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1

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 17, 2024, 11:24:37 PM »

Oh damn I really like the multiple offciers per ship idea. It even fits thematically, i.e. if you have, say, an Engineering Officer with Ordnance Expertise and Polarized Armor you instantly understand that's the "I'm giving her all she's got cap'n" guy.

Yeah in some ways they become not really "officers" per se, more like "specialists", since they specialize in one or two skills, and it makes sense that a ship has multiple people who have specialized into their niche roles. I mean in some sense it's unrealistic that you get this one guy on this ship who is so good that he's specialized into 5 or 6 different areas enough to make a significant contribution to the ship's performance, and what are the rest of the crew doing? Mopping floors? My headcanon is that officers really bring a team of experienced underlings with them, and you're really hiring the whole team (which is what makes them so expensive compared with regular crew), so it's not really just they themselves making the contribution by their lonesome, but it's still a bit odd.

And drawing all the extra portraits since the average number of officers per fleet would double/triple/quadruple!

David gets to bill for overtime!

This is not something you can just claim is obviously true. Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game and not just playing make-believe. Any change to the skill system (short of just granting more skill points without doing anything else) is going to take away some options that previously existed. Should we therefore decide that changing the skill system is inherently bad?

Uh well all games are more or less make-believe, so not sure what you mean. Yes you need some constraints in a game, the question is how much, and for a sandbox game, you want to let the player decide how much they want to lean in one direction at the expense of another without overly constraining it. A flag officer, assuming it would be the current limit of level 5 or level 6, would constrain the player to basically put at least 5 and at most 6 skill points onto the flagship. Any player who prefers putting 4 or less points, or 7 or more points, would be negatively impacted by it and prefer it less than the current system. So you would need to account for the type of player who wants to play with a super ship as well the type of player who doesn't want to pilot and is fine with letting their ship be a "dump stat" so they can put points toward the fleet as a whole instead. You need to justify how those different types of players would prefer the new system more - provide an explanation for what benefit it would bring over the current system, or address how it would correct those shortcomings - instead of just saying "Constraints and limits are what makes a game a game" or "Because it's not fun".

If you went with a hull-size limitation with the max number of officers allowed, you’ve capped the ceiling of the smaller ships. Something like Wolfpack Tactics might bump them up one more officer, but even then, you’ll never see a Frigate with like 8 skills. That’s not necessarily a negative but a consequence of the system.

Yes, I'm not sure if a size-based cap on officers per ship is really needed, I think it's more just for flavor. I mean the thought of having 4 officers and yourself squished into a Kite and everything. Realistically if you're going with a Wolfpack fleet, you're likely to prefer putting one or two officers in each frigate anyway instead of dumping them all onto a couple of frigates, unless you're going for Support Doctrine, so that limitation may not even be needed.

I’m unsure I would want a Pokémon mentality to officers. Gotta catch ‘em all. To imitate the same base level of power of 8 Level 5 officers as current, you’re talking 30-40 of these lesser officers. That’s just swimming in them. Again, not negative per se but has implications.

Agree. It changes the feeling of the officers from a handful of subordinates (like say, the VPs of a company where you're the boss) to essentially a commodity like weapons or blueprints. However, it would address a number of the issues with the current system, namely with how difficult it is to get officers with the right skills you want, encouraging more wolfpack play, and so forth.

Also, would officers level? If so, what does that look like? If not, it sounds like it’s more about amassing them than developing them.

I was thinking of them as essentially static and didn't consider them leveling. Presumably the way to get better officers is to fight harder fights where more officers with 2 skills and elite skills would show up. (In other words, if you fight d-modded pirates, you'd get regular one-skill officers, if you fight Hegemony Starfortress or harder contact deserter bounties, you could get better officers.)

@Vanshilar: just wanted to say, thank you for laying out your thoughts! This was a very interesting and useful read.

Oh to be clear, I didn't come up with the idea. It was someone else who brought it up, probably BigBrainEnergy below. I just found it compelling because it addresses many of the issues that players have raised about the current officer system.

FWIW I think the current system is mostly fine as it is. The only things I feel like should be tweaked are how the officer leveling system works; I would rather choose any skill than choose from a pre-selected subset for them, since if the given options for level 5 are not what I want, I'm not going to just stick with it, I'm going to toss the officer and find a new one, or just save-scum. I just shamelessly save-scum until I get the right combination of skills for each officer.

The other is some way to "store" officers that aren't needed for the current trip at hand or change their skills. This isn't as critical now when there's basically only one type of endgame enemy, but presumably in the future when there are several different types of endgame enemies, each perhaps needing different skills to handle them, there would need to be a way to swap out officers as needed or change their skills as needed for different types of enemies that you're going on a trip to fight. Like dropping them off at your colony to retrain their skills (and take them off your roster temporarily) or something.

(The many-officers-per-ships idea is - it has some positives to it, but it's so different then what the game looks like now that it'd be pretty massive trying to rework all of it, and it's also way, way more complicated.

Well, yes and no. In terms of how ships operate, I think it'd actually be pretty similar to current, by just taking the existing code machinery, and add a layer before it that takes officers on a ship, check for whether or not any of them have each of the 14 combat skills, and then return that array to the rest of the existing code. But yes obviously there'd be a lot more code that needs to be written in terms of officer generation, putting multiple ones on a single ship, creating enemy fleets with officers, etc., so there'd be a lot of backend code needed to make it work.

Balance-wise, in some ways it'd be pretty similar to current, i.e. more or less the same combat skills (maybe Systems Expertise and Missile Specialization would need to be toned down if they're "just another skill" instead of capstones), and there's already the 3 non-combat trees, so while there may be tweaks here and there to make it fit, I don't see that as a big change. Probably fine-tuning the number of officers, etc.

I think the biggest issue is from a design standpoint, i.e. whether or not it'd fit with your idea of how officers should feel in the game for the player. As FooF mentioned above, this makes them more into a collect-em-all mentality (like weapons) rather than handpicked advisers type of feel, once they get into the dozens. Then they just become another commodity to manage. On the other hand I've always felt like the "characters" in the game are the ships, not the officers, which I treat as just bonus stats, but that's just me.

