Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: BCS on November 20, 2022, 12:24:27 PM
-
Every mechanic exists for a reason but I'm not sure about this one. In practice all it seems to do is make hard fights(Remnant) even harder. I also don't find it particularly thrilling to have massive swings in DP(up to 1/3 of your entire fleet may become impossible to deploy depending on the fight) since, well, how do you even design a fleet at that point?
My best guess would be that it's something to incentivize using officers? But against full size Remnant fleets it doesn't matter how many and what levels officers you have, you're always pushed down to 160 base deployment anyway.
-
Yeah I don't get this either. It's not just Remnants - I've been doing a fair few midgame type battles recently, difficult bounties and the like, and I'm always at 160 regardless of how I'd evaluate the force lineup. Like, I just had a fight (deserter fleet) where I had a 40-50ish DP battlecarrier, 3-4 cruisers, about as many destroyers, and a whole lot of frigates; up against one 30ish DP battlecruiser, two cruisers, maybe 3 destroyers, and fewer frigates than what I had. About the same number of officers on either side. Game says: 160.
It wasn't like it was a hard fight either; I did zero micromanagement, just set "light escort" orders on anything that wasn't a frigate, set capture orders on two strategic points, and drove my carrier into the thick of it. No losses. But the game insists that I was at a disadvantage at the start.
-
My guesses? To prevent player from getting 60% max DP by bringing high DP ships (Paragon stack) to artificially bump up DP balance as done as some earlier releases. Also, to make 250k+ bounty fleets harder without having twelve capitals and the rest bulky heavy cruisers (Dominators or Ventures) plus the token Dram (when they obey the thirty ship limit). In case of Remnants, keep them strong after Radiant DP cost went up from 40 to 60.
This is one of the reasons why I would like to see in-game maximum map size settings reverted back to 500, if not more. 160 DP is not enough for a satisfying fleet fight (if I do not build for solo Ziggurat or double Neural Linked Onslaughts). I do not care if the enemy gets more ships on the field, I want to deploy my fleet, not deploy few ships to reenact a shonen hero vs. arc villain fight like Goku doing most of the fighting while the rest of the fleet sits on the sidelines sucking on their thumbs while mouthing off exposition.
The game was more fun when I could deploy close to 300 DP worth of ships.
-
(It's worth noting that when the game went from 500 to 400 DP maximum, it also became possible for each side to deploy 60% of the maximum, meaning the combined total DP is 480. Functionally there's not much of a reduction, just the raw visible number changed *to largely maintain the same maximum as before*.)
-
(It's worth noting that when the game went from 500 to 400 DP maximum, it also became possible for each side to deploy 60% of the maximum, meaning the combined total DP is 480. Functionally there's not much of a reduction, just the raw visible number changed *to largely maintain the same maximum as before*.)
That does not feel like that when player starts with 40% DP at endgame fights (barring BotB), and unless the player can capture and keep all points, he probably will stay at where he started or get about +20 DP (or 40 if he is lucky to get a comm point instead of sensor/nav). In a non-BotB build, I expect no more than 180 DP in worst case scenario. If I can easily keep more than one point captured, my fleet was probably stronger than the enemy to begin with and victory was decided before the fighting began. Only question is if the victory is flawless, or I lose a ship or three from AI stupidity. If the fight is genuinely difficult, it is unlikely my fleet will hold more than one objective for long, especially if I do not have fast ships (or had them but lost or retreated them).
When the max went from 500 to 400, it also changed DP balance from ship power to officer power, and Ordos has officer advantage locked in (with 15+ alpha cores and the rest lower grade cores). So, player went from 300 DP to 160 DP (or 200 DP with BotB). It is probably no coincidence that most of the strongest builds I see on YouTube have BotB for 200 guaranteed DP and third s-mods.
-
Yeah honestly it's really annoying.
There have been many times I looked at a pirate fleet and went "I can probably win with my better-outfitted ships despite being outnumbered!" only to come to the sudden realization that I can very much not win despite being outnumbered because the DP balance made me twice as disadvantaged as before.
-
The game could of course just remove the battle size limit, but things can quickly spiral up in scope and most computers wouldn't handle the kinds of endgame fleets that players would build. The next option would be to give both sides exactly equal deployment points, but that massively handicaps the larger fleet. Yes, you would still have an advantage because you have more ships in reserve that can be thrown in as reinforcements, but it makes it far easier for the smaller force. Try bringing a fleet of 100dp vs an enemy twice your size on battle size 200, then reload your file and fight the same enemy on battle size 400. It's going to be much harder.
Giving weighted deployment points to the larger fleet is meant to reflect the disparity in overall fleet size, so a fleet with 1500dp should get 60% vs a fleet of 1000dp 40%. This means that a battle between the two fleets will always be proportional to the actual size disparity between the fleets, but you have to opportunity to get up to 60% by outmaneuvering your opponent and taking the capture points. This reflects the ability of a skilled commander to overturn the force disparity.
The problem with that is that players will work around it by dragging paragon stacks with them, thus a lot of force deployment weight was shifted to officers as a reflection of this idea that skilled leaders can maneuver the battle so they only engage enemy on equal terms even when faced with a larger force. Overall it makes battles more interesting than just giving both sides equal dp from the start, because now you have to strategize around taking/holding points long enough to get up to your full power. Keep in mind it also makes easy fights easier.
Maybe they could always give both sides 40% at the start and you can only get more from capture points. Maybe they could give both sides 60% at the start and make the capture points more powerful so you still gain a big advantage from holding them. I personally don't have a problem with the current system, but there could be a better one for all I know.
Yeah honestly it's really annoying.
There have been many times I looked at a pirate fleet and went "I can probably win with my better-outfitted ships despite being outnumbered!" only to come to the sudden realization that I can very much not win despite being outnumbered because the DP balance made me twice as disadvantaged as before.
In my experience, all you need is few frigates in your fleet so you can rush the capture points and deploy the rest of your forces. This will allow you to hold those points now that your fleet is equal in size but superior in quality. If you don't have strong enough frigates to take the points at the start of the battle it quickly becomes much harder, but not impossible.
-
In practice all it seems to do is make hard fights(Remnant) even harder.
Well yes...but only in the sense that in the past it was real easy to roflstomp through endgame fleets just by stacking your fleet with capitals. Now it's more even, i.e. 240 DP vs 240 DP.
I also don't find it particularly thrilling to have massive swings in DP(up to 1/3 of your entire fleet may become impossible to deploy depending on the fight) since, well, how do you even design a fleet at that point?
Easy, you just make sure that you grab a couple objectives early on, deploy the rest of your fleet, and then you can forget about the DP unless you lose ships.
My best guess would be that it's something to incentivize using officers? But against full size Remnant fleets it doesn't matter how many and what levels officers you have, you're always pushed down to 160 base deployment anyway.
Yeah, meaning against full Remnant fleets, you'll always start at 160 DP (or 200 if you have BotB) and have to work your way up to 240 DP. They are supposed to be endgame anyway. But in practice it just means you grab a couple of objectives early on and then it doesn't matter after that.
That does not feel like that when player starts with 40% DP at endgame fights (barring BotB), and unless the player can capture and keep all points, he probably will stay at where he started or get about +20 DP (or 40 if he is lucky to get a comm point instead of sensor/nav). In a non-BotB build, I expect no more than 180 DP in worst case scenario.
I've never had any issue getting to 60% of battle size (i.e. 240 DP if battle size is 400), with or without BotB. And even with BotB the player still has to get 20%'s worth of objectives, because BotB's bonus doesn't stack with the deployment bonus from the objectives. I don't need to keep them either, I only need to hold them long enough to deploy the rest of my fleet.
So, player went from 300 DP to 160 DP (or 200 DP with BotB).
No, player went from 300 DP vs 200 DP by spamming capitals fleet, to 240 DP vs 240 DP by good fleet design and battle strategy fleet. And getting to 240 DP is just a small speed bump at the beginning on the way to the full fleet vs fleet action. In the past, the player was rewarded for lugging lots of capitals around, to fight endgame fights at a 3-to-2 advantage. That clearly was a fleet design philosophy that Alex didn't want to reward. Now, the player is rewarded for having good ship builds and proper strategy and fleet (to capture objectives) at the beginning of each battle.
(Side note: To put this in perspective, my current data is that the average full Remnant fleet has around 1.7 Radiants, 5.5 Brilliants, 4.2 Scintillas, 5.5 Fulgents, 4.1 Glimmers, and 3.7 Lumens. With their DP values being 40 DP (instead of 60 DP), 25 DP, 12 DP, 11 DP, 5 DP, and 4 DP, respectively, this comes out to an average of 352 DP. If we assume that Remnant fleet generation hasn't changed, and that it used to purely be a ratio of player fleet DP to enemy fleet DP in the past, then this means that the player would be lugging around 352 * 3/2 = 528 DP's worth of ships to handle a single Ordos fleet to get that 300-to-200 ratio. In 0.95.1a, I've beaten Ordos fleets, including triple Ordos fleets, with probably over a dozen different fleet setups, never having to use more than 240 DP, and often less, at +400% or more bonus XP. This means that the change essentially affected people who were used to carrying around more than double what was needed for endgame fleets.)
It is probably no coincidence that most of the strongest builds I see on YouTube have BotB for 200 guaranteed DP and third s-mods.
That's just because BotB is the only generalist capstone, meaning it has no particular fleet design direction but is just generally useful for all fleets regardless of their design direction. Since the player gets 15 skill points, enough for 3 capstones if they want, it's not surprising that most players would go for it, since that's enough points for them to get a capstone in their chosen fleet design direction, then get BotB, and then have several other skill points leftover for either a 3rd capstone or on whatever else they fancy.
-
I've never had any issue getting to 60% of battle size (i.e. 240 DP if battle size is 400), with or without BotB.
Oh I'd love to see your fleet comp then, if you can take and hold objectives on enemy side of the map within first minute or so of combat.
-
His fleet comp is SO Brawler spam, whih is why he always has control over objectives.
Personally, I have being forced to play for points. It reduces the amount of viable strategies in the late game, and, unlike some, I don't enjoy abusing the few broken fleets over and over and over.
Enemy fleets blatantly breaking officer limits (of yeah, the player totally can have 12 level 6 officers with the right skills and mercs! you don't? your fault for playing the game wrong, lmao!), they don't need more DP as well.
-
Easy, you just make sure that you grab a couple objectives early on, deploy the rest of your fleet, and then you can forget about the DP unless you lose ships.
Grabbing them at first is the easy part. Holding (more than one of) them is the hard part, especially when fast ships (frigates) run out of PPT and are forced to retreat (if they do not die first). If some of my ships die or run out of PPT and need to retreat, and the enemy takes a point, I cannot reinforce, and the fight is likely decided for the enemy.
No, player went from 300 DP vs 200 DP by spamming capitals fleet, to 240 DP vs 240 DP by good fleet design and battle strategy fleet. And getting to 240 DP is just a small speed bump at the beginning on the way to the full fleet vs fleet action. In the past, the player was rewarded for lugging lots of capitals around, to fight endgame fights at a 3-to-2 advantage. That clearly was a fleet design philosophy that Alex didn't want to reward. Now, the player is rewarded for having good ship builds and proper strategy and fleet (to capture objectives) at the beginning of each battle.
It would only be 200 DP if the map size stayed at 500 (or player took BotB). But since it did not and max size went to 400 instead, it went down to 160 DP for non-BotB builds.
240 vs. 240 would be okay, but it is not. It is 240 vs. 160 for non-BotB. Player can be relied on taking +20 DP from holding one point for up to 180 DP.
Even if Alex wanted to reward officer stacking instead of ship stacking, 160 DP is not enough to deploy enough (large) ships unless player wants a bunch of small ships. I dislike small ships if I do not take Leadership because they lack PPT and skill support. I dislike the game pushing player to Leadership if he takes a conventional fleet.
I would have preferred old ship stacking because at least bringing a big fleet had a point even if I could not deploy all the ships. Now, bringing a big war fleet is pointless and very unsatisfying (if I did not build for solo Ziggurat) because the player has the shonen elite doing all the fighting while his cheerleading ships sit on the sidelines.
Personally, I have being forced to play for points. It reduces the amount of viable strategies in the late game, and, unlike some, I don't enjoy abusing the few broken fleets over and over and over.
Enemy fleets blatantly breaking officer limits (of yeah, the player totally can have 12 level 6 officers with the right skills and mercs! you don't? your fault for playing the game wrong, lmao!), they don't need more DP as well.
So much this.
