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1

General Discussion / Re: Transfer planet = open market?

« on: August 21, 2024, 06:45:03 AM »

You'll have to take the "resource storage" issue up with the mod author.  If you want a rationalization statement, its perhaps because you invaded the government and not the civilian traders.  Would you ever go to a planet to trade knowing the government would just seize your goods without payment?  Thats is what you are proposing to do with the open market (civilian traders, not the government military market, such as yourself when you buy or sell goods on the market early in the game).

How are you paying the people working in those industries if they are "your" industries, as well as paying for raw materials and whatever upkeep?  Lets say you have a planet making a profit of 100,000 credits per month, deposited into your account.  Now lets say that profit is nominally coming from the sale of fuel.  And you decide to pick up 100,000 credits worth of fuel from the planet.  Where does your profit at the end of the month come from?  You didn't sell the fuel from the planet, it is in your fleet's fuel tanks.

That is why you "pay" at the end of the month.  You could look at it simply as having less revenue from your planets from lack of sales, due to you taking the product they would have sold.

The numbers don't exactly work out, as it is not a simulation, but a highly simplified game system, however that is the general philosophy behind it.

When founding a new world, I generally suggest having a million credits or two on hand for a newer player.  In Nexerelin, it really depends on a lot of factors.  Is this your first planet, and thus don't have any other positive monthly income to offset it?  Are you receiving a stipend or commission?  Is there a clear path to higher stability and profit making options on the planet?  Pretty sure in Nex you can still sell off expensive industries and so forth.  A level 6 planet should be pretty easy to make profitable - if you've got enough credits on hand initially to afford the correct industries and can get it stable.  If it is your first planet, and extremely high hazard, like 250+%, that can be a bit rough though.

2

General Discussion / Re: Another balance discussion (Falcons, Eagles and Ordos, oh my!)

« on: July 24, 2024, 08:33:44 PM »

I think we're looking at this problem from very different perspectives here. Yes, in an ideal world, you would do testing on the balance of ships at every stage of the game, and against every type of enemy, and come up with some sort of chart or something that describes the strength of every ship at every stage of the game to help people understand the relative strengths and weakness of every ship at every stage of the game, i.e. the balance of ships and weapons etc. But that takes too much work.

Although I'll point out that is the task Alex (or any game developer really) is in some sense tasked with.  Come up with a reasonably fun and reasonably balanced game with only a finite amount of playtesting.  In physics parlance, you can only come up with approximations to make the problem tractable.  And then be aware of where the approximations break down.

To wit, as far as I'm aware, there have been zero other attempts at trying to systematically evaluate the performance of different ships at any stage of the game in any sort of standardized testing process.

Depends on how systematic you want to be, and which release.  I went through a phase where I was using the tournament AI battles mod to throw nominally balanced fleets at each other with identical cores and different setups of ships under test.  Like, say, Condors vs Drovers.  That was a little over 4 years ago: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18804.0

That was back when massed fighters was the endgame build to beat in terms of success and ease of use.  I've used it a few times in Eagle examinations as well - some like in the clipped with thread (not that I'm suggesting you go through it).  You're right it'd take way too much effort get a 90% confidence interval, but, we don't really need it to that precision anyways.  Player skill and AI variance tends to be a larger factor in actual fights that typical players will face.

Others such as Dark Revenant, have also done systematic studies, like looking at stations 5 years ago: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=15758

There have been fits and starts of presentations, and certainly anyone who has made serious progress in a tournament would have had to have done a giant pile of testing, albeit in fairly removed circumstances from normal play.  I admit I haven't seen much systematic testing done in the current release other than by yourself.  I mostly do one off tests these days.  Although during a new release version, I'll still do several campaign runs each just to have some fun and provide feedback to Alex, but I wouldn't call that very systematic. It is what I'm willing to spend on the game these days.  At some point I just got bored by easy and repetitive fights at end game, so I turned to things that felt harder to do to me.  Like spacer start ironman games where after acquiring a first combat frigate, only doing bounty hunting for income and salvage.

Time to kill only encasulates defensive power in the case where overall fleet power is reasonably close on both sides.  If one fleet is significantly stronger, then it measures less of the defensive capability and more of the offensive (how many missiles and projectiles you can put on target).

No, it's still measuring the defensive power of the fleet, because killing an enemy ship before it is able to inflict damage on your fleet is a good way to counter the offensive power of the enemy ship. In fact, if the enemy ship fires no shots at all before it is destroyed, you have essentially reduced its offensive power to zero, which is basically the goal of your fleet's defensive power in the first place.

Fair enough.  It is certainly measuring the defensive capabilities through offense specifically against enemies as difficult or easier than Remnants assuming a 240 DP fleet with all its synergies in place.  It just feels slightly weird to me that the defensive capability of any given ship(s) that already exist in vanilla, and don't change with an update, will have a different ranking if more difficult opposition is eventually introduced.  Perhaps in the form of hand crafted faction fleets, or full fleets of <super redacted> with a capital version through in.

I guess my reasoning comes from some of my experiences with mods, given harder opposition than Remnants is often available from them.  Legio Infernalis comes to mind, for example.  I do remember an example with a now no longer available mod, that had a short range, relatively slow cruiser, with a large synergy, 3 medium hybrid, 4 small energy, and 2 small missiles for 25 DP, speed 60, and cruiser grade flux.  The unique parts about it where it had a 360 degree omni shield with fortress shield as the ship ability and flux shunt (like the Monitor), and couldn't fit ITU, dedicated targeting core, or safety overrides.  But it did have access to a vaguely safety override-like hullmod, but not as drastic.  It certainly wasn't the fastest ship in killing enemies, especially with fortress shield up.  However, I swear it was the most broken ship I'd ever put in AI hands in my fleet for the DP, since a handful of those (like 5) could tank and defeat an entire Legio Infernalis invasion, with some help from a player flagship.  More was just overkill.  It didn't do it quickly, but it did do it, which a lot of other ships combinations wouldn't be able to do at all.

Anyways, a ship like that (say the Monitor) would tend to rate poorly in the speed to kill metric.  Yet the Monitor was in fact nerfed in terms of synergies this latest patch.  On the other hand, can't really test hypothetically harder enemies that don't exist, so perhaps it is the right thing to just not worry about it in currently released vanilla version.

This is also where my desire to understand the minimal set of a fleet that can reliably or 50% chance of defeating the opposition comes from.  In general, but I suppose not always, an 80 DP fleet has more room to grow than a 160 or 240 DP fleet.  Certainly in tournament situations, I've seen very small changes completely change the chance of victory, so I'm aware some fleet compositions are "brittle" or perhaps good as a "bully" but not as an underdog. They're great up to a point, but then a little past that difficulty, degrade very quickly.

