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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); In-development patch notes for Starsector 0.98a (2/8/25)

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Messages - sector_terror

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16
This is arguably worse. Just coming in a bigger package.  Unattractive clutter is still Unattractive. Trying to balance around a whole cluster of skills make imbalance more significant. Some skill in the upper tier is vastly better and more important than the other skills. It overshadow other skill, and possible reason to pick that entire tree. It simply mean it isn't balance against other skills, it unbalance the whole skills tree and probably unbalance the whole skill system. Nothing change, it is not balanced.

Oh I agree, it's not balanced. The choices are just more highlighted since they're now more directly compared against others. The old system wasn't balanced either, but it remains unbalanced as is. But the idea it isn't even a choice in concept and that it's the systems fault is the thing I have a problem with. It being disbalanced? We agree, I've made my concerns on that before. But it doesn't mean choice is removed, just that it isn't a well balanced choice

17

Almost every every game I played I picked very similar skills explicitly because I know I want a very specific thing out of the game, and those skills were the means to do that. [...] I don't consider skills for re-playability purposes, because tbh most of them don't really interest me that much. And finding different things is much better in that regard anyway.

Exactly. You want to play the same way every time with the exact same amount of power. You can CHOOSE to replay again and again all youd like, picking the same ships, using the same tactics and strategies, with the same ksill picks. But then your not really using the replay value given to you. That's fine, you can choose to do that if you'd like, but demanding your choices means the replay value doesn't exist is just short-sighted. It may not be the thing you're interested in, but that replay value is quite valuable to me and many others, and you can't just declare it non-existent because it's not the kind of variation you personally want.

and look, that's fine. Go pick the best skills for the "Easier" play experience if you'd like. IF that's what you wanna do cool, but the old skill system has exactly as many problems with skill balancing, and the only reason people didn't notice was they just ignored it. But now you have to make choices to choices to get what you want, you can't just get everything all at once. We agree it's still in desperate need of fine-tunning, Alex himself has said so and I've written full essays on it multiple time, but let's not ignore what's there and call the hole system trash because you dont get the end-result you use to get.

18
General Discussion / Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« on: April 25, 2021, 10:26:08 AM »
I can kill any fleet, that's good enough for me. I also tried phase ships, and I could kill any fleet, just two different approaches. I don't enjoy grinding SP, and I couldn't care less about min-maxing experience. I find that when my colonies get to max size with full cores and items and I've explored everything, there's nothing left to do that's interesting. I'll farm cores for a bit for the challenge, but I usually abandon the campaign some time around there.

Hey I'm not alone. I also never understood the obsession with phase ships. I see the results sure, but I'm also one of those guys who can't get those results.


Legacy fleets still work well enough to kill everything. If you don't want to play with phase ships, you can still do everything in the game. I personally think the phase skills should be removed entirely, and maybe some of the bonuses can be distributed to other skills in weaker forms.

Well enough? How many fights are you doing with them at 500% difficulty rating? And how fast do you farm SPs after lvl15?

Why are you fighting fleet battles with that kind of difficulty? I got close to post-game and never once had anywhere near that kind of disadvantage. I called at 325% and that was when I got ambushed due to my own mistakes. If this is hard end-game, then maybe discussion of the difficulty balancing of the superboss grade optional fights are in order. Or maybe you're just rushing into fights your not anywhere near prepared for and you deserve to get crushed.

19
General Discussion / Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« on: April 25, 2021, 10:22:45 AM »
There is no balance in the current version. You have legacy fleet (low, mid and high non-phase techs) what was designed as mutually balanced as possible and lives by its rules. And you have new fleet of ships what break said rules. Intentionally, since they are either fleet destroying bosses or "exotic touch" needed for other ship to look "normal". Of course they are hands down better. By design. I see no room for discussion here. We can have endless debate about whats better: Paragon, Onslaught or  Conquest but not about this.


