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1

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: April 04, 2021, 05:00:50 PM »

There is now a jitter / glow effect on energy weapon offsets related to the EW mastery skill (at high flux levels) that could be useful for creating other effects. I dissected the skill.java but there doesn't seem to be anything responsible for triggering the effect.

Has anyone else looked into this?

2

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 04, 2021, 04:53:18 PM »

Keep in mind this patch took 2 years to make. I wouldn't of said as much if it was rushed out within a month. 2 years is plenty of time to properly test balance and go through QA proces if you ask me.

What's going to be the next excuse? Can't get to the office from the upstairs bedroom cause of 'rona quarantine?

3

General Discussion / Re: Drover overnerfed?

« on: April 03, 2021, 10:42:08 AM »

just putting the new PD perk on the table alone would have solved a lot of the problems with lpc spam in the past.

Drover is definitely better than a Condor by a long shot but then again that's not saying much.

And at the same cost as 3-4 more frigates or another fast cruiser?.. that pits the Drover as the most expensive destroyer to field, second to the phase ships which are inherently one size up in terms of costs.

not just drover - carriers in general got a bit overnerfed IMO.

I have also noticed my non-bomber carriers having a hard time sending out sorties during fights, most of the time they're sitting in the background counting their fighters. Very few times during a fight do I notice my broadsword filled heroin making any kind of substantial impact.

4

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 03, 2021, 10:22:37 AM »

Hey Alex, since Remnants used to be undercosted DP-wise because they were meant to be a boss faction and be harder to fight, now that officers are more important, they could be more fairly statted. 60 DP Radiant would also help make it more viable to take anything else but Radiant with Automated Ships skill...

Yeah, this makes sense. Remnants don't really need reduced DP cost on Radiant in addition to all the other advantages they now have.
Automated Ships skill with higher cap would become more proper choice between Radiant and several smaller ships.

If Special Modifications exploited at full power is really strong, why does the Radiant need to be weakened for player use?  It is overpowered for its cost, but that would be a good price to pay for not having +1 s-mods and boosted flux stats for the whole fleet.

I second this, because it is generally wrong to balance one extreme with another extreme. While this successfully makes the remnants stronger, it will also increase the disparity in snowballing every other faction you fight.

5

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 03, 2021, 10:08:56 AM »

Golde, youre making everyone bite their tongues here dude. Stop with the the stropping. I didnt make it past 'its lazy game design' until i didnt read the rest of your last comment. Youre entitled to your opinion, but seriously, tone it down and people may actually respect your opinion more.

The cosmos is a diverse place. I am not some esteemed individual trying to hold some sort of title.

I simply state what I find, they need not to be respected nor am I looking for your approval. They only exist to be read.

6

Suggestions / Re: Can we get a checkbox that lets us choose our gender in character-creation?

« on: April 03, 2021, 09:58:51 AM »

Well that's um..

Spoiler

[close]

There're a couple of mods that adds new portraits, you should look into how they work because it's all specified directly in the file they append.

7

General Discussion / Re: How do you kill 150k+ bounty fleets?

« on: April 03, 2021, 09:57:46 AM »

Piecing together from what Alex said over the past few days, your fleet is just not built correctly for any sort of mid to endgame content in his sandbox game.

Forget about getting small ships, because by the time you get to late game against 20+ officers, you're just going to be trickling in your ship one by one.

95a patch broke just as many things as it fixed.

8

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 03, 2021, 07:46:42 AM »

You need like 4 frigates to solve this (DP) problem?.. the current system is 100 times better than the previous and drastically makes using smaller ships more enjoyable vs lol capital capital capital steamroll.

Because this is lazy game design. On one hand, you are gated from competing at all without officered frigates (which is still kind of a waste). And on the other, just bypass the entire mechanic with two gremlins ontop of everything else wrong with it.

I endorse most if not all the buffs to frigates this release brought because it gave them a role in the fleet. Not this kind of arbitrary mechanic to artificially inflate its value as a do-it or die single use appliance to be kept in the back of the trunk at all times.

