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106

General Discussion / Re: List of mechanics questions from a new player

« on: September 27, 2023, 12:03:56 AM »

1) Can you link your LP Brawler video? I can't find it.

Yeah there's a couple of them, here's one:



LP Brawlers are fairly squishy, so I basically load them up with as much shields as I can. So I max out their flux capacity, get Hardened Shields, etc. I actually wouldn't recommend a full Brawler fleet, it's better to toss in a few bigger ships to help deal with bigger enemy ships. If Brawlers are Zerglings, then this is like sticking some Hydras with the Zerglings. A lot of other ships could work here, i.e. LP Manticores, Falcons, etc.

2) The XP post is very helpful. Do you know how bonus XP for getting killed works? CapnHector had a post about a Colossus fleet he lost against Ordos and he gained 307 million bonus XP from that. How does that work?

Don't know, I only looked at XP from winning battles, and there are other sources of XP (for example, from trading). When you lose a ship, you get the remainder of the SP XP back, i.e. if you got 25% of the XP initially from using a Story Point, you'll get 75% back if the ship is lost. The Colossus fleet thing was a bug, where the XP was multiplied if multiple ships were lost:

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27116

I've also used HIL/TL-HVD-Squall Champion a lot, but it always felt a bit too slow, lacking punch and rather passive in AI hands, even though Champion is not exactly a glass cannon and can afford to brawl in mid-range. Nowadays I prefer Plasma Cannon Champion with Squall and Arbalests for kinetics.

Yeah Plasma can work too, but has to get too close in for my taste. HIL Champion gets 1000*1.55 + 200 = 1750 range on those beams, while Plasma Cannon gets 700*1.55 = 1085 range. That extra range means that HIL Champions can do damage from relative safety, or combine their damage on a single target more easily, etc. I tend to go for long-range weapons for this reason; I've found that they tend to work the best. It seems like long range weaponry (i.e. missiles, long-range ballistic weapons, maybe fighters) is the current meta in Starsector; I haven't found a faster way to chew through enemy fleets.

You generally want kinetics to be longer range than HE, whereas the Hurricane is very long range. Also, if the large missile is Hurricane, it's hard to get enough anti-shield damage on the Champion that matches up to the Hurricane. Thus in this case I'd use Squall over Hurricane, but Hurricane may work if you're using Autopulse or maybe Plasma.

107

General Discussion / Re: List of mechanics questions from a new player

« on: September 25, 2023, 08:48:53 PM »

First off, I have seen many references to SO Aurora. In my first playthrough I found the Aurora to be a very capable ship compared to other cruisers, to the point I was using two of them. What is it exactly that makes the Aurora so good and worth 50% more DP than a normal cruiser? Why is SO really good on an Aurora but not a typical 20 DP cruiser?

The Aurora combines good offensive power (high flux dissipation), good defensive power (good flux capacity and very good shield efficiency -- at 0.6, the best in the game (the lower the better)), and good maneuverability (high top speed and maneuverability, including from its shipsystem), all in one package. Safety Overrides helps it lean into its advantages more; energy weapons tend to have shorter ranges anyway so it's not as hampered by the range decrease, and SO doubling the flux dissipation and greatly increasing its speed means it can get in to do a lot of burst damage where it counts and get out more quickly.

I see s-modded Expanded Magazines recommended on the Onslaught, but I think it only helps the built-in TPC on that ship. Is it worth spending an S-mod to help only one weapon?

It can, it depends. TPC has good range and is very flux-efficient, and s-modded Expanded Magazines means it'll end up doing 50% more damage (the limiting factor is usually ammo recharge, not rate of fire). Depends on how you run your Onslaught but for me, using it as flagship, with s-mod Expanded Magazines TPC usually does around 20% of the total damage, meaning that s-mod Expanded Magazines adds about 7% to my overall damage output.

