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1

General Discussion / Does Recovering My Own Ships Negatively Impact Battle Loot?

« on: September 20, 2024, 12:27:23 PM »

Say there is two outcomes in a battle of my 10 ships versus enemy 10 ships.

• I win, no losses, I don't recover any of the enemy ships, I collect all the loot
• I win, 5 of my ships are disabled, I recover all of them and don't recover any of the enemy ships, I collect all the loot

Do both scenarios equate to the same battle loot?  Or do I lose out on some of the battle loot?  I realize after the battle I'll be spending supplies to recover my own ships back to fighting strength, but does the loot pile from what the enemy drops get diminished simply from the recovery of my own ships?

Doing a trash derelict run and had an idea; what if I just don't repair/recover my ships?  Take Field Repairs, Take Automated Ships.  Throw Explorarium junk at the enemy, whatever of my stuff blows up, guaranteed recovery of it from Rugged Construction, get free 30-40% CR/health from Field Repairs, suspend repair/recovery of the ship.  Next battle deploy, and with a Gamma core giving Combat Endurance repairs in-battle, ship will likely be 30-40% CR and mostly full health by the time the enemy is engaging.  After a few battles, 10-20% CR won't be enough to allow it to survive, it blows up again, repeat the process of recovery with free 30-40% CR & health.  Never pay the actual supply cost for recovery after battle.  30-40% CR and moderately damaged isn't super effective, but throw a few S-mods on it and it's a fairly decent free opening wave in every battle.

Trying to justify using Wardens and Defenders.  Spending the 6-8x the deployment cost to repair them from 30-40% CR/health to 70% again isn't something I can justify.  But throwing a pack of 30-40% CR of them at the enemy, pretty much always knowing they'll die every battle, and then getting to collect them back to mid-health again for free might be acceptable, so long as it isn't costing me overall battle loot from the enemy.

2

General Discussion / Manually set ship target CR?

« on: January 19, 2024, 08:47:49 AM »

Is there a way, through vanilla or mods, to manually set a ship's target CR?  Or limit CR recovery / repairs to when the other is done?

I'm doing a derelict / junk run where the plan is to throw a horde of rugged construction junk at the enemy.  With the relevant skills in the tree, on a 400 DP battle (200 each side), you can throw 357 DP of ships into a fight (support doctrine & derelict operations), and between rugged construction halving the deployment cost and 5 d-mods you're only paying 59 supplies to do so.  If things blow up, they can be brought back at 30-40% hull & CR thanks to Field Repairs.

On big ships everything works out fine.  CR per deployment on cruisers/capitals is usually quite large (15-20+%), and field repairs also expedites ship repairs, so the gap between ~35% CR and the max CR of the ship means paying for 2-3 more deployments worth of supplies before the ships is back to full health / full CR.  The problem is, on smaller ships, this doesn't work out so well.  With smaller CR% per deployment costs, the gap between ~35% CR and 70%+ might mean 5 or up to 17! additional deployments worth of supplies.

In most cases, I don't need them all back to 100%/100%/100%.  I'd like to perhaps make it so I can set a target.  Examples such as:

• "50% CR is sufficient for this ship, stop repairs and recovery of this ship once it reaches 50% CR"
• "Continue recovering CR of this ship until all repairs are complete.  Once hull and armor is restored to 100%, stop additional CR recovery efforts"
• "Continue repairing this ship until target CR is achieved.  Once ship has recovered to target CR, no additional repairs to be performed"

This way I can also cycle ships in auto-battle.  If a ship in my fleet is targeted for 70% CR, and it is currently frozen on repair/recovery at 50% repaired and 70% CR ready, I can send that ship into auto battle, and now that it's down to 50% repaired and 50% CR ready, I can restore the ship again.  Only it basically cost me nothing; the supplies it is using to recover the CR from the battle are also repairing the ship, which I would have had to do eventually.

Most rugged construction junk fights also do not need all ships at 100%/100%/100% anyway.  When you can throw 6x as much DP at the enemy for the same supply cost as their 100% pristine ships, you can generally crush them in overwhelming force before they can even hard flux your shields.  Therefore battles are mostly about just recovering CR, not repairing.

3

Suggestions / Remove 24 ship UI cap on post-battle recovery

« on: September 22, 2023, 07:55:21 PM »

This has been raised a number of times, as far back as 2018, but rather than necro those posts I thought I'd raise it as a request again.
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=14837.0
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=23814.0

With ship recovery mechanics, any ship that is eligible for recovery (either guaranteed due to the ship having the reinforced bulkhead and/or rugged construction hullmod, having an officer as the ship's captain, having an s-mod, or having the Hull Restoration character skill, or otherwise the RNG chance of the ship being recoverable anyway) shows up in the post-battle list of ships to be recovered.

However, UI limitations in the design of this window cap the list of ships to only 24 regular recovery (no story point needed) and 24 special recovery (story points needed).  Any ships above this limit will not appear on the recovery window.  Additionally, I haven't looked at the code to confirm this, but anecdotally I've noticed frigates tend to make the recovery list first, and capitals make this list last.  This preference for smaller ships seems to fall in line with the mechanics of the Hull Restoration skill; low DP ships have a higher percent chance of being recoverable (90%) compared to high DP ships (75%).