There's also the matter of priorities, i.e. there's already been multiple skill overhauls and such, and is it really worth trying to reinvent the wheel again when there are a lot of other things to work on with the game. I mean the skills system already more or less works, the officer system already more or less works, but there are a lot more directions the game can go in in terms of expanding on the story, creating different endgame enemies, etc. And of course even if it does get put in, then players would find new problems to complain about with it, etc., so it's not like it'll solve everything.

Compared to Vanshilar's suggestion, I think each officer having 1 skill is better than giving them 2 because it would solve a lot of potential frustration with skills being bundled together that you don't want on the same ship.

Oh I think of it as officers with 1 or 2 (with maybe the rare ones in the sector having 3) skills more to differentiate between them (i.e. increase the variety of officers that you can get, rather than just 14), and also to help reduce how many officers the player would need. And so yes if a ship can for example have 4 officers, in theory it could have up to 8 of the perfect set of skills if you got lucky with that, but in practice it'd be more like 5 or 6 skills, similar to the current setup. (Skills wouldn't stack, i.e. if two officers on a ship have same skill, it would only count once, so yes the second one would be redundant.) How easy it is to find the perfect set would just depend on how often you could get them; I would think it's something along the lines of after each (significant) battle, you get 1 or 2 that you can pick up, or something. Ones that the player don't want simply get discarded, so it's no big deal that way. So it's something that takes a long time to get the "perfect" set, but you should be able to get "pretty good" sets without too much difficulty, especially since you can mix and match them and you can improve on each ship piecemeal.

I never considered putting officers on the player flagship, but it would make perfect sense to be able to jam them in there and all their skills get treated as elite while the player is present (an idea which I find both thematically and mechanically satisfying). Plus the "captain" (now second-in-command) could determine your flagship's personality during autopilot.

Yeah to me it nicely ties to why your flagship can be so powerful (have more skills than other ships, and have more elite skills than other ships). It has nothing to do with your player character personally but is something that the flagship of fleets are simply able to do, by virtue of the admiral commanding the fleet onboard that ship. So in this way, yes the player can have his super ship if he wants (perhaps because the flagship can have one or two officers more than the usual limit), but since that's drawing from the total number of officers allowed in the fleet, then it means there are fewer officers for the other ships. This makes that flagship vs fleet tradeoff much more transparent, whereas right now the flagship vs fleet tradeoff happens more in the skills system, leading to the issues raised.

Also it may be interesting to fight against, since (sufficiently large) enemy fleets will also presumably have a flagship as well. So that flagship essentially serves as the "end boss" of that fleet basically. And of course since [REDACTED] are all elite skills, they're essentially all flagships, but then again, they're also endgame.

Even with 40 officers I think it wouldn't be too hard to make the interface work, they only have 1 skill, so you can shrink down their portrait to about the same size with a name over the top like:

Then stack up 5 of these per row.
Put the personality underneath, dull and grey, while the captain's is bright white to indicate that it is active.

Oh I think the interface would be the easiest part, the officers would just have their portraits and skill icons in a row next to each ship, like the current but just line up the officers for each ship in a row. I'm no good with graphics so can't really draw what I mean. The problem though is some mod or another would want officers to each have 345729 skills which would mess up the whole interface.

2

Suggestions / Re: Separate Personal (Combat) skills and Fleet skills

« on: April 17, 2024, 12:26:04 AM »

I feel like there are two related but separate issues at discussion here, and that it'd be worth disentangling them. The first is the skills system itself, and the second is the relative power of the player-controlled flagship relative to the power of the other ships in the fleet, including other officers.

Skills System

One of the biggest advantages of the current skills system is its flexibility, which is exactly what you want for a sandbox single-player game. Each player has different perspectives on how they want to play, and different strengths and abilities, and these will change over the course of them playing Starsector. So giving them more flexibility appeals to the widest possible audience and gives the most replayability out of the game.

You can broadly separate each skill as affecting the player-controlled ship (i.e. flagship), affecting the other ships in the fleet, and/or affecting the campaign layer (affecting non-combat related mechanics, or only indirectly affecting combat mechanics). So there are three dimensions to consider. However, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the majority of fleet skills also improve the flagship. The only fleet skills which do not improve the flagship are Officer Training, Officer Management, Support Doctrine, and arguably Neural Link and Automated Ships, depending on how you want to count those. So it's wrong to think of fleet skills as somehow exclusive of the flagship for the most part; most of them will also help the flagship.

So why would someone want to take a flagship-only skill over a fleet skill that improves every ship in the fleet as well as the flagship? Because many of the flagship-only skills give unique advantages that are not achievable through other means, or are very expensive to get outside of those skills. Also (to be addressed below) controlling the flagship gives the player fleet specific advantages that can't be gained elsewhere, in terms of maintaining the flow of the battle to ensure victory, so it's worth giving more advantages to the flagship to that end.

Also, certain skills actually help along all three dimensions. For example, Tactical Drills gives +5% weapon damage to all combat ships, which improves the flagship and the fleet, and also gives bonuses to ground operations such as raids, which help with the campaign layer.

The current skills system gives you a common pool of points that you can allocate toward any of those dimensions any way you like, up to the limit of 15 total points. That lets the player explore the widest possible space of possible choices when playing. This is a good thing. Every proposed alternative thus far ends up constraining this space (limiting the player's flexibility) and thus would not take the game in a positive direction:

* Giving the player 1 combat and 1 fleet skill per level up forces the player to spread those points evenly along those dimensions, even if they prefer a stronger flagship or would rather be more fleet-oriented instead.
* Some sort of "flag captain" option means that the flagship is limited to whatever skill point cap the flag captain is limited to, which will be much more limited than the current game if the flag captain has to obey the same level caps as other officers in the fleet.

Yes, you can rebalance the skills for a proposed new system, but that misses the point: the player is still forced to spend a certain amount of points along one dimension that they wouldn't necessarily want to. For a Starsector-centric analogy, it would be like taking the current OP system for ship loadouts, and then telling the player "you have to spend 40% of the OP on weapons, 30% on offensive hullmods, and 30% on defensive hullmods". Anyone who prefers a different mix of OP usage would like the new system less.

