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16

Suggestions / Re: make planetary shield an industry so it doesn't become mandatory when u have it

« on: February 25, 2024, 02:27:12 PM »

I agree that the shield should be buffed, not nerfed.

Making the shield an industry is basically taking it out of the game. No one would ever use it except for RP or a joke.

I think the Shield should be buffed to remove irradiated as well as meteor impacts, so it's an occasional habitability bonus. Letting players change the color would be a huge cosmetic buff actually.

17

Suggestions / Cargo and fuel capacity should be a hard cap

« on: February 25, 2024, 02:19:31 PM »

I'm curious why cargo and fuel capacity is a soft cap and not a hard cap.

Is there any situation where you would go over cargo or fuel capacity in the game that isn't just a misclick? The supply cost for being over capacity is so punishing that it has to be a misclick or newbie mistake every single time.

The only situation I can think of where you should go over cap would be at a station where you for example take a trade mission you don't have cargo space for. For that case, I think the excess should go into storage at the station automatically (or you simply cannot accept a mission where you don't have the cargo capacity which is reasonable).

Can anyone give me an argument why cargo capacity is a soft cap and not a hard cap?

18

Suggestions / Re: Amazing game - here are my immersion breaks.

« on: September 01, 2023, 02:37:51 PM »

Part of it is the interface (it would be nice if we could toggle slow movement, and even better if we could set our fleet speed to s specific setting. I don't mind the intercept fleets, but as much as I love the game overall, I really hate hyperspace storms and how so much of space is filled with them.

"Go dark" instantly halts your fleet to slow speed, with the added benefit of reducing sensor profile, you can just toggle sustained burn/go dark as needed. Hyperspace doesn't normally spawn intercepting fleets outside of missions, just the ambush ones, they are a bit predictable in where they appear, most commonly at the end/between slipstreams.
As for storms themselves — I obviously can't know for certain how Alex envisioned hyperspace travel, but I'm somewhat confident in saying that for long distance travel its not intended to just click on a desired system and enable autopilot to take you straight through miles of death clouds. You are meant to read the hyperspace map layer and spot multiple open paths that you can take around the main storm bodies.

So here's my problem with making hyperspace travel more inconvenient (or challenging, if you prefer to think of it that way).

For the game to make you spend a lot of time in something, it has to be a fun minigame for at least some minority of players.

Here's an example. Some players hate piloting their own ship. They prefer to focus on building an AI friendly fleet, and fitting their ships with AI friendly loadouts, picking all the "big-picture" leadership skills and nothing in combat, etc.

Some players prefer to directly control their ship. They pick combat skills, and they think of their fleet as just a meat shield / distraction so they can be the hero and kill the enemy.

Both approaches are valid. Combat is fun for both playstyles and that's great!

Ok here's another example. Say someone likes to get to colonies asap and micromanage like a 4X game, maxxing their passive income and fighting off colony threats. Some players prefer to play as a smuggler / space trader / missions / etc. Again, both valid play styles, colony management and missions are both fun.

Now here's my point - is there anyone who plays Starsector because they want to spend MORE time in hyperspace? Does anyone go "this hyperspace minigame is really fun, I want to spend as much time as I can mapping slipstreams and plotting the optimal course to avoid / exploit storms"? Or does every player think of hyperspace as sort of an inconvenience to get to the combat / trading / missions / exploration that they really want to do?

I am completely open to the possibility that there are a lot of players that actually think that way, though I certainly cannot say that I'm one of them. And I think of myself as a player that really likes exploration. The difference, I think, is that exploration offers lots of positive awards. Navigating hyperspace is a game of "is this slightly inconvenient, or really really annoying"? Probably the closest thing to a joyful moment in hyperspace for me is coming across danger beacons. I'm happy to see a danger beacon, because that means I've found an interesting system, one that I know is worth surveying. And that's fine actually - if hyperspace is an obstacle we have to surmount to get to something we want to get to, that's fine, but I guess I can't say I would want to spend a lot more time there than I already do.

19

Suggestions / Re: Amazing game - here are my immersion breaks.

