Starsector 0.98a is out! (03/27/25)
Try reading a history book.
That is, in fact, the only real victory condition.
I had absolutely no reason to buy the game because there was no DRM or other incentives to buy it despite the years of effort that the developers put into it.
Might be a bit of shitpost so feel free to delete but I didn't have the ability to buy it before and I feel like this business model could work for companies/people who are willing to create great game.
Just wanted to say, thank you for the feedback here! Made a few notes and a few changes (improved Thunder maneuverability a bit, reduced Wasp replacement time to 3). Thinking on some of the other stuff; I'll echo the comments on the Claw actually being pretty useful. It has the potential to *really* lock ships down when there's critical mass, and in general it's the same thing that makes it tricky to balance fighters - if they get a little too good in isolation, they get WAY too strong when massed. So, "a little weak but useful situationally" seems like the right thing to aim for, for fighters overall.
For all we know we could be a super omega AI android/cyborg born in Galatia Academy, given memory implant of our false 'background'
SP is an interesting mechanic overall. Allowing the player to customize their ships to suit different playstyles is quite an engaging and fun element of Starsector, and is largely why I continue to play it. Where there starts to be a problem is how low performance some of the ships are without story points. Additionally, the player is actively penalized for experimenting with them and it creates a large headache where it would be really nice to make changes but their hands are tied. This is less of an issue the more skillful/knowledgeable the player gets, but as a new player it's brutal. Their acquisition en masse, and Starsector's design choice to make the game very inflexible once the player has spent them is a more tedious part of their implementation.The whole point of the ship customization is that you can make ships how you want them with the resources you have.
Well, hopefully that gets improved upon in the future.I don't really like flying myself at all, and think the game is much more fun when I try to build something the AI can do well with.Unfortunately, AI cannot pilot every good build. Or even good ships, in the case of bigger phase ships.
They don't stack because almost recoverable actually means that it will be always be recoverable except for when there are so many salvageable ships that it just won't show up as an option to recover.
Devil's advocate argument--
Making the AI much better reduces the incentives to play as a player pilot. It is much more fun to fly yourself when you can have a big impact doing so, and that necessarily requires the AI to not be capable of doing what you can do. I think Alex said somewhere that this game is greatly inspired by Star Control 2, which fundamentally was a game about flying spaceships yourself and having a lot of impact, with some very mild 4x wrapping around it.
I personally don't enjoy piloting at all, so I am just making the counter argument for argument's sake.
I've got a TODO item for looking at improving the autofire AI logic for this specific case, but I'm not sure when/if I'll get to it. I don't think it should be a ship-configuration setting, though.