While you can do that, I don't think it's very informative, since you're basically testing the fleet at a point where the player never wants to be at, i.e. fighting a battle where the player fleet wipes half the time, and which almost certainly means losing multiple ships in each battle. I would say the player should not be doing fights in that situation, and therefore it's not going to be representative of how well the fleet performs. Also, a fleet in that situation is going to depend very sensitively on the player's skill, which means it's not that generally applicable to other players other than the playing doing the testing.

The thing is sometimes players get into fights they don't want. Or don't realize they "should" not be in.  How do you know how many ships you need to not fleet wipe, if you've never fleet wiped? Certainly I've seen enough posts through the years and discussions about iron man, save scumming, and the "right" way to play over the years to realize many players do in fact get into that kind of situation - or worse.

I also agree a fleet in that situation is going to depend on player skill.  And playing those kinds of fights is a great way to improve player skill.  I feel like I got much better once I started playing both 1) Ironman and 2) Spacer start to add a debt component instead of a 2 year stipend.  However, 240 DP fleets also have a skill component which is non-trivial and gained only with experience.  Due to lack of examples, players need to trial and error with what commands work, and when to use them.  A new player can easily get ships killed with a too early exterminate order, and then forgetting about it.

Really, the only way to have repeatable results without any player input is hit deploy, autopilot, and issue no orders, which we all know isn't actually representative of typical play, but it is really hard to define a typical level of skill.  I think you might be discounting the skill you've built up commanding fleets, as I certainly would never even consider playing at 6x speed with baseline x2 plus phase ship slowdown off, which implies an extremely fast ability to process information while commanding your fleet.

There's another problem with this, in that the results depend on what percentage of the player fleet you're talking about, and then at some point it's based more on the player flagship and strategizing around shortmanning the fight (such as running around so that the player fleet never has to deal with the bulk of the enemy fleet) than anything else, instead of fleet vs fleet mechanics. As an extreme example, in 0.96a CapnHector shortmanned double Ordos with a Nova/Afflictor/Monitor/Kite. This metric would imply that 6 * (Nova/Afflictor/Monitor/Kite) is a very strong fleet, but I don't think the tactics used for that fight would scale up very well to a full fleet.

Not sure what you mean by not scale up for a full fleet?  Distraction ships (anvil) plus mobile high DPS ships (hammer) scales as you would expect.  Throwing in a few more monitors means you can distract more of the fleet in more safety, plus more mobile and high DPS ships like means more kills simultaneously.  Now Nova might not be what gets added to it due the Automated Ship skill scaling, but you can use similar battlecruisers or fast and high DPS cruisers as well.  Doesn't kill as fast, but should work against almost anything - other than the kind that completely bypasses Monitor shields or Afflictor phase (Harbingers come to mind as priority targets).  Pretty sure Alex seeing Safety Override Monitors and realizing the interaction is what ended up causing Flux Shunt to no longer work with Safety Overrides.

I know I ran a silly Support Doctrine SO Medusa with officered Monitors, plus a Doom as a player ship as a silly non-capital Ordo killing fleet once.  Wasn't the best fleet I've run, but was a fun Support Doctrine build and did kill the million credit unique bounty plus the Hypershunts, so I had no complaints after building it.

Also, it seems like you prefer to shortman your fights even if it means the fights are longer and more involved, whereas I tend to prefer faster fights even if the XP bonus is a bit less. For example, in your video the fight was at +85% XP bonus and it took a bit less than 8 minutes "real time" and a bit less than 7 minutes "game time" according to DCR; for me, testing the Furies was at +44% XP bonus and it took a bit less than 2.5 minutes "real time" and a bit less than 1.5 minutes "game time" according to DCR. I don't know if either approach is more representative of the early game but I prefer fights where I'm reasonably sure I'm going to win so that I can just beat it and move on without having to savescum or try to rescue the fleet from a bad situation etc.

I personally wouldn't call the double bounty video I presented short manning.  I'd call it playing the game normally within campaign restraints.  I didn't have a giant pile of other ships I could throw in.  I left the Wolf and Kite at home as their defenses tend not to do as well during the transition to mid-game, but that would have only added 7 DP.  I only had 10,000 spare credits going into that fight.  I view it in the same way as someone going into 2 Ordos with 240 DP.  There's no requirement that you do it, but you can do it if you want.  So 74 DP was what I had, and I knew I could take the opposition.

What I would call shortmanning was when I made a copy of the game for testing purposes, and tried it a few times with just 54 DP, which I wasn't positive I could do, and which was where I did have a failed attempt. 

While I might in theory lose a ship or two if I tried to do it many times at 74 DP, I'm positive I could pull off the fight each time, as the fleet had enough redundancy and being primarily a frigate and SO Medusa fleet, its defensive capabilities comes from its speed, not its concentration of damage output, which will leave me enough time to deal with the frigates, which then frees up the rest of the ships to 1 on 1 or even 2 on 1 enemy ships.  I would certainly make more in profit from bounties and salvage than restoring 1 or even 2 destroyers would cost, so I'm guaranteed to come out with a net positive gain in XP and credits.  And definitely in fun.

One thing that comes to mind in the time vs XP comparison of styles, is do you typically use much bonus XP before end game?  Given you don't use officers while leveling, and it sounds like you save story points until late game fleet configurations, do you benefit from bonus XP much in the early and mid-game?  I'll note it is possible to end up 100% in double XP from levels 2 through 15 with a little effort, although I probably average more along the lines of 75% of my leveling under double XP.  Simply mentoring 8 officers is covers 4 levels in bonus XP, for example.  Throw in 4 destroyers and 4 frigates all with 2 s-mods early, and that is another 5 levels covered in double XP, so 9 levels for a minimal investment that could be used to benefit end game (i.e. officers with better skill combinations and some support ships).

So far in this run, my XP rate except for the first level (only 50,000 xp) has been doubled.  So, rather than +85% bonus XP, its more like 2*(1.85) = 3.7, or +270% XP.  By the time I'm done it'll probably be more like 75% on average, so 1.75*(1.85) = 3.23, or +223%.

I'd be curious what your typical bonus XP situation is like, since it sounds like you don't spend story points early?  Have you optimized when you start bringing officers in to account for the double XP in order to reach level 15?  The absolute latest I'd probably start my officers would be like level 11 or 10, since mentoring a full 8 is worth 4 levels of bonus XP just by themselves, or 5 levels if you're grabbing 10 of them.  Any non-capitals with s-mods pushes it even lower, especially with Best of the Best.

3

General Discussion / Re: Another balance discussion (Falcons, Eagles and Ordos, oh my!)

« on: July 21, 2024, 05:38:18 PM »

I'm taking some of these quotes out of order as the flow seemed better for what I wanted to discuss.

