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Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: intrinsic_parity on February 25, 2020, 09:45:06 AM

Title: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 25, 2020, 09:45:06 AM
I've seen a lot of discussion recently about the imbalance between smaller ships and larger ships, however, I think most of that discussion is in the context of very late game fleets. The implicit idea is that all ships should be viable in late game fleets. I feel like that is not necessarily required, as long as all ships are viable/useful for a significant portion of the campaign.

An alternative to altering the balance of very late game ship composition (which will tend to bigger/more powerful ships naturally), is to try and change the balance of progression so that the player spends more time playing with smaller ships, even if they end up retiring them after some time. I think ship availability is something that could be tweaked a lot to affect that. You could alter access to markets, prices, salvage drop rates etc. to try and slow down the progression towards the biggest ships. I like the fact that big ships feel like an upgrade/reward over smaller ships, and not just a slower/tankier alternative.

I'm not going to get into to super specific suggestions for changing this stuff to avoid bloating the post too much (I think I'm going to make a separate thread about salvaging because I have several issues with the current implementation), but IMO, the overabundance of easily acquirable ships (both from salvage and stores) means the player basically scales up their fleet at the same rate they gain money (which is coincidentally all the player does) meaning they scale up very quickly. The effect on fleet balance is that they don't spend that much time playing with small ships because they quickly gain access to better ships.

Another thought: maybe the addition of more content for the player to do (rather than just grind cash and get a bigger fleet) will slow down progression leading the player to spend more time playing with smaller ships.

Anyway, I'd love to hear if other people think this is a good way to alter fleet balance and other suggestions about what to change.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Megas on February 25, 2020, 10:25:57 AM
Not fond of grind gates.

The slower the progression, the slower the named bounties need to progress.  They already possibly progress faster than player can comfortably keep up since 0.9.1a made bigger ships more expensive and slower to acquire (aside from lucky salvage).

As for progression, all I really care about is the spikes in named bounties.  There is a big one between 100k and 150k, and another past 250k.

To make small ships more useful, they need to last in a fight.  I do not want to waste lots of CP retreating ships because they cannot stay and fight long enough before PPT expires.  Recent fleet bloat has made most small ships undesirable.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 25, 2020, 04:33:59 PM
The slower the progression, the slower the named bounties need to progress.  They already possibly progress faster than player can comfortably keep up since 0.9.1a made bigger ships more expensive and slower to acquire (aside from lucky salvage).

As for progression, all I really care about is the spikes in named bounties.  There is a big one between 100k and 150k, and another past 250k.
I definitely think that bounties should progress more slowly, in fact, I think the player should have control over how fast the bounties progress by having to request/unlock higher tiers of bounties from a bounty hunters guild or from factions directly.

To make small ships more useful, they need to last in a fight.  I do not want to waste lots of CP retreating ships because they cannot stay and fight long enough before PPT expires.  Recent fleet bloat has made most small ships undesirable.
I don't agree with the first part though. I wouldn't mind increased PPT, but I think there are way more reasons and mechanics that push large ships to be more useful (officer mechanics, concentration of forces, fighters, individual ship balance etc...), and changing all of those things is never going to be practical. I'm thinking about ships usefulness as something that varies over the course of the campaign rather than them having an overall usefulness. Small ships are already very useful early on in the campaign. I think the problem is that the player can easily get large ships very quickly, and so the portion of the campaign where small ships are useful is too short. I don't have a problem with late game fights being huge, but you get there so quickly that it ends up being most of the game. Frigates are useful as long as you don't have (or have to fight) cruisers and capitals, so you can just make that portion of the game longer and frigates become more useful. Other people have suggested 'skirmishes' or 'ambushes' to get a similar result (more fights mostly composed of smaller ships), but I think progression is maybe a better way to do it. As long as the rest of the game (quests, bounties, remnant fleets etc.) don't scale too quickly, I don't see anything wrong with the player just spending more time playing with smaller ships before reaching end game.

I also don't want the game to become grindy, but I assume as more story/quests/things to do get added in, it will naturally slow down progression. We just need player access to ships and implicit scaling of enemies to get toned back so that the is both less able to scale up and and less required to scale up.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 25, 2020, 04:46:02 PM
I agree with the OP regarding progression mechanics, though I don't necessarily think that the idea of using all ship types in the late game is bad.

That aside, my two main thoughts about ship availability:

1) No capitals or cruisers below .4 rarity on the open market. No ships, in general, below .2 rarity on the black market unless the colony size is 7 or greater. (specific, yes, but this is what it boiled down to for me in my head- feel free to disagree with the details but the general idea is there.)

2) Reduce the accessibility of derelicts when two NPC factions fight. It makes it really easy to get high tier ships in the right circumstances. Maybe tie this into the marine raid encounter mechanics to provide a higher bar to salvage things like capitals?- through requiring a large quantity of marines to be able to make this happen?
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Megas on February 26, 2020, 09:45:29 AM
@ intrinsic_parity:  Sure, PPT is not the only reason, but it is so fundamental that other reasons do not matter if the frigate cannot even fight at all due to no PPT.

Frigates become obsolete almost immediately because pirates are dropping destroyers after battle right off the bat, and they are probably more useful than frigates.  This is not counting the Apogee start for those who want to get out early-game hell as quickly as possible.  My early game fleet quickly becomes a mess of Enforcers, Mules, and Shrike (P)s, led by starter Apogee.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: bobucles on February 26, 2020, 10:37:04 AM
I do find it a bit odd that you can go to the market and pick up a pristine Conquest, just like that. Who's selling these ships? I just checked the Sindrian market and found 3 pristine Prometheus ships. Wow.

Would it make sense to tie story points into fleet progression? For example there's mostly junk on the market but one really nice premium ship. Unfortunately you have to pull some strings to make the sale. The ship would have its normal store cost, but also require some story points to pick up. Practically all capital ships may require story points to purchase, while extremely good smaller ships might need one as well. The rest of the rabble can be bought and sold as you please.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Nick XR on February 26, 2020, 02:34:06 PM
This ties into the skirmish/ambush stuff in that there's nothing for AI frigates to do but die once the big boys show up in normal combat. 
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 26, 2020, 03:27:42 PM
I personally think most worlds shouldn't even have a shipyard. And the worlds with big shipyards should have more restrictions. I don't really like reputation gates the way they are right now because they feel pretty grindy (doing missions for 5 rep at a time to get to a threshold sucks). I would prefer if they were story gates (i.e. do particular missions to help the local admiral and then he gives you access the shipyard). You can have progressively harder missions to get higher access to the shipyard (better and bigger ships), and it might actually be worth losing ships on one of those missions if it gives you access to the big boys. That sort of motivation doesn't exist in the game right now. You can always get money or rep more slowly by doing less risky missions. This would also tie into the suggestion I made in another thread to have your reputation with local commanders determine patrol status. Now it could also determine shipyard access meaning your reputations with local commanders would start to be really important.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 26, 2020, 03:41:44 PM
@ intrinsic_parity:  Sure, PPT is not the only reason, but it is so fundamental that other reasons do not matter if the frigate cannot even fight at all due to no PPT.
Like I said, PPT matters more as battle size increases. Current frigates have enough ppt to fight smaller frigate/destroyer based fleets, but there are so few fights where that is what you have to do that they don't end up being useful over the course of the campaign. One solution is to increase ppt and the other is to increase the number of small fights. That's a bit of an extreme because I agree that ppt is more of an issue than other factors right now and both can be adjusted, but I think there are just so many different factors making frigates weak in late game battles that it's not reasonable or practical to change them all. It's better to change the battles the player commonly has to face (in addition to some tweaks like ppt).

