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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - Thaago

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1
General Discussion / Re: 0.97 IR Pulse Laser Thread
« on: March 28, 2024, 09:37:15 AM »
A small cheap gun for shooting at small targets. 50 hit strength means that vs bigger things they act more like terrible kinetics than energy, but for some ships terrible kinetics is still a good choice. I use them on frigates and on some shrike builds and think they do ok.

2
Suggestions / Re: Making (some) money should be easy...
« on: March 27, 2024, 04:22:00 PM »
tl;dr -- this game clearly plays out very differently as a noob than a veteran.

That sums the situation quite well. It is very difficult to balance for both extremes and maybe the way forward are multiple modes like the existing iron mode.

An iron mode without Hull Restoration could be a solution to the money overflow. After every fight you need to buy new ships or repair your D-modded ones. Ship repairs would be a constant money sink, even in the late game.

As others have said, it all comes down to experience. I play iron mode, never do dedicated smuggling runs, and never take hull restoration, and I'm still swimming in credits. I don't even particularly try to make money, but just take the good opportunities that are around me and do missions clustered in the general direction I want to explore. I consider hull restoration to be, for a veteran, the weakest capstone skill (and industry the weakest branch, again for veterans for whom managing logistics and money is easy). For someone who's not a veteran, the constant upkeep/fuel/officer costs, costs of repairing ships, etc, can be a serious burden that threatens to death spiral the game, so industry is a great skill branch for them.

As an example of an opportunity that might not be obvious: piracy of any convoy that has heavy armaments (and to a lesser extent supplies). If you see one flying, or see one pop up on the intel feed, taking a modest rep hit or a detour, then selling to either a perpetual shortage or possibly the one that was just made, will net between 250k and 750k (and sometimes more) for often a quite easy fight right in the core systems.

3
General Discussion / Re: High Scatter Amplifier, yay or nay?
« on: March 26, 2024, 02:44:48 PM »
That really doesn't sound right. Beams aren't any much more efficient than normal weapons (or at all in some cases), and the range with HSA is truly terrible. If going low vents with lowish efficiency, that just sounds like low damage output combined with low range, which is not good.

Instead of an HSA ion beam, why not just an ion cannon? Way less flux (100), same damage, almost as much range (500 vs 600), way fewer OP (6+ HSA marginal cost), small slot instead of medium. And the phase lance is only going to have 400(!!!) base range. At that point and AM Blaster is competitive in the slot, though I suppose an HSA phase lance is better than an AM Blaster except for range, unlike with the ion beam. HSA + AO for 500 range? But that's a lot of OP for replacement AM Blasters!

Gravitons are efficient, but without their range they are just worse than something like a single light autocannon.

4
General Discussion / Re: High Scatter Amplifier, yay or nay?
« on: March 26, 2024, 02:02:10 PM »
...

Ooof, yeah, 540 range vs over 1000 is just so massive. With 6x damage they are punching through shields anyways (and allies can provide kinetic support as well).

5
General Discussion / Re: High Scatter Amplifier, yay or nay?
« on: March 26, 2024, 11:31:36 AM »
Would a Harbinger be able to use it well? Otoh, they have such high phase lance DPS that it almost doesn't matter if its soft or not, and the range cut puts it in more danger. Plus, OP cost.

6
General Discussion / Re: High Scatter Amplifier, yay or nay?
« on: March 26, 2024, 11:05:37 AM »
Nay from me. The range cut is way too much.

7
General Discussion / Re: should we just nerf the Onslaught?
« on: March 26, 2024, 10:12:30 AM »
...To be fair, i wouldn't call Executor's shields good. It's, at its core, a missile boat someone mad put energy hardpoints on. It has base flux stats of a Legion, which would just get it chewed up and spit out if it didn't have a 0.6 shield to compensate. It's basically the reverse of Sunder and Conquest having "worse" shields.

The flipside to this is that every capacitor gives more effective hp than on ship with lower shield efficiency , and every vent gives more hp/second. A baseline executor might only have 23.333k shield hp (more than most), but with only a modest capacitor investment its hp grow rapidly.

[Edit] Ninja'd!

8
In general yes: More torpedoes. More bombers. More heavy, long ranged ships. Rally and eliminate orders to force the engagement.

At the same time, the AI is very bad at attacking stations. They will happily fire into invulnerable or no-weapon parts at the expense of NOT firing at the things killing them.

In this regard Reapers are the best weapon for killing stations because of their splash damage. A reaper hitting the "wrong" section can still deal thousands of damage to the neighboring ones (including hitting some small stations clear across the center region).

9
General Discussion / Re: Legion/Sunder/Medusa vs 6 Ordos, 2380 DP
« on: March 23, 2024, 01:28:17 PM »
Hmmm, I can't really agree with you on that one. Missiles tend to be specialized so not great vs every target, but they are very powerful while the ammo lasts.

10
Suggestions / Re: Making (some) money should be easy...
« on: March 23, 2024, 11:31:00 AM »
On the one hand, as someone who's played for years: yes, money is easy to make in lots of ways.

On the other hand: money is the one way to really "lose" the game, where lack of money becomes lack of supplies/fuel becomes ships imploding. So having money be hard to make would make the game, which already has a pretty steep learning curve, even harder for new players.

I wouldn't mind having more difficulty-related options though.

11
General Discussion / Re: Legion/Sunder/Medusa vs 6 Ordos, 2380 DP
« on: March 22, 2024, 10:26:30 PM »
These endurance battles are always so funny to me in terms of builds in the way they don't use missiles. For smaller battles, those Legions might have to make do with Mk IX + Mjolnir (or Heph) as the guns... but would be rocking 5x rockets/reapers etc. Also just hardened subsystems on caps!

12
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: March 22, 2024, 02:08:21 PM »
I had a mouse with right click on the fritz juuust enough that it would cause my shields to screw up, so in the end I ended up rebinding 'q' to shields. Helps on a laptop too!

13
General Discussion / Re: should we just nerf the Onslaught?
« on: March 22, 2024, 02:00:35 PM »
I can't remember if I've posted this already or not, but I enjoy S mod auxilliary thrusters on pretty much every capital and moderately slow ship these days. Maneuverability is great and the +10 speed with 0 flux is even better for getting them into combat faster.

14
Suggestions / Re: Change Harbinger's System to a Movement Disruption
« on: March 22, 2024, 01:27:03 AM »
Well I'm using a combo of pirate afflictors/shades in that save, though i'm not sure the pirate shade is worth the OP loss, but moreover I haven't found losing some of the phase bonus to be crippling in practice. I've gone down to about 70% before without really trying and the frigates were still dodging well in phase (and i had been using the pack from before I had the skill at all). Honestly I think even down at 50% the phase frigates would still be very speedy. They already have +45% speed base anyways, so going from 1.95 to 1.7 isn't so bad (assuming additive stacking, which maybe it is not).

15
Suggestions / Re: Change Harbinger's System to a Movement Disruption
« on: March 22, 2024, 12:37:52 AM »
To be fair, the player in a Harbinger already deals very high damage. Triple phase lance + phase anchor is a very strong punch and it even has acceptable (if not super great) range (600*(1.2+possibly gunnery)+200).

I'd be using the ability to help the other phase ships in my pack, mostly. I'd probably pop the ability right before the first hard engagement (once I've gotten the forces nearby and put down the eliminate order) so that the first ship out of phase doesn't take too much damage.

Its similar to when I fly an afflictor its way better for me to intelligently time the system to boost allied ships rather than just focus on myself - delaying my attack/phase/repeat cycle by a few seconds while I wait for allies to move in (as long as they are fast) is fine.

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