Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: Megas on March 05, 2022, 07:34:14 PM
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Some ships benefit so much from specific skills that it feels like I ought to respec often if I want to change flagships, but I do not like the idea of throwing story points away just because I want to change flagships frequently. I like Ziggurat, but its weaknesses irritate me from time to time, and sometimes, I want to pilot something more ordinary like an Onslaught.
Lately, I have been reconsidering swapping my planned Combat skills from Field Modulation and System Expertise to Point Defense and Ballistic Mastery. Why? If I end up picking Onslaught as my primary flagship (because hangar queen Ziggurat eats too much CR and DP), then the range boosts from Ballistic Mastery and elite PD turn Heavy Machine Guns from mostly PD to a medium range assault weapon with high DPS and great efficiency, plus mass HMGs can and will shoot down missiles. HMGs with all the range boosts feels like a poor-man's Storm Needler, but much more practical. Onslaught becomes a blender, with TPCs and Gauss for long-range kills while Devastators and HMGs chew up everything else closer.
That is not all. With Medusa or various midline ships ranging from Centurion to Eagle, I can have long-range burst PD as anti-armor to compliment otherwise all-kinetic loadouts plus double as reliable PD; or I can add elite PD and IPDAI and have some high-tech ships like Wolf or Aurora with IR Pulse Laser spam that has better range and efficiency than 600 range medium weapons. Even with Sunder, elite PD + IPDAI is a cheaper alternative to Ballistic Rangefinder to boost Railgun range close to Tachyon Lance (or HIL) range. Speaking of Railguns, Medusa with ePD+IPDAI Railguns and AO+ePD burst lasers have surprisingly long range that the AI can use very well. While I build up flux with more traditional loadouts, Medusa with Railguns and burst lasers is very cool and defeats enemies that flux themselves out trying to kill Medusa.
But if I am not using one of several ships that benefit highly from Combat range extenders (that let ships replace normal kinetics with extremely efficient and damaging HMGs and/or make burst PDs long-range hitscan weapons), I am stuck with skills (Point Defense and Ballistic Mastery) I cannot use well, and I want to swap back to other combat skills that are more generally useful.
If skill system encourages different selections that vary by flagship, and the player wants to change flagships often, then it should be cheaper to respec. Also, it hurts not being able to respec officers at all. Now, I am tempted to try to squeeze elite PD on most of them (or more precisely, firing most of my officers and hire new ones) because long range HMGs are so good, and long-range burst lasers are fun. Also will not say no to IR Pulse Lasers with more range than any medium hard-flux energy weapon, and longer-ranged railguns for ships with hybrid or universal mounts like Centurion and Medusa (that Ballistic Rangefinder does not work on).
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>Skill system encouraging frequent respec is annoying when it is not cheap.
this is true, but skill systems with cheap respecs may as well not even be skill systems
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"Skill system encourages frequent respec"
It does?
*Has never respec'd yet*
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Respec is not cheap, it eats a story point without any bonus xp.
"Skill system encourages frequent respec"
It does?
*Has never respec'd yet*
For me, I have not taken Combat skills yet because in part because of respecs. But I will need to take more skills once I prepare to attack full Ordos fleets. For some ships, I want range boosters (like elite PD) because it turns normally PD weapons into premium assault weapons by extending range far enough, making the ships that benefit much stronger. If I want Doom, I want Systems Expertise and probably Field Modulation for mine spam. If I have Legion XIV, Conquest, or other missile reliant ship, I may want Missile Specialization. If I have any frontline ship that does not benefit too much from range boosters, I may want Field Modulation and Impact Mitigation to brawl Ordos with mass elite Target Analysis (that cuts through shields and easily knockout mounts). Maybe I want Target Analysis to kill most ships faster.
If I have five points for Combat skills, I do not have enough to take everything I want for any ship I want to pilot. The skills I want for any given ship will vary. Also, if I get bored of Automated Ships and want other ships in my fleet like carriers or several frigates with officers, I want to respec Auto Ships away for the one or two Leadership skills that massively boost certain ships.
Respec with no bonus xp discourages respec, and even if it did, paying off the bonus xp debt is tedious without a fleet that can grind Ordos for +500% xp. I like to spend most of my story points on s-mods and colony improvements (and I want some more to retrain officers), and frequent respecs get in the way of that.
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I know elsewhere you've said that you don't like modding your game, but the fix for your problem is so simple that honestly it's kind of your own fault if you let this continue bothering you.
Go into settings.json and change the maximum level to 21 or 23. Then you'll have enough skill points at maximum level to get all combat skills plus all the essential non-combat skills, but as long you keep your max level under 25 you'll still have enough scarcity that there will be skills you want but can't get, and so will have a distinct "build" instead of just having all the skills.
You'll still need to work to get those skill points. Levels slow down markedly so you'll be playing the mid-game longer as you get those extra few levels, but having those extra skills means you'll be able to have your combat skills while you play through the mid game.
As for story points, change the points per level from 4 to 5. That'll let you do most of your critical colony upgrades, upgrade officers, and still spend enough story points to keep your xp bar green in the later levels. See? Two tiny changes, easily done, and your problems are solved. When a game is this easy to modify, it's really up to the player to make sure they get the most enjoyment out of the game. There's no existential purity to playing the game unmodified - it's a framework designed to let you change it to suit your needs. Change it.
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I know elsewhere you've said that you don't like modding your game, but the fix for your problem is so simple that honestly it's kind of your own fault if you let this continue bothering you.
The underlaying problem is the tedious grind for story points at max level and competition for story points by things more important than respec (like s-modding ships).
I do not mind the max level of 15. What I do not like is the painful cost of reconfiguring skills and officers when story point gain at max level is slow. It is better than before 0.95 when respec was not possible (and replaying the game from the beginning was the only option), but even now, losing story points for relatively frivolous things (like respec or even adding elite skills to officers only to fire them later) hurt when player wants to double or triple s-mod dozens of ships and/or bestow multiple improvements to five or so colonies. If player only gets normal experience or mild extra xp (less than 100%) from combat, it takes a long time to build up story points. I almost feel like I am doing Countess/Mephisto/Baal runs for uniques or other items in Diablo II when I grinding dozens of bounties for credits and story points in Starsector. I do not want to burn a story point for good just to change and optimize for the flagship of the day, then a new one for the next moment, and so on. Instead, I feel my choices that burn story points are locked because if I do not stick with them, I sacrificed my story points for nothing. Even spending a story point to recover one of my ships for +100% xp kind of hurts, and I have reloaded the game once or twice to avoid spending a story point because I do not want to grind away several more bounties to clear the bonus xp debt.
Starsector is not a coffeebreak game that can be done in a few hours or less. It is a long haul game that can take a while before player gets very far.
If the game makes itself a pain to play, I may just quit and stop playing. But Starsector is not finished yet, and there is time to vent things that bother me before the game is done.
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What I do not like is the painful cost of reconfiguring skills and officers when story point gain at max level is slow.
But this is my point. You don't have to reconfigure your skills if you can afford to get the ones you "need" to be happy with your play. You can fix your problem by just increasing the skill cap.
I do not want to burn a story point for good just to change and optimize for the flagship of the day, then a new one for the next moment, and so on.
Again, you won't be burning story points if you allow yourself a few more skills. This will fix the problem you keep hammering on. You'll have enough skill points, and will be able to spend your story points on things you'd rather spend them on, like your S-Mods and colonies.
I feel my choices that burn story points are locked because if I do not stick with them, I sacrificed my story points for nothing.
And yet with just a few more skill points, you don't need to sacrifice story points at all. This problem only exists because you allow it to, despite the game being designed to make it easy for you to fix this problem for yourself.
There's no need to respec, ever. But if you find yourself respeccing, it's because you feel you don't have the bare minimum skills you need. So the fix is obvious - save your story points by increasing your skill points. You can do that by increasing the level cap, or if for some reason you just love the number 15, you can increase the skill points per level from 1 to 2, though 30 skill points is very Monty Haul. But, hey - it's a single player game. There's no such thing as cheating in a single player game. There's just enjoying the game, or not.
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If having all the skills fixes the problem, why is the level cap 15 instead of 40?
Giving myself more skills by altering out-of-game settings file is akin to cheating. If I want to do stuff like that, I would do much more than few minor power tweaks. I want to play the game within the rules given by the devs.
Even raising game speed from 1f to 2f feels a bit dirty, and I do not like to do it, but I make that one change only because I would refuse to play the game otherwise for combat being way too slow paced. I wished game speed was in the in-game settings like map size is (even if maximum map size limits are too low).
Cheating should not be the answer to "fix" problems.
P.S. If I thought the game gave too few skills, I would have posted a topic titled something like "Game gives too few skill points" or something like that and made the case for it. I think the game may favor combat skills more than QoL skills enough that getting QoL skills hurts, but that is not very relevant for this topic of frequent respecs due to varying flagships being painful.
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If having all the skills fixes the problem, why is the level cap 15 instead of 40?
Because for many (most?) people it isn't a 'problem'. Everybody has their own preferred way to play, but your post history reads to me as somebody that feels that there is a single 'right' way to play and everybody else is just wrong.
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I'm a bit confused, because you said that you haven't taken combat skills yet, but you also said the frequent respeccing is due to combat skills, so are you actually doing frequent respecs or not?
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If having all the skills fixes the problem, why is the level cap 15 instead of 40?
You haven't even clearly defined a problem, so who knows? But the reason the skill point cap isn't 40 is because scarcity drives game play. If you can get everything, then there's no tradeoff. Being unable to get everything you want makes you choose a specific way to play. This is Game Design 101.
Giving myself more skills by altering out-of-game settings file is akin to cheating. [...] I want to play the game within the rules given by the devs.
It's nothing like cheating. And if the game devs didn't want players to be able to modify the game rules so they could enjoy the game more, they wouldn't have put those settings in a clear file called settings.json that can be edited by anyone with a text editor. The choice to make a game moddable is exactly that - a choice. The way the devs made this game is so that people can make small or even significant changes, if they want to.
Cheating should not be the answer to "fix" problems.
