Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: Üstad on May 26, 2020, 05:19:02 PM
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A capital exclusive hullmod should allow smaller ships to reload their ammo by coming near the hullmoded capital ship and waiting there.
Though during the battle it could be very problematics with the AI. They should only consider it when they are safe and for the player this behaviour should be turned off by default. With something like automatic orders mod play can allow this behaviour automatically, assuming you're familiar with the mod.
It's just a suggestion. I would be glad if I contribute this game somehow, so here it is who knows maybe it's a good idea. :)
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Cute idea, but you ever try ferrying live warheads on a pulley from one ship to the other while both are maneuvering and in combat? You'd have to sit still, lower shields, expose loading ports on both ships. Not to mention presenting an extremely juicy target in the missiles themselves.
It would also have to be balanced against Afflictors / Reapers zipping over to the enemy, unloading all torpedos and zipping back to load up. Missiles are currently balanced against being limited (most of them), with the only exception of missile reloading ship systems on dedicated missile ships. I'm thinking from the required AI changes to the changes in playing field for missiles in general, this would be difficult to balance and not at all an easy addition to the game.
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This is a reason why I often call fighters better missiles than missiles. Need unlimited torpedoes? Bring an Astral! Need Sabots for Odyssey? Get some Longbows instead of filling your missile mounts with pods.
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There have been a few of these threads. I completely agree, all missiles should regen as a standard, with very rare exceptions.
The current situation where the most basic fighter in the game (Talon) can regenerate its swarmers, but a battleship for some reason can't is just strange. This is what leads to the the the popularity of all Reaper Afflictor - other designs are just not worth it.
To add to that the AI is prone to wasting missiles and once you weather the initial barrage, all that OP becomes dead weight.
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The current situation where the most basic fighter in the game (Talon) can regenerate its swarmers, but a battleship for some reason can't is just strange.
Bad argument. Not because you are wrong, cos' you are right. I mean, what you say is rather a reason to nerf a fighters (especially bombers), than buff a rockets with regeneration.
However, I do not think regenerated missiles are totally bad idea. First of all there are lot of a "small" missiles, who works in swarms. Why not increase their ammo, or add a slow steady regeneration? I mean, we have salamanders, they are infinite, why not else? Not a torpedo, off course.
Do not wish player to abuse missiles? Decrease a CR with each shot based on a rocket type and hull size. I mean, you can almost free launch swarmers on a cap, but some frigates will malfunction if tried to make a second/third/fourth harpoon salvo. And for the reapers, why not just make them almost as dangerous to fire as to catch? I mean, sector is dying, ships and ammunition more and more looks like a scrap, why would firing a tinkered nuke be a safe thing?
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Missiles are currently in a pretty good state as the most powerful weapons in the game. Them reloading in general would require some pretty extreme rebalancing or the game would become a whole lot more deadly, for both sides.
I think this suggestion would be a neat thing for a logistics focused semi-combat capital: perhaps it is teleporting ordinance directly into the racks of the ships nearby? That would be a neat thing to build a fleet around, as long as the ship itself was rather vulnerable for its deployment cost. The AI is a bit problematic though, because with regenerating missiles ships should be firing them much more frequently... hmm can weapon tags be changed on the fly? If the new capital's reload system also changes the weapon tags that could do the trick. Its a neat idea!
This is a reason why I often call fighters better missiles than missiles. Need unlimited torpedoes? Bring an Astral! Need Sabots for Odyssey? Get some Longbows instead of filling your missile mounts with pods.
They are extremely differently though. Bomber wings fire in irregular waves and need to overwhelm an enemy, which may be easier or harder depending on their state. Interceptors and heavy fighters swarm around their target firing guns. Neither of those are how any missiles (except maybe the annihilator rack) behave: the comparison is just not true.
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teleporting ordinance directly into the racks of the ships nearby?
Why not just:
teleporting ordinance directly into the racks vital subsystems of the enemy ships nearby?
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I don't get how some keep saying that fighters (bombers here) carrying the same exact weapon, with same exact stats as you put on your ships are WEAKER. Fighters have much longer range, are faster, usually have some decoy flares around, and most importantly they don't risk ***, if they blow up who cares, new batch coming in right up. Sure a ship may fire more missiles but the bigger ones still have long reloads, so it's still a wave if you look at it that way. and the overwhelm part is just wrong, usually the missiles fired from single ships get knocked out by PD, not the fighter ones coming in almost point blank.