Secret ships and the like are explicitly out of balance and shouldn't even be factored in. I don't like those kinds of easter egg style 'secrets'(and they aren't well hidden either) are even in the game, but they are 100% harmless since they dont have any investment cost. I dont have to spend a skill point or dedicate a colony slot to it or something. Mind you I still think it's bad, but it doesn't suddenly drastically effect the flow of the game, unless Alex is using it to consider the difficulty scaling for end-game superboss style fights. That would indeed be trash and be of serious issue. The balancing here depends on how much your required to interact with it. Far as I know, neither the enemy designs for what is effectively post-game or any permanent cost, actually use it. You can ditch them all without sacrifice of any kind.

tl;dr: The existance of the scarab gun in Halo 2 doesn't make the game unbalanced. A lot of things do, but the scarab gun isn't one of the,

With all that said I must add that my point is that current skill system is non-existent because all that "no fun allowed" policy towards legacy fleet. Phase road is like fast track career option you know. You just got yourself your first Afflictor(P) and the next thing you know you are so overpowered that the game have nothing to offer as a challenge. But on the slow track you are getting your bonus armor cut into thirds because it is so important that old ships should be still vulnerable to medium caliber guns. I just can't stress enough how important this all is under Rift Torpedo fire... And since I'm unable to unsee the whole Zig blitz possibility I'm feeling like I'm done with the current build.

Okay if your blaming .9.5 for phase ship balancing then you are way off in another universe. They were a "problem," since way before this new update. Phase ships are extremely high reward high risk ships, for lack of sustainable defenses you get near invulnerability. Effectively, you decide how much flux to use regardless of enemy fire. But, it means you have nothing to small arms, so even light attacks which would mean nothing to other ships, are a drain on your flux, and defending and defending at the same time is impossible. some people have managed that into a such a skill they are effectively untouchable. Using this st a staple of balancing, is like balancing the difficulty of Minecraft mobs to speedrunners like Dream. Phase ships have to be balanced with the AI and general players, not the literal best of the best. If you found a way to use a skill I don't have to break the game, cool. But not everyone can use phase ships effectively.

Now, I have made clear, within my knowledge, why people see success with these ships. I am not one of those people, and if I am wrong to exactly what mechanics and numbers make them so overpowered, perhaps you would be wise to start a thread discussing the ins and outs of phase ships and what specifically allows this supposed behavior. As for the Zig(debating if I wanna go spoiler on that one), it is addressed above. If you cant stop yourself from using an optional SNK boss not likely considered in balancing your opposition, then it's entirely a you problem. You don't blame the scarab gun, for you using the scarab gun.

20
General Discussion / Re: A solution to make everyone happy
« on: April 25, 2021, 10:03:36 AM »
I didn't mean just difficulty, I meant some game systems downright break when you tweak the values in certain ways.

For example, let's say you want massive battles. You tweak the battlesize way up, fleet ship limit up, and NPC fleet point limit way up. Seemingly, it works - battles are massive now. However, it also breaks colony defense mechanics. Orbital stations don't scale together with fleets, so now they are completely incapable of defending colonies from raids, which is their primary purpose. Despite still existing in the game and being buildable, orbital stations are completely useless and a waste of credits. This isn't just a difficulty thing, this is a game element becoming disfunctional. And a new player tweaking sliders most certainly wouldn't know about it beforehand.

That's an interesting point. So if anything difficulty would have to have hard limits in what can even be scaled. It's an interesting concept, but I think some questions on what can and cannot be caled is in order

21
General Discussion / Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« on: April 25, 2021, 06:53:15 AM »
Well, this ship is the most powerful thing in the current release so why is it a bad idea to center your build around it?

I didn't say your build, I said the balancing of a skill in general. If a skill is defined by being only useful to a -single- ship, then it's so overspecialized as to never really be a pick for the player. Remember, that thing is suppose to be a secret.

Thus, why would I choose IM over RS? To pilot non-phase ships? Well, about that, as I said, you simply cant pilot the best non-phase battleship. Whats left are subpar obsolete ships incapable of the same performance. Choosing them is choosing to handicap yourself. It's a struggle to get the third place. And, finally, Industry. Yes, it has a lot of potential to solve all the problems you are creating for yourself by picking large fleets of those obsolete ships mentioned earlier. Pick the optimal path and you don't need to think about logistics whatsoever. The only fun thing in the whole aptitude is already scheduled to get balanced.