There is no such thing as cheating in a single player game.
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I'm a bit confused, because you said that you haven't taken combat skills yet, but you also said the frequent respeccing is due to combat skills, so are you actually doing frequent respecs or not?
Not yet because 1) I do not want to burn through story points like water reassigning skills frequently instead of s-modding my ships and improving my colonies. As a result, I resorted to 2) Ziggurat flagship with Phase Anchor to avoid the need to pick Combat skills because Ziggurat supported by SO Hyperions is strong enough to smash endgame human bounties without any need of Combat skills. (I have five unspent skill points at the moment, the other ten are in Automated Ships and Hull Restoration.) But I can see it will not be enough against a single full Ordos with Radiants and all blue cores, or even if it is for one fight, if I get sucked into a multi-round combat or a second fight too soon, my fleet will die (because my fleet's strongest ships are Ziggurat and Hyperions, and I may get different ships to fix that). I will need to spend my five unspent points somewhere to make my fleet strong enough to defeat full-strength Ordos instead of getting wiped by them. In other words, I deferred my decision on my remaining five skills for later, but "later" is coming up very soon after I resume my game.
Three of the five points will go the Helmsmanship, Combat Endurance, and Impact Mitigation. Helmsmanship because piloting big ships without it feels very sluggish. I want my ships to feel responsive, not slow as molasses. Combat Endurance mainly because if I pilot a small ship, I do not want PPT expiring too soon. Also, if I pilot Ziggurat, I want less time before its CR recovers enough. Impact Mitigation because more maneuverability (great for otherwise slowpokes) and more importantly, Ordos not knocking out my weapons so easily if my ship eats a few hits, not to mention more armor is great for low-tech armor tanks. So that leaves two left for elective Combat skills, or perhaps Wolfpack Tactics and/or Carrier Group for the rest of my fleet.
For Ziggurat, I would want Field Modulation and (if I get enough Omega missiles) Missile Specialization or (if no Omega missiles) Systems Expertise or Wolfpack Tactics (I have many frigates with officers). Ditto if I pick Doom or Paragon for my flagship. However, if I decide I want Onslaught flagship (and Onslaught is very good this release), I want to swap those two skills for Point Defenses and Ballistic Mastery because it turns those HMGs from fringe PD into superior assault weapons. Ditto if I take various ships that work very well with the kinetics and burst PD combo, like Medusa or some of the midline ships. If I want to pilot something with lots of large missiles, especially if it can use Hammer Barrage, I want Missile Specialization.
However, what I have done is reassign skills frequently when testing ships and loadouts in the SIM in preparation for my eventual clash with Ordos, before quitting and reloading the game to restore story points. When I test Onslaught, I had the best results with Point Defense and Ballistic Mastery instead of the other skills I originally planned to take as default general skills because machine guns become medium range. It is like the Lucky's Onslaught build on steroids because HMGs have so much range (and the old Impact Mitigation that gave extra protection against kinetics and/or low damage attacks is gone). If I want I different capital, I probably want Field Modulation for harder shields (or cheap phase upkeep if I take Doom or Ziggurat), and the last skill can either go to Tier 5 combat or Wolfpack Tactics. My Ordos killer fleet is not yet set in stone, but even if I did pick one, I want to change flagship without spending all of my story points to get the right skills.
I do not want to be locked into one flagship for a significant amount of time. Before now, I have picked QoL or generally useful combat skills in the non-Combat tree.
You haven't even clearly defined a problem, so who knows? But the reason the skill point cap isn't 40 is because scarcity drives game play. If you can get everything, then there's no tradeoff. Being unable to get everything you want makes you choose a specific way to play. This is Game Design 101.
Then why did you suggest I mod the game (via altering settings.json or whatever) to raise max level cap to eliminate scarcity in the first place? (Rhetorical, no need to answer.) Not to mention raising level cap does not truly fix the problem of relatively expensive respec when game can encourage respecs if player wants to change flagships often.
I want to play an unmodded game. But parts of the unmodded game are annoying. For this topic, I am venting about the cost of reassigning skills.
There is no such thing as cheating in a single player game.
Hard disagree with that. Even single-player games have rules. Break them and the game has no point. I do not need to waste time playing a game with no rules. I am not opposed to taking advantage of exploits and loopholes that are degenerate but still rules-legal, even if it is a good idea to patch them out.
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Then why did you suggest I mod the game (via altering settings.json or whatever) to raise max level cap to eliminate scarcity in the first place?
I've been quite clear. Recommending you raise the level cap to 21 or 23 still only represents barely over half the points needed to get all skills, and does not eliminate scarcity - it simply pushes it from what should be, based on your posts, uncomfortable scarcity to tolerable scarcity. If you're not even going to pay attention to solutions, why complain in the first place?
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Whole skill system is stupid on a "sandbox" game. It would make sense for a game that is "play-throughs" based rouge-likes or strategy games. Just mod it yeah?
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No, the premise is backward.
The skill system discourages frequent respec. That's why it costs a story point to do so. It's the game's way of telling you, hey, you should reconsider if doing a respec is worth it. The skill system encouraging frequent respec would be something like, giving you a free story point every time you did it.
However, yes the skill system is by design scarce with the number of skill points given. That is to say, the player will never have "enough" -- the player is always missing out on something, no matter what they choose. This is by design, so that the player is forced to choose between many good options. If this weren't the case, then the player can just stick with one set of skills (the one that's the "best" and has everything) and never bother with other possibilities, which hurts replayability. The whole point is to give the player lots of different ways to play the game, but not all of them simultaneously, so that the player has to consider the effects of the different skills and how they want to construct their flagship and their fleet.
But it seems like you would like to indulge in a playstyle where you're constantly changing flagships and thus changing the skills for them, to min-max the effectiveness of the flagship for any given situation. The whole point of a respec costing a story point is to make it not so frivolous, so that it "means" something. That there are consequences for doing so. In other words, Alex is specifically not condoning too-frequent respecs, or at least, having the player pay in story points if he wishes to do so.
As others have already mentioned, you could just change the total number of skill points given if you feel it's too constricting for you. You could also just give yourself a story point with Console Commands if you don't want to pay for it, whenever you want to respec. It's a single player game, and the devs give the player lots of options to change the game to suit their own tastes. But it seems like you don't want to do that because it feels "akin to cheating". In other words, you would like the devs to change the base game to condone frivolously changing skills, when they expressly don't want that by making it cost a story point. That's what it boils down to.
I don't see it as a problem that the player needs to spend a story point to respec. It means "something", but is not an onerous cost. A story point is fairly cheap. At the early levels, you get a lot of them quickly. After level 15, when you can hit Ordos fleets, you should be getting roughly say 1 to 4 story points per Ordos fleet (assuming your XP bar is in the green). If you can't tackle Ordos fleets yet, then you obviously get less from faction fleets, but they're also correspondingly easier. If you would rather put the story points into s-mods or whatever, well, then that's on you. If you're already at the point of wanting to min-max the game by doing lots of respecs to keep your flagship optimized while changing flagships frequently, then spending the 5 minutes it takes to kill an Ordos fleet shouldn't be a problem.
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When respecs were put in the game instantly transformed into one of respecing. This mechanic informs the player more so than any statement of intent that you are now supposed to make use of the respec feature. It feels bad when some mechanic in a game is under or over used. It feels bad when one included playstyle is obviously superior or inferior. All the missing approaches that could be in the game do not feel as bad in their absence as a single included approach that is clearly out of balance. When a game is balanced the possibilities feel genuine and the player feels good. The playing of the game becomes a kind of exploration. When the game is not balanced the possibilities feel forced - to do something other than optimal requires some force of will, to subvert your instinct and desires to explore the possibilities of the game, to know you are playing the game wrong.
Once respecs existed it did not become a question of whether or not to use it, but how. The entire approach to the game has to be reconfigured due to this possibility. Unless perfectly balanced it will feel bad - either though being a mechanic that is to be ignored entirely and become a glaring flaw in the game system if it is too harsh to ever use it, or a mechanic that invalidates the purpose of choice in skill selection entirely because you can change them at will. And it must be perfectly balanced, 'good enough' will still feel bad.
To advise OP to add more skill points or story points is no different from saying have no respec mechanic and to just edit your save if you want to. Its not a good solution.
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No, the premise is backward.
The skill system discourages frequent respec. That's why it costs a story point to do so.
And that is a problem because it is too much grinding to fix mistakes or even just to have variety in playstyle if I quickly bore of my current one, and fixing mistakes is story points robbed from fueling s-mods for more ships and to satisfy the absurd and asinine 2^n costs of improving multiple colonies. Story points is the Starsector name of Vespene Gas - currency to be spent on upgrading your faction assets.
The game encourages respec because flagships and fleets want different skills to be the best they can be. It is not as bad as the previous 0.95a releases with the mutually exclusive xor skill system, but it is still there. However, the current respec cost hurts if someone wants to change his flagship and/or fleet frequently but does not because he wants to save up story points to spend them on more important things. So, yes, the game also discourages respec at the same time.
Having mechanics that both encourage and discourage respec at the same time does not feel good.
I don't see it as a problem that the player needs to spend a story point to respec. It means "something", but is not an onerous cost. A story point is fairly cheap. At the early levels, you get a lot of them quickly. After level 15, when you can hit Ordos fleets, you should be getting roughly say 1 to 4 story points per Ordos fleet (assuming your XP bar is in the green). If you can't tackle Ordos fleets yet, then you obviously get less from faction fleets, but they're also correspondingly easier. If you would rather put the story points into s-mods or whatever, well, then that's on you. If you're already at the point of wanting to min-max the game by doing lots of respecs to keep your flagship optimized while changing flagships frequently, then spending the 5 minutes it takes to kill an Ordos fleet shouldn't be a problem.
