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1

General Discussion / Ships I don't like

« on: November 29, 2024, 09:54:08 PM »

Venture - Apogee is the best exploration ship in the game, but even if you fully explore the sector you will maybe find 3 of them(including the one you start with) Meanwhile Ventures are dime a dozen. Hovewer no matter how much I tried I could never make an exploration Venture worth a damn. Civilian sensor profile/strength penalty is not suited for exploration at all, so it needs Militarized Subsystems, which cuts into its already strained OP pool and gets rid of one of its few advantages - 9 burn with Bulk Transport. Fast Missile Racks without Expanded Missile Racks(because good luck fitting it in there) basically limits its missiles to entirely support role. I thought the Pirate version would be its saving grace when it released, but it has even more OP issues than the base variant. Venture is also a lowtech ship through and through, which means it has bad flux dissipation and capacity. And even if you were mad enough to try and armor tank a civilian cruiser, crew losses is the last thing you need when you're 50ly away from Corvus.

Champion - Its ship system favors energy weapons even though it absolutely requires kinetics in the medium hybrid slots to function. If you don't put kinetics in there then it can only tickle the enemy at long range, if you do put kinetics in there then half of the ship system is wasted, if you opt for medium range weapons(which is pretty much required for kinetics regardless) then it's too slow to actually put them to good use because it carries too much armor for a shield-tanked ship! And before you ask - no, Squall alone does not work as a kinetic damage source. Champion is the exact opposite of what a midline ship should be, isntead of doing one thing well, it tries to be everything simultaneously underperforms at all of them.

Invictus - A massive slab of metal-meat with special armor that makes it last beyond even other lowtech capitals, with weapon emplacements pointing in every direction, canister flak and even an extra wing of defense fighters, its main role is... to stay far away from actual combat and "snipe" using the LIDAR array. I don't think there is a ship with more mismatched system than the Invictus. I mean sure, technically you can use LIDAR at point blank range too but... why would you? I just find it weird that the ship system screams "glass cannon" but it's on arguably one of the tankiest ships in the game instead. You know what would be cool? If Retribution and Invictus swapped systems. Imagine the Invictus Orion-ing right into the enemy line, not even able to stop in time because of its terrible maneouverability, while it blasts in every direction. It would be hilarious if nothing else(also kind of terrifying if you were on the receiving end of it)

Eag;e - we don't talk about the Eagle

2

General Discussion / Are shields just too strong?

« on: November 03, 2024, 04:54:13 AM »

Recently topics of large kinetics and "damage reflection" came up which got me thinking...

The average shield efficiency is 0.8. Add in Field Modulation and Hardened Shields and it's 0.544. This means that, even for a kinetic damage weapon, it needs flux efficiency of at least ~1.1 to break even on flux spent vs. flux dealt. Most kinetic weapons have flux efficiency of 1.0 or slightly better so it's not a problem, but it's pretty close as it is.

And sure, there are ways to increase damage, but there are also other ways to increase shield efficiency; and 0.8 is not the base cap; and kinetic weapons are already the best case scenario as far as damage vs. shields goes.

What this means is that, against many opponents the optimal play would be to not fire your own weapons at all, waiting until the enemy ship fluxes itself up by trying to get through your shield. Then, once it stops firing because of too high flux, you would start firing yourself an finish it off. How's that for a Thorns aura! The enemy ship is hurting itself(losing the flux war) by firing at you without you even having to do anything. This will happen even if you're flux neutral.

Going back to weapon efficiency, I think this also explains why most high tech ships are lackluster. They lose out on the 2x damage bonus against shields of kinetic weapons, but their shield efficiency is not even close to being 2x as good as the efficiency of ships that do use kinetic weapons against them. And this is on top of them having shorter range as well.

Of course this is all gross simplification since in the actual game different ships have different flux pools(although linear bonus from adding capacitors favors ships with lower base flux), damage/flux is dealt over time and there are ways to deal flux-free damage like with missiles or fighters. But still, it made me wonder, what the game would like if lowtech ships did actually have shields half as efficient as the ones on hightech ships.

3

General Discussion / Showerthought Safety Overrides rework

« on: October 10, 2024, 11:18:07 PM »

15/30/45/60 (yes, can be on capitals)

Replaces current ship system with "Override Safeties", a toggleable ship system.

When active:
 - Increases speed, maneouverability, non-missile range, damage and fire rate by 10%
 - Decreases PPT by 1% of the ship's base PPT value per second (to avoid issues with larger ships having significantly higher PPT)

When S-modded:
 - PPT drain increased to 1.5%/second

4

General Discussion / What's the priority/interaction between Missile Autoloader/Missile Autoforge?

