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1

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: January 19, 2025, 10:54:51 AM »

Hmm, maybe we are discussing two different definitions of 'hit-and-run' then?

Is phasing to let your very slow cooldown weapon recharge not a kind of hit-and-run?  I think you focused way too much on the point that I included the Sunder as an example of a ship that was well suited to use the tachyon lance.  I included that as an example of a ship that works well in the support role thanks to its ability.  While I included the Zigg because it works well in the role of hit-and-run.  Two separate examples for different uses for the tachyon lance.

2

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: January 17, 2025, 10:00:10 PM »

Lance is okay.  If it should be changed, it ought to be more elite than HIL.  I see more HILs than lances used in posted videos.  The one memorable video that used lances that I remember was Paragon with High Scatter Amplifier for hard-flux lance.  Tachyon Lance does not need any nerfing.  Otherwise, HIL will be even better compared to lance.

Lances do best when either put on a ship meant to do hit-and-run or on ships meant to support other ships and secure kills.  It really helps to have high energy focus or be a phase ship, which is pretty much just the Sunder and Zigg.

3

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: December 26, 2024, 02:55:14 PM »

A small number of phase ships was how I always added variety to Dictate fleets on my personal mods.  They're the only faction I could reasonably add phase ships to without diluting down the rest of their identity.

4

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: December 21, 2024, 10:58:33 AM »

Just to make it clear, I don't want to make pirates weaker and I think a jump in difficulty when their fleets get specific ships is totally fine, that's part of what makes things interesting; I don't want their fleets reduced to mushy uniformity. I did like the concept of the ship, though!

It's also probably not healthy for the game if the strength of pirate fleets is entirely dependent on how many Eradicators they have and for there to be a big power spike in pirate fleets the moment they start fielding cruisers.  Or for their fleets to start getting weaker when they start trading Eradicators for Atlas mk2s.  Pirates having some strong ships is fine, the consistency that they currently get powerful fleets entirely off of Eradicators is probably not.

Plus more variety in enemy ships never hurts.

5

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: December 20, 2024, 08:19:40 PM »

Are we going to get anymore previews of other ships?  I've been waiting for a somewhat boring pirate cruiser since we were discussing such a thing like a year ago and have been waiting to see if it went anywhere since.

Ahh, I only vaguely remember this! (Do you happen to have a link handy?) Wasn't planning on adding any more ships for this release, but we'll see.

This thread: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=28594.0

Discussion about ship ideas starts around the end of page 3.

Basic issue is that pirate cruisers tend to be too strong on average compared to the rest of their fleets, so having more low quality cruisers would help fix the problem.  We discussed adding more combat freighters to the game in the cruiser category that the pirates could have a converted version of to add to their fleets.  The design that got the most attention/work was a midline asteroid miner / ice hauler with lots of small nose missiles, broadside medium energy mounts, and a salvage gantry.  The name I gave it was the Harpy.  The civilian ship system was a missile autoforge that slowly trickled missile ammo back while it was on at the cost of hard flux.  Pirate conversions were suggested that they could swap the missile forge for a termination drone forge, a single fighter bay with rapid rearming for bombers, or have a single large missile slot.  Something to make it dangerous in one specific role but that folds under pressure from a solid fleet composition.

6

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: December 20, 2024, 01:20:41 PM »

Are we going to get anymore previews of other ships?  I've been waiting for a somewhat boring pirate cruiser since we were discussing such a thing like a year ago and have been waiting to see if it went anywhere since.

7

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts about starting in Corvus

« on: November 29, 2024, 10:34:55 AM »

If the player started with two different frigate warships, you can solve a lot of the initial problems that a lot of the frigates have and open up a much wider pool of good choices.  Otherwise the only two that make sense are the Lasher and Wolf, if that's going to be the only warship you start with.  However, a Vigilance plus a Centurion?  That's a workable combination.  The whole midline set now works if you combine it with any different frigate warship.  Even the Gremlin could be included in the list.

EDIT: Maybe not the Vigilance + Brawler, but any other combination of Lasher, Wolf, Centurion, Brawler, Vigilance, and Gremlin are fair game.

You could conceivably include the Scarab or Tempest if it were paired with a non-warship, say one of the combat freighters.  Though high tech ships can be a bit frustrating to get properly equipped right at the start of the game.  Energy weapons are hard to find in most markets, especially mediums.

8

Suggestions / Re: hospital ships

« on: November 29, 2024, 10:20:11 AM »

I don't really think that, "This logistics bonus is useless for the player, therefore any ship that includes it is pointless to add to the game.' is a good argument against adding a new ship.  The game already has lots of ships that are basically worthless for the player, however they still add variety to enemy fleets (see pirate frigates and a lot of the derelicts).  Plus even if the hull mod isn't that valuable, it still adds flavor and the ship itself could be useful even if the built-in hull mod is not.

9

Suggestions / Re: hospital ships

« on: November 25, 2024, 09:59:32 AM »

If there's any faction that runs a hospital ship, it should be the LC.

