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1

General Discussion / Ship boarding like FTL

« on: November 27, 2015, 03:37:35 PM »

Not really a suggestion, more of a pondering of an idea if a the ship boarding mechanic could happen in a similar top-down view with our troops flooding the enemy ships. Unlike FTL we would have no control apart from general "attack this room" or "retreat" orders. The scale would also be very different, as capital ships being able to field hundreds of troops across all the ship sections. This would give the oportunity for different kinds of Troops to be available for a more varied outcome of ship takeover. This would obviously be done after the main game ships.

2

Bug Reports & Support / Mission being ignored

« on: November 20, 2015, 11:49:40 PM »

So i picked up a mission in the #3 Magec planet to get 50 infantry guns in 20 days so i managed to get it but when i sold it for them the mission simply ignored it, i lost 15k credits and the mission "failed" when it expired :|

3

Suggestions / Weapons target priority

« on: April 08, 2015, 05:21:36 PM »

Would be cool if I could edit the weapon's target aquisition AI with the following options:

- Nearest - target nearest valid target above everything else.
- Furthest - same principle.
- Center - prioritise targets at the center of cone of fire instead.
- Lowest health - priority on lowest health (by %?).
- Lowest TTK - lowest time to kill.
- ignore role - ignore gun role, such as PD weapons will ignore missiles (they still fire at missiles, just not as their first priority anymore).

These could be checkboxes so i can select multiple targets.
Probably too complicated and perhaps it's better to simply make new gun variations that have these modifications? Perhaps name tags like "Unlinked Light Mortar" that will prioritise targets at the center instead of the locked target. Or a "Bombarding Railgun" that will shoot at the furthest target instead of swarming fighters.

4

Suggestions / NPC Officers

« on: April 08, 2015, 05:09:53 PM »

So, since now we have combat officers how about faction combat officers? Currently we have named NPCs, such as named pirates that have better bounties. What about these named NPCs get the new officer tech with leveling up and each time they win a battle they level up a bit. If the player doesn't deal with them they will eventually become very powerful.

And with this, can these NPC officers take over stations? Would be cool to be able to switch stations and have a faction take over a star system. Maybe station sieges? A station that is basically a huge ship with 0 speed?

5

Suggestions / Another misc/suggestions list

« on: November 03, 2013, 12:45:34 PM »

• Make fighters REQUIRE docking/undocking for battles. At start of battles, if i want to spawn fighters, i need to spawn the ship that has the fighters inside. And do add to that is it possible to make proper hull/animation in reguards to landing/docking/takeoff? Like having fighters actually fly into the hull and disappear inside instead of phasing into nothingness.
• Any plans for a proper drone ship? A ship with no weapons or maybe just PD but with lots of drones and focusing on drone combat. Perhaps have "weapons" that manage said drones, say i want X drone i fit in X "weapon", if i want drone Z i install a Z "weapon".
• Different types of shields, deflector shields that deflect shots back into space, reflector shields that reflect energy shots, ramming shields that do increased damage, etc...
• A smooth visual transition between travel and combat mode. Similar to final fantasy's WOOSH effect when zoning into battle perhaps? Doesn't need to be very accurate, just a fake representation. Something like instantly loading into battle screen but seeing the entire fleet still in warp and then chosing which ships to deploy and the camera, then, pans into the battle map area and the fight starts.
• More "terrian" types. Right now we have asteroids (dynamic blocking) and clouds (slowing). Maybe introduce warp winds, storm clouds, accretion disks, condensates, etc.. that modify or affect ship's movement.
• Boarding as part of the battle. Have new ships that have battle docking hoses that allow for in-combat boarding and capture.
• Speaking of boarding. This idea has nothing to do with the above one. So picture the boarding system like in the game FTL: ships dock and the characters fight eachother in a 2D top-down battle with very simple combat mechanics with a, mostly, rock-paper-scisors logic. Now i imagine this would be automatic and all the player would chose is which troops participate  so we would watch the AI battle it out.  I think it would be a lot of fun to board a new capital ship with 50 crew on board and i send my own cruiser in with 70 soldiers and engineers to take the ship. Soldiers kill enemies and breach doors, engineers slow down the self-destruct or break away of the ship by "hacking" each of the rooms giving soldiers more time to clear the ship. This, as i said, would all be fully AI driven and it's pretty much like watching ants battle.
• Engine contrails. Make it happen!
• New missiles, faster flight and less damaging. These are ment to be fired often like other guns. Right now i never find myself using any missiles cus of lack of ammo or realistic damage.
• Healing/repairs. Was talked about before and i still think it would be fun to have at least the API for it and let mods make it happen.