My fleet has been at max level for a long time, so early game is irrelevant. I do not have an Ordos smasher fleet (yet) and my current fleet will wipe against double Ordos and likely struggle against full Ordos with all blue cores. I fought weaker Ordos on par with or mildly stronger than endgame human bounties (and the rare double human bounties) and identified critical weaknesses in my fleet. The only way I can fix that is to spend my five skill points to optimize my flagship and fleet (and probably fire most of my officers and train new ones - more tedious grinding), but doing so will lock in my fleet in an unsatisfying way. (For example, getting skills for Onslaught flagship, but later, I want to pilot Ziggurat who does not need PD, or Paragon who does not need Ballistic Mastery, or Legion XIV who wants Missile Specialization to spam those missiles, or Doom who wants Systems Expertise to abuse Mine Strike but has little use for Missile Specialization.)
Skill point without refund, or even with refund with current slow bonus xp gain at max level, merely for metagame QoL (of changing your party members and reequipping the party skills), is an onerous cost.
To advise OP to add more skill points or story points is no different from saying have no respec mechanic and to just edit your save if you want to. Its not a good solution.
Totally agreed. If I can "fix" the problem by altering the game (outside of in-game settings), I would not post the topic in the first place.
Starsector is too long a game to replay over and over again from the beginning. If anything, it is an level and item grind much like Diablo II that encourages long term play of a single character, or at least a dedicated magic find character and a munchkin recipient character (and player probably wants several recipients). But with how slow gaining story points are without an Ordos smasher fleet that can slaughter Ordos fleet for +500% xp, respecs that cost story point when player can swap flagships freely cost too much (takes too long to grind up another story point with fights that grant less than +100% xp). Also, having the perfect Ordos smasher is effectively winning the game, unless the goal is to colonize the whole sector and wipe out the core worlds in the process. (I do not have time now to grind for full sector colonization.)
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I will add on that while it is a good limiter for more advanced players, people who are still learning the game will find it frustrating. Baring main story & post level cap story point bonuses, and when you get to that point you have already likely heavily invested into your primary fleet to the point that you cant really break away from it or invest into an entirely new fleet. And if you are a new player and lose those s-mod ships due to being destroyed or otherwise unrecoverable, it can be a run killer and something that can keep new players from jumping back in.
You can find s-mods on random derelict ships however, but what they spawn with is also random so its not like you can count on RNG to spot you a solid one for a secondary fleet.
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If storypoint is too hard maybe start a new game?
The cost is there so you are committed to a build and need to think twice before doing so, while offering a properly priced leeway. Player controlled ship is way more powerful than an AI controlled one (most of the time) so switching flagship constantly is something that is extremely powerful and owe to cost a storypoint. IMO it’s one of the best bargain in all the ways you can spend a storypoint comparing to overpriced historian colony item spawn and exponential growth colony upgrade just for some useless credits.
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If storypoint is too hard maybe start a new game?
Game is too long for that to be a good option too. Restarting and playing to endgame or earning more story points at max level is a tedious grind akin to mindless Diablo II boss runs for goodies.
It does not feel good starting a new game after spending lots of time collecting all the blueprints, acquiring all the ships, and waiting several in-game years for my colonies to grow to size 6. It also took several in-game years of continuous bounty grinding to pay off the massive bonus xp debt I accumulated (to boost my character and officers' leveling).
IMO it’s one of the best bargain in all the ways you can spend a storypoint comparing to overpriced historian colony item spawn and exponential growth colony upgrade just for some useless credits.
Having enough income to not need to grind other income sources is good too. Also, improvements is not just about money, but also ways to overcome colony deficiencies, sometimes without the need of a colony item.
Not to mention if credits were so minor, no one would be trying to build Commerce and optimizing it, or stuffing as many AI cores and colony items into every building possible.
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You can give yourself story points with the command console or by editing a file if its really that big of a deal to you
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You can give yourself story points with the command console or by editing a file if its really that big of a deal to you
Again, if this was the "solution" I wanted to use, I would not have posted this topic in the first place.
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This game has a lot of problems like that and the only way is to fix it yourself.
I increase the level cap for myself and officers. And i also increase the amount of officers and colonies i can have. Some people may call it cheating, but i dont think it is any worse than modding. I just hate these stupid limits. The ai’s have many more officers and colonies so i don’t see why i can’t have the same.
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I've found that you get far more mileage out of skill points when they're used on improving the fleet and all ships instead of the player's.
You can fly be a super ship, or—and hear me out—you can have a fleet of maybe 10% better ships (which also helps you). The fleet will out perform you by a landslide.
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I've found that you get far more mileage out of skill points when they're used on improving the fleet and all ships instead of the player's.
You can fly be a super ship, or—and hear me out—you can have a fleet of maybe 10% better ships (which also helps you). The fleet will out perform you by a landslide.
That is one way to play the game, one I may not want to be locked in for the rest of the game. Then, after I bore of super fleet and want to pilot ace flagship, or just prioritize maximum campaign QoL with less combat related skills (like take nine Industry skills), I need to respec those fleet skills away, and if I previously took officer skills and BotB (premium fleet booster skills), I lose a ton of boosts bought by skill points (because those officers either lose their bonus skills or become mercs, and that third s-mod disappears without any bonus xp refunded). Even if I did not take SP sink skills previously, I still lose a story point for reassigning skills because I got bored of my fleet and want to play something different now.
So it is not just ace flagship and officers' ships that need skills that vary by ship, but also between various playstyles.
Also, I prefer powerful flagship over powerful fleet because I want my flagship to feel responsive and powerful. Flagship without any combat skills is sluggish and weaker than many endgame opponents, something that would give another arcade-like shump game terrible reviews for poor responsive controls or sluggish gameplay. I consider Combat QoL for combat like Industry plus Navigation is QoL for the campaign.
Also, even if fleet skills are good, it hurts if I want to take it but cannot because I do not have skill points left to spare. Wolfpack Tactics taunts me all the time. I want to take it, but I do not have a point left after I put 5 in Combat, Technology, and Industry each. (Automated Ships is the most expendable skill, but I like collecting ships, and automated ships is required to recover them in the first place.)
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I've found that you get far more mileage out of skill points when they're used on improving the fleet and all ships instead of the player's.
You can fly be a super ship, or—and hear me out—you can have a fleet of maybe 10% better ships (which also helps you). The fleet will out perform you by a landslide.
Tell me you're bad at combat without telling me you're bad at combat :P
And now for a serious response, the mileage HEAVILY depends on the player skill and the specific ship you're piloting. The same player piloting an Eagle compared to let's say a Gryphon is a night and day difference. Fleet buffing skills are always a safe bet, but I'd bet anything that a good player will win fights easier and quicker with some combat skills rather than none or very few. I specifically said "some" because there's really no need to get them all, you're wasting points in the end.
Ziggurat is an obvious example how the player alone can turn the tide of fights massively, though there's also ships with lower DP costs that become scary with enough skills.
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Ziggurat is an obvious example how the player alone can turn the tide of fights massively, though there's also ships with lower DP costs that become scary with enough skills.
Problems with Ziggurat:
* Massive hangar queen that is only good for one round of fighting, maybe two if player built for max CR.
* Costs too much DP. If player wants to use another capital (because his second favorite ship is also a capital), that can leave lopsided fleet distribution (your frigates or other sub-capitals are getting slaughtered by the bulk of enemy fleet because your two slowpoke ships guessed wrong and stuck halfway across the map)
Onslaught gets scary powerful with skills. With max armor and PD, they feel like a 60 DP capital but has the price of a 40 DP one. Once I decide on the Combat skills I want, I probably end up storing Ziggurat and breaking out the Onslaughts. May replace some of the high-tech frigates with more Lashers and Centurions.
Conquest that takes Shield Shunt and all armor skills (in Combat and Industry) and hullmods can be as tough as a battleship and can brawl like one, but it is still inferior to Onslaught that does the same job better with more PD, armor, and firepower.
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Yuup, Onslaught was my flagship in the last run and it worked wonders. This one I'm going Neural link Radiant and my god, I feel like I can take any fight in the game with it. Other ships in my fleet are basically irrelevant now, they're just there to aggro enemies.
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That is one way to play the game, one I may not want to be locked in for the rest of the game.
I'll help you out since you obviously want the game to allow respecs for free.
Download the command console mod.
Hit CTRL+Backspace in game to bring up the command console.
Type AddStoryPoint 500
Congratulations, you don't need to worry about story points anymore. Run out from respeccing somehow, add another 500.
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Yuup, Onslaught was my flagship in the last run and it worked wonders. This one I'm going Neural link Radiant and my god, I feel like I can take any fight in the game with it. Other ships in my fleet are basically irrelevant now, they're just there to aggro enemies.
The only time NL Radiant felt overpowered to me was when I took Systems Expertise (and other Combat mobility) for lots of skimming. Even then, it only felt overpowered against large enemy ships. Against a horde of frigates, it felt weaker than Onslaught with min-maxed PD and lots of missiles. That said, it felt good quad skimming against large but fast ships like enemy AI Aurora.
What I dislike about NL Radiant is the massive skill point cost. 5 in Combat (for Systems Expertise), 8 in Tech (NL Radiant), and 2 in Industry (Ordnance Expertise). None for Leadership or high Industry. I feel like I can do nearly as well with a human ship, and still have more skill points for campaign skills or more combat skills.
That is one way to play the game, one I may not want to be locked in for the rest of the game.
I'll help you out since you obviously want the game to allow respecs for free.
This again! Not interested in mods to fix game problems.
Yes, I want free, or at least cheap, respecs. Spending hours to undo choices is not cheap. It is an annoying grind like grinding Diablo bosses for rare items and possibly experience if level is near the cap.
Come to think of it, respec is somewhat like getting hit for permanent level drain by undead or demon.
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This again! Not interested in mods to fix game problems.
Your post suggests that someone has already given you a perfectly valid means by which to resolve your self-imposed problem. This means you're just complaining.
You ultimately have two choices:
a) Just go install the damn mod and be happy, or
b) put up with not being allowed to respec every time you decide you want to captain a different ship.
/shrug
Trust me, mods make the game much, much, much better. Nearly every problem you have with the game has a mod that fixes it. It's amazing.
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ultimately have two choices:
a) Just go install the damn mod and be happy, or
b) put up with not being allowed to respec every time you decide you want to captain a different ship.
