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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 - ANGRYABOUTELVES

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 40
1
General Discussion / Re: whats the most effective missile for the AI
« on: June 16, 2023, 09:16:04 AM »
Sabot or Harpoon is my default choice for an AI fit, depending on whether its relatively lacking in anti-shield or anti-armor capability. In practice this usually means Sabots for high tech, Harpoons for low tech, and a coinflip for mid-tech. Atropos or Hammers are also acceptable for the HE burst role, Swarmers can be decent on frigates or destroyers.

2
Suggestions / Re: Fixed Skill Sets for Level Seven Officers
« on: May 23, 2023, 05:46:38 AM »
Phase Officer: Combat Endurance, Impact Mitigation (Elite), Field Modulation (Elite), Target Analysis (Elite), Systems Expertise, Energy Weapons Mastery (Elite), Polarized Armor (Elite)

3
General Discussion / Re: Afflictor rarity?
« on: May 16, 2023, 08:39:12 PM »
I've seen one (1) regular Afflictor in 4 game years and absolutely 0 shades. A decent number of Dooms and Harbs on TTach markets, almost no phase frigates. Did TTach's faction doctrine get changed to favour larger ships?

4
General Discussion / Re: The Phillip Paradox
« on: May 15, 2023, 11:36:50 PM »
Factions literally have fleet doctrines governing, among other things, ship quality. Pretty sure you find more d-mods on Luddic Church ships, nor advanced ballistics like gauss cannons and HVDs. And the LG's ships are not even that bad when properly outfitted - if you hate the low-tech playstyle you may consider the entirety of luddic church and much of hegemony's roster to be "trash."
This doesn't matter for the player, though. You can buy pristine LC ships from the Knights of Ludd market on Hesperus, and all the weapons the LC has access to are similarly available for purchase. Not so for the Sindrian Dictat; you can't buy Lions Guard ships pristine or otherwise, nor their weapons.

I agree it was a bold choice because it is somewhat different to how the other factions are mechanically represented, but I think it goes a long way of making the SD stand out and is also both a plausible and darkly funny subversion of how the other factions work - the elite fleets being generally inferior to the regular forces, not due to massive mechanical debuffs, but due to doctrinal issues and overambitious loadouts. Which, on the other hand, is not all that different from PL being limited to DEMs or tri-tach being limited to hi-tech hulls and equipment (technological innovation at the heavy cost of flexibility!)
This subversion doesn't make for good gameplay. These mechanical representations of other factions are the way they are for good reason; Lions Guard fleets being pushovers makes killing them to loot their weapons and ships a boring chore rather than an interesting challenge.

I do agree that it is kind of *** if there is no benefit for the SD commission as I read in another threat, despite my strong negative feelings towards authoritarianism I think there should be some upside to pursuing that option.
Correct. Even Pirates and Pathers have good unique ships that a player might want to buy and use, including refits of existing ships which add capability, different weapon slot layouts, or built-in hullmods at no OP cost, with no downsides that don't go away after a restoration. LG ships have base OP penalties which never go away, and their unique slot changes are generally useless aside from the Executor's.

5
General Discussion / Re: The Phillip Paradox
« on: May 15, 2023, 11:02:39 PM »
As for the other factions -

Tri-Tachyon is an amoral corporatocracy with a literally inhuman leadership

The Hegemony is a military junta keeping its citizens under permanent martial law.

The Luddic Church is a terrorist-funding theocracy with plenty of hypocrisy in their dogma.

The Persean League is a Byzantine and opportunistic alliance of petty kingdoms and robber barons.
None of that matters because it doesn't make their ships trash. Why don't Hegemony ships have a built-in d-mod reducing their maximum CR, to represent their crumbling logistics system shipping heavy armaments instead of the heavy machinery for ship repairs? Why doesn't TTach have a d-mod making weapon repairs take longer, representing the crew's difficulty with fixing highly complicated AI designed systems? Why don't League ships have increased OP costs for weapons, to represent the severe mismatch between the industrial production standards of all the different tiny governments? The problem has always been that in a sector of various *** terrible governments and oppressive political systems, the Sindrian Dictat's particular *** terrible oppressive government has been singled out to be not fun to align with because their unique ships are uniquely bad and you can't buy their cool toys.