Ordos used to not break officer limits, but now they do. The toughest recurring ones have cores for all ships, with more than half of them having alpha cores.
And the biggest problem of relying on the same overpowered fleet over and over again is if player wants to change his fleet, he needs to fire his officers and waste a lot of time training new ones to fit his new ships and lose a bunch of story points that were spent to elite skills on officers without refund. (This is one reason I go for solo Ziggurat because I do not need to waste a lot of time and story points with officers, plus no need for Leadership.)
-
His fleet comp is SO Brawler spam, whih is why he always has control over objectives.
Isn't that the guy who fights 3 Ordos simultaneously? Hard to do that with SO ships, especially frigates...
-
I think Brawlers were what Vanshilar was using back in June?
For example:
The fact that most of these strategies boil down to spamming a monofleet of overpowered ships, all with the exact same "optimal" loadout doesn't help the fun either.
Highly disagree. I don't think I've ever used a monofleet for any of my Ordos farming fleets (although Drover spam way back when was pretty close to one, except my flagship was a different ship, and multiple types of fighters were used). Monofleets are generally not as effective as having different types of ships because different ships have different roles, and a single ship is not going to fulfill every possible role effectively. Chances are a monofleet could be improved by having a different ship in it. My LP Brawler fleet was much improved with the addition of several Falcon XIV's to provide Xyphos cover and help against larger targets, not to mention me as the player in a Medusa to jump around to different hotspots.
However, more recently I think he has been playing with a Gryphon heavy fleet led by a Legion (base) or maybe an Onslaught.
Player-piloted Legion XIV (Squalls/HVD/Cobras/Light Needlers but no Ballistic Rangefinder) usually does around 23-25% of overall damage in a Gryphon spam fleet vs triple Ordos, but player-piloted (base) Legion does around 26-28% of overall damage. And the Prox really make the Radiants a breeze, which means that the fight doesn't get disrupted by the initial Radiant nor the end Radiants (where there may be up to 4 Radiants on the field at once), since I just continually use burn drive toward the closest Radiant and unleash my Prox and other weapons on it, then rinse and repeat. That makes the last part of the fight (when the Radiants start pouring in) go really quickly -- and more importantly, safely.
It's a fleet he's used at one point for baseline comparisons between some weapon combination types.
In regards to grabbing points, sorted by speed of completing the fight, I find my options are:
1) Have such an overwhelmingly powerful fleet that you grab 3 of the 4 points early with a really fast ship like an Afflictor, Afflictor (P), or SO Hyperion, and then simple fleet pressure pushes the enemy to the top.
2) You can grab the two points on your side of the map with slow ships, you can spend like 12 DP on two support Afflictor (P) to initially capture one of the 2 other points, and then have them back off once you've deploy your ships. Fight at the back line to increase time for reinforcements to reach your ships.
3) Take BotB and play a defensive game on your side of the map or in the corner (if necessary) where you ignore capturing points. Being immune to being surrounded is worth at least a 20% DP bump in my opinion.
4) Deploy solo initially in a fast, strong ship that cannot be caught by the enemy or can kill anything that does catch it (even an Odyssey works here with the right skills). Eliminate all frigates and destroyers. Maybe a few cruisers. Capture points in a circular motion, after they've gotten it out of their system. Move to your back line. Deploy your fleet against a small portion of the enemy force. Optionally retreat with the ship and take control of another if PPT is low.
Essentially, battle tactics come down to force concentration at any one time. If the enemy has 240 DP to your 200 DP on the field, but only 160 DP of the enemy fleet is engaging your 200 DP fleet while 80 DP is in transit, you have the local advantage. You just need to kill fast enough that you've killed half of the 160 DP in the time it takes the 80 DP to reinforce. A highly mobile player ship can also distract large portions of the enemy fleet at a huge DP ratio (say a Medusa versus a Radiant and some Brilliants), and giving your AI officer ships the local advantage as well.
I'm kind of actually worried when the Remnants get an update in the next release to have much, much faster cruisers and a new battlecruiser. But we'll see.
-
I'm kind of actually worried when the Remnants get an update in the next release to have much, much faster cruisers and a new battlecruiser. But we'll see.
If anything, I think Remnants overall might become easier to kill, if it means fewer Radiants (because some get replaced by the new battlecruiser) and more ships with forward-only mobility systems that force them to overcommit and get picked off by your ships before they can run away.
-
In terms of capturing points, I find that it depends what game "theme" I'm playing. If I'm playing a game where I am using high performance frigates (scarab/tempest/hyperion/omen/remnant ones/phase frigates in particular, there are probably a few more) then its not hard to just grab a pair of points to start the match... and then later on if the enemy is too strong, cancel those and capture the enemy's points. They will trickle ships to reinforce them at which point a few control group frigates + right click eliminate orders kills the isolated stragglers. Easy way to even up a fight if using some "wolfpack" style ships and if the rest of the fleet can successfully kite the enemy main force.
If I'm going for slow ships that can't outrun the enemy, like a low tech battle line for example, then I rush heavy metal on the control points (maybe leading with some disposable lashers/kites/etc to distract enemy frigates) and then turtle up. Use my player ship to either turn the flank (if using a mobile striker) or to break the enemy wherever I am (if going for a combat specced battleship).
-
Well, getting the two points that spawn on "your side" is all but guaranteed even without frigates. Eradicators can get there on time(and possibly even push away an enemy frigate, which AI is terrible at) and they're not even the fastest cruiser. So generally speaking, +60 DP from two points is guaranteed almost regardless of fleet composition.
IMO the whole DP scaling mechanic could be completely removed, just give each side 160 DP at the start and done. At least then it's consistent whether you're fighting full-sized Ordo or some D-modded Pirates so it's easier to plan for.
-
Oh I'd love to see your fleet comp then, if you can take and hold objectives on enemy side of the map within first minute or so of combat.
Well it's not going to be within the first minute, since it takes roughly a minute for the two fleets to actually meet each other in the middle in the first place. But the key is to just note that the AI's behavior is that they will send the bulk of their fleet to only one objective at a time, while they'll only send token forces to capture the other ones, usually frigates. So you just need to send ships strong enough to displace their frigates temporarily while your main fleet bottlenecks their main fleet.
Off the top of my head, the fleet compositions I've used in 0.95.1a include:
Odyssey/Fury/Apogee/Hyperion: Various combinations of these ships, such as 2 Odysseys, 3 Furies, 3 Apogees, 2 Hyperions. A notable example is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUj-ggxn5Jk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUj-ggxn5Jk) (video from 0.95a), a 3 Odyssey, 3 Apogee, 3 Hyperion pure AI fleet, that on a lucky run could kill double Ordos on its own without any commands, after capturing the objectives and gathering the fleet up. This meant that all 15 skill points could go toward the fleet, and I didn't really have to do anything other than issue the occasional command (mostly just to corral the fleet back together). This family of fleet setups was what I first tried out in 0.95.1a. In all cases, if there were Hyperions, the Hyperions were sent to the objectives. If there weren't any (such as 2 Odyssey, 8 Apogee, etc.), then either some Apogees or Furies would grab the objectives.
Fury/Eradicator/Apogee/Hyperion/Shrike/Scarab/Brawler: Again, various combinations of some of these ships, generally all with SO. This was focusing more on having shifting front lines, rather than large tanks that the fleet centered around (note no capital ships). As with before, it would usually be the small ships going for the objectives first.
All-Hyperion fleet: This was frequently mentioned on the forums for a while. I tried it out, it was doable, but wasn't that great. The Hyperions, even with reckless officers, just kept running away unnecessarily, so their overall average DPS was pretty low, even if they had good burst DPS, resulting in long fights (which is made worse by their low PPT). I obviously just sent a Hyperion to each of the objectives.
Eagle/Scarab: This was with me in a Medusa. Like Hyperions above, this was doable, but wasn't that great. The Scarabs grabbed the objectives.
LP Brawlers with Champions or Eagle XIV's or Furies or Eradicators or Gryphons or Apogees or Falcon XIV's: This was with me in a Sunder, or Hammerhead, or Aurora, or LP Brawler, or eventually, Medusa using dual Cryoblasters, with various combinations of ships supporting the LP Brawlers. No officers, so this fleet relied on Support Doctrine. Eventually I settled on SO Falcon XIV's with Xyphos as being the most effective out of these on a per-DP basis for supporting the LP Brawlers. This was probably the easiest start I've ever played since the LP Brawlers could easily punch above their weight in the early game, and it was easy to gradually amass them to gradually scale up the enemies I fought by going to the various LP bases and either buying them or killing them. There were so many LP Brawlers that I could afford to send 2-3 to each objective. I also regularly fought Ordos under-DP'ed (i.e. my fleet only using 40-50% of battle size) since battles would actually finish faster that way -- the Brawlers would be waiting around at the enemy spawn point for new ships to spawn in if I had sized the battle size "correctly" at my fleet taking up 60%, so I made the battle size bigger than needed just so enemy ships would spawn in more quickly. I didn't need to capture the objectives, but this made it easier to corral the enemy fleet.
Ziggurat with LP Brawlers: Me piloting the Ziggurat using Omega weapons. Solo Ziggurat works but isn't that great, since you the player have to individually chase down every ship. Adding some LP Brawlers meant that I could have them fan out to either side, taking care of the trash while I concentrated on the big ships in the middle. The LP Brawlers went and grabbed the objectives while I went straight for the main enemy fleet, then I let them roam free, which meant that they would gradually head toward the enemy spawn point as I myself gradually headed there as I chewed through the main fleet and reinforcements. Doing it this way meant that the Ziggurat increased its own overall DPS by around 15% compared with soloing since it didn't have to turn nor overkill so much against minor targets, and could specialize against bigger ones.
Gryphons with LP Brawlers as support: I started by trying a monofleet of officered Gryphons, but found it sort of lacking. Having the Gryphons grab the objectives meant that it diluted the middle main fleet too much, especially early on before my reinforcements arrive. So the first way I tried was putting in some unofficered LP Brawlers (with Support Doctrine), to capture the objectives and allow the Gryphons to concentrate their fire on the main fleet. 10 officered Gryphons and 10 unofficered LP Brawlers. On a per-DP basis, the LP Brawlers did around as much damage as the Gryphons -- even though the Gryphons were officered while the LP Brawlers weren't (though they had Support Doctrine to help).
Gryphon with Legion XIV or Legion or Onslaught XIV flagship: I then piloted a Legion XIV or Legion or Onslaught XIV as the flagship, along with 10 officered Gryphons. Because I was helping to chew up the main enemy fleet, this freed up some Gryphons to grab the objectives. This is a case where the base Legion is noticeably better than the Legion XIV, because the base Legion could fit 5 Proximity Charge Launchers to completely annihilate the Radiants whenever they showed up (by using its burn drive to yeet the Prox en masse into the Radiants), along with its fighters, etc. I eventually settled on the Onslaught XIV though because even though it only had 4 instead of 5 medium missile slots, it had more ballistic weaponry and I didn't have to deal with pressing Z to toggle fighter engage/regroup.
Conquests with Onslaught XIV flagship: In looking at the Conquest to make use of my data on ballistic weapons (and to test them further), I started off with using Conquests with me piloting an Onslaught XIV in the middle. Two of the Conquests would grab the objectives. Unfortunately, this meant that (with BotB) it was me and 2 Conquests holding off the main fleet until reinforcements came, which was sometimes a bit risky, leading to...
Conquests with Medusa (me) and Gryphon as support: 5 officered Conquests as the main damage-dealers, while an officered Gryphon and me piloting a Medusa would grab objectives and do general support (mostly chasing down stragglers). This is the current fleet setup I'm playing around with to look at the Conquest in detail in support of the Conquest Appreciation Thread (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=25459.0) and now, Optimizing the Conquest (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=25536.0) threads, and it's a monster. The 4 initial Conquests are more than enough to handle their main fleet while the Gryphon and I grab the objectives and deal with any trash that spills over the sides, and then once the 5th Conquest shows up, I just sit back and let them fight for the most part (to collect the data; around 90% of the total damage is dealt by the Conquests for my data). They have no trouble going through double Ordos with me sitting back after grabbing objectives, so this fleet could most likely handle triple Ordos as well if I wanted it to (especially if I actually bothered to get into the thick of things instead of staying back). Except there's no reason to since I'm already running up near the XP cap against double Ordos; if I wanted to I could probably push the XP bonus to over +750% with this fleet, but the XP bonus is capped at +500% so there's really no need.