Given the default fleet size in the settings file is 30 ships and the mechanics for which ships make the cut and which ships don't seem to favor smaller ships, this causes issues in the following instances:

• Losing your own ships designed around the Derelict Operations character skill.  Players going this path expect to lose ships often, both to acquire D-Mods to lower the deployment cost of the ship for future battles, and because they are running junk ships expecting to beat the enemy with quantity over quality.  This thus is an encouraged mechanic; lose your own ships.  Particularly challenging battles may entail losing some or a good portion of your fleet.  This means your good ships lost may be pushed off the recovery list, especially if you're facing off against a large fleet of ships with rugged construction, such as pirates with hounds & cerebus or explorarium fleets.
• Recovering good Explorarium ships.  If you can individually isolate 2 sets of 25-ship Explorarium fleets that have 5 Ramparts and 20 junk destroyers/frigates each, you can acquire both sets of 5 Ramparts.  If instead the two fleets attack together, you will likely find 24 junk destroyers and frigates in the salvage, with no option to recover the Ramparts.  This is particularly bothersome in mods that focus on adding more Explorarium ships.  Many of the Explorarium capitals and cruisers developed by mods can only really be found from accepting a contact bounty to eliminate a rogue Explorarium fleet, and that fleet will likely have 30 ships (fleet max), of which 1-3 are the prized capitals / cruisers...guess which ships do not make the recovery list, despite having rugged construction?
• Super-sized battles, particularly if you have the Hull Restoration skill.  Super large battles may happen, either by adjusting the settings to change fleet sizes beyond 30 ships, or just by running into multiple pirate/pather or other faction fleets all at once.  You may have the skill to use your 30-ship fleet to fend off 60+ ships from enemy fleets and only lose a few ships yourself, but if you killed enough ships you may unfortunately find so many frigates and destroyers made the recovery list that the few cruisers and capitals you yourself lost and cared about recovering got pushed off the recovery screen.

Can the UI be re-done to allow for a more practical ship limit during recovery?  I understand not making it completely unconstrained, to prevent some massive performance lag if someone has set 100+ ship fleets and the menu is trying to pull up 500+ ships from a battle.  But a limit of 40-60 ships for each menu should be a good number to allow for many of the above issues to be mitigated or eliminated.

Thank you.

4

General Discussion / Tutorial TIL - Variable Reward for Tetra Mission

« on: September 21, 2023, 05:05:02 PM »

So spoilers in advance if you haven't played through the tutorial.

Today I learned that when you play through the tutorial, and you are tasked with going to Tetra to collect ships to fight off the pirates guarding the gate, what you get as a reward for this mini-mission is directly linked to what you salvage.

If you choose to salvage nothing, perhaps because you already have a decent fleet from choosing one of the advanced starts that kick you off with an apogee or a hammerhead, you get the lowest reward possible waiting for you in the storage area:

• 100 supplies
• 1 talon wing LPC
• 1 piranha wing LPC

If you salvage any of the derelicts recovered around Tetra, your reward increases to:

• The above
• A random armament for each of the mounts of whatever ships you recovered, whether or not there was anything mounted on that slot already when you recovered it.  This does not include additional LPCs for the Condor, you already have 2.  These will always be low value common tech junk armaments; like thumpers, heavy mortar, mining blaster, light machine guns, mortars and autocannons (not even the double variants), sabots, annihilators.  But which specific ones you get are not linked to the seed, but rather completely variable and will trigger when completing the mission; if you save right before completion, you can re-roll what is waiting for you in storage.

This reward does not increase to include armaments for any additional ships you recover post-battle, either from the 4 fleets guarding the jump points, the fleet guarding Derinkuyu, nor the fleet guarding the probe (if you power level to level 5 via smuggling drugs to Derinkuyu, and pick automated ships skill, you can recover these ships too), nor any other ships that may populate through other means (pirate/pather spawns from mining with Nexerelin, impoverished mercenaries spawning from taking credits off the Tetra derelicts from IndEvo, etc.)

Also, and probably already well known, when completing the Tetra mini-mission, all ships in your possession will be raised to 100% health / maximum possible CR (70% by default, but will adjust to include crew training or officer's combat endurance buffs if they exist), so to maximize your reward, mothball the Tetra derelicts as you recover them to avoid unnecessarily wasting supplies repairing them on the way back to Ancyra.  This free repair will also apply to any other ships, so you can really milk the most of this reward by

• Recovering any ship you can in battle (if you choose to take on the Derinkuyu or jump gate guards early, or recover the drones from the probe), then mothballing them.  Even if you don't want them, they will yield more in resources for scuttling them at full health after the free repair than they would have yielded as post-battle scrap.
• Toggling off recovery for your ships.  Your fleet starts off the tutorial at 70% CR.  If you play smart, you can probably clear the first battle without a scratch.  As well as the probe battle, even at reduced CR from the first battle.  And if you picked the bigger fleet start, you can probably also take on the Derinkuyu fleet and some or all of the gate guards with the apogee or hammerhead.  At a minimum, toggle off recovery for the free mudskipper you get which starts at 50% CR, there is no need to waste 2 supplies bringing it up to 70% just to head out to Tetra.