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Topics - Gothars

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Modding / MOVED: [Guide] Semantic Versioning for mods

« on: October 22, 2020, 04:23:41 AM »

This topic has been moved to Modding Resources.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=19277.0

Modding / MOVED: [0.9.1a] Hullmod Barratry 1.0a

« on: October 09, 2020, 02:53:25 AM »

This topic has been moved to Mods.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=19222.0

Suggestions / Flares should be usable during venting and overload

« on: October 08, 2020, 07:03:19 AM »

Passive and active flares are the two weakest ship system and very redundant with PD weapons. Most of the time I actually forget using them when they are on my flagship. But being able to use them while the main defense against missiles is out of action would transform them from the bottom of the barrel into a very useful (although still weak) ship system.

Suggestions / Utility weapons

« on: October 07, 2020, 07:46:18 AM »

I really liked the introduction of logistics hullmods, as it allows to (role-)play something other than combat focused fleets. How about extending that logic to some weapons?

For example:
Mining blaster - increase loot found druing scavenging
Mining laser - decreases frequency of asteroid impacts on the drive bubble (as per its description)
Hellbore - decreases fuel required for orbital bombardment
Thumper - decreases maintenance supplies/month of the ship it is installed on (as per its description)

Such utility weapons could only be installed/switched when docked. They'd also solves some other problems:

- their utility function gives another reason to use this weapons past early game and thus increases weapon variety
- explains the existence of mining weapons in a world in which asteroid mining seems to be virtually nonexistent

Suggestions / Streamline the salvaging/scavenging mechanic by front-loading it

« on: October 05, 2020, 05:30:49 AM »

For the most part Starsector has great gameflow, but salvaging is one of the major hiccups, I think. You usually want to scavenge large debris fields two times, which over time really ads up to a lot of player inputs required.

In more detail:

Spoiler

1. (Explore->) consider ship recovery ->select ship->recover->2. pick trough wreckage -> click to reveal loot instantly -> take all -> dump metals etc. -> confirm and continue

3. Scavenge- > Asses -> consider ship recovery ->select ship->recover-> Begin salvage operations -> click to reveal loot instantly ->take all -> dumb metals -> confirm and continue

4. Scavenge again -> Asses -> Begin salvage operations -> click to reveal loot instantly ->take all -> dumb metals -> confirm and continue

That's often over 20 player inputs required for (thorough) post battle salvage or for extracting all resources from abandoned stations/probes, floating hulls or any other exploration encounter. And since you're doing this hundreds of times during a play-though, it really ads up.

[close]

I'd propose that in the after battle/exploration encounter dialog, you get two salvage options:

1. Thoroughly search the wreckage. This discovers all ship hulls and as many of the loot as scavenging a debris field twice would discover. However, your fleet is immobilized for a day or so, like after using the active sensor burst. This option does not leave a debris field.

2. Give the wrecks a cursory inspection. This recovers only as much loot as the current post battle salvaging does, maybe even minus enemy hulls. It exist mostly for the situations where you have to get away immediately after a battle and is the default option for AI fleet. That it so they leave debris field behind that the player may salvage.

The thorough search option would easily cut the inputs required in half. Are there any major downsides I am missing?

Suggestions / An incentive to fight pitched battles - earning story points

« on: October 02, 2020, 02:54:03 PM »

Right, we know very little about story points, but I'll try a suggestion anyway:)

I remember that one of the ideas behind having deployment costs is to motivate players to deploy as little as possible to defeat an enemy, theoretically leading to more interesting battles even if the enemy is outnumbered. I practice, however, it is usually better to deploy enough ships to easily crush the opponent, as the danger of losing one of your own far outweighs the concern of increased deployment costs. Consciously deciding to make a battle more interesting and challenging yourself to hard battles is, in sum, punished by the game, not rewarded.

One idea to change that is to reward players with story points if they win a pitched battle. The go to way to grant story points seems to be bonus experience, so maybe that should happen here as well. It seems a good way to give "partial" story points with something like 50% bonus experience.

A pitched battle could be either:

- a battle were you win against a far great DP deployment than you deployed yourself, or
- a battle were you suffered heavy losses and came close to losing, but didn't.

In the second case a generous helping of extra XP might keep you from just reloading.
Both cases should probably have a cooldown so it's less easy to abuse them for XP farming.

I think it could also be cool if pitched battles were noted down in the new story point log. With that, story points could be slight redefined to not only mean "points you spend to shape your story" but also "points you earn by shaping an interesting story".

Suggestions / Better retreat for "too large" fleets

« on: September 14, 2020, 04:39:45 AM »

Of all the combat scenarios in the game, the one I find the most problematic is the retreat of "too large" fleets. If you want to retreat in a big fleet you have to fight until either
- you dealt significant damage to the enemy, which is often impossible when they far outnumber you, or
- you lose enough ships that you are not longer considered a large fleet.
But it is not indicated when this point is reached, so you might have to retreat multiple times (losing CR) to check if you are eligible already. In practice, this makes losing your entire fleet a far more likely thing than it has to be.

I gather that the main reason to limit retreat is performance related, because a big fleet can't be deployed all at once.