10

Suggestions / Re: Patrols around wormholes

« on: November 25, 2024, 09:16:25 AM »

I have a suggestion:

Place your wormhole pilot device, thing, into your colony’s…. Waystation? Starport? Like a domain colony item. Anyway, while installed, if allows any fleet to use your wormhole if one anchor is inside the system with the installed wormhole navigation device, including your own.

Gameplay wise, this makes it so that every market in your system is considered to located at the wormhole with the best accessibility to other markets. So for example you could have a wormhole 20 ly from the core, but you put one wormhole in your system and the other in Penelope’s Star. Your colonies in that system now act like they’re at Penelope’s star for accessibility bonuses.

Installing the key into a waystation is a great way of using the wormhole to connect your system to somewhere else.  If that's too strong, perhaps it can be used to halve the distance penalty instead, implying only your own faction fleets can use the wormhole?

11

Suggestions / Patrols around wormholes

« on: November 19, 2024, 11:23:35 AM »

A small little flavor thing.  If you've got a colony sufficiently close to a wormhole (those from the abyss), it would make sense for your faction to send a fleet to patrol that side of the wormhole and protect it from prospective thieves.  If they're able to use the wormhole as a shortcut, they should patrol both sides.

However I don't remember if your faction can or cannot use the wormhole pair as a shortcut for their trade fleets.

12

Blog Posts / Re: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More

« on: April 10, 2024, 02:03:30 PM »

All wonderful additions here.

One thought for finding survey data, you could probably add planets with ruins of size 3+4 to potential discoverable data.  In addition to the high end plants, ruins, stations, and the Domain ships/motherships are the most useful/valuable breadcrumbs we could find from derelicts and Domain era objects.

13

Blog Posts / Re: Simulator Enhancements

« on: March 15, 2024, 09:56:20 AM »

Just give it a souped up version of our autoloader?

Could do something a bit like the missile autoloader mod?  I suggested something like this on a custom ship proposal and possibly that could be put on the Griffon as well.  While the ship system is active, flux (hard?) is generated while the system is running and it gradually replenishes ammo for your missile launchers one at a time.  The missile autoforge can be toggled on and off freely.

14

Blog Posts / Re: Simulator Enhancements

« on: March 14, 2024, 10:23:41 AM »

Very good improvements.  This will help a lot with testing fleets and loadouts.  I see someone else already brought up using commissions to unlock ships as they became available on the military market, so I won't get into that.

Instead, one thought I had was that being able to use blueprint ships in the simulator would be really helpful for the player if they want to test the new blueprint they just found and decide if they want to actually build it or not.  Being able to fight blueprint ships also means you can try fighting your own faction for fun.  If you don't want this to be something that just instantly unlocks the moment the player finds a random cartridge in some backwards ruins, it could require the player own a Heavy Industry building first to become available.

15

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 11, 2024, 11:15:37 AM »

There's a lot of ways that players can delay crises, not just killing the fleets but also agreeing to deals or getting Kanta's protection.  You can relatively easily avoid a crisis entirely right now if you're so inclined and know how the game's mechanics work.  New players don't really have that knowledge, nor do they have any clue how dangerous the crisis fleets are.  So the mechanic sort of winds up being a bit of a new player trap and big source of anxiety for anyone unfamiliar with it.  And an annoyance for experienced players given just how slow it is without you deliberately angering the Heg and LP.  Then suddenly everything will start happening at once as your colonies get big enough to attract PL and TT attention, and you'll have to drop what you're doing to run off to deal with your colonies until those two are sorted out.  Often by that point you've got overwhelming force at your disposal as an experienced player.

I stand by that crisis take too long to get started, then happen too quickly once they've all piled up.  Then they become too slow again once PL/TT are removed from the pool.  More frequent minor crises that escalate each time one triggers would help immensely with this.


Two side notes.  First, I don't think scaling threats based on the number of colonies in a system or even colony size is good design.  It makes spreading out your colonies the objectively correct choice and punishes new players who don't know to do that.  Especially for crises that demand a stand up fight against the entire crisis force to defeat.  You have to have multiple boosted military bases and battlestations for colony defenses to meaningfully fight off crisis fleets right now.

Second, TT's crisis had a few issues when I played through it.  The primary fleet with elite officers, 2-3 S-mods on all ships, and an extreme mobility high tech lineup were able to defeat any fleet I brought in detail until I respeced into electronic warfare.  Then I could capture enough objectives to get my larger fleet deployed to match their power.  Even then it was an extremely close fight.  Paying them the half a million credit bribe was an amazing deal vs losing like a 5+ million credit fleet to them.  The rest of the TT crisis fleets were non-threats and easily moped up even fighting many of them at the same time.  Defeating the crisis gave such a small bonus to the TT commerce raiding progress that it wasn't worth dealing with the crisis fleets.  While the commerce raiding retaliation fleet they sent was like 10 frigates against my 3 capital 6 cruiser fleet, nothing even close to the strength of the crisis fleet.