/shrug
Trust me, mods make the game much, much, much better. Nearly every problem you have with the game has a mod that fixes it. It's amazing.
I take option c), which is hope the game changes for the better before it becomes final. If not, I stop playing and look for another game. In the meantime, I put up with the game as-is and report what I like and dislike about the game now, effectively option b) temporarily.
As I wrote before, I am venting my dissatisfaction with the current game as it is. It is better than no respec at all in releases before 0.95, but the current mechanics still punishes respec when current gameplay otherwise encourages it. Maybe it will change in newer releases before the game goes final, but maybe not.
No, I will not trust you. I have "been there, done that" regarding mods for other games, years before I found Starsector. I do not want to rely on mods for a solid game experience. Game that is mediocre without mods and only good with mods is not a good game. After playing one such game that was mediocre without mods, I thought "never again" for games that need mods to be good.
And I disagree with mods making game much, much better (unless the game was bad enough that it needed mods to fix issues that should have been fixed by the devs in the first place). It can make the game different, maybe in a good and memorable way, maybe better than the base game, but the base game needs to be good on its own without mods.
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I feel like the solution to your problem is to run specialized saves. It's what I do in games like Dark Souls in which respects are limited or non existing. So when you get in the mood for a super ship run, go to your save A. Want to run a carrier fleet? Go to save B. Heck, this is even better for role-playing if you're into that.
But I want to finish by saying that what you're claiming to be the game fault, it really isn't. There are reasons why Alex limited choices and most of the community seems to agree with them. I agree with you that modding games shouldn't be the go-to solution but the reason why so many people are telling you to do it is because you have run into a problem that is unique to you because of your playstyle, in other words not an inherent problem of the game.
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How about a system that allows us to switch between multiple builds ?
You get presets you can aquire by, say, turning in a A.I. core and then gain the ability to switch between presets,
you gain presets based on the quality of A.I. cores, not quantity
Gamma gives 1 extra set of skills
Beta gives 2 extra sets of skills
Alpha gives 3 extra set of skills
You can only have one active at a time
Say the A.I. core is used to make a sort of personnal assistant or something, like a personnal secretary android or whatever...
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I feel like the solution to your problem is to run specialized saves. It's what I do in games like Dark Souls in which respects are limited or non existing. So when you get in the mood for a super ship run, go to your save A. Want to run a carrier fleet? Go to save B. Heck, this is even better for role-playing if you're into that.
The game is too slow or too long to keep and support multiple saves like this. I kill few fleets, and now I have more loot and maybe a story point or two, and more time elapsed. And if I want something different, I go back to another save and repeat? In terms of respec, it is better to stick with one save than support three or so. This is why I posted the topic. Unless I have progressed far enough to build a specialized farmer fleet, gaining story points at max level is too slow, and wasting them on frivolous respecs when story point gain is a mind-numbing grind is harsh.
I just reached the Ordos killing part of endgame, and even that is annoying if I want maximum story point game because I need a specialized story point farmer fleet (ships and skills) if I want maximum skill point gain (to get +300% or more instead of 100% or less bonus xp and pay off the story points eaten by respec). It feels just like bringing a magic-find sorceress (decked in specialized magic-find gear) to farm items from Mephisto or some other boss, only instead of items it is story points. And if I bring a small fleet, I cannot carry much loot (limited capacity) or recover more ships if my fleet can handle another battle before leaving (because bonus xp drops).
The limits should be what the player can use at any given time. Respec does not raise limits, it reallocates resources within the skill point budget.
How about a system that allows us to switch between multiple builds ?
Seems like alternate equipment switching, kind of like Diablo II: LoD where pressing a button changes your hand equipment.
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So the core issue is that you want a vanila way to farm SP once you reach lvl cap that doesn't involve you from getting into fights with XP multipliers?
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So the core issue is that you want a vanila way to farm SP once you reach lvl cap that doesn't involve you from getting into fights with XP multipliers?
If there's anything Megas has made clear in this thread, it's that he doesn't want a solution, he wants to complain. It's not even a problem anyone else has, and yet when given ways to mitigate or solve the problem, he just says no and restates his complaint that the default settings aren't set specifically for him.
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Story point grind being exhaustingly slow at max level is an issue multiple people brought up across multiple threads. It's by no means Megas-exclusive.
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Story point is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be, unnatural.
I think it is owe to be hard to acquire. In fact, due to how ordos calculated exp gain, they’re not all that hard to come by.
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Then the game shouldn't advertise itself as ironman-friendly. Spending 10 hours grinding story points to recover from a fleet wipe isn't friendly.
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At least you respawn and your offshore assets are preserved?
Do you expect “recover” to be a 30 cap fleet with 150 S-mods?
Might as well just save scum.
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At least you respawn and your offshore assets are preserved?
The point is that offshore assets are worth very little in the current state of the game. Before you could at least quickly replace your fleet if you had colonies set up, now you need to grind story points because full s-mods are expected. Getting to keep your credits is pointless when credits can't buy anything nice, which requires separate rare currency.
Bonus XP existing implies bouncing back should be possible (we even now get bonus XP for lost ships, how generous...), except the system is disfunctional and it still takes ages.
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I just reached the Ordos killing part of endgame, and even that is annoying if I want maximum story point game because I need a specialized story point farmer fleet (ships and skills) if I want maximum skill point gain (to get +300% or more instead of 100% or less bonus xp and pay off the story points eaten by respec). It feels just like bringing a magic-find sorceress (decked in specialized magic-find gear) to farm items from Mephisto or some other boss, only instead of items it is story points.
Let's put in some numbers here to put it in perspective.
After level 15, you get 1 story point per 1 million XP. It's not Vespene gas, it's basically just XP, like in pretty much any other RPG. You kill stuff, you get XP for killing stuff, you use that XP to upgrade your character. (Vespene gas is different, you farm Vespene gas which doesn't involve combat, and you don't get any more from killing enemies.) After all, such games reward the player for going out and actually doing something, i.e. killing baddies.
Level 10 Hegemony deserter bounties give around 500k base XP (assuming double from SP bonus), and the DP for the XP bonus (not the fleet's actual DP) is roughly 700 DP or so. This means if the player's fleet is 350 DP then you get +100% XP bonus (i.e. 700/350), if the player's fleet is 500 DP then you get +40% XP bonus (i.e. 700/500), etc. By the way, bounties go higher than level 10 (which corresponds to about 300k credit payout), I've seen level 13 bounties already, just that I've already collected data on multiple level 10 bounties at this point. So higher-level deserter bounties will pay out even more.
The personal bounties tend to cluster together in the same region of the map. So it's easy to take a fleet and do a lap to kill them. Say you knock out 3 of them, and they're level 10 (noting that this isn't even the highest-paying bounties). That's 1.5 mil XP right there, assuming no XP bonuses, plus whatever you get from the XP bonus, meaning you should be netting around 2-6 SP per bounty run, depending on your fleet. It's easy to get multiple SP points from doing a bounty run, and you don't need anywhere near an endgame fleet to do it. Claims that you need something specialized to get SP is completely overblown when we're just talking about regular faction fleets at this point and not even talking about [REDACTED] fleets.
For full-size [REDACTED] fleets, it's roughly 700k base XP, with a DP for XP bonus (again, not the fleet's DP) of roughly 1200 DP. So you should be getting multiple SP per [REDACTED] fleet. Endgame fleets actually pull together multiple [REDACTED] fleets at once to maximize the XP bonus, and hence why you can get upwards of 10 to 15 million XP (i.e. 10 to 15 story points) per fight if you had an actual, optimized endgame fleet. Hence with such a fleet you're talking about getting dozens of SP per hour of gameplay.
Long story short: if you're finding that SP gain is too slow, then it has to do with how you built your fleet, and/or because you're wasting them frivolously and then complaining about how hard it is to get more.
And if I bring a small fleet, I cannot carry much loot (limited capacity) or recover more ships if my fleet can handle another battle before leaving (because bonus xp drops).
No. Civilian ships (with the actual CIVILIAN tag in ship_data.csv, not the civilian hullmod) count for 1/4 of their DP in terms of XP. So even an Atlas, which is 10 DP, only counts as 2.5 DP in terms of XP. That's a drop in the bucket when your fleet size is hundreds of DP.
Also, ships without any weapons on them (i.e. when you recover a ship and are lugging it back home) also only count for 1/4 of their DP in terms of XP. So again, they're not going to impact your XP much.
Then the game shouldn't advertise itself as ironman-friendly. Spending 10 hours grinding story points to recover from a fleet wipe isn't friendly.
Um, ironman in any game is generally for powergamers who want an additional challenge beyond what the regular game provides. Almost by definition it's for those who want to make the game the most challenging possible because it's already gotten too easy for them otherwise. Why a game needs to be "ironman-friendly" is beyond me. If a player is playing ironman, they're expected to know how to handle themselves.
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Um, ironman in any game is generally for powergamers who want an additional challenge beyond what the regular game provides. Almost by definition it's for those who want to make the game the most challenging possible because it's already gotten too easy for them otherwise. Why a game needs to be "ironman-friendly" is beyond me. If a player is playing ironman, they're expected to know how to handle themselves.
That's not true at all. Games can be designed for ironman (i.e. no savescumming) regardless of their difficulty. X-com series, roguelikes and roguelites, games with dark souls like respawns, etc. Taking an average game NOT designed for ironman and slapping the option "for the challenge" is what Starsector currently is (sadly).
Never taking risky fights isn't "knowing how to handle yourself" - it's playing the game in a way that isn't fun. Good ironman games reward risk taking while also providing some means to recover from failures. Starsector is lacking in the second aspect, even though it tries (bonus XP for lost ships, retaining officers and levels, passive credits income from colonies in the late game, etc). The systems are there, they need to be balanced to do their job.