I haven't seen a proposed system thus far that lets the player command a super-buffed flagship if he wants, or a super-buffed fleet if he wants, with as wide a flexibility as the current system. The proposals thus far have served to limit the power of the player-controlled flagship, which seems sketchy when the other theme of this thread is the view that the flagship isn't powerful enough. Any proposal to replace or change the current skills system should consider how it changes the player's flexibility to explore different options.

Flagship vs Officer Power

The second theme is the relative power of the player-controlled flagship versus that of other ships in the fleet. I feel like back in the days of Drover spam, the fleet was decidedly more powerful. Nowadays though I think the flagship vs fleet balance is in a pretty good spot. The best fleets are not flagship-centric nor fleet-centric, but rather, a hybrid approach combining the two while maximizing the strengths of each.

The flagship is the only ship on both sides that do not have to follow the AI subroutines of all the ships. The human player is much better at understanding battle formations (even though Starsector does not have formations per se), predicting behavior and outcomes, and so forth. The human player performs much better under pressure than the AI (the AI struggles with what to do when it's overburdened, often leading to disastrous outcomes). The flagship is also the only ship that is instantly responsive to the player's commands. As such, the flagship is much better at directing the flow of combat to ensure a victory.

The other ships provide the bulk of the fleet. Even the biggest flagship peaks at 75 DP, out of the 240 DP that you can put on the battlefield. So in general (unless you're deliberately short-manning), the player fleet will always be dominated by AI-controlled ships in bulk and in numbers.

It's a bit difficult to quantify just how effective the flagship can be. In general, I estimate that the player-controlled flagship can be around 2-3 times effective as the AI controlling the same ship. Furthermore, the flagship can do what no AI-controlled ship can in terms of influencing the outcome of the battle, and thus acts as a force multiplier on the entire player fleet.

So the reason why someone would want to put more skills on the flagship is specifically because of the outsized influence the flagship can have over the general fleet. If the flagship is influential enough, it makes more sense to put skills toward improving that specific ship than toward improving the fleet as a whole.

In terms of the current game, any fleet which is too flagship-centric suffers from simply not enough bulk -- not enough DP shooting stuff at the enemy (or not enough ships doing so effectively), increasing how long it takes to kill the enemy fleet. Any fleet which is too fleet-centric suffers from a lack of direction and cohesion, again increasing how long it takes to kill the enemy fleet. This is pretty evident in the various videos of both types that have been posted.

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With that general stuff out of the way, let's talk specifics; I'm just going to quote one each for length although several posters raised the same points:

In particular, that's not a division that falls into the 'fun trap' where a player who isn't great at piloting their flagship is going to want to lean towards non-combat skills, at which point their flagship performs poorly, which then feeds back into them not gaining skill at piloting and not wanting combat skills.

I don't buy this idea of a "fun trap". Pretty much by definition, when a player is new, they don't understand how the game works and they're going to do poorly at just about everything. So yes, the stock AI is going to be better than them at controlling the ship at first. That's true for nearly every video game, whether you're talking about Mario Kart, or Street Fighter, or Starcraft, or Quake, or whatever. The way new players are incentivized to improve is to start easy and then gradually increase the difficulty of the challenges and to provide feedback as to what areas they could improve on. In Starsector, this takes the form of tutorials, the combat simulator, the bounties (which escalate in difficulty as the player does more of them and more difficult ones), and that the campaign starts with a bunch of d-modded pirates with the difficult challenges gated behind having to travel long distances and/or behind quests, etc., while giving the player a "get out of jail free" card through SP for too-difficult fights if needed. And as the player understands more about the game, he starts seeing more limitations of the AI and weaknesses to exploit, and with that it starts becoming better to pilot the flagship himself. That's the nature of the learning curve with nearly every video game. Changing the balance of various systems in the game is not the way to go if improving the new player experience is the justification given.

*Are* fleetwide skills actually stronger? I'm not sure that "how many Ordos can this take down" is a particularly useful metric for this. I mean, if that's the metric, then sure, we can say one or the other is "stronger" by that metric, but an endurance fight like this distorts a lot of things.

I don't find "how many Ordos" to be particularly useful. I certainly commend people for taking the time to do it, but I feel like it's more like climbing Mt. Everest -- fun to say you did it, but not useful for game balance, and not particularly relevant to the game as a whole. It's little different than doing a themed playthrough like a Low Tech-only playthrough or a playthrough where the player only uses ships that have the letter "e". Interesting to do and to discuss, but not something to balance the game around nor something to consider for game balance.

To start with, fighting more than 3 Ordos means the player has to do shenanigans with the player fleet just for it to be possible in the first place (specifically, raise the player fleet's FP, by either carrying extra junk ships that they don't intend to fight with and/or by editing ship_data.csv). So it's already out of the regular player experience and something the player has to know specifically how to make it happen.

Also, even a full 240-DP 8-officer player fleet maxes out at +500% XP bonus at around triple Ordos, so there's little point to going beyond that game-wise except for bragging rights.

Thus far, going beyond 3 Ordos has for the most part been endurance fights, which distorts player fleets toward larger ships, or cycling out smaller ships as they run out of PPT/CR. It also distorts player fleets away from limited-ammo weapons such as missiles, even though those weapons are perhaps the strongest when playing the game "normally".

So I personally feel like roughly double Ordos is about the maximum in expected difficulty for the game. In fact the fleet that I use reaches the maximum XP bonus already at around 1.95 Ordos, so there's no point to going beyond that. Obviously the player can basically "choose" the difficulty by just going for single Ordos, or sticking with faction fleets, etc., and the balance will shift somewhat depending on what the player chooses as the enemy fleet to compare player fleets to (right now I'm having fun fighting against PL fleet spam). But balance-wise I find little reason to consider anything beyond double Ordos.

Cap'n Hector's various "5 ships vs 5 ordos" videos (Legions, Onslaughts, Paragons, , Draba's various fleet comp vs 6 ordos videos, Rainy's (on Discord) ordo hunting escapades, Legionhead's (also on Discord) ordo hunting fleet (I don't know if he ended up getting 5 points in industry or not) and yes, even my own experiences after playing the game for quite some time.