Regenerating missiles is a completely normal thing as we have those already in the game and I've seen lots in mods, they're not even close to broken. The cooldown just has to be long enough, that's all. Because personally, going out of ammo in half of a fight is such a stupid feeling, and don't give me that ''but you took out more ships faster so the enemy forces are now thinner'', yea but that doesn't mean much when the enemy forces are 4 times as big as your fleet. If a goal is to kill the enemies quickly then SO is perfect for that.
Out of all large missiles I only use Locusts, everything else runs out super quick and is not worth it. Other sizes get more spread out choices but I usually give those to AI so they have some sort of panic button. On my flagship I either have Reapers or nothing.
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They are different because the cyclic fire rate is lower, you can't control the time of fire, they cost more OP and have higher opportunity costs (must have decks! usually dedicated ships, with a few exceptions), and fighters that have been killed have long down time before they are available again (and people keep saying how expanded decks is a "must have" hullmod, so I guess they are getting shot down pretty often). In exchange they have longer range and regenerate when depleted.
I'm not saying bombers are weak - a Heron or Astral is a darn powerful strike craft - but ignoring the difference between fighters and missiles and when its good to use one vs the other is an easy way to make fleets a lot weaker than they should be.
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Yeah I agree that they're different but in the end it gets leveled out. So when someone claims regenerating missiles would be broken it makes me laugh. Also you can't compare OPs when one way the missiles regens and the other doesn't.
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What fighters lose from lack of coordination (if you're trying to pump out as many torpedoes as possible and/or are in close combat), they make up for with unlimited ordnance. Just brute force your way into victory.
Main reason to take EDC is to prevent any losses from accumulating. It means more fighters have to be lost for longer, before fighter replacement rate starts dropping under pressure.
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What fighters lose from lack of coordination (if you're trying to pump out as many torpedoes as possible and/or are in close combat), they make up for with unlimited ordnance. Just brute force your way into victory.
Pretty much this, but also fighters allow force concentration. You can stack many khopeshes on a single ship in a way that's almost impossbile to do with ships.
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Generally, the difference between fighters and missiles is fighters can endure for the whole battle and win battles for you if you have enough of them. For missiles, if they are like Pilums, it is a joke weapon that can blot the screen for a few minutes and maybe kill a ship before they run out of steam, while anything else that is effective runs out of ammo too quickly (except maybe Locusts with missile racks) and you deal with the rest of the ship spam with less. At best, it is four Reaper Afflictor assassinating a high-value enemy target or two, maybe playership Aurora spamming tons of Sabots and blasting a few cruisers to death before running out and retreats like Reaper Afflictor would, or Conquest with double Locusts and missile racks slaughtering small fry and weakened battleships in round one. Some of the really good missiles are only effective in player's hands.
In some ways, fighters behave like missiles. They are weapons your ships can equip, and they seek out the enemy, but instead being dumb and crashing into the enemy, they release submunitions like a MIRV before returning back to the mothership for another run. Fighters-as-weapons really blur the line. Fighters even feel closer to missiles than ballistic or energy weapons do.
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all missiles should regen as a standard, with very rare exceptions
reloading in general would require some pretty extreme rebalancing
This thread has derailed evolved into a perennial different conversation about strikecraft as a game mechanic, but I'd like to go a little meta on the original point -- feel free to ignore me.
I, and I think a lot of other very nerdy players of RPGs and battle simulators like Starsector, have a really weird hoarding instinct and aversion to items/weapons with limited ammunition/charges/uses/etc. When I started playing, it took a long time for me to get comfortable with missiles. It wasn't even clear to me as a new player whether missiles recharged between battles -- I thought maybe I'd have to buy them again when they ran out, and that the weapon item itself held the charges. Adding even an extremely slow regeneration speed to missiles, like one per minute for a harpoon rack, I think might go a long way to getting new players and very, very loss-averse players to experiment with, and learn to love, missile weapons.
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I think near-universal missile regen is a must at this point. If carriers can essentially print fighters, why can't basically any ship do so with missiles? In a fight between one or the other, carriers will win because as mentioned, fighters tend to outlast missiles and overall tend to not only deal out a lot more damage on their own, but also help create even more opportunities to deliver further damage - EMP-armed fighters especially.
This is where Frigates could be given another distinct advantage over larger ships - smaller ones reload missiles faster. I can't pull a good in-universe explanation for this, but for gameplay purposes it'd help them keep punching above their weight class.
