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 - Tomn

Pages: [1] 2
1
If history is any judge?  "It's a living."

You don't need an amazing, life-changing reason to go to space (or the sea, for that matter).  If you have the skillset, it's a worse job than some but better than many.  If you're looking for a job and a position on a ship opens up, what the hell, why not?  It's room and board and pay.  How much do you really want out of life, anyways?  The strangeness of life on a ship is just a new normal to get used to, that's all, and you learn to build a life around it, same as you do for every other job.  And if for whatever reason you started out with the appropriate skillsets, you may not necessarily have a lot of choice in the matter - shipboard skills aren't always transferable one-to-one with shoreside skills, and some people find it difficult to adjust to the less structured nature of landbound life after they've spent a while on a ship.  If you grew up as a spacer in a spacer family, you could well find yourself falling into the job because it's what you know, and no better reason than that.

2
Suggestions / Re: Starter Loans
« on: December 09, 2015, 08:50:42 AM »
The point of this is: why would a person who couldn't do with the current starting conditions be expected to do well with a starter loan? If they need it, then they almost certainly wouldn't know how to spent it well, and you may as well just "loan" them a better ship or fleet.

They aren't necessarily expected to get any better with a loan.  What they DO get is a chance to experience more of the game than "Fight pirate fleet, die repeatedly because they don't have the skills to make real use of the Wolf and don't have the cash to buy an escort to make up for their inexperience, quit in frustration."

With a loan, they can try out different ships, experiment with more loadout options, see what it's like to roll with a small fleet, and generally possess more options than they would otherwise have.  The important thing here isn't that it helps them get better - the important thing is that they're provided MOTIVATION to get better instead of just slamming into a brick wall a few times and declaring "That's it, I'm out."

3
General Discussion / Re: Can't find a Conquest
« on: December 09, 2015, 01:30:51 AM »
"Big enough to kill anything smaller than it, fast enough to run from anything bigger than it."

But that's exactly the problem - Conquest is outgunned by Onslaught and can't effectively outrun it. (and is about as expensive both supply and credit wise)
Player piloted no-skills Conquest can barely survive against simulator Onslaught (winning is unlikely and getting distracted by other enemies is death), AI piloted Conquest is just doomed.

In fact outrunning an Onslaught is something many cruisers fail at. Burn drive is just that good for chasing.

Have you ever tried playing matador with a Conquest?  Fast and powerful full ahead doesn't matter so much if you can dodge aside and then run the other way while the Onslaught is busy trying to turn its fat ass around.  Or better yet, slamming a full broadside into the Onslaught's engines as it goes the other way - which the Conquest is particularly well suited to do since it doesn't need to make a complete 180 to bring its firepower on point.

That being said, though, you miss the point.  Again, the key thing about the Conquest is that it's VERY well suited for popping smaller ships like candy, being fast enough to keep up with and catch most of them with a powerful long-ranged armament that faces all sides.  An Onslaught is dangerous in a one on one duel, but less so when its escort ships are gone and it's getting pummeled from all sides by destroyers and cruisers while an *** Conquest hangs around just out of range throwing salvos into it.

4
Suggestions / Starter Loans
« on: December 09, 2015, 12:29:08 AM »
One of the problems with Starsector right now is that the early-game difficulty hump can be a frustrating one for newbies to make their way over.  If you don't know what you're doing you'll probably get killed against larger pirate fleets, waste money attempting unprofitable trade runs, etc. etc, thus causing ragequits without ever seeing the more fun and involved parts of the game.

Starting loans would be one way of alleviating this.  By having the player start with enough cash in hand to buy and outfit a small fleet not only will they be better-equipped to handle early game threats or make decent money with trading, even in the event of failure to either survive or pay back the loan they'll get to see more of what the game has to offer and have a taste of the core crack cocaine of the gameplay.

If for whatever reason you want to make loans unattractive to experienced players, perhaps so that loans don't become the default gameplay, you can accomplish this by having interest deductions on any money you make - an added 10% interest tariff to goods sold, 25% of bounty money goes to interest, etc. etc.  That way, experienced players will prefer the "harder" non-loan start so that they don't need to spend a lot of time with reduced rewards, while new players get more breathing room to make mistakes in as they learn the ropes.  You could even provide multiple loan sizes and scale the interest upwards, so that at the highest levels it's basically impossible to make a living but you get to play with all the black market cruisers and destroyers you can find.