And not we're into the extreme min-maxing. Just do everything perfect and play by math! Im sure you're good enough to pilot those ships perfectly and enjoy it, but I'm not. Nor are a lot of people, and none of us not in the phase ship party enjoy phase ships. Saying [redacted] battleship, SNK ship(exageration) it is, makes every other choice invalid is ridiculous. To just get alone is a nightmare and a half, often costing more than it's worth, and you need to drop a specific skill to even have it. Even if DP limits were removed it still wouldn't be black and white min-maxing since you're ignoring availability. Even if you weren't it's an issue with ship balancing at worst. You need to expand your horizons more man.

22
You can't get the ability to just ignore mechanics you don't like without a price tag
The price tag would be 1 skill point. Price paid in full.

These choices don't balance anything. They are arbitrary and this is a SP game. What Alex did was strip a large number of players their ability to their preferred playstyle.

A skill point is just a number. What the skill point represents is the choice. The actual cost, the payment, is the potential battle power you're losing in turn to obtain that boon. Serenitis' playstyle appeared to be 'pick the best skills and be super at everything while ignoring every weak skill' which is just ignoring the problem of skill balancing and not making choices anyway. Making players interact with all skills and make difficult choices isn't taking away anything.

Why do you think you have been denied a pick of what you want? If you want blind total freedom then, by your own admission, you just wanted to play the same thing over and over. Why bother even replaying at that point?

You are defending less choices and more limited choices. That's it. The answer is it doesn't matter, your questions aren't relevant, they are a way for you to obfuscate. Stop building straw men to make it seem like the point is absurd. You are being intellectually dishonest. Want people to start asking you loaded straw man questions. Seems fair. Why do you hate player choice so much? Why do you think limiting player options in a SP game is good for the player base? Totally unproductive accusatory questions. Just like yours.

No....I actually defended that statement when the source poster admitted he chose the same things over and over because they were the best skills and allowed him to both have full combat power and major logistical support at the same time with no cost. He wasn't "choosing" and managing a limited resources, he was just taking the best skills and ignoring everything else because, you could do that. He didn't have to choose, he could get everything without cost. Again, at worst the choice was changed, not removed. In my mind, it was -added-. If the previous system was encouraging people to make the same thing over and over and over without limit, which it evidently did(the post I quoted hasn't been the only one to say that. I was one of those people as well), I'm glad it's gone for a system that has stricter and more difficult choices.

23
General Discussion / Re: A solution to make everyone happy
« on: April 25, 2021, 06:24:56 AM »
Setting.jsom exists, and you can outright make a simple mod to remove DP limits and edit skill numbers. All the actual edits are global variables. That's enough for me.

24
This required it's own post. Sorry for the double-post but the other one would get WAY too long otherwise.

I severely dislike being forced to do things in a specific way. Just show me the 'tools' and let me decide which ones I want to use.

Depends on the tool. If the game is telling you "you have to field more than just Astrals and nothing else," to encourage buying sips as they appear and not just hoarding only one kind of ship, then it's doing fine encouraging players to different options.

Quote
Is it because skill design now means you can't comfortably get X skill in your playthrough? Even more importantly, why is X skill required in the first place?
Again, why does it matter? Every player has a different thing they want to do, and different abilities they consider more valuable than others.
Some players want to want make themselves more powerful, some want to be able to do 'interesting' things, and others want to just remove as many 'chores' as possible. The first two groups have been catered to quite well. While the latter group has not.

You didn't answer his question. Why do you think you have been denied a pick of what you want? If you want blind total freedom then, by your own admission, you just wanted to play the same thing over and over. Why bother even replaying at that point? Just make one min-maxed build and go beat faction boys all day while playing pirate. It's not even that insanely difficult to do that. Also, the third has been catered to by catering to the first. You keep demanding that making the game easier is somehow not removing "chores," which apparently means mechanics by what you posted below.