There are probably others that I've forgotten about. At any rate, most of these fleet setups fought Ordos fleets at around +400% XP bonus or higher, and all of them had a way to grab objectives early to deploy the whole fleet and then stay alive to not have to worry about DP after that. Although usually grabbing the objectives is what allows me to encircle the enemy fleet in the first place so the enemy fleet never really got a chance to get the objectives back after I grabbed them, so it didn't really matter.
(Side note: As I mentioned before, this is why I haven't really bothered to play with content mods in over a year, not because I don't want to, but because once I started getting into the game, I could see that there were far more possible effective fleet builds in the vanilla game than I have time to try. For example, for Gryphon spam with Onslaught XIV flagship, I actually tried out using different weapons as well as different fleet setups: 10 Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs triple Ordos, 6 Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs double Ordos, and 10 unofficered Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs single Ordos, using Support Doctrine and Derelict Operations. Each of these play very differently even though they're ostensibly the same fleet configuration. And I haven't even gotten into other fleet configurations like carrier spam (Heron? Mora? Condor? I'm sure each of those play differently, not to mention all the possible fighter arrangements), automated ships, fleet centered around Eradicators, etc.)
Grabbing them at first is the easy part. Holding (more than one of) them is the hard part, especially when fast ships (frigates) run out of PPT and are forced to retreat (if they do not die first). If some of my ships die or run out of PPT and need to retreat, and the enemy takes a point, I cannot reinforce, and the fight is likely decided for the enemy.
There's no need to hold them unless your ships die. If your ships are dying, that's the problem to solve first, not whether or not you can hold objectives for the whole fight. If your ships are running out of PPT, then that's an issue with trying to fight a fleet that's too large for your fleet (too many ships to churn through), or killing them too slowly. (Exception is if you're using SO in which case, well, you take the CR penalty as part of the deal if the fleet is too big.)
It would only be 200 DP if the map size stayed at 500 (or player took BotB). But since it did not and max size went to 400 instead, it went down to 160 DP for non-BotB builds.
No, it starts at 160 DP or 200 DP, but your fleet should be running at 240 DP for the majority of the battle. It just means that the beginning of the battle now has an extra step of grabbing the objectives, then after that it's a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight.
I would have preferred old ship stacking because at least bringing a big fleet had a point even if I could not deploy all the ships. Now, bringing a big war fleet is pointless and very unsatisfying (if I did not build for solo Ziggurat) because the player has the shonen elite doing all the fighting while his cheerleading ships sit on the sidelines.
This makes no sense. Because of upkeep, skills DP cap, XP bonus, along with other factors, the player is now incentivized to bring along only what's necessary and to deploy it all (except logistics ships), whereas in the past the player was incentivized to bring along a bunch of deadweight just to bulk up the fleet for that 300-to-200 deployment ratio. And you're complaining that the current system is the one that encourages having ships sit on the sidelines?
Ordos used to not break officer limits, but now they do. The toughest recurring ones have cores for all ships, with more than half of them having alpha cores.
That's actually one of the best features of the current system, because officers give so much more XP compared with how much more difficult the fight becomes. Enemy officers slightly less than doubles the base XP of the fleet, and slightly more than quadruples the XP bonus, so each current Ordos fleet gives around eight times more overall XP than if the fleet had no cores at all. So you get 4 million XP instead of 500k XP per Ordos fleet because of the cores. Granted without cores they'd be much easier to fight, but you'd have to fight 8 times as many (or stack that many more fleets together, etc.). A big part of why leveling is so much faster now is that enemy fleets, in particular Ordos fleets, give so much more XP now, and a big part of that is the overstocking of officers. (Another reason is that SP use basically doubles XP gain.)
And the biggest problem of relying on the same overpowered fleet over and over again is if player wants to change his fleet, he needs to fire his officers and waste a lot of time training new ones to fit his new ships and lose a bunch of story points that were spent to elite skills on officers without refund. (This is one reason I go for solo Ziggurat because I do not need to waste a lot of time and story points with officers, plus no need for Leadership.)
I don't like the officer training mechanic myself (I feel like the player should be able to directly select the skill they want the officer to learn, not choose from a list; I just directly save scum until I get the skills I wanted), but the loss of SP for new officers is minor. 8 officers each with an elite skill means 8 SP which you get back after around 2-3 Ordos fleets. (Could be two fights vs single Ordos fleets or a single fight vs double Ordos fleet.) You'll easily rack up several hundred SP throughout the course of each playthrough. Limiting yourself to soloing to "not lose story points when you fire officers" is entirely a self-imposed problem, especially if you end up getting more SP from the officers making your fleet more effective than without them.
Essentially, battle tactics come down to force concentration at any one time. If the enemy has 240 DP to your 200 DP on the field, but only 160 DP of the enemy fleet is engaging your 200 DP fleet while 80 DP is in transit, you have the local advantage. You just need to kill fast enough that you've killed half of the 160 DP in the time it takes the 80 DP to reinforce. A highly mobile player ship can also distract large portions of the enemy fleet at a huge DP ratio (say a Medusa versus a Radiant and some Brilliants), and giving your AI officer ships the local advantage as well.
Basically this. What's important is the local concentration of force. When your main fleet collides with their main fleet, you want to kill some of their smaller ships right away, then work your way toward bigger ships, to establish local force superiority and to start their line of reinforcements before they get the chance to do the same to you. Once you have your kill zone established, then the goal is to kill the enemy ships as fast as they're arriving at the front lines, so they never get a chance to build up enough of a force to threaten your ships. My 10 Gryphon with Onslaught XIV flagship fleet (at 240 DP) can beat a triple Ordos at 600 battle size (360 DP) relatively easily in this way, and could probably get up to around 700-800 battle size if I really tried. It just comes down to keeping their fleet scattered and always having to bring in reinforcements, while keeping my fleet in a coherent whole to focus my fleet's firepower on their ships.
-
What I miss the most about that, as a sidenote, is the dynamic recalculation of dp balance after destroying enemy ships. Can we have that back?
-
stuff
Why is it that every "Here's how to wipe multiple Ordo" video is from some old patch? Either way, you held a total of two points simultaneously in that battle - you just went for enemy Comm Relay with a Hyperion that can't do it in current patch and got lucky that the enemy fleet went for the Sensor Jammer instead.
Although I'll concede to the strategy because you could have also went for the Sensor Jammer on your side, which would give you a brief period of full deployment. So no, you cannot hold all four points, but you CAN make it so you get max deployment with proper fleet comp.
-
No, it starts at 160 DP or 200 DP, but your fleet should be running at 240 DP for the majority of the battle. It just means that the beginning of the battle now has an extra step of grabbing the objectives, then after that it's a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight.
Only if my fleet can hold the points. If my fleet can do that, then the fight was trivial, and victory is assured.
There's no need to hold them unless your ships die. If your ships are dying, that's the problem to solve first, not whether or not you can hold objectives for the whole fight. If your ships are running out of PPT, then that's an issue with trying to fight a fleet that's too large for your fleet (too many ships to churn through), or killing them too slowly. (Exception is if you're using SO in which case, well, you take the CR penalty as part of the deal if the fleet is too big.)
In other words, get Leadership because it has Wolfpack to give small ships the PPT and damage buffs it needs to last in double fights, which is where the bar is at (+500% xp for a proper fleet against double Ordos). I do not like how the game forces Leadership if I want a conventional fleet.
Using fast bigger ships (like Furies and Auroras) to cap points is not a solution since they cost too much DP and divide fleet power too much.
This makes no sense. Because of upkeep, skills DP cap, XP bonus, along with other factors, the player is now incentivized to bring along only what's necessary and to deploy it all (except logistics ships), whereas in the past the player was incentivized to bring along a bunch of deadweight just to bulk up the fleet for that 300-to-200 deployment ratio. And you're complaining that the current system is the one that encourages having ships sit on the sidelines?
At least bulking up the fleet lets the player deploy more ships back then. It was also an incentive to bring extra ships to switch into from worn-out ships for later fights (so player can chain-battle several encounters back-to-back like a battle-manic). Now, with officers determining nearly all the DP, plus +xp% multiplier reliant on small fleet, bringing a big war fleet is a trap, and I like it less than the old way.
In those older releases, those without gate travel, I effectively brought two fleets, primary one for fighting, and backups for later fights when some ships got too damaged to fight later battles. That was enough for 60% DP for me. There was no need for me to stack extra capitals solely for more DP. Also, I brought mostly big ships because they had more PPT, which was an option to win the PPT stall war in case the enemy tried to play that game.
Of course, extra ships mean reinforcements to deploy to replace lost ships, but the goal is flawless victory, so any ships beyond what the player can deploy are worthless. Bringing extra ships now to rotate out for more fights is a bad idea because of xp% multiplier and DP limits from skills.
but the loss of SP for new officers is minor. 8 officers each with an elite skill means 8 SP which you get back after around 2-3 Ordos fleets.
It is only minor if I do not hoard SP for colonies. Because I am crazy enough to consider feeding 2^n costs to have my shining empire with lots of green buildings (about 6+ improvements for each colony), wasting SP for any reason is like stealing SP meant for colonies. So far, I have not done this yet because I do not want to waste that much time for every release, but I do intend to try it on the final release if current mechanics stay more-or-less the same then.
Well, getting the two points that spawn on "your side" is all but guaranteed even without frigates.
Not always. Sometimes, there is the diamond pattern where one is at your side, one at the enemy side, and two vertically in the middle and near the left and right sides of the map.
-
Why is it that every "Here's how to wipe multiple Ordo" video is from some old patch? Either way, you held a total of two points simultaneously in that battle - you just went for enemy Comm Relay with a Hyperion that can't do it in current patch and got lucky that the enemy fleet went for the Sensor Jammer instead.
It's just to illustrate the fleet, it works the same in the current patch. I haven't bothered to re-record it since it's a pain for me to record and it'd be more or less the same except with "0.95.1a" instead of "0.95a" in the upper right corner.
Although I'll concede to the strategy because you could have also went for the Sensor Jammer on your side, which would give you a brief period of full deployment. So no, you cannot hold all four points, but you CAN make it so you get max deployment with proper fleet comp.
The goal is to get max deployment, not to hold all 4 points. That means 2 Comm Relays, or a Comm Relay and 2 other objectives. If you got unlucky and the enemy fleet is on the only Comm Relay, then just wait until after they capture it, at which point they move on to the next objective, then grab it. Basically getting max deployment is not that hard to do.
Only if my fleet can hold the points. If my fleet can do that, then the fight was trivial, and victory is assured.
No. There's no penalty for going over the DP limit once your fleet is deployed. It just means you can't bring in reinforcements in case you lose a ship or they retreat. So there's no need to hold on to the points other than at the very beginning.
Um isn't the point of good fleet design to ensure that the fight will be "trivial" i.e. that your fleet will win? That's what you should be aiming for, not treating it like an afterthought.
In other words, get Leadership because it has Wolfpack to give small ships the PPT and damage buffs it needs to last in double fights, which is where the bar is at (+500% xp for a proper fleet against double Ordos). I do not like how the game forces Leadership if I want a conventional fleet.
No. Most frigates (i.e. all except Hyperion) have at least 180 of PPT. With Hardened Subsystems, that increases to 270. That should be fairly close to what you need for double Ordos with a good fleet. Even if it starts ticking down after that, you still have a lot of time after that before malfunctions becomes a concern.
Using fast bigger ships (like Furies and Auroras) to cap points is not a solution since they cost too much DP and divide fleet power too much.
It's not a great solution but if your whole fleet is Furies and Auroras and larger, then you'll have to strategize around that. As I posted, I was actually using Conquests to capture objectives since that was what I had, and it worked fine. (Though I don't recommend it.) Nowadays, with my Conquest fleet, I rely on myself in an SO Medusa and a Gryphon to capture objectives while the Conquests mulch the enemy fleet. The Gryphon is not exactly the paragon of speed. (The Gryphon is overkill, I should probably just stick 2 LP Brawlers on it instead or something, but I wasn't concerned about trying to optimize for XP or anything.)
Now, with officers determining nearly all the DP, plus +xp% multiplier reliant on small fleet, bringing a big war fleet is a trap, and I like it less than the old way.
Bringing a big war fleet is also unnecessary. I think some mods like to put in huge death fleets to make things more "epic" but it just devalues the worth of the ships. It's like that old saying, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. (There's a video somewhere on Youtube where someone talked about this phenomenon in Star Trek, where older series had fewer ships in battles, so the viewer actually cared about what happened to each one. Whereas the newer series, you have stuff like Riker showing up with a fleet of hundreds of Galaxy-class ships or something to make it look more "epic" due to advances in CG, but it just means that the viewer just treats them like ants.) Limiting the DP that each side can deploy means that each ship actually matters, rewarding good fleet composition, instead of the battle just devolving into getting huge ships to launch huge salvos at each other.
