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

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Messages - RyMarq

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1
General Discussion / Re: Alex Appreciation Thread
« on: May 13, 2023, 01:38:46 PM »
Even I, who hasnt played in years, appreciated the patch enough that I have put in another 20+ hours.

2
General Discussion / Re: Do you like traveling in the hyperspace?
« on: May 11, 2023, 07:40:54 PM »
I generally like the hyperspace in the early game, but as I scale and get very high distances to go it becomes a chore. There is not an intuitive map for my of hyperspace topography, and I might be a noob, but I am a noob who has played games for over a decade and put 10s of hours into Starsector, so if the game hasn't lead me to be able to understand it its probably too opaque.

Because there is no map, I have to plot courses my memory. Because I have to plot courses by memory if I make mistakes it can easily be frustrating.

Now, according to this thread, there is apparently a filter for it, so I will get back to this mon how well that works for me. That said, I generally find myself really wishing there was a sort of super-sustained burn for hyperspace, where you could not turn at all but moved at twice the speed, or perhaps more specific spacial anomaly which could be used to boost an attentive player like storms, but without the damage. I would mod this sort of functionality in, but from what I can tell, this sort of stuff is the most difficult to implement in the limited scripting we have available.

3
Modding / Re: Speeders's Common Sense Economy Mod (in dev)
« on: December 23, 2015, 10:32:49 PM »
Your model creates a stabilized system of actors, if price is completely ignored and goods are distributed based upon need blindly regardless of affiliation or tie or distance.

Your ordering system does not include price, and it means that stockpiles are not allowed to occur. Its actually rather interesting in its behavior, because if a given empire/faction has more of a supply and goes to war with an enemy, every single system that enemy has will suffer a distributed increase in cost for the goods they cannot produce.

Currently, proxy mercantile planets can heavily alleviate that effect.

I still have yet to make a sufficiently good system here, but I wish you luck on your efforts there.


SD modeling is good for baseline equations to understand these flows and behaviors, but you have to remember that this is very finite set of actors with very strong restrictions on ordering decisions (distance/war/etc) that if you incorporate into your system will undermine it as anything more than a baseline goal.

4
Modding / Re: Speeders's Common Sense Economy Mod (in dev)
« on: December 20, 2015, 06:12:27 AM »
Will do the math for this. Am busy this weekend, will be done monday, probably.

5
Modding / Re: Speeders's Common Sense Economy Mod (in dev)
« on: December 19, 2015, 09:37:23 PM »
I suppose I will put this comment here.

If you are looking for a large-step delayed trade economy to feed supply and demand, then your factors are very simple.

Stockpile Size: This is the core thing here. In order to stabilize an economy like this, stockpile size must be *very large*. We are talking months of supply. This gives you the padding and stabilization necessary to dampen the system.

Ordering Logic: With a sufficiently robust stockpile, a system can order exactly what it consumes, and it will be perfectly stable. The larger the delay between 'ordering' and 'receiving' the more this is important for stability, given a larger multi-part system. Each step between supplier and end user adds chaos, based around how much they deviate from ordering based upon their consumption (including shipments out). Larger Stockpiles allow this to occur flexibly, without suffering collapse behaviors.

These two parts are key. When you deviate from the points I am listing above, you are inviting instability into the system. Maybe you want that, but you can be sure its what you are getting.

For the record, I do not see a reason for smaller stockpiles. They force you to produce things arbitrarily in failure conditions, just to make the game work, and it isn't as though having a large number somewhere is going to cause a bug.


I will get more into this later, I have been trying to make a full writeup on the subject, but its just not hitting my standards.


The most important thing to note though is that stability in a market system is based around the relative size of the stockpiles, and how 'calmly' an actor is able to order goods, and not overestimate its needs.


With regards to fleets defining all market activities... with *very large* once per month scale transfers, the whole process becomes a fair bit more reasonable. You still should have 'padding' so the market can have any of its needs met, but if you have very large stockpiles (and markets that respond to them well), then the random loss of major fleets is an infrequent sort of market disruption, and consecutive months of loss represent really major problems (that presumably could be reacted to as events).

6
Its important to remember that it is the inefficiencies in the system that allow players to make money, especially without using the black market.


I was going to do a full writeup on how the system lacks sufficient feedback loops, and I will probably do it still at some point. Honestly, the fact that I am frustratingly terrible at code is limiting my work here(I am terrible enough that it takes me forever to even realize I am looking in the wrong place). If I could just understand it as a series of behaviors it would be so much easier.

The core issue of the economy seems to be how feedback works. It isn't calibrated with feedback that feels real.

The best way to deal with it is probably to rely upon *large* fleet transfers of goods and create very real major stockpiles, and accommodate the economy for expecting those stockpiles.

Monthly major shipments, maintaining a two-month stockpile would likely be best. Significant price and output corrections beginning at having less than the 1-month available stockpile.
I can figure out what equations and relationships are best for this setup, but it will help to understand the current base behavior.


7
Suggestions / Re: Basic Balance Oversights
« on: December 18, 2015, 04:52:35 PM »
I understand civilian ships are balanced to be technically useful, but I find them quite.. undertuned for that purpose. Fair enough though.

With regards to phase ships, does anyone actually find fighting them fun? I think that is a pretty important question here. I don't even find fighting them frustrating, its just boring. They force you to wait until they have overheated, and if you stop waiting around and do something interesting they recover. I don't feel that is good gameplay there.

