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1

Suggestions / Re: Mercenaries

« on: June 06, 2013, 10:10:21 PM »

The first two missions feature a player as a mercenary who end up contracting against his/her original employer. They've been in there since the earliest versions of starfarer.

2

General Discussion / Re: Anyone else prefer missions to the campaign?

« on: August 19, 2012, 01:26:35 AM »

Well I guess the tribe has spoken.

An idea I've been floating around for a while though - an "export this encounter to the simulation computer database" button in a campaign engagement, that automatically creates a mission for replay later. Allows you to practice all the joys of refitting / trying different tactic, with an in-universe explanation to boot. Also, folks could upload their best missions to this site to share.

but what does the last hurrah teach?

It's likely the first major capital-capital engagement the player encounters:
- How to use the conquest
- How to take down an onslaught
- Learn not to wrestle with the command system (especially used to direct RTS orders)
- commanding and making the most of a large, non-optimal fleet (in the old days you used to have some civy frigates)

3

General Discussion / Anyone else prefer missions to the campaign?

« on: August 14, 2012, 04:11:38 AM »

Maybe I'm just getting old and don't have time to grind away for hours developing a character, but as per the title does what would be your preference:

• an expansive, dynamic and randomly generated universe to explore,
• or a continuous set of extremely well designed and arranged missions.

The appeal of missions is repeatability -- you get to focus on trying all sorts of different tactics / ship load outs and really push the combat engine to it's limits, not to mention developing your own skill. There's also the aspect of being able to discuss your strategies and experiences with others, having been faced with the same starting conditions. If you had an N64 with Goldeneye in the past I think you know what I mean.

I suppose the counter point is Star Control 2, and all the exploration and character development aspects that go with that. I really enjoyed that too, but my sense is that a massive campaign like that takes many more hours, especially to get right. Dunno, Alex, if you're read it would be interesting to know what the relative number of hours were each to create the campaign and mission set, as they appear in 0.53.

Also interested to hear everyone's thoughts. I think a hybrid of types might be best, a la Tie Fighter

4

General Discussion / Re: Graviton Beam Counterpart

« on: August 14, 2012, 03:55:28 AM »

I think from a game play perspective this defeats the concept of beams: for a given OP cost, they trade damage and burst potential for high accuracy and sustained pressure.

5

General Discussion / Re: Chasing fleeing fighters

« on: August 07, 2012, 04:25:27 PM »

Seems said judgement call comes down to what sort of fleet you are operating.

If you're running a merchant fleet, then you're more interested in the fat pay-off at your destination than killing every last ship you encounter. In which case fighters automatically pursuing to the edge of the map is perceived as AI stupidity.

But if you're a small privateer / pirate company, every kill is more possible salvage so in that case you'd be impressed with the AI seeking to leave no survivors.

Move up to a capital armada, and you go back to not caring about stray fighters / frigates, at least while the enemy still has other larger ships on the field.

To this end I think an overall fleet behaviour or "AI Theme" (needs a better name) might be warranted. Perhaps something that it not easily controlled -- like the character traits of your officers or the overall sum of the player actions etc. SOTS2 has something similar where your choices shift your 'government type' toward different ideologies depending on the playstyle you use. Dunno if it actually works / is fun to play though.

6

Suggestions / Re: Ballistic ammo ballance; fallback

« on: July 09, 2012, 01:19:41 AM »

I've found it interesting with a Conquest + hellbores, in that often I have to start circling targets in the opposite direction to balance the use off ammunition from the broadsides.

7

Suggestions / Re: My feedback on the upcoming (tentative) ship systems

« on: July 07, 2012, 12:11:20 AM »

The less profanity here, the better.

But if you suck all the air out of the room we'll suffocate (see stephen fry on the joys of swearing). I used profanity -- measured, not "face-first" -- in reference to "corporate schmucks." It's an awkward filter if folks can't tell where the word used to be.

@BonhommeCarnaval - imagine you are a musician, and someone manages to hack into your mixing computer and leak some unfinished tracks you're working on. These tracks are subsequently picked up by a reviewer, who publishes as article and opens up a discussion about why your music is crap. Do you not see any fundamental issues here?

