Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
Bar bounties are much easier than intel bounties in terms of the ratio of fleet power to money, so they are good to get in the early game.I think the problem with bad bar missions is not that you re-roll them over and over until you get good ones, but rather that bar missions are just not that useful in comparison to other things you can do. Maybe that is ok, but I think going to bars for missions is a more interesting way of getting them than just looking at the intel tab.Bar missions (like raids or drop dead for something) pay even worse than named bounties (which already underpay if you cannot win flawlessly), after revenge fleets or other "gotcha" traps sprung.
More recurring people to look for sometimes:
* Arms dealers, illegal or otherwise. (Order things, possibly without blueprint; possible contact)
* (Maybe) Someone concerned about increased pirate raids. (Effective system bounty at a fringe system)
And sometimes, especially in my own colonies, someone posting bounty missions like a contact. (I do not know if you can make contacts with your own faction.)
So I started up a colony system, and I'm hemorrhaging money (which was to be expected at the beginning), so I leave the system to go make some money. Before I can get back, my spaceport is disabled for 90 days on one planet, and my stability is dropped by 6 points on another. I have a spaceport at every planet, and a patrol HQ at my "capital", and ground defenses on every planet.Destroy the pirate base that raided you & that should give you a few free months.
I can't sit in system and wait for enemies to show up, so how do I increase the protection of my colonies without babysitting them?
It would make salvaging ships to sell more viable though, assuming the ships are made expensive through an increase in base price. Are bounty prices also calculated based on the value of the enemy ships?I think the main issue is that ships are too cheap.Nah.
More expensive ships just means people grind more smuggling to get the fleet they want, and are that much more likely to ragequit on losing a fight.
I actually remember someone asking a similar question to this, that being how much is 1 credit worth. after they compared the cost of a wolf compared to that of modern frigates they concluded that one credit would be worth approximately 1000 dollars today. Using this we can assume the player character has to start with at least 1 million dollars to afford the fleet they have using the default start settings, not including the money you start with. so I'm guessing the player at the very least is a millionaire at the start.Maybe it was designed to be equivalent to a pound sterling during the golden age of piracy, given the inspirations of this game. You could also check vs supply maintenance cost, which for the Wolf is 5 supplies or 500C a month, compared to the material costs of upkeeping a frigate that is not in port and furnishing the crew's necessities.
I play this game on and off for about 10 years now and i still struggle to grasp the game mechanisms in combat.Shields do complicate this, if your long range DPS isn't high enough you won't break through the shield and all you'll do is annoy the enemy (since they tend to be smart enough to retreat behind their allies to vent), which is still useful because the AI will often overcommit to chasing you, but some ships will have to do the actual killing. I usually have a core of ~80-100 speed ships to destroy the cruisers & destroyers & scatter frigates, a couple Tempests for that harassment role, and some ~140 speed ships for flanking and pursuit.
For me it comes down to having speed and range and everything else is just second nature.
For example if you have Speed and Range you can just drive away while pummeling the enemy without any risks.
If you have range you can pummel the enemy who don't have range without any risks.
If you have Speed, well you can run away indefinitely - i retract my previous statement and say range is the only really important thing. With Range you are King of all. Range counters Speed.
There are some fringe cases but all involve high risk - high reward and that's not efficient.
Exponential profits meet exponential costsAnd exponential margins, though given the almost anarchic state of the post-Collapse sector perhaps we're meant to imagine that a populous planet is like a realm in Crusader Kings 3 (or 2 to a less extent), in which a single ruler can leverage only a small portion of the realm's resources. Administrators demand an absurd amount of money, perhaps the a substantial cut is taken by all lesser officials.
Very cool thread!What is the lore explanation for the planet population tiers being represented as powers of ten but the income and fleet power they produce scaling almost linearly with the tier number rather than logarithmically?
[I have a bit of a hang-up about how a lot of fantastic worldbuilding - scifi or not - doesn't have much respect for scale. (He says, writing for a game with hyperspace, popping between planets in mere days, and other absurdities. But at least it's not pretending to be an entire galaxy!) ... like, saying 'a thousand planets' sounds cool and is fun to drop as a line, but just imagine trying to comprehend what that means. If each of those planets has a billion people on it, that's a trillion people. No one really deals with the consequence of that number of people, the number of cultures and subcultures and ideas that would spin out from them all the time. It's too big. (Admittedly, some good science fiction does deal with trying to comprehend inhuman scales. We're, uh, not doing that here.)
It requires such massive abstraction that... well, the go-to would be Star Wars, right? How many planets are in Star Wars? Answers vary, but like: a thousand? a million? 50 million? How many have we seen across the whole of the behemoth of Star Wars IP- a couple hundred, maybe 0.002 percent of the alleged total? The difference between the stated number and experienced number hits me as a bit much, especially when we're asked to believe we're dealing with the top dogs of this universe. It can feel like begging for gravitas by throwing zeroes at you without earning them. (But who knows, maybe most of these planets have like 50 people and are super boring.) Anyway, to convey the universe, each planet is not treated as a planet, but is effectively treated as a single region or city. It has to be cut down like that so each planet has like 2 biomes and perhaps 3 significant locations, max, otherwise it's too much for human comprehension.
Starsector absolutely does this same thing, though reduced by a few orders of magnitude. Each planet has basically one thing going on, because that's the comprehensible scope of the game. The social scale of the game feels more like, I dunno, the seas of southeast Asia in the 17th century - getting between islands takes a couple days, crossing the span of the reasonably known world might take on the order of months, depending. This provides that human scale; a player can feel like they know the Persean Sector. Likewise, I feel like it's a lot more believable for one super cool space captain to have a large effect on a shared human demographic unit of somewhere around 200-2000 million people than doing the same in a population of trillions.]
[Ooh, in an alternate universe, it'd be cool if Starsector was set in just one solar system with similar game scale. ... Something like "Against A Dark Background"...]
To be fair King had some redeeming qualities which explained his high position, if Drachinifel's video on him is to be believed. He was a skilled reformer who brought the US navy from a negligible force that was all but disbanded in the late Gilded Age to the victors of the Pacific War, and despite his infamous temper and tendency to pick fights with his superiors he rose quite rapidly through the ranks for the time. No clue about the others though. So someone like Andrada should also have some qualities that explains his rise to power in addition to his fatal flaws, we've been given hints of his shrewd politicking, maybe he was a master of intrigue who engineered the victory that made him "the Lion" weeks before any ships were deployed. He did pick his star system well at any rate, even if he usually gets conquered in the first 4 years in Nerexelin.on the flipside, being an admiral does not necessarily imply any degree of competence in naval matters - one could easily advance up the ranks through some combination of charisma, politics, and patronage.
One of my favorite real-life examples; Miklos Horthy, Hungarian regent-slash-dictator, who was an admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Navy, back when Austria and Hungary had... a coastline, who had a distinctly mediocre record that consisted mostly of 'not losing'.
Or Ernest King, who rose to Fleet Admiral without ever commanding ships in battle at sea, drank heavily, and was frequently described as stupid and bullying (you can find numerous unflattering and hilarious comments about him by plenty of public figures; FDR once joked that King 'shaved every morning with a blowtorch').
The less said about David Beatty, the better. Dumb, sloppy, self-aggrandizing, indisciplined... and the longest serving First Sea Lord in the history of the Royal Navy.
This is just off the top of my head; it's easy to find more examples.