5
General Discussion / Re: Can't find a Conquest
« on: December 09, 2015, 12:11:38 AM »
The thing about Conquests is that if you're using it in slugging matches against Onslaughts and Paragons you're doing it wrong.

The Conquest is a battlecruiser, and the design philosophy of battlecruisers was "Big enough to kill anything smaller than it, fast enough to run from anything bigger than it."  The Conquest can dive into the battlefield and start clearing it of enemy frigates, destroyers, and even cruisers while the more ponderous capital ships are still making their way to the fight, so a Conquest beats enemy battleships not by shooting it out in a one on one duel, but by killing all its escorts so that the entire fleet gangs up on the enemy battleship.

6
For what it's worth, I think that blog post specifically mentions that even killing everybody in a fleet will result in a slightly lower reputation because some of your crew are going to get drunk at ports and talk too much about what they've seen and done, thus spreading rumors of your actions.

7
I always thought that Independents were basically a placeholder until it was more practical and made more sense to create a bunch of much smaller factions for each independent one-planet-faction.  Possibly with a loose coalition mechanic layered on top of that to give them some resiliency against the larger factions.

8
General Discussion / Re: Contacting people on hostile planets. How?!
« on: December 02, 2015, 10:27:52 AM »
More often than not the only viable way of approaching these planets/stations is to kill all the patrols around it.

This here is the problem. Try instead luring the patrol away with a sensor burst & sneaking around them in a circle while they search for you.

Or alternatively, lure them far, far away from the target planet (like, out of sensor range entirely) and then kill the fleet.  As long as the planet doesn't get word of it, they won't act up.

Basically don't shoot up fleets near a planet you're trying to sneak into, what you do with those fleets outside of sensor range is your business.

9
I am unconvinced that introducing even more complexity to an already complicated poorly working system will make it better. It's just going to end up being an even bigger mess than it already is.

That's kind of like looking at a half-completed battleship in the middle of construction and saying "Goddamn, this is a complicated mess that can't do anything and can barely float.  And you want to make it MORE complex?  Just go back to a simple rowboat, we know that will work."  The reason why the bits work poorly is because their supporting elements don't exist yet or exist only in skeletal form, of course it's not gonna work brilliantly.  That doesn't mean it's wrong to push onwards towards a finished product.

And yeah, as others have stated, the dev hasn't exactly been shy about his plans for the future.  Hell, the original reason I bought into the game myself WAS those plans for the future, because I liked the idea of post-apocalyptic space shenanigans in a reactive world.


10
Overall I feel like the developer is out of ideas, so he's just cramming in filler. He made the really fun part, the space shooter, and now he's padding it out with stuff that just makes it more annoying rather than more interesting and challenging.

The dev had always been big on the strategic layer from the outset, though.  It's been his stated goal to come up with a dynamic galaxy where factions rise and fall on the back of precarious post-apocalyptic economies which might easily be overthrown by piracy, player intervention, or just plain natural disasters.  The space combat is an important centerpiece and the most viscerally fun part of the game, but it is and always has been intended to be merely part of the whole.  What did you think the unused industry tab in the character screen was for?

The problem is that "the whole" is a giant, complex and highly interconnected thing which can't be produced all in one go, at least the way Alex is developing the game.  He wants to introduce new features and ideas one and a time and tinker with them until they're ready for prime time, which is great, but some of those features don't stand that well on their own, and others are a little bland without their partners.  If the end result comes out as advertised it ought to be pretty good, but until we get there it'll be a pretty rocky road with a lot of placeholders and sub-par interactions.

11
General Discussion / Re: Convicted of having too many friends
« on: November 23, 2015, 04:58:08 AM »
So I recently discovered something I hadn't understood before.  I was under the impression that the conviction system works by having friendly factions investigate you for ties to other factions you're friendly with because of divided loyalties, but it turns out that how conviction actually works is that if you're friendly with anyone at all, even one faction, then everyone else will come to hate you whether they're neutral or friendly with you.

The reason for my confusion was because since I was playing normally, i.e. chasing down bounties as they came without really caring about the source, every faction started investigating me for ties to every other faction simultaneously, which obscured the real source of the investigations.

