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1

General Discussion / Re: Being an officer with no combat skills

« on: February 10, 2024, 09:42:36 PM »

Generally speaking no, its really not worth it.
Times it could be is either if you are doing some form of player cheese or just do not have a full officer roster+ship build acquired yet in which case as people said some support skills give bonus for just having someone in them so you may as well ride around in a combat ship.
The things that really could benefit from player control with out combat skills are backline carriers benefiting from the players target selection and timing ability or some form of proximity mine cheese. The first was nerfed a few updates ago and the second was nerfed this version (though its probably still decently strong im not sure its worth something like a fully combat skilled up eradicator in your battle line or whatever the meta cruisers are now)

I never run out of command points. maybe the operations center hullmod should be changed to something 'increases fleet wide damage and defense by (fleet passive skills - personal combat skills)% the player character has'.
Make it scale with hull size. You could then have things like a command frigate for a totally passive player, or even a bigger hull if you can afford the DP, and also make operations center a more attractive mod for a player combat ship if the player has something like 10 support skills and 5 combat skills, thus bridging the gulf between support and combat skill builds

2

General Discussion / Re: why would Luddic majority increase production and stability?

« on: February 09, 2024, 06:17:32 PM »

And if they are motivated sheerly by peer pressure, then why would they be more productive?

well, most parts of peoples personality are in fact shaped by social pressures, unfortunately. Its not forcing them to do a thing against their will, its forcing that thing to become their will. Because there are different factions within the church does not mean those people experience it as a kind of dissonance that undermines the validity of the church but rather their church becomes everything and all conflict can only take place within it.

The big problem is that the idea of purity that religion has deals with a kind of counter-technological movement, so while practically they need technology, to maintain their belief that they are pure they really really are going to want to try and at least not have the latest tech so they can pretend they are still abiding by some interpretation of the rule. The more they have to deviate the more psychic strain their egos will suffer. This means i would be really surprised if they were using the latest tech on anything, and in fact would explicitly be behind on absolutely all technology they use as a matter of principal, because saying this is ok but that isnt fulfills the need to symbolically reject technology, but if there is nothing higher tech you can point to that makes the older tech righteous to use they will become insecure.

So yeah, tri tachyon should have better farming

3

General Discussion / Re: Officer Limit

« on: February 09, 2024, 02:00:57 PM »

I tend to plan my fleet composition not just around 240 dp but around 8, 9, 10, or 11 ships just so they can all be officered (odd when im playing combat, even when im doing an ai run). I find the ideal of trying to fit that number of ships into that number of dp has me make composition choices i would not if i was just going for 240 dp. Generally i like the potential for this interaction to make certain ships or compositions that might not be strictly efficient dp wise still make sense to me to run as it opens up more variety. However the overall officer mechanics of this game have always felt tedious to me.

Megas' post illustrates the problem i think. You are locked in when you have assembled and trained up your officers. You can swap ships around easily. One solution would be having reserve officers, but it doesnt make sense why if you had officers you couldnt use them all. This creates ludonarrative dissonance and should be avoided. Another solution would be reworking officers away from simply having combat skills like the player character, but rather having different officer classes representing their general training path. Then your fleet composition would be more generally built out of ship roles rather than specific ship builds and you could experement with radically different ships and loadouts filling the same role. This would probably also make balancing the game easier since player combat bonuses and officer combat bonuses would be their own separate things. Then the player characters officer limit would still make sense, it is the capacity for your administrative hassle and ability to maintain strong relationships with your officer. More flexibility would be added with out ludonarrative dissonance added by magical respecing or having lots of officers but not being able to actually use them.

4

General Discussion / Re: why would Luddic majority increase production and stability?

« on: February 09, 2024, 01:46:12 PM »

I came into the thread thinking that made sense to me. After reading the thread i question my position. While it is true you could easily attribute more social harmony and higher morale to a homogeneous society unified by a religious ideal, the shunning of technology is going to affect farming just as much as heavy industry.
Unless the entire sector is using old fashion farming techniques as a consequence of the setting being kind of scrappy and post apocalyptic and none have the technological farming edge you would expect them to produce less.
Stability still makes sense though, and i suppose lore could make agricultural increase make sense if it is something like i say.

