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1

General Discussion / Re: Tighter leash?

« on: November 02, 2023, 12:03:47 PM »

I've seen this subject pop up many times, and I agree that the leashes need to be tightened, even if it can cause the destruction of player ships; at least the player would be the one responsible for it. If that isn't the answer then some other kind of change could help, but I feel that the order system in general needs improvement as it stands. I found it just as frustrating as many other individuals that I have seen post about it.

I used to have the exact same idea of assigning PD escorts but they didn't work and they didn't help with frontal threats either. Since then I have abandoned all use of the escort order and changed my doctrine accordingly. All of my ships are meant to be able to operate independently, and if they happen to help each other then that's great, but it is not a necessity. This also means that I only use certain ships that are capable of doing this, which doesn't leave a very big roster.

2

Suggestions / Order your second in command to handle it better

« on: October 28, 2023, 08:34:48 AM »

Ordering your second in command to handle a weak fleet is a nice time saver and it is generous in it's own ways; such as deploying armed ships that normally wouldn't really be able to fight, and with no risk. However, this function tends to be lackluster at completely mopping enemy fleets and in this, will require multiple attempts to do so; sometimes yielding no result whatsoever. Once the enemy's CR gets low enough from these repeated failures, you have to manually engage anyway. This ironically wastes more of the player's time than it should.

My suggestion is that this could be improved to reliably eliminate fleets that are not a threat, and limit the number of pursuits to one or two total. Even a single Dram that stubbornly wont die and also wont leave can link a much larger fleet to you when said Dram should have already been gone. This would also be useful for collecting every bit of scattered bounty and reputation.

3

General Discussion / Persean stations

« on: October 28, 2023, 08:19:58 AM »

I'm surprised that I haven't seen a single mention of this, so I think it is worth bringing to light.

To put it simply, I have run over enough stations of all kinds to feel that the Persean stations are an outlier now, and not by a little bit. It's almost entirely because of the frequent and endless DEM spam, although the Mjolnir battery is quite nasty too. So perhaps the frequency of missile spam should be lowered, but do they just fire on cooldown with infinite ammo or do they refill? Maybe lowering the number of launchers could be a solution so ships aren't affected by altering the missile cooldown itself. I also think that the AI's inability to engage stations properly is compounded with this type of station. It spins too fast and they don't know how to follow it or get anything done, and just get picked off by DEM barrages. Persean fleets themselves are annoying but tactics can be applied, ships can be picked off, and most importantly they don't have infinite missiles.

I would go so far as to say that even a Persean battlestation is comparable to a full strength Nexus, maybe even more dangerous. But where do the stations rank in your book, and do any of them need to be adjusted?

4

General Discussion / Re: Requesting High-Tech Fleet Advice

« on: October 07, 2023, 06:51:29 PM »

I'm surprised that Furies didn't get more love in recommendations; I personally use them as a flexible backbone with supporting frigates (excluding wolf) and an anchor of your choice. I typically field four or five of them and use two or three at a time to strike the edges and ships that are out of formation, although you have to be careful with those orders. I also tend to support these strikes by driving a wedge between the target in question and the enemy fleet with my flagship. This synergy favors mobility over all else I believe, but the shields can absorb quite a bit before backing off.

As for a carrier, I'd go with a Heron with Daggers or Tridents because of it's mobility and it's ability makes individual strikes more accomplishing. If it needs something to hide behind it can hang out with your anchor.

5

Suggestions / Re: Accidental conversation selection railroad

« on: October 05, 2023, 03:45:32 PM »

The Console Commands mod is very useful for correcting things like this.

For example if you install it you can Ctrl+Backspace to access it, after you engage the fleet in question you can use Endcombat, and then Adjustrelation <Faction> Player <numerical amount>.

That should put things back to the way they were; no sense in such dire consequences for a simple misclick, and use the Help command to see a list of other things. I typically use this to refund myself credits for ships that die to bugs, friendly fire, or excessive stupidity, and it is such a relief to have.

6

General Discussion / Re: How has the allied AI gotten more antagonistically dumb?

« on: September 28, 2023, 11:16:09 AM »

I think one of the important takeaways here should be that the order system isn't intuitive at all, and certainly not for newer players. I would describe it as learning what these things will cause the AI to do instead of what it sounds like they would do and it still feels like herding cats at times. If some level of mastery of ship loadouts is expected before one can even use the order system effectively then the system needs improvement. I've felt the same frustration about the same behaviors mentioned and I have to agree with the OP that no, in fact, that behavior isn't really defending, or that one isn't really what it sounds like etc..

