Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

1

Suggestions / Re: Increasing carrier interactivity with separate fighter controls and more!

« on: July 02, 2021, 07:55:48 PM »

bump

also something needs to be done with piranhas. They were fine in .5 when everything was much slower but now they are enormous minimum 60 second setup negligible payoff missile that are slower and more vulnerable.

2

Suggestions / Re: Increasing carrier interactivity with separate fighter controls and more!

« on: June 24, 2021, 04:14:26 PM »

it doesn't really matter that much. bring it back please.

3

Suggestions / Re: Increasing carrier interactivity with separate fighter controls and more!

« on: June 23, 2021, 05:56:12 PM »

can you guys keep on topic please. can anybody come up with a reason why fighters shouldn't be given back an ability they have (and had) to attack at oblique angles instead of just yolo-ing directly into the enemy armor and gun belts please.

the fact that this was simplified away in the first place bothers me and since fighters are no longer nearly as oppressive as they were in .7x or w/e it was it'd be a good time to put it back and right the ship a little.

oh and if I were emperor i'd implement some real terrain in the game as well while we're throwing out ideas.

Totally on topic. promise.

4

Suggestions / Re: Increasing carrier interactivity with separate fighter controls and more!

« on: June 23, 2021, 06:12:15 AM »

It used to be this way in .5 actually. There were fighter rally points and package-level strikes. It was better.

5

General Discussion / Re: Frustrated with AI ignoring my orders in battle.

« on: June 15, 2021, 05:32:38 PM »

Personally I think the game would likely choke and die if you tried to extend the AI's decision making much beyond the purely personal. As it is it does a relatively~ OK job of considering it's own circumstances and it can at least mostly hold a steady state and threat-estimate to keep itself alive. The problem is the "mount and blade problem" in that it gets hung up in a purely personal consideration of firepower levels. It will refuse to engage a target it could easily take as long as it engages with friendlies that are nearby and ready to hand.

I always thought a good way to fix this would be a way to organize your ships into squadrons, which would automatically escort each other at the start of the battle (or something similar) and would calculate their firepower and tankiness as a sort of group if they were inside a certain radius and unengaged with other targets. That way at least if a couple ships operating together encountered a foe they could work out if they could take that foe or not keeping in mind the fact that there is more ships than just themselves and it on the field.

I hoped a long while back that a more detailed deployment / engagement metagame might eventually arrive where the game would become strategically more detailed than just burning on to the table in a big deathball and shooing it out with the enemy deathball. I mean, the game is fun don't get me wrong but there's not really any strrategy to it; if you have a superior fleet you'll win, and if you have an evenly matched fleet you'll win with maybe a couple losses caused by the AI on your team miscalculating and getting overwhelmed or surrounded in a way you can't really prevent.

I actually liked "old" fighters more than the current "personal" way they work. At least you could form them up into a big package and push them at enemies in a way that was kind of interesting and involved some skill. The game, imo, retrograded when they were changed and has stayed in pretty much the same place (strategically / tactically obviously, the actual game has gotten much better in most other ways)

anyway this post sounds grumpy. I wish serious attention would be paid to what I addressed above but I think I'm in the vanishingly small minority that doesn't just want to fly a 2d spaceship and blast people with some friendly/enemy ships around to fill up the table with fireballs during the battle.

6

Suggestions / Re: Combat Command Overhaul?

« on: November 14, 2019, 09:48:27 PM »

pre-battle formations are definitely necessary.

I don't want to have to give the same escort orders every battle, just give me a way to set up squadrons of ships as a general rule and give them a basic missionset (frigate squadron 1 always is on capture of objective X) and be done with it honestly.

7

Suggestions / Re: Thinking Inside the Box About Hyperspace Terrain

« on: November 10, 2019, 02:29:29 PM »

hyperspace terrain would be much less obnoxious if you just had a waypointing system and could steer around it without a ton of guessing as to where all the openings are.

in terms of tactical terrain considerations, you'd have to make terrain actually do something besides be a minor annoyance first. the shape of the battlespace and the nature of the encounter almost never mean anything to start with, so no matter what those two things are it will never affect the battle much.