If anything, those examples actually show just how limited in power it is to go for fleet-centric player fleets without using a player-controlled flagship. Most of them involve the player fleet losing one or more ships, and most of them are long endurance fights lasting 20 minutes or more, sometimes taking multiple rounds. CapnHector also talked about how he had to try multiple times and experiment with a lot different ship loadouts just to get one successful completion; those completions were not "routine". For example, the best of the screenshots you posted from Rainy took over 35 minutes, had at least 5 player fleet ship deaths, and (assuming an initial 45 seconds of 0 damage done for the two fleets to merge) killed around 80 DP's worth of ships per in-game minute.

In contrast my 5-Ordos video taking a hybrid approach of using a player-controlled flagship leading a full player fleet took less than 14 minutes against a 2130 DP, 10-capital 5 Ordos fleet (compared with Rainy's 2782 DP, 13-capital fleet) with no player fleet deaths, and on the first try (I didn't bother to iterate to look for better ways to go about it nor to try to get a better result). That's killing the Ordos fleet at a bit over 164 DP per minute, more than twice as fast as Rainy's. Your own "2 Radiants & Co vs 5 Ordos" video came in at around 116 DP killed per minute, and it's arguable whether it should be considered a flagship-centric fleet or a hybrid flagship-leading fleet, but it was definitely not a fleet-centric player fleet.

So even if we look at multi-Ordos fights, right now the evidence points toward having a player-controlled flagship as being significantly stronger than taking a fleet-centric approach toward building the player fleet. The evidence you cited shows that the player can use fleet-centric player fleets to get completions, but in no way that it's better to do so, which is what we're looking for when discussing balancing flagship vs no flagship fleets.

Officers are strong enough to make the no flagship playstyle the playstyle of least resistance. It's better to improve your strengths (officers) than weaknesses (the flagship). Or, to put differently: why "separate flagship skills from fleet skills because I can never justify taking them" threads exist, if officers are so strong you don't have to buff them more and can focus on the flagship instead?

Is it? Relying on officers without a player-controlled flagship means you're putting the fate of your fleet on the AI subroutines, which I don't think anybody really understands. It's essentially rolling the dice for a good outcome. I have a pretty good understanding of my playing abilities and strengths and weaknesses as a player in just about any game (namely: I do a lot of analysis but my actual playing ability, i.e. controlling units, predicting what's going to happen, thinking on my feet, reacting to unforeseen events, etc. is pretty pedestrian -- I absolutely suck at any PvP games specifically because of that, and prefer PvC games because it's easier to understand and come up with successful strategies against a static, predictable opponent), but I still struggle with just what the AI in Starsector is trying to do in just about every battle. (Mostly when the AI does something dumb that I didn't expect.) Is trying to be successful using an AI system that you don't understand actually easier than improving your own skills as a player, which you do understand and can directly change? I personally find figuring out what the AI is doing to be much more difficult.

I can similarly say there are plenty of threads complaining about the AI, which leads toward piloting the ship yourself as the better option.

Now this doesn't take away from the discussion about decreasing officer skills (or officer elite skills or capstone skills), which is entirely valid for discussion; I just don't see the evidence for why it's needed.

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One idea that I've seen tossed around is to change the officer system to where each officer has only one or two skills, but you can put multiple officers on a single ship (perhaps limited by ship size, i.e. say each ship can have 1/2/3/4 officers by size or whatever). The player fleet can have a max total number of officers (and therefore a max total number of skills) but (perhaps other than ship size) can distribute them as he sees fit. The skills system can then be changed to focus specifically on fleet-wide and campaign layer benefits.

* This would more clearly disentangle the skills system from the flagship-centric vs fleet-centric combat issue, while still giving the player the flexibility to have a super flagship or super fleet as desired, thereby addressing nearly all of the above points.
* Specifically, this would also remove the concern that the player wouldn't want to learn to pilot the flagship if the player feels like he gets more out of putting skill points toward the fleet instead, i.e. the "fun trap".
* Also, for those players who want to have a really super flagship with a bunch of combat skills over fleet skills, it's easy enough for one or more of the new skills to simply be "this skill lets the player put more officers on his flagship" or similar. This effectively uses a skill point to put an additional combat skill on the flagship instead of spending the skill point on the fleet, just like the current system, so it retains much of the current system's flagship vs fleet flexibility.
* This would also more easily allow the player to place officers in wide (many little ships) versus tall (fewer big ships) fleets as desired. Right now there's little point to putting an officer on a low-DP ship such as most frigates (with certain exceptions like the Hyperion or the Monitor) because most low-DP ships don't impact the battle as a whole enough to be worth it, and you only get 8 or 10 (or more but then you have to spend SP) officers to distribute amongst the entire fleet, when you can use up to 30 ships. Again it gives the player more flexibility.
* This would make it easier to acquire the "ideal" set of skills for a given ship. Right now the player has to abide by RNGesus when leveling up each officer to get the desired skills, or save-scum to get it, and then it can't be changed afterward except by dumping the officer and trying for a new one, rinse and repeat. Making officers a bit more like equipping weapons or items (find frequently, equip and unequip at will, in piecemeal amounts) makes this process easier. There is still some work involved in hunting around to get the right mix of skills, so there's still the long-term process of gradually improving the fleet, but it wouldn't be as unforgiving as the current system.
* Also, with some officers having one skill while others having two (i.e. the "better" ones), but with the max total number of officers capped, there is still the process of finding all two-level officers, of the right combination, for each given ship. So again there's still the journey of gradually improving the fleet over time in each playthrough.
* Elite vs non-elite officer skills can be easily handled: if you want to limit the number of elite skills per ship, then if say each officer can have 1-2 skills with 0-2 of them being elite, then you can say that a ship can only designate one officer as the lead officer, allowing its elite skills to apply, and allowing its personality to be the one that dictates the ship's behavior, while all the other officers only contribute their skills (but not elite effects) to the ship. Thus each ship is limited to a maximum of 2 elite skills.
* Similarly, it's easy enough to say that the player flagship is the only one, by virtue of the player character as the fleet admiral being on it (regardless of if the player is personally controlling it or if it's on AI-controlled autopilot) to have all the elite effects from all the officers onboard apply to it, and/or have more officers than usual on it. So the player can still have one super ship, whether player-controlled or AI-controlled, to center the fleet around (i.e. make it "special" as the flagship, to "personalize" the story in a fashion, like the Vindicator in Star Control 2, and just like in the current game), while limiting the number of elite effects in the fleet generally for balance purposes. No more needing to put the player on a Kite or Dram because the player dumped combat skills.
* With the player having one super ship, this gives the game more of an adventure feel (like Star Control 2) rather than an RTS, send-a-bunch-of-faceless-units-to-their-death feel. From a UI standpoint, the player is following along the view of this super ship, even if it's on AI-controlled autopilot, again providing more of an adventure feel instead of an hands-off RTS overworld feel if the player does not have his flagship deployed or is giving orders from some Dram in the corner of the map.
* As a corollary to the above, it's easy enough to have enemy fleets also have the same one super ship with all elite skills thing, without ruining immersion, i.e. "why does only the player get it" issue in the current version. The answer, of course, is for gameplay purposes, but there's the immersion issue of why can the player have over 10 combat skills, all elite, when even integrated Alpha cores can only have up to 8 combat skills.
* As another corollary to the above, AI cores can be easily balanced the same way, in terms of total number of skills and elite skills, as desired.
* The combat skills can stay mostly as-is; there doesn't need to be an overhaul of the combat skills for this.
* The skills system, while it would have to be reworked, is already mostly set up for this; it could just be the current Leadership, Technology, and Industry trees, with some modifications for the current tier 2 combat skills in the Technology and Industry trees to be replaced with something else, and then changing the max number of skills to something suitable to account for the reduced number of total possible skills.