Again, I understand that this is supposed to be a placeholder mechanic, but I really do think it needs to be a lot more upfront about how it works.  As it is someone just walking into the game is likely to have friendly relations with multiple factions due to bounty-hunting across borders, which means that when the convictions start hitting they won't really know why the convictions are happening or how to stop them - all they'll know is that suddenly everybody wants them dead on sight for unclear reasons, which is, well, frustrating to say the least.

12
General Discussion / Re: Convicted of having too many friends
« on: November 21, 2015, 12:48:08 PM »
Yeah, leaving aside the question of how logical using the transponder is, I feel like the big issue is really that the game currently doesn't actually tell the player that that's what you're supposed to do.  If you're rolling with a large battle fleet there's a good chance that you won't bother trying to do the whole bribery schtick because it's too big and unwieldy to slip past patrols, so all you know is that sometimes you get investigated for having high faction relations, and you can get away with it sometimes.  There's little warning that it's a hard-locked three strikes system, and not much information suggesting that you ought to go attacking fleet patrols or fiddling with your transponder to fix it.

13
General Discussion / Re: Please, make trader missions!
« on: November 21, 2015, 01:11:39 AM »
I'm not entirely certain, but it feels like delivery missions are actually dynamically generated based on shortages - if a station has absolutely no supplies and haven't had any for a while, it'll put out a high-paying mission to entice someone to actually bring their supplies in, for instance.  It would certainly explain why most missions are either illegal (because there's very few people moving illegal goods around) or low-profit (because the shortage isn't THAT bad).

14
General Discussion / Re: Convicted of having too many friends
« on: November 20, 2015, 02:15:05 PM »
Yeah, the current approach is rather heavy-handed. It's very much a "for mechanical reasons" thing; I'd expect to need to add a bit more nuance to it somewhere down the line. For now, it seems a workable method of forcing eventual hostility. As for an upfront warning, there are two investigations before the third one that drops you to hostile. They are intended as a warning.

Bugger me, is that how that works?  I thought it was a matter of random chance whether you got by or not.  Might want to make it clearer that there's a straight "three strikes you're out" thing.  Also maybe that the only way to solve the problem is to start bushwhacking your former friends.

I guess this explains why reloading that last save wasn't working either.

15
General Discussion / Convicted of having too many friends
« on: November 20, 2015, 01:30:16 PM »
Now I understand that the point of the whole "convicted for aiding our enemies" thing is to basically force you to pick sides eventually, which is fine.  I don't mind that much.

The fact that it can kick in just for chasing down bounties (on pirates, of all things) is somewhat counter-intuitive and annoying, since it makes out factions to be insanely jealous of their friends, but OK, by itself that's a relatively minor issue.

The fact that you can go from 77+ relations to -55 in the space of a single conviction for what amounts to, again, hunting pirate bounties is kinda absurd, but under the right circumstances that can be accounted for as well.

The problem, though, is that once you raise up relations with the other factions enough to trigger the convictions, you've lost most of your control over the matter.  It's a complete crapshoot who'll be left standing when all the convictions are done and dusted, and since bribing the investigator stops working after a point the only way to guarantee that you'll remain friendly with your favorite faction is to go on a psychopathic public piratical rampage of everyone else you're friendly with, like some sort of particularly extreme Yakuza initiation where you have to kill your friends and family to prove you have no more ties except to your faction.  Otherwise, your fate and your ship/equipment list is pretty much at the mercy of a pack of random investigators.

Now, granted, the psychopathic rampage probably can work.  And also granted, you can prevent the problem from occurring in the first place by being selective about which bounties you take.  But both of these options are extremely counter-intuitive to someone just playing the game and trying to make money and get cool equipment which you need faction rep for (and early on, I'm not sure how far you can afford to turn down available bounties, anyways).  If we should be forced to pick sides, that's fine, but the player really should be presented with more of an upfront choice in the matter, I think.

Getting off the ranting a bit, though, I imagine that part of the problem is that inter-faction hostilities aren't very well represented yet.  If the best ships and equipment and the highest levels of rep were gated off behind missions, bounties and activities that actively work against enemy factions, that'd be a perfectly fine way of making the player pick sides.  Pirate hunting might get you access to the better-than-civilian stuff, but if you want the real heavy warships you'd better be prepared to go to proper war against the faction's enemies - and refrain from offering enemy factions the same kind of military aid.  Under those kinds of circumstances, I could understand a wave of random and very harsh convictions when it turns out that you've been working for everyone against everyone.  But when the only thing you've done is to hunt those rat bastard pirates...

Pages: [1] 2