As I personally have never created a station in Starsector before, and yet am endeavoring to do so, I reasoned that I need a repeatable test procedure to measure stations. This would help me determine the overall strength of the station, at least as a reasonable preliminary balance point.
After creating a test-bench and a methodology to go along with it, I began measuring the vanilla stations to establish a baseline to judge my own creations upon. This led me to some interesting discoveries that, in some cases, confirm "metagame" assumptions about the stations. In other cases, however, the test results directly contradict accepted "metagame" knowledge.
Test Method- Use a battle size of 500, and all other gameplay settings (such as max ships per fleet) are left at vanilla defaults.
- Use the mods Ship and Weapon Pack, Underworld, Interstellar Imperium, and any applicable faction mod required to spawn the station being tested.
- The rationale for this is simple: my goal for this was ultimately to make Imperium stations, so that mod contains the testbench and is included by default.
- In addition, SWP is required for the procedural faction framework I used.
- Since the Imperium and SWP mods are already included, I added Underworld because just about everyone who is playing with the former two mods will be using UW as well.
- Spawn a 100%-CR station, no officer, no auto-fit, for the player side and assign full control of the fleet and station to the AI.
- Generate a procedural faction with unweighted access to the ships, weapons, fighters, and hull mods available to all other factions (including derelicts and remnants) - using the following doctrine:
- Warships 3 / Carriers 2 / Phase Ships 2
- Officers 2 / Ship Quality 3 / Fleet Size 2
- Ship Size 3
- Aggression 3
- Combat Freighter Fraction 1.0
- Auto-fit Randomize 0.1
- Select a fleet size, in FP (Fleet Points) according to the following logic:
- If this is the first test, begin at the best guess of the tester (e.g. 100 FP for an orbital station).
- Otherwise, adjust by some constant number of FP (typically 5% of the original guess): up, if the station won the last bout; down, if the station lost the last bout.
- Spawn a 70%-CR fleet of the faction and size described above, no officers, using auto-fit, no D-mods, for the enemy side - and use starting command points equal to the fleet size divided by 40, rounding down.
- Repeat the previous step up to 1,000 times if the fleet's size does not match the target size, choosing the single fleet that wound up closest to what we want.
- Generate a random battle scenario using the same algorithms/parameters as a campaign station battle.
- Non-hyperspace.
- 50% chance of being in a nebula.
- 48.8% chance of being in an asteroid field; 1-20 asteroids nearby if so.
- 43.8% chance of being in at least one ring system; 6.3% chance of being in two ring systems.
- Fixed standoff range of 6000 units.
- The enemy is not allowed to retreat, must fight to the last, and must deploy all ships.
- Repeat the test until a minimum of 10 bouts of mixed or unpredictable outcomes (i.e. a mix of Win and Lose) has been observed.
- The final score is the sum of the fleet sizes of the last 9 bouts plus the fleet size the following bout would have been (had the test continued), divided by 10, rounded to a whole number.
The generated scenario isn't meant to be perfectly realistic to a particular in-game scenario, but rather something that won't be unfairly biased towards one particular fleet composition over another. The following represents a typical max-strength fleet:
To speed up testing, a plugin automatically speeds the game up such that the internal game logic is running at 1/30 second intervals at the fastest possible speed, limited by the refresh rate and system hardware.
ResultsLow Tech Orbital Station:
124 FPMidline Orbital Station:
135 FPHigh Tech Orbital Station:
161 FPMidline Battlestation:
207 FPHigh Tech Battlestation:
245 FPLow Tech Battlestation:
253 FPLow Tech Star Fortress:
346 FPHigh Tech Star Fortress:
354 FPMidline Star Fortress:
358 FPDamaged Remnant Station:
173 FPRemnant Station:
370 FPShadowyards Orbital Station:
170 FPShadowyards Battlestation:
333 FPShadowyards Star Fortress:
394 FPOCI Orbital Station:
205 FPOCI Battlestation:
490 FPOCI Star Fortress:
579+ FPNote: the OCI Star Fortress is literally off the chart. I couldn't generate fleets above ~600 FP, as the test method essentially broke down and couldn't scale high enough to produce an accurate score.
AnalysisAside from the Remnant Stations and the High Tech Orbital Station, the tested FP scores are not that far off from the advertised FP scores in the game files.
As for balance between the tech levels, at least when it comes to a station soloing an AI fleet, the star fortresses are all basically balanced with each other. As for the battlestations, Midline is a clear loser - perhaps because of the lack of armor and dissipation on the main module. For the orbital stations, High Tech is the runaway winner thanks to how strong those shields are.
The big surprises are:
- Midline is strongly competitive at tier 3, even though it is lagging behind at tiers 1-2.
- High Tech is not utterly dominant (other than at tier 1).
- Low Tech is strongly competitive at tiers 2-3.
However, let us not forget a few important facts about the vanilla stations that significantly color the overall experience players have with them, observed through gameplay and many hours of looking at AI tests:
- Low Tech stations tend to incite AI glitches at an alarming rate, particularly with regards to shooting through/at invincible modules, wasting ammo and flux to achieve nothing.
- Midline stations are disproportionately easy to dispatch by a clever player by taking out the protective spurs and sending precise shots through the shield gap towards the main broadside section.
- High Tech stations are reportedly frustrating and dangerous to fight because of how their shields work and of the ship-loss risk the mine strike modules pose.
If we assume that 60 FP with this test methodology is a "level 1" threat (on a scale from 0 to 10), we have the following threat classifications:
Orbital Station:
Level 2Damaged Remnant Station:
Level 3Battlestation:
Level 4Star Fortress:
Level 6Remnant Station:
Level 6A level 0 threat is a truly beginner challenge solvable by the tutorial fleet, while level 10 represents a challenge that requires game mastery to overcome, because it isn't possible to overcome through sheer numbers. While I think a level 20 officer on a station affects the station more than a bunch of level 20 officers in the player fleet affect the player's fleet (considering you're boosting 100% of the station and perhaps 37% of the player's fleet), there is definitely still room to include even tougher threats in the campaign world.
