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31

Suggestions / Re: Mid-Endgame Difficulty Enhancement - easily implemented

« on: August 16, 2022, 06:31:04 PM »

I'm going to echo that "conquest" balance isn't a thing Vanilla should be addressing.

It's a mod feature. I personally prefer to play in a style that's more like Privateer / free trading than Genghis Khan. I would actually like to see more interesting peaceful diplomatic options with the various core world factions.

32

Suggestions / Re: Colony Economy Changes

« on: July 25, 2022, 12:41:17 PM »

Colonies don't need economic buffs. I'm confused on how the OP thinks a colony doesn't boost income.

Colonies boost income so much that there's literally no reason to even haul back salvage past a certain point. If you pick a good planet and grow it to 4 industries, you rapidly reach a point where money literally doesn't matter to the player at all. Expeditions are easy to deal with, just turn off your transponder and blow them up. The lost rep can be quickly earned back with missions or bought back with a few gamma cores.

If Colonies get a rework, I'd prefer they get buffed by enabling unique gameplay. Find some cool benefits for a colony that go beyond money, like access to unique weapons, ships, officer skills, raiding opportunities, etc..

33

Suggestions / Re: Chicomoztoc (Hegemony colony) cannot be destroyed by saturation bombardment

« on: July 20, 2022, 10:55:10 AM »

Pather cells can be avoided the same way AI inspections can be. Just don't use any AI cores. The Hegemony inspections have no effect in that case.

If you're using a ton of Alpha cores I don't think it's possible to avoid Pather activity even if you sat bomb every Pather colony.

Here's my hot take : Evil players already get literally *all the goodies* in this game. It's the peaceful traders that are totally screwed.

Peaceful traders: Pay tarriffs, low profitability, try to be friends with factions, nobody rewards you anyway.

Evil warlords: Do warcrimes, never pay taxes, traffic in drugs and human organs, starve colonies to make extra profits on food,  commit literal genocide all the time, get mega rich.

Maybe Alex can throw a bone to the players that want to roleplay being a nice guy once in a while? If I wanted to know all about a *** place where evil wins, I'd just read the news or look out the window.

34

Suggestions / Re: Chicomoztoc (Hegemony colony) cannot be destroyed by saturation bombardment

« on: July 20, 2022, 07:03:07 AM »

The Pirates and the Pathers never stop harassing your colonies either. You can sat bomb every other faction into oblivion and pirate / pather bases will still spawn and harass you. AI inspections are just another kind of raid. I don't see what's so particularly worse about them.

35

Suggestions / Re: Chicomoztoc (Hegemony colony) cannot be destroyed by saturation bombardment

« on: July 19, 2022, 11:43:57 PM »

Man do people really like warcrimes that much?

Finish the storyline and then sat bomb Chico. Or actually, just don't let the player sat bomb Chico at all, period, without mods.

How is your crew not mutinying? How are the independents even talking to you? If we're talking realism, max colony size should plummet after Chico is sat bombed. There's no way you'll get a colony to size 5 let alone size 6 after you genocide half the sector, as immigration is the main source of population and A) half of the potential immigrants are now dead and B) who wants to move to a planet owned by a genocidal maniac?

Geez. Is this really that important of a feature for people? Put warcrimes in a mod, this change shouldn't be in the vanilla game at all is my opinion.

36

Suggestions / Re: Fighter pilots should be treated more like marines are now

« on: June 06, 2022, 05:15:45 PM »

Another thought I had was that this also works for threats the player encounters. For example, a bounty to take on an Astral with elite pilots vs novice pilots would feel like a big step in difficulty.

37

Suggestions / Fighter pilots should be treated more like marines are now

« on: June 06, 2022, 03:30:52 PM »

Right now, fighter pilots are treated as disposable. Does anyone ever take recovery shuttles, except for RP purposes? From a gameplay perspective, you're incentivized to just pick up more crew when you run low. There's no reason to try to save pilot's lives.

Contrast with marines, where your elite marines are a precious resource and players don't want to squander them. You actually care about marine losses, because replacing them with novice marines is a big deal. Keeping your experienced marines alive feels like an investment.

I think there's a huge design space open here to make players care about their fighters more. If pilots were a resource that gained experience and became elite over time, players would feel more invested in their carriers. Perhaps pilots ought to be a separate category, like marines, instead of drawing from general crew? It would make sense : A pilot has to be highly trained, and the difference between a novice pilot and an elite pilot SHOULD feel like a big gap.

