Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

31

General Discussion / Re: The endgame enemy.....

« on: November 27, 2020, 01:29:33 PM »

Have any of you read Hyperion?

Let's just say it is very, very similar. Maybe alex even said it was an ainspiration to him, I cant remember rn.

im 99999999% sure that AI will be a factor, but I dont think it will be in the way a lot of people seem to be imagining

This is entirely incorrect. The different levels of AI are a direct reference to Revelation Space. Come on, if you can get through the Hyperion Cantos, you can get through at least the first three rev space novels.

Yes - there's lots of stuff drawn from dan simmons, but the style of his nanotech, AI, and so on is pretty different (a lot softer IMO, more mythological). But Revspace, The Culture novels, and Hyperion Cantos are mentioned by name as inspirations for the lore in this blog post - and the shrike isn't that much of LE TWEEST to act mysterious about it (especially considering how many sci-fi novels love to play around with timey wimey stuff). http://fractalsoftworks.com/2015/03/12/a-starsector-reading-list/

Edit: Oh - almost forgot - the lore stuff is written by David.

32

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / CTD on campaign start

« on: November 22, 2020, 10:19:02 AM »

On the start of a game to go do some system bounties, slammed into a remnant hyperspace fleet (ruthless sector) for the first encounter, go to reload and hit this.

Code

968958 [Thread-4] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
	at data.scripts.campaign.VayraAbandonedStationBonker.advance(VayraAbandonedStationBonker.java:84)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager.super(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager.super(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.title.TitleScreenState.menuItemSelected(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.title.Object.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newnew.buttonPressed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.?00000(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.O0Oo.o00000(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)

33

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: November 14, 2020, 01:02:06 PM »

Hmm. Well, one of them has "cryoarithmetic" in the name

Did you google what Landauer limit is or something?

This is a Revelation Space reference. https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Cryo-arithmetic_engine

34

General Discussion / Re: New player here - wanted to share my impressions / give some feedback

« on: November 03, 2020, 03:53:16 PM »

The remnant fleets ignoring you seems off, though; I dunno what's up with that.

He's probably talking about the individual 1/2 frigate remnant patrol fleets that will keep contact with you but never engage unless you're doing solo dram exploring or something (even a handful of shepherds will make the threat level high enough they refuse to fight), and all of the unpowered patrols that just sit there until bothered in low/med threat beacon systems.

The high beacon threat fleets stuffed with radiants would have instantly tackled and deleted him.

35

General Discussion / Re: My fleets struggle versus carriers

« on: October 21, 2020, 05:01:15 PM »

A lot of mods add new weapons. Including PD. Some of them actually are viable.

But in vanilla, I still struggle. Dual Flaks seems to work okay. But most ships can not use it.

Most AI controlled cruisers struggle against a single drover.

I use the onslaught now, this ship shreds fighters quite good with Vulcans and flak. But it does not feel fun not to be able to use most ships as they fail to win against drovers.

You'd have a lot more luck including a few anchor ships in your fleet composition if this presents such a problem - put IPDAI, ITU, and mix frag and kinetic in the small/medium slots as appropriate. That is, using dual flak in the mediums and light machine guns in the small slots, or vulcans in the small slots and heavy machine guns in the mediums. This, with an officer who has advanced countermeasures 3, will make it so that only the most egregious fighter/bomber spam will get past it's area of influence. It will also help if the ship is fit so it's difficult to disable these defensive weapons with Armored weapon mounts/Automated Repair Unit and the relevant officer skills so some thunders or an ion beam/pulser don't defang it at the most inopportune time.

The changes to the Paladin and Devastator Alex has made for the next update might also alleviate some of your issues by adding an additional defensive option with your spare large slots, as they should be viable options for including in your roster (instead of Paladins being a memey way to flux out whatever they're on right now, and devastators only seeing use on SO dominators).

36

General Discussion / Re: My fleets struggle versus carriers

« on: October 21, 2020, 07:09:57 AM »

Ammo from standard ballistics weapons were removed.  Clip mechanics are still there, being used by various energy weapons like Autopulse.

I don't believe there's anything this guy could be fielding which fits the bill of being able to use flak and autopulse, though? The Paragon's the only player-available ship that can fit both at the same time, that I can think of.

37

General Discussion / Re: My fleets struggle versus carriers

« on: October 20, 2020, 11:15:16 PM »

Ammo and clip mechanics were removed in 0.65.2a. That was uhhhh 6 years ago.