6

General Discussion / Any ideas what 0.7 is going to bring?

« on: October 16, 2013, 03:06:34 PM »

So what's it gonna be? More incremental changes such as more star systems, more ships and balancing/tweaks?

Or is it going to have new things like a very early version of industry? Perhaps new mechanics like trade, crafting or gathering?

I guess the devs don't want to reveal anything until it hits the patch notes but is it looking more like the first or second option?

7

Modding / Simple EXP mod?

« on: September 28, 2013, 07:05:43 AM »

Is there one? I want to get a simple multiplier on experience gains after battles. Like 1.1, 1.5, 3.0, etc...

8

Suggestions / Heightmap for lighting effects

« on: September 28, 2013, 06:59:55 AM »

Probably mentioned before. Would it be possible to have an additional channel on the ship mesh texture that would give elevation data between 0-255 and apply it to lighting effects? An explosion nearby would illuminate the surface of the ship accordingly, generally the middle of the ship being the brightest in that channel. This would also provide some basis for other effects like (PhysX?) fog with the fog particles waving around the ship accordingly. Whaddaya thing?

9

Suggestions / Misc ideas list

« on: September 25, 2013, 02:44:34 PM »

1. (F)leet screen overlay in space and battle. The icons on the left, make options to toggle visibility (show all, show incomplete CR, show incomplete repairs, never show) so i can see CR and repairs. Just rip off from sins of a solar empire:



2. When using any screen in space the bottom-left info panel expands. Make it always expanded, add toggle options for every line?

3. Shooting through ships: When ship loses armour across the fire line make the shots go through the ship like indiana jones shooting the five nazis with one bullet.

4. I never use missiles, they always get shot down/miss unless the enemy is overloaded (by that point he's dead already anyway). Make missiles less powerful but more numerous and faster, they should be an alternative to blasters of cannons, not a niche thing.

5. Minigame missions. Later in development i guess, an example of these missions will be a race between your frigate and others to manouver through a very dense asteroid field to the top end of the map (similar to Pursue). Another will be on the same map an "Icebreaker" mission where its up to you to clear a path through asteroids/ice/comets between the nodes (sensor array, etc...) for NPC convoy.

6. Different battle scenarios. Examples of this will be a 30-second timer at start of battle, at the end of which a hugeass comet will streak by the battle map ramming and possibly destroying any ship in its path, followed by a cloud of asteroids. Another example would be falling into a planet's atmosphere - all ships start in the middle of the map and the only goal is to reach the edge of the map to escape and survive, ships will have an increasing red/fire glow as entering the atmosphere with increased damage taken until all ships escape or burn up (use shields!).

7. Automated "fleets". Send a small convoy from your fleet to sell all the goods and clear your inventory and buy supplies. These will return to your fleet ofc, perhaps a specific ship for this like the towing ships. opens fun things for modding.

8. Multiple factions battles (not just 1v1), have pirates run into battles between me and hegemony. This opens up sweet storyline options.

9. "Siege" ships, things like disabling shields and engines for increased range. Probably not exactly like that but you get the idea. Perhaps have it interact with battle objective nodes?

10. Larger wings. Wasps are cool imho. I want wings of fighters with more fighters (and each weaker i guess).

11. Ramming ships. Have ship hulls specialised in melee/ramming. Fast cruiser with no shields and lots of armor, small weapon slots and decent for actually ramming bigger ships.

12. New weapon slot (for new faction?). Purple colour weapon slot, focuses on "fancy" weapons with weird effects. Things like Nanite Swarm Launcher that releases a nanobot cloud to damage any ships within bypassing shields, dubstep gun (google it), spiderbot gun that launchers tiny spiders that crawl around the enemy ship's hull and damage subsystems, grapple gun that launches a grapple to enemy ship and you can mess with that ship's trajectory and maybe ram it into your own ships or asteroids for fun. Things like that.

Hope that's enough! <3

10

General Discussion / CR is balanced in the long term!

« on: September 16, 2013, 08:20:36 PM »

Right now CR is bad. It's not fun and annoying. But this happens only because there is nothing to do apart from one and a half system of only combat. We are still missing trade, missions, mining, research, storyline, exploration, etc...

Only doing combat means CR gets tanked really hard really fast and I essentially spend half my time simply waiting and doing nothing waiting for my CR to go up for the next engagement (i also use dev mode just to get more cash and buy supply so i dont have to bother with supply maintenance). Also we have to adapt from our previews way of fighting, understanding that freight ships help, going after the biggest ship right away might not the the best, etc...