I saw in Gryphon discussion that this ship is only good when you link the missiles to a single firing group. Are there other ships where there are unintuitive linking groups that make the ship perform better? There was a post on one of the Executor threads referring to linking a flak cannon to some of the weapons to make them fire better. What is going on mechanically when you do that?

There are actually two different mechanisms going on here, although they're for the same purpose -- making the AI fire the weapons more. The AI controls each ship similar to the player, i.e. one weapon group is manually controlled (presumably with an imaginary cursor to aim it), while all other weapon groups are on autofire on (each fires if a target gets in range) or autofire off (none of them will fire).

For a typical Squall/Harpoon Gryphon, both of those missiles have 2500 range, but the Harpoons, being High Explosive, will usually not fire unless the target is at high flux. Ships at high flux tend to back off though, and since the Harpoons aren't that fast, it means the target may get away by the time the Harpoons arrive. By putting them in the same weapon group, the Harpoons start heading to the target as it comes under fire from the Squalls, increasing the chance that the target dies before it gets away.

The AI is generally overly conservative about running up its own flux levels; it'll start turning off autofire on weapon groups pretty quickly, i.e. when its current flux gets to say 30-50% of its total flux. (You can think of flux as "waste heat" in some sense.) But once its turns off its weapons, if the enemy ships keep firing, they'll continue driving up its flux, meaning it'll keep turning off more weapons instead of pressing the attack and driving up the flux on the enemy's ships to get them to stop attacking. This leads to a bad feedback loop where the AI will just sit there, take damage, and then die.

To prevent this, you can mix some PD weapons in with your weapon group(s). The AI is very loathe to turn off weapon groups that have PD on them, letting them stay on even up to 90% flux or higher, so this ensures that those weapons are always on and firing. A Flak Cannon is a PD weapon so it ensures that weapon groups with it will stay on even when the AI would have normally turned them off.

However, you need to use this with care, since the AI really will keep those weapons on (almost) all the time, which means the AI will overload more easily. I usually recommend grouping kinetic weapons which have good flux efficiency together with PD weapons, but not weapons in general -- only the ones that should absolutely always stay on to keep flux pressure on the enemy and help win the "flux war".

Besides LP Brawler, what are other good SO ships?

I like the LP Manticore, and for player piloting, the Medusa. Once you reach the late game though SO tends to fall off in effectiveness so you'll want to explore other options, but for the early- and mid-game, it's great.

Why is the Hyperion so good? For 15 DP it seems to have really low weapon space.

It's basically a light cruiser masquerading as a frigate. You want to look at flux stats more than number of weapon slots. It's also very small and maneuverable (and thus hard to hit), and its shipsystem is to teleport around meaning it can easily get away, making it very hard to kill. As a frigate, it also benefits from frigate skills (most notably, Wolfpack Tactics), and frigate OP costs. Putting SO on it only costs 15 OP but you get 500 (or more) flux dissipation out of it, which is a very good deal.

Is there a good discussion of XP mechanics anywhere?

The base XP that you get is based on the sum of the FP (not DP) of each enemy ship multiplied by (5 + level of officer on that ship) * 100. If a ship has no officer then its FP is multiplied by 600 (i.e. as if it had a level 1 officer). This product is then rounded down to the nearest 500, and then all of these products are added together. So it's basically static per enemy fleet -- not particularly interesting.

What's more interesting is that you can get a % bonus to that XP if your fleet is relatively "small" compared with the sum of the fleet(s) that you're facing. You can get up to a +500% XP bonus, meaning you can get up to 6x more XP by having a fleet that is good at killing lots of enemies quickly. I've written about the XP bonus formula, for example here. The basic gist is that it compares your fleet's total DP with the enemy fleet's total DP, noting that officers also add to each side. Enemy officers count double in terms of the XP bonus you get, but the overall enemy fleet score is multiplied by 0.67, so it kind of evens out. So if the enemy's DP for XP bonus purposes is double yours, then you get a +100% XP bonus, if it's triple then you get a +200% XP bonus, etc.

