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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - Asherogar

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1
Blog Posts / Re: Skill Tweaks
« on: December 13, 2023, 02:01:22 AM »
I'll be honest, while I like the changes to some individual skills and reasoning behind it, I'm very iffy on a slew of +% dmg dealt and -% dmg taken added all over the place. Not because it's boring, I would rather take small and boring bonus over a flowery one with no practical use ("Triple the radius and dmg from your ship explosion". Unless...). You said it yourself, 5% doesn't sound much, but can easily add-up. What it also does is snowballs out of control, because dmg in Starsector is not just dmg, it affects flux efficiency too and armor calculation, meaning in roundabout way it increases your survivability too. I still remember chewing throught armor with kinetic weapons, because old Target Analysis was beyond broken.

Making your flagship beyond OP is not even the worst part. I prefer making my flagship strong and skills that give unique effects, like dissipating some hard flux with shields up, or increasing projectile speed rather than unconditional effect like "You take 10% less dmg". The bigger problem is that all those +/-% bonuses work on enemies too. And [REDACTED] are a massive statsticks, meaning any % bonuses on them work miles better. Radiant with 95% dmg resistance on shields, full array of energy weapons with better flux efficiency than your kinetics, flux stats enough to make firing all it's weaponry with shields up flux neutral and on top of it mobility to dance around anything that can attempt to fight it. Sounds like a definition of anti-fun.

2
Not sure if it's a bug or not, but i can't find a way to get rid of Sierra ship (Voidwitch/Voidwretch) from Promise quest. I can't store it on any planet, both "Store" and "Scuttle" options are permanently greyed out with "Cannot store/sell last ship" tag.

3
Yeah, that would be really handy. Even on vanilla there's a bunch of hullmods, skills and stuff to keep track of and the moment we go into a mod territoty things just go into untrackeable levels.

4
General Discussion / Re: Have the falcon and eagle been left behind?
« on: December 19, 2021, 06:36:24 AM »
Completely agree with Grievous, cruisers right now are finally fun to play with. Overall difficulty of the game increased and as a result Eagle falling behind, there's no need to nerf all other cruisers to it's level, base level (Eagle) should be bumped up a bit. Besides Eagle and Falcon are just weak in current meta, where skills push you hard towards specialising and both ships mounts lack any synergy, which further multiplied by their inability to fully utilise offficers. As I already mentioned they need overall stat buff to remain JoAT or their mounts should be reworked towards more definitive playstile/role.

5
General Discussion / Re: Have the falcon and eagle been left behind?
« on: December 18, 2021, 06:49:51 AM »
I feel like another reason why Eagle/Falcon falling behind is frigates and destroyers buffs. Before they barely quantify as cannon fodder, now they are an actual threat. Eagle or Falcon are fast, but nowhere near officerted frigates and they have no firepower to deal with a swarm of frigates. And what firepower it is? Hybrid loadout with no missile firepower, backed up by pathetic flux stats. It's even unable to utilise new Ballistic Rangefinder.

I don't think a little buff to mobility would cut it. Overall stats buff and/or do something with current weird mounts loadout would be much better.

6
General Discussion / Re: Colony admins lost their skills
« on: December 17, 2021, 04:43:55 AM »
Some of my admins are 10k/month while one stayed at 20k/month, but all have same skills.  Possibly a mod interaction issue, but odd either way.

Same thing, some admins just have 20k paycheck, while others with IP only 10k. And I'm 100% sure I don't have any mods affecting admins, officers or skill tree.

7
General Discussion / Re: Small kinetics in 0.95.1a
« on: December 16, 2021, 07:06:14 AM »
While it's not entirely about small kinetics, but...

Is there a chance we can get a new medium kinetic brawler weapon? Something like 12-13 OP, 800 range 200-250 dps with 0.8-0.9 flux and better recoil then HACs. Currently I'm constantly running into problem of having some OP to spare for better guns, but there's just nothing better then HACs and they are not good enough. Only alternatives are HVD (sniper/support with low dps) or Heavy Needler (premium burst option), which fill in completely different niches.

Don't get me wrong, HAC is an amazing budget brawler weapon, but small kinetics with Ballistic Rangefinder are actively stepping into this niche and completely overshadow HAC. They have the same range or higher (800 for HAC), better flux stats (1.0 is pretty bad for kinetics), better recoil handling and some of them can even compete in per shot dmg.

I'm starting to think that medium ballistics better be used for flak, with small mounts as primary anti shield option and large mounts for armor breacking.

8
I do think the main problem with High tech ships is Shields. Or more precisely lack of instruments to deal with them.

Let's look at armor first. The most effective way to deal with it is HE weapons with high per shot dmg. Alternatively you can use a whole arsenal of missiles and torpedoes. Non-HE weapons with high per shot dmg would work too. Hits on hull disable weapon mounts and modules, reducing enemy ability to fight back. You can use EMP to completely cripple your enemy. And even if all the previous tools are unavailable to you, you still can just brute-force armor, as it is finite resource and you're trading temporary dmg to yourself for permament dmg to enemy.