What I liked from the previous iteration of the skills was that I could remove or mitigate 'chores' and add QoL features.
  • Access to T-Jump
  • Ships turn faster
  • Reduce supply use
  • Reduce fuel use
  • Lean into D-mods for further supply reasons
And I could still do what I wanted.
  • Increase PPT
  • Explore everything
  • Build and develop multiple colonies
  • Tech mine

Being able to ignore exit points and leave wherever you wanted, ignoring a mechanic which makes it risky to be in a purely negative space with an area by making exit paths more difficult, is not an  option you should just get for free. Do you want better raw speed, or better stealth? You can't get the ability to just ignore mechanics you don't like without a price tag. Same with supply use. If you don't like the mechanic fine. If you think it's a bit too expensive, then join the club(I prefer a slow but inevitable rise in power than the knife-edge risk reward where everything is insanely expensive so a poor job performance means losing a -lot-). And absolutely none of the second list has been taken away from you in any way sans the PPT thing. You can do all those things in any way. And if you want to be able to more easily ignore mechanics, losing classical battle power in having lower PPT is a fine trade.

With the new setup all this has been locked behind other things that aren't of much use or interest to me, but need to be picked because of the way the 'tiers' work. Some of them are opposite things that I don't care about, so are non-choices. Some of them are opposite each other, thus guaranteeing that I'll need to double-back. Some of them are 'gated' behind things that I outright do not want under any circumstances because they undermine what I want to do, and so are completely impossible to attain. And this isn't even touching on how much harder the entire game is when you've been forced to spend your limited points on 'filler' skills that don't really help in order to get basic QoL features/abilities, in addition to the weirdness with officers/ECM. The real kick in this that's making the whole thing bitter, is that forcing choices for skills just isn't nescessary. In a more open selection, the player who wants to pick something new every game and the player who wants QoL features can both get what they want.  In a sequential selection, the player who wants to pick something new every game will probably be delighted by being 'forced' down different chutes. The other player less so.

Okay first, please learn what "Quality of life" means. quality of life does not mean ignoring mechanics and limitations against you. I think we can establish you dislike the supply system and wormhole travel, but people like me like it, even if I think supplies are a bit too expensive. But, no, removing or limiting their effects heavily isn't quality of life, it's a skill which increases your fleet's growth by cutting it's expenses. Those are benefits you get, and having to choose between better battle performance and logistical skills, if a choice. By YOUR admission, it was so little a choice before you could freely get both and did so by choosing the same skills every single time. Now you have to make tough choices onto what's important to you. You can't just power game to have basically everything, you have to choose.

Yes, there are balancing issues with skills that aren't worth a damn. But by your own admission, the old system had that to. But instead of being forced to address the weakness with mods or formal writing to discussion solutions in the main game, you just ignored the balancing problems by picking the best ones over and over. I get it's frustrating to have to face balancing issues now, but you can't call it a problem with the system itself. Though writing this gives me some more perspective into why so many people are complaining about the system. If anything that -really- further conversation.

25
Well this will be fun to discuss given what's out there. Well, onto the essay.

I'll start with this: A -lot- was added to the game. The new contact system gives tremendous control over your missions that wasn't there before and more missions to work with. The stealth ones may suck and bounties may need some work(I only came back recently so I won't have much to add on the front of bounty profit for a while.) New colony upgrades, the story point in-built systems, new ship designs, new raiding mechanics that made it a much better and more controlled option. If you're going to run down the idea that nothing was added, you're not going to see any sympathy from me.

Now, we do agree on the overkill enemy challenge, as does most of the playerbase it seems. But, I have no idea what that has to do with PvP,that just came off like wild rambling. I don't think it needed this level of officer at all(Sans the full end-game, but superbosses are fine,) given the difficulty of keeping a profit in combat scenarios so we agree there. But that is the end of my praise. If you have an issue with the difficulty curve then join the club. Alex put in notes he toned the officer spam down and it's a known issue on an entirely new system.  It's one man with limited QA testing doing about as well as the entire team at paradox does with Stellaris, give some credit here.