So having unused ships in your fleet can hurt your XP (but you should be throwing them in storage anyway -- there are some free storage locations in abandoned spacedocks such as in Corvus near Asharu), thus in general you want a relatively "lean" fleet where each ship contributes a lot to each battle, and have a fleet that can take on numbers if you're going for maximizing your XP bonus.

For your fleet, you can roughly estimate your fleet's DP score for XP bonus purposes by adding up each ship's DP, then adding each officer as 7.5 + 3.75 * level to that, noting that you the character at level 15 counts as 7.5 + 3.75 * 15 = 63.75 DP. Civilian ships only count as 1/4 of their DP. At the higher end of faction fleets, level 10 and above bounties are usually around 650-700 DP for XP bonus purposes (not the DP of the fleet), so that amount divided by your fleet's DP for XP bonus purposes will tell you how much bonus you get. Then once you hit [REDACTED] fleets, they average around 1100 DP for XP bonus purposes (and close to 700k base XP) so you can easily get millions of XP per fight from them. My endgame fleet hits the +500% XP cap at double [REDACTED], netting about 4 million base XP per fight, meaning up to 16 million XP depending on how much SP XP I've saved up -- all for a fight that lasts around 4 minutes (according to the Detailed Combat Results mod). So there are certainly ways to increase your XP gain once you hit the endgame.

If there are any detailed discussions on the pros and cons of other weapon categories (e.g. large ballistics, small energy, whatever), use cases, good synergies with other weapons and s-mods, good ships to use them on, can you point me to them? Most of the discussion is from older versions and I assume the stats on a lot of these weapons have changed.

You basically have 3 types of defenses for the weapons to go through: shields, then armor, then hull, generally in that order. So it's not about which one is better but having a mix of weapons which together can deal with all 3 defenses. Kinetic weapons are anti-shield, High Explosive (HE) weapons are anti-armor, and fragmentation weapons are good against hull but tend to be bad against shields and armor. Energy has no particular damage bonuses. Shields and hull are relatively straightforward (it's basically just the sum of the individual weapons), but armor depends highly on the weapon with the highest hit strength. Hit strength for projectile weapons is the per-shot damage, and is modified by weapon damage type (kinetic = /2, HE = *2, frag = /4). So generally speaking, you'll want to have one or maybe two good HE weapons, and the rest would be kinetic/energy/frag weapons.

Small ballistics are usually kinetic, because the hit strength is so low that they can't really function as anti-armor weapons. For medium ballistics, I tend to favor the Hypervelocity Driver (HVD) since it has good range, good hit strength (despite being kinetic), and decent damage. The good hit strength means that it also doubles as good anti-hull, not just good anti-shield, compared with most other kinetic weapons. But if the ship has no other source of HE damage, one of the medium ballistics would be a Heavy Mauler. I tend to use HE on large ballistics, because chances are the ship also has plenty of medium and small ballistics to put kinetic weapons on those. So I generally use Hephaestus on large ballistics, although sometimes I'll use Mjolnir if the ship has enough flux to support it (i.e. Conquest).

For missile, if the ship has one large missile slot I almost always use Squall, which deal kinetic damage at very long range and disrupts enemy formations, putting them on the defensive before the ships get in range. But if there are two large missile slots then I usually put Locust on the second one, to help clean up trash around the ship. The Locust would be linked in the same weapon group as the Squall to ensure that it's always firing.

For medium missile it really depends on the situation, though I've typically used Harpoon Pods, Annihilator Pods, or Proximity Charge Launchers. PCL's are great on the player flagship, the AI doesn't spam them enough.

For small missile, it's generally not going to be the star but it helps fill out the weapon complement. Note that there is also now the Missile Autoloader hullmod which helps boost small missile ammo. I've generally used Harpoons, Annihilators, or Swarmers. The Annihilators really help to throw a bunch of "stuff" at the enemy to fill up the space between ships with your stuff that can help take down enemy missiles, make enemies scared, etc.