5

General Discussion / Re: Why would I want to do bounties, take missions or attack convoys?

« on: February 08, 2024, 10:49:02 AM »

Ive never once gone after bounties for profit. All combat is to get exp for officers. Trading is just faster and smoother so i always start out trading/transporting.
Thinking on this it occurs to me that its not really the trading itself but how it synergizes with other early game activities.
Early game you need to do the following things:
1. Find officers
2. Find arms dealer contacts
3. Locate certain useful hull mods/gather ships and materials through non contact means.

All of these are accomplished by flying around the core. While doing this you can simultaneously fit trading into the whole scheme seamlessly and be producing lots of money to fund the stuff you want as you find it (i count taking transport missions to a place you were headed to anyway as trading). So one act does absolutely everything you need to build up a strong enough fleet to tackle ordos. I only fight when i have to or after i have gathered my officers to start leveling them up. If i were to try a more combat focused start and try to bootstrap myself up through combat i would still have to fly around looking for all these things since what i might find in the process is not going to be a real substitute. The question then just becomes one of order. When it comes time to level up my officers would i rather do it with nice well equipped ships and easily snowball or have to do it more scrappy?
Further, it really helps to have all the factions amiable with you while doing this, so agroing onto any of them by attacking their stuff is counterproductive. Its just full of anti-synergies to go out of your way doing the vast majority of missions.

The problem is not the mission reward balance so much as how the game is designed to have certain things that are really beneficial to do early on that can all be done simultaneously and effectively obsolete other early game play strategies. I know there are people who just take their starting wolf and go bootstrap themselves up through combat but there is no game reason to do this, its purely counting on the players own preference to override a massive gameplay benefit. It basically would count as a challenge run to do it this way.

The solution i think would have to do with disconnecting these things, some of which i think most people would agree are tedious anyway, from the same core trade route loop. Imagine if officers did not need to be hunted down by scouring the core (the promotion candidate mechanic did this, but its not frequently triggered enough, maybe change it so the use of the story point 'scours the crew for a suitable candidate' or something, and contacts sought you out once you obtained a certain ammount of renown? Now all traveling in circles around the core would provide is the trade income. Doing this you could take low level missions, agro different factions, and play a more combatant style with out missing out on the convenience trading brought you. It would still be less money but it would provide more exp to offset that. I dont think the rewards themselves are the issue and just increasing the rewards would simply unbalance things a different way by likely encouraging rushes to specific combat capability breakpoints to maximize gains.

6

General Discussion / Re: is second-in-command pursuit an anti-mechanic?

« on: February 05, 2024, 11:18:22 AM »

the problem is not whether auto resolve exists or not it seems to be that auto resolve in these chase fights is a way for you to overcome the speed of fleeing ships you couldnt catch by just stacking dp value to overpower the autoresolve calculation.
I do what the OP does and use this as a way to kill fast ships with my slow ships. If this was changed so that auto resolve no longer allows this i would have to just let the faster ships go, which might on occasion annoy me, but overall it would make clicking that auto resolve button actually something i need to think about beyond just 'do i exchange some resources for more exp or not?' which is probably more soothing to some internal part of me im unaware of by preventing what is called ludonarrative dissonance

7

General Discussion / Re: 7 Skill Officers

« on: February 05, 2024, 11:08:02 AM »

The mindset of making custom officers for specific ship builds direction of officer management would dictate the 7 skill officers are useless as a concept if they are not super officer.
Making them super officers would mitigate the regular old officers sentimental value though and feel bad.
My desire if i enter this mental orientation would be for 7 skill officers to simply not exist, and leave me to minmax my bespoke officers.

From the utilitarian mindset of officer use though, where you just use officers to improve things, a 7 skill officer is not some crowning jewel you find to increase your power level so much as a handy thing you might run across to give you some skills for now. Maybe you replace them with a custom officer later, maybe they are good enough and its not worth it.

This second mindset is more healthy and probably what people would ideally have, the first is too rigid and causes internal grief, but the question is due to common occurrence of the first mindset should games be made with this in mind? The psychic turmoil of decisions is a real thing. Maybe its better to not have special officers at all.