I'm not sure what other metric you might have in mind to measure player fleet effectiveness other than time to kill an enemy fleet. That measurement encapsulates both the player fleet's offensive power as well as the player fleet's defensive power since the player fleet is also absorbing the enemy fleet's offense during battle.

Time to kill only encasulates defensive power in the case where overall fleet power is reasonably close on both sides.  If one fleet is significantly stronger, then it measures less of the defensive capability and more of the offensive (how many missiles and projectiles you can put on target).  I haven't tried it yet, but we could confirm that defensive capability is in fact being measured by changing some defensive attributes of the ships and nothing else, and repeating the kill speed test.  For example, if we drop the hull and armor of the ships in the player fleet by half, how much does it slow down the kill time?

Under the current hypothesis that defensive power is measured, then the Conquests and Gryphons with lowered defense numbers should take longer to kill the enemy, since given otherwise identical stats, the lower hull/armor ships are by definition defensively weaker.  If it doesn't, then that means hull and armor defensive capability is not being measured by the test.  Having not done it, I don't know which way it would go, but I think it is an interesting experiment to confirm that defenses matter.

Personally, I like tests where both sides are losing ships, since I know hull and armor numbers must matter.  If one side is beating the other repeated with zero losses, that strikes me as a significantly unbalanced fight.

As a testing metric, I'd start removing ships or lowering the character level from the stronger fleet until it begins to take significant losses regularly (more than than a frigate or two, at least a destroyer or cruiser perhaps), but still wins reliably.  Which I think is an insteresting data point.  What is the least investment in terms of campaign effort and prior fights to still beat the challenge reliably?  Further, you could remove even more ships until victory is roughly 50/50, which would be another interesting data point.  When victory is a 50% chance, then presumably both fleets are equal in strength, which takes into account the player's command and piloting abilities which the AI lacks, which is why player fleets equal in size to AI deployments are much, much stronger.

If one fleet composition only needs, say 80 DP, to win 50% of the time while another needs 160 DP, I'd submit the 80 DP fleet composition is stronger, even if it might take longer, since the 160 DP fleet composition is likely unable to win at all.

This is unfortunately much harder to measure repeatably and reliably, will depend heavily on player piloting skill, and requires a much larger sample size, so I'm not suggesting it the best way to do this, but it certainly is something people could do with enough time on their hands.

So unless a better metric is articulated, as far as I can tell it's the best one we've got for comparing player fleets. For me personally I actually measure ship performance based on XP DP (how much the ship contributes toward lowering your XP bonus), which includes the XP DP cost of officers, but that's a bit niche (I'm looking at maximizing how much XP I get), and it's derivative of the time to kill, so for discussion purposes I usually just look at time to kill.

This is one thing I expect to vary from player to player, namely what they want out of the game.  I personally don't care all that much about XP per time, given you can fight all the way up to Ordos and a variety of lesser enemies from day 1.  Which means it is possible to find fights that are as hard for me to win in my Wolf and Kite as a fight between a double Ordo and 240 DP optimized fleet.  So these days I just play to fight battles themselves, rather than grinding for XP, but I tend to have a different outlook than alot of others.

Or, alternately: How are you defining the "early game"? How are you defining what feels "good and balanced", and how can someone evaluate or measure whether or not something is "good and balanced"?

This is a great question.  What is early game?  Probably is different for different people, so we probably should specify.

For example, the double pirate aramada fleet you posted looks like an early game opponent to me.  After a long bit of travel that started Friday early in the morning (and was supposed to last 5 hours) and only got home yesterday in the late afternoon, I felt like playing some Starsector to de-stress.  I played from the start with Wolf + Kite, and only did bounty hunting for income (plus the usual stipend).  So I played normally for me, and then when I saw some fleets I could combine in the same system that might be at that level of difficulty, saved, and did a few runs at it.  It was admittedly only 163 DP, but half of it was a pristine Tri-tach deserter fleet, and the pirates only averaged 1.6 d-mods each, so I hope its roughly as strong as your 188 DP fleet of pure pirates with 4 d-mods each.  Officers were non-trivial as well, since they had three at level 5, a level 4, three at level 3, and a level 2.

I can reliably beat it with a little less than 75 DP (4 Medusa, 1 Shrike, 3 Omens), which is roughly 500,000 credits worth of ships off the black market, and at player level 5, with officers of level 3, 3, 2, 1 and 1.  I admittedly had spend 8 story points on s-mods, but no elite skills on the officers.  I can beat it maybe ~50-66% of the time with 54 DP (4 Medusa, 1 Omen) or ~350,000 credits and level 5 with same officers.

See for example the 74 DP run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JAWxT-BYq8&t=6s

I can upload an example 54 DP run if people want.

So in terms of early game, I'd probably describe it as levels 1 to 5 roughly, with credits under half a million.  Fleet DPs are typically 10-80 DP, if I'm going pristine, but could be higher if I'm doing a junker fleet.

I'd say mid-game probably kicks in when I get a cruiser, and have levels in the 6-10 range, and credits on the order of a million or maybe two.  Probably 80-120 DP worth of ships. 

End or late game is levels 11-15 and three million or more credits (which can buy you at least 2-3 capitals and escorts), so sitting in the 160-240 DP region.  Personal challenges which don't actually get you anything new as a reward are level 15, unlimited story points and credits, and a full 240 DP fleet - or alternatively, 75 DP and under with omega weapons .

The early game is also when the player likely only has access to some frigates and destroyers, and are also up against frigates and destroyers, so it's not representative of the game's combat balance as a whole.

I'm not sure if we're talking about new players in this, but for a veteran player, I would expect them to be taking out destroyers with only frigates, and taking out cruisers with only destroyers.  A pair of early game Medusa can take out any AI cruiser in the game for example, including Dooms and Auroras.  And have a decent chance against some isolated capitals as well.  This probably just comes down to playstyles, and when people are willing to invest story points and officers. 

Although our early game player fleet description seems to match up (some destroyers and frigates), perhaps our expected opposition does not.

I just tried SO Furies vs non-SO Furies against a pirate fleet, and not only were the non-SO Furies better than SO Furies, but the non-SO Furies were better than SO Furies by almost 40%. Pirate fleet was the initial "warm-up" Colony Crises fleet (the one that hits at 300 points), totaling 188 DP. Attached is a screenshot of the fleet. Player fleet limitations were assuming level 10, 160 DP, no s-mods, no elite skills on the player, no officers (but using Support Doctrine), but any non-Omega weapons and any hullmods. So stating this in an alternate way, taking just this one case, SO would need to be buffed by nearly 40% just to be as effective as non-SO loadouts by this point in the game.

Just to confirm my understanding, were you using 9 pristine Support Doctrine Furies for this test (16 DP each, 20 for the player flown one).