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Funnily enough, I was going to use xcom as an example of horribly done ironman: it just has the option and a masochistic community, but nothing else about the ironman feature other than strict anti-save scum is actually well designed. Failure in xcom is much more luck based and so much more punishing than failure in starsector, with a single bad die roll or mission destroying a hundred hour save (or multi-hundred hours for long march) on the harder difficulties, as the game can actually be lost. In terms of not engaging in risk, watching ironman playthroughs of that game is both enlightening on how to reduce risk as much as possible and also horribly tedious because of it.
The only permanent things that can be lost in SS is tesseract weapons and getting the polluted condition on a planet after a saturation bombardment. Everything else is renewable, sometimes quite quickly, with the most powerful things (skills and officers) being completely immune from damage.
A full fleet wipe is an extreme example of failure - literally the worst outcome of a fleet combat and it implies that the player never retreated damaged ships/called for a full retreat when the battle was clearly lost. Most actual ironman failures for me involve engaging an enemy fleet, wincing as my initial clash doesn't do enough damage and my ships get driven back, trying and failing to turn the battle with my flagship, and then doing a fighting retreat followed by disengaging maneuvers. Sure that sucks and costs a good amount of money and even some story points, but its nothing like a full fleet wipe!
I agree that the upside of difficult fights is lower in SS than what would be nice for the level of risk, but they do have upsides: higher rewards of money, better ships to recover, and more XP for the player and officers. Taking risky fights/entering risky situations in ironman is still a good idea, but knowing how to salvage the situation when those risks start to turn bad (and building fleets able to do so) is very much a skill that needs to be developed in tandem!
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Perma-death in rogue likes works well because the gameplay/failure loop is short.
Also, the problem with retreating for me was that the retreat scenario (where all the logistics ships get deployed) basically guarantees losing any slow ships (if you can't win the battle normally, you won't be able to defend your slow ships either). I've never had a retreat battle that didn't involve massive losses. Can you reliably avoid that scenario?
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I do not have enough time now to reply to everything posted since yesterday, but here are (not so) quick thoughts.
With how slow leveling is in the game, bonus xp feels like full normal progression, while no bonus xp feels like half xp gain. I feel like I need green xp to progress at normal rate. The player is forced to do activities just to get green xp.
If I have an unoptimized fleet comparable to an endgame human bounty, I have from zero to less than +100% for the fight. I need to fight several such battles to earn one story point. On the other hand, if I solo the same fleet with Ziggurat (and bring very few support ships), I get +300% or more bonus xp, but I almost certainly cannot loot much (which hurts because a game like this thrives on loot). (I would not be surprised if better players can destroy a human endgame bounty with less than 75 DP, like with four Afflictors.) Better, but not as rewarding as Ordos. If getting story points is the goal, and I do not want to fight Ordos, then killing an enemy fleet with a one big ship or few small ships seem to be the way. No fleet battle, just one ship (or a few frigate) against the horde. Kind of like 0.6 era releases, only instead of getting extreme combat power from skills (instead of a bigger fleet), you get... more story points to fuel respecs, s-mods, and colonies.
I have posted recently than I lament settings do not support bigger map size, but it is moot when trying to game story point acquisition.
So far, my Ordos killer fleet started with: Can I solo this with Ziggurat? So far, the best I could do was kill a double alpha Radiant fleet with half the ships in the fleet with Alpha cores for +500%. It was hard but beatable. Then I added alpha core Radiant. Bonus was only a little more than +400 and I get objectives that I cannot keep but winning is a bit easier. Then I replaced Radiant with two Onslaughts. Works almost as well in combat, but if I lose them, then I have crew problems. Then, if I get +20 DP from taking a point (player can get at least one without much difficulty), who else to bring? Hyperion does not last long enough, so I tried Fury with Omega weapons, and it is quite good. Unfortunately, adding extra ships to make the fight less stressful sharply lowers the bonus xp from about +400% to little over +100%.
Continuing from above, if I want more bonus xp while using more than two ships, I need to attack double Ordos. I am not at that point yet.
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Um, ironman in any game is generally for powergamers who want an additional challenge beyond what the regular game provides. Almost by definition it's for those who want to make the game the most challenging possible because it's already gotten too easy for them otherwise. Why a game needs to be "ironman-friendly" is beyond me. If a player is playing ironman, they're expected to know how to handle themselves.
That's not true at all. Games can be designed for ironman (i.e. no savescumming) regardless of their difficulty. X-com series, roguelikes and roguelites, games with dark souls like respawns, etc. Taking an average game NOT designed for ironman and slapping the option "for the challenge" is what Starsector currently is (sadly).
Agreed with Amoebka, there are games that are genuinely enjoyable (and often better) in ironman.
I think Faster Than Light is the best ironman game ever made, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup comes pretty pretty close.
Noita is also nice, it just rewards dragging your feet a little bit too much.
Perma-death in rogue likes works well because the gameplay/failure loop is short.
Never taking risky fights isn't "knowing how to handle yourself" - it's playing the game in a way that isn't fun. Good ironman games reward risk taking while also providing some means to recover from failures.
And this is what's common in good ironman games: relatively short, and doesn't reward avoiding risk.
XCOM is really bad in the length/recovery department, even the base game takes dozens of hours.
Getting the A team wiped in Long War is an instant game over, and it only takes 1 unlucky activation with a minor mistake to destroy a >100 hour save.
Honorable mention Battle Brothers, also long and it's really easy to avoid actual danger there.
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In my mind, a good ironman game isn't about the shortness of the gameplay loop, it's the quality of the game play loop.
Fundamentally, I see playing 20 runs of 1 hour each of a permadeath ironman game being equivalent to a longer ironman game played once for 20 hours. You've essentially got the same thing at the end of both, namely 20 hours of game time. The question is, did you have fun during the gameplay loops of each game? For a good permadeath ironman, that typically means the early, middle, and late portions of the game need to be equally fun, or at least fun enough to stand on their own. If you never make it the middle or late game, the early game better be worth it.
It also tends to require a variety of different playstyle be viable, which start being distinct right from the start of the run or something that makes each of those runs feel different enough to keep you playing (randomized levels and enemies for example).
To me, it sounds like Megas is not enjoying the early and mid-portions of the game, since they are describing them as a grind, as well as indicating the game takes too long to level and get to the end game. At which point it makes sense to me that they would prefer the replayability and different options be available starting at that stage, as opposed to being at the start of the game. Unfortunately, you kind of need that replayability to make the game a reasonable ironman game.
My question would be, what would make the early and mid-game more interesting or more fun such that it doesn't feel like a grind?
Personally, I like the early game combats, often more so than the late game. There's a much larger range of threats compared to my combat capability, and there are situations I actively need to avoid. The campaign map is far more interesting when you need to actually take into consideration enemy fleet positions or expenditures over time, as opposed to just barreling through everything, fleets and storms alike, with an end game death fleet funded by multiple size 6 colonies.
Gameplay duration is always a bit tough to deal with, as different players have different amounts of time they want to commit or expect to put into a game. In that same line of thought, some players want more risk in their risk/reward balance, and others, less. Risk is just as much determined by what you're risking, as by the odds of success/failure. You can have the exact same fight with the exact same mechanics, but if in one case you're risking an hour of progress and in the other two minutes of progress, those two situations will feel different to the player. And some players seek out that kind of feeling of actually risking something more meaningful than a couple minutes of their time when playing.
The only way to really make a large variety of players happy is to provide a number of options at game selection. "Easier" or "Harder" modes which change the risk/reward calculations, game length settings (speed of technology research and resource accumulation in some 4x games for example or advanced starts which start you in a mid-game or late-game situation instead of the normal early game). Or make the game very mod friendly, which is what Alex has done with Starsector. So now if you want a long conquer the sector game, you boot up Nexerlin instead of vanilla. If you want to get right into the end game, start with a full combat fleet with a Supership plus a faction or planet.
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On the other hand, if I solo the same fleet with Ziggurat (and bring very few support ships), I get +300% or more bonus xp, but I almost certainly cannot loot much (which hurts because a game like this thrives on loot).
There's very little correlation between fleet size for XP purposes and the amount of loot that can be carried. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Atlas takes away very little for XP calc purposes because of low FP * 1/4 civilian hullmod reduction, so you could easily carry multiple Atlases for less than 10% of the FP value of Ziggurat + player levels.
Personally I carry 120 FP of combat ships in my fleet even into endgame when fighting multiple Ordos, and have zero problems with XP or SP - if anything, XP/SP gain is too easy when you're not carrying around a big bloated fleet, and can easily handle combat-heavy activities like bounties without losses instead of low-XP activities like trading. For example, you could quickly and easily max out your character to level 15 at the start of a run just by hunting large d-modded pirate fleets using a tiny fleet equipped with Alpha Site weapons and pure Combat skills, then respec your character to maxed out fleet skills and build a real fleet to take on factions/bounties. The system rewards you for efficiency with fleet composition and battlefield performance, and it's something that players are incentivized to design for.
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In my mind, a good ironman game isn't about the shortness of the gameplay loop, it's the quality of the game play loop.
Fundamentally, I see playing 20 runs of 1 hour each of a permadeath ironman game being equivalent to a longer ironman game played once for 20 hours. You've essentially got the same thing at the end of both, namely 20 hours of game time. The question is, did you have fun during the gameplay loops of each game? For a good permadeath ironman, that typically means the early, middle, and late portions of the game need to be equally fun, or at least fun enough to stand on their own. If you never make it the middle or late game, the early game better be worth it.
Usually a big portion of ironman style games is losing being a real possibility and that's perfectly fine with games that typically last 5, 10, maybe low 10s of hours.
My guess is if a game takes more than ~50 hours that means only a small fraction of players will actually see most of it.
There are definitely people who enjoy honest, untweaked ironman runs of XCOM:LW but no clue if it's a high enough percentage to base design decisions on.
Agreed in that how long is too long changes by game, 10-20 generally isn't much (some FTL/DCSS/Noita runs can easily surpass that).
After a threshold I do think it comes at the expense of the ironman experience, too long and it locks content/promotes conservative play.
My question would be, what would make the early and mid-game more interesting or more fun such that it doesn't feel like a grind?
Early dogfights/progression and trying different fleet compositions late are both interesting to me.
