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1

General Discussion / Re: 0.9.1a Balance Testing Case Study: Condor

« on: July 12, 2020, 04:41:29 PM »

In all the testing I have done with ships running under autopilot, I have never seen a ship under AI control shoot at fighters with guns that the ship it is targeting is in range of. I mostly blame the bad behavior around fighter swarms on the AI often refusing to target what it is engaging, even to the point of deselecting a target while it is manually firing a weapon group at it in preference of a fighter or a ship several thousand units away, or outright deselecting the target it is engaging and having nothing targeted. If that was fixed, then the AI's handling of fighters would become quite a bit better (all that would be left is not being so damn skittish around them).

2

General Discussion / Re: Low Tech ship non viablility

« on: May 16, 2020, 09:19:53 PM »

The problem with the Enforcer is not the Enforcer, it is the Hammerhead. Nerf outliers, don't power creep things that are fine.

Is it, though? The Hammerhead is just about the only vanilla combat destroyer that I will snap up once I have started transitioning to a cruiser/capital fleet. And unlike the Drover, the Hammerhead doesn't obsolete anything of a larger ship class - it is good, but not a substitute for a real cruiser.

Either the other destroyers that aren't named "Drover" should be brought up to the level of the Hammerhead or there needs to be a change in the combat mechanics to make destroyers generally better before the nerf hammer is brought down on the Hammerhead. Otherwise, all that would be accomplished is making a marginalized ship class even more marginalized.

3

Suggestions / Re: Outsourcing exploration

« on: April 17, 2020, 02:35:03 AM »

I do agree that the alternatives to systematic trawling of the outer reaches are lacking. Personally, I feel that the logs you find that point you to objects of interest need to be a lot more high impact. At the moment, it is barely worth following them up because hopping between distant high value finds that you have logs for is too fuel intensive to sustain on loot (forcing resupplies which waste time and money), while systematic exploration can be self sustaining even with a fleet that can take on remnant ordos, and your rate of finding loot is usually high enough by just checking every system that the time lost from being thorough and sweeping entire constellations is comparable to the time lost keeping your fleet going in between targeted salvage runs.

I can think of two ways immediately to make this a little better.

One, make it so you have an RNG chance to pull logs off ships at the end of combat, giving you a steady source of exploration hints that doesn't require you to explore to find them. Justifying this lorewise might require jumping through some hoops and/or being selective about what fleets can drop hints, but making this change will help quite a bit.

Two, have it so the exploration hints for things like stations or caches will also have info on the highest (or approximately highest) value item in the loot. The calculus for systematic vs targeted changes if I *know* that I can go to a cache/station in system X and get a BP or industry item worth hundreds of thousands, rather than having to roll for RNG like what I do when I systematically survey constellations.

Perhaps survey data should be in the loot table when fighting outside the core worlds, especially when fighting indie prospectors/explorers/salvagers.

The problem with that is that you aren't going to find indie expeditions very often unless you are already exploring, and if you are exploring then hunting down fleets of indies to kill in a system with active salvagers is likely to be less time and cost efficient than just trawling constellations - a single 5 minute fight with an indie fleet is enough to survey an entire system filled with loot (probably nabbing some high value loot and enough supplies/fuel to keep you going in the process) or an entire constellation that has little worthwhile in it.

4

Suggestions / Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters

« on: January 01, 2020, 03:53:25 AM »

I am reasonably sure plasma passes through fighters as well.

5

Modding / Re: [0.9.1a] Resist AI Inspections By Default (2019-12-05)

« on: December 15, 2019, 07:51:56 AM »

Ok, I started a new game with this mod installed, and I ran into a serious bug when I installed AI core admins at two of my colonies (the first time I used cores this run).

An AI inspection happened within seconds of installing the cores, and bribing the inspection just results in another inspection starting seconds after the first one completes (and bribing that results in another one etc).

I asked around on discord, and at least one other person is having the same problem with this mod.

6

Suggestions / Re: Frag damage vs ships with stripped armor behaves strangely

« on: September 20, 2019, 03:05:03 AM »

Just for reference, I whipped this up in excel. Hopefully I didn't screw anything up.

There are a few interesting things to note.

Pretty much every weapon loses a significant chunk of max damage from hull armor except in the most extre

HE weapons suffer a little from the 5% armor, but none are severely crippled by it. Even in extreme cases, such as a Light Assault Gun against an XIV Onslaught with armored turret mounts and heavy armor, each hit only loses about 60% of it's punch. Once you get to Assault Chainguns or above, hull armor only shaves off a little of the incoming damage.