8

General Discussion / Re: Neutrino detector needs a rework or outright removal

« on: February 05, 2024, 10:58:19 AM »

I just pretend it doesn't exist. I tried to use it at times but the constant drain on resources (both volatiles and supplies as you wind up spending a lot more time in each system) was not worth it.
Its a shame because i like the concept of flying around and trying to triangulate things but the in game time it takes to really get immersed in this too much.
There are various ways it could be fixed from removing volatile cost so its only costing you time, to reworking it entirely in various ways, but currently its just not worth it.
The idea of using increased rewards to entice players to do a painful activity can work and make people even feel satisfaction from it but that underlying suffering is still there and maybe games shouldnt have things like this.

9

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: May 01, 2023, 11:01:55 AM »

You know what the worst thing is? I cant decide if i should start a new game or wait to start it latre after the update and all mods update... T.T

you could do both, nothing says you have to stop playing your current game if the update comes out and you arent finished yet. Even moreso if you have mods you wanna use, since those might take a while to update.

10

General Discussion / Re: Can't find a single Heavy Mauler.

« on: April 24, 2023, 07:50:06 PM »

sometimes luck does this to you
same with officers, ive had all the officers ive wanted quick just from my first run around the core, or wound up in endgame with only like 3 officers of suitable skill/personality

11

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: April 12, 2023, 05:20:04 PM »

I like the drover changes. 10 OP seems to be a straight buff to how i use them as a player ship, and combat carrier means maybe the AI will use them how i use them. For a passive carrier in AI hands id always just pick condors.

12

General Discussion / Re: Asking ChatGPT things about Starsector

« on: March 31, 2023, 11:52:34 PM »

It might be fun to play through entirely following chatgpts suggestion for ship builds and officer skills and the whole deal. One thing i noticed about chatgpt is if you can tell its drawing off of old data you can just give it updates (for example you might need to explain the current iteration of the skill system to it), but it can reference everything within the chat session you are in and so you can build up a lot of contextual knowledge for it to draw from.

I have a feeling everyones knowledge is flawed, and by being some kind of amalgamation of everything everyones written about the game at the very least it might provide some kind of unbiased central thread of truth. The whole wisdom of the crowds thing. I know in many games ive played the accepted and authoritative meta everyone agrees on is sometimes not really correct, it can be good enough that it plays nice with the game and shows great success, but it really might not be best. Tools like this can help us explore the unintuitive.

13

General Discussion / Re: Does the game deactivate itself if you don't play for a long time?

« on: October 23, 2022, 05:59:02 AM »

Last time i played again i had to re-enter the key as well

14

General Discussion / Re: Skill system encouraging frequent respec is annoying when it is not cheap.

« on: March 07, 2022, 12:05:02 AM »

When respecs were put in the game instantly transformed into one of respecing. This mechanic informs the player more so than any statement of intent that you are now supposed to make use of the respec feature. It feels bad when some mechanic in a game is under or over used. It feels bad when one included playstyle is obviously superior or inferior. All the missing approaches that could be in the game do not feel as bad in their absence as a single included approach that is clearly out of balance. When a game is balanced the possibilities feel genuine and the player feels good. The playing of the game becomes a kind of exploration. When the game is not balanced the possibilities feel forced - to do something other than optimal requires some force of will, to subvert your instinct and desires to explore the possibilities of the game, to know you are playing the game wrong.

Once respecs existed it did not become a question of whether or not to use it, but how. The entire approach to the game has to be reconfigured due to this possibility. Unless perfectly balanced it will feel bad - either though being a mechanic that is to be ignored entirely and become a glaring flaw in the game system if it is too harsh to ever use it, or a mechanic that invalidates the purpose of choice in skill selection entirely because you can change them at will. And it must be perfectly balanced, 'good enough' will still feel bad.

To advise OP to add more skill points or story points is no different from saying have no respec mechanic and to just edit your save if you want to. Its not a good solution.

15

General Discussion / Re: Skill system encouraging frequent respec is annoying when it is not cheap.

« on: March 05, 2022, 10:56:34 PM »

>Skill system encouraging frequent respec is annoying when it is not cheap.
this is true, but skill systems with cheap respecs may as well not even be skill systems