The biggest disadvantage, of course, is the time it would take to overhaul (and recode) the skills system and the officer system to do all this, and to rebalance everything, and I'm not sure if it would really lead to better results in the end, to change a system that IMO mostly works about right. But I found the idea pretty interesting and it does seem to address most of the issues that people have raised about the current skills system and about the officer system in this and similar threads.

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Suggestions / Re: Hull Restoration is way too overpowered

« on: April 15, 2024, 09:32:26 PM »

Yup I can corroborate Tranquility's observation that if the player has Hull Restoration, then the player won't have to use story points to recover enemy ships. Furthermore, it appears like the enemy ships which should've required a story point to recover, instead replaces the standard ships that the player can normally recover list, with the original normal recover list gone. I think, anyway, based on a sample size of one.

Attached is from my current playthrough, vanilla with only utility mods, the PL blockade, fight with and without Hull Restoration. Note how the recover ships list with Hull Restoration, is the same as the story point recover ships list without Hull Restoration. Used the console commands "nuke" command to get it over with quickly for the screenshots, but I can play through it easily enough to verify that it happens the same way as well if you'd like.

I think this is an interesting side benefit of Hull Restoration that maybe should remain as is, since IMO it's somewhat weaker than the other capstones

4

General Discussion / Re: Is the Hephaestus at a good spot?

« on: April 10, 2024, 12:22:18 PM »

Yeah now trying out the test double Ordos fight, making sure I don't pause when any beams are firing (oh, and having the tactical map not pause can be set by unchecking "Pause combat when opening map" in Settings -> Settings), I can get results for beams that match projectiles, in terms of the expected total hull damage for a given fight, which is relatively static. For my Conquest (Squall/Locust, 2 Mjolnir, 2 HVD, 2 Harpoon, with 1 IRAL on the medium energy with s-mod Expanded Magazines), the IRAL seems to do about as much armor damage as one HVD, and around 1.5x the hull damage of one HVD. Most of the HVD's damage is to shields though, as expected, so I think given the choice (i.e. on an Executor or Pegasus) it's still better to use HVD instead of IRAL (IRAL is more flux-efficient though), depending on what type of damage you need. But this gives an estimate of IRAL damage.

Attached is the DCR for one of the double Ordos test fights. SS version 0.97a-RC10 but there shouldn't be any differences between RC10 and RC11, and latest version (5.4.0) of DCR. Made sure no beams were firing whenever I pause, and played at 1x game speed.

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Mods / Re: [0.97a] Detailed Combat Results v5.4.0 (2024-02-04)

« on: April 09, 2024, 10:04:35 PM »

Hi Nick XR! Great job with this mod, it's been absolutely invaluable in figuring out what actually happens during combat.

I think I've found a bug for DCR. It tends to overstate beam damage. After doing some testing, it seems like when the game is paused, if there's any ship hitting another ship with beam weapons, it'll continue to register that damage for as long as the game is paused. Pausing can mean either during combat (space bar), or switching over to the tactical map, since combat is paused during that time. This happens both in the sim and in actual combat. I'm guessing there needs to be a check added for if the game is paused when it decides whether or not to count the ongoing beam damage.

Also, it doesn't seem to count beam damage correctly if there's time dilation, such as when using the Scarab.

I've put up a video of the bug in action here:

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad5OcAfuohs

[close]

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General Discussion / Re: Is the Hephaestus at a good spot?

« on: April 09, 2024, 09:45:02 PM »

Combat results got cleaned out (maybe on rc11 update or save copy?) so only have stats for ~20 >1K DP battles with lots of HILs/autolances, went over them to check.
Highest hull damage ratio one was 573K hull damage against 1243 DP, so 460 hull health for each DP. Lots of regenerating <capitals including Fulgents and Apexes.
Lowest one was 424K against 1118, 379 against lots of Radiants/Novas. Average seems to be 420-430-ish.

Higher than the theoretical average hull on remnants, but pretty close.
More important is that have 5 battles with Onslaught+Manticore and full plasma Paragon+Manticore/Hammerhead, their average is similar.
Even slightly higher, but they kill much slower so regen from combat endurance probably adds more hull to kill.
Having a definite value would be pretty nice ofc.

