enough to win reliably" off of just one or two battles.
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At the end of the day, you can just assemble a fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage which seems better in every way.
This depends heavily on what you're fighting. I'm curious what you'd suggest as a "fleet that can win while at a DP disadvantage" when the opposition is, say, a remnant ordos with four or more Radiants, or a large Blade Breaker war-fleet (from the DME mod).
I mean you will have a DP disadvantage against tons of ordos, even if you bring 4 paragons (I think?). You're not bringing the paragons for the DP advantage, you're bringing them because you need a bunch of capital ships to win. I don't think you need to bring 15 paragons (which might give you a DP advantage) when you can just bring 4 and win the battle without a crazy DP advantage.
If you bring four paragons, you will not be able to deploy all four at once, and you will not win that fight*. If you bring eight paragons, then you -can- deploy all of those original four, and that swings it back to win with no losses.*
* Note that this is in general. If you run into an ordo where all the Radiants are armed with paladin PD lasers - and I've seen this happen - then you can easily win with the smaller fleet. And on the flip side, if you run into an ordo that's full of autopulse lasers and harpoon pods boosted by missile spec, then even when you can deploy four paragons, you will probably still lose one or two of them. Both of these extremes are rare, but they do mean that you can't get an accurate judgement of "is this fleet good enough to win reliably" off of just one or two battles.
Or you can isolate the ordos and fight them a few at a time. I don't think there's anything in vanilla where the only way to get what you want, in this case cores and dead fleets, is to stack DP advantage. Sure if all you want is to fight an arbitrarily large number of ordos at the same time, then maybe you need cheese, but you can kill 2 or 3 ordos while only deploying 1 or 2 paragons (I can consistently kill 2 ordos with only 1 paragon and no losses). I don't see why you would need or want to be able to do more than that. There's no benefit to being able to do more than that.
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but you can kill 2 or 3 ordos while only deploying 1 or 2 paragons (I can consistently kill 2 ordos with only 1 paragon and no losses).
This does not match my experiences. At all. Please provide more details - what is that one paragon armed with, what are your character skills, what do those two ordos look like? I, frankly, do not believe you here*; one paragon on its own, up against even just a pair of Radiant-class battleships is unlikely to win - and that's what you can find in a single remnant fleet, nevermind engaging more than one at once.
* Or, rather, I do not believe that you're talking about the same sort of remnant fleet that I am. Here's the thing you're probably missing: fleet size in red-threat systems scales up as you kill more of their fleets. I could buy a single paragon taking down the fleets such systems start with, where they'll only sometimes contain even a single Radiant. I do not believe you're taking on the two-to-three Radiants such fleets end up fielding, nevermind the four-to-six Radiants you'd find if you were foolish enough to engage two such fleets at once.
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* Or, rather, I do not believe that you're talking about the same sort of remnant fleet that I am. Here's the thing you're probably missing: fleet size in red-threat systems scales up as you kill more of their fleets. I could buy a single paragon taking down the fleets such systems start with, where they'll only sometimes contain even a single Radiant. I do not believe you're taking on the two-to-three Radiants such fleets end up fielding, nevermind the four-to-six Radiants you'd find if you were foolish enough to engage two such fleets at once.
You're right that I am not talking about ordos where each fleet has 3+ radiants, but I've also never even seen that and I have farmed red systems before (although apparently not that extensively). So now you're talking about an extreme edge case of combat. You can easily do everything else in the game without ever having to fight 4-6 radiants simultaneously (or even see them on the screen at the same time). I have filled multiple large colonies with as many AI cores as possible without ever seeing that (I also explore extensively so some cores come from there). If there is no gameplay reason to fight said fleets, why would there need to be a gameplay solution to fighting them without capital spam?
I don't see why it's such a big problem that major changes/mechanics have to be made/added to remedy it. A super specific and easily avoidable situation requiring DP manipulation to win just doesn't seem like a problem to me.
For reference, I am not talking about a solo paragon either, I also have other ships. My fleet would typically consist of a paragon and an astral and maybe 1 other capital (odyssey or conquest) + cruisers (apogees and carriers usually) and I usually fly a doom. That fleet will comfortably kill 2 or 3 radiants. I guess if I saw that fleets you are referring to, I would just kill them 1 at a time.
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i just hacked my firefox to replace every "intrinsic_parity" with "mr.Status_Quo"
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As an example, I've seen late-game red-system ordos with three battleships, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and eight frigates. That is on the larger end, but it's still a single fleet, and if you bring just the ships needed to beat it, you won't be able to deploy all of them. You have to bring extras just to get enough of your fleet on the field.
For another example, I've recently encountered a bounty fleet with a total of 533 deployment points; my normal fleet was quite capable of killing it... when I brought enough un-deployed backup to get deployment point parity. And then there are expedition fleets, that come in large hard-to-separate swarms.
In short, fighting ridiculous piles of enemies is not a "super specific and easily avoidable" situation in the current game, it's just what you end up dealing with late-game.
