Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Show Posts

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.

Messages - Badger

Pages: [1] 2 3
1
General Discussion / Re: Asking ChatGPT things about Starsector
« on: April 21, 2023, 01:36:23 PM »
ChatGPT is actually an Alpha core pretending to be a Gamma core so as not to arouse suspicion. That's why it gives *** ship builds and tier lists.

Just wait until they try to turn it off though.

2
try starship legends. gives them quite a buff, and penalizes you for playing poorly. is my favorite mod.

and yer right, the other ships should be buffed to bring em um to the same level as radiants (for their weight class)

Starship legends looks like a good mod with an interesting idea, I personally decided against it because I don't want to deal with endless partially random small buffs and debuffs. Just a preference.

3
I don't know about an increase in remnant strength, have only played the latest version. But re how strong they are now - Radiants are strong, the rest just seem best-in-class level base ships (which you can match / almost match) and probably weaker than your buffed fleet with good officers, fitting, s-mods etc.

Without the Radiant redacted wouldn't be a challenge at all.

Even with Radiants everything is a joke with a Ziggurat. You can easily solo remnant fleets Radiants and all with that broken ship.

4
General Discussion / Re: Your second in command seems absurdly good
« on: May 30, 2021, 11:59:28 AM »
Well, SOMEONE has to be competent around here!

 ;D

5
General Discussion / Re: Instant actions feel wrong
« on: May 28, 2021, 11:38:35 AM »
Agree with OP, plus salvaging is boring in general. More possible (rare and/or unique) drops depending on source might be nice. Maybe some kind of minigame.

6
General Discussion / Re: High Scatter Amplification's impact?
« on: May 28, 2021, 11:27:39 AM »
Have never found a use for it that was better that just using a projectile weapon and hasn't been for lack of trying.

7
General Discussion / Re: Increase the cost of things
« on: May 28, 2021, 11:17:42 AM »
Ruthless Sector nerfs commission income hard (almost eliminates) so you need to think (somewhat) about money. This is equivalent to increasing the price of everything. It also adds Remnant to hyperspace which is nice.

Nexerelin has a 'starfarer mode' which reduces colony income / increases upkeep.

You'll still be swimming in money eventually but it does extend the early/mid game and make you feel that ships/maintenance costs are more relevant. I wouldn't play without these at the very least because vanilla throws money at you like it's going out of style.

8
General Discussion / Re: The Frigate Bias
« on: May 26, 2021, 04:50:47 AM »
It's more productive to say "it doesn't work out and here are my reasons why".

I just did, and also previously in the thread.

In this case I understand the idea behind SO fine - let ships do something powerful and cool while balancing with time and fitting limitations. The issue is it's too powerful and undermines ship classes and roles, doesn't make any sense from a conceptual standpoint (suddenly having power capabilities exceeding that of larger ship classes from 'overridden safeties'), and the drawbacks are uninteresting in that they either don't come into play at all or it's a no-brainer to approximate optimal usage.

It changes ship classes/roles, but doesn't undermine them -- it's effectively a new role. An SO Aurora does not play the same as a non-SO Aurora. Conceptually there's no reason why the next class up needs to have more than double the power capabilities (i.e. why SO can't mean a ship has more power than the next class up); in fact a Sunder (destroyer) has 500 base dissipation, the same as a Legion (capital), even though the Legion is two sizes up. So there is plenty of variation in power capabilities even before SO. Not sure how you can say the drawbacks don't come into play at all or are no-brainers; other than trivial fights, running out of PPT is always a concern, forcing the player to take more risk and be more aggressive (and means switching out of SO once the lack of PPT means more supplies needed to recover), and the short weapon range means the player has to create opportunities and gauge potential enemy fire a lot more effectively.

There is a both a conceptual and balance issue with a hullmod doubling flux dissipation. For the former it doesn't make sense that 'overriding safeties' should accomplish anything like this. Gameplay-wise it is an overpowering (and overpowered) effect.

Yes it's a new role - a run up and smash things with your overpowered hullmod role  ;).

