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General Discussion / Re: Tournament Musings
« on: September 05, 2019, 12:43:38 PM »
Gosh I probably spent more time on that odyssey than the entire rest of the fleet combined
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2
General Discussion / Re: I HAVE MANAGED TO GET STARSECTOR RUNNING ON ANDROID
« on: August 06, 2019, 08:12:21 PM »
aww yeah, time to break out my Ouya
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Suggestions / Re: Targeting Duration Enforcement - Autofire Retargets Too Much?
« on: May 05, 2019, 01:46:53 PM »Was a ship targeted? I noticed that beams tend to interrupt more if I have a target lock on a ship. I sometimes remove target lock so that beam PD works better.
No idea if AI maintains target locks on their enemies.
To be honest, I've never tested this, though i don't know if it makes it better - especially considering that the problem persists in AI controlled ships however the case may be. Worthwhile thought, though, with regards to trying to find a central "cause" for these patterns.
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Suggestions / Targeting Duration Enforcement - Autofire Retargets Too Much?
« on: May 02, 2019, 01:41:52 PM »
As per a conversation that was had just right now in the discord server, it's again come to my attention that the autofire AI struggles to engage long distance targets. The trouble is that the AI would appear to constantly switch targets in the middle of preparing to fire, which is a real problem for beams and weapons with firing delays. Want to test it out? Cover a conquest with tac beams, give it all the range increases you can, and install integrated point defense AI - the guns will struggle to stay on track for a single target long enough to even reliably destroy missiles from far away!
There may be a more concrete solution for this I'm not thinking of, but a possible "band-aid" fix could be to apply a "minimum targetting time" hint to weapons with charge-up times, beams, and other possible weapons susceptible to this issue. Ideally this could scale based on the distance to target, as especially with the case of beams, the further away the target is the less damage the AI will commit to before switching off.
I know this is probably the worst time to suggest such a thing, RCs being worked on and all, but hey - it's out here now!
There may be a more concrete solution for this I'm not thinking of, but a possible "band-aid" fix could be to apply a "minimum targetting time" hint to weapons with charge-up times, beams, and other possible weapons susceptible to this issue. Ideally this could scale based on the distance to target, as especially with the case of beams, the further away the target is the less damage the AI will commit to before switching off.
I know this is probably the worst time to suggest such a thing, RCs being worked on and all, but hey - it's out here now!
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General Discussion / Re: Level scaling is overly agressive and immersion breaking
« on: March 20, 2019, 10:41:39 AM »
Either it scales, and people will always be unhappy with the rate because of the sheer sensitivity to it all (big fleets are so exponentially more deadly than small ones, and player fleets fluctuate in size in a matter of weeks ingame even though the campaign features take months to tick through things), or it doesn't scale, and early game is torture until late game is mindlessly easy.
Hell, late game is already kind of mindless in vanilla and this is one of the main problems mods and many of the base game updates have hoped to resolve over time, to varying success. But at its core this game is a fleet bashing simulator, eventually you're just going to have a big fleet and will bash it against the biggest fleets in the area, there's no real way to resolve that currently. At least that I know of.
Seriously though people complain about scaling, not scaling, the rate of scaling, and while they're all valid ideas to have (I mean, any feedback is on some level useful) it's also a complaint I hear a lot without solutions.
Also, honestly, if you want my take? I can go from one of the starting options in vanilla to having enough ships to take on the biggest capital ship tier pirate bounties in like two hours. Heck, if I do the apogee start I can do it nearly instantly - a pristine apogee is worth three pirate cruisers, you just need a few semi durable escort ships for your murder machine.
Hell, late game is already kind of mindless in vanilla and this is one of the main problems mods and many of the base game updates have hoped to resolve over time, to varying success. But at its core this game is a fleet bashing simulator, eventually you're just going to have a big fleet and will bash it against the biggest fleets in the area, there's no real way to resolve that currently. At least that I know of.
Seriously though people complain about scaling, not scaling, the rate of scaling, and while they're all valid ideas to have (I mean, any feedback is on some level useful) it's also a complaint I hear a lot without solutions.