Assuming it was 9, I'd consider myself to have a late game or end game capable fleet.  Certainly what you're describing to me sounds like an even more of an unbalanced fight in favor of the player than level 15 and 240 DP versus double Ordo, and is certainly not an interesting fight for me in the campaign.  Although, I personally wouldn't have a fleet with 180 DP worth of ships (nearly 1.5 million credits worth) and have not spent any story points on them nor be lacking officers.

For me, the much more relevant fleet test would be something in the 50-75 DP range, level 5, with reasonable expenditures of story points on elite skills, officers and s-mods (i.e. 16 or less).  So, if you wanted to test a fleet still able to reliably beat that pirate fleet, I'd suggest a test more like 3 Furies and a pair of 6-8 DP frigates, a level 5 character, a pair of level 3 officers, and a pair of level 2 officers, and up to 16 story points spent.   That'd probably come out to be about 500,000 credits or a little over.

So at some point before the player gets to 160 DP in fleet size, before the player invests in s-mods, before the player invests in officers, before the player starts encountering around 200 DP's worth of d-modded pirates, etc., SO is already significantly worse than non-SO loadouts. And just how much of a typical playthrough is under these conditions?

This set of conditions tells me that our campaign playstyles are different, as this list is a combination of late/end game, extremely early game, and early game for me.

Before the player gets to 160 DP is before late/end game in my mind, as noted above.  I also start investing story points as soon as I'm able, so like at level 1 or 2, since I like the bonus XP, and lets me take on harder fleets quicker.  I also typically pick the starting officer option, so I have an officer before the game starts which makes for a weird cutoff.  200 DP worth of 4 d-mod pirate fleet is an early game opponent for me, since I will typically fight that in the 50-80 DP range.  I think based on your own testing, the derelict operations ended up being roughly as strong as just the normal fleet without the discount, so 4 d-mod pirates are probably worth about 150 DP of pristine ships, using the time to kill metric.

Certainly if I luck into a Doom, Aurora, or Odyssey early, I can mostly solo 200 DP trash pirates with a pair of distraction frigates while at level 5. 

So for me, I play well over half the game, maybe up to 75% under 160 DP. I play none of the game without officers (unless I'm doing silly solo ship stuff which is divergent from typical play I'd wager).  I play like the first 5 minutes without spending story points.  A 200 DP trash pirate fleet is typically around 10-15 fights into the game, not a mid-game fight, depending on what I find, salvage or get offered by contacts.

I happened to hit level 6 after the video I linked above, so early game for me was roughly finished after 14 fights, as 240k credit reward is enough to get me a decent pristine cruiser.  This was with income only from bounty hunting (contact + intel, plus selling drops), and the stipend.  No trading, no exploration, no campaign missions.

Lastly, I'd also like to point people's attention to a cool video in the High Tech thread where an 80 DP fleet is taking out roughly 350 DP worth of Remnants.  So I'm not the only one who will take on late game enemies with less than 160 DP.  See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItoOQxtOqTA

4

General Discussion / Re: Another balance discussion (Falcons, Eagles and Ordos, oh my!)

« on: July 12, 2024, 08:39:37 AM »

I will point out that DP, although really the related fleet points (FP), are used by NPC fleets throughout the game as well as player end game fleets.  Balance changes apply to both sides.  Which is why I'm pretty sure Alex reads everybody's comments for inspiration, but then does testing himself, with potential changes being both used by him and against him.  Falcon (P) was raised at the time to 20 because that is what Alex thought it should be, not because of the tournament results.

While Conquests and Gryphons along with a solid player ship is doing extremely well in Vanshilar's hands, and might suggest balance changes (nerfs for them or buffs for other ships/weapon systems), how are those Persean League NPC fleets using those ships holding up against mid-game players?  Would nerfing missiles, Conquests, and Gryphons further make them too much of a joke?

When you see an opposing Gryphon, do you think this going to be tough, or do you think easy prey with weak defenses?  Would you rather fight against a fleet with 4 Conquests at the top of the list or a fleet with 2 Legions and 2 Onslaughts.

The fact that a Falcon (P) has far less ammo capacity than a Gryphon doesn't really matter much when the NPC Gryphon is destroyed before it even needs to use its missile auto-forge.  A Falcon (P) is going to be much scarier to an early game fast fleet (destroyers and frigates) than the Gryphon, simply because its going to be able to dictate engagements at least some of the time (120 average speed is faster than base speed for destroyers).  Where as a lone Gryphon at long range is a single stream of Squalls or maybe some Hydra bursts.

So Alex can't just balance against end game, he needs to be balanced at early and mid-game as well, both in player and NPC hands.  As well as with semi-random loadouts the NPCs use.  Now people will point out all of this is impossible to balance exactly, and they are right.  But this is a single player game, so it just needs to be balanced well enough to be fun.  Which by the fact that we're all here discussing it means the game can't be too far off from the mark.

So while DPS speed tests in player hands against end game enemies are interesting and valuable data points, which can be easily compared, I always feel like they're only half the story.  A necessary part of the story, but still only half.

For example, one of the reasons I believe Safety Overrides is considered strong by many people, is because it makes it much easier for a new player to actually defeat early game opposition, as being able to pick and chose when to engage is extremely powerful early and mid-game, arguably more so than long range firepower.  If you're having trouble getting to end game or even mid-game, it is a quick switch using already existing ships you can flip.  Admittedly, some ships work better with it than others, but there's enough that it a new player will likely have one or two that then feel much stronger to fly with it on.

Another example is the ability of some weapons, mostly guided missiles and fighters, to shoot over allies.  This ability is strongest at end game with full fleets on both sides, and worth nothing when there is only one allied ship on the map, and somewhere in between depending on how many of your ships are crowded together in the mid-game.  So do you balance said weapons for the beginning game, the mid-game, or the end game?  If you balance for end game, they are by definition weak in the early game.  If you balance them for the early game, they'll be much stronger than other weapons at end game.  Mid-game is probably best with them being a little weaker early and a little stronger late.

5

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 14, 2024, 08:03:17 AM »

Which comes back to my original question to the posters in the thread: Is the game too hard, too easy, or about right in difficulty?

Too easy for no flagship playstyles.

Thank you for answering the question.  Which is a good data point, especially coming from you, since I've got ample evidence you can play the flagship style fine.

You could for example instead of reducing officer and core levels, simply multiply the effects of skills on the flagship (and only the flagship) by a factor of 1.25, or 1.5 or even 2, in concept similar to how carrier skills get a 1.5 multiplier on officered ships.

One thing I'd been thinking about for a *while* is finding items that, when right-clicked, grant the player a unique combat or two. Something very limited - you wouldn't get amazing at combat off those alone - but it could be a fun way to approach this sort of thing.