Yeah it's kind of hard to tell, especially since even when I run the exact same enemy test fleet, the hull damage varies, depending on how many secondary explosions (one ship's explosion taking out another ship), overkill (even if the target had 5 hp left, if the weapon does 1000 damage on that hit, it'll count as 1000 damage), etc. But I just notice because when fighting the exact same enemy fleet, if the player fleet has beam weapons then there'll be more hull damage registered, regardless of battle duration, etc.

I finally got around to spending some time with it tonight, and think I figured it out (or at least, hope I did). Beam weapon damage continues to register even when the game is paused. So if you ever pause combat, any ship whose beam weapon is hitting an enemy ship will have its beam damage overstated. This is easy to test in the sim; fire a beam at a target, pause combat, wait a while, then just exit out and look at the simulation damage, and it'll wildly overstate the damage done. This also happens for combat.

Switching to the tactical map also counts as pausing combat (since combat is indeed paused while you're giving orders, unless you unpause it), so if you switch over to the tactical map while any ship is hitting with their beams, it'll also overstate the damage.

I'll post in the DCR thread about this bug. Hope we can start getting some good data on beam damage!

(It makes sense that I may see the bug more often than you, because I do pause the game a lot and give commands a lot when I play.)

By the way, DCR also doesn't seem to register bullet time damage (i.e. Scarab with beams) correctly. Again, easy to test in sim and in combat.

Stats are a tangent though, autolances do pass the eye test. Definitely kill hull faster than other non-torpedo weapons, but then again that's the ~only thing they can be used for.
Executor/Sunder/Eagle turns them on, things die very fast.

Oh yes definitely agree with this. IR Autolances are really good against hull. For my Conquests, I've actually started putting them on both medium energies, even though there's no weapons on the other side. This is to help them clear out frigates so that they don't get surrounded, and it works very well. The question is just how effective it is, but it is definitely pretty good.

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General Discussion / Re: Question on Fighter Uplink and Carrier Group skill

« on: April 05, 2024, 10:49:32 PM »

I've been thinking of experimenting with Longbows and DTA as they have burst pd's as well, but as they are bombers the reloading penalty on converted hangar will apply for most ships. Might be good on battle carriers though!

Yeah from trying different wings against a practice target, thus far it seems like Daggers do the most damage (even more than Tridents, incidentally), testing DTA with the practice target at 1500 su. So I've been trying out Daggers, or sometimes 3 Daggers and 1 Spark since the Legion's rear is unprotected (lately I've been going for all 4 Daggers though).

Both the regular Legion and the Legion XIV work well as the player flagship. For the regular Legion, using BRF with Light Needlers + Heavy Autocannons gives it a lot of anti-shield DPS at long range, and then dual Hephaestus + Daggers will finish them off. It's very flux-intensive though and I tend to overflux a lot; I could probably do better by using one or more Annihilator Pods on the medium hybrids (they would also serve as distraction to help more Dagger shots get through). But HAC (with BRF) does more damage than Annihilator Pods or Proximity Charge Launchers, and Hephaestus does more damage than Mark9, so I've been using the above setup, even though it's very flux-heavy.

For the Legion XIV, it has shorter range without BRF, but dual Cyclones means I have massive burst DPS when I want it, especially for capitals which AI tends to have trouble with, and there's still Daggers for regular targets. That's what I've been having a lot of fun doing, running in toward the capitals/cruisers, fluxing them up via Light Needlers and Heavy Autocannons, then launching Cyclones at them when they're at high flux. Very satisfying when they connect. I've attached a screenshot of one such battle. I estimate that about 100k of the Cyclone damage is actually overkill (if the target only had say 100 hull left but it hits for say 3800 damage, it still reports it as 3800 damage even though only 100 damage was really done), but even so, it puts the Legion XIV at over 1300 DPS, which puts it at roughly what I've been able to do with the flagship Onslaught XIV in version 0.97a after the PCL nerf. (Note that the "Unknown High Explosive" and "Ship Explosion" are actually due to the Cyclones.) I hit 30 out of 44 shots so I can clearly get better at aiming/timing them, which would make them even more effective.

Even with DTA, you can still order the fighters to engage, and Daggers will still try to launch their missiles if the target is close enough (they're tethered to you though). So on regroup they'll be tethered in front of your ship and launch missiles from time to time if a target is close enough, but if you really need some damage right away, you can still have them engage for some quick DPS, at the expense of their replacement rate. So it works out well for battlecarriers.

I tried with and without DTA Mora spam using Daggers with Support Doctrine, and without DTA was still better, so the AI seems to use non-DTA better than this "battlecarrier" style of DTA. So it seems more like a player strategy (since I fly close enough where the Daggers will attack in regroup mode with DTA, which the AI doesn't seem to like doing). Even so it's a lot of damage when done right.

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Suggestions / Re: Player Character Officer Portrait for Flagship During Combat

« on: April 05, 2024, 01:37:33 PM »

Another way around it is to look for the ship that is displaying weapon ranges. The Weapon Arcs mod helps a lot in this respect. Regardless of how many ships are on the screen, there will be only one with the weapon range shown. It also helps you with deciding whether or not you should fire your weapons.

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General Discussion / Re: Question on Fighter Uplink and Carrier Group skill

« on: April 05, 2024, 09:42:52 AM »

While we're at it. Does the Wolf pack skills damage bonus apllies to fighters launched from destroyer-size carriers like Moras and Condors ?

Nope, in fact nearly all damage bonuses except CR and Heron's Targeting Feed don't apply to fighters. (Might be a couple of other exceptions, but those are off the top of my head.)

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General Discussion / Re: Question on Fighter Uplink and Carrier Group skill

« on: April 04, 2024, 09:59:00 PM »

(And it's worth noting that the Point Defense elite benefit does not apply to a ship's fighters.)

Actually...it does! Easy to test in sim with Sparks.