6
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: May 15, 2023, 07:25:57 PM »
I just got my hands on an executor. I am probably going to be executed for doing this but i have just put mining blasters on all the medium ballistic and hybrid slots because i thought it was funny
All Mining Blasters is a meme, but 4 Mining Blaster + 2 Autopulse Executor with S-mod Expanded Mags, some kinetic ballistics, and Squalls or Locusts is a very dangerous capital and not a meme build at all.

7
General Discussion / Re: Colony Threat event
« on: May 08, 2023, 04:54:57 PM »
Quote
(For all this, though, I do want to add that I, personally, think the pather interest accrual is fine as it is. There's still plenty of room in the "budget", especially later on, for colony items and even some AI use, and, yeah, if you turn your colonies into Molochian AI Meccas that'd make TriTach blush, that's obviously going to override any kind of 'practical' concern about military power the Path would have and will probably even get the Church funding them on the sly to mess with your stuff. And that that point, you're likely raking in so much money from your AI bonuses that you can afford to pay off the Pathers as just part of the cost of doing business. This aspect, I think, works just about fine and fits with both the lore of the world and the huge gains you can get from using Alpha AI in particular.)

My question is, of course, what happen if you de-civilize or sat-bomb every colony of every faction that is trying to damage your business? Any reputation penalties can always be overcome with enough AI core bribes. If there are no pirate or pather or Church planets left, does the game take that into account and have them stop damaging your bottom line?

8
Interestingly, the total bonus stays constant when you go over the limit. At max +50% with 8 bays, the bonus is 50%* 8 so 400%, at +40% with 10 that’s also +400%, 20 at +20% is +400% again and so on though the rounding can mess it up.

So you’re not actually penalised for going over the limit, it is just spread out more. You’re only penalised for having less than the limit.
What this means, essentially, is that you can get a maximum of 4 extra decks worth of replacement speed out of the Carrier Group skill, 6 with officers. When you have 8 decks of support interceptors only for contesting airspace, that's a lot. When you have 60 decks and that's your whole fleet, 4-6 more decks is tiny, and that skill point is better spent elsewhere. Opportunity cost is a serious issue when skill points are as limited as they are. Carrier group fleets end up not wanting the Carrier Group skill at all anyway because it requires having an officer in the ship to get the full bonus; what they want is Support Doctrine and Derelict Operations, to spam officerless carriers at 50% DP cost. Double the flight decks per DP is way better than the tiny boost to replacement rate you'd get from putting officers in that many carriers, and you wouldn't be able to get 20 officers for the 20 Moras/Herons anyway. Better to spend the three tier 1 leadership points on Wolfpack Tactics, Coordinated Maneuvers, and Crew Training, so you can have 40 DP of really good officered frigates to capture points so you can actually deploy those 20 Moras.

9
Suggestions / Re: Display the number of missile reloads dynamically
« on: December 28, 2022, 03:10:11 PM »
I think that's a fair concern, though it's very much not designed with just the Eagle in mind. I've gone back and forth on making it unable to be built in, but I think building it in has enough of an opportunity cost in not building in something else.

I mean, yeah, a Tempest would benefit from this - but it's just an extra 3 Sabots compared to building in EMR, for example. It sounds scarier when it's Atropos - there's 8 of those (2 from weapon, 6 from reload) but that might be an argument that the Atropos reload should be more expensive, perhaps.

But regardless, is something like an extra 6 Sabots (that you can't actually launch en masse) worth giving up hardened subsystems or hardened shields? Or 5 vents/caps? Ideally, the answer to that would be "sometimes".

... I also messed around with a cooldown mechanic for it at some point - where it would take an extra 5 seconds per reload.  That might be worth considering, honestly - maybe at a lower value, like 2-3 seconds. It'd also be a hit to the Atropos, which seems like it might be too good here.
In the high-tech wolfpack kind of fleet I like to run which has about 10 total omens and tempests, yes, it's very much going to be worth it to get an additional 60 sabots over the whole fleet, and high-tech wolfpack was already a very strong fleet composition. How many additional hammer torpedoes does this give a tempest, btw? I don't build-in EMR on tempests and omens because it's not worth it, but this absolutely is.