Frigates become obsolete almost immediately because pirates are dropping destroyers after battle right off the bat, and they are probably more useful than frigates.  This is not counting the Apogee start for those who want to get out early-game hell as quickly as possible.  My early game fleet quickly becomes a mess of Enforcers, Mules, and Shrike (P)s, led by starter Apogee.
I definitely agree that salvaging tends to push the player out of early game much more quickly than into late game, and the starting options and early game enemies push the player away from frigates as well. I'm going to make another suggestion thread about salvaging but I think it could use some significant changes.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: FooF on February 26, 2020, 05:05:37 PM
Suggestion:

As long as a Frigate is "near" (range to be determined) an allied ship of equal or greater size than an opposing ship "nearby", its PPT rate does not decay. Additional consideration could be made if this is a skill-based mechanism rather than inherent.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Megas on February 26, 2020, 05:15:46 PM
If shipyards become too hard to access, player may just skip entirely and rely either on salvage or early colony/heavy industry.  Military market is a no-go zone unless player has commission.

Missions and named bounty hunting stink for rep building.  Multiple combats in quick succession is the fastest way to build rep.  That means either commission and killing spree against their enemies, or let pirates raid a system then go on pirate killing spree after a system bounty gets posted.  Bonus points if player can do both at the same time.

I buy very few ships from core markets, but I do like that they are in open market due to commission gate.  Most of my ships are whatever I steal from the enemy or find laying around, then whatever my colony can produce after I build a heavy industry.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 26, 2020, 05:51:55 PM
If shipyards become too hard to access, player may just skip entirely and rely either on salvage or early colony/heavy industry.  Military market is a no-go zone unless player has commission.

Missions and named bounty hunting stink for rep building.  Multiple combats in quick succession is the fastest way to build rep.  That means either commission and killing spree against their enemies, or let pirates raid a system then go on pirate killing spree after a system bounty gets posted.  Bonus points if player can do both at the same time.

I buy very few ships from core markets, but I do like that they are in open market due to commission gate.  Most of my ships are whatever I steal from the enemy or find laying around, then whatever my colony can produce after I build a heavy industry.

This is why I wanted to change the way the player gets access to shipyards:
I don't really like reputation gates the way they are right now because they feel pretty grindy (doing missions for 5 rep at a time to get to a threshold sucks). I would prefer if they were story gates (i.e. do particular missions to help the local admiral and then he gives you access the shipyard). You can have progressively harder missions to get higher access to the shipyard (better and bigger ships), and it might actually be worth losing ships on one of those missions if it gives you access to the big boys. That sort of motivation doesn't exist in the game right now. You can always get money or rep more slowly by doing less risky missions and that's boring IMO.
The suggestion is that faction rep no longer gives you access to shipyards. Instead, access to a shipyard is given by a local commander who you need to do missions for. The idea is that you might only need to do a couple missions to get full access to a particular shipyard, but they will be much harder and more story oriented, rather than grinding 20 easy missions or fights.

I mostly buy ships, especially early on. I buy on the black market whenever possible, and I take TT commission to get my favorite high tech ships. I'm happy to pay full price for a nice pristine flagship that lets me have a big influence on battles, and I'll pay black market prices for solid fleet filler ships like hammerheads/drovers/eagles.

I also agree that salvaging might become too good if shipyards are hard to access which is why I think salvaging needs to change too.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Plantissue on February 27, 2020, 07:14:12 AM
I don't understand where this idea of an overabundance of easily acquirable capital ships come from. The only easily acquirable capital ship is the conquest and that's because the sole independent military colony produces it, so you don't need a commission, only reputation. Everything else is gated behind commissions and reputation. There's also black markets, but that's hardly an overabundance if you have to search for the ship you want.

Not against the idea of gating ships further, but there should be some awareness of its side effects, namely accelerating the desirability of a colony that can produce of blueprints and of blueprints itself.

I do find it a bit odd that you can go to the market and pick up a pristine Conquest, just like that. Who's selling these ships? I just checked the Sindrian market and found 3 pristine Prometheus ships. Wow.
Yes, tell us who is selling these ships? What open market is selling pristine Conquest? Should be only Sindria to my recollection and it should have d-mods. Maybe Kazeron theoretically as well though I've never seen it. So it's pretty rare and you can't buy in bulk. Prometheus ships are a civilian ship. To be honest I would expect 6-8 size colonies to have them available.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 27, 2020, 09:08:26 AM
It's not about capitals specifically, it's about  how quickly your fleet increases in size (both numbers and ships sizes). You can literally start the game with an apogee and multiple frigates and destroyers. The idea is to stretch out the early period of the game when you have a smaller fleet. I think the combat plays very differently when there are less/smaller ships, and that combat style is also fun, but it just ends so quickly because you get access to bigger ships so quickly. Capitals aren't fundamentally the problem nor are they the reason for the suggestion.

I would also argue its pretty easy to get a friendly/cooperative reputation with any size fleet because you get the same reputation gains from every fight and mission. Just take a commission right away and go to a couple system bounties with the starter fleet and you will have good enough rep to buy capitals or at least cruisers from your faction of choice. That can happen very early on in the game, so I don't consider reputation gates to really be a significant obstacle.

I would also agree that these changes could necessitate changes to colony production as well, but honestly, its much less viable to 'rush' a colony for ship production if you don't already have a decent fleet. You will get crushed by the raids and expeditions. It more likely that this would delay the point in the game where you could safely start a colony unless raids and expeditions change a bit. I think they are already slated to be changed though so its sort of hard to speculate about that.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Grievous69 on February 27, 2020, 10:15:24 AM
You can literally start the game with an apogee and multiple frigates and destroyers. The idea is to stretch out the early period of the game when you have a smaller fleet.
It's called a FAST start for a reason, seeing as how you prefer battles with smaller ships you can just, you know, go with the ordinary starts...

And I also don't get the ''oh look pristine capitals in every market''. Yeah ok someone got lucky and saw a pristine ship once, so what? It's one capital. I was once commissioned by Tri-Tach and spent multiple months at their markets trying to buy a capital other than Paragon and no dice. It was always 4-5 Paragons and nothing else, not even Auroras. People see one Atlas 2 on the black market and immediately lose their mind. It's strong as a mere cruiser so who cares about the ''no capitals on black market''.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 27, 2020, 11:57:35 AM
The intent behind the idea of no capitals on the open market is to reduce the RNG factor and therefore allow capital acquisition be more predictable- but not reliant on the player being lucky or unlucky.

Quote
And I also don't get the ''oh look pristine capitals in every market''. Yeah ok someone got lucky and saw a pristine ship once, so what? It's one capital. I was once commissioned by Tri-Tach and spent multiple months at their markets trying to buy a capital other than Paragon and no dice. It was always 4-5 Paragons and nothing else, not even Auroras. People see one Astral 2 on the black market and immediately lose their mind. It's strong as a mere cruiser so who cares about the ''no capitals on black market''.