It is only minor if I do not hoard SP for colonies. Because I am crazy enough to consider feeding 2^n costs to have my shining empire with lots of green buildings (about 6+ improvements for each colony), wasting SP for any reason is like stealing SP meant for colonies. So far, I have not done this yet because I do not want to waste that much time for every release, but I do intend to try it on the final release if current mechanics stay more-or-less the same then.
Again, that's entirely a player-imposed problem. The 6th colony improvement costs 2^6 or 64 SP. That's more than what you get leveling from level 1 to level 15. That's more than what you need to make a whole new fleet with s-mods and officers. Colony improvements beyond the first few just means getting +1 commodity. And you're talking about getting more improvements than that, and having multiple colonies with that, amounting to hundreds or thousands of SP spent on getting +1 ore here or +1 food there. Yet 8 SP to reroll new officers for a better fleet is too tough a cross to bear?
Multiple posters have pointed out to you that there's little point to getting more than the first few colony improvements (there's little benefit to it), and that the exponential nature of their cost is pretty directly saying that it's not intended for players to go past the first few either, other than when they got nothing else left to do with their SP. Treating it as an excuse to not spend SP on more worthwhile endeavors just means a bad ordering of priorities. I mean, if you want to, sure, but don't expect the game to cater to that.
And if that really is your intent, then you should be most concerned about trying to maximize your XP gain per minute, rather than using fleets that are not geared for that and then complaining about your SP gain being too slow.
-
Well, getting the two points that spawn on "your side" is all but guaranteed even without frigates.
Not always. Sometimes, there is the diamond pattern where one is at your side, one at the enemy side, and two vertically in the middle and near the left and right sides of the map.
One is still closer and easier to get to first...
-
Bringing a big war fleet is also unnecessary.
But I like using big war fleets that Starsector used to encourage or at least make possible in some of the earlier releases. Now, Starsector feels more like a console jRPG. Bring a small party of dungeon-crawling fools and kill the horde, and if the player wants a big fleet anyway, he will be punished for it if he can even use it.
And if that really is your intent, then you should be most concerned about trying to maximize your XP gain per minute, rather than using fleets that are not geared for that and then complaining about your SP gain being too slow.
Which means being forced into a fleet and/or skill set I may not want to use.
If I want to use a classic fleet that can smash double Ordos, I should get max Leadership, which means I need to give up some Technology and/or Industry. It means trading fun for power. I do not want to do that.
I fought a double Ordos fleet with a fleet and play experience was miserable (had to carefully construct a fleet, tailor all officers for a fleet, and the right skills). I had a better (more fun) time killing double Ordos with solo Ziggurat, but I do not want to be stuck between solo Ziggurat and switching to another fleet that takes days to construct (because of the time needed to level up at least eight new officers.) Ultimately, I have stopped playing Starsector because I do not want to waste days leveling up new officers to replace the eight that became obsolete and were fired whenever I want to change the fleet.
Multiple posters have pointed out to you that there's little point to getting more than the first few colony improvements (there's little benefit to it), and that the exponential nature of their cost is pretty directly saying that it's not intended for players to go past the first few either, other than when they got nothing else left to do with their SP. Treating it as an excuse to not spend SP on more worthwhile endeavors just means a bad ordering of priorities. I mean, if you want to, sure, but don't expect the game to cater to that.
If it is not intended, then there should be a hard cap to improvements, not dangle the carrot like Diablo II (and likely other games) did for rare loot and high levels. Doing so is cruel to the player (that does not use cheats), and Starsector does not have online play that wants players hooked on playing as long as possible. Make improvements work like s-mods, but for colonies instead of ships.
I like having lots of improvements for the same reason why people love perfect items in Diablo II. Greed trumps reason, and do not underestimate the lengths people went through to get what they coveted. I have seen a lot of that behavior when I used to play Diablo II:LoD during its heyday.
I have seen what improvements do to colonies, and I want them all (although I probably settle from six to eight per colony if I had the time to grind for them like I once had grinding for items in Diablo II)! If it means grinding for them like grinding for items in Diablo II, I may not like lt, but I will grind for them, or just quit the game in disgust.
I do not use cores in my colonies because I do not want to play whack-a-mole Pathers. Whack-a-mole pirates is already enough annoyance, and I do not want to add Pathers too for more pain. (Hegemony, I would wipe their worlds off the map to eliminate inspections permanently.) Because I do not use cores and use minimal items to dodge Pather cells, I am left with Industrial Planning and colony improvements to bring colonies up to snuff, or at least to meet demand of my buildings. (If I take an Industry capstone, I take Industrial Planning along the way too, instead of Containment Procedures.)
Um isn't the point of good fleet design to ensure that the fight will be "trivial" i.e. that your fleet will win? That's what you should be aiming for, not treating it like an afterthought.
That means the game is too easy, at least for those who used the top-tier builds of the game.
I expect hard fights to be a real meatgrinder no matter what the player uses, not be a joke for the top few builds while being hard for those who took trap or non-combat options (especially if they were more fun than the power options). Especially if the top options take a long time to assemble (which it does thanks to officers).
P.S. If officer experience stays like it is, I like to see more limited superhero ships like Ziggurat, just to have more variety of one-man army options.
-
But I like using big war fleets that Starsector used to encourage or at least make possible in some of the earlier releases. Now, Starsector feels more like a console jRPG. Bring a small party of dungeon-crawling fools and kill the horde, and if the player wants a big fleet anyway, he will be punished for it if he can even use it.
So somehow 300 DP means "big war fleet", but decreasing it by 20% to 240 DP means "small party of dungeon-crawling fools". Uh huh.
If I want to use a classic fleet that can smash double Ordos, I should get max Leadership, which means I need to give up some Technology and/or Industry. It means trading fun for power. I do not want to do that.
I fought a double Ordos fleet with a fleet and play experience was miserable (had to carefully construct a fleet, tailor all officers for a fleet, and the right skills). I had a better (more fun) time killing double Ordos with solo Ziggurat, but I do not want to be stuck between solo Ziggurat and switching to another fleet that takes days to construct (because of the time needed to level up at least eight new officers.) Ultimately, I have stopped playing Starsector because I do not want to waste days leveling up new officers to replace the eight that became obsolete and were fired whenever I want to change the fleet.
Yeah, I already replied to this back in June, and you're repeating this same arguments again:
Yes you keep saying this in multiple threads. Apparently:
1. The game is fun and you get to do what you want how you want to do it until you get to Ordos.
2. All fleets capable of defeating (double) Ordos are categorically deemed "unfun". There's never any discussion of just what your preferred playstyle is or why it doesn't work against Ordos fleets, or why you don't like any of the many different ways to defeat Ordos fleets, but any possible player fleets are automatically considered "unfun" if they can beat Ordos fleets.
3. Non-Ordos fleets don't give enough XP to fuel your desire to put improvements on all colony structures despite the 2^n cost, whose purpose is intentionally to dissuade players from trying to put improvements on all colony structures.
4. Therefore, Alex should make it so that regular fleets give millions of XP or you'll quit the game. Oh, and the skill cap should be increased because you want to be a fighter who can also cast spells like a mage, heal like a cleric, and sneak around like a thief.
If you're complaining about how long it takes to level up new officers, then you should be absolutely loving the current system compared to the previous one. Let's compare:
Old system (0.9.1a): Level 20 officer takes 339750 XP to level up.
Current system (0.95.1a): Level 5 officer takes 560000 XP to level up, or about 65% more XP needed. But you can now get XP bonus of up to +500%, i.e. gain XP up to 6 times faster. Meaning if you're getting an XP bonus of over +65%, then you're actually leveling up officers faster now than before. If you're fighting at +500% (and you keep saying that's the only acceptable way to fight), then this means that you can now level up 7 officers in the time that it used to take for 2 officers. Over 3.5 times faster. But somehow, the system now is just unbearably difficult.
If it is not intended, then there should be a hard cap to improvements, not dangle the carrot like Diablo II (and likely other games) did for rare loot and high levels. Doing so is cruel to the player (that does not use cheats), and Starsector does not have online play that wants players hooked on playing as long as possible. Make improvements work like s-mods, but for colonies instead of ships.
I mean "not intended" as in "not something the game is balanced around", not "something that should be forbidden". For example, a player could choose to colonize all ~600 planets if they wanted to, but that's not something that the game is balanced around, and in fact there are multiple mechanisms in place (stability penalty, diminishing returns with market share while upkeep increases linearly with number of industries, etc.) to discourage overdoing it.
Greed trumps reason
And that's the problem right there. People should be doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not different goals in a game are worth achieving, instead of just doing stuff "because it looks cool" or whatever. Or well, they can, it's their own time they're wasting, but they shouldn't expect the game nor the general playerbase to cater to their own peculiar interests or goals. I can say "hey a Kite looks awesome, I should be able to solo endgame fleets with it, otherwise the game isn't fun" but I shouldn't expect Alex to cater to that, especially when the only justification I ever bring up is to automatically declare "anything else is unfun". As I already mentioned, it's a single player game, if you want that kind of game you can just set "xpGainMult" to 100 or whatever you want in settings.json.
That means the game is too easy, at least for those who used the top-tier builds of the game.
No, that means that the game rewards players who take the time to understand and develop good fleet compositions, as it should. Good games will make it so that the endgame challenges can be beaten in multiple ways if the player knows what they're doing, which this game does.
I expect hard fights to be a real meatgrinder no matter what the player uses, not be a joke for the top few builds while being hard for those who took trap or non-combat options (especially if they were more fun than the power options).
Then you need to first figure out if you're arguing that the current game is too easy or that it's too hard. You complain that the game no longer allows players to roflstomp enemy fleets by fighting at a 300 DP to 200 DP ratio, but then you say you expect hard fights to be hard no matter what the player uses. Those two positions are mutually contradictory. Not to mention, I posted a bunch of different fleet compositions that can beat Remnant fleets at +400% XP bonus or above, and mentioned several that I haven't tried but should be able to do it as well, so apparently we have a very different definition of what "top few builds" means.
-----
By the way, attached is a screenshot of my 5 Conquest plus me in Medusa + Gryphon fleet mid-battle against a double Ordos fleet. The exact amounts varied throughout the battle, but in the screenshot there are 127 DP's worth of enemy ships transiting from the spawn point to the front lines, while there are 111 DP's worth of enemy ships at the front lines actively engaging my fleet. So I have 220 DP's worth of ships fighting 111 DP's worth of enemy ships (and my flagship is sitting out, whereas I'd be the biggest contributor if I had gone in).
The distance between Conquest 2 and Conquest 3 is roughly 2000 su, so within those 111 DP's worth of enemy ships, there are several whom my fleet is firing on, but are unable to fire back since my fleet is still out of range of their weapons. So it looks like I'm taking fire from only around 77 DP's worth of ships (89 DP if you count the Scintilla). Basically, only 1/3 of their fleet (2 Brilliants, 2 Fulgents and a Glimmer) is actually attacking my fleet, while I can bring all 240 DP to bear on their fleet. That local concentration of force is how you mulch through enemy fleets.
My fleet is slightly above the midpoint of the map (my Medusa, to the lower left, is next to one of the objectives which is in a diamond formation). So this means that if my fleet is at around the midpoint, then over half of the enemy fleet is stuck in transiting, and I'm only dealing with less than half of their fleet at any given time. I can stretch their line out even more (and thus deal with only a smaller portion of their fleet at a time) if I stayed lower on the map. So yeah, once you start killing a couple of enemy ships and get the ball rolling, then you're really only dealing with a fraction of the enemy fleet. So 240 DP vs 240 DP is actually more like 240 DP vs 80 DP if you can kill some initial ships and then set the battle up correctly.
[attachment deleted by admin]
-
Old system (0.9.1a): Level 20 officer takes 339750 XP to level up.
Current system (0.95.1a): Level 5 officer takes 560000 XP to level up, or about 65% more XP needed. But you can now get XP bonus of up to +500%, i.e. gain XP up to 6 times faster. Meaning if you're getting an XP bonus of over +65%, then you're actually leveling up officers faster now than before. If you're fighting at +500% (and you keep saying that's the only acceptable way to fight), then this means that you can now level up 7 officers in the time that it used to take for 2 officers. Over 3.5 times faster. But somehow, the system now is just unbearably difficult.