« on: August 30, 2023, 08:06:34 PM »

Basically, the game's a shooty game at its core. Trying to square that with a literally believeable world would be a fool's errand; you'd end up not getting either of those right. It might make sense to think of what happens in-game as a hugely exaggerated story told by a drunk old spacer at a bar It's certainly not literal to any sort of believable story the player might tell themselves; it *can't* be, and I don't want to sacrifice gameplay in a vain attempt to make it so.

I totally accept this. One suggestion that might help people who are sticklers for "realism" - maybe push the whole game a bit more towards the surreal or tongue in cheek direction.

An example of a universe like this is Borderlands. I totally accept that I'm a mass murderer who kills bandits by the hundreds (without needing any explanation for how there's a never ending supply of them) because that's just one of the tropes of the genre. It's a silly old west shooter, so being a stickler about realism just feels dumb. So in this case, making the lore *more silly* might serve the gameplay better. Just a thought.

FWIW, the direction doesn't have to be comedic. If you turn up the "cosmic horror" level to 11, then you can have masses of enemies crawling out of every black hole and nebula. That would also go a long way towards explaining why most of humanity hides near the core worlds, for fear of what they will disturb if they leave.

20

Suggestions / Re: Simulation Freedom

« on: August 30, 2023, 04:55:35 PM »

I agree. I think at the very least, if you have blueprints for a ship you should be able to add it to your opponents in the simulator.

There's a good argument to be made that mod makers don't want to spoil ships or fights that they want to be a surprise. But once you have the blueprints to a ship and can build it yourself, the element of surprise is no longer relevant.

21

Suggestions / Re: Smoothing out the player power curve

« on: August 23, 2023, 12:54:43 PM »

I’m just throwing in my two cents:

It feels really good to occasionally get very lucky. A big sudden spike in power is a huge adrenaline rush. I mean I’m not going to be excited about a game where progression is always a smooth, predictable, boring curve.

I call that a grind, not fun. If I find a spotless salvageable Paragon 1 year into the run, I feel like I won the lottery. Why take that away from the player? Yes I know that if I grind slowly and safely doing missions, smuggling and building colonies etc I will finally get some good ships, but if that’s the ONLY way it can happen it would most content feel boring and predictable. Like work.

This is a single player sandbox game. Let the player live their power fantasy if that’s what they want. Exploration is only fun because you’re hoping for that rare game changing loot or event.

22

Suggestions / Re: Improve Explorarium Mothership Loot!

« on: August 16, 2023, 03:23:35 PM »

There are already two guaranteed pristine nanoforges in every vanilla sector.

Imho there don’t need to be more guaranteed drops. They always spawn on the same two planets, go get one of them if you want it that bad. =)

23

Suggestions / Re: Go ham on the colony mechanics

« on: August 16, 2023, 03:16:28 PM »

I’m piggybacking this to resurrect an old suggestion I made.

Growing a colony beyond size 3 should require a cryosleeper, and cryosleepers should be salvageable ships so they can be claimed and moved by the player.

This would provide a lore friendly reason why the Captain is able to found colonies and yet none of the other factions of the core worlds are able to.

24

General Discussion / Re: Combat in this game is frustrating

« on: June 17, 2023, 04:40:33 PM »

Just 2 things I noticed:

- You have a paragon
- You mentioned mounting plasma cannons

I beat the phase ship battle handily without piloting my flagship (AI control only) using a 4x HIL disco ball paragon (with escorts, I had a doom, an eagle, and a heron, and a few frigates, maybe other stuff I can't remember but it wasn't that important).

My build was : 4x high intensity lasers, tactical lasers wherever i could fit them, advanced optics, advanced turret gyros, hardened accelerated shields. Went all beams just to have an advantage that fight.

The flux from the HIL is so low that your disco ball is continuously firing, and the range of the weapons greatly outranges anything the phase fleet can bring to bear.

As soon as they drop out of phase the HILs wreck them. As I recall nothing in their fleet has shields. Plasma cannons are especially inefficient against phase ships imho - they eat a ton of flux and they're easy to dodge.

Also, reading though your comments I suspect you're not conceptualizing how the AI works in Starsector. The very limited rate of command points should give you a hint - this game isn't really about micromanaging the AI. If you think of your orders more like suggestions and just think that the AI is gonna do what the AI is gonna do, you'll have a better time. If you're counting on the AI to exactly engage when and where you want it to, you'll probably have a bad time. It's not really like Starcraft or Red Alert or a traditional RTS.
 