This experience kind of says it all for me. It shouldn't take months to find a certain ship when commissioned, but it also shouldn't be easy to get a Paragon or Astral without one. The RNG is what is frustrating on both sides of the issue.

Keep in mind that this proposal wouldn't prevent the player from getting these ships from their own colonies' markets or from building them themselves. So a commission isn't strictly necessary to get one- it's just one of the more predictable ways. A story quest could also be implemented that could guarantee some of these things, too, or even blueprints.

The real point, in my opinion, is that in this sense it's hard to gauge a player's experience (strictly along the lines of ship access) because the RNG makes for two very different possible outcomes that can be extremes at either end of the spectrum. Either extreme feels bad here to me- and doesn't really do anything special when at its best case scenario.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 27, 2020, 01:40:04 PM
My original suggestion was not directly about capital ships. I never mention them once in the post. The suggestion is about slowing down the rate that the player grows their fleet. Right now the only limiters to fleet growth are logistics/money, faction rep, and rarity/RNG, and all of those things push the player towards grinding.

The reason the player has access to so many ships is because RNG is frustrating, so the player needs to see a lot of ships to ensure that on average, they will see the rare ships a reasonable number of times. The side effect of this is that they pretty much get as many common/average ships as they want. I would argue that in terms of just making your fleet stronger (not obtaining specific ships), the player always has access to ships and the only limiting factor is money and rep. In other words, if an enemy fleet (like the red planet fleet or a big bounty) is too strong for me, the solution is always to just go and grind money or rep or salvage until my fleet is strong enough. I never have to do anything risky or difficult to get access to better ships, they're already there for the taking if I have enough money and rep. It's also very quick to scale up, the player can make money and gain rep very quickly so they can also get a large fleet very quickly. The only way to slow this down within the current set of limiting factors is to reduce monetary rewards and ship drop rates which I think would be more frustrating than fun.

The suggestion is to make the players access to ships an actual limiting factor in how fast they can increase in power. In some sense, you might say I want to replace the rarity aspect of finding ships, with difficulty of access i.e. you have to do very difficult missions to get access to TT capitals, but once you do, you can somewhat consistently find them (higher drop rates from a much smaller number of gated sources).

The idea is that limited ship access allows more direct control over the rate of progression and also creates more avenues for story-driven or relationship-driven progression rather than just grinding basic missions. Now there can be certain challenges that are actually worth struggling with because succeeding gives you access to better ships. Maybe it's worth losing 4 cruisers to get access to capitals from the TT, but it's certainly not worth losing a couple cruisers to get 200k, when I can just get 100k twice without losing any ships. This also can have the effect of causing the player to spend more time playing with smaller ships (assuming the progression gates are balanced that way) which I think will partially address a lot of other concerns with small ships being useless. They will be useful as long as the player hasn't progressed too far. If I use a ship for half of the campaign to good effect, then it is not useless, even if it can't compete in a super late game fleet.

Also, it's crazy to me that people think the astral is weak, but it also will totally derail this thread to argue about it.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 27, 2020, 03:14:11 PM
@intrisic_parity

I agree with your thoughts in general. I highlight capitals here because when it comes to derelict salvage and market access they offer the highest offset of RNG leading to a direct increase in player power for the lowest overall opportunity cost- and therefore a lower reliance on smaller ships when that happens cost effectively (such as in the case of derelict salvage). Whether I buy or find an Onslaught or a Legion, though, many faction patrols are now much easier to deal with compared to the purchase of most cruisers. There are still plenty of threats that are scary, but I've theoretically boosted my progression as a player into (subjective, true) late-early game at best, or straight into midgame and able to make colony acquisition and defense early on much easier in comparison. I don't think you can make that case for the majority of ships below capitals (and that is a good thing! power projection is my opinion of their overall role). There are certainly some outliers, I know, but in general I think this holds true the majority of the time.

Your point about credit acquisition as the sole output of progression is interesting to me. 200k credits versus higher level (whether size or "tier") ship access would be valued much differently for many players. Therefore that value is inherently highly subjective- since if you didn't really care about higher level ships that wouldn't be progression to you. I'm not saying that's a bad thing- it's just a different thing to consider over the arguable purity of credit rewards. (Credits are always valuable and can be used towards players making choices about what to purchase and so therefore are more flexible)

For my own thoughts on this subject, I think it is perfectly fine to soft-gate or even hard-gate access to larger ships and then require larger ships (composition-wise) for certain things. This opinion is mostly due to the idea that I don't think it forces the player to pilot any specific ship personally, per se, but rather results in a system where having larger ships accessible as fleet composition options is a sense of progression that makes sense to me. I don't think it should invalidate smaller ships though, but result in increasing fleet synergy or tactical options that boost player power indirectly in that way.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Grievous69 on February 27, 2020, 03:50:24 PM
Yeah sorry I meant Atlas mk 2, not Astral.

Anyways, similarly to Megas I don't see the point of increasing the grind for everyone. If someone wants to jump to big fleet battles, they can do so, if someone wants to be a small trader, also fine. See my point? You're free to do as you please. Literal sandbox. Why limit something that's fun for some people behind artificial gates just so you "feel good progressing"...

Every time a thread like this comes up, I always say something like this but people just can't imagine someone not enjoying early game. It would be the same as me making a post to make it super hard to have small battles with frigates and destroyers, make capital fights the biggest part of the game. Now that would be stupid and selfish wouldn't it? (I'm not attacking anyone, I'm trying to paint a picture)
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 27, 2020, 04:45:51 PM
Yeah sorry I meant Atlas mk 2, not Astral.

Anyways, similarly to Megas I don't see the point of increasing the grind for everyone. If someone wants to jump to big fleet battles, they can do so, if someone wants to be a small trader, also fine. See my point? You're free to do as you please. Literal sandbox. Why limit something that's fun for some people behind artificial gates just so you "feel good progressing"...

Every time a thread like this comes up, I always say something like this but people just can't imagine someone not enjoying early game. It would be the same as me making a post to make it super hard to have small battles with frigates and destroyers, make capital fights the biggest part of the game. Now that would be stupid and selfish wouldn't it? (I'm not attacking anyone, I'm trying to paint a picture)
I personally don't agree that more choice is always better. I think that constraints are what makes a game fun. The player having to overcome certain challenges in order to succeed/win/progress is what makes for interesting decisions. I guess you could say I like the problem solving aspect of games. If there are no requirements/constraints/objectives, then there is no reason to do anything. I like sandboxes in the sense that you have a lot of different ways to overcome challenges, but I still want to have the challenges and things that I need to figure out how to do, and not just be free to do whatever. I think that small ships are bad right now because they never represent the best solution to anything the game asks you to do. You can always choose a better fleet composition and so they become useless. The idea here is that if you introduce some other constraints that make it so smaller ships are the best solution at some point in the game, then they become useful without having to try and tune them to be similarly useful to bigger ships in general. This is a disagreement about what games we enjoy though, your opinion is valid and games that let you do whatever you want are fun for a lot of people, but that's not me, and I'm still going to say how I think the game should be.