Come on dude, you're not going to send level 1-2 officers against double Ordo.
On a slightly related note, I don't mind the leveling speed of Officers but I do mind the skill lottery. Not getting the last skill and having to retrain the officer from level 1 is pain. This happens way too often(~30-40% of the time?) even with Mentor on.
Basically, only 1/3 of their fleet (2 Brilliants, 2 Fulgents and a Glimmer) is actually attacking my fleet, while I can bring all 240 DP to bear on their fleet. That local concentration of force is how you mulch through enemy fleets.
Yeah, but the first time the forces meet it's 240 DP for the Ordo vs. 240 DP(or less) for you. So to achieve the "force concentration" you need to be able to beat the enemy fleet in an even(or uneven) fight first anyway. At best you could say that this favors burst weapons like Sabots, since by the time they run out of them you should have a local advantage and not need them anymore. But simply saying "just have a local avantage bro" is rather meaningless.
By the way, have you tested any of your anti-Ordo fleets against other enemy "types" like Derelicts and Omega? I guess Derelicts would be fine since Gauss does so much raw damage even against armor but the Omega could be problematic because of their speed and extremely strong fighters that can all but ignore regular PD.
-
So somehow 300 DP means "big war fleet", but decreasing it by 20% to 240 DP means "small party of dungeon-crawling fools". Uh huh.
Not 240, 160 (or 200 with BotB). Going from ship-based 300 DP to officer-based 160 DP is a huge cut. I have to capture and hold the points. That means I need fast ships to capture them, which probably means frigates. I cannot do this in fights that I cannot totally dominate. I can reliably hold one point for +20 or +40 DP, in case of diamond pattern. Maybe two for at least +40 if the map gives two points on my side instead of one.
In older releases, that did not matter, and I did not need fast ships just for capturing. Since frigates had low PPT, I did not use them past early game in earlier post-0.8 releases.
Yes you keep saying this in multiple threads. Apparently:
1. The game is fun and you get to do what you want how you want to do it until you get to Ordos.
2. All fleets capable of defeating (double) Ordos are categorically deemed "unfun". There's never any discussion of just what your preferred playstyle is or why it doesn't work against Ordos fleets, or why you don't like any of the many different ways to defeat Ordos fleets, but any possible player fleets are automatically considered "unfun" if they can beat Ordos fleets.
3. Non-Ordos fleets don't give enough XP to fuel your desire to put improvements on all colony structures despite the 2^n cost, whose purpose is intentionally to dissuade players from trying to put improvements on all colony structures.
4. Therefore, Alex should make it so that regular fleets give millions of XP or you'll quit the game. Oh, and the skill cap should be increased because you want to be a fighter who can also cast spells like a mage, heal like a cleric, and sneak around like a thief.
They are not fun because I need to carefully construct the right combination of ships, skills, officers, and s-mods, and lock them in. If I want to change the fleet, I need to get new officers, ships, and s-mods. Maybe a single change may not cost that much but changing several times (which I will want to do eventually) will bleed story points. Raising several new officers takes days to do (I do not have the luxury of playing as long as I used to), and I need to bring extra ships for officers to set in. I did not need to do this much careful planning or dedication in prior releases.
I feel pushed to use overpowered ships (those that punch higher than their DP value) to win. Being balanced is not good enough if I have a quality and quantity disadvantage. Weaker stuff like Eagle (which used to be good but not overpowered in older releases) gets pushed to the wayside. That hurts when such ships were legitimately good in previous releases.
I need to devote all of my skills points to the power direct combat skills (that are not prereqs for tier 2 Tech/Industry), so any fun skills that do not directly add to combat power must be passed over. So no Automated Ships if it is not Alpha Radiant or Alpha frigates, no Neural Link that is not Radiant (with Systems Exp.), no Industry skills beyond tier 2 (unless I attempt Derelict Ops strategy), or no additional low-tier Tech/Industry (like no Sensors if I already have Navigation and/or no Bulk Transport if I have Field Repairs).
Against non-Ordos fleets, once I get Ziggurat (and the weapons it needs), it is the only thing I use because I get close to +400% xp from an endgame human bounty. Until then, I use a more conventional fleet that gives around +50% xp against human bounties. If I want a proper fleet, I need to hit double Ordos for the full +500%.
Even if I do not want to buff colonies, earning story points without +500% xp is a real slog at max level. Before my fleet was powerful enough to kill Ordos, it took several in-game years of grinding human bounties with no more than +50% (because I built my fleet like in previous releases) to earn little more than ten million xp to turn the green bar blue. With progress slow like that, story points are effectively finite, and I am opposed to spending story points for anything like respecs or making officers (that will be fired eventually) elite. Only when I can kill endgame fleets with high +xp% multiplier (fleet vs. double Ordos or lone Ziggurat vs. any endgame fleet) that I consider burning skill points without refund for the fleet (instead of banking them for the colonies I covet) maybe worth it.
I quit because I do not like the gameplay. Slow story point gain, fun but weak options (and giving them up for required power options). Gameplay seems to be all about Ordos at the end.
I preferred some of the gameplay features from previous releases that were more fun than today.
As for 4. It is more like pilot/combat, leader/fleet, or meta/non-combat for the player. Enemies late have high combat, and they have some fleet power. Non-combat is irrelevant for them. Player can already get plenty of combat stuff provided he dumps all of the non-combat or weak combat stuff. The enemy has full combat by the end, so players who do not use autopilot will want high combat to not be a weak-link. That leaves fleet or non-combat.
If you're complaining about how long it takes to level up new officers, then you should be absolutely loving the current system compared to the previous one. Let's compare:
I did not need to fire officers for a new fleet back in older releases, except maybe for general-purpose warship vs. carrier (and only if I wanted to go from balanced fleet to pure carrier spam or vice-versa).
Releases before 0.7 did not have officers.
In 0.7, officers were bench warmers to keep CR up since I soloed everything with a single ship. I did not use a fleet in battle back then (which required Leadership to use a single capital without CR penalties). The one exception I considered would be ten Timid officers for Pilum Vigilance spam (when it was still effective), which I did not do because I did not have the patience to level them up only to fire and replace them after the novelty wore off. Not when max skilled Dominator could solo a single endgame fleet, and Onslaught could solo more than a hundred ships faster than Paragon can.
In 0.8, I did not need officers to kill fleets. Back then, the strongest enemy was red system Remnant Nexus. (Ordos did not have Radiant back then.) Sparks were overpowered (armed with two full-strength burst PDs), and Astral with Sparks was probably the strongest ship that release.
In early 0.9, I had no incentive to kill Ordos, since they had nothing I want (aside from Sparks for carriers) and Pathers and Pirates were the primary recurring threat. (I favored anti-armor builds that could chew through pirates fast.) In the release infamous for Drover spam, I used large ships only (I did not take carrier skills for Drover spam). In 0.95, which I did not play until late, I barely made it to endgame (i.e., able to kill my first human bounty with a capital) when 0.95.1 was released.
Before 0.95, officers did not need to be specialized beyond warship (no carrier skills) or carrier (has carrier skills). Now, I need officers with specific skills for specific ships. Also, there were no elite skills before, so I did not need to agonize whether to burn a story point without refund for officers.
I mean "not intended" as in "not something the game is balanced around", not "something that should be forbidden". For example, a player could choose to colonize all ~600 planets if they wanted to, but that's not something that the game is balanced around, and in fact there are multiple mechanisms in place (stability penalty, diminishing returns with market share while upkeep increases linearly with number of industries, etc.) to discourage overdoing it.
It should be discouraging, but it is about on par with (or perhaps less than) the grinding required to get many of the best and rare stuff in Diablo II, at least for those who do not cheat. (Yes, there were plenty of cheaters then.) I have spent many days grinding for items and levels beyond 90 in Diablo II.
Greed trumps reason
And that's the problem right there. People should be doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not different goals in a game are worth achieving, instead of just doing stuff "because it looks cool" or whatever.
It is unrealistic to expect flawed human beings to do the right thing every time. We would have much less crime and sin in the world if people could be relied on doing the right thing instead of falling into temptation or following their desires over reason.
P.S. Until the current release, I was only compelled to grind Ordos if I wanted lots of alpha cores for the mad quest to colonize the entire sector. Now, I feel the need to grind Ordos for max +xp% gain if I want to play with a classic style fleet.
-
Come on dude, you're not going to send level 1-2 officers against double Ordo.
Actually, some of the fleets probably could, but realistically there's not that much need to. If the officers are low-level then they're also not impacting your XP bonus as much so you could get away with smaller double Ordos or just go for single Ordos. The point is that leveling up officers now is much faster than before. Even a large full fleet (240 DP's worth of ships, 8 level 5 officers) is going to get over +100% XP bonus against single Ordos, and the bar to clear was getting at least +65% XP bonus. Not to mention I forgot about mentoring, which doubles the officer's XP gain, if the player is willing to spend a SP on it.
On a slightly related note, I don't mind the leveling speed of Officers but I do mind the skill lottery. Not getting the last skill and having to retrain the officer from level 1 is pain. This happens way too often(~30-40% of the time?) even with Mentor on.
Yeah I don't care for it myself. I feel like the player should just be able to pick the skill at will (and also store officers at planets or something if they're not currently needed). I've been save-scumming officer skills since 0.9.1a. I mean back then you had to choose 1 skill out of the 2 given, and do that for 19 levels. Nowadays it's choose 1 skill out of 4 (or 6, if mentored) for 4 levels, and there are some patterns in there. For example, when choosing a skill, I always pick Systems Expertise or Missile Spec last or unless I'm forced to, since they're guaranteed to always be there (after the first few picks). Since they'll always show up, I'll try to pick the others first, unless none of them are what I want. But yeah I just save-scum most of the time.
Yeah, but the first time the forces meet it's 240 DP for the Ordo vs. 240 DP(or less) for you. So to achieve the "force concentration" you need to be able to beat the enemy fleet in an even(or uneven) fight first anyway. At best you could say that this favors burst weapons like Sabots, since by the time they run out of them you should have a local advantage and not need them anymore. But simply saying "just have a local avantage bro" is rather meaningless.
Yes I knew that this was the case (i.e. that after the initial clash, it's just a matter of enemy ships streaming in as I kill them, so I'm not actually facing the full amount of ships) but I was surprised by just how few enemy ships were actually at the front lines fighting when I actually took a screenshot mid-fight. What this means is that when planning out your fleet, you may want to have some burst weapons (Harpoons, Sabots, etc.) that you know won't last the whole fight, but just to get you through the initial clash. Then after that, it basically becomes "steady state" with a continual stream of ships coming in and dying, and then you won't need to worry as much about having overwhelming firepower.
So for example, a question for the Conquest build was whether the Harpoons should be in their own weapon group or in the same group as the Squalls. Testing it both ways, the Harpoon's hit rate wasn't really appreciably affected either way, so the Harpoons did more or less the same amount of total damage either way. But the AI does conserve the Harpoons more (fire them less frequently) if they're in their own weapon group. Based on this, it's probably better to put them in the same group as the Squalls, to encourage the AI to spam them more at the crucial beginning of the fight.
So it comes down to how to survive the initial clash. Fortunately, you're not really dealing with the entire 240 DP enemy fleet anyway. A couple of ships will split off to grab objectives (although it's the same for you), plus they don't move together in a uniform line -- they sort of move in a clump, so you're dealing primarily with the side of that clump that's closest to you. As I mentioned, generally speaking I pick off the smaller ships first, since they're quick and easy, and then I work my way up to the larger ones.
Make sure your own ships are survivable; for example, for my LP Brawler fleet, I max out their capacity (including Flux Regulation) and also stick on Hardened Shields and Solar Shielding, so they go from being able to absorb 3000/0.8 = 3750 raw damage to being able to absorb 6300/0.68 = 9265 raw damage, or 6300/0.68/0.8 = 11581 raw energy damage (which is what the Ordos will mostly have). Basically tripled the damage they could absorb. That makes it so that the enemy fleet loses ships while I keep mine alive, and then it'll gradually snowball from there.
By the way, have you tested any of your anti-Ordo fleets against other enemy "types" like Derelicts and Omega? I guess Derelicts would be fine since Gauss does so much raw damage even against armor but the Omega could be problematic because of their speed and extremely strong fighters that can all but ignore regular PD.