What i think the game needs is these interelationships fleshed out, perhaps lock certain ships behind a skill tree or require specific crew/officer requirements. So yes right now CR kinda feels bad, supply feels too hard to manage but i think it will lend itself well enough later on as the remaining core features are implemented. Fingers crossed for our own supply chain from autofactories!

11

Suggestions / 0.6 so far for me

« on: September 15, 2013, 10:26:21 AM »

Some of these might be from simply not knowing how to play!

- Constantly running out of supplies either to lack of cargo space or not being able to catch anything. As soon as i go into cruisers i can't catch anything except the big fleets that overpower me.

- CR makes me wait after combat just to watch the CR bar fill back up, that leads into the first problem above where i spend too much supply and not being able to sustainably recover it.

- CR in combat - as soon as battle goes over the optimal performance timer i might aswel quit because i keep getting malfunctions. Yes i know CR is low but if i wait for CR to come back up i run out of supplies.

- Supply and fuel costs - too high? I can't affort to buy them all the time, maybe im just doing it wrong?

- Repairs + CR is too big of a supply hit, supply just evaporates.

- Can't see crew requirements while buying crew. When i buy a new ship i need to leave the shop screen and go into fleet screen to mouseover the ? icon and find the skeleton crew line in the messy list of the tooltip and then come back and calculate how much crew i need across all ships to get them all manned.

- Really need a better way to see crews on ships in space and shops.

- Can't zoom out far enough to be confortable. Need more zoom out.

- Can't unpause while looking at map in space. Need that allowed. <3

- In space when i go into inventory the bottom-left frames expand. Any way to keep these expanded outside of inventory screen?

- Text based pre- and post-battle manouvers (send salvate teams, pursue, etc...) are a bit awkward, would be nice to have some sort scheme or visual cue. Some coloured circles schematic or something?

-New sounds are awesome, tho it seems all sound the same somewhat, not much differentiation between different weapon types but maybe it's just me. overall awesome.

- Improved UI tho there's new problems with it. Overall greately improved.

Suggestions:

- Tie CR to crew. Implement a "skeleton crew vs optimal crew" dial where CR is gained faster if the ship has optimal crew as opposed to skeleton crew. Crew rank also affects both the gain and maximum CR. Supplies should go to repairs and rearms.

-Add an Auto-Sort checkbox in inventory screens, would be sweet <3

- "Auto-fire" on shield, can't fire, manouver and turn the omni shield at the same time Would be nice to let the AI turn the shield around to absorb the 20 missiles flying at me. I ALWAYS go for front shield + extended shield because i really don't like controlling the omni shield on top of the rest.

- Have you thought about a third crew type Engineer Crew; that doesn't count towards ship crew requirement (like marines) but work towards repairing/CR? What about having crew dependent on the hull, installed mods and equipment? Having a cruiser with fewer weapons or mods would require less crew?

- Have you thought about "Elite" ships that need higher crew requirements as opposed to their normal couterparts? Or anything similar.

12

General Discussion / Installer torrent?

« on: September 13, 2013, 04:08:00 PM »

The download links don't work/are very slow, any chance for a torrent of the installer? I would seed all the time

EDIT: Meh i guess it will download eventually >_>

13

Modding / Making a mod/coversion but need a helper

« on: August 22, 2013, 02:51:15 PM »

Hi! I was looking at making my own total conversion of the vanilla game into a new game that includes using only ships and weapons from the mod (no vanilla anything).

But i am having trouble wrapping my head around all the coding required to do that so if anyone is interested in doing the "paperwork" to set up the ships and weapons i'd be very glad as i would handle the art creation.

So the one thing i ask of you is confidentiality (i want it to be a suprise :3 ) and a little patience as i create all the models for ships and weapons. Skype for discussion would be best, in english ofc (i have all other voice comms). The total conversion itself is not going to be big, it will, in fact, have less ships and weapons than vanilla i think.

14

Suggestions / Campaign progress and post-endgame

« on: August 21, 2013, 06:33:38 PM »

I've no idea how the campaign will go so i'll explain my idea with the typical trope of: Trying to survive -> finding a secret -> secret revealed -> gather team/weapons/allies -> fight waves of enemies -> confront boss -> boss tells you the ACTUAL secret at 1% health and he becomes your ally to fight THE ACTUAL EVIL -> the end,  you get the princess, the castle and a hug.