10
Suggestions / Re: Display the number of missile reloads dynamically
« on: December 28, 2022, 02:17:16 PM »
I can't help but feel this hullmod is a bad idea. This is going to have knock-on effects way beyond the Eagle. Many ships are balanced around not having access to lots of missiles, like the Omen, Tempest, Hammerhead, and Paragon. Building-in this hullmod on those ships is going to be very powerful and is a buff these ships really don't need. If you want to buff the Eagle's effective missile payload up to mediums, just redo the sprite a bit to include two sideways facing medium missile mounts.

11
General Discussion / Re: Is there a point to colonies?
« on: December 06, 2022, 11:37:17 PM »
I feel like every game I play the moment i colonize the fun ends. It's constant defending my colonies, even if I'm present at every raid and build every defensive building I still get debuffs from pirate activity and my colonies lack resources lowering my stability and income, causing me to dump money into them and not being able to profit from the trade, becuase my fleet has to defend the settlements. Is there anything that can be done to avoid it or colonies are just not worth putting time into?
This is caused by poor system selection. You want all your colonies in a single system with at least 4 planets that can fill as much of its own demand as possible to reduce upkeep as much as possible, and support multiple military bases. Or alternatively a single military base on an extremely hot planet with a Cryoarithmic engine. Incoming raids and expeditions can't deal with multiple military bases in the same system. The pirate activity debuff is ignorable for quite a while, and luddic path activity should only require killing 1 station every year; so about 2 stations per year combined, as long as you only have a single system to worry about. Having multiple systems means a less concentrated military presence so raids and expeditions are way more likely to require your presence, multiple areas of pirate activity, and potentially luddics being supplied from multiple separate bases, massively increasing the amount of busywork you need to do. You need to emulate the Sindrian Dictat, not the Hegemony.

12
General Discussion / Re: Why do fighters in the setting still use pilots?
« on: November 21, 2022, 08:33:33 AM »
AIs capable of piloting fightercraft are illegal, remote control is practically impossible due to all the jamming and EWAR being thrown around in space combat, and human life is cheap.

13
General Discussion / Re: Domain era probes
« on: August 23, 2022, 12:42:17 AM »
I have been consistently encountering domain probes with a message about internal density and structural changes. I was wondering if this is a result of the hyperspace signals sometimes sent from probes after you explore them. Do these changes reduce the loot you can get? Is it spoilers as to what or who is responsible for the changes?
You've got it sort of correct. The hyperspace signals are distress signals warning other probes that someone's tearing them apart for scrap, so they start building more droneships to defend themselves. You get more loot overall; probe loot itself doesn't change, but since there's more drones to blow up you get more salvage from the fight.

14
Quote
The fleshed out player colony system, including resource management, warding off raiders and AI inspections, and diplomacy, are a far more enjoyable and enduring aspect of the game. But if the core worlds are easily wiped out or conquered, this aspect of the game is no real challenge or necessity. I think the game would be much more fun if there were a game/difficulty mode where the challenge in this aspect of the game was increased. I'm aware that Nexerelin has income-multiplier and growth-multiplier settings (including the "starfarer" mode), but this doesn't go nearly far enough.
This is mostly a modded-game problem. In vanilla, if you wipe out the core worlds to make colony maintenance less difficult then you lose the vast majority of your income because you have no customers. I somewhat agree that the existing markets are too easy to decivilize in vanilla, to the point that it's sometimes possible to do so by accident.

15
General Discussion / Re: Is Thumper good now?
« on: June 17, 2022, 07:22:13 PM »
No, the Thumper isn't good, but what do you expect from a 7 OP medium ballistic? As a budget weapon that you use because you don't have access to actually good weapons, well, it's acceptable. It does a lot of things; shield pressure, burst damage, hull damage finisher, but it doesn't do any of them particularly well. You can slap it onto any empty medium ballistic mount on any loadout and it won't be completely useless but it won't be actually good, and this is what it's intended to be.

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