Playing late more nowadays, the exploration phase (scan every moderloving pulsar/black hole/whatever) does get stale if you do it too much.
2 main nitpicks with late:
- you can tinker with fleet compositions, but there are no enemies that can challenge an optimised player fleet. No fully s-modded faction fleets with proper officers, stacked ordos come closest
- officers are set in stone, you can have (and pay!) >20 of them but can't ever rotate the active 8/10
Fully modding ships is also a timesink, not a fan of that mechanic but only really gets in the way if you want a full switch (and then your officers are borked anyway).
Player respec is basically free compared to everything else so don't agree with the premise of the thread.
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I guess I should have specified that by "X-com" I meant the games from the 90s, not the new ones I haven't played.
I thought this was a boomer forum? ::)
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I guess I should have specified that by "X-com" I meant the games from the 90s, not the new ones I haven't played.
I thought this was a boomer forum? ::)
I'm a boomer but still think Enemy Within + Long War is the best X-Com, fite me :)
Original grinded down your attention: lots of soldiers, lots of individual actions, constant "last xray waiting in the toilet to instakill your dudes" threat.
It was revolutionary in its own time, but would prefer repeatedly getting kicked in the junk to playing it in ironman today.
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While the original might have had some frustrating moments, ironman was very much doable and enjoyable. Recovering from even full squad wipes was relatively painless - you just hired 14 fresh rookies and made new tier 2 armor for them (and bought a new Triton if you had to). Assuming you weren't wiping all the time, you would have all the spare resources needed to recover immediately. The grindy aspect - soldier veterancy - was more of a psychological thing, it barely mattered for gameplay, unlike s-mods in Starsector.
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I guess I should have specified that by "X-com" I meant the games from the 90s, not the new ones I haven't played.
Having played both, the older x-com was unlosable until the final mission if you had even a modest idea of what you were doing, and the newer ones are long and sufficiently random to make playing them ironman unpleasant.
I personally come to ironman games from a roguelike background, where neither of the above things are virtues. I don't play games for the purpose of testing my patience with grind.
For example, training up new rookies in the original is much more useful than you imply, especially once you start contemplating the end-game missions where you can't just bring fresh troops in if something goes wrong - but it's also very easy and safe, if tedious. Mind-control a muton into dropping its guns and walk it around in front of a bunch of rookies armed with the starting rifle or pistol, and they skill up fast.
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Oh, I know about the exploity training methods. Thing is, you could only level 2-6 points of firing accuracy per mission, for example, so you had to do it across many different missions. Tedious stuff like this is a major design flaw, but thankfully it was unnecessary even on superhuman difficulty.
I've done countless Cydonia/T'leth clears with full rookie squads. Mind control resistance is the only stat that truly matters there, armors/weapons give FAR more power than soldier skills, and make even untrained rookies sufficient.
To draw a parallel with Starsector - recovering from a (near) full squad wipe was a lot faster than recovering from a (near) full fleet wipe. If you had money/plastics you could immediately replace soldiers and armors, but lost the grindy veterancy. In Starsector, if you have money you can replace ships and weapons (you'll have to make multiple circles around the core markets though), but lose the grindy s-mods. The difference is, s-mods in Starsector are a lot more important and necessary than veterancy in X-com. You don't have to grind stats in X-com if you don't want to, but you HAVE to grind s-mods in Starsector.
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Warning: A Huge Post Is Approaching Fast. (Okay, no more Darius parody.)
After level 15, you get 1 story point per 1 million XP. It's not Vespene gas, it's basically just XP, like in pretty much any other RPG. You kill stuff, you get XP for killing stuff, you use that XP to upgrade your character. (Vespene gas is different, you farm Vespene gas which doesn't involve combat, and you don't get any more from killing enemies.) After all, such games reward the player for going out and actually doing something, i.e. killing baddies.
Level 10 Hegemony deserter bounties give around 500k base XP (assuming double from SP bonus), and the DP for the XP bonus (not the fleet's actual DP) is roughly 700 DP or so. This means if the player's fleet is 350 DP then you get +100% XP bonus (i.e. 700/350), if the player's fleet is 500 DP then you get +40% XP bonus (i.e. 700/500), etc. By the way, bounties go higher than level 10 (which corresponds to about 300k credit payout), I've seen level 13 bounties already, just that I've already collected data on multiple level 10 bounties at this point. So higher-level deserter bounties will pay out even more.
The personal bounties tend to cluster together in the same region of the map. So it's easy to take a fleet and do a lap to kill them. Say you knock out 3 of them, and they're level 10 (noting that this isn't even the highest-paying bounties). That's 1.5 mil XP right there, assuming no XP bonuses, plus whatever you get from the XP bonus, meaning you should be netting around 2-6 SP per bounty run, depending on your fleet. It's easy to get multiple SP points from doing a bounty run, and you don't need anywhere near an endgame fleet to do it. Claims that you need something specialized to get SP is completely overblown when we're just talking about regular faction fleets at this point and not even talking about [REDACTED] fleets.
I just took out a random high-end bounty, League deserter worth about 390k. With +384% xp from soloing the entire enemy fleet with Ziggurat (would have had +397% if I left Revenant behind), I received about base 990k xp, which was doubled with the bonus xp, so almost two million total. Had I used random stuff comparable to their fleet, I probably would have about +50% xp instead, and would have gained only about a fourth of the xp (close to half million due to bonus xp). I would need to fight four or five such bounties to get a million xp with a fleet similar to an endgame bounty.
At the time I posted the OP, I had not fully upgraded my skills and fleet because I did not want to risk locking myself into a build or configuration that could take a long time to undo. After seeing how slow xp gain was if I want to chill with a big fleet and smash stuff, I was really hesitant into committing into a single build. I guess I had about 15 million bonus xp after I reached max level, and I did not have access to everything. I took several in-game years fighting many endgame bounties with from 0% to 100% (but rarely above 70%) to clear that xp debt, although part of the reason for that was I did not have Janus device for gate travel during some of that time.
Named bounties are sometimes close, but not that much. I rarely get more than two near each other.
Long story short: if you're finding that SP gain is too slow, then it has to do with how you built your fleet, and/or because you're wasting them frivolously and then complaining about how hard it is to get more.
In other words, I am playing the game wrong because I dare to use a fleet that is comparable to an endgame bounty fleet instead of a solo Ziggurat or something less powerful for maximum xp gain.
To me, it sounds like Megas is not enjoying the early and mid-portions of the game, since they are describing them as a grind, as well as indicating the game takes too long to level and get to the end game. At which point it makes sense to me that they would prefer the replayability and different options be available starting at that stage, as opposed to being at the start of the game. Unfortunately, you kind of need that replayability to make the game a reasonable ironman game.
My question would be, what would make the early and mid-game more interesting or more fun such that it doesn't feel like a grind?
Personally, I like the early game combats, often more so than the late game. There's a much larger range of threats compared to my combat capability, and there are situations I actively need to avoid. The campaign map is far more interesting when you need to actually take into consideration enemy fleet positions or expenditures over time, as opposed to just barreling through everything, fleets and storms alike, with an end game death fleet funded by multiple size 6 colonies.
This response probably deserves its own topic, but the short of it is while there are efforts in recent releases to slow the player's gameplay, the world progression has not slowed down. In effect, the world outlevels the player if he does not rush or min-max things. Related are colonies. It takes about ten years to grow a colony to size 6 (or less time with Cyrosleeper bonus). Meanwhile, it takes about five years to reach at least the cusp of endgame, able to crush endgame bounties without much difficulty and maybe Ordos too.
Early game feels like survival mode and making do with what you find. Some people like that, I do not. Midgame is a continuation of that to a point then transitions to something else as player finds more toys and builds colonies. At this point, the world has outleveled the player and the player tries to plays catchup (or maybe not if player optimized for combat and got the hardware and skills he needed.) Gameplay is more enjoyable if I can fight the enemy (but if I cannot, then I am forced into commodity runs for easy money), but I still do not have access to everything. During endgame, I have access to most if not all resources and can use whatever I want, and I like this... until I hit the slow xp gain unless I use a specialized xp hunter fleet (or a flat out overpowered fleet).
There's very little correlation between fleet size for XP purposes and the amount of loot that can be carried. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Atlas takes away very little for XP calc purposes because of low FP * 1/4 civilian hullmod reduction, so you could easily carry multiple Atlases for less than 10% of the FP value of Ziggurat + player levels.
If I solo with Ziggurat, I do not want my fleet to exceed 100 DP because doing so spawns a bigger map with objectives, and I dislike objectives, especially if my side cannot stop the enemy from taking the points. I have 25 DP left for support ships. I can take either Prometheus, Atlas, and an Ox; or one Revenant and two Oxen.
Also, bringing support ships eats a noticeable amount a bonus xp from named bounties. Against a human endgame bounty fleet, having Revenant in my "fleet" reduces bonus xp by 12% or 13%. Tugs reduce the bonus by 4% per tug. If I did not need a hauler for fuel to reach systems with named bounties, I would consider bringing only Ziggurat for maximum xp.
Bringing more haulers probably hurts less when player brings a bigger fleet and attacks at least two Ordos at a time, but anything less than an Ordos really wants a lone capital or few smaller ships.
Also, loot is not only cargo or fuel, but also the enemy ships themselves for those with Hull Restoration. If I recover ships, then my bonus xp will drop if I fight again until I drop off the new ship(s). I may also find myself with not enough crew if I loot a large ship or several small ships that need crew. (If I bring Revenant, I put Additional Crew Berthing and other capacity boosting hullmods on it.)
The system rewards you for efficiency with fleet composition and battlefield performance, and it's something that players are incentivized to design for.
Unfortunately, I think the game "rewards" the player by being stingy with xp and story points, and money from non-contact bounties, unless the player utterly games the system by using only the strongest options available (which may not be available early). In other words, Starsector punishes the player for playing the game wrong. Currently, the game wants you to solo things if at all possible, like in pre-0.6a releases, which defeats the point of a fleet and fleet skills that need officers or more ships to work. It seems like the only time a fleet is useful was when player fights more than one Ordos at a time, or when xp gain is not the goal (like smashing a planet's defenses before raiding it for items or sat bombing it to wipe it off the map).