9

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 03, 2021, 01:41:24 AM »

Hey Alex, since Remnants used to be undercosted DP-wise because they were meant to be a boss faction and be harder to fight, now that officers are more important, they could be more fairly statted. 60 DP Radiant would also help make it more viable to take anything else but Radiant with Automated Ships skill...

That's also part of the outline in the original post.

@Alex I know you're a one man studio, but can we expect more than 10 minutes of playtest and no QA out of the 2 years it took you to bring this update to the table?

Barring Safety Overrides or some other unbalanced cheese like derelict contingency (that also somehow slips right through QA) a lowtech fleet at your ideal 180 DP is just straight up not playable against endgame remnant ordos sauntering about with 4 radiants and 20+ officers.

Just a quick glance at all these glaring issues that people have brought up over the past week makes it obvious that, no, the game is not just rough around the edges, slightly overtuned or needs a little polish. It's no QA and no playtest.

10

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 02, 2021, 03:31:53 PM »

If shafting players with 160 DP is mere encouragement for contest objectives to reach DP parity or to force their hands to use frigates in the first place; then having two phase frigates to completely sidestep the mechanic shouldn't even be allowed.

I'm not sure what you mean. Having 2 officered phase frigates for capping points isn't sidestepping the mechanic that encourages the use of fast frigates, it's leaning into it and doing it as efficiently as possible. That's like saying having 3 Drovers with the carrier group skill just for interceptor coverage is sidestepping the fighter game.

Because the new DP system is nothing but a nuisance that hinders gameplay. AI piloting has never been good to begin with. Fighting remnants now just devolves into fighting outnumbered zombie pilots with stacked debuffs lest you have some sort of min maxed burst damage build that passes the frigate stat check.

5 cruisers and some frigates gets the upper hand in every possible way against an endgame fleet because of what? Say it louder because I can't hear you.

@Alex, nobody asked you to go make a pity mode.

The previous release had its own fair share of problems; spending 20 minutes spawnkilling 50 odd atlases at top map was too easy and too long,

So now somehow being forced to trickle in your endgame fleet one ship at a time into a massive remnant armada that consists all of one cap and 5 zombie cruisers due to some conveniently placed artificial limitation is supposed to be less ad tedium??

You still haven't told us how many mercenary officers we're gonna need to hire to get a leg up in this fight, because if 7 alpha cores ontop of officer cap can't do it, then I'm out of story points for the next 10 cycles.

Care to explain your deep wisdom and chain of logic involved in this new system, so that even the mentally challenged me can understand?

11

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 02, 2021, 09:45:19 AM »

All very well said. It's not the player's job to be making these kind of balancing changes in the first place.

The key to having 240 DP all the time is to have 2 officered phase frigates with elite phase mastery.

Ontop of the infinite officer, and permanent ECCM penalty, this is a very important point.

If shafting players with 160 DP is mere encouragement for contest objectives to reach DP parity or to force their hands to use frigates in the first place; then having two phase frigates to completely sidestep the mechanic shouldn't even be allowed.

The way I see it, it's a basic stat check mechanic shoehorned into otherwise good gameplay that's been implemented with very little foresight as to balance and whatnot.

12

Suggestions / Re: MAJOR STORY SPOILERS! The disappointing nerfs to one of the new ships

« on: April 01, 2021, 11:35:33 PM »

Consider this, it's a phase ship.

They shouldn't be able to detect it in the first place.

13

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 11:20:51 PM »

Barring mercenaries (which are a very stop-gap measure), capturing objectives is how you overcome the DP deficit if you really need to get deployment parity to win a fight.

But enemy fleet having 2-3 times normal limit of officers is not some exceptional rare situation. It is the norm of high end bounties.

And while also using non-gimped ships at CR levels not exceptionally high.

The thing you're both missing, I think, is how the deployment point allocation works now. It's explained in the tooltip, but having already played the game, it's kind of natural to assume it works the same way as before, look at things in those terms, and become frustrated.

But - what primarily matters is officers, not the ships they're on. Adding an extra 10 Paragons won't help much. 10 Paragons with officers vs 10 frigates with officers also doesn't make much of a difference. If you *really* need a leg up for a tough fight, you can hire some mercenary officers to go above the limit. You're not encouraged to go with a fleet full of large ships because it doesn't help at all. Neither does trying to "match the dp" of the enemy fleet.