« on: August 23, 2024, 04:40:24 AM »

I was testing a missile spam fleet and I noticed no difference between Gryphons having the Autoloader or not.

5

Suggestions / Make fighters targetable only by PD weapons

« on: August 01, 2024, 02:39:18 AM »

Fighters have a weird power curve where they become less and less useful as the fleets get bigger, with more ships with more and longer ranged weapons squeezed in closer together. In 240 DP fleet battles the sheer volume of fire usually evaporates them before they even reach the target. Some of the best anti-fighter weapons are large batteries like the HAG, Mjolnir or even HIL which is just bizarre on a conceptual level. Shielded fighters are easy to overload with ship-grade weaponry negating their advantage entirely and all fighters are vulnerable to EMP damage. Even if fighters do make it to their destination the reinforcements spawned by the carrier, flying there one by one, certainly won't.

For the AI, fighters are almost a liability; it's usually in your best interest for the enemy fleet to have as many carriers as possible as they won't do much and that's less actual combat ships you have to deal with. For the player the fighters are basically an all-or-nothing choice; you either don't bother or go all-in on carriers to overwhelm the enemies with sheer numbers. Adding a few carriers to your fleet to "round it up" is almost always a bad choice. The entire "minigame" of interceptors/heavy fighters/bombers basically doesn't exist because most fighters die to ship guns, not other fighters.

PD weapons in general are shunned in the meta because most missiles deal explosive damage that is easily stopped by shields(and the notable exceptions - Squalls, Sabots and recently DEMs - are hard to stop with PD anyway) and fighters can be dealt with using just your ship's regular weapons. Changing fighters to PD-only targets would massively increase the value of PD on ships and result in less builds where most small mounts are left empty.

6

Suggestions / Paladin and Tachyon Lance

« on: June 01, 2024, 11:08:15 PM »

Paladin: give it the IR Autolance tweak so that it stops wasting entire mag on the shield of first ship that comes close

Tachyon Lance: give is the Plasma Cannon tweak so that it stops wasting volleys on fighters

7

Suggestions / Should faction fleets retreat sooner?

« on: February 16, 2024, 12:20:01 PM »

I was playing Rimworld... well, actually I was just watching a Let's Play. But I was reminded of the difference between human and Mechanoid raids - humans will start running away once you kill half of them while Mechanoids fight to the last. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice to have something similar in Starsector? This mechanic technically exists, but the threshold for AI retreat is so high that it almost doesn't matter - the fleets only start retreating when DP is down to something like 30 so it doesn't really do anything.

You could even have different thresholds for different factions based on their identity, for example: TT(retreats the fastest) > Pirates > LP > Hegemony > LC > Bounties(since they have "nothing to lose")/LP > Derelicts/Remnant(never retreat)

This would potentially make salvaging specific ships from enemy fleets harder but it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

8

General Discussion / Legion XIV availability? And how do you fit them?

« on: February 05, 2024, 12:18:49 PM »

I wanted to clear some info about this. As far as I understand:

 - no NPC fleets use the Legion XIV and you cannot buy them from Hegemony
 - You can find (up to 4? Always 4?) derelict Legion XIVs in random systems
 - Bar Historian can provide a Legion XIV blueprint

As for the fits, just post what you got. It's kind of in an unfortunate place of being split three ways(ballistics/missiles/fighters) with nowhere near enough OP to get it all, even after the buff(which to be fair is likely by design)

9

General Discussion / What's the story behind Hermes in Abandoned Terraforming Platform?

« on: February 01, 2024, 06:16:23 AM »

Is it a relic from some older build? I just find it weird because on Spacer start the first thing you do is ditch the PPC Kite and grab the Hermes instead.

10

General Discussion / Should Falcon be buffed to match the Eagle?

« on: July 18, 2023, 05:10:24 AM »

Since Falcon was always "2/3 of an Eagle" here is what scaling it proportionally would look like:

DP 14 -> 14
Flux Dissipation 400 -> 460 (actually 462 but no one wants to see that)
Base speed 80 -> 90
Price 80k -> 64k

11

Suggestions / Increase ECM range to 0-20%?

« on: July 13, 2023, 12:37:34 AM »

Currently ECM is very all-or-nothing, you either get an absurd amount(40%+) to beat the Remnant at the game or don't bother at all. Because the range is only 0-10% most of the ECM - for you OR the enemy - is wasted. The bigger the range, the more relevant even small amounts of ECM become.

Also, currently even if you(or the enemy) completely loses the ECM war, well, 10% reduction in range is not that big of a deal. Especially if you also have ECCM on your ships which cuts the penalty in half.