Having a fleet with elite pilots, the player should want to invest in skills and mods that reduce pilot losses. It also could affect gameplay a lot: Do I want to accept potentially higher losses of throwing elite bomber squadrons against REDACTED or a star fortress? Maybe I want to invest in more expensive, heavily shielded fighters so my elite pilots will last longer, even if it costs more OP / potentially deals less damage? Or I could RP that the sector is just a harsh, deadly place and my pilots will die a lot, but at least now there's a tradeoff where I'll never have elite pilots. The decision space would be really interesting imho.

38

Suggestions / Respec and mentoring should limit combat skills to those the Player has

« on: April 19, 2022, 02:49:30 PM »

My suggestion is that when a player chooses to mentor or respect officers, they should be limited (or expanded) to skills the player has invested points into, plus maybe a random choice.

The fiction is simple. When you respec / mentor an officer, how are they learning new skills? Who's teaching them, if not the player?

This is a buff to combat skills, and a nerf to everything else. Is your player a combat god? They will have total freedom to train their officers to fill any specific role.

Is your player mostly a leadership / logistics captain? You'll have a hodgepodge of random officer skills, plus whatever level 7 officers you pick up in stasis pods.

This could also open up some interesting story / modding choices to find NPCs that can join your crew / colony to allow officers to gain skills the Player doesn't have. Perhaps there are plans for a new colony building, the "Flight Academy" or some other fiction, that lets players that are strategists and not pilots similarly configure their officers after they start a colony.

39

General Discussion / What games were inspiration for / spiritual ancestors of Starsector?

« on: April 05, 2022, 12:27:15 PM »

One reason I love Starsector is that it feels like the natural evolution of games that I enjoyed playing as a kid, but the genre feels like it's been abandoned by AAA studios.

Games that Starsector reminds me of:

Star Control
Wing Commander : Privateer
Starflight
Sundog (this one dates me quite a bit)


They all have in common the top down, 2-d action space combat gameplay originated in Asteroids, with roleplaying, exploration and economy building slowly added later.

I don't know why the genre isn't more popular, but I hope when Starsector goes on Steam it makes a comeback.

Edit: I just remembered Privateer isn't top down at all. My bad.

40

Suggestions / Re: Balancing Income

« on: March 28, 2022, 03:35:30 PM »

Just chiming in with my two cents.

First, I think it's a good thing if the game has a grindy/slow/consistent way to earn money at low risk. To put it diplomatically, as others have pointed out, some players just aren't very good at combat. There should be a progression "slow boat" that lets less skilled (or less combat inclined) players "over-level" by earning cash and levels until they can win some fights with AI fleets.

This leads into my second point, which is that progression is really random in this game. This especially comes into play with exploration. As a general rule, I would expect that the further I fly from the core worlds, the riskier the exploration mission should be, and the better the rewards should be. The cash payout is a minor point, because really when I explore I'm hoping to find vast ruins or an abandoned station. The colony items and blueprints found will greatly outweigh any cash payout when that happens. In reality, exploration missions feel a lot like lottery tickets. I don't know if the randomness is bad exactly, but it could be a bit "smoother".

If it were more explicit that distant caches are very well rewarded, but also well guarded, that would give players an intuitive notion that distant exploration missions are riskier, but nearby ones are more relaxed. This also could let the player control their own risk reward: Take survey missions a few days from the core worlds? Chill, easy, low risk money as long as you bring a lean fleet. Distant mining station? Bring your fleet, there could be guards but there will be tons of loot. In practice, maybe I get lucky with an early exploration and find a capital ship / good cruiser, and then I'm doing high level bounties as early as I possibly can to bootstrap a colony. That can be a huge leg up in the early game. OTOH, sometimes I'm just finding way more ore than I can carry and probes full of gamma cores that lead to a slow grind before I can build the fleet I want.

One sort of "easy" way to do this would be to concentrate Red High Warning beacons at the edges and corners of the map, Medium beacons an intermediate distance away, and low warning beacons close to the core worlds. That intuitively makes sense, because even the existence of "Redacted" fleets is supposed to be unknown to the average core world resident, and that fits the lore better if Remnants make their homes far from the core worlds.