For energies, small energy is generally going to be IR Pulse Laser for its decent anti-shield capability, for energy weapons, anyway, since high-tech ships tend to be weaker at that. Some people will prefer Antimatter Blaster for its strike capability, which works too. This is also where I might stick some PD for midline ships, to have PD and also to force autofire on. Generally that ends up being LR PD laser.

For medium energy, if you're going SO or mid-range then you can choose between Heavy Blaster (good damage but very flux-inefficient), Pulse Laser (good for anti-shield), or Ion Pulser (good for initial burst damage and disabling weapons). Kinetic Blaster is good anti-shield damage but tends to be too inefficient at anything else compared with Pulse Laser. If you're going long range, then right now it's a tossup between Graviton Beam and IR Autolance. Graviton increases anti-shield damage of all other weapons on the target as well, but IR Autolance is killer against stripped hull. It's hard to tell which is better.

For large energy, I've generally used HIL, but will sometimes use Autopulse or Plasma if I want to close in. But if there are other sources of anti-shield hard flux weapons to make them drop their shields, HIL is a good choice.

So for example, for Conquest, the weapons I use are Squall, Locust, 2 Harpoon Pods (all linked together so the others will fire whenever the Squall fires), then 2 Mjolnirs, 2 HVD, Graviton Beam, and 4 LR PD Lasers all on one side, all linked together. The Conquest has plenty of flux so I'm not concerned about overfluxing it from linking weapons to PD, and I want them firing at all times. It's a long-range ship and shouldn't take much damage anyway. Yes the Harpoon Pods will run out, but I want it to be firing a lot at the beginning, which is the most critical phase of battle, and don't mind that it runs out later on when the enemy fleet is streaming in rather than arriving as one big mass.

For Eradicator, I use 2 HVD, 1 Heavy Mauler, 4 Railguns, 4 Annihilators, and 1 Breach. The Heavy Mauler provides that one main anti-armor, with Breach as backup in between (since the fire rate of the Heavy Mauler is low), the Annihilators provide a lot of distraction, and the rest are general anti-shield. The HVDs also contribute a lot to anti-hull. In this case, I use Ballistic Rangefinder, despite it just giving the base +100 base range bonus, because it helps the Eradicator stay a bit farther away and take less damage. The less damage you take, the more flux you can spend on damaging the enemy fleet.

For Champion, the large missile is Squall, the large energy is HIL, the mediums are HVDs, and the smalls are LR PD Lasers or Tactical Lasers. The Squalls and HVDs provide enough anti-shield damage for the HIL to be very effective here.

For my flagship Onslaught, the 3 large ballistics are all Hephaestus, the 3 front medium ballistics are Heavy Autocannons while the inner 2 medium ballistics are HVDs to match range, while the small ballistics are Light Needlers and Light Autocannons on the side, with Ballistic Rangefinder. Some people prefer LDAC but I prefer Light Needlers and LACs for the greater range. The medium missiles are Proximity Charge Launchers.

The ship has a lot of frontal firepower, but its highest anti-armor/hull damage is actually when it's facing to the side of the target, so that the side Hephaestus can also fire at the target. It turns out that the Onslaught can have so much firepower that one Hephaestus is simply not enough damage, so the second one is also used. So the way I use it is that it faces its current target with its kinetics (Hephaestus weapon group turned off), then once the target's shields go down, I turn on the Hephaestus weapon group and then start pointing the nose at the next target, so that its TPCs and kinetics start firing at the next target while the HE weapon group finishes off the current one. In this way I can keep killing targets without stopping, except to vent because the flux rise is pretty extreme.

The Hephaestus is so-so at anti-armor, which is good enough up to cruisers (and its high DPS is good against hull). For cruisers and capital ships, I burn drive into them with the Proximity Charge Launchers, which makes pretty short work of capital ships. Me running in also ensures that I'm the one tanking the capital ships, so that the rest of my fleet can continue doing damage instead of being under attack, since the Onslaught is one of the best ships at soaking up damage.