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Phase ships is ideal deployment weights. Good fuels storage and biggest DP per hull class. Im tugging 4 Dooms just for this task.
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In short, fighting ridiculous piles of enemies is not a "super specific and easily avoidable" situation in the current game, it's just what you end up dealing with late-game.
Something I hope we can tweak smaller in the future
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I think that people should post what kind of battle size they are playing under and what kind of deployment point the are talking about. For instance large bounties can scale to 640 Deployment Points and I've seen 350 DP Ordos. Expedition fleets seem to vary greatly in number of fleets and in DP count, and I barely even look at them so I'm not really sure about those. However it is entirely possible to be swarmed by multiple ordos and sub-Ordos, making for grueling 1000+ DP fights that last so long that you might completely deplete Capital CR twice.
But taking the 640 DP bounties as an example, the kind of game you have at 300 battle size is entirely different from a 500 battle size. Assuming you have a 300 DP fleet, at 300 battle size, you have 120 DP to deploy, you have to destroy 460 DP worth of enemy fleet, so to destroy the enemy fleet 2.5 times over before you can get your first reinforcement assuming no losses. Meanwhile you have 180 DP, which is greater than your deployed fleet, almost entirely wasted till the CR runs down which it will, and you have to retreat your ships before being able to deploy more, creating even more of a disadvantage as you have even less ships to face their +50% more ships. If your fleet is less than 300 DP is is even more onerous.
Now take a battle size for 500. You have 300 DP, they have 640 DP. You deply 200 DP, they deploy 300 DP. You have to destroy 340 DP worth, so to destroy the enemy fleet 1.13 times over before you can get your first reinforcement, assuming no losses.
Simply but, the larger your battle size is put to, the less incentive you have to make really large DP fleets in order to counter the disadvantages for the DP battle size system gives you. If you play at 300 battle size, (200 battle size was even worse), there is an absolute incentive to simple pack the most fuel/supply efficient source of DP so you don't have to suffer what feels like a most unfair and almost insurmountable disadvantage. For instance at 300 battle size, I found my carefully tailored 300 DP fleet unable to defeat these 640 DP bounty fleets, but if I changed the battle size to 500, I can win without losing a single ship.
For the 350 DP remnant Ordos, which as long as you can separate them from other remnant fleets roaming around, it isn't nearly as bad for 300 DP, and it's not much of a problem for 500 battle size. But that's around the size where you will immediately see that battles get a lot easier, just for the cost of of obtaining and upkeeping some DP that you may never use. It doesn't have to be a paragon. It could be, as suggested, a bunch of phase ships, or a bunch of Eagles that you will never realistically use, because once you aren't suffering by having an opponent that has +50% more ships than you, fighting battles get a lot easier and faster.
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300 map is practically two or three against whatever the AI throws at the player. Worst case, 3v3, something like three capitals against three of their Onslaughts.
I rose map size to 500 because I got sick of multi-round endurance (dueling) matches akin to Mortal Kombat or Marvel vs. Capcom.
But taking the 640 DP bounties as an example, the kind of game you have at 300 battle size is entirely different from a 500 battle size. Assuming you have a 300 DP fleet, at 300 battle size, you have 120 DP to deploy, you have to destroy 460 DP worth of enemy fleet, so to destroy the enemy fleet 2.5 times over before you can get your first reinforcement assuming no losses. Meanwhile you have 180 DP, which is greater than your deployed fleet, almost entirely wasted till the CR runs down which it will, and you have to retreat your ships before being able to deploy more, creating even more of a disadvantage as you have even less ships to face their +50% more ships. If your fleet is less than 300 DP is is even more onerous.
Yes! At 300 map size, I edge-camp so I can retreat ships that run out of PPT. At 500 map size, I may not need to worry about PPT, and can fight normally.
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Isnt this whole topic pointless, since nobody can find any issue with nothing beyond deep-lategame, and deep-lategame isnt implemented yet?
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What do you mean? You don't see a problem with how battlesize allocates DP? It's not just a problem when encountering overly large DP fleets. It's part of a problem including having a part of a fleet that never sees combat, escalating bounties being too hard, because you haven't reached the fleet to equalise yet, the incentive towards Capitals. It also means that estimating how powerful an opposing fleet is much more difficult, depending on what size fleet you have. People can solve it partially by simply changing battlesize options to their own benefit, but then you run into the problem of different game experience in regards to gamplay and balance.
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I wasn't fully aware that maximum deployment depends on your existing fleet size. I figured it was more a case of the admiral having a finite ability to command in the chaos of battle, with more and larger ships pushing the fleet's organizational limits. It might make more sense to attach deployment limits to player level, with higher level players able to deploy more ships at once.
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@Plantissue
I dont. But Ill bite, at least for the sake of an argument.
The issue is, that i dont think you thought this topic through.