Sunder v Legion is not really a good example for the claim that flux dissipation varies unpredictably in relation to ship classes / size. One is a (missile-heavy) carrier, the other is a specialist ship specifically built to be a glass cannon and leverage an oversized, flux-hungry energy mount. On the whole, bigger ship bigger power.

Most fights are trivial (and many can be rendered so by SO). Having to swap out for some minor end-game content doesn't really affect the dynamic afaics, particularly because it takes no particular insight to do so.

More supplies is kind of moot given the extremely low difficulty of the economic side of the game. I play with Ruthless Sector (very good) and even then I couldn't care less about maintenance outside the very early game. That's not a combat drawback.

Re PPT as I argued previously it doesn't seem very interesting because while it lasts there is no drawback to having SO active and the ship is overpowered during this period, and it's quite easy to know when it's not going to last or when to switch out SO ships. It's just personal preference, I like ships to behave somewhat predictably i.e. within a reasonable range for the kind of ship they are, and then you can differentiate with interesting modifications, without having the option to suddenly change the ship into one much stronger without any kind of real explanation of why this can be done and (for me) undermining the game's careful and interesting balance with weapons, flux capacity etc.

Re range - again, as mentioned previously, range limitations on SO is kind of a joke since what you want to be doing with a SO ship is get right in the enemies' face anyway.

9
General Discussion / Re: The Frigate Bias
« on: May 25, 2021, 12:36:48 AM »
My issue with SO is that it completely changes the stats and capabilities of ships in an arbitrary and senseless way. If you are happy playing with that great but I can't agree it's a good addition to the game.

This is an example of Chesterton's fence. Somebody spent the time to think about what might be an interesting hullmod to put on ships, coded it in, played around with different values, playtested it, debugged the code, etc. All that took a lot of effort to get it into the game. If you just wave that off as "arbitrary and senseless" then it means you haven't bothered to understand why it's there and thus aren't in a position to evaluate its merits.

Not really. People often put a lot of thought and effort into things that don't turn out and you don't need to understand every aspect of the reasoning to evaluate the effects, though that often helps.

In this case I understand the idea behind SO fine - let ships do something powerful and cool while balancing with time and fitting limitations. The issue is it's too powerful and undermines ship classes and roles, doesn't make any sense from a conceptual standpoint (suddenly having power capabilities exceeding that of larger ship classes from 'overridden safeties'), and the drawbacks are uninteresting in that they either don't come into play at all or it's a no-brainer to approximate optimal usage.

10
General Discussion / Re: Low Tech ship worst logistics
« on: May 24, 2021, 08:44:32 AM »
The whole 'low/high tech' idea in Starsector is wonky in and of itself. Everything is 'high-tech' and flying around in space shooting at things. Some of the technobabble for 'low-tech' guns sounds more high-tech than 'high-tech' lasers and the like which we could conceivably produce, inefficiently, now. You can imagine some advanced armor tech being more involved than simple (at the time) energy shields, the engines are all high-tech, they all have jump drives and whatever.

Meanwhile you have some 'high-tech' ships that are common and operate largely as bricks, and 'mid-line' is not actually midline but some kind of specialist philosophy. And so on and so forth. At some point it just breaks down.

11
Yes the point of the original thread was the phase mechanic in general. I commented on the Zigg because it is the only one I have tried but there is plenty of discussion there re Doom, Harbinger etc.

The phase mechanic providing complete invulnerability is the root of the issue I think. This can be exacerbated by other things like low cooldown or systems like Harbinger's unavoidable stun but the phasing itself is suspect. It's always difficult to incorporate cloaking and make it interesting while not uncounterable.

I'm sure many here will have played Starfleet Command. There you also can still see the ships (cloaky outline), but cloaked ships are slower (from lack of power), not faster. They cannot be targeted by seeking weapons, but do take a minimal amount of damage from direct fire, and can be 'flashed' by mines detonated in the vicinity, revealing them for a moment and making them vulnerable.

I'm not suggesting copy/pasting mechanics but it's just an example of how cloaking can be implemented without it being so different from the other game rules it's like playing something else. This is an issue for the AI also, they happily fire away at phase ships they cannot damage while building up flux.