But really I would love if there were more unexpected enemies one could find when stumbling across a research station at a distant black hole. Aliens? Some experimental Domain AI defense system? Or an enclave of devolved scientists from centuries ago still maintaining advanced domain weapons? The possibilities are endless.


 

41

Suggestions / Re: Some mechanics feel really outdated

« on: March 18, 2022, 09:59:58 AM »

I gave you my reason why.  Cannot help you if you did not like my response.

There are other reasons for five colonies.
* Player wants to tech mine planets with ruins to loot them, and doing so takes months, although the rare items are of little use without other colonies to exploit them.

* Player wants to distribute items over several planets to satisfy demand of his industries without generating too much Pather interest and getting Pather cells implanted on his colonies.

There is no real support for conquering.  If there was, there would be alternatives to killing everyone and building new colonies over their ashes.  Currently, the player will probably need to grind Ordos for more alpha cores to break the colony limits.  It seems more like an accident that conquering in a roundabout way works at all.

What kind of love for exploration?  Hopefully, not more FedEx quests or other tedium.  Keep in mind anything new and exciting does not stay that way for long.

As for politics, sometimes the player can be forced into it by the constant expeditions and the pather cells.  That is a reason why I like to wipe everyone off the map, to eliminate the politics.  Unfortunately, wiping out the core worlds does nothing to the Pather cells, which is why I consider Pather cells more obnoxious than Hegemony inspections.  I can prevent Hegemony inspections by wiping H off the map, but if I want to avoid Pathers, I need to make sure all of my colonies never grow past size 3 or never get more than eight Pather interests (which means no alpha admin, no hypershunt tap, no more than one colony item on the world).

You have a billion and one mods to get what you want.  The most popular mod ever, Nexerelin, is an attempt to turn Starsector into a 4x game.

All I want is to explore and find something interesting. How about unique challenges, or unexpected AI / Alien threats near the edge of the sector? How about more STORY, hints about why the collapse happened, news from other sectors or the REAL core worlds of the old Domain? Unique weapons or items that can only be salvaged from challenges distant from the Hegemony?

To me the magic of Starsector is that the setting is something like a Fallout / Last of Us post apocalyptic world in a far future sci fi setting. There's hints everywhere of a deeper world. As soon as it becomes a "conquer the galaxy" 4x game, the magic is gone for me. What's the point of smuggling, taking missions, surveying single planets, reading the stories of individual characters, if the true scale of the game is being the Emperor of the Galaxy? Emperors don't bother with carrying transport fleets full of organics, or hunting down bounties. They certainly don't care about scanning anomalies in distant remote stars, or stealing transport ships from lightly guarded hangars. If you're Han Solo, stealing a Venture from a lightly guarded hangar is an exciting coup! Your fleet is 25% larger now! If you're the Emperor, who even gives a ***? It could have been a Paragon, and you churn out 5 of those every month.

Btw, your roleplaying exercise isn't just pointless from a gameplay perspective (because every single thing you want to do you can do with one colony or ZERO colonies. You can reopen the gates, murder all the Doritos and burn the entire sector to the ground, with a zero colony playthrough) but is also unrealistic immersion breaking. A game of starsector spans at most 25 years, and every cryosleeper in the game added together makes a single size 7 colony.

Once you've decivilized Chicomoztoc, where is the population of your empire coming from? The Persean sector isn't exactly a beacon of prosperity and growth even in stable times. There isn't enough time in the game to grow the population of the sector in a meaningful way. The fact that you can apparently spring up 2419 colonies or whatever in just 2 decades using AI cores is just immersion breaking, unless in your RP fantasy your colony is entirely populated by androids and AI or something.

Ok one last problem with being Emperor:

It's easy. There is no challenge to it whatsoever. The AI is not tuned like a 4x game, it won't build up to a counteroffensive, reinforce it's planets in times of war. It just.. .Sits there and waits for you to conquer it. It's pointless (there is no gameplay reward for being emperor), it's immersion breaking (because it's impossibly easy to do) and it's just boring. At least a game of Stellaris would be challenging to take over the galaxy, because the game is tuned to make that an actual challenge. You're just farming Alpha cores to plant colony after colony for.. Why? No new items, no new challenges.

42

Suggestions / Re: Some mechanics feel really outdated

« on: March 17, 2022, 01:56:07 PM »

At a minimum, to be self-sufficient so that if the core worlds are wiped out, my faction can still function just fine.  I can get ships and consumables, and fight any zombie enemies that refuse to stay dead.  Maybe not optimal without as much income, but still viable civilization.