The last time that I used an escort order the escorts weren't helping with frontal threats, has that changed? Either way I stopped using it out of frustration a while back. Nowadays I get the most out of carefully placed eliminate orders, waypoints, and the occasional full assault. However I really do wish there was something in between engage and eliminate, or that engage were just given a higher priority.

7

Suggestions / Debris could stand to be more easily breakable

« on: September 28, 2023, 10:52:44 AM »

Sometimes to me it feels like hunks of dead ship are able to soak up as much damage as the ships that they came from. Debris also tends to get in the way and stay in the way for quite a while. Don't get me wrong though, I absolutely love using space trash as a shield to vent flux. But when you want to get rid of it it takes a lot of punishment and then just breaks into smaller pieces that are still in the way and also tough to get rid of. Sometimes the same dead ship will get ping ponged back and forth for quite a while. This is partly because autofire won't bother to try and get rid of the debris even if its a small piece. This goes both ways of course, although the AI won't try to 'use' the pieces in their favor.

8

General Discussion / Re: Issues with the AI

« on: September 28, 2023, 10:38:13 AM »

The most useful thing that I've found in station fights is to attach ships to waypoints that are pretty far back; far enough that their maximum leash range is as close as you want those ships to ever get. I do this with all of the warships that I want to actually engage the station to some degree, and I just tether frigates far and off to the sides so they will engage the supporting fleet or if there isn't one they can just sit in the back and give their coordinated maneuvers bonus. One important thing about doing this is that they won't be doing much damage to the station itself so much as they are soaking up it's firepower. It will be up to the flagship and carriers to inflict most of it, unless of course you set all of the tethers loose.

The crowding is another problem entirely, and I run into this problem (no pun intended) even on non station fights because I use about seven or eight frigates. I know that frigates aren't the only ones that crowd but they seem to be the worst about it because they are fast and dance back and forth in front of their targets. They tend to do this even when the rear of the target is wide open. It's kind of rare but I have seem them shoot each other and I have lost an Omen to friendly AM blaster fire before. The other factor of crowding is collision which is worse in station fights but still present in normal fights due to hunks of dead AtlasII, the crowding itself, and sometimes a Fury bowling over all of the above.

Ships taking unnecessarily long range torpedo shots adds to the danger of crowding as well; I have seen a fair number of friendly fire torpedo shield-hits and have had to dodge would-be hull hits on my flagship coming from behind. Edit: I forgot to add that friendlies crowding a target will interfere with autofire; everyone is too close like they are trying to use a melee weapon.

9

Bug Reports & Support / Discrepancy when taking jump-points

« on: September 22, 2023, 09:44:05 AM »

On semi-rare occasions when an enemy fleet is in pursuit of your fleet, a small but important discrepancy can occur in the position of the enemy fleet. For example, if the pursuers are about two or three seconds behind you and you use a jump point it is possible for them to appear behind you immediately, thus eliminating the small but vital distance you had between the two of you. Needless to say if you are running from someone to begin with, it can be catastrophic if you are forced into an engagement with your pursuers because of this small break in continuity.

10

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: September 22, 2023, 09:08:29 AM »

Having more incremental skills might also alleviate the problem of having to specialize skills to a specific ship in a game loop that promotes randomized opportunities and thus random ship access. Such a system could also exclude the frustrating random officer skills as well.

The officer roster building is annoying. You spend time looking through the markets to find one, preferably with the starting skills you actually need, then you mentor them, go through 5/6 subsequent levels and still might end up without all of the skills you wanted, and now you either have to cope or look for replacement and do it all over again.

Oh and there is also busted level 7 salvaged officers but with entirely random skillset. Considering officers are semi-permanent and you can't reliably store dozens of them to adjust on the fly I find it bizarre how many RNG layers are involved here.