Fully modding ships is also a timesink, not a fan of that mechanic but only really gets in the way if you want a full switch (and then your officers are borked anyway).
Player respec is basically free compared to everything else so don't agree with the premise of the thread.
Example: I want to pilot Ziggurat and I have say, Point Defense and Ballistic Mastery for Combat skills. Later, I want to store Ziggurat then pilot Doom for a while; now I want to swap those two skills and get Field Modulation and Systems Expertise. Later, I drop the phase ships and I want to pilot Aurora; now Phase Coil Tuning is useless and I want to get Energy Mastery instead. Each respec burns a skill point without refund if I want to be optimal with my toy of the day. But even if respec gave +100% bonus xp, regaining that point (at max level) is too slow unless I am already at the end killing endgame enemies with a specialized hunter fleet. So, no, it is not free.
It gets worse if I obtained then respec Best of the Best or officer skills away. Any extra s-mods and officer skills disappear without refund. (It is the primary reason why I do not take such skills.)
At best, it is not as bad as firing and training new officers to work with new ships, but it still hurts for most of the game.
And points spent for respecs means less green money (story points) for s-mods, elite skills, and colony improvements.
Needing to fire and train new officers hurt. At the very least, that means more bonus xp spent to train them, and maybe new elite skills.
And I do want the option of full switch without being heavily punished for it.
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In other words, I am playing the game wrong because I dare to use a fleet that is comparable to an endgame bounty fleet instead of a solo Ziggurat or something less powerful for maximum xp gain.
There is absolutely no requirement that players bring a "comparable" fleet to take on enemy fleets, because fleets from an experienced player are many times stronger than enemy fleets on a per-DP basis, due to numerous advantages that all stack to multiply the disparity:- Vastly superior loadouts and fleet design.
- Intelligent officer skill and personality selection.
- Far more fleetwide skills, including top tier skills.
- Far higher s-mod and far lower d-mod density in most cases.
- Better usage of fleet tactics and orders.
- The impact of the player piloting itself.
And so on. I haven't encountered a single battle in vanilla that required a 240+ DP fleet to defeat without losses, which is why I run with 120 DP of combat ships. And I've "only" been playing since 0.8 so I'm sure there are many better pilots out there.
There's very little correlation between fleet size for XP purposes and the amount of loot that can be carried. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Atlas takes away very little for XP calc purposes because of low FP * 1/4 civilian hullmod reduction, so you could easily carry multiple Atlases for less than 10% of the FP value of Ziggurat + player levels.
If I solo with Ziggurat, I do not want my fleet to exceed 100 DP because doing so spawns a bigger map with objectives, and I dislike objectives, especially if my side cannot stop the enemy from taking the points. I have 25 DP left for support ships. I can take either Prometheus, Atlas, and an Ox; or one Revenant and two Oxen.
Also, bringing support ships eats a noticeable amount a bonus xp from named bounties. Against a human endgame bounty fleet, having Revenant in my "fleet" reduces bonus xp by 12% or 13%. Tugs reduce the bonus by 4% per tug. If I did not need a hauler for fuel to reach systems with named bounties, I would consider bringing only Ziggurat for maximum xp.
It simply doesn't make much sense to drag Revenants around for that purpose. Revenants cost 15 DP compared to the Atlas's 10 DP, and lacks the Atlas's civilian hullmod for 1/4 XP impact. Using Revenants isn't just logistically expensive, but also XP/SP expensive as well. It seems unfair to make an inefficient choice and then blame the outcome on the game, instead of the choice.
The system rewards you for efficiency with fleet composition and battlefield performance, and it's something that players are incentivized to design for.
Unfortunately, I think the game "rewards" the player by being stingy with xp and story points, and money from non-contact bounties, unless the player utterly games the system by using only the strongest options available (which may not be available early). In other words, Starsector punishes the player for playing the game wrong. Currently, the game wants you to solo things if at all possible, like in pre-0.6a releases, which defeats the point of a fleet and fleet skills that need officers or more ships to work. It seems like the only time a fleet is useful was when player fights more than one Ordos at a time, or when xp gain is not the goal (like smashing a planet's defenses before raiding it for items or sat bombing it to wipe it off the map).
First of all, fighting more than one Ordos at a time is far a more efficient use of the initial CR deployment cost, as long as you're not taking excessive CR loss or ship damage/loss. Earning much better XP is simply another bonus on top of that - another incentive to play the game more efficiently.
Secondly, there's a vast middle ground between "solo everything" and "matching comparable enemy fleet size" - it's simply designing and using a smaller, more efficient fleet for everything.
More importantly, you choose to negatively label making choices you don't like as "punishment", whereas I think it's more productive to view it in terms of which player actions are being incentivized. The old system of "lug around a bunch of undeployed Paragons for easy deployment advantage leading to easy XP gain" was ridiculous and incentivized undermining the combat layer using campaign layer cheese. The current system incentivizes player competence in designing and utilizing better and more efficient fleets, loadouts, and combat tactics to overcome initial deployment for better XP gain. To me, this is a far superior gameplay approach than the "punishment" of being obligated to fill up my fleet with junk Paragons to game the system.
And I do want the option of full switch without being heavily punished for it.
Considering that respec was previously not an option for... many patches, now that there's a respec is available it's suddenly a "punishment" because there's a tangible cost for using it? That doesn't seem like a very fair or reasonable assessment. At what point during the game's development was there an expectation or precedent established for unlimited free respecs?
FWIW, in my view respec costs in Starsector are pretty mild compared to other games, especially for those who are experienced with the combat layer of the game to be able to quickly and easily earn SP.
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About hours sunk...
Funnily enough, I was going to use xcom as an example of horribly done ironman: it just has the option and a masochistic community, but nothing else about the ironman feature other than strict anti-save scum is actually well designed. Failure in xcom is much more luck based and so much more punishing than failure in starsector, with a single bad die roll or mission destroying a hundred hour save (or multi-hundred hours for long march) on the harder difficulties, as the game can actually be lost. In terms of not engaging in risk, watching ironman playthroughs of that game is both enlightening on how to reduce risk as much as possible and also horribly tedious because of it.
XCOM is really bad in the length/recovery department, even the base game takes dozens of hours.
Getting the A team wiped in Long War is an instant game over, and it only takes 1 unlucky activation with a minor mistake to destroy a >100 hour save.
Honorable mention Battle Brothers, also long and it's really easy to avoid actual danger there.
Usually a big portion of ironman style games is losing being a real possibility and that's perfectly fine with games that typically last 5, 10, maybe low 10s of hours.
My guess is if a game takes more than ~50 hours that means only a small fraction of players will actually see most of it.
There are definitely people who enjoy honest, untweaked ironman runs of XCOM:LW but no clue if it's a high enough percentage to base design decisions on.
Agreed in that how long is too long changes by game, 10-20 generally isn't much (some FTL/DCSS/Noita runs can easily surpass that).
After a threshold I do think it comes at the expense of the ironman experience, too long and it locks content/promotes conservative play.
I played a JRPG-style game a few months ago. By the time I finished it, it recorded over forty hours of play by the time I finished, and I played the game off and on for about three weeks. Much time was spent either grinding up experience in encounters or collecting items (sometimes lots of them) to unlock new locations. I considered that game long.
For Starsector, it took at least a week (probably longer) to go from start to endgame when I am comfortable enough to kill endgame bounties easily with an unoptimized fleet (Ziggurat with no Combat skills and most ships without any s-mods). Then I took time off before I resumed to play to experiment with stuff and help me decide which skills, ships, and s-mods to get.
Anything that needs ten or more hours of casual play (no speed-running) to finish is a long game.
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Switching gears...
There is absolutely no requirement that players bring a "comparable" fleet to take on enemy fleets, because fleets from an experienced player are many times stronger than enemy fleets on a per-DP basis, due to numerous advantages that all stack to multiply the disparity:
The point was if I use a conventional fleet to fight the enemy, the xp gain for story points is too slow. For me to get close to a million xp from endgame bounties (not Ordos), I need to solo them with Ziggurat (or perhaps something even cheaper and less powerful), which is easily capable of doing if I have found the weapons and s-modded in two 25+ OP hullmods (and did not get Augmented Engines). But if I do that, I cannot bring enough support to haul all the loot. It is very constraining to be stuck with Ziggurat only if I fight anything other than Ordos just so I can get more story points in my lifetime.
It simply doesn't make much sense to drag Revenants around for that purpose. Revenants cost 15 DP compared to the Atlas's 10 DP, and lacks the Atlas's civilian hullmod for 1/4 XP impact. Using Revenants isn't just logistically expensive, but also XP/SP expensive as well. It seems unfair to make an inefficient choice and then blame the outcome on the game, instead of the choice.
I not only need extra space for cargo, but also fuel. Atlas is not a tanker. If I did not use Revenant, then I need not only Atlas, but also Prometheus (or maybe Phaeton is good enough if I do not recover enemy ships).
I take Revenant because it is 15 DP, while Atlas and Prometheus combo is 20 DP, and both need more fuel than Revenant. With Revenant, I have 10 DP left for small combat map. I can bring two tugs for more burn or whatever, provided I am okay with giving up +4% xp per tug. Maybe a Phantom (or a passenger ship like Nebula) to haul more crew or marines.
Considering that respec was previously not an option for... many patches, now that there's a respec is available it's suddenly a "punishment" because there's a tangible cost for using it? That doesn't seem like a very fair or reasonable assessment. At what point during the game's development was there an expectation or precedent established for unlimited free respecs?
In 0.95a, some of the better skills (like the one Tech 5 that combined both BotB and Flux Regulations) were permanent and could not be respecced out. Barely better than no respec at all.
Today, I think the current cost is still too great unless I have an optimized "fleet" that can smash endgame fights because story point gain is much too slow unless I have the correct fleet. If I fight something less than Ordos, then it is solo flagship or forget it. If I fight more than one Ordos, I need to find the right combination of overpowered ships, hullmods, and skills to pull it off, and it certainly not the equivalent of a random NPC endgame bounty fleet put together.