I don't think I agree with 'worse ships' being a design decision. With Hound, for example, its cargo capacity compares with a Lasher, but the Lasher is a vastly superior combat ship.

When you don't want to pick the other option, it becomes dull.

8
Suggestions / Basic Balance Oversights
« on: December 18, 2015, 03:50:47 PM »
Something of a place for really basic balance/gameplay issues with the game. The type that could be overcome with simple tweaks.


1: Atropos torpedoes are simply lacking. For 6 OP, I get something generally worse than a Hammer (2 OP). There is just no reason for these torpedoes to be as bad as they are. It would be nice if they at least had more HP than normal torpedoes, granting them some use.

2: The Hound and to a lesser extent the Cerberus are just sorta pointlessly bad. Without shield generators, they need more armor or more something to really compare as viable ships. If these were particularly cheap to maintain or purchase they might even have meaning, or even if shielded cargo was important these days, but as it stands they are kinda flatly bad. Makes fighting (D) versions of them from pirates feel particularly like punching children.

3: Civilian ships in general - Shuttles/Liners/Troop Transports/The Atlas/Larger Tankers do not create interesting and meaningful trade-offs, they are just generally bad. Part of this is how the economy works, but in general the issue is that you can have a whole fleet of combat capable vessels that all can carry a meaningful amount of cargo, or you can have one giant cargo ship that slows you down tremendously, provides no combat utility, and isn't even cheap to maintain or purchase. The scales of advantages these ships provide need to be reworked such that they are interesting choices rather than really bad ones. Simply buffing their cargo/troop/fuel capacity might be sufficient. The disadvantages these ships often have are very large, it seems only reasonable that their advantages might be big enough that you would ever decide to use them.

4: (D) Hulls. Currently they are a minor price drop for a massive disadvantage. The easiest trade-off is what Starsector+ did, just reduce their maintenance/deploy costs as well. Make them feel like you have a budget version of the real ship.

5: Phase ships are mostly just annoying to face. Not exactly a balance issue mind you, but with instant re-engage and long duration cloaks it simply takes too long doing nothing to kill them. Even a half second of delay to cloak, or a flat flux drain when initiating it, would make them remarkably less annoying.


These are the ones that come to mind for me immediately. By all means add some if you want, there are like many more of these simple sorts of issues with very real solutions.

9
Mods / Re: [0.7a] Diable Avionics 1.1 - Continued (30/11/2015)
« on: November 30, 2015, 02:54:43 PM »
Not going to lie.

Those fighters are cool as hell.

10
Mods / Re: [0.7a] Nexerelin v0.6.9 beta (test release 2015-11-29)
« on: November 30, 2015, 01:19:57 PM »
Alright, glancing through your files for econ generation. You start with a randomized base of sectors based on some market stereotypes, and then you trim out the extremes to balance it out.
Balance here is based upon expected supply and demand of the overall system of planets.

Some interesting aspects about this.

1: Enemies don't ship to each-other as I understand it. This means if the supply for a product is on one side of a rivalry, and not the other, then there will be a price imbalance that occurs.

2: As I understand it, shipping isn't really based upon demand in a way that really scales. Because actors in your economy are not profit-motivated, imbalanced continue and can keep increasing. There is something of a limit to this, but the market doesn't really ever try to 'correct' itself.

3: Likewise, as I understand it, trade doesn't occur as much over long distances, so you can get a similar cut-off from a sector that happens to be very far away.




Edit: That said, I have spent quite some time trying to reproduce this problem, and looking at the way the economy flows. Best I can tell there is far too *much* production, not too little. I have trouble finding the basic economic imbalances that lead to any profit at all, and I have made a handful of worlds to test this. As it stands now, I contend you basically have killed merchants because of the way the economy currently functions. Admittedly, they were quite easy in vanilla, but this extreme is a bit of a problem.
If you are to try to adjust for this, you need smuggled goods to transfer when market imbalance gets very high, or at least some sort of response here. Right now these effects are what you use to have pockets where a player can profit as a merchant in the normal game. Its why you almost always start with a ton of money you can make off of short-range supply trading in the base game. With tarrifs are they are, its a very real need.

If you want to correct this, you need some sort of reflexive economic response to high/low prices. Whether that is building a new economic trait and tearing an old one down, or triggering new trade routes.



11
Modding / 0.7a Ship Spawning and Economy
« on: November 25, 2015, 10:04:27 PM »
I am trying to understand how the economic systems tie into factional behaviors in the game files.

Can anyone answer the following questions on what determines these things, and where that is located.

What determines frequency and size of fleet production for patrols and so on? Are there structures that alter this, or a way for this to be based on resources?

What determines who tries to send out a fleet to fill a demand? Is it always determined based upon the import/export needs of the base planet and finds its target based upon there?
How are the sizes are these fleets then determined?

Does fuel consumption of interstellar trade affect the market, or is that simply automated?

Does fleet death have an economic impact? Is there part of the rebuilding process or so on that consumes materials? Are those materials consumed regardless of if there is space for the fleet? How does this behavior work.



In general I am pretty decent with these sorts of systems. Ideally if I understand this stuff, I can make more compelling and interconnected markets. As it stands, it appears most of these things are just scripted truths, rather than something that interacts with the economy, but ideally I would like to try to make the whole system a bit more interconnected.

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