Gameplay and design wise, this isn't that different from the pre-chosen character builds but limited to one path.   It just makes doing certain actions or quests feel mandatory on repeat playthroughs, which is not a bad thing as long as its entertaining to do.  On the plus side, unique skills to the player are really handy balancing levers, since they don't impact anything else.

And, yeah, it's a fair point about officers having too many elite skills; that definitely got a little out of hand. I've pulled it back a bit with CyberAug going from +2 elites to +1, but 3/6 elites is still a lot.

I feel like you've chosen a harder balancing path by coupling the player to NPCs and end game challenges so tightly in terms of skills.  Your balance levers are elite skills number and maximum level for the officers.  Whereas in a more decoupled system, where perhaps officers and AI cores alike only ever get 1 elite skills, period, you also get the lever of changing elite power itself like you did in the recent release.  In such a system, AI cores could remove all the elite skills (not even 1 - they are alien in a sense) and just get a bonus Hypercognition skill, like they do with Administration where you actually did break the player/officer/core symmetry.  Or maybe instead of selecting elites, you pick an AI Hypercognition specialization.  Defense, Offense, Support.  Something like that.  Make them orthogonal to people, they're non-human, let the "skills" reflect that.  It also gives you something you can use tune end game difficulty very easily without changing anything else, and potentially adds variety to encounters.  Instead of just having all the skills, now an Offensive Radiant with very different and large bonuses will feel very different to a Support Radiant and a bit of variety at the end.  Right now an Alpha Core Radiant is an Alpha Core Radiant, because you haven't left yourself the option of customizing, simply applying the same 90% of all elite skills - which mirrors player flagship power.

Personally, since I almost never pick the +2 officer skill, you could probably drop the elite skill from Officer Training and people would still take it. +1 base skill on 8 officers isn't bad, especially compared to most fleet wides.  As for Cybernetic Augmentation, you could double the damage reduction for the flagship as well and remove the +1 elite skill and call it a day.  Again, this isn't that different from simply giving the player's flagship larger bonuses - here it is just more and different bonuses.  So easier to balance.

And if no flagship playstyles are truly true strong, this is a sensible way to go - weaken a few fleetwides.  Even if they are not truly strong, well, then you've got levers to adjust that are orthogonal - you can weaken or strengthen end game threats (hypercognition), weaken or strengthen flagship (elite skills), and weaken or strengthen no flaship style (fleet wides) relatively independently.

6

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 13, 2024, 05:15:16 PM »

If there's an elegant solution to keeping current flexibility versus guiding new players down a particular way to play the game, I'd love to see it.

Nerfing baseline officer level to 3. AI cores to 1, 3 and 5.
Why: currently officers are very strong and there's no need whatsoever to pilot your ship, and if you do so, most players are likely to reduce their performance in combat. And people complained that reducing baseline officer count to 4 would just lead to cap spam.
Upsides:
- Officers, by default, don't get capstones, so the player is harder to replace.
- It's cheaper for the player to reach parity with officers in skills.
- Indirectly nerfs capital ships.
- Easy to implement.
- Doesn't impact balance against most factions
Downsides:
- Melodrama about officers levels being taken away (from everyone, yes).
- Officer Management becomes worse, because individual officer quality degraded.
- AI core levels are smushed in a weird way.

This is a reasonably self-consistent approach.  Similar alternatives I've seen is just disconnect officer combat skills from player combat skills, which allows you to scale the player skills harder to make the fleet vs pilot balance better, if that is something that is perceived to be off.  If combat skills are in fact not attractive enough, then make them individually more attractive for the player character only (and not officers and AIs as well) makes sense to me.

This is kind of what the elite system tries to do, but then allows for 50% elite skills on officers anyways for skill picks, or in the case of cores, 100% of the skills are elite, so it never feels like the game fully commits to the idea.  Is a 6 combat skill with 6 elites really that much better than 6 combat skills and 3 elites (the 3 most synergistic).  Plus the existence of 7/4 officers as well.

You could for example instead of reducing officer and core levels, simply multiply the effects of skills on the flagship (and only the flagship) by a factor of 1.25, or 1.5 or even 2, in concept similar to how carrier skills get a 1.5 multiplier on officered ships.  So 3 skills act more like 4.5 or even 6 skills.  Same 3 skill investment in this proposal gets you the same relative performance as a level 5 or level 6 officer, plus the elite effects.  Which would be like a level 3 combat skill player character versus a level 3 officer.  Has the advantage of not changing any of the current "your fleet vs NPC fleet" dynamics at all, and just purely affects the flagship.  Or just as you say, limit everyone else's maximum officer level does something similar in the other direction.  Fleet vs fleet stays the same, while flagship vs fleet is stronger.

Of course, all of this only makes sense if the game is too hard when using those combat skill picks instead of fleet wide skill picks, or alternatively, the game is too easy when you go fleet wide focused.

Which comes back to my original question to the posters in the thread: Is the game too hard, too easy, or about right in difficulty?  How much does it depend on skills picks and personal player skill?  I think we'll continue to get these types of discussions so long as we've only got 2 difficulty levels, simply because it is really hard to balance for multiple player skill levels simultaneously.  A "heroic" difficulty, where you are playing a "hero" after all, that had all flagship skills effects doubled would be one way to approach it and likely easy to code up.

7

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 12, 2024, 06:24:47 PM »

And the same people come by and try to shoot this down with the same flawed arguments every time, as if rebalancing skill values and potential character power levels is somehow magically completely impossible and unacceptable.

Well, that is why I phrased my response in the form of questions.  If there's an elegant solution to keeping current flexibility versus guiding new players down a particular way to play the game, I'd love to see it.  If its magically impossible, then present the counter example.  And also present the negatives that come along with it, not just the positives.  Explore what the suggestion fully requires for implementation.

A suggestion I've sometimes thought of is just requiring players to have successfully finished all the vanilla missions as a pre-requisite to playing the campaign, as that would force players to learn a number of key concepts which will make them better at combat, and also pilot a ship to progress.  No officers or extra skill bonuses are going to save you there.  The campaign skill system maintains its flexibility, while new players are taught the joys of piloting (whether they want to or not), and a given a reason to take personal combat skills given they see what a lone Paragon can do against entire fleet in player hands, let alone some of the wolf pack scenarios.

Although, if I don't care about flexibility, and only want the best play experience for new players, another option I haven't seen thrown around is eliminating the free skill picking and just let you pick a pre-picked path at the start of the game.  You could have 4 pre-designed characters, getting a specific skill at each level that synergizes on a particular theme.  Ensure players get capstones early for example rather than do something like 3 picks in each tree by level 12.  Make sure they take Target Analysis before Damage Control (if they ever take Damage Control).  Navigation can be the 1st pick for two characters, and Bulk Transport for the other two.  Ensures they get an even mixture of personal and fleet skills as they level up in an "optimal" way. 