My long term goals are first, annihilation of the core worlds, then full sector colonization (via alpha core admins).  I have not tried full sector colonization because I do not have that much free time, and I do not want to repeat it every time Alex releases an update.

In short, I want my empire!

That's pure roleplaying. The only way the core worlds could be wiped out is if YOU decide to wipe them out. So... don't?

You want to roleplay genocide and war crimes. Ok fine, but why is your roleplaying preference more important than mine? If I had my choice, exploration would get a little more love, compared to all the attention building 52151 colonies and conquering the sector gets.

I prefer to play neutral good trader/privateer that doesn't give a *** about politics. Having to worry about core worlds factions attacking each other isn't the game I want to play. Just my opinion.

43

Suggestions / Re: Some mechanics feel really outdated

« on: March 16, 2022, 11:38:51 PM »

If I deploy Ziggurat, I can only deploy 85 DP worth of ships.  Even Paragon at 60 DP (and 100 left for rest of fleet) is not much better.  That is not enough for a fleet - at least enough ships for all eight of your officers - unless everything else is cheap small stuff like frigates.  That is practically from two to four more ships, which feels more like a small party of three or four adventurers from an RPG or a light novel fighting an evil version of themselves, not an epic fleet battle at Endor.

If you just want a lot of ships, don't deploy the Ziggurat. You can have a Paragon and an Eagle instead, or two Onslaughts.


Regarding colonies - I have to ask, what is the point of having more than one?

In gameplay terms, what is the difference between earning $500K a month and $5M per month?

What is the point of having 5 colonies, other than roleplaying? Seriously, what is it? There is no game left at that point. I start building colonies at a point where it doesn't even matter anymore. You have all the ships you want and all the gear you want. What exactly are you doing with all those colonies and all that money?

If you just want to sat bomb Chicomoztoc, you don't need a single colony to do it. Yes, starting colonies and growing them is fun. I see the appeal. But it feels like a completely different game tacked onto a fleet combat simulator. If there was some gameplay *reason* to actually have a ton of colonies, it would be different. As it stands, pretty much anything you want to do in the game, you can do without ever building a colony.

But I don't want to really rip on the colony mechanics because my assumption is that Alex has some endgame planned, where having a bunch of colonies may factor into it. In which case you'll be right, but at this exact moment, the "Build an empire and perfect a ton of colonies minigame" is pure RP.

44

Suggestions / Re: Some mechanics feel really outdated

« on: March 16, 2022, 04:42:10 PM »

I want massive fleet battle royale, not a Star Control SuperMelee or Mortal Kombat endurance match.

Gotta disagree with this one and vote in favor of the lower DP limit. Maybe this is my bias, but I always felt Starsector was supposed to be closer to Privateer than to Stellaris. You're a scrappy Han-solo type, getting by on smuggling, the odd exploration, supporting the occasional rebellion, and once in a blue moon beating a vastly superior fleet as the outnumbered underdog with grit, skill and luck. Not herding armadas.

When the player pilots a ship, that player's piloting skill should be decisive. If it's a 30 capital vs 30 capital slugfest then as other people have pointed out it's more about metagaming the AI than your own skill. Isn't Starsector a game of tactical space combat? How is it tactical if it's a 30 cap vs 30 cap 1000 DP slog?

If you deploy a Ziggurat, why the hell do you need 20 capitals supporting you? You should be shredding the entire opposing fleet on your own if you know what you're doing. I'm not an especially good pilot, but the Ziggurat is just busted. Even in a Doom the player should shred the opposing fleet.

If the DP limit is 1000, might as well get rid of combat skills for the player entirely. Actually if you want to play with a 1000 DP limit, why not just play a 4X game designed for that kind of scale like Stellaris? Also, how is a 180 DP match an endurance match if a 1000 DP match isn't? The latter sounds way more tedious than a sharp tactical 180 DP skirmish.

45

Suggestions / Re: Shields....

« on: October 31, 2021, 04:29:39 PM »

Sounds like that would be a massive nerf to shields.

Phase ships would be strictly better than shields if you couldn't fire weapons with shields up.

If you need a lore reason, shields take energy to power so they can be one way. Only passive defenses, like armor, are forced to function both ways.

For example, powered magnetic fields are one way. They apply force in one direction but not the other. No laws of physics are violated by having a one-way forcefield.