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1

General Discussion / Re: Asking ChatGPT things about Starsector

« on: March 31, 2023, 04:05:18 PM »

It does seem about as informed as the average reddit user lol.

In all seriousness, I'm pretty sure these AI language models are just trying to guess which words are likely to come after each other based on whatever data they were trained on (which is almost certainly from long before the official release of Chat GPT), so there is no direct understanding of the meanings of words or concepts, just correlations between words and phrases based on whatever training data they fed it.

It's clearly not spitting out anything particularly meaningful or insightful, but it is sort of fun to read.

2

Suggestions / Re: Underslung Weapon Mounts

« on: March 17, 2023, 08:18:03 AM »

I will say that I was trying to think of use cases, and realized that apogee could really like this hullmod, although OP would still probably be a big concern.

But it would be insanely niche in the best case, assuming it is not allowing missiles and not allowing mount types that don't already exist on the ship.

3

Suggestions / Re: Underslung Weapon Mounts

« on: March 16, 2023, 02:17:59 PM »

I think the OP cost of an extra (non-missile) weapon, vents to support the extra weapon, and the hullmod would be too much 99% of the time for it to be useful. IMO, most ships are either flux limited or OP limited. Very few are mount limited.

Edit: Rewording some stuff because I missed a bit of the discussion skimming: I think if you eliminate the obvious strong things like extra missiles, or mount types you can't normally get, then it would not be very good.

4

General Discussion / Re: Automated Ships Question

« on: March 05, 2023, 09:14:38 AM »

You can also use automated ships to get a bunch of gamma core frigates that benefit from wolfpack tactics and count towards electronic warfare stuff.

Honestly, I'm not even sure alpha core is worth it over beta core all the time. 6 skills from a beta core is frequently enough to get the best stuff and the last 3 are just ok. I've tried beta radiant + gamma frigates and it seemed solid.

5

General Discussion / Re: Automated Ships Question

« on: March 04, 2023, 08:22:57 AM »

Keep in mind that fights are basically never 1v1.

Yes, fights are never 1v1, so if you dump all your capacity into inefficient energy weapons to kill one ship, you will not have much capacity left to use your extremely efficient shields against the other ships you are engaging, whereas if you are firing around dissipation, then the enemies are wasting their flux on your (fortress) shield while you deal steady damage. A paragon on max flux is unable to use its most valuable asset (shield).

Obviously like 20%-30% over dissipation is fine because fortress shield gives some extra effective dissipation, but weapon flux doubling dissipation is very bad IMO.

IMO, how tolerant a ship is to over-fluxing is about how much they rely on shields. The more you want to keep shields up, the less you want to overflux. It also relates to weapon efficiency (and opposing shield efficiency): firing weapons over dissipation can be actively bad if you are building up flux faster in your own ship than the opponent (tac lances are pretty bad for this, particularly since the AI like to fire them on cooldown rather than saving them for armor/hull damage where they are actually effective).

The other factor I was thinking about recently is polarized armor, since that is based on hard flux, so you might actually want to avoid generating too much soft flux to maximize polarized armor value, but I am not sure how important that is.

6

General Discussion / Re: Automated Ships Question

« on: March 03, 2023, 10:17:47 PM »

I think paragon in particular benefits from not overfluxing too much because it has fortress shield which uses capacity very efficiently, so it's better to save capacity to block damage (forcing the enemy to trade flux for 90% reduced damage on top of .6 or better shield efficiency, instead of spending your capacity on >1 flux/damage energy weapons). You don't need to be perfectly neutral but significantly overfluxing is bad IMO.

Also, in general, overfluxing with inefficient guns (like tach lance) is bad for the AI because it will fire into shields (and the flux efficiency means you are building more flux in your own ship than the opponent) and then back off because of high flux. You can overcome that to some extent with reckless AI, but that has... other downsides. It can also be tricky to get the AI to turn off the right guns on high flux and you have to be clever with weapon groupings.

A player ship can be as overfluxxed pretty much as you want, because the player can manage that better than the AI.

7

Suggestions / Re: Nerfing safety overrides

« on: February 28, 2023, 12:44:43 PM »

Personally, I find SO to be boring to use. It turns the game into just holding W+M1 and using reckless officers, and if you kill everything before CR runs out, you win, otherwise you lose. Obviously that's an exaggeration, but IMO it makes the loadout design much less interesting (just use highest DPS weapons and ignore other stats because ranges are all reduced anyway and you have functionally limitless dissipation), and it also makes piloting a bit less interesting, since it's mostly running things over with boosted speed and flux stats, or occasionally sitting and waiting for your fleet to make an opening because your reduced range prevents you from engaging. I find less situations where I have to do piloting stuff rather than just auto fire everything and fly forward until things die. To me that's just uninteresting.

