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121

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 27, 2020, 08:40:11 PM »

Battle 3: Those look kind of Ok to me apart from Onslaught's slightly low performance. I think you could experiment with some unsymmetrical loadout on Dominators such as ballistic on the left and explosive on the right. The one with dual Devastators didn't perform well.

Capital Pulse projectiles also look unassuming to me. I think you should add some glow effect to it. Anything that hit hard should be more noticeable. Some FS weapons can also have a bullet trail effect to make it obvious which ship is dangerous.

Re autofit: Eh, I mean the auto setting for weapon groups not the actual autofit of weapons. I believe the manually crafted loadouts will fit in with the lore better anyway.

122

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 25, 2020, 09:09:15 PM »

Just curious, why do you think it is better to have all the ballistics in one auto fire group? The reason I ask, is that flux generation is a factor there. If you have the large railguns in a separate group, the AI can toggle them on autofire while at high flux while only toggling off the main group of mediums, etc. Separate groups allow the AI to be more efficient and eek out more damage under pressure than it otherwise would be able to. In your build, however, I can see you prioritize way more flux dissipation than weapon flux generation. So maybe that is why you run into that problem less.

I also think explosive weapons are a little overrated against high tech ships like these. The railguns penetrate the armor fairly quickly and it has the Terminator Beam (yeah when that hits shields it is indeed a bummer!) and the two forward firing flux free autocannons to punch through the minimal armor. Especially in the case of the Defense Paragon, kinetic damage is essential.

Let me explain my criteria to decide if it's Ok to put everything in one group first.
- All high flux weapons should be separate out of this group due to inefficiency to sustain.
- Weapons have to be at a similar range or cost no flux.
- High alpha long reload should be separate out so as not to waste on a good opportunity.
- Flux/sec for that group should not go over 1500 for capital or much higher than the vent rate. Lower the better.

Here're the pros and cons that I can think of in grouping everything together.
+ Highest burst potential possible. Effective in brief meet n' greet. Don't have to waste time switching between multiple groups.
+ Mix weapons give a good continuous suppression advantage. Mix small explosive weapons in the group, deny them no chance to lower shields.
+ AI tends to not change group when it can still fire. This gives an advantage to the next one.
+ Unlikely to waste explosive shot due to not having anything to fire, AI picks next group with highest DPS even though it's ineffective/inefficient flux wise over small weapons.
+ AI can still fully take advantage when a shield is down.
+ Can act as PD.

- Cannot sustain when under heavy fire but can still retaliate somewhat because of auto fire.
- Cannot focus fire on a specific target. Anything in range will receive a fair share.
- AI will still fire short-range weapons forward even if it's will never reach the target hence wasted flux. Next Alex's patch might fix this.
- Only work with turrets and not hardpoints.

But I would prefer stock variants to use Alex auto setting. This will be kind of a high end optimize and I prefer others to experiment with it themself.

As for your new videos, I think Dominators could use a Resistance Flux Conduit for a better active vent.

123

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 25, 2020, 08:46:17 AM »

Battle 1 Defense Paragon: Nah, that looks fine to me your Onslaught just lack explosive weapons. Wasted Terminator beam on a shield you fool!! Do group all ballistics together in 1 auto fire. If it can't sustain, switch to a lower flux weapon. Aurora has a speed advantage so it can retreat from Dominator easily. Maybe Aurora DP should be increased as well?
Battle 1 Beam Paragon: It's the wrong video!!

Onslaught revision 1:

124

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 25, 2020, 02:27:46 AM »

Can't watch the video. You have to set it to unlist and not private.

My old build but I have to watch the video first to see if ballistics are enough.

125

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 24, 2020, 09:29:03 PM »

I%u2019m outside right now and won%u2019t be able to write a proper reply but I would slap a frontal shield on that Onslaught. It shield/flux is too horrendous. Weapon group settings is sometime quite important to do manually.

Titan ship from Imperium mod can switch variant with auto fit.

It would be better if you could post a video clip as well so I can make a better analysis.

126

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 24, 2020, 07:09:32 AM »

Man, that was quick work right there. This might absolutely be the only time to shine for Timid captains all over the sector!!