As to 'grindyness', the whole point of this is to reduce the grind and replace it with a small number of big challenges. I specifically don't want to reduce access to ships by just making things cost more, or reducing income or decreasing ship drop rates because those would increase grinding. I want to make specific and tailored challenges/quests to unlock access to things. Hopefully you can see how this fits with my idea of a fun game.

As to the balance between late game and early game, this doesn't have to make early game longer. That's my preference, and I made the thread because I think putting more emphasis on early game would address some concerns I've seen in other threads, but you could just as easily make all the gates feasible in early game so that the player could go straight to late game (maybe that could even be an in-game option like an easy mode or something). The point is more that the dev has some control over that without messing with prices and drop rates that have huge impacts on other parts of the game.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 27, 2020, 05:10:46 PM
@Grievous69

I definitely appreciate that picture and the mentality behind it. I think this somewhat comes down to playstyle preference and what incentivizes me as a gamer. For me, at least, I don't want a literal sandbox like you suggest- at least in the sense that you can do everything right away like that. I've always hated pure sandboxes because the exploration and freedom that most of them advertise as their appeal inevitably breaks down from insane difficulty spikes due to RNG or boring "sameness" of difficulty to avoid said difficulty spikes. Experienced players know better and can manipulate those things to get what they want from it, but a new player it oftentimes completely lost. You have such little creative room to do anything memorable under those harsh of design constraints. Red Planet is a progression mechanic just as story-chains are. They feel good to complete, in part, because of that. I feel that more of that kind of thing is needed in this game.

I also don't believe progression is inherently grind. A game is only a "grind" if it feels like grind to play the game- no matter what part of the game you are in. What often feels like a grind is repetition and lack of meaningful player choices. You can still maintain that concept and have progression mechanics- in fact, to have a game that doesn't wear out after the initial appeal it must to my mind. In my opinion, a player shouldn't get all the best toys all at once. Goals give new players something to look forward to later in the same way that colonies currently operate. If ta player hates the toys they have at the start, then those toys aren't attractive enough and that is the design consideration to me- not accessibility to different toys that open up additional gameplay options.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: furl on February 27, 2020, 05:40:36 PM
I don't know if it has been suggested before, but a skill would be nice that increases frigates' damage to larger ships, depending on the number of frigates deployed. Just like coordinated maneuvers. It could encourage you to use large number of frigates if you choose to invest in this skill.

Leadership: "Knowing how to utilize multiple frigates' mobility to distract their opponents, an experienced commander can order attacks on weak points of large ships, right where it hurts the most."

Level 1: Each frigate deployed increases damage dealt by frigates to destroyer-sized ships and larger by 5% up to a maximum of 50% extra damage.
Level 2: Bonus damage cap increased to 100%
Level 3: Bonus damage cap increased to 150% (for 30 frigates - max fleet size)

Or it could look like this (more straightforward):
Level 1: Frigates deal x1.5 damage to capital ships
Level 2: Frigates deal x1.5 damage to cruisers and double damage to capital ships
Level 3: Frigates deal x1.5 damage to destroyers, double damage to cruisers and x2.5 damage to capital ships
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Grievous69 on February 28, 2020, 02:19:46 AM
I'm pretty sure Alex already confirmed there will be some new skills that'll make use of smaller ships in fleet. We don't know what exactly it will do or the numbers but that's at least something.

Anyways for the original topic, I just think that way of making smaller ships more useful is not the way to go. Your solution to using weaker ships is to force a player to spend more time with them, instead of actually trying to make them useful in general. There's a good thread going on about PPT when escorting, that's a decent idea, as furl said, skills may also help a bit. Almost anything that will make smaller ships a decent choice in every part of the game and not ''well you just have to deal with this a bit longer''.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 28, 2020, 02:31:43 AM
There's a good thread going on about PPT when escorting, that's a decent idea, as furl said, skills may also help a bit. Almost anything that will make smaller ships a decent choice in every part of the game and not ''well you just have to deal with this a bit longer''.

I agree with this. I also agree with the progression mechanics of the OP though- but things like this that encourage diverse fleet compositions are great! It doesn't mean you can't gain value from progression mechanics around ship size, though.

The way I was thinking about this (from the perspective of easy access to larger ships for experienced players) would be to provide skill-based ways to streamline this progression (so, quests that are hard). That way if you absolutely loathe smaller ships, for instance, you can choose to circumvent that requirement through a challenge (rather than RNG determining your options at the expense of any sort of progression other than credit acquisition or the colony phase).
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Plantissue on February 28, 2020, 07:07:46 AM
I see what you mean. You want to gate away ship progression whilst at the same time reduce the ability of the player to receive money. Which sounds reasonable, but how does that work in a universe where you can create colonies, find blueprints and have them produce the ships for you?

How would that work in a game where boring trading to give money safely is supposed to be part of the gameplay? I think the procurement missions give way too much money for the risk, but on the other hand, if they gave less money it just means that a player who desires to never take up a challenge will just grind for longer.

Currently it's not a grind anyways, if you can go from a normal start of 2 frigates to 5 million credits in 3 hours. So a good start would be to reduce the money given from procurement missions. perhaps instead of normally double the price, you get +20% of the price. Then the black market, both for ships and commodities, can only be accessed by being transponder off. Otherwise you can see, but not interact with it. Perhaps reputation with pirates is needed for buying ships. Perhaps reputation is the absolute gateway for ships and is gated by completing harder bounties or by fighting faction enemies in a commission. Perhaps resigning a commission plunges you in a state of hostility depending on the number of ships you have brought. Is that more of the style you was looking for?
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 28, 2020, 09:40:07 AM
I see what you mean. You want to gate away ship progression whilst at the same time reduce the ability of the player to receive money. Which sounds reasonable, but how does that work in a universe where you can create colonies, find blueprints and have them produce the ships for you?

How would that work in a game where boring trading to give money safely is supposed to be part of the gameplay? I think the procurement missions give way too much money for the risk, but on the other hand, if they gave less money it just means that a player who desires to never take up a challenge will just grind for longer.

Currently it's not a grind anyways, if you can go from a normal start of 2 frigates to 5 million credits in 3 hours. So a good start would be to reduce the money given from procurement missions. perhaps instead of normally double the price, you get +20% of the price. Then the black market, both for ships and commodities, can only be accessed by being transponder off. Otherwise you can see, but not interact with it. Perhaps reputation with pirates is needed for buying ships. Perhaps reputation is the absolute gateway for ships and is gated by completing harder bounties or by fighting faction enemies in a commission. Perhaps resigning a commission plunges you in a state of hostility depending on the number of ships you have brought. Is that more of the style you was looking for?
I definitely agree that other forms of income could stand to be reduced a bit.

I think colonies sort themselves out in the sense that you need a good fleet to defend the colony successfully, so if your access to the ships needed to defend your colony is limited, then your access to colonies is also limited, although starting colonies in a commissioning factions system or in remnant systems is a bit of a loophole since you can get free defense. I think that could be fixed by having the remnants attack your colony rather than just the fleets (so it can't grow or make money), and having you commissioned faction get mad at you if you colonize in their system.

Procurement contracts also could stand to be reduced, although you could use a similar gating system where you can get access to the more lucrative contracts by completing missions for the factions/NPC's giving the contracts. Then you could grind low value contracts, or do the hard quests/missions which give you access to both better contracts and better ships as intended. I like things being gated by relationships with specific NPC's (station commanders or something) rather than factions so that you don't need to grind overall faction rep, you just need to do stuff for that NPC meaning you might only need to do a few missions where grinding the faction rep would take many missions.