So Sparks can theoretically have 800 range (500 base, 200 from elite Point Defense, 100 from Defensive Targeting Array). Broadsword/Gladius can get a large range boost too. DTA itself is kind of interesting; yes it tethers the fighters to the ship, but it actually makes them "protect" the ship, i.e. get in front of the ship usually. And so Sparks, despite having a roam range of 0 due to DTA, will nonetheless go forward and attack targets roughly 1300 su away. Similarly, Daggers will attack targets around 1600 su away, despite having a roam range of 0 due to DTA and despite being in "regroup" mode. Without DTA, under "regroup", they simply stay behind the carrier and do nothing. So if you're like me and can't figure out when to use "engage" or "regroup", and if you're playing as a battlecarrier anyway, DTA is a way to give your bombers some range and still keep their replacement rate up. I've been having fun using Legion + 4 Daggers + DTA + Light Needlers + Heavy Autocannons + Ballistic Rangefinder + Hephaestus in this way as the flagship. (The AI is better at "engage" vs "regroup" than I am, and they are indeed better using bombers without DTA than with DTA.)

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General Discussion / Re: Question on Fighter Uplink and Carrier Group skill

« on: April 04, 2024, 09:28:40 PM »

Nope! That was removed a couple of versions ago. Officers only get the skills in the red Combat tree, plus the two tier 2 skills in the blue Technology tree and the two tier 2 skills in the yellow Industry tree. So there are no skills that officers can get that can improve fighters, *except* the Point Defense skill whose bonuses do affect fighters as well the ship.

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General Discussion / Re: Question on Fighter Uplink and Carrier Group skill

« on: April 04, 2024, 09:10:39 PM »

It just means that if the ship has an officer, then the ship's fighters get an additional 50% of whatever bonus it would've gotten. So if no officer means the ship's fighters get +20% top speed, then if the ship has an officer, the fighters get +30% top speed instead. No effect on the ship directly (other than the replacement rate for Carrier Group).

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General Discussion / Re: Does anything genuinely benefit from the existence of story points and s-mods?

« on: April 04, 2024, 07:03:22 PM »

I've always felt like the Story Points concept is sort of schizophrenic. The main way to get them is via combat, and the main use of them is to upgrade your ships and officers, so they're basically an extension of the XP/leveling system in other games. But they also serve dual purpose in letting the player do do some "extra" stuff like getting you out of hard fights, etc., which is arguably story-related. So it's actually kind of two separate things that are merged to use the same resource.

If story points were something like, you gain story points for finishing fetch quests or bounties, etc., and you can then use them to unlock unique dialog options and/or outcomes, then it would be more like "Story Points". But as it is right now it's more like "Upgrade Points" or "Leveling Points" in terms of how they work in terms of game mechanics, with a minor side benefit of several "get out of jail free"-type options.

Easy bargains such as SP usage to render skills elite, increase the value of trade contracts, or mentor officers do not contribute any fun or dynamism to the game, serving only to needlessly obfuscate player choices and punish players for failing to adhere to a shallow meta-game of SP resource management entirely divorced from the setting and substance of the game itself.

With that in mind, stuff like this, using a lot of emotionally charged words but with little substance, just kind of falls apart. Seen as simply an extension of the XP system, SP largely makes sense. It's just another dimension for people to mess around with ships and different fleets. It's a single-player game, you want to give the player lots of different options to explore. Just like how there are small/medium/large and ballistic/energy/missile weapon slots. And yes, balancing them is difficult. However, there are many different approaches that are all viable, and that's what matters. It's good for replayability that way, by giving the player a lot of different options to explore.

S-modding adheres to the above fault but expands heavily upon it from multiple angles. Its permanence directly harms a player’s ability to experiment with different ship builds and fleet compositions, which is the core mechanic and attraction that the entire game is built around.

You get the SP back when you scuttle the ship. There's only one unique ship where the s-mods are basically permanent, since you can't get another one, although there is a workaround (possible, though expensive) for that. Realistically, though, yes, in this and just about all other games, there is some permanence to the characters you make. Getting the XP back when you scuttle a ship, meaning the only cost is to get another copy of the ship, is actually pretty cheap. There's usually some sort of cost to do a respec of your character; this game is no different. It's to discourage frivolous changing, or too-frequent changing, but is fairly easy to manage if you change only every so often.

In conclusion, my perspective on the mechanic is steeply negative. When time affords I’ll likely try to mod SP back out of game entirely. But there are always opinions on at least three sides of any given argument, so I’d like to inquire what other people make of the matter, and how your takes differ.

I'm seeing a lot of emotionally-charged words, but not a deep argument against the Story Point system, especially when considering that it's mostly just another way to level up or customize your fleet.

One of the worst qualities to my eyes is the fact that s-mods provide direct stat advantages over AI fleets; to me the predominant attraction of the game is building capable fleets, and this is trivialised by mechanics built to render AI adversaries directly inferior. The satisfaction of creating a competitive fighting force is only significant if the playing field is level, and I can be sure that actual skill, knowledge, testing, and planning are the factors predominantly responsible for my success.

Yes, but the playing field is not equal. As already mentioned earlier, for the player to "win", the player needs to kill the entire enemy fleet, with no or very few losses. The enemy only needs to kill one or a few ships before the player will have lost more than he gained -- the player will have "lost". So the game needs to be "easy" enough that the player will, in general, win. Otherwise it gets too frustrating.

There are a number of advantages in favor of the AI, but there are more advantages in favor of the player if he knows how to make use of them, and that is very much intentional, and how a lot of these games work.

Oh.  'cause the reason I asked is because of this tooltip I mentioned, which says "intended to be played on."  Maybe not now, but that appears to be the goal.

I've always interpreted that to mean, the game is balanced around ironman, meaning it's doable to play it on ironman (and not "impossible") and never having to rely on reloading your save, console commands, etc. to succeed. So in some sense being able to use SP to get out of a hard fight, instead of taking a fleet wipe, is sort of a sop to this.

14

General Discussion / Re: How to get rid of those white flashes?

« on: April 01, 2024, 02:05:49 PM »

For the large ship explosion, you can deselect it under Settings -> Settings -> "Enable ship explosion screen whiteout".

I'm not sure about the colony menu flash, but it might be under the same menu, deselect "Enable UI noise overlay".

15

General Discussion / Re: should we just nerf the Onslaught?

« on: March 31, 2024, 08:53:19 PM »

I guess I just wanted Conquest to be more intuitive to use.

Well every ship has its own learning curve, which is a good thing. That maximizes replayability, and a lot of what makes Starsector interesting is to try out different combinations of ships and weapons and see how well they work. It's a good thing that ships are not cookie-cutter versions of each other.