I also propose another idea to go along with it, even though I don't want to delay the mod any longer. You know that carrier tag ships are really good at rear hugging a capital and that would be an ideal position for a fire-support team. I wonder if it is possible to make a Hull-mod that can override a ship tag to act as a pseudo carrier.

Now that I try to visualize it, the game complexity will really go up a notch. All tanky frontline ships may also need buffs to withstand this new barrage and the nerf to shield stacking may be somewhat detrimental now.

As for Advance Optic, I would put it on hold for the moment as it doesn't feel right. Any change right now would go over my head since I have no clue nor good judgment anymore from your across the board change. So, just put whatever you feel ok as a place holder.

You make it sound so good. I'm itching to test right now lol.

127

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 23, 2020, 08:49:45 AM »

By no means beam weapons are weak, that pinpoint accuracy is OP enough to kill even the most heavily armored ship by drilling through a small section of armor. I think the entire problem is the penalty to flux cost. It's just too severe/critical to trade for. It's not worth the risk to lose ship IMO.

As for another question, no, I didn't test the fire support build because I think the flux cost to fire is not worth it. There's a catch though. I think if you can make all fire support weapons able to go through the friendly ship (I hope the AI will be able to handle it) and have a range of around 1500 it might become very useful. You know, "fire support" suppose to come from the rear. Without having to deploy the shield, those flux cost might not be so bad anymore.

As for the Advance Optic, we can slowly think it through. I think a large penalty to flux cost is a no go. It can still be there..., and less intense, in combination with other debuffs of choice. From what I understand, you want Advance Optic to be able to transform the normal beams into the fire support beams with similar flux cost to ballistic counterpart and similar range. But the beam is slightly different from ballistic as it, has no specialization, has no opportunistic window to fire like an explosive when the shield is down which makes the damage x 200% still lower than 1.0 flux ratio, and is fine.

I think the mod will not work as intended for every weapon and the easy way would be to craft a new entire line of support energy weapons.

Zzz

128

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 22, 2020, 04:57:13 AM »

What I intend to compare for is not the balance between an Advance Optic beam and a long-range ballistic but an un-optic beam. The logic behind how I decide not to use it is the survivability of the ship and overall DPS. Because beams weapon is soft flux the need for constant suppression is a must. If the flux cost goes too high and can't be fire continuously, the suppression ability is practically voided. It may be ok to reduce the number of beam weapons to lower flux cost with alternative energy weapons but by that time the Advance Optic might not be worth it anymore just to apply to a couple of weapons where targeting core can buff all weapons at once. And for survivability, it will be like Archean Order ships that kill themselves by wasting all the flux on the enermy efficient shield.

This problem does not apply to zero flux and cheap flux Graviton beam. But when the weapon is an Artronarch beam (which has short-range and would benefit most from Advance Optic), Tachlance, or phase beam that has a high cost to fire, it's very crippling to use Advance Optic with it. Do try to test with 4x Artronarch Paragon I think it will just kill itself from the flux cost. Also, do test with outnumbered fights as well I think that the con will be quite obvious as it can't fire weapons in retaliation in quick succession and will be gang to death more often than un-optic build.

Also to note, I tend to play with max deployment so the situation I'm in may be different from others.

129

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 21, 2020, 02:37:30 AM »

Good to hear it's coming along nicely.

Even though I'm the one making requests for anti-shield/anti-armor energy weapons. Please please make sure it's not going overboard than its ballistic counterpart. There was this heated discussion in Alex's 0.9.5 patch note on the same matter and various people also make good agreements and arguments about it. I also don't want it to outshine the energy damage type.

- Flux costs for firing beams when equipping Advanced Optics increased to ~120% more up from ~60% more originally.

RIP advance optic. Are you sure this's a good choice? I already can't use it in any build but zero flux. It's just not flux friendly.

- Graviton Beam, Graviton Lance, Assault Beam and Razor Tri-beam are all now PD weapons with assault range. The AI should prioritize ships over missiles for these weapons.
 - ^ These were too powerful with Advanced Optics. The PD change reduces the range bonus from that hullmod down to 200 instead of 500 and allows me to keep flux costs low.