I also 100% agree that currently the game is not a grind, and that its a bit too easy to get up to huge fleets. I got onto these ideas because I realized that in order to slow that down by just reducing income or ship drop rates, you would have to make the game a grind which led me to this idea of progression gates.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Lucky33 on February 29, 2020, 11:07:28 AM
I think that everybody missing a point. There is no reason to force player to run small fleet if there is really nothing there to do with it.

Tried playing with the selfimposed rule of not using anything larger than a destroyer and dont do carrier spam. It gets stale very fast.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on February 29, 2020, 11:40:52 AM
I think that everybody missing a point. There is no reason to force player to run small fleet if there is really nothing there to do with it.

Tried playing with the selfimposed rule of not using anything larger than a destroyer and dont do carrier spam. It gets stale very fast.
That's a good point. I think that as more quests and story type content gets added, there will be more to do because hopefully some will be aimed at smaller fleets. I also think some of the time implicit scaling like bounty scaling also means you actually have less to do as small fleet as time goes on. I don't mind things being made more challenging though. I think the game is a bit too easy right now because there aren't enough constraints.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 29, 2020, 04:24:51 PM
Speaking to Lucky33's point, I thought maybe I would take some time and really flesh out my thoughts on this suggestion in the hopes of possibly alleviating some of the concerns (or at least explaining why I think this is helpful) and generating further discussion. I've thought about this for a while (even before this post), so this will be a long one. I'll provide summary points though, no worries!

Briefly: I think the scale of fleet to above the destroyer level would be relatively quick to access anyway. Capitals should be an accomplishment, though, maybe right before or even shortly after a player's first colony is possible. For ship access, one or two missions past the tutorial, or a single modestly challenging mission that can be completed by a skilled pilot with a couple escorts (which you would already have the money for most likely) would give you destroyer access. Then, another mission or two from a local commander would give limited cruiser access. That could either be faction wide or market specific depending on what feels best in the end.

Two major points I'd like to highlight about why I like this design principle as a whole:

1) For new players this represents an extension to the tutorial that gives some guidance- with a relatively high incentive to complete these tasks as soon as that player is able. This increases the likelihood that the first experiences of new players remain balance-able and positive through additional constraints and guided learning. Yes, this is hand holding to veterans, but making parts "skip-able" to those players is the way to go there- either through harder missions not recommended to new players or are even unavailable during a first play through- but!- give accelerated access to the rewards this way. Right now far too many have to resort to online guides or help through forum posts. Many likely simply give up before they get to that point, and that could hurt reviews upon release (silent majority). This allows that experience to be streamlined (so ideally the missions teach many of the fundamental early game campaign mechanics in an immersive story-driven way to invest the player into the setting early on.)

For an example:

The first mission to get destroyers could be a small bounty fleet the player has to hunt down. This is therefore small-scale practice for doing the tiered bounties later. That can be invaluable guidance to a new player. The tutorial teaches combat, but it does not specifically teach all the mechanics of bounty-hunting. This is then the next "logical step" in difficulty for the player and specifically showcases an option for repeatable tasks that they have in the greater overall sandbox. So they don't exit the tutorial and meet that inevitable moment of "well... now what do I do?"

The next mission could be commodity based or even something more dramatic like a scripted food shortage or pather cell (to teach about those kinds of trading opportunities right away) that would require the player to gain the commodities in a way that requires more fighting (so again measurable difficulty that provides core mechanics practice). This also prevents the new player from "biting off more than they can chew" by attempting to immediately pilot larger ships- which can be more complex to fly and also incentivize larger and oftentimes therefore harder or more complex conflicts. (I plan to deep-dive that idea further down)

2) This will take some time to explain reasonably well, so please bear with me here: I'd like to go back to the idea of pure sandboxes and use a personal experience I had testing out .9 to demonstrate one of that design style's primary drawbacks- difficulty inconsistency or difficulty spikes due to RNG:

Spoiler
I was testing out the new bar missions in a relatively small fleet- (a couple destroyers and several frigates). The first mission I tried was the fairly common: "I need this shipment of X delivered to Y market." I will go on a tiny tangent here and point out that this alone has several difficulty factors: open market or underground transactions - hidden dangers, etc. For a new player, even if they understand all the elements there, it can be much harder to sneak in to some markets- and the random pick nature of the mission would make it impossible to reliably judge the overall difficulty of an underground transaction unless you are experienced enough to know what typically guards each market. Ok, tangent over. This time, its a standard delivery type and it goes smoothly.

Next mission(s). I choose a derelict salvage package mission and- hey! lucky me!- there is a weapons cache mission close by so may as well take that too while I'm at it! Since I'm going more into the unknown than last time, I beef up my fleet with a cruiser and another destroyer. I handle the derelict mission easily, and, to my horror, realize that the weapons cache is deep within the corona of the star. Well... I can't take my current fleet in there without eating my supplies to a point that likely my completed mission was a waste (I think to myself). So, instead, I calculate that I have enough time and fuel to make a return trip with a smaller fleet and still cut a profit. I've played Starsector for a while at this point, so I know how to do this. A new player would likely not even be able to make that judgement call. They would dive into the star and learn the hard way the first time. Anyway, I bring back a smaller fleet, fly to the weapon cache... and get met with a guard group of remnants that includes 2 Brilliants who do not much care about the environment they are sitting in. Well, that's out. I reload and bring back the cruiser fleet determined to beat the remnants because "wow this cache must be valuable to be this difficult!" I will admit, I didn't even know about this after playing Starsector for a long while before this update :P , but I had no idea having a larger fleet made it more difficult to get deeper within a corona. The cache was right by the surface of the star, so even with E-burn I don't think I could even make it there with enough available CR to fight the remnants. Impossibly difficult (to me) compared to the other two missions I had just completed. I'm not sure if this has changed since then, or, heck, maybe weapon caches aren't even supposed to spawn there and that was unintended. Either way, there were no differences between the way the missions were presented that indicated one was that much harder than the others, they were just "something to do." Imagine, for a moment, if this was a brand new player's first bar mission.

Another example:

I suppose I should have brushed up on my astrology, but I was woefully unprepared for a neutron star. I got unlucky and was already within the blast area when I spawned from the jump-point. That cost me two decent battles because I was careless and hadn't immediately saved after (which is why, I think auto-save as a feature comes up so much even though it's impractical to implement for this game)

Then there was the first, and last, time I responded to a distress call ;) (whoa that pirate ambush is huge!)

Importantly, these kinds of experiences are necessary to make the sector feel like a dangerous and exciting place. One might be tempted to think the way to go, then, is to warn the player and give them time to avoid the hazard through intelligent choices or good preparation, but consider the effect that has when that principle over-saturates the difficulty and everything is avoidable- now it's boring! You never feel in danger because you can always pick your battles! That's a problem too... so what is there to be done about this paradox of design? I'll get to that soon, but first: (feel free to skip ahead, I know this is long, sorry)

Deep dive analysis of player incentives from a learning perspective:

The primary thing to consider when thinking about difficulty and the scale of ship size is the hazard to the player. What does it do to make the game more difficult when you increase ship size? It costs more supplies to deploy fleets and maintain fleets (crew, maintenance, officers, etc). Essentially more credits required per month. This means from the player's perspective they must earn more credits than before to survive (inherent time limit to play without further risk by doing missions- remember this is before colonies and assuming no commission is possible right away because that causes further complexity or dangers). What does a player gain by larger ships (flavor aside)? Power to ignore hazards that include larger sized fleets.