Finally to make this all good for veterans, you make free skill picks an advanced option that you unlock at some point for new game (or new game+ if you prefer that parlance), perhaps after finishing the main quest line or reaching max level.  And just to let players try different things, make it a single story point to swap between the 4 pre-made characters once started (with all elite skills pre-paid).

Both these suggestions maintain flexibility for veterans, while introducing new players to the concept of personal piloting as well as good skill builds.  It also prevents a randomly leveled up officer being the flagship officer.

The downsides to both of these suggestions of course, is railroading players into doing something they may not want to do first.  Or at all.  I doubt either suggestion would get much traction.

Yes, something like this is absolutely a good idea.

For some playstyles and some players.  It is not a universally good idea for all players and all playstyles.  The entire skills system and overall difficulty of the game is by definition a compromise.  It can't be all things to all players.  So if you tell me that the way I've played some campaigns and had fun is absolutely the wrong way to play or the wrong difficulty, I'm going to have to disagree.  Admittedly, my having fun likely has different requirements than a brand new player playing the game.  By the same token, the requirements for having fun for that same player after a month of play time might also be different. 

I am more than capable of doing self-imposed challenges to increase my difficulty.  If the assumption is many players are unwilling to explore the parameter space of skills, are the majority going to do self-imposed challenges, or simply consider the game too easy at the end?  What level of difficulty is the right one to pick for the default version of the game?  It is really hard to say as single veteran player.  Which is why I'm interested in players opinions on the difficulty of the game, especially new players.

My personal favorite version of this is the 'flag captain' notion, where your combat skills are just whatever officer is assigned to your flagship. Interestingly, there is a mod that actually implements something like this; there's a pair of special ships you can acquire in the Secrets of the Frontier mod that have an integrated AI core, but don't count as automated ships; you can set one of them as your flagship, and in battle it uses the AI core's skills rather than yours.

I've seen the suggestion, but you I disagree that such a change is absolutely better, and doesn't have downsides.  There are compromises that need to be made to make it work given the current game balance.  So what are the compromises and changes you'd make along with this?  Or as I asked, do consider the game too hard right now and need the increase in power that just a straight addition of this would add?  There are completely self-consistent and valid arguments to be made for this change.  However, self-consistent and valid arguments can be made against it just as well, simply because different people value different things.

I assume your suggestion would not simply slap this ability on top of the current skill system and call it a day, given that leads to things like nine level 6 officers with 3 elite skills with a player piloted triple s-mod Radiant (with elite Missile Specialization and Elite Systems Expertise?) backed up by Combat Drills, Coordinated Maneuvers, Crew Training, Electronic Warfare, Flux Regulation, Phase Coil Tuning.  Essentially a 6 combat, 7 Leadership, 8 Technology build.  That strikes me as significantly more powerful than what I can do right now, with an entire 2 extra capstone talents.  I could also replace the Radiant with the Ziggurat if I preferred to skip Automated ships and grab Industry 5 instead of Tech 8.  Or maybe an Onslaught if I'm being old school.

Or perhaps you would, and simply increase the difficulty of the base game to account for the effective level 21 possible?  Or do you allow only 2 non-combat capstones to reign in the possible synergies?  Reduce the power of skills overall?  Or something I haven't thought of that elegantly reigns in power?

Don't just consider the impacts on the new player learning to play, but how does it impact the new player who can't (perhaps due to physical limitations) or doesn't want to pilot.  How does it impact the grizzled veteran interested in exploring a different way to play?  Perhaps those should take a back seat to the typical new player experience, but I'd suggest they should at least be acknowledged, even if in the end you argue they are lesser impacts worth accepting.

8

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 12, 2024, 07:04:10 AM »

When this proposal comes up, I do like asking a few questions of the proposer.

1) Do consider the current game balance too hard, too easy, or about right?
2) With an eye to question 1, are you proposing that level cap, where you get 1 combat skill and 1 non-combat skill and max out at level 7 or 8? So we have total roughly the same number of skill points as now of like 14 - 16?
3) The industry tree contains 2 Combat skills, so it is pretty easy to do picks at level up of non-combat, personal combat, non-combat, personal combat, capstone already.  How does this proposal change your own skill picks in the Industry tree?

4) If I say I feel like the game is about right, and we don't want to raise the overall power level, given I often play very personal combat focused (10+ skills in combat skills), and other often play fleet focused only and never pilot (so 15 non-combat skills), does this proposal eliminate those builds and playstyles?  Or phrased another way, is there some new combination of skill enabled by this proposal, or is it only reducing what other players could pick, and your ideal skill picks end up the same as a currently possible combination?

9

Suggestions / Re: Hull Restoration is way too overpowered

« on: April 12, 2024, 06:55:47 AM »

Personally, I don't mind skills which have different values to players with different skill levels.

I will point out d-mod ships are perfectly usable, and if you're struggling with supply/fuel costs as a new player, cheaper to run combats with.  Until you hit 240 DP, d-mod ships are in a sense, not a disadvantage.  You just need to remember to bring more fuel tankers than supplies since the fuel/supplies ratio usage changes.

The only thing I've seen close to that is when they are selling off a specific ship, but the vast majority of the time its only going to be a destroyer or a cruiser and you don't get a choice of ships. When it comes to Nano forge production you normally only get a 200k-300k at 80% cost or so which is never enough for he more expensive capitals.

It's the specific ship sold by a high ranking military officer contact.  I've gotten Onslaught XIVs offers (multiple, one after another) from the one very high contact I once lucked out on Jangala and I made priority.  Admittedly, very high  contacts are pretty rare.  A high ranking priority contact should do something similar I think (not sure if its Jangala's size 6 or military base that made it seem like he was offering a lot of ships, or just human perception).

Of course, if you're acquired a multi d-mod capital at point in the game where bounties won't pay for the capital's restoration in 2 or 3 fights, you probably don't need a pristine capital.  And saving ~2000 credits per deployment on a 3 d-mod capital isn't a bad thing.  Another d-modded synergy is with safety overrides, since running down the CR is much cheaper to pay off.

And occassionally, I lose a ship, it gets a single d-mod and I realize, its an improvement as the supply savings is greater than the impact to the combat capability of the ship (typically high tech frigates losing armor).

10

General Discussion / Re: tell me few things about this game

« on: April 06, 2024, 10:12:27 AM »

Welcome to the forums.

I've never played Star Valor, and only a very little bit of Endless Sky at one point.  I did play a lot of Escape Velocity Nova back in the day, which I believe Endless Sky is a spiritual successor to.

The game is a bit like Endless Sky.  However, it is like Mount in Blade in that there are two layers to the main camaign game (as opposed to the stand alone missions). 