You have made a lot of claims without any evidence behind it. I don't know whether that hyperbole for rhetorical purposes or not, but demanding everything is just blindly nerfed into the ground is frankly a bit too far. Reminder the phase didn't even have much in terms of upgrades before and still managed to be insanely overpowered fleet killers more than carriers, even with the complaints. So demanding "Carriers dont get easy upgrades now," is a bit unfair don't you think? Now again, the DP discussion is a well known complaint. To the point people named it the largest issue with the skill system, and very few disagree. But flat removing them on the spot is a waste of development time and ignoring the issue with overspecialization. There is little to no point to building general skills at all if you're going to only field one specific type of ship and nothing else. The point is to encourage broad fleet building rather than a stack of carriers you swapped between whenever your ship needed to pull back for CR or damage. Removing that entirely just means packing 10 Astrals and nothing but 10 Astrals is more effective than a broad fleet setup using what you can get. That isn't railroading, it's incentivizing like you wanted. The numbers are they are have too strict a drop sure, and If I wanted to spend time learning Java I'd do my own edits to cut both the slope of the diminishing returns and raise the "maximum," but removing it entirely is just as extreme.

The more I write this, the more I think the title and thesis is a lie. All of this is a discussion of balancing issues and difficulty curve. It has less than nothing to do with player options. It also shows, at to me, that you just wants a power trip to rip enemies apart, rather than a constant struggle to build your fleet up to galaxy grade levels. The only difficulty I've had as of late is keeping profit in bounty hunting, and I still routinely curbstop anything not the [redacted] capital ship with minimal to no losses. The only thing that brings it down is officer spam, which everyone knows about and can be fixed by using setting.jsom to cut officer pay heavily and raise the max number of them to 20. You demand incentivizing, but then the game gives you exactly what you want through the DP limit....being able to choose jobs gives better rewards for specializing your fleet without outright forcing you to. You demand all of this is taken out, and nerfed into the ground but it just comes with no evidence behind it.

Now, to some additional posts that aren't the original:

The problem I'm having is that I played StarSector to unwind. It was a chill time bumbling around in space doing whatever as I slowly meander toward some fuzzily defined goal.
But in the new version there's so much stuff either making what I want to do either a chore or flat impossible, it's just not chill anymore.
And the vast bulk of those problems come from the skills.

In previous versions I'd usually pick mostly similar skills every time specifically because they enabled more chill and less worry (QoL). And this was never an issue for me as I'm not interested in varying player ability for different playthroughs because I want the same thing out of the next game as I did from the current one.
Re-playability for me is not what the player can do, but what the player encounters.

First off, "making things easier for yourself" in terms of difficulty and enemy threats isn't quality of life. That's making the actual tool use simpler or more comrtable. Things like difficulty balancing and the balance between choices is another thing entirely. Regardless, I heavily disagree. If all you're doing is picking the same skills and ships every single time, then you aren't getting good replay value. If you run into the same build again and again without limit or care, then those minor differences in encounter aren't actually changing anything. In fairness that's just because the old system had just as many balancing issues and meta trash as anything else did. I don't grasp why people think the old system was some holy grail without flaws. People are complaining now because they deem there is only one meta, the OP included. Yet here you are confirming the old system wasn't any different in that.

You were never interested in the choices the skill system gave you. You admitted it yourself when you said you picked the same skills every single time. And yes your admitting that in this new system you actually consider your skills and make choices toward getting choice picks and figuring how to put more minor skills to synergistic use. If anything your disproving your own complaint, that your being restricted for no reason and replay value isn't added by this new skill system.

Against human bounties, PPT is the main enemy.  So many enemy capitals, more than 0.9.1a ever had.  I never saw twelve Conquests from a single fleet before 0.95a.

Uh....did we play the same game? That was a routine problem for level 10 bounties, that they -very quickly- skyrocketed to that exact kind of spam. I routinely saw 12 paragons in a fleet. And Alex admitted the 10 levle difficulty stuff became even harder, just more rare and controllable and easily spawned.

