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1

General Discussion / Re: Physics turn on by collisions

« on: June 05, 2021, 06:27:50 AM »

it isnt unrealistic physics -- even cars have governors.

Come on, you seriously buy this? We are talking about rockets in space, which are able to accelerate for maybe 5 seconds before they get arbitrary "max speed" limit, which is applied out of what, safety (and then increased if they happen to not be shooting weapons)? Do they worry the ship will break in half due to the resistance of the void? This is kind of an artificial magical non-sense that's trying to explain some unrealistic gamey system in a vague scientific reasoning, but ends up making it actually worse. The more explanations like this, the more unrealistic it all seems, if you have any sort of education and spare a minute of thought. I don't mean to be rude, but it's just ridiculous to me. I prefer to have no explanation for things that are so obviously unrealistic, to not bring attention to them.

And to be clear, it's not just the max speed limit that's "unrealistic physics" I was talking about, the whole game premise is just unimaginable, starting from battles themselves, through the space travel, scale, interplanetary trade, nebulae and asteroid belts, and so on and on. But it's fun, I have no complaints about it, I would just prefer if the game didn't suddenly jerk me out of the suspension of disbelief with those moments when my ship is magically catapulted.

2

General Discussion / Re: Physics turn on by collisions

« on: June 05, 2021, 02:12:23 AM »

Ok, so it really is intended? Oh well. To me it's really weird. I can buy space with kind of aircraft physics (I just take it as a part of a game/genre), but collisions make it so incredibely obvious that it's just a gamey system and they break me away from the suspension of disbelief.

In starsector, your ships are hard-coded to not allow you to go too fast relative to what's near you as a safety precaution

I'd rather have no excuse for unrealistic physics than this, but that's my personal preference I guess.

3

General Discussion / Re: Physics turn on by collisions

« on: June 04, 2021, 01:30:11 PM »

Yep, exactly, which is very weird.

4

General Discussion / Physics turn on by collisions

« on: June 04, 2021, 01:26:58 PM »

So, I'm sure this is known to all game veterans, but is this a bug? The collisions sometimes turn the game physics on, and in a weird way? Recently I was plasma burning and  think I hit something. Ended up flying with the top plasma burn speed for long enough to end up close to the edge of the map (and the collision was somewhere in the center), before the engines came online.

5

General Discussion / Re: Hullmod Ideas Thread

« on: June 04, 2021, 01:20:19 PM »

Speaking of shields, every time I see Onslought I'd like to see it with its shield mounted backwards, with reduced arc. That is - no shield from the front, at all, but cover the engines. The mod could lower manevouribility and speed when the shield is enabled (could completely disable engines, but give some nice buff to the shield, maybe even no hard flux). Only installable on capital ships.

Now you pesky frigates, you wanted to talk to me, come see my face.

6

General Discussion / Re: More missions

« on: June 02, 2021, 03:55:05 AM »

Thanks for your answers. Personally I don't feel I know the game enough to be able to create interesting missions, but I would love to play some if others made them. I'll look into faction mods, to be honest I haven't yet tried any mods (the list is quite overwhelming and I don't really know where to start, but I'll try).

7

General Discussion / Re: the #1 reason I don't play this game

« on: June 02, 2021, 01:41:56 AM »

In my experience a lot of annoyance with friendly AI is that it has a very specific playstyle and if you don't follow/use it, you are going to get frustrated.

The AI in general is very cautious, which is kind of a must, otherwise you would be losing a lot of friendly ships while you are engaged in other part of battlefield. But it makes it really hard to force your fleet to really push against the enemy.

For example, when I recently got back to the game after a couple years of break, I would often lose my flagship as I was finding myself suddenly all alone around enemy ships (as I was trying to finish the overfluxed one, while my allies would stay back).
Instinctevely I tried fixing this by setting a couple bigger ships as an escort to my flagship. This doesn't work, because the game understand escorting capital ship to mean staying at the back of it... I guess they were trying to secure my back, but that only works if we are on defense.

There is no simple way to make the AI ships form a battle line and move it together with the player ship, concentrating the fire. Eliminate order helps, but sometimes AI ridiculously ignores it and favours focusing on some other, closer target.