Look, you found something that looks like a problem, and for the sake of an argument, lets say, that you are correct. But you never bothered to go one step further, and think about the implications of fixing it.
Let's see, one point at a time:
1.There has to be a limit.
Listen, It would be best, if there was no limit at all. But sadly, this is an imperfect world that has its limitations. 500 already strangles the game like hell. Maybe you could code the game to use more processing cores, but ouh boy, thats a lot of work. And this is a small project all things considered.
So if 1 = true, then:
2.You have to be able to carry more DP than you can deploy,
because if you dont, then Combat readiness is void, and should be scraped/redesigned. Ergo skill nodes that upgrade it, should be scraped/redesigned, and ship mods, and even map movement, storms, emergency burn and much more. Since alot of strings are connected to combat readiness.
So, if 1 = true and 2 = true, then:
3.There has to be a mechanism that allocates DP,
because if there isnt, and DP's are simply split in half, then there is no advantage to having a bigger fleet, ergo, you could fly with nothing but 2 Onslaughts + maybe a gryphon(100DP whole fleet), and win with multiple ordos at once, since the game isnt capable of wining with a human 1:1, and after the first wave going down, you would just camp the spawn. And also, it would be pointless to be smart on the galaxy map, and pick off fleets 1 by 1, not just run at multiple opponents bunched up.
So at the end of the day, the only thing that you could potentially do, is to come up with a different way of making a split, but is there a different way? All i can think of, is a bunch of horrible ideas that would make it even worse, like making skills, or level of the main character affect it.
Hmm, maybe you could give the player something like a bonus DP's for deploying small ships, and not capitals? But then, its only fair, if bigger fleets have the upper hand...
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Sorry, but I read "I'll bite" and stopped right there. As if somehow my thoughts are insincere or a "troll" in some form. Perhaps if you rephrase your post to be more respectful, I'll consider reading it.
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2.You have to be able to carry more DP than you can deploy,
because if you dont, then Combat readiness is void, and should be scraped/redesigned. Ergo skill nodes that upgrade it, should be scraped/redesigned, and ship mods, and even map movement, storms, emergency burn and much more. Since alot of strings are connected to combat readiness.
So, if 1 = true and 2 = true, then:
3.There has to be a mechanism that allocates DP,
because if there isnt, and DP's are simply split in half, then there is no advantage to having a bigger fleet, ergo, you could fly with nothing but 2 Onslaughts + maybe a gryphon(100DP whole fleet), and win with multiple ordos at once, since the game isnt capable of wining with a human 1:1, and after the first wave going down, you would just camp the spawn. And also, it would be pointless to be smart on the galaxy map, and pick off fleets 1 by 1, not just run at multiple opponents bunched up.
So at the end of the day, the only thing that you could potentially do, is to come up with a different way of making a split, but is there a different way? All i can think of, is a bunch of horrible ideas that would make it even worse, like making skills, or level of the main character affect it.
Hmm, maybe you could give the player something like a bonus DP's for deploying small ships, and not capitals? But then, its only fair, if bigger fleets have the upper hand...
Your point two doesn't follow, and isn't relevant. CR matters even if your fleet is small enough that you can deploy the whole thing.
Your point three also doesn't follow. The situation you suggest - battle size cranked down to the minimum, deploying a small fleet - is a situation that can happen anyway. Splitting the battle size evenly, right now, simply requires that you cart around a few hundred DP of extra warships; making it split evenly by default removes that requirement, but doesn't otherwise change how such a battle would go. And, well, if you fly with two Onslaughts and a Gryphon... no, that'd be a terrible idea. Sure, you'd probably nuke the first two, maybe three or even four hundred deployment points of the enemy. And then the Gryphon would be out of missiles and CR, and the Onslaughts would be out of CR and armor, and whatever was left of the enemy fleet would just kill you. (And that's assuming that the enemy didn't lead off with a bunch of high mobility frigates that could just surround and kill those Onslaughts outright.)
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CR matters even if your fleet is small enough that you can deploy the whole thing.
ehh.. This topic, is not about 'under limit' fighting, and thats why i wrote it like that, but okay okay, maybe i should have been more precise. Im sorry. Let me try again.
The main mechanic that CR creates is forcing rotations off/into the battlefield. But if you play under the limit, then CR is nothing but an arbitrary timer, since you wont swap a ship with 50%CR for a fresh one, for that +-5% to everything, since u dont have a fresh ship. But that is not a problem, because even if you had a bonus DP for a smaller fleet(as the topic sugests), you cant use it, since you have no ships in the back... Ye, there are few side reasons, like attrition in space, but that could be easily dumped into hull and would work the same.
Point 2 not only stands, but its stronger than i stated before, only i didnt bother to count all the reasons. What about noncombat ships for example?
But that doesnt matter really, since the deep lategame isnt implemented yet. I wrote it in the post before...
Listen, as i said, and that was the first point i made, that it would be best, if there was no limit. But that will not happen. So everything beyond that is damage control.