Energy weapons suffer a little more, but owing to their fairly high damage per shot, they are in roughly the same boat as HE weapons.

High ROF kinetics, on the other hand, are absolutely wrecked by a decent amount of hull armor.  Even 5% of destroyer level armor is enough to chop off half of a needler's damage. Even Heavy Auto Cannons lose a lot of their punch against capital grade armor. It gets a lot better when you start using "sniper" type kinetics, however - HVDs and Gauss are somewhat impacted by hull armor, but will never be totally crippled by it (except, perhaps, when stacking several armor boosting skills).

Vulcans only deal marginal damage to destroyer grade armor or above, no matter how much armor stripping you apply beforehand. Look, they are bad at killing things that aren't damaged frigates or missiles, OK? Even their ridiculous raw DPS doesn't save them. As an aside, they start doing minimum damage at less armor damage than most fighters have, meaning that something like a warthog can sit point blank in front of a Vulcan for several seconds before dying (and in reality, most rounds fired by Vulcans miss).

The Thumper's damage suffers quite a bit, but unlike Vulcans, their damage per shot plus their ridiculously high raw DPS and flux efficiency means that anything that isn't rocking capital grade armor will still get torn to shreds quicker than most other kinetic or HE weapons in the same slot.

[attachment deleted by admin]

7

General Discussion / Re: Raiding exploit

« on: September 10, 2019, 09:30:42 PM »

Does 0 stability market really stop giving you more blueprints?
...

Unless Nex changes how this works (which it almost certainly doesn't), then blueprint raiding can be spammed well below 0 stability. I have gotten colonies to well over -100 unrest in the pursuit of blueprints, and I was still getting blueprints up until I acquired every one that the owning faction had available, or until I stopped hoarding duplicates of capitals and expensive cruisers and actually learned them.

Ironically, Prism Freeport makes abusing blueprint raiding more attractive, since you can easily amass 100k worth of blueprint exchange points off a single colony via this method (enough to buy a dozen+ capital ship blueprints).

And I have also had a difficult time getting cores and nano-forges sometimes via raiding. I think I had a colony down to about -130 once before I finally got it's alpha core (I was probably exceptionally unlucky, but still).

8

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Tahlan Shipworks 0.3.7b - Ready broadsides!

« on: September 09, 2019, 02:42:24 PM »

The visual glitches are gone, but now my weapons are doing no...

Here's a second fix:

...

OK, all good I think. Nothing buggy is showing up during sim testing after I pop the Izanami's ability.

9

General Discussion / Re: How often do you undergun mounts?

« on: September 09, 2019, 10:00:22 AM »

It depends wildly on the ship. Generally, I aim for a range band and slap in weapons that use up as much flux dissipation as that ship has available minus shield upkeep (or just fit what works best if I am fitting a dedicated missile boat/carrier), fill in any slots that can be stuffed full of generally good weapons (e.g. locusts, reapers), and then add in PD to give coverage against salamanders and opportunistic missile/torpedo strikes. Anything beyond that either gets left empty, or has cheap/undersized weapons in it to cover against flankers and missiles. It helps that I use mods, so I can usually slot in 1OP kinetic PD or something instead of leaving slots open, and I have access to stuff that vanilla doesn't have a good selection of e.g. general purpose small energy weapons, good medium energy PD, small/large reloading missiles.

Sometimes every slot has high OP weapons in it. And sometimes I am fitting an Apogee, during which I will fill up the two large slots and then maybe slap in mod PD weapons in the medium slots and that's it.

10

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Tahlan Shipworks 0.3.7b - Ready broadsides!

« on: September 09, 2019, 03:46:19 AM »

Sounds distinctly like an issue with your GraphicsLib installation; this sounds like OpenGL messing itself up quite royally. The Izanami triggering it is most likely due to it having a big distortion being triggered, though I'm not sure.

I have the same bug with the Izanami's system, but the details are a little different.

When shooting beams* that it has while it's system is active breaks things. The beam weapons stop functioning, they appear to come off cooldown immediately (even though they no longer fire at all), and remain locked in the position they were fired in until they eventually return to a neutral position. Graphical glitches happen for a bit, including a zone in which ships visually become black that looks like it follows the beam turrets/where the beams would be if they were fired by the turrets. Worst of all, the shields of ships nearby become invisible and don't give that ship any flux when fired upon (and don't appear to generate any shield upkeep flux either). Ships that are some distance away don't bug out. The bug was still present when I disabled every mod but this one and it's two required mods and tested the Izanami in sim. And yes, I disabled Graphics Lib for the last test - the weird visual glitches with ships going black went away, but every other bug remained (including invisible and invulnerable shields).