Some of the subsystems are very good, some are terribly boring and borderline silly.

That's the core of the discussion, isn't it, the difficult balance of design. Perhaps Alex should get a bit more involved with community feedback and write up a blog post on how he came to his decisions on said difficult balance.

8

Suggestions / Re: My feedback on the upcoming (tentative) ship systems

« on: July 06, 2012, 09:32:23 PM »

Immersion-breaking, this sounds like some fantasy cooldown ability straight from WoW or Diablo. It would be much more immersive as a toggled ability with a drawback such as +50% fire rate but +100% flux generation, or -90% turret turn rate, or even have the weapons overheat and break down afterwards.

Oh come off it man, wait till you try it before forecasting the end of civilization and All That is Good.

And speaking of immersion-breaking, your suggested "improvement" reads like Microsoft Excel Simulator, instead of the intuitive and ultra-slick yet tactically rich and subtle dystopian presentation we currently have. Makes me want to slit my wrists and bleed all over your keyboard, as a means to help you realise the smugness and ridiculous irony in your post.


p.s the Burn Drive is awesome as a concept. I can't wait to use it and cackle as I imagine the corporate schmucks *** themselves in their namby Aurora, as I close in at warp speed. 

9

General Discussion / Re: fleet tactics

« on: July 06, 2012, 09:16:51 PM »

1.) As said above: though perhaps it's not entirely intuitive/obvious, the "Full Escort" command does exactly what you are asking for.

2.) I thought about this before, but then I tried working within the simple system as it stands and learnt something much more interesting. Namely, have you actually tried replacing the LRMs with harpoons or the medium torpedo tube? I found that speed/fire rate/delivery far, far outweighs the extra ammo you get for support weapons.

10

General Discussion / Re: Will the full game be more than one system?

« on: July 06, 2012, 09:02:48 PM »

yes.

11

Suggestions / Re: Make .gif possible.

« on: June 16, 2012, 04:56:32 PM »

The large slot needler rotates. Some constantly moving mechanisms on a mining ship should be manageable. And incredibly awesome.

It's just multiple pictures. Check your graphics folder.

You might want to refine your understanding of Animation

12

Suggestions / Re: Thrusters should not slow a ship down

« on: June 01, 2012, 09:35:29 PM »

I figured the physics engine was as robust as you say it is, and that's why I figured this would be an easy fix.

Hey come on now, that's just snark. As Alex has already said, it would be trivial to implement some sort of system that scales your speed bonus depending on the angle you want to accelerate away from your current heading. What you are talking about is not a fix, because evidently there's nothing broken.

What about the buttons on the main menu?!?? surely they could be improved and made more intuitive by increasing their width by 2 pixels??!?!?? Maybe, maybe not -- it's hard to tell but who gives a ***?

I bet if this sort of behaviour was available as a hull-mod that cost 2OP on your conquest, you wouldn't use it in exchange for the tiny bit of flux capacity.

Incidentally, I really like the way it works right now lore wise, because it suggests that the ship-engine technology is not fully understood / fully under control, at least within the Sector. As in, pilots have to learn to deal with these quirks because we don't really know what's going on when you push your engines inside the magic warp bubble. Even better, perhaps as part of the campaign you can uncover a crash-landed alien drive core or some other magic on an isolated world that enables this control of speed boosting. That sort of thing....

13

Modding / Re: Code Sample - Random Reduction of Station Inventory

« on: May 28, 2012, 05:41:41 AM »

why random? why not whenever a fleet arrives?

14

General Discussion / Re: Systems speculation and discussion thread

« on: May 25, 2012, 05:36:37 PM »

No speculation on the high-tech ships yet?!

I think the Apogee, being a research ship, will have Science as it's special move. So you push the button during combat and cure cancer or fold proteins or whatever. Cool stuff

15

Suggestions / Re: Drone/robotic crew

« on: May 25, 2012, 07:56:48 AM »

already in the game -- see wasp "drones"