You do travel between star systems, as well as inside the star systems between planets, but it is done on a campaign layer, where you see your ship and the rest of the fleet ships traveling in a little bubble together.  If that bubble intersects an opposing fleet's bubble, then you drop into the combat layer, which will feel similar to the combat in Endless Sky (I.e. top down, flying your own ship, with your other owned ships around you as allies).  In combat you also have some ability to influence your allied ships via orders although the AI controlled allied ships may or may not follow those orders depending on their current situation for that particular ship.   The AI has been tuned to err on the side of survival, although that can be tweaked via officers and other settings.

I'll also note you have to pick which ship you are piloting at the start of combat, along with which ships of your fleet will join you on the battle field.  While Escape Velocity Nova had fuel, it didn't have supplies.  Simply having your ships flying with you consumes supplies over time, so you can't just stay out flying around forever without heading back to a settled world where you can buy more supplies and fuel. Unless you're finding enough supplies in the remains of your enemies or in random derelicts scattered about.  Also sending your ships into combat eats a lot of supplies, so there is incentive to use the bare minimum of forces needed for complete victory to conserve supplies and thus credits.

In the campaign layer, you do have to travel between systems, although by memory its not that bad compared to Endless Sky transit times.  As the game progresses, different types of short cuts become possible.  The latest release added a bunch of new campaign layer travel options that unlock with exploration type activities.  Buildings sensor arrays and powering them volatiles, sensor pinging interesting types of planets and phenomena, etc.  Late game I find I can get around the entire sector quickly enough, although not instantly from any given point to any other given point. 

There's also the transverse jump ability, which allows you to transit between a star system and hyperspace instead of using a fixed location jump point, and from hyperspace back to a planet within the system, which can be a short cut (that costs a bit of fuel and supplies to do), to cross star systems with very distant planets.  It is an ability you can either get from the skill system (available at level 1) or from the main questline.

I'd suggest taking a few minutes to look at a video or two of the game, with an eye to looking at the campaign layer travel and then the combat layer (which I consider the heart of the game).  Given the wide range of ships from frigates to capitals, the needed level of reflexes by the player can vary.  I would say it is more akin to a Mechwarrior game in terms of reflex and thought for combat than say a classic shoot 'em up game.

11

Suggestions / Re: Making (some) money should be easy...

« on: April 06, 2024, 09:27:32 AM »

The game is enough of a sandbox that I expect portions of the game to be ignored by different subsets of players.  If don't want to trade, then I'm ignoring the majority of the trade system.  If I don't want to pirate, then a lot of disruption manipulation is off the table.

Personally, I play the game to see pretty exploding opposing spaceships with the least amount of stuff on my side I can get away with.  Doing stuff which does not involve exploding opposing spaceships gets filed under boring grind that I don't want to do a lot of. 

1. Hulls/ships - yes, it's true that buying a brand new Paragon from some arms dealer guy is pretty expensive, but this is the exception. Hulls, in general, feel cheap at best, or trash at worst. I feel this aspect of the game needs some serious work, but that's a separate topic.

This can be fixed simply by increasing the proportions in cost from each ship class, make destroyers substantially more than frigates, and crusiers substantially more than destroyers ect.  Make a cruiser be a million, Make capitols even more, 10 mill, balance the numbers, but make that progression up ship classes more expensive.

That will require more extensive changes to the game to make work than I think you're proposing here.  Keep in mind, veteran players can kill capitals with certain frigates (i.e. Afflictor, Shade, Hyperion), in the middle of the enemy fleet no less.  For a combat oriented player, it is currently quite easy to salvage a capital early on, which would suddenly mean I could sell a salvaged capital for a full fleet of destroyers (since its value is 100 times that of the destroyer tier, and assuming even a 10% sale price, that is 10 destroyers) earned from a single fight.  Or simply salvage a cruiser from the salvage field left by a Tri-tachyon fleet fighting a Hegemony fleet near Skathi without needing combat.  Or maybe an invasion fleet fighting defending fleets in a Nex game.  Or simply find a Legion XIV drifting around a lonely planet, of which I believe there are 4 guaranteed each game in Vanilla.

You'd have to completely change the salvaging system to make that kind of distinction work, or else the path of least resistance becomes salvaging everything.  Especially if ship value is large compared to running costs.  As it is, there already is a huge mark down for selling ships.  One option I guess would be to force the sale value down to 1% of its purchase price in such a scaling scheme, although I think that would get even more complaints than the current system.

As a combat focused veteran player, changing the credits gain for various campaign layer actions such as trade, colonization, commissions, exploration missions, isn't going to affect me much.  Now if you start making it so bounty profits and AI core sales aren't sufficient to maintain that bounty hunting, then we're going to have a problem.  As now you're saying I need to other credit making options in order to get to the good part of the game.

The fundamental question I feel a lot of these types of discussions should answer is, what do you want the player to spend most of their time doing?  Or perhaps do a finer break down of time spent percentage wise, along with considering if that time usage breakdown should change as the game progresses?  My suggestion is the majority of time a player spends should be on game loops they consider fun.  The equivalent of fetch quests is not a particularly exciting game loop, and forcing new players to do even more of that in order to simply get to the good part of the game either because of running costs or acquiring ship costs isn't a direction I'd take the game.

12

General Discussion / Re: [SPOILERS] What is the fastest way to finish the story line?

« on: March 29, 2024, 06:59:00 AM »

You could also use a solo revenant, if you get lucky on a derelict spawn. With phase anchor, even if you get caught during a pursuit the auto-disengage effect of the anchor will let you escape from any enemy.

I'll note neither Augmented Drive Field (to bump up to burn 10) or Phase Anchor is available from day 1, I'd probably reserve this for an already established character playing for a while deciding it is time to get the main quest out of the way, as opposed to trying to use it to get it out of the way from the very start.  Spending time looking the right hullmods is time not spent doing the questline and is heavily RNG dependent.  Even then, it is still much faster to be able to just hit the leave button as opposed to select the ship, deploy, and either try to escape or let the ship be "destroyed".

Given you have to hit the core worlds anyways to turn missions in at Galatia, there's no significant benefit to being able to circle the sector 3 times without stopping when speed running, especially since the early missions from Galatia that you have to go through are all clustered in roughly one quadrant of the sector.

13

General Discussion / Re: [SPOILERS] What is the fastest way to finish the story line?

« on: March 27, 2024, 12:58:31 PM »

Allows you to disengage most fights, and those you can't just run foe the top of the map at full speed.

That doesn't sound any different to my Dram experience.

It mostly only matters against Pather fleets with fast SO frigates or if you play with mods, some mod factions.  Or if you are not using a Safety Override Dram since a basic Dram can be caught by most d-mod pirates fleets with some frigates.