25

General Discussion / Re: Insulated engines s-mod bonus is pretty neat

« on: June 15, 2023, 11:10:50 AM »

I think the balance is fine. These are logistics ships! If you're spending an S-mod with 0% XP payback on a logistics hullmod it better be awesome, otherwise what's the point?

I really like the S-mod bonuses to logistics ships. It creates real decisions when deciding on your support ships, something that was lacking before.

26

Suggestions / Re: Exploration needs to be a challenge again

« on: June 08, 2023, 07:09:20 PM »

> If there's no danger of running out of them, then what are supplies good for? You could just pay credits every month to maintain your fleet.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind that.

At the moment, supplies and fuel are sort of a tether that attaches you to the core worlds. You aren't ultimately free to be a pure starfaring vagabond because at some point you'll have to go back to the core worlds to resupply. This is intensified by the fact that the coolest loot you can get from exploration (or bounties) isn't really money or a colony device (although that's nice) but it's SHIPS. You pick up a cool derelict, maybe it's [REDACTED] maybe it's a capital ship, either way the logistics demand is too much for you to haul it around forever so you eventually have to go back to town to store or refit it. I mean, that's reasonable, you have a loop where you eventually need to go back to town to refit, resupply, change up your fleet, turn in/pick up quests and whatnot. I get that you want supply to be this sword hanging over your head where you die if you make a misstep, for me it's more like a reminder of "oh, I'm running low on supplies, probably time to go back to town and sell my loot."

But if there were skills that actually allowed you to leave the core worlds and basically never return except for picking up quests - well why not? If exploration is fun, why do you want to take that away from players? Just let them play how they want.  If maxxing out Industry meant you never had to worry about running out supplies as long as you kept salvaging and winning fights, what exactly would be the problem with that? I mean, that sounds great to me.

The Sentinel encounter was great, I loved it. It was *new*. I didn't know what to expect, and the reward is incredible. More stuff like that please. I'm completely ambivalent about losing 1 cargo space as a result of the encounter. By the time you're beating it, 1 cargo space shouldn't matter at all.

27

Suggestions / Re: Hire an Exploration Team from Galatia

« on: June 08, 2023, 06:54:11 PM »

I feel like this is going in the wrong direction. This suggestion is just off.

Like, the reward for something in the game shouldn't be less gameplay. If exploration isn't exciting, the problem is that **exploration isn't exciting**.

If you want to auto survey, you might as well just take exploration out of the game entirely. Isn't the right approach to, you know, just make exploration more fun?

The game is all about space combat. How about more combats out in distant sectors? More interesting encounters in distant systems, and better loot as a reward?

28

Suggestions / Re: Exploration needs to be a challenge again

« on: June 02, 2023, 03:37:13 PM »

I disagree with the premise that exploration should be very logistically punishing, for two reasons:

1. Industry skills come with huge tradeoffs.
2. Punishingly difficult logistics simply isn't fun (for me) and I suspect for a large class of other players too.

What's fun about Starsector? Combat and finding cool loot are the two big draws for me. Doing spreadsheet calculations to see how far you can go and carefully shepherding your supplies simply isn't the sort of game I would prefer to play. Simply put, it feels like avoiding punishment, rather than seeking a fun reward. So your reward for doing the math right is just not dying when you go explore a new system? I mean maybe that's fun for some but it's not fun for me.

Okay, so even if you do find that fun, I think you can choose that playstyle. Just don't put any points in Industry. In the early game, if you put every point into Industry skills you're probably dodging combats and avoiding bounties and combat missions, because your combat stats will be gimped.

If a player wants to RP as a relatively peaceful explorer, avoiding combats and building up a strong fleet before respeccing into combat, I think that should be fine.

If the game DOES go the way you propose, I would hope that it comes with a greatly improved UI / tools. For example, setting multiple waypoints in a chain and seeing the total travel time and supply / fuel expenditure at base burn level and so forth.  I understand that some people like that excel spreadsheet style of play, but I don't. I'm happy to spend a couple points in Industry in the early game to simply not have to deal with that, and feel free to travel.