Also, honestly, if you want my take? I can go from one of the starting options in vanilla to having enough ships to take on the biggest capital ship tier pirate bounties in like two hours. Heck, if I do the apogee start I can do it nearly instantly - a pristine apogee is worth three pirate cruisers, you just need a few semi durable escort ships for your murder machine.
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Bug Reports & Support / Re: [0.9a-RC9] Tooltip for goods cutout on last 2 lines
« on: November 20, 2018, 03:39:21 AM »
that's probably because that's the per-month income rather than your current stockpiles - the other stuff has been collecting for about 5 months, looks like, while those two things are only a month deep
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Bug Reports & Support / Re: DTC and ITU generated in the same variant
« on: November 19, 2018, 09:15:16 AM »
While I'm at it actually it's kind of weird the game keeps autofitting DTC on ships after you have ITU. I just don't know if that's worth a whole thread.
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Bug Reports & Support / DTC and ITU generated in the same variant
« on: November 19, 2018, 09:08:34 AM »
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/512356777451323393/514081654738911235/screenshot045.png?width=1202&height=677
So I disabled then recovered a mora from a fleet battle, and when I went to refit it I was met with this screen. Now I know that randomized variants leads to some wonk, but obviously two hullmods that are supposed to be mutually exclusive being placed in the same variant is an unintentional glitch in the system.
Great work on the update though! Honestly this is such a minor issue, and it being on a mora makes it just worthless enough that I'm considering letting the guy keep his impossible loadout for the fun of it.
So I disabled then recovered a mora from a fleet battle, and when I went to refit it I was met with this screen. Now I know that randomized variants leads to some wonk, but obviously two hullmods that are supposed to be mutually exclusive being placed in the same variant is an unintentional glitch in the system.
Great work on the update though! Honestly this is such a minor issue, and it being on a mora makes it just worthless enough that I'm considering letting the guy keep his impossible loadout for the fun of it.
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Suggestions / Re: MORA - Or Damper Field as a whole.
« on: October 11, 2018, 03:54:08 AM »
My take on damper field has always been that % reduction is too binary, and it'd be more interesting as a mechanic if it was a +armor effect instead.
Basically, damper field gives just enough oomph to reduce the hurt when the ship is pristine, and when the ship is heavily stripped it can use it as a last-ditch attempt to stop itself from getting chewed by LMGs. 50% damage reduction on the mora, for instance, means that it would double its already capital-grade armor. Giving it a simple +400 armor, however, would make relatively little difference against dedicated armor cracking weapons like hammers, reapers, or hellbores, but it'd make the ship a LOT more capable of shrugging off inconveniently timed fighter or frigate strikes while its armor is already low. Unless they use harpoons.
it's an idea, and I'd be happy to let people tear it apart.
Basically, damper field gives just enough oomph to reduce the hurt when the ship is pristine, and when the ship is heavily stripped it can use it as a last-ditch attempt to stop itself from getting chewed by LMGs. 50% damage reduction on the mora, for instance, means that it would double its already capital-grade armor. Giving it a simple +400 armor, however, would make relatively little difference against dedicated armor cracking weapons like hammers, reapers, or hellbores, but it'd make the ship a LOT more capable of shrugging off inconveniently timed fighter or frigate strikes while its armor is already low. Unless they use harpoons.
it's an idea, and I'd be happy to let people tear it apart.
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Suggestions / Re: Fix Alternating Weapon Mode.
« on: October 11, 2018, 03:47:58 AM »
Honestly I'd like an expansion of firing modes in general, though this is a fairly low-level request to the game. Like having an alternating firing mode where you set the order of fire manually, so instead of firing 1-2-3-4 you fire 1+2, then 3+4, then back to 1+2. I could probably make a whole new thread for this...
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Suggestions / Re: 100% Recoverable Weapons / Salvaged ships maintaining their settings
« on: October 11, 2018, 03:45:01 AM »How about a "Restore" button in the refit menu, that restores the ship to its last configuration before its destruction? Or, if not a dedicated button, an autosaved, temporary variant.