That did counter my zero flux build but still RIP advance optic. If we... Increase the range benefit by scaling with the flux ratio of the weapon instead will it work? Like 1.2*500 for Tachlance, 0.4*500 for Graviton beam, flux free can eat dirt.

- Changed Armored Weapon Mounts armor bonus to a flat increase by hullsize (50/100/120/200) instead of a percent modifier. - Doubled benefit to weapon hitpoints.

RIP armored weapon mounts as well. Double weapon hitpoint might actually be good enough to consider it if cheap.

EDIT: Ah what the heck, I wasn't going to spoil it, but, here is one of the Legendary weapons: (View at your own discretion )

Uh Ho, nice thic beam.

130

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: November 19, 2020, 04:02:56 AM »

Any progress regarding the mod?

131

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

« on: November 16, 2020, 12:43:27 AM »

Is +25% hazard rating really that gamebreaking? As a player who doesn't cherry pick worlds to settle when I did bother touching colonization, I can't really tell if is or not. I want to say its really not that big of a problem, especially when there will be content to improve planet conditions anyway in this update

25% more hazard really hit pop growth hard in the long run. Hazard rating is one of the decisive factors whether you can have a planet that can churn out 200k+ per month or not by the end game. But to consider if it's game breaking or not, I don't think it is. Just a little less money from 500k - 1m average monthly income.

As for the corrupted nano forge, it is so useless even without pollution. I kept 20 of it as a paperweight every gameplay.

132

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

« on: November 12, 2020, 12:37:33 AM »

Honest answer! I don't play "a lot of video games", rather, I occasionally play a specific video game *a lot*. Cyberpunk isn't one I'm at all interested in, so it won't have any impact. Generally it's not AAA stuff I gravitate to, anyway; I think the main AAA I've played in recent memory is SC2. Nothing against AAA in general, btw, t's just usually not my cup of tea.

That's probably why everybody is here, in this forum... majority lol. Indie games usually are more complex and unique due to the absurd amount of years spent in developing it.

133

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

« on: November 01, 2020, 04:00:47 AM »

There's this rare crash that I don't get too often when assisting an orbital station against multiple invasion fleets so large that the battle span on for multiple rounds. For virtualization's sake, the first round is full-blown very long combat, the second round is also full-blown combat with capitals that haven't been deploy yet plus the one that retreats. In the third round, the enemy just throws all of the support ship and cargo at the station until nothing left. But that's not the end, the screen prompts a fourth round that has no enemy ship in it. If I click to join said combat, the game will immediately crash.

This rarely happened (probably 4-5 times) but I still noticed and avoided not joining in the last round. It probably a NEX mod issue but you could maybe put a check code on empty combat.

134

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - Update preview 6/24/20

« on: October 22, 2020, 10:41:34 PM »

Completely without the game informing me, random mercenary squads and even scavengers managed to take out 4-5 of my orbital stations - with me only learning about this by manually flying around my colonies or checking the colony management screen.

Is this intended behavior under your mod?

It could potentially be due to one of the other mods I have installed, but it seems really weird. I'm okay with a faction hating me - the Luddic Church launched multiple invasions on me due to them hating my saturation bombing of the Adamantine Order worlds - but those invasions I could counter because the game announced them and announced when they were or were not successful.

The independent fleets however vastly outnumber the invasions from other sources, even if they are weaker individually, and crucially they seem to attack entirely without warning and far more viciously than I ever had to worry about with pirates or the pathers.

Do you have any recommendations for fixing this on my end? I am likely not going to play my current save for all that much longer, but I don't want to have to scrap it over this.

Lol, that's funny, do you know where they are spawning from? If they spawn from your planet then that's a problem with maybe the new Nex update. And for the second point, there won't be any warning because these are roaming fleets that randomly spawn and patrol around any planet that isn't hostile to Independent. Like free patrols but you still need some high command for it to spawn a really big fleet but usually these "big fleet" contains no capital ship, never. It also sometimes go on to attack some pirate or any enemy force but they don't usually raid planet, I think.