This update really limited player options by introducing new mechanics. An example is the hullmod integration system, with 3 integrated hullmod it is a huge power boost that without it players are gimping themselves, while the system itself does not offer more options. The choice of what to intergrate is not an option, it's too simple. Because before there were not enough points and you had to choose between hardened shields or tagerting, now it's just slap them both on. Less player choice.

The same thing with objectives, before objectives helped, but was not MANDATORY. See? Less player option. Same thing could be said for player builds in comparison. Now starsector almost forces the player to play a certain 'class' because all the gameplay funnels the player into one thing. Get ECM, Cap objectives, use phase or temporal shell mechanics. All the options are mandatory, therefore they are Not options anymore, just more checkboxes to fill.

What are you talking about. Choosing where to spend story points, on what ship, and how to manage it with bonus experience and methods of keeping story points around for emergency scenarios is a huge new system to work with and keep around. It's not easy to story point every single ship, and you still have to choose which ones to point and if you follow that by using the extra OP for better raw stats and guns, or mods you otherwise might not consider. Hell, at worse it's -changing- the choice, not outright removing it. As for objectives, are we playing the same game? I've gotten to [super redacted] and been fine just ignoring points for the most part and focusing on combat. a few frigates set to hold a position is fine, and they make excellent fallback points and flanking positions. I have no idea how you think tactics has anything to do with a "class" of character, or how you're in any way required to use phase ships or temporal shell. Again, even in the worst case interpretation your just like the OP, discussing -balancing- issues with the difficulty curve, not anything about player choice.





26
General Discussion / Re: Impressions about skills in 0.9.5
« on: April 24, 2021, 06:24:22 PM »
Derelict Contingent is already marked for the nerf.

Reason for the Ranged Specialization is called Ziggurat.

Balancing your skill over some ship is never a good idea. "This skill is good if you take ONE ship" is so specialized it's ridiculous. It should be dropped to 1k range IMO, but alex himself admitted a non hot-fix balance patch is needed.

I do disagree with lucky. Industry has a lot of potential use and combat only needs minor upgrades to keep up. Remember, almost every one of these skill is made from scratch, it will take a lot of life playtesting to fix. I've posted my solutions before on that part. I admit to just not grasping the armor vs shield argument, so I'll let other people have that discussion. In general though, I do agree that the general vs specialist rundown isn't always the best. The discussion for Impact mitigation mitigation being a perfect example. That skill should remain powerful, but be left to less general ships, mostly being a staple of low tech and some closer ranger type midline. But range damage buff is useful to anyone, is the minimum was lowered to 700 or so.

Leadership is the only real mess, but that's a whole bag of worms

27
General Discussion / Re: About skill tree design
« on: April 24, 2021, 06:15:09 PM »
I'm not susprised that the DP limits got the highest votes right now. I mean, I would love the fight bay cap to run to around 30 or so myself(5 astrals) but the desire to non-liniarity surprised me.

28
General Discussion / Re: AI backing off from 100% sure kill
« on: April 15, 2021, 10:34:51 AM »
https://youtu.be/1peFMQR4AZE

SO Hammerhead with Reckless Officer vs default Enforcer.
Look and weep.


Oh I see what's going on there. It's looking at it's flux capacity as way too high and is prioritizing lowing it's flux before approaching again, on the risk it gets overwhelmed by surrounding enemies. The AI doesn't take the grander awareness of enemy locations into concern, as it really can't do that. So it's acting in it's protection without knowledge there is no chance of enemy forces attacking him.

29
General Discussion / Re: AI backing off from 100% sure kill
« on: April 13, 2021, 03:31:15 AM »
I remember Alex saying a while ago there is a bug in the AI that prioritized avoiding enemy fire over getting in minimum weapon range for steady officers. So if I'm right the AI reluctance is a glitch. Forgive me if I'm wrong there

30
General Discussion / Re: Stealth missile nerf due to new skills
« on: April 13, 2021, 03:30:02 AM »
As a quick edition while I was rummaging through the java files. The damage increase for missiles is still present in the code, just commented out. At some point apperently Alex considered adding it

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