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1

General Discussion / Re: the case against steam

« on: Today at 11:50:22 AM »

The idea that steam comment and reviews would drive devs to madness... sounds like a skill issue. If the steam userbase did leave a flood of negativity on the steam platform, then just don't read it? This is especially true for starsector, which has its own forum right here with a relatively active community. No need to engage with toxicity on another platform. That is, assuming it would actually be that bad.

It's not like they can't just come here once they found out this the only place that feedback matters.

Only a small percentage of people would care enough to do that, and if their attitude is really *that bad* then just ban them from the forums.

AFAIK the only reason Alex has stated for not putting the game on steam is specifically the slow update schedule potentially causing the game to get review bombed on steam, so if it was on steam he would only do that after a proper 1.0 release. Can't complain about "slow" updates on a finished product.

2

Suggestions / Re: missiles arent op, eccm is

« on: January 17, 2025, 03:07:36 PM »

I think overall harpoons might be too strong, but not terribly so. Vanshilar has demonstrated that a truly optimized fleet requires mixing in ballistics from the conquests, some frigates to cover the flanks, and a doom flagship. So while it is still missile spam, it's not as simple as running pure gryphons.

3

Suggestions / Re: missiles arent op, eccm is

« on: January 17, 2025, 01:36:04 PM »

Firing all 3 sounds like it'd kill the small harpoon as an actual weapon.

I don't really see situations where you would want to fire less than 3 in a volley.

4

Suggestions / Re: missiles arent op, eccm is

« on: January 17, 2025, 01:10:17 PM »

I think the rate of fire for the small harpoon is a bit trickier to balance. Even if you doubled the refire delay to 2 seconds I don't think it would make a substantial difference to spam. You would have to nerf it up to something like 4 seconds, which would ruin the missile as a finisher. Oddly enough, something that might work is changing it to fire a 3 shot burst but with a 10 second cooldown. It could still work as a finisher, but it would have a worse overall rate of fire when you stack up additional ammo. Not being able to shoot the *exact* number you want doesn't seem like much a of a downside either, I rarely see the need to fire exactly 1 or exactly 2 harpoons.

5

Suggestions / Re: Require BP for Hostile Ship Recovery

« on: January 17, 2025, 10:09:13 AM »

This idea goes against a lot of the intentional design choices of the game. In the post-collapse sector you have to get by using whatever you find lying around specifically because blueprints aren't available and making new stuff is hard.

On top of that, there's nothing unfair about getting a new ship as reward for beating said ship.

6

Suggestions / Re: missiles arent op, eccm is

« on: January 17, 2025, 10:03:32 AM »

Personally I feel like if harpoon gets its refire rate heavily nerfed, vanilla missile spam would become less oppressive in its current state.

It is pretty strange that medium harpoons have a cooldown of only 10 seconds when typhoons have 15 seconds. You can overload a ship with harpoons, and then hit the same ship with another volley before the overload ends. Sabot pod also has a cooldown of 10 seconds, but that feels fair when it has short range and only 2 missiles per volley.

If I remember correctly, the small gorgon was too powerful on release was fixed by nerfing its refire rate. Harpoon pods could stand to have at least a 15 second cooldown, if not 20.

7

General Discussion / Re: Ziggurat performance testing

« on: January 15, 2025, 11:21:27 AM »

That is impressive. I guess nobody has truly optimized the ziggurat's loadout, since it's always taken for granted that it's going to be powerful regardless. If it has this kind of performance solo, it might be able to outdo missile spam with an actual fleet backing it up.

8

Suggestions / Re: Officer academy structure

« on: January 15, 2025, 09:59:20 AM »

An officer academy could be an interesting structure. It could even be integrated into the core worlds, where factions with high officer quality as part of their doctrine could have one of these on their military worlds.

For functions, I can think of a couple that would be fair without just giving you custom made officers. The first is it changes how officers spawn on the planet: basically, it always keeps the planet stocked up with 3 officers that refresh each month. Even better, they always spawn at level 2 and you get to pick what skills they start with. This would make it fairly easy to get started on a new set of officers if you decide to change your fleet.

The second function would be officer storage. Admins that are inactive sit around at 10% of their normal salary. The academy letting you store officers, only paying 10% their normal salary would be nice. You don't want store a billion of them because it is costing you money, but if you have a good officer skillset for a ship you aren't using right now, you don't have to fire them to make room.

9

Suggestions / Re: Recall device

« on: January 15, 2025, 03:44:21 AM »

Yeah, this makes sense. My thought here is that even if the AI is not great with using the system on a lone Astral, the behavior *might* become more effective when it reaches critical  mass, for whatever reason.

I'll think about it a bit more! Leaning towards sticking with it as-is, just to avoid overbuffing the ship, since what it's already getting is substantial and realistically, it didn't feel to me like it was *that* far off from being viable already. Well, I'd say it's already viable (depending on one's definition), just on the lower end of the spectrum unless you build it like a battleship and go very hardcore with micromanaging it.