And if I am grinding multiple Ordos in a single fight, then I am at the very end of the game, unless my ultimate goal is full Sector colonization via alpha cores.
FWIW, in my view respec costs in Starsector are pretty mild compared to other games, especially for those who are experienced with the combat layer of the game to be able to quickly and easily earn SP.
It also costs more than one game I played too (and I would not be surprised if there are others), an indie JRPG-like game (same one that took more than 40 hours to reach near the end of currently finished content) that allowed free respec of skill points while not in combat. Probably because the player can use only four party members at a time in combat, while many more sit in the sidelines.
In Starsector, player can have a hundred or more ships in storage, while he can only use about a dozen or so at a time.
P.S. And if player has an Ordos killer fleet, he probably made heavy investment into s-mods and officers. If I want to change the fleet or skills because I want to play with a different fleet, then the cost will probably be more than a single story point. If player had BotB previously and does not now, his third s-mods from all of his ships disappear. Then, player will probably need new officers for his ships.
Some of the advantages the player has over NPC fleets require the player to lock in his choices that are difficult or costly to undo, which hurts.
And NPCs have one major advantage over the player, and that is unlimited resources (for replacements). If enemy fleet suffered a total wipe, no problem, the game will conjure a replacement fleet out of nothing. If the player wiped similarly, he lost far more than any bounty would pay.
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That's not true at all. Games can be designed for ironman (i.e. no savescumming) regardless of their difficulty. X-com series, roguelikes and roguelites, games with dark souls like respawns, etc. Taking an average game NOT designed for ironman and slapping the option "for the challenge" is what Starsector currently is (sadly).
My point is "a game doesn't need to make it easy for ironman players", especially when the mode is optional, so any player who doesn't want to take that risk can skip it - it's for players who choose to take on that risk. Nor does Starsector make it difficult to recover from failure. Unlike "permadeath" games (where once you die, the save game is erased), you get to restart with a couple of starter ships, and if you're restarting from a fleet wipe, presumably you had some extra ships/weapons stored away and/or colonies able to print ships for you, etc. to get you going again, along with credits, etc. And fleet wipes should be fairly rare, when you can spend an SP to get out of any fight you deem too risky.
I think people in this thread keep taking the underlying assumption of "my fleet needs to be full of s-mods to fight", and then using it as the basis for arguing that getting SP for the s-mods is too difficult (or too slow), as if somehow they can't play the game unless they have a full set of green bars. No, like any other XP system, it's meant to be a gradual improvement of your character as you do more battles, not something you need in order to fight battles in the first place. It's the reward for winning battles, not the prerequisite for them. You can fight [REDACTED] fleets without them if you want. They're certainly nice to have and make your ships more powerful, but are by no means required, and are incremental improvements to your fleet.
I just took out a random high-end bounty, League deserter worth about 390k. With +384% xp from soloing the entire enemy fleet with Ziggurat (would have had +397% if I left Revenant behind), I received about base 990k xp, which was doubled with the bonus xp, so almost two million total. Had I used random stuff comparable to their fleet, I probably would have about +50% xp instead, and would have gained only about a fourth of the xp (close to half million due to bonus xp). I would need to fight four or five such bounties to get a million xp with a fleet similar to an endgame bounty.
So you got 1980k XP at +384%. Which means base XP was 409k. Which means +50% XP bonus would be 614k. Which means 2 fights is all you need.
Named bounties are sometimes close, but not that much. I rarely get more than two near each other.
Depends on your save game seed I suppose, but for me they've been pretty consistently in a string north of the Core Worlds, with usually 1 of the 5 to the south instead. Attached is an example, with 4 of them in a line and a 5th bounty for a pirate base if I care to do it. For the 3 ~300k bounties, each are around 500k base XP (assuming double XP from SP) and my current fleet would average around 1.8 mil XP from each of them. Hence 5.4 story points from doing a single run, and my current fleet is nowhere near an "endgame bounty fleet" yet nor are these the highest-level (i.e. biggest) bounties possible.
In other words, I am playing the game wrong because I dare to use a fleet that is comparable to an endgame bounty fleet instead of a solo Ziggurat or something less powerful for maximum xp gain.
No, it means that it has to do with how you built your fleet, and/or because you're wasting them frivolously and then complaining about how hard it is to get more. Your topic for this thread is that you want to be able to frequently switch between different sets of character skills for different flagships, so that you can keep the ship's fighting ability optimized regardless of whichever ship-of-the-day you want to use. You also want to spend a lot of SP on colonies, which, other than storage (which could be done for free anyway) and the ability to print your own ships/gear, essentially serve as credit factories -- when credits are basically unlimited at the endgame anyway. Therefore it boils down to spending SP to gain more credits, which is a bad trade.
So you want to spend a lot of SP on these unnecessary things, but are unwilling to make the adjustments to your fleet and your playstyle to accommodate it. You don't need a solo Zig for max XP gain. You need a fleet that can take on multiple times its DP, and win, regardless of its size. After all, why should the game bother giving you bonus XP if you're taking on even odds? That's what regular XP is for. The whole point of bonus XP is to reward the player for when the fleet takes on heavy odds, and can still win. So that can be a small fleet able to take on a single [REDACTED] fleet for 5 mil XP per pop, or a large fleet able to take on triple [REDACTED] at once for 15 mil XP per pop. Three smaller fights or one large epic battle, but the same amount of XP gain. That's where the game rewards good fleet compositions, player skill, and so forth.
If I solo with Ziggurat, I do not want my fleet to exceed 100 DP because doing so spawns a bigger map with objectives, and I dislike objectives, especially if my side cannot stop the enemy from taking the points. I have 25 DP left for support ships. I can take either Prometheus, Atlas, and an Ox; or one Revenant and two Oxen.
The point was if I use a conventional fleet to fight the enemy, the xp gain for story points is too slow. For me to get close to a million xp from endgame bounties (not Ordos), I need to solo them with Ziggurat (or perhaps something even cheaper and less powerful), which is easily capable of doing if I have found the weapons and s-modded in two 25+ OP hullmods (and did not get Augmented Engines). But if I do that, I cannot bring enough support to haul all the loot. It is very constraining to be stuck with Ziggurat only if I fight anything other than Ordos just so I can get more story points in my lifetime.
Here's another example of complaining about an entirely self-imposed problem, artificially limiting yourself to 25 DP of support ships if you're soloing with Zig, and then complaining about how that's limiting your loot. (Obviously, large fleets can have all the support ships they want.) There are multiple solutions, such as 1) centering the fight over one of the objectives, ensuring that you get some benefit from it 2) not caring about the objectives as you fight 3) changing the "maxNoObjectiveBattleSize" in \starsector-core\data\config\settings.json to whatever size you like so that you don't have to worry about them. But you end up choosing none of them so that you can set up a Zig "XP but no loot" or large fleet "loot but no XP" false choice to complain about.
In reality, XP, fleet size, etc. all operate on a sliding scale. There's no "either or", it's how much you prefer. The larger your fleet, the less XP bonus, because presumably the easier the battles become and the faster you can do them (so that while you get less XP per battle, you can do more of them per hour of playing time). Conversely, if you use a smaller fleet, you get a larger XP bonus but each fight is harder, with more risk of losing ships or losing the battle entirely, and each fight takes longer because you have less firepower to chew through the same amount of ships.
Also, bringing support ships eats a noticeable amount a bonus xp from named bounties. Against a human endgame bounty fleet, having Revenant in my "fleet" reduces bonus xp by 12% or 13%. Tugs reduce the bonus by 4% per tug.
And those percentages are measured against the +384% XP bonus. In other words, the Revenant means less than 3% of your overall XP gain (0.13 vs 4.84 multiplier on your XP, 0.13/4.84 = 2.7%). Tug means less than 1% of your overall XP gain. You probably get more XP per hour from the tug moving your fleet faster on the campaign map than what you lose from its contribution to the DP. That's hardly noticeable when each bounty's base XP varies by around 15% (in other words, when fighting the exact same bounty repeatedly by reloading the save, the base XP varies by around +-8% of its average).
Revenants cost 15 DP compared to the Atlas's 10 DP, and lacks the Atlas's civilian hullmod for 1/4 XP impact.
Just a side note, Revenant does have the CIVILIAN tag in ship_data.csv, plus it lacks any weapons. Either of those conditions means its DP counts for 1/4 of its original value for XP bonus. (Thus just-recovered warships, as long as you remove all weapons and fighters, will also count for 1/4 of their DP for XP bonus.)
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Honorable mention Battle Brothers, also long and it's really easy to avoid actual danger there.
I've compared Starsector to BB before (probably because I secretly wish Starsector took some more queues from BB). But I think the fundamental "problem" with viewing it as a rogue-lite and why it's ironman is destined to be a band-aid:
1) You can't actually lose the game
2) You have safe-haven storage and untouchable income in the form of colonies
3) You can avoid unwanted battles by using SP's.
4) You can accrue infinite money and by extension almost every ship in the game while completely avoiding combat/danger
Since it's pretty obvious that Starsector is a just a sandbox with the rogue aspect slapped on the side, people feel no qualms with saying "just dev-mod in more SP's" - and they aren't strictly wrong. The "optimal" rate of SP gain is dependent on the individual player, so debating what it "should" be in a sandbox game is a dead end.
Personally I would prefer Starsector be more roguelike, but it would require massive adjustments in virtually all areas of gameplay, including SP's.
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Randomly putting in my protest here. Dark Souls and Xcom are not "Iron Man" likes. I despise Iron Man, I hate the stupidity of attempting to prevent save scum. Liking a challenge is different than being "hard core", whatever the Dark Souls community might pretend at being. Challengeless games hold very little interest to me, and I think Starsector could do with MORE, not LESS challenge in it. Especially since there's mods like Command Console for those that might want to... adjust things for themselves. Singleplayer games have always been about personal balance (in the smallest example, the choice of save-scumming or not).