38

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: October 19, 2020, 03:20:47 AM »

I'd like to further endorse the idea of being able to just plop down a beacon that says "here be colony" and then your organic mission is to actually transition from that into an actual faction - with a variety of options picked from a list to get to that point (mechanics wise, you could have a table of stuff that mods can add to that it draws from where it provides options for population (do you just give incentives for homesteaders, rescue cryosleepers,), administration, industry/resources, etc - seems like it could be a way to add another questline dynamic (that's still just a variation on go here do thing/pick thing up, return, but for engaging story reasons).

Besides that, I'd also like to not have too create a fully functioning colony to provide resources to the faction. I'd like the whole vast resources available in space aspect to be leaned further into - drop one lonely guy in an inflated balloon in charge of corralling a bevy of automated mining drones and their tenders in a ring system, mined out nickel-iron asteroids spun up for super cheap habitat space (no antimatter powered grav generators for the poor), lean into the whole 'these planets are *** and we have to make do' aspect of the Persean Sector. It's not as though there isn't the technology to do great things, but there's so much squabbling between the factions that no one's using the resources to do anything - until you the PC explodes upon the scene.

Basically Alex, I just want to put a particle collider around a gas giant and start mass-manufacturing supermaterials - these stars won't harvest themselves!

(Also John C. Wright has some fascinating stuff in his two space opera series)

39

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes

« on: October 16, 2020, 05:01:00 PM »

Thanks for the patch notes Alex, and g'luck on assembling everything together for this release!

I imagine you must be itching to get the post-patch bug fixes out of the way too, lol.

Also I just wanted to say I'm excited you've thrown me a bone with the megastructure stuff in this release, and I can't wait to engage with what's there in the release, and to see more in future versions. Also, I don't know if David or you are doing the story elements/descriptions for them, but don't forget to check out Charles Sheffield's work - his novels (Summertide) partly inspired my lifelong fascination with them (and the ideas in Jack McDevitt's stuff, even if I found all his novels dry as a desert).

The first thing I'm doing is still changing the Apogee's shield efficiency back to .6 though, the suspiciously combat effective long-range exploration vessel checks every one of my favorite science fiction tropes, and I love her so much.

40

General Discussion / Re: Which aspect of a computer is the most important for Starsector?

« on: August 29, 2020, 09:09:46 AM »

snip

MSRP doesn't matter if there's no supply. You could get the 1080ti for $500 in 2018, the 2080ti is ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED right now, but good luck picking one of those up for less than $1500.

41

Bug Reports & Support / Re: Doubleclick bug

« on: August 17, 2020, 06:41:27 PM »

It might help to add that many programs have input lockouts so that you cannot click through menus too fast accidentally, or accept popups before it's humanly possible to have read them, so it might register only a single mouseclick every 5-100ms depending on the program. Starsector doesn't have this lockout, and neither does windows10. This 'bug' is actually systemic to most currently sold mice, as they use chinese switches that have bad voltage regulation (simplified explanation). This can hide the fact you have an issue until you interact with a program which accepts input as fast as you give it.

You can determine whether this is a bug with your actual mouse hardware, or something odd with your software interactions, by dragging and dropping something around on the desktop. The doubleclick bug means your mouse has to think the button isn't being held at some point to fire off another click - so if the file or application is dropped/opened when attempting to move it around with the mouse button held down, it's a hardware issue.

42

General Discussion / Re: Which aspect of a computer is the most important for Starsector?

« on: August 17, 2020, 06:26:03 PM »

Yup but I wouldn't mind been proven wrong actually. Could you link the benchmark you were thinking of, Modo44? Preferably using the Ryzen 3800 or 3700 as base.

He is right that intel holds the lead in single threaded performance, so something like the 9600k outperforms the 3600x by 10-20frames (at 1080p, around 160-180fps)...

But if you step above that entry level and either want your computer to not implode while doing multiple things at once with it, or do anything else with it that can utilize threading, we get to comparisons between a 3900x , versus intel's insanity that is its higher end cpu lineup, like the 10900k. A ~$450 cpu that crushes a cpu that sells so poorly it's discounted by more than a $100 and still ends up ~$900.

And this disregards that it's looking much, much worse in the comparison department with AMD's next design.

43

General Discussion / Re: The Guardian makes no sense

« on: July 23, 2020, 03:08:14 PM »

This thread makes me realize how unrealistic all sci-fi is.
Even a quarter of the technological progress from now to faster than light spaceships and we will destroy ourselves by unleashing gray goo. Its unavoidable.