For me a lot of the understanding about the Conquest came about via CapnHector's threads about it. So it's not like I figured it out myself. But whereas he approached it more from a mathematical simulation point of view, I approached it more from a experimental point of view, basing it on the numbers coming out of the Detailed Combat Results mod by fighting the same test fleet using different player fleets. So my view about the relative strengths of ships are based on how they perform in actual fleet combat.

According to its description it's a ship for ballsy captains in which the concept of outperforming defences by offences is applied. In that significant fire power will allow it to compete against other large ships. But the issue is that it's defences are undervalued. And yet its DPS isn't even that exceptional.

But that's exactly what I was pointing out -- it had one of the highest measured battle DPS result when I tested over a dozen different ships in 0.96a, and now in 0.97a its DPS is actually higher than before. I simply haven't tested enough other ships yet to know if this is a global thing (i.e. meaning, double Ordos is now easier to do in general) or if it's a Conquest thing (i.e. the Conquest really is stronger relative to other ships now). So I think it's doing just fine.

I understand that the ship's performance when min-maxed with 3 s-mods is good. But that is not how most people play the game. That's just how most experienced ones do. And this is a singleplayer story immersive like... Depressing space simulator. Not esports, so why make ships that usually perform like garbage until you use a dominating specific end-game strategy to break them?

Funny enough, when I started comparing ships using this method of fighting against a standardized test fleet using standardized rules, one complaint was literally that the ships would've done better if I had min-maxed them out more (I use level 5 officers and I think 2 elite skills for all the ships, they said it's not valid because the ships would've done better if I had used level 6 officers instead, with 4 of the skills elited). Can't please everyone, I guess.

But s-mods matter a lot less than some people are claiming. I would offhandedly estimate they increase the ship's overall battle DPS by probably around 10-20% or so. They're "nice to have" but not necessary, and if you don't have s-mods on your ships yet, you're probably not fighting endgame fleets yet in which case the ships definitely don't need s-mods to steamroll through regular human faction fleets.

What we're really interested in is how the ships perform relative to each other, and there might be some slight differences in how much each ship can benefit from s-mods but they're going to be pretty close.

Also, it's better to measure things based on what they can do, regardless of what percentage of the population actually does. You measure a car's acceleration based on its 0-60 mph time with pedal to the medal even if that's not how most people drive. Nobody knows how most people actually play the game, unless you claim to have done a survey or have a virus on everyone's game that reports back on how they're playing it. I can say with certainty that the numbers that I post are not the best possible; there's someone I know who can do it better (the one who introduced me to the game), he just doesn't bother to post on the forums. (When CapnHector started trying to do multi-Ordos fights beyond 3 Ordos and asked why the game wasn't letting him, the reason why I was able to respond so quickly with the solution was because I had already figured it out for the guy; the guy was doing 4+ Ordos fights for fun long before it became a thing to post about on the forums.)

Yes, because you are piloting a flagship Onslaught with six combat skills and three S-mods. THAT is why you can put almost anything else in your fleet and it works.

Wrong. I use the Onslaught because I personally like piloting it the most. I've already mentioned before that I did this using the Medusa as the flagship (back during the time of the CapnHector Conquest threads). I've also done it using the Executor, the Pegasus, the Aurora, the LP Brawler, the Conquest, the Odyssey, the Hyperion, the Legion, the Legion XIV, and a number of others that I don't recall offhand as the flagship. Attached is an example using the regular Legion in version 0.97a where the enemy fleet is balled up near the spawn point less than halfway through the double Ordos fight (the double Ordos had 844 DP).

In any case, not only can the player fleet surround the enemy fleet near the spawn with a large variety of different fleets and flagships, but when doing the analysis the player flagship's DPS is subtracted out and I'm only looking at the DPS done by each ship anyway. So even if it had something to do with the flagship being the Onslaught, all other ships being tested for comparison would've benefited from it as well. So it doesn't even make sense to claim it has something to do with the Onslaught being the flagship.

I will not comment on your "evidence of other fleets doing the same" from several game versions ago because there's no point.

Right, because showing that 1) this has been done for a number of years now, so it's not exactly unknown nor unusual and 2) with a variety of different fleets and different types of fleets, completely destroys your claim that it's unique or rare and only because the currently presented fleet is bonkers. So suddenly you're declaring anything from more than 2 months ago to be off-limits as evidence.

And as for selective reading and strawmans, right back at you.

Uh huh. I've countered your claims with around a dozen specific counterexamples already, and you've yet to provide a single counterexample, and once again, devolving into a personal attack without any evidence.

[Edit]Although I just want to make one thing clear: "Local superiority" is a spectrum in itself.

When I started playing and was struggling with how to beat Ordos, local concentration of force was simply the term that the person used to describe why doing this works. (I wasn't the one who came up with the idea of surrounding the enemy fleet and pushing them back to the spawn point, it was the strategy that someone else recommended to me.) Basically you focus your attacks on one or a few ships, while ensuring that none of your ships are so far in front that the enemy ships start focusing their fire on any one of your ships. In this way you kill them while keeping your flux levels low so that your ships aren't in danger, and can keep chugging along. I don't recall the military term they used for doing this, just that "local concentration of force" was the term they used for the principle behind why it worked.

But there's a world of difference between slowly grinding up enemy ships as they come in the middle of the map(which is the norm) and being SO overwhelming that you push the AI back all the way up to the spawn point.

That's where having some burst damage comes into play. The initial enemy fleet is the only time when all 240 DP of their fleet are attacking you. After that, some (or most) of their DP is locked up in their ships traveling to the front lines; usually, after the initial clash, only around 80-120 DP of their 240 DP battle size is at the front lines while the rest are still on their way. At that point it's more just a matter of concentrating your force efficiently and keeping your flux levels low, not necessarily overwhelming DPS per se, to take full advantage of the lopsided DP ratio. It's not necessarily about pushing them back all the way to the spawn point per se (which is inefficient if you're waiting for them to spawn in), but you reach sort of an equilibrium near the spawn point where the rate that you kill their ships matches the rate that their ships are advancing to the front lines.