Not much. They'll probably do well against some other stuff but might not be able to handle things like Omega. I know for example that the LP Brawler fleet couldn't handle stations, since they don't know how to maintain range properly and kept running into the stations and overloading. But say the Gryphon fleets worked fine. Realistically though I'm not concerned about trying to optimize my fleet around Omega, because those are basically one-off (or, two-off) fights, not something that I'm going to do continuously like with Alpha core farming. So with them, I don't mind if I lose half my fleet or whatever, since I'm just going to go back to base and repair afterward anyway. To me, it's the Ordos that's worth building a fleet around, since I know any anti-Ordos fleet can handle faction fleets, so I know it'll be able to handle pretty much any general purpose battle, excepting only the special and occasional fights that I can prepare specifically for (against stations, against Omega, etc.). They've handled pretty much all of the custom bounties pretty well so far as well.
Not 240, 160 (or 200 with BotB). Going from ship-based 300 DP to officer-based 160 DP is a huge cut.
No. 160 DP or 200 DP with BotB is only at the beginning. The rest of the time is a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight. I gave a bunch of examples of fleet compositions above that could get full deployment no problem and beat Ordos fleets at over +400% XP bonus. As I already said, you don't need to hold the objectives, unless you're losing ships. You can use frigates if you want but you don't have to; a lot of the fleet compositions didn't use them. (I was even capturing objectives with Conquests, although I don't recommend it.) It's not that hard to modify a fleet to be able to grab objectives. You can either wallow in a 160-DP prison that is entirely self-imposed or figure out how to grab objectives at the beginning to make your fleet into a 240-DP fleet.
They are not fun because I need to carefully construct the right combination of ships, skills, officers, and s-mods, and lock them in.
You make it sound as if accidentally hiring an officer with the wrong name or getting a ship with a bolt loose will mean the whole fleet will fall apart and result in a fleet wipe. There are countless combinations of ships, officers, etc. that can beat Ordos or whatever other fleet you want to take on.
Officer leveling is "free" in that every battle will give officers XP if there are any officers that need it, so you don't need to fight "just to level officers up", you can go about your regular business and let the XP accrue naturally. Again, complaining about "oh my gosh I might change my mind in the future and have to redo my fleet" and therefore refusing to commit to any fleet is entirely a self-imposed problem. You're going to level up and gain SP naturally just by going around fighting anyway. (And if you're not fighting, then you don't need to worry about building the "perfect" fleet.)
I feel pushed to use overpowered ships (those that punch higher than their DP value) to win.
So your complaint is that...some ships are better than others? That different fleet compositions lead to different results, some better and some worse? That the player is encouraged to use better ships over worse ships? Um, all this is going to be a feature of pretty much every game where there is sufficient variety in what the player can choose to play. There would be little point to trying out different builds or offering different varieties of ships if they all gave the same result. This complaint makes no sense.
Not to mention, I listed around two dozen different ships above in my compilation of fleet compositions that I've used to beat Ordos fleets in 0.95.1a. Apparently a large portion of the vanilla ship roster is "overpowered".
I need to devote all of my skills points to the power direct combat skills (that are not prereqs for tier 2 Tech/Industry), so any fun skills that do not directly add to combat power must be passed over.
There you go again, equating "power" with "not fun" and "not power" with "fun".
Even if I do not want to buff colonies, earning story points without +500% xp is a real slog at max level. Before my fleet was powerful enough to kill Ordos, it took several in-game years of grinding human bounties with no more than +50% (because I built my fleet like in previous releases) to earn little more than ten million xp to turn the green bar blue.
Then that's just poor gaming strategy. If you're going for XP, then your goal should be Ordos-farming. If your fleet can't handle Ordos fleets and you're going for XP, then building it to handle Ordos fleets should be a priority. So you basically went XP-farming very inefficiently and then complained about it being too inefficient and slow. It took you several in-game years to get a little more than 10 mil XP; by comparison, as I posted earlier (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=25183.msg374529#msg374529), in my Brawler playthrough, I had gained around 198 mil XP in 6 in-game years, or around 33 mil XP per in-game year.
As for 4. It is more like pilot/combat, leader/fleet, or meta/non-combat for the player. Enemies late have high combat, and they have some fleet power. Non-combat is irrelevant for them. Player can already get plenty of combat stuff provided he dumps all of the non-combat or weak combat stuff. The enemy has full combat by the end, so players who do not use autopilot will want high combat to not be a weak-link. That leaves fleet or non-combat.
And what's the point of this? Is it that the player needs to choose between A or B, and somehow that's a bad thing? Yes, that's the whole point, if the player didn't have to give up anything meaningful for not taking certain paths, then the choice itself is meaningless.
I did not need to fire officers for a new fleet back in older releases, except maybe for general-purpose warship vs. carrier (and only if I wanted to go from balanced fleet to pure carrier spam or vice-versa).
...
Before 0.95, officers did not need to be specialized beyond warship (no carrier skills) or carrier (has carrier skills). Now, I need officers with specific skills for specific ships.
I don't know how you could have had only one general-purpose warship officer and one carrier officer skill setup, I had something like 6 different officer profiles depending on the type of ship for 0.9.1a. Having to fire and retrain new officers now is the same as then.
It should be discouraging, but it is about on par with (or perhaps less than) the grinding required to get many of the best and rare stuff in Diablo II, at least for those who do not cheat. (Yes, there were plenty of cheaters then.) I have spent many days grinding for items and levels beyond 90 in Diablo II.
Sure, I played Diablo II too when it came out. Has little to do with this though, since grinding for levels actually had gameplay impact there, however limited it was from a practical standpoint, while here, colony improvements beyond the first few only serve to increase commodities, which only serve to increase the player's passive money gain per month. Spending SP to gain credits is a bad trade. You can probably make more from a single trade run than all the credits that you'll get from a +1 commodity over the course of the playthrough.
Regardless, Alex has directly said that the "worth" of an SP is balanced around using it for putting in s-mods into ships. That means it is not based around players trying to spend hundreds of SP in one mouse click to get +1 food. The player is welcome to do it if he likes, but it's not going to be held as a legitimate basis for complaining that SP gain is too slow.
It is unrealistic to expect flawed human beings to do the right thing every time. We would have much less crime and sin in the world if people could be relied on doing the right thing instead of falling into temptation or following their desires over reason.
That's a complete non sequitur. I'm talking about when playing a game (or most other endeavors), the player should look at what's the benefit of doing something versus how much effort it takes in terms of setting achievable and worthwhile goals, and then you go off on some morality thing.
-
You need officers to deploy more ships effectively? Oh no! It's almost as if commanders are important in a battle.
-
So, getting back to the original topic...
As I understood it, the goal in having officers affect deployment points was to keep the 'larger fleets get more deployment' feel, but without letting the player swing that in their favor by bringing 'extra' ships they never plan to actually field.
However, this lead directly to the current game's issues where the deployment distribution feels* unfair due to the enemy fleets not needing to respect the same limits the player has on number of officers.
* Note that I'm not necessarily saying that it is unfair, only that it feels that way. Kindof like the smuggler fleets; would it be 'fair' if the player could just run around with transponder off and have the patrols ignore them? Probably not. But it absolutely feels unfair that the AI fleets can do just that.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the player just treats extra ships differently than the AI. For the AI, having a spare paragon or two means they can deploy those once their frontline has been destroyed. For the player**, having their frontline destroyed means they already lost the battle - reserves aren't useful if you're going to be reloading anyway.
** Or at least for me, personally, excluding Ziggurat and Omega fights: Those have unique and valuable rewards such that losing a few ships can still feel like a win, albeit an extraordinarily expensive one.
As such, I don't think that you can have these systems work in a way that preserves 'larger fleets get more of the deployment pool' and feels fair to the player and doesn't encourage the player to haul along 'dead' ships that they won't deploy just to get their fleet size up.
Given that, were I looking at revamping this mechanic, I'd probably make a few specific changes:
1: Remove the current deployment scaling with fleet size and officer count/level. Just scrap that entirely, let the default state be that both fleets get equal shares of the available battle size.
2: Give high-level supposed-to-be-a-threat enemy commanders access to the Best of the Best deployment bonus; this probably includes all remnant fleets.
3: Make the deployment limits tilt in the AI's favor if it has multiple full fleets - more than 30 ships total (with a station counting as a full thirty ships worth on its own) - let the player fight against the numerical disadvantage if they're trying to fend off multiple battle fleets at once, or gain that advantage if they're supporting their own planet's defense platform.
Edit: Alternatively, just roll back to the fleet size based calculations of last patch, and if the player wants to drag along an extra couple of paragons - well, let them. All the skills with DP limits will be weaker for it, and if they decide that tradeoff is worth getting the deployment advantage, so be it.
-
However, this lead directly to the current game's issues where the deployment distribution feels* unfair due to the enemy fleets not needing to respect the same limits the player has on number of officers.
Well, I'm not sure that it's necessary for a fight to feel "fair", especially endgame fights. In some RPG's, endgame bosses can have over a million HP while the player party is limited to around a thousand HP or so. The conceit in those games is that the player wins "against all odds" through ingenuity, better preparation (the player gets to prepare against the monster's strengths and weaknesses, whereas the monster doesn't get to prepare against the player), better tactics, etc. If the fight were "fair", the enemy fleets would have as many s-mods as the player's fleet, the AI would be as good as the player's ability to play, and the AI would be able to select ships and weapons that counter the player's fleet composition, in the same way that the player gets to prepare against the AI. It's precisely because of these factors (and others) that the player gets to prevail against the AI despite such lopsided numbers.
If anything, the deployment distribution is actually incredibly unfair...to the enemy fleets. It's possible to create different fleets that can take on triple Ordos and win with no losses. We even got people complaining about anything less than +500% XP vs double Ordos being too slow. In either case it means the player fleet is around 1/4 the size of the enemy fleets and around 1/6 the number of officers, depending on fleet composition, yet still prevailing. If we were actually adjusting deployment points based on ship DP, the player should only be able to deploy 80 DP to the enemy's 320 DP when players go up against double Ordos with these types of fleets. It's only because the deployment distribution is even (each side gets to deploy up to 60% of the battle size), allowing the player to deploy his whole fleet while the enemy fleets are bottlenecked to the deployment cap, that player fleets can handle such odds.
In other words: the current deployment system is precisely what allows the player to rack up such huge XP bonuses in fighting huge fleets. So if you're arguing for "fairness", then Alex should actually just remove the minimum of 40% of battle size for the smaller fleet, so that players doing multiple Ordos for XP (or complaining about it) have to actually have a fleet that can handle multiple times their DP at once.
-
There is, indeed, a large gulf between 'actually unfair' and 'feels unfair'.
And I'm not arguing that the fight itself needs to feel fair, just that the framing of it should - Starsector is not a game designed around the notion that the player is some magical special hero, and mechanics that make it obvious that the AI is running under different rules than the player is are - for me - annoying immersion-breakers.
(Yes, that includes colonies. If it's so easy to set them up... why are you the only one doing so? I'd honestly prefer that suggestion someone made a while back of requiring a sleeper ship to be able to start colonizing at all - obviously, not with the current sleeper-ship mechanics, you'd need to be able to cart it around to where you needed it, and maybe the current-game's sleeper ships are 'bigger' versions and the one(s) the player can find & use to start a colony are smaller... Add in a semi-tutorial mission string that points the player to one to get them started, and off you go.)
-
But the fights should be unfair in favour of the player. This isn't a PvP game, the opponents don't really "exist" and therefore don't obey the same rules as the player does; or to put it differently they don't play the game at all. Enemy fleets just spawn out of thin space and don't need to pay maintenance, officers, don't have to pay SP for S-mods and don't use up fuel or supplies. If fights were really "fair" then the player would lose most of the fleet with every engagement, just like every equal chess match ends up with both sides losing most of the pieces. Except only the player has to actually put in effort to get their fleet back so that would be incredibly tedious to do.
It's possible to create different fleets that can take on triple Ordos and win with no losses.
Is it? I know you listed a bunch but they all basically boil down to "Safety Overrides and/or Squall". Sure individual ships change but the principle remains the same - a hullmod that basically breaks the game when installed on ships larger than a frigate and a broken oddity of a weapon that generates tons of hard flux at no flux cost to the firing ship and has amazing endurance to boot. Given how many different ways there theoretically are to build fleets/ships in Starsector, narrowing everything down to a single hullmod and a single weapon system is actually incredibly limiting.
-
i would prefer there to be "initiative" thing, where the stronger force starts with advantage, but the points AND killing ships can give you the upper hand
also rework to reinforcements, where the points are actually limited like command points, and they slowly regenerate, but killing enemy ships speeds it up
it doesnt happen as often vanilla (but still does), where i get advantage and then game turns into meatgrinder at top of map, its boring and makes no sense, at that point they should lose the battle and get the option to run or try to reengage but at disadvantage (maybe CR hit?)