It turns out: yes. I added the extra system charge on top of the other changes and 4 astrals easily destroyed the same remnant fleet without the enemy getting close enough to fight back. You could balance that out by increasing the cooldown, but at that point it doesn't feel good to use either, so why bother.

10

Suggestions / Re: Buff the Enforcer

« on: January 14, 2025, 12:39:49 AM »

I noticed that too. Now if only they would actually turn before burn driving. Add turning to burn drive, anyone? hehe

But then it wouldn't be a BURN drive, it would be a TURN drive!

11

Suggestions / Re: Recall device

« on: January 13, 2025, 07:51:26 AM »

I've got another suggestion for an AI tweak.

Carriers are often assigned as escorts to keep them safe. They even have an "auto-escort" behavior when you don't assign them yourself. This is great, but it creates a small issue when you want to focus fire on a target. If I have my astral escorting a paragon and I want them both to target the same ship, this overrides the astral's escort order. To get around this, it would be nice if instead I can just give the paragon a kill command, and any carriers escorting it would automatically target the same ship.

I would not want this behavior for any other escorts, just for carriers specifically.

12

Suggestions / Re: Recall device

« on: January 13, 2025, 07:29:01 AM »

There is the chronic issue that fighters get more powerful the more you stack them.

Bro's stuck in 0.9.1. Quite curiously, missile spamming never caught on like carrier spam, despite also being quite good currently.

I'm talking about the inherent nature of fighters (and missiles) to concentrate large amounts of burst damage on a single target due to their ability to fly over allies. Carrier spam's viability is entirely irrelevant, the point is that it's hard to buff carriers without running into this specific issue.

13

Suggestions / Re: Buff the Enforcer

« on: January 13, 2025, 04:01:19 AM »

Enforcer at 8 dp would be good with its current stats. It's already *fine* in the early game, and at 8 dp it could run CH xyphos for the same dp as a manticore. That sounds fair.

14

Suggestions / Re: Recall device

« on: January 13, 2025, 01:00:50 AM »

There is always the heretical option of buffing it a lot, and then raising the dp

I mostly like the charge-based system for player piloting, it makes it feel much more impactful as a flagship. While it does help the AI, I don't think it's going to get nearly as much value as the player can. I'll test out an astral mono-fleet with this change to see if it's an issue.


First test
This is without the recall device change, just the ATC and missile racks (and 0.7 efficiency).

astral

[close]

combat screenshots

[close]

The [4 astrals + support] is doing worse than [3 paragons + support], but they can at least beat ordos. Next I'm going to test a mixed fleet [2 astral + 2 paragon + support] to see how it does.


*Side note:*
There is the chronic issue that fighters get more powerful the more you stack them. The current carrier skills somewhat mitigate this by giving larger bonuses when you run a smaller number of carriers, but the numbers could be even more aggressive in that direction. For example, you could increase the carrier group bonus to 75% and reduce the max number of bays to 6. On top of that, you could increase the officer multiplier from x1.5 to x2. The result would be that running 1 astral would get you +150% replacement speed instead of the current +75%. A similar change to fighter uplink would net you +60% top speed instead of +30%.

That might sound very strong, but if you're investing in fleet skills to buff a specific ship type they need to come out more powerful than other ships as long as you respect the skill's soft-cap. This approach works perfectly for phase coil tuning, so it should be possible with the carrier skills too. For herons and moras, 6 bays comes out to 40 dp which is the same as phase coil tuning.


Second test
I don't know about the speed, but compared to running 4 astrals this felt a lot safer. Both the paragon and the astral escorting it had nothing to fear from pretty much anything the remnant could throw at it.

fleet screenshots

[close]

15

Suggestions / Re: Recall device

« on: January 12, 2025, 01:44:50 PM »

Hmm, that's a nice suggestion about the AI, thank you - did that! Going to mull over the charge-based idea; it definitely does have some things going for it.

Nice! Glad I could help.

Astral:
   Removed built-in Advanced Optics
   Added built-in Advanced Targeting Core and Expanded Missile Racks
   Increased shield flux/damage to 0.7 (was: 0.6)

The thought here is that if you give the Astral something special that boosts the fighters, then what you're doing is encouraging builds that focus purely on the fighters and neglect its weapons, which is already something that may happen to some extent. So instead, the hullmods add value to the weapons you might mount, and the slight shield nerf is to make it more difficult for it to work as a primary a front-line combatant.

I do get this. Missile racks are a no-brainer, because those large missiles are always worth using. The medium energies, not so much. Advanced targeting core might help with that.


For the system change, it might cause the ship to be too fighter focused. On the other hand consider: it's really fun to pilot!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVzAJpU2RyY