Barring mercenaries (which are a very stop-gap measure), capturing objectives is how you overcome the DP deficit if you really need to get deployment parity to win a fight.

Very funny.

1) Please educate us on how many mercenaries are required to really leg up in this fight.

2) Explain cost both in SP, time and capital required to amass said amount of mercenaries. (if that is possible in the first place due to contract expiring)

3) see attached picture.

Spoiler

with 7 Alpha Core's worth of officers (which wouldn't even be realistic in the first place), we are STILL at 50% DP penalty.

You're gonna need to count both hands and feet for the number of mercenaries to get a leg up in this fight.

[close]

The current non-modded cap is 240 deployment points at max battle slider, if the player gets all objectives. I wouldn't mind the skills being scaled up to meet that instead of being at 180.

(Yep - I've actually got a note to raise the skill cap from 180 to 240 where applicable. I think that'll just make more sense as the number to settle on there.)

Again, why bother implementing a DP calculation system if your *ideal* way of playing the game is to be permanently *** at 160dp?

Also, I remember correctly someone said something about how unintuitive stat-checks are in videogames and that they are definitely not the way to go in starsector?

Care to explain the difference here between a stat check and no frigate w/ officer = game over?

Frigates are useful in their own right, but as of now it's plain and obvious that they're just an excuse to add statchecks in disguise.

I could be mistaken, but your target audience for the game is not all of the 5 people that stuck around since kickstarter and would attend your birthday party when 1.0 launches in 2077.

And to the point where you would go and cap the max battle size in the ingame settings to 400. To an average player such as myself who might not be capable of building a min-maxed fleet to your ideal specifications OR someone who might not even be familiar with the concept of a config file outside the game or someone who might not even care enough because the icon is sitting the recycling and they're already back to playing Fortnite, just go figure right? because you've already got our money.

Singleplayer indie games are often one way streets to the consumer to begin with. We are talking in broad terms of course; of ten random people that purchase your game, should they encounter some kind of non-technical related issue with your game, how likely do you think they are going to take out their time, seek out the forums then make an account, get verified and then spend some more time to describe in great detail what they think went wrong and propose some kind of solution supppose they have one in the first place?

It goes without saying with all the things both mentioned and unmentioned above that QA and playtesting are particularly important if your intent is to make a wonderful game. So why do you forego it?

Alex; undeniably, you have a good following of the most hardcore and talented fanbase.

But stuff like this is just a disservice to everyone else, this release by far has been two steps forwards and one step backwards.

14

Suggestions / Re: pathetic DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 04:10:43 PM »

The game clearly balanced around 180 dp max for the player, what's the point of builds and tactics if you can just deploy 10 capital ships to faceroll every challenge. Now small ships have their purpose even at late game.

sounds good!

Mind telling us why don't we just cap DP at 180 and call it a day then? I'm sure by that point the game would be a lot smaller and would be much easier running on toasters no?

it's a win win for you, right?

15

Suggestions / Re: * DP balance, is QA and playtest not part of the dev cycle?

« on: April 01, 2021, 03:31:58 PM »

Also, capturing command points gives you a lot of extra DP, like 60-80 extra DP now. I've been deploying frigates early just to contest command points and it works quite well. You're definitely not stuck at min DP, like in the last release. IMO, that problem has been improved, not worsened with this patch.

The ECM thing is pretty annoying though, and I hope it gets adjusted. Even with the ECM skill, I feel like I have no chance to match enemy ECM. I can't spam officered frigates like the AI can.

I do like that the endgame is a lot harder. It's been much more interesting trying to find things that work, and I've been having a lot of fun.

half the times, the objectives are in a line in the dead center of the map. With the officer personality changes, remnants actively suicide to trade damage and will only drive forwards.

Suppose that your frigates are superior in every way, capturing objectives still wouldn't be feasible from dog-piling of superior body count, and should you not get there fast enough the objectives will be permanently overrun.

I guess I'm really better off to go play cointoss.