-
I agree with the Dev that the previous state of the game (where you would just bring 15 paragons and get 50% more DP than the enemy to trivialize the fight) was boring and needed to be fixed.
I do feel like a better direction would be to try and change the campaign layer of the game so that bringing tons of large ships is very difficult to achieve or undesirable (via logistics or access to ships, and the new skills and bonus XP already do this to some extent) rather than making those extra ships have no deployment benefit if you bring them along.
I feel like between skill thresholds, bonus XP, and logistics/ship access, it should be possible to make the 'bring 15 paragons to get +50% DP' strategy unviable, while still using the old system of initial DP ratio being decided by the ships in the fleet. Maybe considering both officers and ships is best though.
I think equal deployment points for both sides is a bad idea. It's way too much of an advantage for the smaller fleet, which is frequently the players because of the new skill system.
-
There is, indeed, a large gulf between 'actually unfair' and 'feels unfair'.
And I'm not arguing that the fight itself needs to feel fair, just that the framing of it should - Starsector is not a game designed around the notion that the player is some magical special hero, and mechanics that make it obvious that the AI is running under different rules than the player is are - for me - annoying immersion-breakers.
It's the opposite. Endgame fights in many games need to "feel unfair" against the player for them to seem epic or be memorable, but in reality are "actually unfair" against the AI. That's why you get stuff like a merry band of adventurers going up against a dragon or a demigod or an orc horde or whatever as the endgame in a lot of games, not you the player going up against a random joe schmo. Those monsters typically not only have much better stats, but also have spells and such that the player doesn't have access to. (Imagine the player getting to play through Diablo II as Baal.)
For Starsector, In terms of regular faction fleets, at least in terms of the random personal bounties that pop up, the biggest ones (level 10 or above, i.e. 285k credits and above) average roughly 11 officers that have around 57 total levels. (Keep in mind that you the player count as a level 15 officer.) So the player fleet is at rough parity with the highest personal bounties for deployment. It's when you get to multiple fleets or Ordos fleets that the player is at a numerical disadvantage, but have a bunch of bonuses to make up for that. Not only is the deployment ratio "capped" (or in this case, minimized) at 40:60 instead of whatever the actual ratio might be, but the player can make up for it and get an even 60:60 ratio by temporarily grabbing objectives at the beginning. So my point is that the deployment system actually favors the player against the hardest fleets, rather than working against the player.
But the fights should be unfair in favour of the player.
Right, and I'm saying they already are (in particular the deployment system), and it doesn't need to be adjusted even more in favor of the player than it already is. The rest of it is due to reducing computation time to only what's important, i.e. simulating the world around the player. You *don't* want the computer to be simulating the equipping, fighting, leveling, etc. process of every kobold and goblin that the player encounters dispatches with hardly a second thought before the player sees them, that would grind the whole game down. That's why enemies appear already "fully developed" so to speak while the player needs to level up, etc., in pretty much every game.
Is it? I know you listed a bunch but they all basically boil down to "Safety Overrides and/or Squall". Sure individual ships change but the principle remains the same - a hullmod that basically breaks the game when installed on ships larger than a frigate and a broken oddity of a weapon that generates tons of hard flux at no flux cost to the firing ship and has amazing endurance to boot. Given how many different ways there theoretically are to build fleets/ships in Starsector, narrowing everything down to a single hullmod and a single weapon system is actually incredibly limiting.
No, it's entirely possible to make fleets that don't use them and still beat multiple Ordos, I just choose to because 1) Safety Overrides doubles flux, flux is related to the ship's damage output, and I focus on maximizing damage output to kill the enemy fleet as quickly as possible, and 2) my fleets tend to favor kinetic weapons, because:
1. Ordos ships have lots of shields but relatively low armor and hull, so you want lots of kinetic weaponry. From Detailed Combat Results, usually the total damage done is around 55% to shields, 15% to armor, and 30% to hull. That much damage is going up against the Ordos ships' very good shield efficiency too (in other words, the raw damage done to shields is actually around double of that).
2. High kinetic damage is a good way to drive up enemy flux and thus nullifying their offense, so that I don't have to worry about them fighting back as much, and Ordos fleets are very offensively-focused.
3. Since I the player am much better than AI at deciding if jumping in to finish off a target is worth the risk, the flagship tends to have more anti-armor/hull while my AI ships have more anti-shield. For example, my flagship Medusa simply has 2 LDMG and 2 Cryoblasters. (Without SO, then it's 2 Light Needlers and 2 Cryoblasters.) My Onslaught XIV's main weaponry is 4 Proximity Charge Launchers, which I use while burn driving into a target, which the AI doesn't really know how to do.
So if my fleet has large missiles, then the most obvious weapon to put in that slot is Squalls. Hurricanes suffer too much from missing and overkill, while Locusts are best for finishing off targets which I'm already focusing on in the flagship. I've generally been using HVD for medium ballistics and Mjolnirs for large ballistics for the same reason. (Gauss does a bit more than Mjolnir to shields, but Mjolnir does far more to armor and hull to make up for it, plus have a higher hit rate.)
But for example, the 5 Conquests can win against double Ordos just fine using Hurricane/Locust/Mjolnir/Gauss/HVD/Harpoon, as attached. In that case the Gryphon's large missile was switched to Locust and I removed the SO on my Medusa, switching out my dual LDMG for dual Light Needlers. It can still win just fine. My Furies tended to use Sabots and Xyphos instead of SO. My understanding of Eradicator fleets is that they're long-range fleets, not based on SO. And whenever I get around to playing with carriers, they won't use SO nor Squalls most likely (unless the best carrier I find for a carrier-heavy fleet is Legion XIV or Astral). I don't think phase ships use SO nor Squalls either. So it has more to do with my personal playstyle than "it has to be done this way".
[attachment deleted by admin]
-
Post your fits/skills/officers then because I literally cannot imagine these five Conquests beating a full sized Ordo. Maybe if you cheesed the hell out of AI with the flagship by dragging most of their forces(or at least the Radiant(s)) away, that's the only way I could imagine it working.
-
imo Officers affecting the DP you can bring makes it really punishing to not go heavily into leadership... a while ago there was a thread about combat skills being fundamentally underpowered compared to keadership and tech skills that affect the whole fleet and i feel like this contributes to that problem
-
imo Officers affecting the DP you can bring makes it really punishing to not go heavily into leadership... a while ago there was a thread about combat skills being fundamentally underpowered compared to keadership and tech skills that affect the whole fleet and i feel like this contributes to that problem
Can you give an example where you find the extra officers actually give you more DP at the start and the extra deployment is actually necessary, because that is not my personal experience. I don't doubt the extra ship skills on AI allies are handy, but in terms of pure deployment, I don't think I notice any difference between most of my builds, heavy leadership or not.
I would argue that as far deployments go, for the majority of the game, you are in fact not punished for not going heavily into leadership.
In the end game, heavily farmed red system Ordos or high end Ordo bounties completely swamp your officers with Alpha cores and you will be at minimum 40% deployment with objectives capturing up to 60%. Having 10 level 6 officers compared to 5 level 8 officers doesn't matter (plus yourself as level 15). We're only talking about 36% more officer levels (75/55), where as the enemy fleet can be up to 7*30 = 210, or 381% more. I suppose the ratios are less if you grab a mercenary or two, or happen to find an actually useful level 7 exploring, but that just helps the no leadership case proportionally more. The double Tesseract fight lets you deploy your entire 240 DP fleet anyways with 5 level 8 officers. About the only skill that does affect deployment at that late in the game is Best of the Best, which still requires you to capture two Comm relays or a Comm relay and two others to hit 240 DP. Given there is typically enough relays on your side of the map to grab 40-60 DP, I personally don't see much of an advantage from BotB's guaranteed 200 DP deployment in most combats.
So for the super late game, I submit you are in fact not punished for not going Leadership.
You are also not punished if your fleet is 160 DP or less, since your entire fleet deploys anyways, so early and perhaps early mid-game there is no difference in deployment.
The only place going deep into leadership can make a difference in deployment is going up against single mid-game NPC faction bounty fleets, maybe in the 250-400k credit range? Multiple NPC fleets orbiting the same planet, doing a raid on a heavily patrolled world, and so on will rapidly swamp you in enemy officers no matter your leadership investment, so it really does limit it to single enemy bounty fleets. I can solo a number of those NPC faction fleet compositions (when encountered singly, not multiple at the same time) in a combat-specced Odyssey, and actually using a 160 DP fleet just makes it easier.
-
i would prefer there to be "initiative" thing, where the stronger force starts with advantage, but the points AND killing ships can give you the upper hand
That's actually what it is already. For endgame, Ordos fights, you start with 160 DP or 200 DP, but then grabbing objectives can boost your fleet to 240 DP. The opposing side starts with 240 DP, but as you start killing ships, that DP moves from "being at the front lines" firing at you to "moving in from the spawn point" and therefore out of the action. Eventually I only have roughly 80 DP's worth of enemy ships firing at my Conquest line, when I'm able to bring my whole fleet to bear on that.
That also has implications for Safety Overrides ships, because their weapon range is so short. The SO ships are going to be in the range of more enemy ships, so they get double the flux dissipation, but they're also dealing with incoming fire from say 120 to 160 DP's worth of ships, instead of just 80 DP or so if you're using long range ships. The enemy ships need to be kept separated, since if they bunch up, then SO ships won't be able to go in to do damage and survive. So SO isn't an unmitigated benefit; it has tradeoffs and changes your battle strategy a lot. Basically high risk high reward.
it doesnt happen as often vanilla (but still does), where i get advantage and then game turns into meatgrinder at top of map, its boring and makes no sense, at that point they should lose the battle and get the option to run or try to reengage but at disadvantage (maybe CR hit?)
Yup and in fact that's what you're going for, your ships just mulching through their fleet as you gradually head toward the top of the map.
So it seems like the meta for good battle strategy is to take out a bunch of ships early on (meaning good burst damage such as from missiles) while keeping your ships alive, while you're at a numerical disadvantage at the beginning of the fight. If your fleet can achieve that, then the fight becomes much easier once the enemy fleet is just gradually spawning in to replaces losses, and they're unable to form proper battle lines. Then it's smooth sailing from there.
Post your fits/skills/officers then because I literally cannot imagine these five Conquests beating a full sized Ordo. Maybe if you cheesed the hell out of AI with the flagship by dragging most of their forces(or at least the Radiant(s)) away, that's the only way I could imagine it working.
I posted an example of the fight here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqX-JLfOtN0
Sorry about the video quality, my computer is too crappy to run Starsector + screen capture software at the same time, so this is recorded on a phone set on a box on the computer table. My fridge was also running in the background. Anyway, you can see the setup at the beginning, with the actual fight starting at around 3 minutes in. This is the same battle strategy that I've been using to test different Conquest loadouts, and this shows how they usually go.
In this case, my Medusa is using Light Needlers, an Ion Pulser, and a Heavy Needler. In practice, I use it with SO, 2 LDMG, and 2 Cryoblasters, but just running it this way here to show neither SO nor Cryoblasters are necessary (they do speed things up though). The Conquests have level 4 officers; basically the most important skill is Missile Spec which boosts missile damage by around 65%. Obviously they'd be stronger if they were level 6 officers (in which case they'd also have Gunnery Implants and Ordnance Expertise), but again just showing that it's not necessary here. Thus far the strongest Conquest build I've found is 2x Squall, 2x Mjolnir, 2x HVD, 2x Harpoon, but you can see that here, it's Hurricane, Locust, Mjolnir, Gauss, 2x HVD, 2x Harpoon, and it works just fine. The Gryphon would normally have a Squall but it used a Locust for this video.
So you can see that my role in the Medusa is to help finish off already-weakened targets, and that I'm not that great one-on-one. Since I'm in the front, I also distract enemy ships to keep incoming fire on me and away from the Conquests. I made a couple of mistakes and you can see dumb AI behavior about 7 minutes in; both are fairly frequent, but the setup is resilient enough to recover from it.
Interestingly, Gauss does more damage than Mjolnir in this setup (average 35k total damage to Mjolnir's average 28k total damage), because the missiles aren't doing as much anti-shield damage. When dual Squalls are used, Mjolnirs do more damage than Gauss, since more of the shields are already gone so it's more armor/hull that remains. So this is another anecdotal data point as to why it's important to look at weapon loadouts as a whole, because whether weapon A or weapon B is better depends on weapon C, D, E, etc.