Hazards. The secondary thing to consider here is that there are currently two category types of hazards whose lines would scale inverted in opposite directions if we were to graph them: Hazards that scale upwards in cost (again more credits) according to increasing fleet size (category 1) and hazards that scale in less combat difficulty by the same metric (category 2). The early game, and Core Worlds in particular, has far more category 2 hazards than category 1 hazards. Players, therefore, quickly feel incentivized to increase their fleet size- which requires more credits- which requires venturing outside the Core- which increases the likelihood of running into the category 1 hazard! RNG makes this even more difficult to calculate, and so the end result for an inexperienced player is often bankruptcy by trying to protect themselves from the category 2 hazard. Since the scale is exponential in this regard, it can make it all the more frustrating.

One special thing to note about this dynamic, is that it greatly increases the attractiveness of lucrative trading missions and Core World events such as food shortages or market commodity deficiencies to a large degree. Why? Because a player can avoid most if not all of the category 1 hazards and reliably predict the category 2 hazards. The only RNG comes from black market activities- which are generally a really light penalty overall considering the gain that can be achieved.

Since Starsector is about campaign elements funneling back to combat with meaningful player choices in between, it therefore makes sense in my mind to both increase the usefulness of smaller ships in trading missions (they are the most attractive early game options as a conclusion from above ) since decreasing the missions' lucrativeness could potentially create more grind without reducing the benefit of less risk/calculable progression at the expense of boredom- if that makes sense. Again, I'm not saying small ships shouldn't have a role all campaign long, but this is a current campaign mechanic that can increase their usefulness in direct way. Part of the way to do this would be to funnel trading missions back into combat by increasing their risk. Importantly this could scale to fleet size and make small ship-only group's have more interesting things to do early on and late campaign both- depending upon the Core's overall stability. This is only one example, ideally, but gets the general point across of the necessity, in this case, of creating additional options to increase the variety of things to do at each stage of the difficulty progression in order to prevent staleness at any particular level.

What I mean by "difficulty progression" is explained below.
[close]

(I think the details are useful to understanding the overall point- but for those wanting the bullet points of the story/analysis)

 - Difficulty spikes are very common in the campaign, and they can be very frustrating to a new player- even killing interest in the game outright when a player is trying to learn
 - These hazards have to be present for the sector to feel dangerous/exciting- so this creates a conundrum of design
 - There are ways to somewhat mitigate or explain these hazards to the player- but see point 2- this can make the sector boring so beware!
 - The dangers to smaller fleets vs larger fleets are separate considerations altogether and provide a difficulty conundrum where the player feels like they "can't win either way"

Ok, sorry for the novel. So how does all that relate to the suggestion? (You thought I'd never get there didn't you ;) )

Alongside gating ship access to briefly limit player power creep, the suggestion can be used to better gate difficulty as well! More difficult random missions or even campaign hazards/elements can be designed- guilt free- because they can be logically reserved for "when the player is ready" by locking them behind an accessibility gate that, crucially, requires the player to opt-in to the difficulty increase (and the story-driven nature gives the perfect medium to describe that particular detail to the player so they can make an informed choice in the matter).
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: TaLaR on February 29, 2020, 04:43:43 PM
Why wouldn't you be able to get larger ships without finishing some particular bounty/etc? It would be a horribly gamy mechanic. I'd rather prefer starsector design to move in exactly opposite direction, toward more dynamic sandbox.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: TaylorItaly on February 29, 2020, 04:50:55 PM
A briliant post.

As a Newbee player i can not say much about that topic , only two things.

1. I love this game for being harsh to me , while learning it.
But after a few attemps , the only difficult thing is to beat those Remmants Fleets.
So , i would love to have more missions , to unlock things.

2. You wrote : " (which is why, I think auto-save as a feature comes up so much even though it's impractical to implement for this game) "

I am using that Autosave mod , with the Autosave after each Market Transaction.
That is a good thing , but sometimes it also saves when i am in Space or after a battle , so when i get a Distress Call i save manually , Alt-Tab , copy the Save folder to another location and look.
If i was ambushed and the game saved after that battle , i just Alt-Tab again , get that save , copy it into SS/save and all is good.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on February 29, 2020, 05:44:15 PM
Why wouldn't you be able to get larger ships without finishing some particular bounty/etc? It would be a horribly gamy mechanic. I'd rather prefer starsector design to move in exactly opposite direction, toward more dynamic sandbox.

I think it can be explained by setting alone reasonably well. I mean, much of the game is "gamy" right now for practical reasons. Mostly, my goal here is to point out what I believe to be the biggest concerns for new players and give potential ways of solving them while extending other design benefits in the process. I'm trying to take the grind aspect into account, generally, and give access to higher difficulty without overwhelming an unlucky new player too often. Essentially- "What results in the most 'fun' to me?" (from the perspective of trying to imagine myself as a new player) - and I really like what instrisic_parity has suggested and wanted to add my thoughts to it.

I'm certainly open to your interpretation, though. It would be helpful from the idea of trying to better understand your thoughts for you to flesh out what you mean. What do you mean by dynamic, for instance? Does dynamic sandbox mean progression can't be implemented, and why? Do you think the difficulty issue is a problem, and if so, how would you solve it? (An answer of "no clue" is fine for me- just to be clear- just trying to move the discussion into more detail and get more info out there)

I am using that Autosave mod , with the Autosave after each Market Transaction.
That is a good thing , but sometimes it also saves when i am in Space or after a battle , so when i get a Distress Call i save manually , Alt-Tab , copy the Save folder to another location and look.
If i was ambushed and the game saved after that battle , i just Alt-Tab again , get that save , copy it into SS/save and all is good.

Thanks for pointing out that mod and thanks for the general advice. :) The story in the example was before that mod was available (I think, anyway), but that sounds really useful to have installed.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Lucky33 on February 29, 2020, 10:43:16 PM
That was a nice read, Morrokain.

Now for the more practical things.

1. There is a need of the intel ui overhaul. Reminder of the missions availability should be on the main screen and linked to the main intel screen. There should be a more simple index system for missions.

2. All missions should be tiered by difficulty and tiers are based on "opposition power", "cargo capacity", "time importance" and "secrecy". This is a more systematic approach to the mission generation resulting in easier sorting and indexing. In turn this allows to keep missions of different tiers in abundance since you can simply hide anything you dont want to see and participate in. This way the player can define that progression actually is. Admiral, Smuggler, Trader, Explorer and so on. With the possibility of mixed types of missions and gameplay. This also provides opportunity to control the scale of the player's operations.