In the end I simply changed my playstyle. Instead of being the tip of a spear for my fleet, I'm trying to stay in line with my other ships and we all fight rather defensevily. This works nicer, as I'm able to retreat behind friendlies to vent flux. Alternatively I get something faster and then move on flanks, but still let my main force and enemy clash before I move all in.


Personally I would welcome some changes to the orders mechanic. I liked the whole system in theory, but I think it clashes a bit with the main game mechanics, which are playing individual ship.  I think the orders should be more focused on formations and support of the player. Give me wingmen, give me orders "cover me", "get back", "shoot at my target" or "defend my flanks" etc. etc. Teach the AI to better position itself in relation to other friendly units (for example frigates should never go directly front of the friendly capital ship). Maybe even teach it reply to an order with "I can't do it now" instead of just not doing it (though I imagine this would be tricky to implement well).

8

General Discussion / More missions

« on: June 01, 2021, 01:16:09 PM »

Can we get more missions in the game? Is that planned? Or maybe there are mods that do that? I really like that aspect of the game and kind of like it more than the campaign itself, because I'm not huge on open/sandbox games and I really like the limitations of the missions.

There's been a few that I struggled a lot and they seemed just impossible (Forlorn Hope is one of them), but since they were there, I knew they are in fact  not impossible, which encouraged me to try again and again, until I finally cracked them. The story provided is also nice bonus, though I would even more like some kind of an outro story after winning the mission.

Also by the way I suspect they need some rebalancing. Sinking the Bismar is trivially easy now, and I remember I struggled with it several years ago (before the campaign was introduced). Didn't it have wolf frigate then? I wonder if this part of the game is going to get any love, or it's basically forgotten with full focus on the campaign?

9

General Discussion / Re: Super-mobilty on capital ships is cancer

« on: May 31, 2021, 05:35:00 AM »

Personally I don't mind how strong and teleporting they are, but the fact they also get numerical advantage (low deployement cost + always advantage in deployment points) is getting on my nerves a lot. And even that would be fine if not the fact we are limited to 30 ships, so they also win the war of attrition.

I just got out of the fight in coronal tap (or what was the name) with the 2 weird ships and it was really really fun, because they were 2 and I had 30 ships (and I did have to use several civilian ships by the end of the battle to tank some shots). But then I went and got bounty contract for remnant fleet with another weird ship and heh... it's just impossible with my setup and I'm not even sure what I'm doing wrong, except I would probably need to optimize all my fleet composition, including the weapons, for this specific battle. With shields that take less than half the damage and high mobility it's really hard to finish of any enemy ship. When you add huge numerical advantage to that, it's just impossible for me.

10

General Discussion / Re: Game performance with no graphics card

« on: May 28, 2021, 11:32:54 AM »

I don't think the graphics chip in MS Surface is the same as what I have in my 6600k CPU. It might be inferior even if it's newer, due to much more demanding ultra-low energy profile of the device, but I'm just guessing.
I don't experience any crashes or performance issues in battles (except the biggest explosions). I do have 16 GB RAM, so if that was the cause of issues there, this might explain it. My issues are mostly between battles, but the game is certainly playable with them.

11

General Discussion / Game performance with no graphics card

« on: May 25, 2021, 07:35:16 AM »

So, I got rid of my graphics card some time ago. I'm running the game on i5-6600K CPU, which has some weak integrated graphics. Overall the game works quite well. The battles especially are very smooth (except the huge explosions like destroying battlestation, but I remember I had this issue on a powerful gaming PC as well in the past).

However, outside of the battles, it can lag quite a bit. Travelling in hyperspace around ion storms can drag FPS down quite a bit. But what's weirder to me is that the game can lag quite a lot in some menus, especially the refit screen. Scrolling down through the list of ships feels very slow and unresponsive. Also some other menus get slow like this, even though there doesn't seem there should be any heavy calculations being done by the game in those places.

Hope the dev can look into it a bit, maybe it's something simple that's causing the game to render the screen 1000 times per second, which might not even be noticeable on a modern PC.

Also maybe there is a way to reduce some of the more power-hungry graphical effects (especially the ion storms)?