12

General Discussion / Money balance

« on: July 05, 2023, 11:03:15 AM »

tl;dr: you get way too much money in the game.

Black Market trading(not even "smuggling" - simply trading with Transponder off which can be easily and mostly completely safely done in all Independent, Pirate and Path stations, plus some others) can generate infinite amounts of money. As soon as you get any amount of cargo space - i.e. a single Buffalo or even a Wayfarer - you basically stop thinking about your bank balance at all. Cost is no longer an issue, only availability is.

But in my last few started runs I got so lazy I don't even bother with that anymore. Why would I when I can take several "scan a ship" or "scan a probe" missions in the same quadrant and get 200k+ per run? And don't even get me started on the Galatia questline. As soon as you finish the tutorial(or as soon as you spawn in Corvus in a Spacer start) you can just go back to Galatia Academy and then Aliyss Sebestyen will have an infinite supply of absolutely trivial missions that can be completed even in a Pristine Pre-Collapse Kite. Half the time you don't even need to leave the core worlds for them and they pay like 50-70k each.

I was thinking about how much less money would I need to get for me to actually care about it and we're talking about a 10x reduction(yes, ten times less) So a 50k probe scan is now 5k, and a 300k black market trade is now 30k. That sounds a lot more reasonable compared to what ships cost, so you have to actually work for them, and would even make things like crew/officers pay an actual factor.

13

General Discussion / Arms dealer?

« on: June 28, 2023, 07:32:00 AM »

What are conditions to get the 1 million offer where rare stuff actually appears? I always thought you need to have a million in bank, but that is apparently not the case...

14

Bug Reports & Support / Repeatedly selling/buying large quantities generates infinite credits

« on: June 26, 2023, 09:36:27 AM »

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/14ja7yt/starsector_is_a_perfectly_balanced_game_with_no/

I'll just copy and paste the explanation:

what you're doing is selling supplies so they register a massive surplus and lower the price massively. (from 28 credits per unit average because the game will buy until the colony has X at Y price, then lower the buy price for the next value of X, leading to an average sell price of 28 per unit)...

you then buying them up at an even lower price of 18 units. (except here the math is different. its selling ALL of the supplies at 18 credits per without increasing it giving you a roughly 10 credit PPU (profit per unit)

but here's the thing, you just bought all their supplies and now they need them again. so now they have a demand for it. which, surprise surprise, jumps the price back up. so now you can sell again with the same profit degradation.

this isnt exclusive to supplies. I do it with heavy weapons when places have demand for them. usually they want 400 or so. so I'll sell them 3000 starting at 1.5k per unit down to 300 per unit. but then I can buy them at 250 per unit so I just buy them out and earn a million credits in just profit.

Perhaps when satisfying a shortage the goods in question should be "used" and disappear, the way blueprints or colony items do?

15

General Discussion / Venture

« on: June 17, 2023, 11:31:00 PM »

This ship is so awkward it drives me crazy.

First of all if you want it for combat(and why would you bring a 14 DP Venture otherwise instead of just slapping Surveying Equipment on a Colossus or something) you need to pay the 12 OP tax for Militarized Subsystems. And if you want to do stealthy exploration you also need to pay 9 OP for Insulated Engine Assembly. That's 18% of your already lean OP gone right off the bat.

Of course, putting MS on a civilian ship gets rid of the Bulk Transport +2 Burn bonus and now you're at base burn of 8 - highly inadvisable, especially in medium/high danger systems. So now you're putting an Ox in your exploration fleet, with all the fuel costs that entails. On top of Ventures' 3/ly fuel use.

In combat you can't run, your damage is anemic and four Mining Lasers is in no way adequate PD especially if they can be destroyed. Given that Shepherd's Borer Drones also have one laser each(and there's 6 of them) I feel like each Mining Pod should have two Mining Lasers, not one.

Venture LP is even worse. Scrap ship for your fleets to blow up. I think it needs Safety Overrides to be worth anything. Maybe even at the cost of losing Surveying Equipment.

Venture P is clearly the winner because of the large missile mount. While that brings your damage up to "adequate" level(remember that Hurricane was doubly nerfed this patch) the moment a Rampart looks in your direction you're dead anyways: you can't outshoot it, you can't out-tank it(because you have no OP left for shields) and you can't outrun it.

I get that Venture is not supposed to be as strong as a regular cruiser - it's a 14 DP ship - but in that case at least it could have decent logistic stats. If Apogees weren't nearly impossible to find no one would even consider the Venture for exploration; it's not a "cheaper alternative", it's literally "better than nothing".