The hardpoint/launcher's charges could still be limited overall, by CR would probably be easiest but a Harpoon rack could have its 3 missiles and say 27 in reserve (maybe reserves are larger for larger ship classes) - it'd have to be a protracted fight to burn through all those given a sufficiently long reloading period.
I think buffing things generally has better results than nerfing - With fighters being so powerful, and especially if missiles are going to be rounded up rather than fighters rounded down, PD and anti-missile, anti-fighter equipment capabilities would benefit from a buff too.
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I, and I think a lot of other very nerdy players of RPGs and battle simulators like Starsector, have a really weird hoarding instinct and aversion to items/weapons with limited ammunition/charges/uses/etc.
True, I generally don't like paying for something that's gonna be of super short use for me. Like let's say a strong weapon in an RPG but with very low durability. You're either gonna blow it right at the start or just end up saving it for the perfect opportunity that's gonna stretch out to forever and it'll stay unused until you figure out what has happened to your sanity (I know it's not like this in Starsector with missiles but just for the sake of the argument).
Btw when I meant regenerating missiles, I didn't mean each and every one of them should be like that. I'm fine with some being limited, those that are strong ofc. But look at Annihilators, both small and medium, perfect choice for slow regen. Squall is also weird, large missile that has only 5! uses and it's not even that good (sustained limited kinetic damage). Relying on missiles to do kinetic work is bad from the start so the only time I've used these was in a tournament because fights are short there. Medium Harpoons also strike me as a bit odd with only 3 uses, I think they were changed a while ago (maybe it was 3 fired before?). I fit these only on Falcon(P) and low DP ships, other than that Reapers are better, especially on a flagship. I'd like to see Sabot damage nerfed a bit, but adding a regen because they're essential for some high-tech ships and it seems we maybe not getting an alternative (be in energy or missile).
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ANY ships uses limited resources, namely PPT/CR. Basically, THE measure of loadout usefulness is how much stuff you can kill before you run out of PPT.
A non-ammo based ship enjoys it's peak performance for whole PPT duration, a missile user gets short burst of higher performance while missiles last followed by down phase.
I don't find most missiles good enough by this metric, at least for player ships - there are usually enough ways to win without resorting to limited missiles that are only somewhat slower.
As exception, Reapers are usually good to have a few, considering that they cost only 2 OP for 4k damage shot. The ship needs to be fast and have right slots to deliver them comfortably though.
Sabots already have only about the same dps as HAC (sure it's flux-free, but also very limited). Imo the primary reason many players praise Sabots is AI's inability to counter them. It's not that hard - just let them hit armor (they don't do that much emp or armor damage (especially with AC1 + IM1), getting emp-ed is not as bad as getting overfluxed even if it happens) or back off (Sabot 1st stage doesn't inherit launcher's speed, is very slow and can't catch up to most ships). Or use skimmer to dodge outright.
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I don't get how some keep saying that fighters (bombers here) carrying the same exact weapon, with same exact stats as you put on your ships are WEAKER.
Besides the fact that you can control the timing and amount and target much easier with your own ship weapons on fighters are also just weaker.
Missiles benefit from all combat weapon skills
They get +25% damage, +15% damage, +50% hit strength to penetrate armor, +15% damage to shields, +50% damage to weapons and armor, and if you shoot at fighters or missiles (swarmers are a good example) another +50% damage to those.
Missiles on fighters get +20% damage to ships destroyer size and larger or +30% damage to fighters and missiles.
Now lets add up then the damage that a sabot does against shields when fired by a longbow vs a player ship.
Longbow = 1.2
Player Ship = 1.25*1.15*1.15 = 1.6531
When those sabots end up penetrating shields they do 50% more damage with their EMP arcs.
You might notice that this is almost 40% more damage from the player ship(or an officer ship which is why a single harpoon/mirv loaded griffin is really good), which has a much easier time coordinating those missile strikes.
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@Goumindong
Besides the fact that you're comparing walking up to a ship versus the payload coming on a small hard to hit craft with no risk. I wouldn't care if player did 100% more damage, you still need to grab all those skills. In general it's annoying when someone is just using stats in a vacuum to show something while at the same time ignoring 10 other factors that actually matter. Numbers aren't everything people!
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Well yes fighters do have some advantages. They would have to wouldn't they?