This solution doesn't address that at all. Honestly, SO is really not far off from balanced right now (although IMO definitely over-tuned), but I just don't think it's a good mechanic, and I would be happy to see it reworked for that reason.

8

General Discussion / Re: Why the sliding-scale mechanic on prices?

« on: February 27, 2023, 08:16:16 AM »

I have a vague memory that the price per/unit is not uniform for the entire sale, i.e. the first x units sell for the original high price, and then the price goes down per unit as you sell more, but the first units are still getting the higher price.

Not 100% sure though.

9

Suggestions / Re: Bounty Target inside Black Hole.

« on: February 25, 2023, 10:52:07 AM »

I've been in this situation before, and it's not really that reasonable to kill the flagship without losing your own ships because you also lose CR extremely rapidly. When I was trying, I would be in critical malfunction territory before even killing any enemies. I don't think you could reliably find and kill the enemy flagship in the middle of their fleet. Only possibility would be maybe phase ship or hyperion cheese IMO, but those ships already have CR issues.

IMO, the bounty fleet should just die from being in the black hole.

10

Suggestions / Re: Balistic PD - whole machingun production line is overpriced

« on: February 25, 2023, 08:28:54 AM »

MGs are not really PD weapons, they are safety overrides weapons with a bit of PD utility.

11

General Discussion / Re: "Energy" Onslaught actually works

« on: February 22, 2023, 01:27:26 PM »

Doesn't VPD have a scripted effect where not all the shots make it to max range? I though it was as many as half the shots don't make it, but there's no hard info on the wiki. The gun will still fire at max range and I found that really hurt the gun in AI hands. It would spam all the charges and build up all the soft flux but lose a good chunk of the damage output, making it quite a bit less efficient than it seems.

12

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: February 01, 2023, 03:16:00 PM »

I don't think the squall change really does anything. The power of the weapon is 2500 range zero flux kinetic pressure (that can fire over allies and is high volume with decent missile HP so moderate PD is not super effective). None of the things that make it strong are reduced at all. Honestly, even the EMP damage is more significant than the damage to hull/armor.

13

General Discussion / Re: Optimizing the Conquest: a Mathematical Model of Space Combat

« on: January 17, 2023, 12:44:05 AM »

I am not saying doing things in the ship-fixed frame is inherently wrong, and I understand how to do it that way, I just don't see why you wouldn't do it in a stationary frame. If you ever want to do stuff like model shots as projectiles with travel time, or consider dynamic motion of ships during combat, using a rotation frame results in stuff like non-accelerating (moving in a straight line) projectiles following a curved path in your coordinate system if your ship is rotating. And it certainly seems like it would be more complicated computationally and unintuitive to have to update the states of every other object in the simulation whenever your own ship moves, rather than just updating the state of your ship.

The way I would do it is just make the ship class have x,y coordinates and an angle/orientation (defined wrt a stationary frame). Then the vector between ships is just the difference in their position coordinates, and the direction of a weapon arc center is just the the angle between it and 'forward' on the ship plus the rotation angle of the ship (and you can get a unit vector from that easily). That's all very simple, and extends naturally to having ships moving around, or having projectiles modeled etc.

14

General Discussion / Re: Optimizing the Conquest: a Mathematical Model of Space Combat

« on: January 16, 2023, 02:08:13 PM »

Isn't general relativity just about gravity and replaces newtons law of gravity? Not all of newtons laws. Like there is definitely a relativistic version of F=ma but I'm pretty sure it still requires a non-accelerating frame... I just asked my dad who taught physics and he agreed with that.

But this is all completely beside the point lmao. All I was saying is that everything in engineering is done in inertial frames because classical mechanics requires it, and no one is wasting their time with relativity unless they need it. Very few things reach a non-trivial fraction of c where relativity would be relevant.

15

Suggestions / Re: Poison gameplay loop; (by design)

« on: January 16, 2023, 11:40:02 AM »

4-5% on both damage done and damage received is a pretty large boost in terms of winning the flux war.

On a related note, I know some people who had an officer in their flagship to give CR and missile ammo, and then they would swap their character in at the start of battle and keep those bonuses without having the the skills which is a closely related cheese strat. I agree with OP that it's an annoying feature of the game.

I feel like the most effective fix would be somehow restricting officer swapping, like making it take time to gain the benefits of skills after swapping in, or making it impossible to swap officers unless you are in port or something.

I'm definitely against removing combat endurance from support doctrine though. I think it really benefits/incentivizes the use of frigates and destroyers due to the PPT bonus as well.