Unfortunately, I don't know when this bug started appearing - I updated a whole bunch of mods (including this one) in preparation for a new playthrough with the Izanami super ship start, and before that I had never used the Izanami.

*I tried both the super ship start Izunami's HE beams and vanilla phase lances. Behavior was identical with both.

[attachment deleted by admin]

11

Suggestions / Re: Combining enemy fleets

« on: September 05, 2019, 01:57:58 AM »

The only "problem" I can see is that pickets are mostly the realm of patrol stations, the weakest patrol producing structure, and a structure that the player's own colonies will usually have built. The whole point is for it to be inferior to higher tier patrol structures, which can crap out multiple capital ships for it's patrols. Having pickets combine into threatening defense fleets undermines both the supposed formidableness of faction capitals/military strongholds and their max tier defenses, as well as the massive opportunity cost the player pays for giving up an industry slot on a High Command.

Of course, this "problem" might actually be a problem with how patrol buildings are currently balanced and implemented. But then you have to ask yourself - is spending a whole bunch of time adding and bug-testing a mechanic for fleets to combine the most time-effective way for Alex to tweak patrol mechanics, as opposed to the extremely quick option of just buffing the fleet sizes produced by patrols, or adding in a much easier to implement mechanic for making pickets useful like letting them call over larger patrol fleets from other parts of the system (or even nearby systems, if High Commands are involved) if they encounter something they can't handle.

12

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Vayra's Sector v3.0.4 - Absolutely No Bugs I Swear 2019-08-29

« on: September 04, 2019, 03:06:17 AM »

probably quick and dirty Starsector\mods\Vayra's Sector\VAYRA_SETTINGS.ini, set "bountiesOnPlayer":false, save reload and try to reenable it after you leave the sector.

Already tried that. Didn't work.

If this doesn't work on its own open your campaign.xml file in your save file (preferably with notepad++) and search for VayraPlayerBountyIntel or/and VayraPlayerBountyHunter get a feel for the structure and delete the affected rows.

I wasn't sure exactly which entries were to blame, so I just deleted every entry with VayraPlayerBounty in it, and that stopped the CDT. Thanks.

13

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Vayra's Sector v3.0.4 - Absolutely No Bugs I Swear 2019-08-29

« on: September 04, 2019, 01:05:34 AM »

You swore there were no bugs. You swore to me .

Spoiler

530719 [Thread-4] ERROR data.scripts.campaign.intel.VayraPlayerBountyHunter  - *** null, probably didn't have a VayraPlayerBountyIntel or the faction id was malformed
530728 [Thread-4] INFO  data.scripts.campaign.intel.VayraPlayerBountyHunter  - spawned bounty hunter Councilist bounty hunter with 53 FP to hunt and kill the player for their crimes
530729 [Thread-4] ERROR data.scripts.campaign.intel.VayraPlayerBountyHunter  - *** null, probably didn't have a VayraPlayerBountyIntel or the faction id was malformed
533404 [Thread-4] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at data.scripts.campaign.intel.VayraPlayerBountyHunter.createBountyHunter(VayraPlayerBountyHunter.java:175)
   at data.scripts.campaign.intel.VayraPlayerBountyHunter.sendFleet(VayraPlayerBountyHunter.java:105)
   at data.scripts.campaign.intel.VayraPlayerBountyHunter.advance(VayraPlayerBountyHunter.java:82)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignState.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.BaseGameState.traverse(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

[close]

Context - I raidspammed the only market of a minor mod faction (Persean Democratic People's Revolutionary Council) that was well outside of the core worlds, racked up an impressive bounty, and then invaded and abandoned it, eliminating that faction. I left that system and returned to a system in the core worlds. Now, whenever I try to jump out of the system I am stranded in, I get a CDT with a fatal:null message, and the above is the relevant stuff in the logs afterwards.

I can provide you with the save file if you want. Warning - I count 27 mods active on this save.

Also, can you think of an easy way to fix this with the console mod or something? I have a save copy from about a year earlier that should be good, but I am not super keen on losing a year of campaign time (and 10 million worth of raided blueprints).

EDIT: It doesn't crash when I use the console to jump to a system in the fringes and enter hyperspace from there, and I didn't get a crash when I entered and exited a core system from there (although I just popped in and out, didn't hang around). Guess I will just teleport out of the core if this bug crops up again.