No. If you invest some time into looking up publications on it, you'll learn that while advanced self-replicating nanotech could be an annoying hazard (replacing edible plantlife, killing off animal life as a particularly nasty virus, etc), the planet devouring one drop on the ground and you're done for story element is pure fiction.
Thermal limits would mean that any rapid replication (as in fast enough that it would be problematic if you don't respond in months/years, instead of geological time) are so endothermic it would almost immediately break down any complex atomic structure (It's a robot made of a few molecules, any considerable amount of heat shakes it to bits).

Some more reading https://foresight.org/nano/Ecophagy.php.

44

General Discussion / Re: My personal vanilla Starsector ships Tier-list

« on: June 16, 2020, 11:38:30 PM »

I realize the astral is *really* boring to fly, but come on y'all, search your souls. You know it's the second best ship in the game, objectively.

Recall with 6 bombers is absolutely broken, only ridiculous fighter swarms stops it, as there's nothing vanilla with enough PD to counter it (Unless you face a radiant which has rolled 5 paladins and is using the buddy system).

For a less objective take on ships, I also feel like everyone severely undervalues how many sabots a gryphon can bring to the party. Tossing out 7,000 kinetic damage with one click, backed by locusts or hurricane/reapers/hammers from the large means you get to choose 6 ships that WILL die, and threaten another 6 before you autoforge a fresh set of sabots. All on a ship that can be chain deployed 5 times from 100% cr before even reaching malfunction threshold. Yeah, it's slow, it's paper, has bad weapon arcs for its ballistics, and the AI can't pilot it at all - but that's some great combat efficiency for something without fighters.

45

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Blackrock Drive Yards v0.9.5a (10.06.2019) - Hotfix released

« on: May 23, 2020, 09:23:59 AM »

Spoiler

Hi, this is my favourite faction mod by a very long way. Everything about Blackrock is fantastic, and I commend you for your work on it.

I have, however, found something you should be aware of. Someone else noticed the same thing, on the previous page, and it appears to have gone unnoticed, so let me reiterate it here.

The Vespa is completely overpowered. It offers the most powerful unguided payload available outside of the Cobra Bomber, and it does so at several times the speed of its Reaper-class rival. The result is a torpedo dealing 2500 damage (plus 1500 EMP damage) travelling at speeds high enough to catch destroyers.

This alone is very strong, though not enough to be overpowered. In fact, the Vespa bombers are balanced in most cases through the following drawback:

Their flight path takes them directly into danger, so you are more likely to lose them than you are most other bombers. Even if they don’t die, their flight path leads them far away from your carrier, making them take a lot longer than most bombers to return to the ship. As a result of Vespas dying and taking a long time to return, your fighter reinforcement takes a beating. If you field Vespas, you spend a long time waiting for them to be ready again.

Unless you use the Vespas on the Astral.

Now you have 12 Vespas travelling faster than any other bomber, launching torpedoes faster than any other torpedo, each torpedo doing more damage than any other weapon save the Reaper, each torpedo almost impossible to evade and which PD systems can’t kill in time, fielded on a ship that can teleport the bombers straight back after they have finished their bombing run, completely negating the only weakness that renders them balanced.

12 Vespas. Dealing 30,000 damage.

Two six-wing Vespa runs can kill an Onslaught from full shield and full health, and an officer-controlled Astral can land that 30,000 damage nuke over and over and over again.

This wasn’t playtested. It can’t have been.

To make the most of this broken combo, pair your Astral with a couple of lesser carriers using fighters and interceptors. These keep your Astral safe from enemy fighter wings, and they help by overloading the weapon and PD systems of your target enemy.

Well, at least you no longer have to Drover spam?

Anyway. Still, best mod ever. Sick work all around.

[close]

Astral's egregiously overpowered, any mod bomber can do the equivalent (seriously, just throw some other good bomber on to compare). The fury torpedo's ENERGY damage type confuses your impressions of it - it's effective enough against shields to force overloads and has enough per-hit damage to chew through the armor damage reduction calculation and expose bare hull - as is intended for it's all around nature.

Using mod weaponry outside of its faction is a silly comparison, it's simple to pair things together such that you remove weaknesses or enhance factional strengths to the point of something being broken.

Fighters are simply broken and shouldn't be used in balance discussions till the next version's changes are seen and mods update as needed.

Even more hilarious is the intimation that an entirely unscreened capital ship *should* be able to survive 12 wings of combined bombing damage output of *any* bomber that isn't a joke (piranha).

And just so we're clear about how broken fighters are - that astral's DP cost is *still* less effective than it's equivalent DP of drovers & sparks. Fighter Recall is bad, reserve deployment is broken.