From my experience, the ability to disengage without if fight is a comparison of your slowest speed, or your slowest burn speed ship to the enemy's fast speed or fastest burn speed.  Oddly enough, a Bulk Transport skill + civilian Dram (so no SO fallback) at burn speed 11 can disengage from most frigate fleets, while a Militarized Dram with Navigation skill at burn speed 11 can't.  Not sure what the interaction there is.  In any case, for a speed run of the campaign, I'd almost always pick Navigation first for transverse jump ability from the very start, which has me leaning towards the Hound, personally.

I attach two pictures of trying to disengage from the exact same opposing fleet to explain why.  An SO + UI Hound can do disengage and then leave without a fight, while the SO + UI Dram cannot and is forced into a retreat combat.  Essentially, if a Pirate fleet includes an Overdriven Hound (one of the target variants) or it is a Pather fleet with sufficiently fast frigates generally, means the SO + UI Dram can be caught, or at least forced to the battle map.  And an Overdriven Hound is speed 280 vs the Dram's 245.  It is admittedly a small sub-set of the game space, and Pather usually let you pay credits to be on your way, but as someone who has played a lot of early game on Iron man, I've at least regretted the Dram choice once.  And again, can matter more if mods are present.

I also happen to like the interaction of Rugged Construction, disengaging only costing 10% CR and 1.5 supplies (instead of 20% CR and 2 supplies) so I can chain escape, larger cargo bay and more crew which means I can take advantage of serendipitous salvage opportunities a bit better.

You don't really have to get away from things, as long as you've completed the objective. In fact, if your mission takes you to outer worlds, it might be quicker to intentionally sink your ships and emerge back in core worlds.

For me, it is more likely a hostile small frigate fleet patrolling the core I accidently land on while transverse jumping that gets me.  Or speeding through a slipstream into an ambush I can't react fast enough at 2x speed.

As for taking the fast way back from the black, getting destroyed also hits your accumulated credits somewhat, and is also precluded if you hit up some salvage opportunities while out in the black, which may or may not matter depending on why you are speed running the gate storyline in the first place.

14

General Discussion / Re: [SPOILERS] What is the fastest way to finish the story line?

« on: March 27, 2024, 08:43:02 AM »

I personally like a solo Safety Override and Unstable Injector Hound with s-mod auxiliary fuel tanks instead of a Dram, at least when playing with the Ironman option.  Allows you to disengage most fights, and those you can't just run foe the top of the map at full speed.

15

General Discussion / Re: do you unironically use DEM missiles?

« on: March 17, 2024, 11:13:26 AM »

In terms of dragonfire: I don't find that they do soft flux to matter much. If the enemy decides to hold fire to bleed off 4k soft flux then they aren't firing 4k flux at me.

you pay 6 op to make your opponent pretend they missed 5.5 blaster shots? Best case scenario. Cause most often shields are like 0.5 for Remnants. Or 0.8 on average I would guess...
I mean, fair.

If you're including bonuses from skills and CR to get to 0.5 efficiency, you really should apply it to both offense and defense.  Baseline Remnant shield efficiency is 0.6.  Alpha cores get Field Modulation and 100% CR for 0.6*0.85*0.9=0.459 efficiency.  Beta and Gamma only get Combat Endurance (i.e. 100% CR) for 0.6*0.9=0.54 efficiency.

Missiles in a player fleet will often benefit from 100% CR, Elite Missile Specialization, Target Analysis, and Tactical drills or Cybernetic Augmentation (assume +5% either way).  Against a cruiser, this would be  (1+0.1+0.1+0.05)*1.15 = 1.43.

For a Dragonfire, this means 4000*1.43*0.459=2625 net soft flux vs a Brilliant or Apex.  Or an effective overall shield efficiency of 0.65 when both sets of skills are taken into account.  And DEMs clearly were balanced with Missile Specialization in mind given every single Persean League officer has the skill.

So, 5.5 Heavy Blaster shots (no shield efficiency or skills), or in the case of a typical player vs Remnant fight, 3.6 Heavy Blaster shots or 4.8 Plasma cannon projectiles can be the difference between you overloading, or them overloading.  Especially when it is done in 1 seconds instead of 3-4 seconds.  It is a flux race, and being able to keep the enemy frozen in place for 3-4 seconds can be enough to win that race.  Although, to be honest, best case scenario is you prevent a flux dump of an Auto-pulse Laser on a Brilliant with its 0.83 flux efficiency rather than a Heavy Blaster's 1.44 efficiency on an Apex.  2625 flux is 3162 hard flux shield damage from an Auto-Pulse Laser in a little over 2.1 seconds, while it is 1822 hard flux in 3.6 seconds from a Heavy Blaster.

So a lot of analysis here is going to be heavily context dependent.  Although in general against Remnants, spending 6 OP to make the enemy "miss" 3.64 shots every 10 seconds is still a better deal than paying 1.6 OP to make them fire 5 burst PD charges in the case of a Missile Specialization Typhoon launcher and Remnant shields, and "miss" the equivalent of 0.55 shots (400 soft flux for the burst) every 15 seconds.  2625 is still 26% of the base flux capacity of a Brilliant, or 21% of an Apex.  16% or 14.5% in the case of maxed vents.  Those 5 burst PD shots against Reapers are 4% and 3.3% of the base capacity, or 2.5% and 2.2% of maxed vents.

Against a fully functional combat line, a single Reaper, 4 Harpoons, or 3 Hammers are not making it across that no-man's land.  Even a Dragonfire might not make it depending on its target's relative location to the line.  Now, point blank range in a human player's hand on a highly mobile ship is a different situation, but I'd argue that is not the use case being considered here, given it sounds like an AI firing into shields. I'd be interested what the best missile investment would in fact be for a single salvo from a medium or large missile launcher is into shields?  Even a single Squall launcher won't drive the hard flux up on an Alpha Core Radiant if there's nothing else hitting it.

And it is true, DEMs are much more effective in a missile saturated fleet than not.  But this is true basically for all missiles, since you need to overwhelm the opposing line's point defense to land non-DEM missiles.  A single Harpoon pod or Typhoon Launcher is not likely to overwhelm a typical Remnant cruiser's PD, while a set of 4 or 8 is going to land some hits.  A full fleet of Gryphons and Conquests spamming Squalls and Harpoons will overwhelm and destroy an Ordo in short order, as their PD simply can't keep up.  Every missile past saturation is a free hit and a fully missile loaded fleet can easily mix missiles to cover each other's weakness.  Squalls and Harpoons or Squalls and Hurricanes can be an effective mixed damage type long range volley of missiles from a missile specialized fleet.

Also, in regards to the extra shots of the Reaper launcher compared to the Dragonfire, how often do you actually run out in actual play?  If you're not running out of Reapers, what are the extra shots actually doing for you?  Is a Typhoon launcher 6 shots for 10 OP, or is it more like 2 or 3 for 10 OP in AI hands?  Especially once Expanded Missile Racks and Missile Specialization come into play.