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1

General Discussion / Poll: Did you read the Writing Starsector spoilers?

« on: December 17, 2020, 02:35:18 PM »

After seeing the blog post’s spoiler warning (and then the second spoiler warning), I decided to step away from the back of the curtain. For Alex and David’s amusement, how did everyone else respond?
No spoilers!

2

Discussions / Velocity: Vanguard, a space physics board game on Kickstarter

« on: November 03, 2020, 12:55:46 PM »

No idea if there’s any interest in board games around here, but the subject matter aligns.

Velocity: Vanguard is a space combat board game with a focus on inertia-based movement and customization. Ships maintain a velocity vector from turn to turn, which they can only modify by accelerating with their rear engines. Ship weapons are often facing-dependent as well, which makes maneuvering into a trade off between getting to the right location or shooting all your guns.

Also, the game is super pretty.

Spoiler

[close]

Anyway, if anyone’s interested, check out their Kickstarter page or a longer review I wrote. They have several games recorded on Twitch, but for anyone who wants to try it out live, they should release a Tabletop Simulator module later this week. Let me know if you want a demo!
Kickstarter page
Longer review on BoardGameGeek

3

Suggestions / Display Fighter Weapon Stats

« on: February 04, 2019, 09:07:08 PM »

So, for the second round of the Starsector AI Tournament, I found myself attempting to compare the effectiveness of various fighter wings, especially among mods I hadn't used before. One hurdle was that I didn't recognize the weapons that the fighters used, so I often tried to make guesses for damage types based on the description. However, even if I knew all the weapons off-hand, I think it would be convenient for comparisons to display the weapon stats, especially since some fighters use fighter-specific versions of weapons which do not have in-game-visible stats.

Since fighters typically ignore flux costs and tend to have consistent behaviors (launching bombs at long range, or closing in and circling the opponent), I imagine the main stats are the following:

• Damage Type
• Damage
• Damage/Second
• Refire Delay / Limited Ammo

The only fighter where range might be important would be the Xyphos, I think, so it seems like it can be ignored most of the time.

As for rendering these in the UI, I'm not sure what would be the best way. Most likely would be the ability to press F1 while hovering to show expanded weapon stat blocks, instead of the weapon list. However, it could be nice if there was a way to click the weapon and go to a codex entry. Not likely to be relevant right now, but possibly some time in the future.

4

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Cruiser AI Occassionally Stops Responding

« on: February 05, 2017, 01:31:21 PM »

Sometimes, the AI of certain ships will stop responding. This results in the ship drifting off in a single direction, and it no longer turns or responds to orders. The ship usually breaks out of this state when an enemy enters within range, or when player control is transferred to the ship. (The ship will do the bare minimum course correction to avoid the edge of the map, however.) This has so far only been noticed on cruisers.

I ran into the bug during some personal testing for the AI tournament, twice with a Blackrock Nevermore and once with a Blackrock Stenos. I'll see if I can find the conditions I used, but the loss of control happened maybe 20-25% of the times the mission was run.

The condition popped up several times during the third round of the Starsector AI tournament, perhaps due to the number of cruisers added to various fleets. Most footage comes from Nemo's twitch stream(Click Here for the video).

Time Range	Description
48:25-49:00	The Shouren (Eagle-shaped cruiser) in the bottom-right corner bounces idly against the edge of the map instead of engaging the enemy fleet.
50:46-51:22	The same Shouren continues bouncing off the right edge of the map.
53:20-54:00	Despite the enemy fleet consisting of a single 0% CR frigate, the Shouren continues bouncing off the edge of the map. Unknown if it engaged at the end and finished off the Robberfly with a beam.
2:11:30-2:13:34	The two Threshers (wide, cyan-colored cruisers) completely ignore the Enforcer behind them.
2:33:00-2:34:45	The Haze (unshielded red-colored Diable cruiser) doesn't move towards the battle for this time frame. A Search and Destroy order is issued by the fleet, letting its escorts return to battle, but the Haze doesn't respond to that either.
2:48:20-2:52:15	The Thresher on the right, in the nebula, does not engage for the majority of this time. At 2:49:40 it engages combat long enough to kill a carrier and overload the Versant, and then resumes drifting away form combat unresponsively. At 2:50:25, the Haze on the left doesn't respond for about 20 seconds before re-engaging.

5

General Discussion / Retreat without Dying

« on: November 15, 2015, 03:02:15 PM »

Hello forum,

Been playing some SS+ in anticipation of the update, and I've been having some trouble. If you want to retreat a fleet from a standard battle that includes cruisers, what tactics or sequence of commands do you use to try and get them out alive?

For context:
Ran into a superior Hegemony force with a hybrid fleet of Blackrock and SCY. My plan was to deploy all forces, inflict some casualties on the faster enemy forces, then retreat and re-engage. I attempted to tell all forces to Defend a point towards the bottom of the map... and the cruisers refused to go that direction. They were locked in combat, but still. An Erymanthian Boar was actually moving northwest away from the point, and eventually got surrounded and destroyed.
A straight-up retreat command would result in the ship turning its back and then getting destroyed anyway. What's some way to prevent things like that? 

6

General Discussion / [Poll] December 4th Dev Patch Thoughts

« on: December 06, 2014, 01:01:02 PM »

Given that the discussion about the upcoming changes are getting particularly loud, some statistics might help people discuss it. Note that this poll will not include anyone who doesn't regularly visit the forums, so it's not perfect.

If you want to discuss the patch notes, it's probably better to do so in the announcement thread. This thread is better suited for discussing the statistics.