-
i would prefer there to be "initiative" thing, where the stronger force starts with advantage, but the points AND killing ships can give you the upper hand
That's actually what it is already. For endgame, Ordos fights, you start with 160 DP or 200 DP, but then grabbing objectives can boost your fleet to 240 DP. The opposing side starts with 240 DP, but as you start killing ships, that DP moves from "being at the front lines" firing at you to "moving in from the spawn point" and therefore out of the action. Eventually I only have roughly 80 DP's worth of enemy ships firing at my Conquest line, when I'm able to bring my whole fleet to bear on that.
No, thats not the same thing i suggested. Read more than just first sentence or half of it.
I know what current system works like and its flawed.
Yup and in fact that's what you're going for, your ships just mulching through their fleet as you gradually head toward the top of the map.
So it seems like the meta for good battle strategy is to take out a bunch of ships early on (meaning good burst damage such as from missiles) while keeping your ships alive, while you're at a numerical disadvantage at the beginning of the fight. If your fleet can achieve that, then the fight becomes much easier once the enemy fleet is just gradually spawning in to replaces losses, and they're unable to form proper battle lines. Then it's smooth sailing from there.
And that is the problem. Its boring and tedious. Its just a grind at that point, neither demanding nor interesting.
-
Since I'm in the front, I also distract enemy ships to keep incoming fire on me and away from the Conquests.
Yeah, it's as I feared. I know that generally all you have to do against Ordo is to overflux and/or distract the very first Radiant that comes in - since other Remnant ships are really nothing special - but that is very hard to do reliably without a flagship because of how AI works. (Which is why I keep saying that Radiant is broken and needs a nerf)
Edit: Also note that how despite being 5% of deployed DP, your flagship did 12% total damage - should show this to the guy who argued combat skills are not worth getting because "they only affect one ship in the fleet".
-
No, thats not the same thing i suggested. Read more than just first sentence or half of it.
I know what current system works like and its flawed.
It is possible your suggestion may need a bit more detail, or perhaps an example of how it would play out? I kind of read it the same way as Vanshilar did.
i would prefer there to be "initiative" thing, where the stronger force starts with advantage, but the points AND killing ships can give you the upper hand
also rework to reinforcements, where the points are actually limited like command points, and they slowly regenerate, but killing enemy ships speeds it up
it doesnt happen as often vanilla (but still does), where i get advantage and then game turns into meatgrinder at top of map, its boring and makes no sense, at that point they should lose the battle and get the option to run or try to reengage but at disadvantage (maybe CR hit?)
So I see 3 distinct suggestions here:
1) Both capture points and killing enemy ships affects reinforcements somehow
- This is not too far from what we have now. If you're not doing a speed grab at the beginning, you essentially need to kill enemy ships to push to the capture points anyways.
- Killing ships does in fact give you the upper hand as you have localized fleet superiority at that point.
- I note this version gives a disincentive to using frigates, since they're the most likely to die early. Unless you want it based on hull damage done, as opposed to full on ship death.
2) Deployment/Reinforcements is changed to some kind of timed counter, that is then spent from to deploy new ships, but somehow in the favor of the larger or stronger side initially?
-Is this a flat 160 DP/240 DP split like we have at the start? Some kind of even 60 DP vs 60 DP initially that ramps up differently for the two sides over time? In both cases some kind of regenerating reinforcement DP budget? Is this a counter that counts up every X seconds? Something like 1 DP every 6 second (10 DP a minute?) baseline for both sides? Kill 20 DP worth of ships and now it is counting up like 3 DP every 6 seconds? Capture a point and get +5 DP per minute. Until it reach some kind of maximum or just keeps going up for both sides? Is there a maximum number of DP points on the field set by capture points, like we have now?
How would this interact with a solo deployment initially, evading the enemy fleet (and avoiding PPT loss by being far enough away) and letting the deployment regen up while capturing a point here and there, and then do a full deployment with the maximum DP you can collect?
Overall, this strikes me as an even more strongly "win more mechanic" than we have now with just the capture points. Namely, if you're already winning, this just makes you win even faster. If reinforcements past your initial deployment are some kind of number counting up, and it's based on capture points and killing ships, and you've killed zero ships, and captured no points, you'll have minimal reinforcements, while the side that is already winning and killing ships gets even more backup to kill faster. It also means if you're completely losing, you might not even be able to reinforce with anything. So you're forced into a number of redeployments, potentially eating the victor's CR each time. Like, what happens when you're engaging multiple fleets for like 1000 DP total, and they only ever deploy 240 at a time? Are you always going to be at 0% CR on the final deployment for your high tech ships?
Or I'm perhaps misunderstanding your suggestion?
3) Some kind of AI logic which determines that it should give up and retreat sooner than it does now. Possibly based on ship positioning?
I will point out getting pushed to the top of the map is better for the AI than being completely surrounded in them middle of the map, as you can generally bring less of your fleet to bear. In those "meatgrinder" situations, half my fleet is usually sitting around doing nothing since it can't shoot through my allied ships.
What would trigger this decision to pull out early and try to re-engage? Certainly if its say 320 DP worth of ship in the enemy fleet, and it deployed 240 DP, did not reinforce with the 80 DP but rather ordered a retreat with 120 DP left on the field, that is a worse tactical situation as the retreating 120 DP is likely to be destroyed while trying to escape. Re-engaging with just the reserved 80 DP sounds like a poor choice, as opposed to trying to have the 80 DP and 120 DP on the field at the same time, meeting up as the front is pushed back and reinforcements move up. What is the 80 DP going to do that the 240 DP wasn't able to do, when both sides have refreshed PPT? Similarly, why is leaving the 120 DP to it's fate the better decision.
Is this mostly a suggestion of having the AI give up sooner? So most fights don't end in 100% enemy fleet destruction, but more like 75%? Although that could get really annoying with bounty fleets and having the bounty target running away half the time.
Although, I have been in really big multiple fleet fights that take multiple deployments, since the enemy doesn't actually send all it's reinforcements. Not quite sure what triggers it, but it's a lot higher than the 240 initial deployment limit.
Yup and in fact that's what you're going for, your ships just mulching through their fleet as you gradually head toward the top of the map.
So it seems like the meta for good battle strategy is to take out a bunch of ships early on (meaning good burst damage such as from missiles) while keeping your ships alive, while you're at a numerical disadvantage at the beginning of the fight. If your fleet can achieve that, then the fight becomes much easier once the enemy fleet is just gradually spawning in to replaces losses, and they're unable to form proper battle lines. Then it's smooth sailing from there.
And that is the problem. Its boring and tedious. Its just a grind at that point, neither demanding nor interesting.
The only other option I see is to have the enemy fleet with more DP run in fear of the smaller player fleet to regroup, which feels weird, and likely less effective overall for the AI fleet side. The only possible place where it makes sense to abandoned ships already in the battle space to their fate is when the fleet still has any many ships as it initially deployed in reserve, or the player's side has also taken significant losses, although at that point its not the meatgrinder situation we describe here. Which at end game only really happens when we're talking about 2 or more fleets working together. Or you're purposefully engaging significantly larger fleets with a smaller fleet (i.e. 200 DP with 50 DP) in the early or mid-game. So probably pretty rare to be honest, as it's mostly a challenge thing.
-
wow, like starting a plan to modernize an army by selecting sock color for tankers
-
No, thats not the same thing i suggested. Read more than just first sentence or half of it.
I know what current system works like and its flawed.
Sure seems like it's what you said. Stronger force starts with advantage is starting with extra DP, if you capture points you can deploy more ships, if you kill ships there are less enemy ships on the front lines thus giving you the upper hand. You might have to give more details as to what you have in mind that's functionally different than what the game already has.
And that is the problem. Its boring and tedious. Its just a grind at that point, neither demanding nor interesting.
What it means is that your fleet can completely overwhelm the enemy fleet. So the "problem" is that you're past the difficulty curve of the game. It's "neither demanding nor interesting" just because your fleet is too powerful. So at that point it's a matter of moving on to more difficult fleets, or multiple fleets, or if you're already fighting multiple of the most difficult fleets, congratulations, you can "beat" the game. Then you can try doing it with a different fleet, etc.
Yeah, it's as I feared. I know that generally all you have to do against Ordo is to overflux and/or distract the very first Radiant that comes in - since other Remnant ships are really nothing special - but that is very hard to do reliably without a flagship because of how AI works. (Which is why I keep saying that Radiant is broken and needs a nerf)
Well I don't really need to do it (when I do the 5-Conquest testing, they go off and fight the fleet, including the Radiants, on their own, while I just help clean up stragglers on the sides), though it helps. Your flagship is the most important ship in your fleet, the Radiant is the most important ship in the enemy fleet, it makes sense that you should be there to help out. I don't see how that's a bad thing, and in the video, I'm there basically just to distract while I go about my business killing other ships.
Edit: Also note that how despite being 5% of deployed DP, your flagship did 12% total damage - should show this to the guy who argued combat skills are not worth getting because "they only affect one ship in the fleet".
Yeah that's nothing new, usually the flagship contributes around 2-3 times its worth in DP in terms of damage, and is a key contributor to the overall smoothness of the battle even if it's not doing damage (such as distracting Radiants). So usually I get 5-7 personal skills, but it does vary depending on how many points the fleet needs, depending on whatever flavor I'm going for.
Is this mostly a suggestion of having the AI give up sooner? So most fights don't end in 100% enemy fleet destruction, but more like 75%? Although that could get really annoying with bounty fleets and having the bounty target running away half the time.
I will say I much rather enemy fleets fight to the end, since them fleeing and having to chase them down (and burning more CR) is annoying. One of the reason I prefer fighting Ordos fleets over faction fleets. So it's more gameplay over realism.
Although, I have been in really big multiple fleet fights that take multiple deployments, since the enemy doesn't actually send all it's reinforcements. Not quite sure what triggers it, but it's a lot higher than the 240 initial deployment limit.
I don't actually know, but I *suspect* it's when you kill a bunch of enemy ships at once, when there are so few on the battlefield at that point in time that the enemy admiral AI decides to just retreat to start a new round rather than bringing in reinforcements. I don't really know though.
-
In terms of limiting battle sizes, is the main argument one purely of FPS / performance?
I've never liked the fact that two massive fleets can fly into each other, yet maybe half the ships actually go into battle while the other half waits patiently. :o
On modern day rigs, I assume it's been tested to throw every ship in a max capacity fleet into battle?
I assume it kills the game or is unplayable? Otherwise why not, I'd prefer to just simplify the whole thing and have two fleets battle it out, as they would in reality.
-
In terms of limiting battle sizes, is the main argument one purely of FPS / performance?
I've never liked the fact that two massive fleets can fly into each other, yet maybe half the ships actually go into battle while the other half waits patiently. :o
On modern day rigs, I assume it's been tested to throw every ship in a max capacity fleet into battle?
I assume it kills the game or is unplayable? Otherwise why not, I'd prefer to just simplify the whole thing and have two fleets battle it out, as they would in reality.
the combat is built around a certain engagement size to be fun, and raising it makes stuff go wonky balance wise
-
In terms of limiting battle sizes, is the main argument one purely of FPS / performance?
I've never liked the fact that two massive fleets can fly into each other, yet maybe half the ships actually go into battle while the other half waits patiently. :o
On modern day rigs, I assume it's been tested to throw every ship in a max capacity fleet into battle?
I assume it kills the game or is unplayable? Otherwise why not, I'd prefer to just simplify the whole thing and have two fleets battle it out, as they would in reality.
Expanding on jackundor's point-
At higher sizes, battles become boring slogs of capitals & cruisers bashing their heads against eachother, waiting to see which side runs out of ships first (and it often leads to the congaline behaviour that's been brought up in this thread (I think it has at least)).
It also all but removes frigates & destroyers from the game (lategame especially), 99% of the time they simply don't have the stats to poke their heads out into a nigh-unflankable wall of guns, let alone do any damage to it.
This isn't even touching on the fact that the AI's been tuned around the 3-400 limit, so it gets really wonky when you're bringing 2-3x the amount of ships into a battle, I've seen some full-on traffic jams develop as the AI moved to capture points.
-
Too many ships makes big traffic jams, blobs of ships not being able to fire because they are blocking each other, even bumper cars frequent collisions! There's no room to maneuver and much less payout for piloting a ship: the combat gameplay just gets worse!
In physics there is quite a bit of study on "jamming" (objects/particles/grains etc getting stuck on each other in a container) and how dimensions relate to it, and 2D is much more susceptible to jamming than 3D.