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1

General Discussion / Re: How does Energy Mastery work?

« on: May 24, 2025, 01:23:25 AM »

I do think the skill is kinda rubbish outside of some niche cases (afflictor etc). Even on something like Medusa, I only take it because there's nothing else to take, as one of the last picks. Meanwhile ballistic mastery is a no-brainer for any low-tech ship, and most midline ones.

2

General Discussion / Re: How does Energy Mastery work?

« on: May 20, 2025, 11:00:36 PM »

The close range damage bonus still applies to energy PD weapons, and it stacks multiplicatively with PD skills and hullmods. Being high on flux is when you drop your shields, so having your pd lasers go psycho mode at that time is helpful.

Design Compromises and EWM modify the same mutable stat - getEnergyWeaponFluxCostMod(). However, the hullmod modifies the percentage of it, and the skill - the multiplier. So in theory, their effects should be multiplicative (180% total).

3

Suggestions / Re: Omen's EMP Emitter and inconsistencies

« on: May 17, 2025, 03:51:18 AM »

Based on your description, it seems like EMP Emitter benefits from the bonuses in Group B (which are loosely speaking, dependent on ship size) but not Group A (which are the garden-variety general, "regardless of ship size" bonuses).

Group A is bonuses dependent on weapon types. "General" damage bonuses like CyberAugs under the hood are implemented as bonuses to each weapon type (ballistic, energy, missile) at the same time.

Mine Strike benefits from them, because it has a dummy weapon associated with it (minelayer1). EMP emitter has no associated weapon, it's "just a ship system".

4

General Discussion / Re: Deploy the SpySat

« on: May 08, 2025, 05:15:17 AM »

I think these missions would make way more sense if they didn't spawn additional patrols for no reason

The extra patrols are not the problem, actually. They can be lured away. The problem is that there are always some patrols "standing down" or "preparing for duty" around the planet. And these patrols don't investigate anything.

If you turn your transponder off and ping, all patrols will go look for you. The extra and normal patrols will keep searching for a while. The patrols that were standing down will NOT search, they will go straight back to the planet as soon as they lose sight of you.

5

General Discussion / Re: Hitting the Wall, Advice for High Tech Fleet?

« on: May 04, 2025, 03:35:33 AM »

In my experience, s-ATG has the issue of helping you deal with ships that are already the least threatening, so you just have to ask yourself why would you make an already easy task even easier?

Because being able to do something, and being able to do it quickly and efficiently are different things. Killing 2000 hp swarms, or killing an assault unit a couple seconds faster, is genuinely useful.

6

General Discussion / Re: Where's the 'endgame'?

« on: May 04, 2025, 03:22:54 AM »

The fundamental problem with leaving everything to user settings is that you are expecting the player to make a choice before they know what any of the options really are. A person who has never played Starsector before cant know if they will enjoy exploration enough to base their entire playthrough around it, or combat, or anything. It's a responsibility of the game designer to set some baseline framework of what the game experience will be.

7

General Discussion / Re: Is [spoiler weapon] too powerful?

« on: May 01, 2025, 01:55:06 AM »

You aren't supposed to react to void blaster, that's its whole point. It forces you to keep shields up when an assault unit is around, and eat kinetic fragments that you would otherwise armor tank.

A bad day to be an Afflictor pilot, but cheese had to stop somewhere.

8

Suggestions / System Defense Armada for player faction

« on: April 30, 2025, 11:00:57 AM »

Using a story point on Military Base / High Command should add a unique, s-modded mega patrol to the system, similar to major factions, instead of just another heavy patrol. The amount of s-mods and some other stats can depend on the player's skills (3 s-mods if BotB, 2 otherwise, etc).

9

Suggestions / Re: Omega tweaks

« on: April 30, 2025, 08:06:39 AM »

namely that Coronal Hypershunts can often spawn in non-Remnant systems

Can they? I was under the impression that one of the hypershunts always spawns in a remnant constellation (not necessarily in a beacon system), and the special bounty is always located there.

10

General Discussion / Re: Where's the 'endgame'?

« on: April 28, 2025, 01:44:53 AM »

All sorts of games, including space exploration RPGs like Star Control 2 or Space Rangers. It's by no means some niche game design.

11

General Discussion / Re: Where's the 'endgame'?

« on: April 27, 2025, 02:15:42 AM »

I think that design is a cool way to do things- but for Starsector, I would worry about exploration. A decent chunk of the game is just wandering, looking for domain-era stuff.

Yeah, I'm not saying one design or the other is inherently better, and maybe (probably?) Starsector is meant to be a themepark.

There are ways to incorporate exploration into games with clocks though. Ultimately, exploration is trading time for resources. If those resources increase your power enough, it will be worth it even though enemies also leveled up in the time you spent exploring. This would arguably make exploration even more fun, because you would have to think about efficiency, hunt for breadcrumb intel to know where to search, consider burn level, sleapstream usage, etc. Right now, it doesn't matter if you spend 2 cycles to scout the sector, or 20. Nothing happens in that time anyway, there's no incentive to be smart or efficient.

12

General Discussion / Re: Where's the 'endgame'?

« on: April 27, 2025, 01:50:21 AM »

I'm not talking about games that scale up based on player progress (I dislike those too). I'm talking about games that scale up based simply on time. Enemies are leveling up no matter what you do. If you don't keep up, you lose. If you keep up, you keep playing. If you somehow outpace the enemies, you get to have it easy for a while, but eventually the enemies will catch up (ideally, game shouldn't allow you to outpace it to begin with, though). Games like old X-com, for example.

13

General Discussion / Re: Where's the 'endgame'?

« on: April 27, 2025, 01:36:05 AM »

Isn't this a thing in almost every game ever?

No, because a lot of games have "doom clocks" and game over screens. Enemies scale up over time and proactively attack you, and you have to keep the pace up to survive. When properly balanced, the player never reaches the "maxed out" state, by the time you are getting close to full tier N gear, the enemies are already using tier N+1. So you don't really have the luxury of grinding for the best loot, you need to get the one that's good enough to survive until the next tier becomes available. And then by the time the tiers run out, the game just says "campaign over, you win", maybe letting you continue in freeplay, in which case the problem does finally manifest.

14

General Discussion / Re: Where's the 'endgame'?

« on: April 27, 2025, 01:14:17 AM »

Will there even be an "endgame"?
So far it seems Starsector follows the themepark MMO approach, where content is isolated in pockets and nothing happens unless the player intentionally chooses to make it happen. You can choose to go to the dungeon and farm enemies for loot, and if you don't, they just sit in place and never do anything.
The only endgame possible in such games is grinding enemies to get loot, using that loot to grind harder enemies to get better loot, using that better loot to grind even harder enemies, etc, etc. The top loot will always have "nothing to use it on", by design.

15

General Discussion / Re: How to build tempests so they don't die instantly

« on: April 26, 2025, 01:07:16 PM »

But against something like omega Doritos - no way. AI doesn't pre-plan future escape before engagement even starts, and that's what is necessary against this kind of opponents.

Against Tesseracts no amount of being smart would help. If they ever get in range, frigates melt in one second, without much exaggeration.

Same with eyes - laser kills small ships almost instantly.

Tempest just won't be able to get in range to fire its guns without being evaporated, there's nothing to outsmart in these fights, they are just stat checks.