3. To spice things up there should be missions with only partial details available.

4. Current system of a single guaranteed sniffer should be more flexible to allow more diverse info stream. Yes, it includes the capability to tap into Redacted comms.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: TaLaR on March 01, 2020, 12:11:35 AM
@Morrokain

I really don't like any sort of world scaling to player. It's always immersion-breaking. Dumbest example of this was TES Oblivion: you are level 1? - Rats everywhere! Level 20 ? - Trolls everywhere!... Bounties in starsector follow overall same principle, though with wider range of outcomes.
You are lowly single frigate captain? Behave like one! Hide from scary big fleets, smuggle, seek appropriate challenges in large sandbox rather have game generate only them. Game may highlight threat levels of missions/fleets/areas/etc, but it should be always up to player to decide to challenge them anyway.

Dynamic, as in faction doing their own things - waging wars, expanding, building up infrastructure, etc. Not just formally declaring war/peace like now without any real consequences. Or pirates behaving like ones, rather than combination of zombie horde and bounty pinatas waiting to be looted.
Missions/bounties/etc not generated simply because player needs something to do of X difficulty, but due to current state of simulation. Of course, in sufficient number that player is likely to find ones he can do with current fleet at any point.

In terms of mission generation based on simulation state, 'Drox Operative' was quite a good example (if you were willing to accept actual combat mechanics being not very good).
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on March 01, 2020, 02:24:15 AM
I really don't like any sort of world scaling to player. It's always immersion-breaking. Dumbest example of this was TES Oblivion: you are level 1? - Rats everywhere! Level 20 ? - Trolls everywhere!... Bounties in starsector follow overall same principle, though with wider range of outcomes.
You are lowly single frigate captain? Behave like one! Hide from scary big fleets, smuggle, seek appropriate challenges in large sandbox rather have game generate only them. Game may highlight threat levels of missions/fleets/areas/etc, but it should be always up to player to decide to challenge them anyway.

Heh, I can't agree with that more :D. I greatly disliked TES: Oblivion's scaling just as much as you, it seems, and it really ruined the game for me. Starsector's bounties don't feel that bad to me. Anyway, Oblivion-esque scaling- in general- was not what I was going for, but I definitely get the concern. I think pirate ambushes/other threats to "pre-determined trade convoy targets" (aka the player on a trade mission) would warrant an appropriately boasting-level optimistic rather than decisively overwhelming- "response strength" from pirates/other hazards due to their nature as having your travel/escort information upfront. So scaling is very specific in context in this regard. It was intended to be a suggestion to give small fleets direct roles in more missions since general mission scaling tends to require larger fleets from repeated completion. Good point, though!

I'm also wanting to preserve the player's choice of composition, so I agree with the large sandbox aspect in general- it adds a lot to replay-ability and for that I like the concept a lot. My intention wasn't to take this part away, if that was the concern. I would, subjectively, like to try and get away from the idea that implementing progression gates kills the sandbox feel, though. I don't think it has to, at least. I could be wrong, but that's my take on it.

Quote
Dynamic, as in faction doing their own things - waging wars, expanding, building up infrastructure, etc. Not just formally declaring war/peace like now without any real consequences. Or pirates behaving like ones, rather than combination of zombie horde and bounty pinatas waiting to be looted.
Missions/bounties/etc not generated simply because player needs something to do of X difficulty, but due to current state of simulation. Of course, in sufficient number that player is likely to find ones he can do with current fleet at any point.

In terms of mission generation based on simulation state, 'Drox Operative' was quite a good example (if you were willing to accept actual combat mechanics being not very good).

Oh ok, I see what you mean. Well, it's not necessarily my preference for dev work, but I understand the desire for those kinds of mechanics in general. It's not that I don't want these things too, to be sure (Slightly off topic: Doesn't Nexerelin do some of these things? This doesn't help the unmodded new player but is a consideration as far as available content is concerned), but more that the difficulty state early on cannot, by the simulation's nature of being dynamic and variable, result in a calculable determination of difficulty for early game. The game could be difficult to learn in some circumstances because it's somewhat random as such a simulation should be- or therefore it's too predictable. The gates act as an ease of entrance into the simulation to increase the overall available audience of gamers and their general tolerance levels regarding said difficulty spikes. That's the idea, anyway.

The sort of dynamic simulation you're referring to, in my mind, would be a mid-late game mechanic to me (so debatable difficulty gate 3-4)- because it requires experienced knowledge of the simulation for the player to be able to interact with it effectively without a relatively steep learning curve or, worse, a predictable enough behavior to be manageable for a new player. The gates are proposed with the intention to give that new player experience in a controlled and therefore balance-able way. Then, greater difficulty levels can provide greater challenge without the worry of RNG causing an over-percentage of difficulty spikes. Experienced players could theoretically opt-in to as much complexity/difficulty as they want relatively quickly.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: TaLaR on March 01, 2020, 03:42:32 AM
Nexelerin does a good job at making game more dynamic, but there is always place for improvement. And there are limits to what can be done as a mod vs core game.

As for having clear difficulty progression, is it really that important? I've played many runs. From single frigate to capital fleet doesn't take all that long. For replay-ability embracing the volatile nature of dynamic sandbox and developing that further would be the best imo.

I mean sure, we could have some crutches for the tutorial run. But overall I don't like design like: "Big alien invasion will start...But only after you do this particular fetch quest.". Player shouldn't have that much unilateral influence on world state. Being able to influence - yes, but up to a limit. And if player ignores/delays some critical event it shouldn't simply go away/wait for him endlessly.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: intrinsic_parity on March 01, 2020, 11:08:11 AM
I think there can be scaling in a natural way. In a job, you might be given easy tasks early on, and then when you prove you can do them, you get promoted to doing more difficult tasks with more responsibility and access to resources. That's not some unnatural structure imposed on you, that's just a reasonable way of getting things done and allocating resources. Particularly here, the scaling is supposed to resemble a situation where you do some work for an admiral and prove that you're loyal to the faction, and then he gives access to some military tech help you continue benefiting his faction. Even more so, the idea that he gives you access to tech to do some specific thing that he wants done (i.e. I need you to kill this enemy admiral, so I'm going to give you access to a higher tier of tech that I think you will need to do that mission). To me that is less 'gamey' than you clicking the 'commission' button and then getting monthly income and access to military tech with virtually no strings attached.

In some sense, this idea can get reduced down to replacing the current reputation system where you can grind an endless number of simple/easy missions to build up rep and get access to tech, with a system where you do a few significant and challenging things to build up rep. At the end of the day, your access to tech would still be based on your 'reputation' like it is now (although perhaps with local commanders rather than whole factions), it's just that the way you get reputation is a bit different. I spent a lot of time explaining the benefits I think that will have on gameplay, but that really the actual change that I'm suggesting.

My biggest problem with the game right now is that there's no reason to ever do anything difficult. Once you understand the game mechanics well enough, you can pretty easily avoid every situation/fight with any risk and get the exact same outcomes you could get by taking difficult fights. The only exception might be if you want to get to a certain point faster, but there's no in-game reason to do things faster so that doesn't really do it for me.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Morrokain on March 01, 2020, 12:59:53 PM
Nexelerin does a good job at making game more dynamic, but there is always place for improvement. And there are limits to what can be done as a mod vs core game.

True.

As for having clear difficulty progression, is it really that important?

Certainly not to most people here (when speaking to the easy side of things) but to widen the audience? Absolutely. Those who would care about this the most can't speak here because they got frustrated and never registered (is my thought process). Some did, and after experienced forum members helped them out they got a better impression. That is part of the evidence I am considering to think about this in the first place.