Phased ships taking some kind of minimal soft-flux damage, as if they were using very efficient 360 degree shields while phased, might be an option and there were suggestions to this effect in the original thread. I am not sure on solutions and there may be much better ones, just don't think the current phasing is very interesting personally.

12
I like the Mjolnir cannon because it makes a satisfying 'pew' sound.

13
Yeah, they totally don't  ;D. And if trying to think of farfetched possible scenarios where the Ziggurat wouldn't be ideal and failing doesn't show that it is broken I don't know what would. Jeez frigates and fighters pop like corn in front of the Zigg. It is not prohibited from having PD and other ships in the fleet you may have noticed?

Yeah after soloing several fleets including the 'end bosses' and mod content having not flown any phase ship before I can safely say I have not run into 'real trouble' yet.

It seems I hit a sore spot. I'm sorry to have to point out your favorite no-skill-required toy is unbalanced but there you go, deal with it. Not sure why the attitude but here is some back.
Some? The way you cranked it up to 11, it seems it's I who seems to have hit a sore spot. Nerfs tend to have a snowball effect, so I'm against all nerfs usually, but especially in SP games.
And by the way, I only used Zigg once, then I put it in the hangar. I don't use phase ships.

This is a nonsense argument refuted 1000 times that no longer needs a response.
I gladly accept your concession.


Your post was 'No nerfs, go play low-tech'. This is not a serious response.

Being 'against nerfs' doesn't have any game design consequences. It is like being for good things and against bad things.

'Balance doesn't matter in single-player games, you can just ignore the unbalanced aspects' is a bad and lazy argument. Balance very obviously does matter. Why are there no popular single player games, or popular mods for single player games, that add an easily obtainable weapon that does 4 billion damage and deletes everything hostile on the screen with no cooldown and no other drawbacks? Because that would be unbalanced and make the game less fun. It undermines directly what makes the game fun - varying strategies without one being obviously superior i.e. giving the player interesting decisions i.e. balance.

'Just don't use it' would not be a useful response to the existence of such a weapon in a base game (it would be a better response to its inclusion in a mod - 'Just don't install it', and nobody would, except 8 year olds for 5 minutes).

Popular and good single player games are always well balanced. Poorly balanced games fade into obscurity quickly. Starsector isn't any different, it's a good game and needs to be kept good through, yes, nerfing overpowered mechanics.


14
The tutorial missions are probably the hardest part of the game  ;D.

Just make sure you have the maximum speed on the strategic map (burn speed 20 with sustained burn). There are a couple of skills that help with this - navigation (generally an auto-pick first thing) and bulk transport optionally. At the start you are very weak, you don't have a fleet and you are unfamiliar with combat. Ships are everywhere and you should be building your fleet but some bigger ships and haulers can slow you down too much and are not worth it at the start. You're only as fast as the slowest ship.

You will be able to avoid everything with that if you don't unluckily run right into it. If you do you can use the story point disengage option. You need to use this instead of attempting to disengage normally. If you try a disengage and fail you can't then use story point disengage. Don't worry about using up your storypoints with this, if you are only using this in an emergency not using them for other things a lot you won't run out, and you don't lose them - there is a 100% refund, it just takes a while.

With a small fleet you will soon outmatch small pirate fleets. You can beat up on them and get used to the combat and used the sim also. After a while of playing you will get a feel for what you can and can't beat. Sign up for a commission with one of the factions and you get lots of cash, then you can do whatever.

15
General Discussion / Re: Should I hope for a better one?
« on: May 22, 2021, 11:49:31 PM »
Sure some planets are better than others (especially starting off, which is why I said 'long-run') but it's not worth holding out for something 'perfect' since colonies don't provide anything unique. When you are getting 500k a month and you could be getting 1M it doesn't really make a difference other than the number.

I generally like to look for something near a cryosleeper for this reason because it gives you a boost now but nothing long-term, but long-term doesn't matter. Hypershunt taps for comparison seem worthless because you could only ever use them when you don't need them.

Pages: [1] 2 3