So what we do after that? The story of Starsector tells us that technology is not being developed and we're living in some sort of dark ages where everything is degraded back. So what if, when we get to the final boss fight and get the princess/castle/hug we find some AI dude in a tessaract-something that says "yo, you dudes kinda forgot technology, so here's a planet full of pre-made stuff. all food and water is free you guys just go live there and make some mona lisas, reinvent the wheel (literally, cus there's no charriots in space), and start discovering new stuff like your ancestors did! would be totally rad to go back to the golden age of huma-- BZZ" the tritachion takes over and wants some post-human singularity thing where everyone is like uploaded to internet and walks around in robots instead. But then the hegemony sweeps in and goes like "no we must keep order and have everyone living and paying taxes so we can have free education and medicare for everyone and---. Then pirates come in and go like "yarr you swalbags! we all just want freedom for everyone and no taxes and opression we just want freedom and bla bla".

So you have this mass-effect style choice between the three and there's a random hologram kid standing nearby but ignore him. But the trick here is that no matter what choice you make the other two factions fight you so its a you+your choice against the other two factions in a 2v2 space battle boss fight. But everyone dies except your single ship. You escape with that AI dude in a tessaract-something and it takes you to an unknown star system at the edge of the square galaxy map (wat?) and you find some tribe of humans and start developing space infrastructure to establish trade and culture for everyone and get out of the dark ages.

SO TO MY POINT/TLDR: After the "endgame" there should be a procedural phase of the game where you use the resources of your fleet to fight against everyone else to establish planetary and space infrastructure to get humanity out of the dark ages with the help of that AI dude in a tessaract-something. Things like beacons, hypergates between systems, space elevators on planets, etc... You establish industrial chains on gathering resources from asteroids, research stations to unlock new technologies (like a technology victory in Civilization) and expand that across the entire square galaxy map for the glory of humanity and a second renaissance!

What do you think of this post-endgame open-ended phase?

15

Suggestions / "Hacking"

« on: July 05, 2013, 07:51:56 PM »

Using it in quotes in the title because anyone who is able to hack understands that "hacking" is an often misused word. What i'm basically talking about here is the typical ability of sci-fi ships to hack into the enemie's computers to extract hidden information and influence the ship physicly. But this has to be confined in a game mechanic that lends itself smoothly across the rest of the game's features.

So i propose the following mechanic as another dimention to combat. My aim is to keep it as micromanagement-free as possible so as to not influence current gameplay in combat but add another layer of interesting gameplay.

So a stat that ships have is the processing power of the on-board computer in Flops (don't mind actual numbers). This computer, or more precisely its processing speed will dictate how all system ships work - this will translate into a flat % modifier, not unlike World of Warcraft's Haste Rating. Things like turret accuracy, shield extension, damage-to-flux shield efficiency, etc... Things that are controlled not by hardware but by software. Implementing it into the "vanilla" game will simply add a 100% modifier to all affected stats thus changing absolutely nothing.

What will change however is the addition of on-board computer software. This software is just programs sold in stations (or hacked from other ships in combat!) that you upload to ships in order to provide that function. So i'll provide some concrete examples:

-TunnelWorm.huk - Long range. Its only function is to provide access to the enemy ship's systems for other programs to work and must successfully penetrate the enemy ship first before activating. [Passively increases virus penetration +20 while active]
-ShieldFrequency.sov - Short range. Every 1 second there's a 0.25% chance to find the enemy's shield frequency. Chance is additive each attempt. (5% on the 20th second)
-TurretJam.siv - Short range. Takes 10 seconds. Immobilizes a random turret on the enemy's ship.
-TurretHack.sov - Short range, takes 30 seconds. Takes control of a random enemy ship's turret or hardpoint.
-Firewall.huk - Passively increases virus protection by +15.
-Punda Anti-Virus.huk - Removes a random virus within your ship's systems. Generates Flux while active. Still doesn't block popups.
-xxxBBCxxx.hck - Disguised as a porn folder designed to retrieve schematics. A successful anti-viral attack on this program sends a random schematic available from this ship to you.
-DDOS.bak - An extremely simple yet effective way to shut down a virus attack. Increases time required for successful virus attacks for both you and all affected by 800%. Yes, a .bak file. These are still around.
-LogicBomb.hck - Upon uploading takes 20 seconds to activate. Upon activation it randomly choses a subsystem (a turret, afterburner, shields, etc...), when that subsystem activates it generates a large amount of Flux instead. If this causes an overload that subsystem is destroyed (flameout).

Pretty much all of the hacking is done automatically in fleet battles. The only management a player has to make is which programs to load on which ships outside of combat. Programs have a computing power requirement (so bigger ships can handle more programs), range at which they are effective and the firewall/anti-viral software running. Ships with faster computers perform viral and anti-viral tasks faster (usually). I envision fancy minimalistic tooltips popping out from a ship indicating a hack is in progress and it's basically a tug-of-war between your and the enemy ship's software programs. Some ships may be loadded with defence software and nigh-impossible to penetrate, others may focus on penetration and have less defence.

What do you think?