I mean sure, we could have some crutches for the tutorial run. But overall I don't like design like: "Big alien invasion will start...But only after you do this particular fetch quest.". Player shouldn't have that much unilateral influence on world state. Being able to influence - yes, but up to a limit. And if player ignores/delays some critical event it shouldn't simply go away/wait for him endlessly.

I think that may be a tendency to look at the most extreme cases of difficulty gates and assume that will be the implementation because it has been done before. Those two things don't make much sense when stacked up next to each other- but- "Deteriorating diplomacy that relies on the player to smooth things over (for whatever reason) and opps! War!"- Is much more believable, for instance. Context matters here.

My biggest problem with the game right now is that there's no reason to ever do anything difficult. Once you understand the game mechanics well enough, you can pretty easily avoid every situation/fight with any risk and get the exact same outcomes you could get by taking difficult fights. The only exception might be if you want to get to a certain point faster, but there's no in-game reason to do things faster so that doesn't really do it for me.

This cuts to the core of why I, personally, am excited by the idea. It allows for harder difficulty without hurting new comers. Harder difficulty is tough to do right now because the way missions are generated is somewhat random. So the more difficult missions you have as potential options the more convoluted the mission screen gets and the increasing likelihood of generating few to no "easy" missions early on becomes more of a problem without some kind of system or metric to direct it.

Looking at the metrics that would be immediately attractive (player level, num of officers, fleet size) it becomes difficult to correctly parse a player's "strength" effectively to increase the difficulty since that can be so dynamic (so the calculation would have to be equally dynamic and complex- that could be really tough!). Players opting in seems like the best solution.

Since the technical considerations of opting in- upfront- (by easy mode, hard mode, etc) are good but incapable of handling the random (so difficulty spikes still prevail just more scale is available) in-game opt-ins seem better suited (alongside the difficulty options). On that note, since a "Do you want to increase the difficulty now?" dialogue seems immersion breaking, the logical conclusion is immersive missions (to me).
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Terethall on March 02, 2020, 12:44:24 PM
My first playthrough, I got a commission and bought all the best ships, and made a colony and then printed paragons and tach lances. I was bored after like 15-20 hours. My second playthrough, I added a handful of extra ships in mods and played salvage-only (no commission, no market purchases except fuel, crew, and supplies, no officer hiring from markets, and no colonies). It was a hundred times better because I was forced to use a wide variety of ships, and when I lost them,I couldn't just buy or print more (reinforced bulkheads was a good friend). D mods everywhere. Hunting fleets with capitals in them on the chance of being able to recover them was huge fun. I 100% support the suggestions here about having an option that heavily restricts markets and access to the top tier ships. Otherwise you miss out on a lot of content. New players don't have any kind of reference telling them that using markets and colonies and commissions will make the game stale much faster.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Daynen on March 05, 2020, 03:08:13 PM
Over the last three decades of gaming, I've developed a bit of a bad taste for what I call "disposable gameplay."  It feels bad to me to discard something I enjoy using just because something else is more powerful.  It's one thing to drop a low-level sword in an MMO because that's just a stat stick; it's another entirely to throw away a detailed, nuanced, specialized starship just because something else is bigger.  How many times have you found a weapon, character, ship, etc. in a game somewhere that you fell in love with playing but had to discard later because "it's not viable late game?"  It sucks and I don't like doing it.  That's not even counting how I feel for whichever artists and developers put in the work to make the thing in the first place.  It just feels like we're throwing away what they built.

I'm of the mind that if you're going to make something for the game and put in the work to make it useful you should make something that STAYS useful so it doesn't just get left by the wayside.  It's easy to get lost in the "progression" debate and turn the game into a spreadsheet with a bell curve but I feel that does great games (like Starsector) an injustice.  There's a strong foundation here for varied, challenging and durable gameplay but if it all boils down to who has more Paragons then that's a lot of wasted work in my eyes.

One thing I think could have an intriguing effect on Starsector pacing and progression, or at least the player's priorities within it, is time.  You have all the time you want in SS.  There is no real "game over."  Lose your entire fleet?  you get thrown back to a ragtag starter fleet.  Get all your cores taken?  Go farm some more.  Sure it's a sandboxy game but a definite loss condition adds structure and incentive.  If you've ever played a game like Sid Meier's Pirates you'll know precisely what I'm talking about.  Having your captain age as you game puts you on the clock and forces choices.  I've mentioned it before and I still wonder what kind of experience SS would be if your time in the sector wasn't infinite.

Another game that taught me a fascinating lesson on progression was Firefall (before its full release; I played during the open beta.)  The main feature I reference was the finite durability of every piece of gear.  No matter the item, it had a limited pool of health and when it hit zero, it was scrap.  End of story.  Some weapons could be maintained longer but eventually, EVERY item broke.  Many people hated it.  I found it created an intriguing choice system: do you bring your best gear for this outing?  Or do you hold it back and bring something more expendable?  Do you really NEED that top quality epic gun for this or can you handle it with your more common variant?  What if bigger ships just gradually developed baked in D-mods over a period of time, owing to the more challenging maintenance of such huge vessels?  Taking less hits could slow this process but all machines degrade with time, right?  While it would automatically make smaller ships better, it would create an ever so slight rubberband effect on endgame capital fleets, while also giving your favorite ships a bit of a history over time.  What if having excess crew helped delay this degradation, while running understrength accelerated it?  What would THAT game look like?
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Grievous69 on March 06, 2020, 01:25:54 AM
@Daynen
1. ''disposable gameplay'': There's nothing wrong with wanting a certain ship or weapon to be useful 100% of the game but that's nearly impossible to achieve. There's always gonna be a better escort ship, better missile boat, better support etc. And you're not ''disposing'' anything that you really need to do so, it's a single player game. Your point would stand in a multiplayer one where it's beneficial to have the best possible equipment unless you want a real challenge, here the choice is all yours. So what people found out capital spam works, and capital spam is also good? You can still experiment with other fleet comps. I'm getting a bit annoyed seeing these two playstyles EVERYWHERE and then people totally forget you can play the game however you want. Also even if something appears only once in the whole game, then it's not a waste of resources, your ''disposable gameplay'' contradicts every linear game ever.

2. Time limit: Now I don't think this was confirmed confirmed but Alex said he wanted to experiment with a system where you have a limited time frame before x thing happens, there was also talk about it being optional so it doesn't ruin the game for those who like to take it slow.

3. Durability: Funnily enough, this is my #1 most hated game mechanic, it's so incredibly gamey and just a way for the game to tell you ''*** you for using good weapons''. But even I understand that it's meant to diversify what equipment a player will have to use for any given task. The thing is, we already have a similar-ish system in Starsector. Aaaaand the name is DP. You have to deploy just enough ships to be able to defeat the enemies, but under the total cost of CR repairs afterwards. Just like you're not gonna kill a lvl 1 Frog with an Excalibur in RPGs, you're not gonna deploy your whole fleet to blow up a few destroyers here.
Title: Re: Tuning fleet composition balance by progression
Post by: Igncom1 on March 07, 2020, 12:56:11 AM
I suppose one thing to consider is even if late game frigates become outmoded, giving them a new use could be nice.