Now one thing I can agree with is putting more combat threats at the edges of the map. The challenge of exploration, IMHO, shouldn't be running out of supplies. That just makes the universe feel emptier and more desolate. I would prefer that you find more STUFF in remote systems - more fights, more difficult enemies, more weirdness.

The most annoying thing about exploration is simply going to a system to survey it and finding NOTHING there. No habitable worlds, no probes, no domain security systems, no [REDACTED]. Just a boring, empty dead system. Put a boss fight there or maybe even just a paragraph of story scrap, a teaser of how the Domain used to be. The game setting is the ruins of a post-apocalyptic millennia-spanning galactic empire.  Stories, mysteries, strangeness should abound in every corner of the galaxy.

29

Suggestions / Re: Founding a colony should require a Cryosleeper.

« on: August 17, 2022, 03:41:49 PM »

I really like the idea of factions having their own hoard of cryosleepers, which they can give to the player if they are especially chummy.

To flesh out the idea a bit more:

- Maybe let the player found stations cannot build industries. They allow storage, waystations and tech mining, kind of a "mid game" halfway point between colonies and just a salvage fleet
- To build a colony that supports industries, a cryosleeper is required.
- Cryosleepers can be obtained through exploration or through special quests major factions can offer when you reach Cooperative reputation level

The cool thing about obtaining a cryosleeper as a quest chain reward from a faction is that it offers an extra goody for building up reputation and siding with a faction, and offers more of a reason for diplomacy with the core factions instead of just glassing them all. Maybe if you're Tri-Tach you have to go hostile with the Hegemony and disrupt a major spaceport, or with the League you have to bring them a particularly rare colony item (like a synchrotron or nanoforge). If you're Hegemony maybe you have to "AI inspect" Culann, and attack their star fortress and raid an AI core. The possibilities are endless.

30

Suggestions / Founding a colony should require a Cryosleeper.

« on: August 16, 2022, 06:39:01 PM »

- Make Cryosleepers ships that can be salvaged to join your fleet.
- Colonies can only be founded by consuming a cryosleeper
- Cryorevival facilities are automatically available as a building for any colony founded by the player

Here's the reasoning : Starsector isn't a 4x game. Founding a colony should be one of the late game exploration and trade goals, not something that anybody can do with 1000 extra crew and a set of supplies. Furthermore, this change would give a lore reason why the core factions haven't colonized every single class V planet in the sector yet. A player with a modest start can easily colonize 4 planets by a mere 10 years after game start, so why hasn't the Hegemony already recolonized half the sector? And also, even WITH immigration, hazard pay, etc, a colony founded with 1000 people shouldn't be able to grow to millions in less than a decade..

The explanation should be that colonizing planets is hard. The reason every modest salvage fleet in the sector doesn't have their own colony to go back to is that setting up a colony on a new world without advanced domain tech requires thousands of people, years of investment and tons of scarce equipment. All of which is neatly bundled into these giant ancient Domain created arks that are scattered throughout the sector.

Also, in terms of the storyline - shouldn't other factions have more of a reaction to the sudden appearance of a new faction? The first one to pop up in ages, and with tons of advanced technology (that players usually have by this point in the form of nanoforges, synchotrons, etc..) that was supposedly very scarce in the sector? How does every faction respond to this new upstart, do they view them as a threat or a trading partner?

As it stands now, it's like "Meh. We're all gonna raid you or ignore you. Also the Hegemony wants to get into your business, but a few bribes can take care of that easily".

This also opens up possibilities for new and powerful terraforming items. If player colonies are capped at the sector Cryosleeper count, it actually opens up the design space to make individual colonies MORE powerful, since the player now can't drop colonies all over the sector. Maybe items or events can eliminate decivilized / cold / hot / high gravity, etc.. And this suggestion is intrinsically a buff to the first colony, since it means that Cryorevival facility has it's maximum effect on any world the player chooses for their first colony.

Edit : One other thought. If the goal is really to let the player have tons of colonies, gate the first one behind the Cryosleeper. That also sort of makes sense - founding new worlds requires massive effort, the sort of effort that an entire government / planet needs to get behind. Once the first colony is founded, the player has access to the resources and institutions needed to make more colonies work. I kind of think that planting colonies everywhere actually cheapens the mechanic of colonies (since they're a lot less special in that case) but it's an option if that's where the game is heading.