But you said that they're the exact same stats with the exact same weapon. Its not. Its legitimately stronger in the player version. A lot stronger, both in raw numbers, and in the ability to more easily follow up and capitalize on the strikes. Sometimes this matters, sometimes this doesn't. Sometimes combat doesn't have six cycles of fighter engagements. Sometimes player ships with missiles make you not need that much time in a fight either.
And that makes missiles still really really good.
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But you said that they're the exact same stats with the exact same weapon. Its not. Its legitimately stronger in the player version. A lot stronger, both in raw numbers,
So you're saying they are better but ONLY if you take all the combat skills you mentioned, gotcha, because yes every single Starsector player picks those skills. Not to mention we're getting a new skill system so maybe they'll be even less powerful next update.
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ANY ships uses limited resources, namely PPT/CR. Basically, THE measure of loadout usefulness is how much stuff you can kill before you run out of PPT.
This is the reason why, even with bloated fights sometimes happening, I still use missiles. I don't have infinite time to defeat the enemy, even if I can greatly extend it. However, the time it takes to win some battles still makes me hesitant to use some missiles, which get used up too fast to be really useful. Locusts are amazing, because they're so versatile and last so long.
Presumably, these concerns will be taken care of by decreased scale of battles. Alex said he reigned the capspam in. We will see how it goes.
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But you said that they're the exact same stats with the exact same weapon. Its not. Its legitimately stronger in the player version. A lot stronger, both in raw numbers,
So you're saying they are better but ONLY if you take all the combat skills you mentioned, gotcha, because yes every single Starsector player picks those skills. Not to mention we're getting a new skill system so maybe they'll be even less powerful next update.
And fighters arent that good if you dont take the three/four fighter skills? There are actually more fighter skils than missile damage ones (3 primary ones).
But i dont think that matters. Not every loadout has to be good with every skill set.
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@ Grievous: About missile pods, they still had 12 ammo, but only fired two at a time, for six bursts total. They were weaker racks with more ammo. Later (possibly during 0.6.x), they became four-shot. Recently, Sabot pods were reverted back to the original two-shot burst again due to how AI is incapable of defending against them, while Harpoons retain the four-shot burst.
Four shot Harpoons were deadly with old Missile Specialization 10. Now, I do not know good Harpoons are with modern Modern Spec, but without the skill, Harpoons are far too unreliable (too slow and easily shot down) and low ammo, not to mention AI squanders them at insignificant targets at times.
The only missiles I bother with are Hammers, Reapers, Sabots, Salamanders, Annihilators, and Locusts. Some of those are only good as player-only weapons. Hammers and Reapers are cheap, Sabots are life for high-tech, Annihilators are life for low-tech, Salamanders can be good in one-on-one duels, and Locusts are reliable, effective, and can get enough ammo (with Expanded Missile Racks) to be useful in a long fight (which is every fight late in the game).
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Harpoons are killers, especially with missile skills - they have a hard time hitting frigates without any boosters at all, but will reliably pop overloaded destroyers+.
I extensively use Harpoons in my fleets, though I will put Reapers on ships I know are going to be right up in the enemy's face (Hammerheads, close range frigates like omen, Tempest (though Tempest moves so fast the horizontal velocity can cause the reaper to miss...)), and also sabots on ships that I think need some shield breaking help. I did comparisons on the same battle with missiles on my ships and with the OP spent on caps/hullmods using combat analytics: The missile versions performed better, having higher damage output over the course of the fight. The combats were also quicker and easier.
(Fun aside: I had two P Shrikes, railgun and heavy blaster, but I didn't have enough sabot pods, so 1 got a sabot pod and 1 got a harpoon pods. Overall they tied for damage output: sometimes the harpoon shrike did better, sometimes the sabot shrike, but they mostly averaged out.)
There's a fallacy going on when people say something akin to 'quick kills are nice but don't matter when the AI outnumbers you by a lot': its ignoring how the enemy enters the battlefield. They burn in just like the player, coming in in a massive wave outnumbering the player 3:2, then trickle in as they die. A huge part of the fight is just breaking that initial 3:2 wave. After that the AI never has the same concentration of force: their fighters are depleted and on recharge, or at least aren't coordinated anymore; their caps coming in are slow (barring Radiant) and take a long time to reach the battle; they have less and less overall forces as the DP balance shifts.
An aggressive strategy - no matter how its accomplished - hinges on breaking the enemy wave and then locally overpowering them over and over again. I do that with a combat skilled player ship and with missiles all over the place, and I find it to be effective. Its not the only way to go, but it works.