So, I'd suggest to at least better indicate when your fleet would be eligible for a retreat (a counter how many enemy/own ships have to be destroyed still?), or better, to come up with a new combat scenario for these types of situations.

My idea for such an scenario would be this:

When encountering an overwhelming enemy force, you select some of your fleet to fight a time-limited delaying action against the enemy. All your ships not part of that action will be in an autoresolved escape scenario. (Autoresolved, because then the size is not performance-limited.)
Int he delaying scenario, the enemy has the goal to send ships to the border on your side of the map as fast as possible. All enemy ships that reach that border within a time limit burn away and will be the pursuing force in the autoresolved escape scenario. Your goal is to stop the enemy ships from crossing your border, and thus increase the chances of your fleeing ships. When the timer ends, the remaining enemy ships can no longer join the pursuit. They will now likely destroy or root your delaying force, or if they are in turn defeated, the scenario will reset. At any point, you can retreat your delaying force and fight a standard escape scenario with them. At the end the survivors from the autoresolved escape scenario and the escape scenario of the delaying force will be joined again on the campaign map into one fleet.

Feel free to come up with a better scenario, I think there are many better options than what we have now!

Suggestions / Various QoL ideas

« on: September 10, 2020, 11:42:17 AM »

I recently started playing again for a bit, and made some notes:

- Fighters should not make the overload sound when their shields brake. The purpose of the sound is do indicate a chance (or danger) of critically damaging a ship, that it plays when fighters are affected dilutes the sound's informational value.

- It happened to often to me that I made I quick weapon switch while underway only to go into a fight with a low CR ship. It would be helpful if there could be a pop up when a change leads to my ship not being combat ready.

- The "low on supplies" tooltip should probably mention the option to suspend repairs, because that is often your best option in a low supply situation. Maybe also mothballing. The "scuttle ship" option id does mention is far less useful.

- It would be nice to have a text float (like the damage floats in combat) on the campaign map, next to your fleet, that indicates how much fleet-wide CR damage you're taking. That would be especially useful when travelling through hyperspace storms, and also help to immediately estimate the danger different environments pose. At the moment I have to carefully read the tooltip to compare a corona vs a flare vs an event horizon.

- It was probably suggested before, but it would be really nice to have all storage locations connected into one. Like a magic chest, you know. Call it the sector courier network or something, maybe give it a waiting time or extra costs.

- More of a random thought: Harvested organs could reduce crew casualities.

Suggestions / Indicate overload duration with flux bar

« on: August 22, 2020, 04:03:31 PM »

The overload duration could be visually inidcated by the flux bar. The flux bar shrinks by a certain amount during overload, if the part of the flux bar corresponding to that amount was textured differently, the remaining time of the overload could be estimated accurately. If the texture would look like chaotic noise the would communicate the meaning clearly, I believe.

Related to that, it might be interesting to give ion damage the additional property to increase overload duration. In order to not give them the ability to keep enemies in overload indefinitely, they could increase total overload time by an percentage of the time that would be left from the original overload time.
Would make them into even more interesting support weapons.

(There's the rare case were a ship has so much dissipation that it can shed more that 100% of flux during an overload, in such a case the bar indicator would not be precise. That could be fixed by the new texture overruning the flux bar or by resseting it at 0%. But I dont think it's much of an issue to just be vague in these cases.)

Modding / MOVED: [0.9.1a] Anvil Industries ship and weapon pack (V:0.7)

« on: November 17, 2019, 01:13:30 PM »

This topic has been moved to Mods.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16911.0

Modding / MOVED: [0.9.1a] Transfer All Items v1.0 (2019/11/11)

« on: November 17, 2019, 01:10:01 PM »

This topic has been moved to Mods.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17210.0

Suggestions / Ship explosions should destroy/disable nearby missiles and torpedoes

« on: May 08, 2019, 01:43:52 PM »

For two reasons:
1) The white out explosions make it hard or impossible to see missiles near it, giving them a few seconds were they can sneak up on you undetected. I was hurt that way a few times now, and it felt a bit unfair.

2) I think it would make sense, look cool and sell the power of the blast better. A giant explosion should have an impact on its environment, and that missiles just pass trough it takes away from the wow-effect.

Suggestions / Pin important intel on the screen

« on: May 06, 2019, 01:51:45 AM »

I think it would be helpful if you could always see important intel during transit, like how long you have left to finish a delivery or until a raiding fleet arrives at your colony. You can tag/untag stuff as important in the intel menu, so there's no danger of cluttering the screen with stuff you don't care for.

Suggestions / Randomized start option

« on: May 02, 2019, 02:12:15 AM »

As much as I am looking forward to the upcoming update, I can't help but also feeling a little dread at the thought of starting in on of the same few ships in the same old Jangala orbit again. The gameplay usually develops in some interesting, unforseen direction quickly, but the very start is samey and thus quite boring.

Can we get a randomized starting ship and location option, please? I'm fine with every random starting ship being equal or worse when compared to the current options, so it doensn't encourgae save scumming. I also wouldn't mind to have so other things randomized, like credit balance, accepted missions, faction relations.

Modding / MOVED: [0.9a] Another Portrait Pack v1.1

« on: February 02, 2019, 06:28:16 AM »

This topic has been moved to Mods.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=13716.0