Oh, also, the Adamantine Consortium Battleships are slightly annoying to chase down. They seem to rarely actually fight in battles I have had against them, and instead just run away at the first sign of any danger - wasting all of their flux to phase past minor attacks, then teleporting away so I have to chase them down for ages. I wonder if there's a way to tweak this - is it possible to give a cooldown to their "phase" ability of perhaps 3-4 seconds so they actually end up fighting rather than spending all of their flux to hide? I don't want to make them weaker - I haven't had any problems actually fighting them - but most of my battles against the Adamantine Consortium end up with me spending just as long chasing those things down without them being any threat as I spent actually winning the battle.

This is normal Phase ship AI behavior at the moment. It was not designed for a big phase ship. In Vanilla, The biggest one is Doom that barely has any weapons hence avoidance behavior. In the next Starsector update, there will be an improvement to this aspect. You can still bypass this somewhat with a captain with Aggressive and Ruthless Behavior.

Edit 2: Okay, now after fighting those two fleets off, two "more" fleets of Scavengers are repeatedly attacking the same station over and over again. When I go to fight them, the game says "Your forces let them off without incident," the game literally won't let me destroy them! They then fly away and wait for me to leave the area, then immediately attack again. This seems incredibly broken behavior-wise, and it's really weird to see in action.

Edit 3: I saw the message "Your forces let them off without incident" effectively against the Luddic Church forces as well that invaded my system, so that seems to be a larger issue. I wonder if this is due to the game (or some mod) making it so you can only have so many battles within a certain span of time - but that wouldn't make much sense to me when Combat Readiness already deals with that issue.

This "Your forces let them off without incident" is also another normal behavior because you're trying to assist your orbital station in combat and the enemy is scare of your big fleet and trying to run. Since you are an assisting force, your orbital station gets to decide what to do and they will always let them go. If you don't want them to run away and still want the orbital station assistance, you have to run your ship at them after this massage end and be the one to initiate the combat. You will have the orbital station in combat as well as it's still in the vicinity.

And for the recommendation in what to do with all these messes, you have a few options
1) Make amend with the Independent by doing their quest. Transport quest always counts for Independent no matter who you're transporting for. Use prisoner spam. Use agent.
2) Build multiple High Commands in one system. The recommended number is 3. Orbital station with no support is just a chunk of steel.
3) Choose a proper system that's easy to defend. I saw you have Terraforming mod install, so, pretty much any system that has at least 8 rich planets with at least one stable orbit slot is fine. You can then spam multiple High commands in it and no one can mess with you ever again.

In my last playthrough, I ally with pirate and hostile to all but still find no trouble ruining everyone's day. Hence if there's something crazy happening, it's not this mod fault.

135

Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Nexerelin v0.9.7c "War and Peace Redux" (update 2020-10-10)

« on: October 22, 2020, 05:04:22 AM »

I won't give factions free fleets to retake lost markets (if that's the proposal) though, there's enough issues in the game with fleets out of thin air as it is.
(as for decivilization, I can't readily modify that part of the code at present, but if I ever do I might do some stuff with it)

No, of course not free recapture fleets out of thin air but their would be invasion fleets. Instead of targeting a new unrelated planet that it can't even defend, it should aim for their lost planet in the home system. For example, I have multiple instances of Sindrian and Tri-tac lost their important planet like Sindria and Culann in the first hour of the play. They were pretty much done for with the loss of said planets which can be easily fixed with just recapture it but of course they don't and went on to capture some random Persean or Hegemony planets which got trashed nonstop because it doesn't have any patrol or even an orbital station.

And the issue of predictable invasion, I don't see the point of worry about that since I would be doing the same in their shoe but any invasion apart from recapture home planets should still be allowed. Only that, it prefers more on target inside an existing system with their colony.

Hmm they already get some fairly significant buffs (both the Culann and Eochu Bres stations get alpha cores) and I'm wary of piling on further buffs on top of that to turn Hybrasil into some ultra-fortified system. Well, I'm giving the military base on Culann an alpha core too, that'll help.

Adding alpha cores to those stations only makes it harder for the player to capture. What I usually saw was that it never pose any resistance to multiple invasion fleets ganging it since they will always spawn enough fleets to bring it down.