That's a lot of tools. And any of them also have a lot of options in what weapons exactly are you going to use and how.

And with shields...copious amount of flux effective kinetic dmg. That's the only decent option against shields. Nothing else works. No other options. You can't do anything else against good shield. Missiles? You have a single missile, so you need to center you entire build around this missile. Non-kinetic weapons? You need another High-tech ship with superior flux stats, powerful shield of it's own and skills to make it semi-decent. EMP? You need to build-up hard flux on enemy first and even then it works vastly less effective then against armor. And you can't brute force it, you simply end up dealing way more dmg to yourself then to enemy and even then dmg you're dealt is temporary. You can't even bypass shield as most of the High tech ships have either an omni-shield or pretty wide frontal and superior mobility that renders any attempts to outmaneuver them useless.

You have one tool against shields. And it's pretty limited one.

9
Hm, sounds like a bug then.

I checked settings.json and indeed "maxSleeperPodsOfficerLevel" is set to 7. And I have no mods affecting Officers, Progression or Skills.

Well, whatever, i've no idea how to reproduce this bug and it's not crashing anything.

10
I know that base max lvl for officers is 5. Lvl 6 with Leadership skill. Officers in pods usually lvl 6 or 7. Iirc Alpha cores are lvl 8.
Managed to find a lvl 8 officer in a pod and I thought it's an absolute maximum for officers.
But then i found an absolute Chad, lvl 14 officer. He has so many skills that UI unable to show them properly. And now I'm confused is there even a limit on lvls for officers founds in pods?
I don't run any mods affecting officers and I haven't touched any files. 

[attachment deleted by admin]

11
General Discussion / Re: AI backing off from 100% sure kill
« on: April 13, 2021, 12:42:08 AM »
This is what I'm talked about, when I mentioned somewhere AI backing off from overloaded enemies instead of finishing them off. Wasn't able to recreate it, but it played out identically, but with overloaded enemy.

12
Yes, they have. At least Diable Avionics do, I got several contacts from them while doing bar missions.

13
General Discussion / Re: Shield shunt hullmod seems pretty bad
« on: April 08, 2021, 01:52:38 PM »
So Shield shunt works as a band-aid solution for AI's bad handling of weak shields? Sure, but I still disagree with OP cost, it should at least cost 0. You are losing shield anyway, so any random ships wouldn't be abusing this mod. And I don't see 50% EMP resistance as a bonus, it's a minimum mandatory thing, otherwise even a tiniest bit of EMP in whole enemy fleet will left you completely paralyzed with no counterplay.

14
General Discussion / Re: Shield shunt hullmod seems pretty bad
« on: April 08, 2021, 09:43:41 AM »
You spend OP to make your braindead AI not tank kinetics on a 1.4 efficiency shield. For a player's flagship, it's never a right choice because you know when to turn the shield off, the AI needs it taken away because they misuse it. Better let them eat a stray reaper than see them waste all their flux shield tanking on a 2500 armor ship and never shoot their weapons.
Aaand now your braindead AI fiddling on the edge of enemy range, constantly taking permanent damage and very uncertain if it should engage or not. Also there's not so many situations when even 1.4 shield get overloaded instantly, especially if we are talking about AI, which tends to shield flicker masterfully near 80-90% flux.

15
General Discussion / Shield shunt hullmod seems pretty bad
« on: April 08, 2021, 09:31:09 AM »
Options are good, and having option to make shieldless build is great, but current Shield shunt seems to work entirely backwards. As someone already pointed out: "You are spending OP to make your ship worse". Even ships with terrible shields like Conquest better of spending those OP on anything else and still have shield to catch some occasional torpedo or scary HE weapon shot.

Let's compare it with Resistant Flux Conduits. They both provide 50% EMP resistance, Conduits cost 5 OP more on capital but provide you with 25% flux vent bonus (which now even more important, because we no longer have additional 25% from skills) and leave your shield enabled. Again, I don't think 5 additional OP worth it even for Conquest, even if you need EMP resistance you better off just squeeze this 5 OP from somewhere and get yourself Conduits.

I see 2 ways how Shield shunt can be improved:

First one is by giving it additional bonuses, like increased armor, maybe some flux buffs or very limited armor regen. Which is sound like pretty herd to balance thing.

Second one is reverting hullmod cost into giving OP instead. And plain additional OP is way more flexible than any bonuses, because you can spend them on whatever this exact ship needs. It's even sounds more logical, because I imagine by disabling shield you're also removing all the equipment need for it to function, freeing up space and system energy or whatever for additional modifications.

Or a hybrid of both can be used, by giving out additional OP and a bit of bonuses on top. Shield is still too good to ships with decent flux stats and shield efficiency to give up for a bit of additional OP.

Anyway, does anyone have any success with this hullmod?

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