That would require the game to autsoave all variants before each battle, of course.
I really like this idea, actually! I don't know how reasonable it'd be to actually implement, though, since it means the game has to save quite a bit of data - it miiight eat up a bit of a PC's resources in a game already bottlenecked slightly by preloading everything at once. Not that I'm complaining about that feature, it's really a game that benefits from zero loadtimes.
In general, regarding the issue faced by OP, I agree there's a desire to reduce the losses of valuable hardware, and in a way having d-mods, crew loss, and CR degradation is *already* a heck of a punishment for losing a ship, but since actually recovering the ship after battle isn't guaranteed, a part of me wonders whether or not weapons should be beholden to the same rule. Personally I'm fine with losing the guns on my fancy ship when it dies, but I'm also a hoarder so I always have spare stuff lying about to put in the slot, at least once i get past the early game struggle for power. Ultimately this seems to me like more of a design decision than a balance or QoL one, so whatever Alex decides to do (which seems to be the "make weapons come back with the ship always" route) is OK in my book.
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General Discussion / Re: The Wasp sucks
« on: September 16, 2018, 04:09:22 AM »
See, I've found similar results, but I maintain very enthusiastically that wasps are still the best single-wing interceptors in the game. I just also believe that it's bad form at best, and tactically suicidal at worst, to exclusively mount light interceptors on a multi-wing carrier. And on single wing ones, I rarely give them anything but more multi-purpose craft. This offsets the fragile-ness of wasps and similar craft, in addition to granting them a thicker screen to hide behind. The longer you keep your wasps in the area, the more proxy mines they disgorge. You can also, technically, say the same for the more wasps you deploy, except wasps alone are - as you've found - incredibly fragile and incapable of self defense. Having thicker, more durable fighters that last longer in a fight limits how many ships the carrier has to be constantly replacing, a strategy I also used in one of the AI Tournaments.
While sending 18 wasps per mora into the fray may make the first burn as large as possible, you'd notice quite quickly that the number of proxy mines dropped immediately won't be 18 - some of your flying dots got shot down already! And since proxy mines have no delay fuse and negligible friendly fire potential (the only fighters at risk are the ones without functioning engines), you may find that they're actually better when deployed during a dogfight rather than while approaching - it's like a sudden burst of explosive damage centered roughly around the wasp, detonating directly in the center of a group of enemy fighters. Harder to shoot down on approach, and far more likely to hit multiple targets.
In a game as varied in content as this, I also think that using exclusively one item such as a ship, weapon, or fighter in this case is not representative of the game at large. Things are intended to have various tradeoffs both straightforward and contextual, and refusing this design in favor of simply brute forcing a standardization means you'll inevitably exaggerate the weaknesses of your chosen subject.
Also,Carthago delenda est Talons are overpowered.
While sending 18 wasps per mora into the fray may make the first burn as large as possible, you'd notice quite quickly that the number of proxy mines dropped immediately won't be 18 - some of your flying dots got shot down already! And since proxy mines have no delay fuse and negligible friendly fire potential (the only fighters at risk are the ones without functioning engines), you may find that they're actually better when deployed during a dogfight rather than while approaching - it's like a sudden burst of explosive damage centered roughly around the wasp, detonating directly in the center of a group of enemy fighters. Harder to shoot down on approach, and far more likely to hit multiple targets.
In a game as varied in content as this, I also think that using exclusively one item such as a ship, weapon, or fighter in this case is not representative of the game at large. Things are intended to have various tradeoffs both straightforward and contextual, and refusing this design in favor of simply brute forcing a standardization means you'll inevitably exaggerate the weaknesses of your chosen subject.
Also,
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General Discussion / Re: Abandonware?
« on: July 14, 2018, 07:19:34 PM »
Follow bounties to actually profit from combat.
Explore, salvage, and survey uninhabited systems to print money without relying on combat.
Buy supplies and fuel constantly, recognising the logistical load of taking on new ships to your fleet.