The best workaround I've found is to use Officer Extension and set the demotion cost to 0 story points. It might take a few tries to get what you want but eventually you will be able to without having to fire officers repeatedly. This way you also can't just race to perfect officers and it gives a long term goal which fits perfectly in a single player sandbox. Although you can still level officers pretty quick with the frigate daredevil bonus; I think that's a vanilla feature but I can't remember for sure. Not to mention you can actually feel good about finding rare level 7 officers; with some time and SP investment they can be sculpted to what you are looking for. But speaking of a single player sandbox, such an RNG based restriction with officer skills indeed seems out of place to say the least.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I think a lot of issue comes from individual skills making a ton of difference. The current system encourages perfect optimization because even one skill can make or break a ship/build. If the skill investment offered more basic attributes and other things like specialization could be learned by flying ships, maybe the problem could be alleviated. Although specialization seems tricky with the game being significantly about random opportunities, hard to say; I'm just trying to encourage discussion on this topic 'cause the current system doesn't feel good to me.

11

General Discussion / Re: Problem getting mods to work (first time using mods)

« on: September 19, 2023, 02:14:37 PM »

Attached: the inside of one of the mod folders that is not working

Do they look correct?

Judging by the first two screens it looks like what I was describing: Mods/Mod A 1.1/Mod A/data, json, etc mod files

So try taking them out of the parent folder so that the directory looks like: Mods/Mod A/data, json, etc mod files

12

General Discussion / Re: Problem getting mods to work (first time using mods)

« on: September 19, 2023, 01:24:33 PM »

Do your mod folders have another subfolder before reaching the data, config, etc? I think you'll need to take them out of their current parent folder if they do.

13

Bug Reports & Support / Plasma burn and stations

« on: September 19, 2023, 05:24:06 AM »

I'm really surprised that I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere, but I noticed my Furies using plasma burn to crash into stations, resulting in overloads and death. My usage of Shrikes against stations is very limited so I can't speak for them yet, and I don't give Odyssey to my AI. They seem to do this when the station is overloaded or high flux, causing them to dogpile in and hit the station and each other too. Although, they still ram into the station itself or broken off parts of it even if there aren't other ships in the way. It's also worth mentioning that I have noticed my Omens just flying into stations and dying too, particularly the rotating extremities.

I debated on whether to put this in the modded subforum or not, but I don't think anything I have would cause this.

However, my mod list is as follows:

A New Level of Confidence
Another Portrait Pack
Attuned Drive Field
Console Commands
Detailed Combat Results
Interesting Portraits Pack
LazyLib
MagicLib
Nexerelin
OfficerExtension
SpeedUp
Terraforming & Station Construction

14

Suggestions / Re: Finisher missiles and unshielded targets

« on: September 19, 2023, 04:41:15 AM »

(This isn't a bug, moving to suggestions.) What actually happens is the AI *will* sometimes fire these kinds of missiles at unshielded targets, but not too much. If it just fires them off, it's very likely that when encountering a fleet with unshielded ships, it would just waste these missiles in a rapid initial salvo.

A target being unshielded does not necessarily mean it's vulnerable to missiles; it may have PD, or a system that counters missiles, or nearby allies that can cover for it. Edit: or, they may be vulnerable to missiles, but also very easy to take down with other weapons, making massive missile use to clear them out a waste.

So what the AI does is only fire these at unshielded targets sometimes, more when its *own* flux levels get higher (to try and create some breathing room, taking flux being high as an indication that it's at more of a risk). And IIRC if the target vents etc, that's handled differently.

Does this behavior apply to all types of missiles against unshielded targets? I wanted to use Gorgons for example, but the AI was proving far too stingy about using them against common Hounds and Cerberi. These DEMs are specifically designed to evade PD aren't they? I was trying to get the same frontloaded effect as when I fight the Persean League and their missile barrages.

15

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: September 19, 2023, 04:17:13 AM »

I wish that the skills where somehow separated so that you don't have to sacrifice your flagship experience for a better overall fleet, whilst being balanced around having full access to both. That being said I still like to get combat but there are periods in my playthroughs where my flagship is lacking for the sake of leadership skills, and it's not all that exciting. If the skill system was more incremental instead of fewer, much more impactful skills, then it might be easier to manage such a feature. Having more incremental skills might also alleviate the problem of having to specialize skills to a specific ship in a game loop that promotes randomized opportunities and thus random ship access. Such a system could also exclude the frustrating random officer skills as well.

Edit: I should mention that I favor getting leadership first not just for overall performance, but so that my AI are stronger and less likely to wreck my expensive ships. But I very much like to take my flagship into the heat of battle.