8

General Discussion / Re: Small ships, battle sizes, fleet limits

« on: October 17, 2019, 07:29:48 PM »

the problem with small ships is and has always been that they are not suited to a line engagement but that's all the game is. there's no real objectives worth taking, so overland speed means nothing. post-officer introduction turn speeds are too high for flanking to be viable, even against the ships without omnishields that won't just swivel them to cover.

the only real advantage to frigates is replaceability, which is a total non-starter  because they are not overly cheap when well-armed and whether or not you can replace them is a low chance of success dice roll.

if you could actually have real factions building real ships and not rely on total RNG markets you could simply order a group of wolves, organize them into a pack and then field them, and if 10 battles hence they're all dead you could just order more. Failing this, frigates are basically worthless.

I made a post way back about how you could fix all this but it was all ignored.

tl;dr you need an actual battle system that can handle things that aren't straight shooting engagements between big ships, a way to order ships from naval yards that actually produce them, and the ability to squadron small ships under a single officer. then it would be fine.

really the core battle system's main problem is that it's been unchanged from .5 and while it's the most important system in the game it's barely there. there is the barest veneer of the most tactical kind of strategic thinking, but it doesn't even handle the most basic types of engagements you would find in a naval context. Thus anything that is even slightly tangential to the direct progression of bigger gun == better is directly harmed in proportion to how tangential it is.

9

General Discussion / Re: Lack of Fighter Control

« on: January 10, 2019, 03:47:51 PM »

yes, there needs to be some player control of missile use too.

i would really like a "salvo this target with weapons of X types"

10

General Discussion / Re: Do not "fix" pirate deathball swarms

« on: December 31, 2018, 12:15:23 AM »

i actually kind of like insane battles that take a while to resolve.

my only problem is the idea that such a battle is possible in such a degraded industrial base.

i mean, how could it possibly happen that a pirate band has like hundreds of millions of tons and tens of thousands of crew to throw at you.. and how could they maintain it?

i feel like the current lategame scale would be more reasonable if the sector was orders of magnitudes larger or something. still, the fights themselves are pretty fun. getting really "stuck in" and having to fight several battles in a row for a change, that's nice.

11

Suggestions / Re: Re-working command points and fleet command

« on: December 21, 2018, 09:32:15 AM »

While I'm against super ridiculous micro in general and am a fan of complicated c2 systems in my sims, I don't really see a realistic case where this changes anything. Orders don't really do that much and aren't needed to win anyway, wht bother hitting them with what is effectively a nerf stick?

12

Suggestions / Re: Blending drive field travel and in-combat travel

« on: December 21, 2018, 04:48:09 AM »

If the problem is bad deployment rules, why not just fix the deployment rules?

I don't really agree that there needs to be a "fluid transition" what exactly does this achieve besides setting back other, more important development tasks by a year?

13

Suggestions / Re: Increase planetary stocks

« on: December 14, 2018, 05:02:27 PM »

put a real production system in the game and then just allow earmarking portions of it on some sort of escalating price scheme. once you have jangala producing 30,000 supplies daily and the hegemony monopolizing 25,000 of those, you can have the player compete over the scraps.

likewise with ships.

this should of course require a high faction standing etc.

14

General Discussion / Re: How to overcome an endless cycle of start-scumming?

« on: December 11, 2018, 09:35:59 AM »

if you grow too fast, it will kill you. if you ton up to cruisers (burn and you are a low character level, and you meet one or more cruisers with high officer levels, you are instantly dead.

stay with larger numbers of faster ships, and always run transponder off if able. this will give you strategic initiative and you can always choose not to engage things you think will kill you.

~perfect SA comes with time and practice. before long you will be extremely good at estimating the threat level of an enemy fleet, and as long as you have strategic initiative you will win every fight.

know the enemy, know thyself, need not fear result of a hundred battles etc.

15

General Discussion / Re: Economy of Nonsense

« on: November 26, 2018, 03:35:32 PM »

fair points all i think

what is really needed is just a more concrete handling of ship production generally. once the AI can't pull infinite ships out of it's hat things will be a little more sane.

but yeah, i think range has to be added back in somewhere.. the sector is supposed to be in a death spiral so the fact that trade is so omnipotent and untouchable is a real problem.

we will likely see some significant improvements to diplomacy and state interaction going forward which will make the AI polities behavior less insane and more bounded by actual resource limitations one hopes. trade (outside well-protected convoys) should be quite rare, and only for cases in which there is simply no other way of producing that good at a place that desperately needs it.