Practice combat in the missions from main menu or in the simulator in campaign and missions, as there's no loss from dying there.
Instead of blaming a game for bad design because you aren't good at it, consider what goes wrong to try to find the origin of your mistakes. This IS a hard game, but if you don't try to learn the mechanics you aren't going to be able to brute force it, unlike your Dark Souls example.
This is hardly abandonware, as the developer maintains an ongoing dev blog with updates nearly every month on progress.
Explore, salvage, and survey uninhabited systems to print money without relying on combat.
Buy supplies and fuel constantly, recognising the logistical load of taking on new ships to your fleet.
Practice combat in the missions from main menu or in the simulator in campaign and missions, as there's no loss from dying there.
Instead of blaming a game for bad design because you aren't good at it, consider what goes wrong to try to find the origin of your mistakes. This IS a hard game, but if you don't try to learn the mechanics you aren't going to be able to brute force it, unlike your Dark Souls example.
This is hardly abandonware, as the developer maintains an ongoing dev blog with updates nearly every month on progress.
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Suggestions / Re: Skill idea to boost combat aptitude
« on: July 14, 2018, 12:51:38 PM »
Personally something I wanna point out with the OP idea I can see is that it promotes snowballing. Starsector combat is already kind of sink or swim, and while it may feel satisfying to rapidly get a half dozen kills with your flagship and provide your fleet with a whole 15% boost in damage, or something, it's a 15% damage boost deployed against a fleet that you probably now outnumber and outgun already. Basically, by the time that you get the buff to a significant level, it's too late to really matter.
I suppose the perk idea does make possible a "mega-murder" strategy where you deploy your fleet against an enemy that far outmatches yours, but you equip a flagship with high-power burst killing weapons (such as missiles) and just blast all the ships you can before either fleet can fully commit. But that sounds less like a "strategy" to me so much as flexing on the AI because you leveled the "one man army" tree. And as much as people complain that the current combat tree is a shadow of the old one, full treeing combat basically turns you invulnerable in .8 and you can pull the maneuver I described off anyway. Combat+Tech is basically the most lethal" way to level yourself, focusing on all the "piloted ship" buffs with only 3 points spared for getting yourself +10% OP because, uh, come on.
Of course, what someone with skill "can" do and what the general player base is aware of or is also capable of pulling off is not one in the same. The real value of the idea as outlined in OP isn't actually the mechanical effect, it's the "feeling" of it. Logically, 20% damage boosts when you outnumber the enemy fleet 2 to 1 doesn't matter at all. Emotionally, it's a great way to encourage players to try a combat-focused playstyle when they may otherwise think it's not useful. In reality the combat tree is PLENTY useful, it's just harder to see (how is +150 armor for the purpose of DR going to help me kill things?). The suggestion in this thread OP would be "visible" enough to seem like a good idea.
I suppose the perk idea does make possible a "mega-murder" strategy where you deploy your fleet against an enemy that far outmatches yours, but you equip a flagship with high-power burst killing weapons (such as missiles) and just blast all the ships you can before either fleet can fully commit. But that sounds less like a "strategy" to me so much as flexing on the AI because you leveled the "one man army" tree. And as much as people complain that the current combat tree is a shadow of the old one, full treeing combat basically turns you invulnerable in .8 and you can pull the maneuver I described off anyway. Combat+Tech is basically the most lethal" way to level yourself, focusing on all the "piloted ship" buffs with only 3 points spared for getting yourself +10% OP because, uh, come on.
Of course, what someone with skill "can" do and what the general player base is aware of or is also capable of pulling off is not one in the same. The real value of the idea as outlined in OP isn't actually the mechanical effect, it's the "feeling" of it. Logically, 20% damage boosts when you outnumber the enemy fleet 2 to 1 doesn't matter at all. Emotionally, it's a great way to encourage players to try a combat-focused playstyle when they may otherwise think it's not useful. In reality the combat tree is PLENTY useful, it's just harder to see (how is +150 armor for the purpose of DR going to help me kill things?). The suggestion in this thread OP would be "visible" enough to seem like a good idea.