It's pretty advanced, and definitely player-only, but I've found that it makes the best use of all the Onslaught's advantages, as a big wrecking ball diving into the heart of the enemy fleet.

Are there other s-mods like Expanded Mags or SO that drastically change how a ship plays?

I don't know if it's "drastic" but ITU is definitely needed for cruisers and capital ships, s-mod Advanced Turret Gyros is good for capital ships, and s-mod Armored Weapon Mounts is good for many ships since it increases their weapon rate of fire by 10% (increasing their damage output by 10%...and also their flux usage). Front shield conversion is awesome for some ships like the Aurora, and s-mod Extended Shields is also good for ships like the Medusa, etc., in closing off the engine gap.

Overall what are the strongest cruisers and destroyers I should be keeping an eye out for in .96?

I think hands down the strongest cruiser is the Gryphon, because of its sheer damage output. The build that I would recommend for it is Squall/Harpoon Pod/Harpoons, all linked, plus an HVD. Get Missile Autoloader (s-mod is fine), ITU for the HVD to help the Gryphon stay at the correct range, then load it up with defenses like Hardened Shields, lots of flux capacity, etc. Officer skills would be CE, TA, MS (elite), then I usually take Helms (elite) and FM. I don't bother with Systems Expertise because usually it's simply not needed, most battles are over before it gets used anyway, at least up to double [REDACTED].

The Gryphon is very much a glass cannon though so it can get overwhelmed easily, but if you have a pack of them they can clear out almost anything in the game. The fastest fleet I've found for killing enemy fleets is the aforementioned player Onslaught along with 8 Gryphons.

Other than that, there are plenty of decent cruisers, such as Eradicators, Champions, and Apogees. I haven't played much with the Mora but apparently carriers work really well with Derelict Operations, since for fighters, having a lot of them is more important than how strong each individual fighter is.

Vanshilar has a video on building Brawler LPs, which I'll look up. I haven't found a lot of these for sale--do I need to be fighting LP fleets to get them?

I think an SO fleet is a good way to start out, and a fleet of LP Brawlers is very easy to make. The LP markets reset their wares every 30 days or so, so I'll go to the LP markets (transponder off) once a month, buy any LP Brawlers I find, then go out looking for any LP fleets around it to kill to get more LP Brawlers. (Once you kill their fleets in the vicinity of their market, you'll need to wait awhile before using the market again, and hence you go to the market first.) You'll need to restore each LP Brawler after you get it to get rid of Ill-Advised Modifications, but it's only ~36k credits which is really cheap. So it's easy to gradually build up a fleet.

If you're adventurous, you can also go to the LP bases scattered throughout the sector, and again go to the base first to look for ships to buy before killing any fleets nearby.

HE weapons - Light Mortar and Light Autocannon - in most cases these are useless because of low hit strength against large ships' armor. Their only use is the early game for small ships to fight other small ships. I can safely sell them if I find enough good kinetic guns.

Think you mean Light Assault Gun but yeah, you'll probably be using something else. Keep 1 or 2 of them on hand in case you have no HE weapons whatsoever but I've never really found a use for them.

Kinetic PD - Light Machine Gun and LD Machine Gun - basically the same weapon, LMG is more OP efficient and LDMG is more slot efficient. Is there ever a reason to use these over a Vulcan? With elite PD they would be 500 range and extremely flux efficient. But I guess no ship has enough slots to put 30 of these forward-facing.

They're good for SO ships, in which case they're actually serving as anti-shield rather than PD. For example, they're useful on the LP Brawler.

Regular Kinetics - LAC, LDAC, Railgun, Light Needler - All of them look decent. Lots of discussion of how good LDAC is in this patch but even then I see lots of builds preferring railguns for range and accuracy. The Light Needler looks like a decent substitute for a Railgun, with more efficiency at the cost of accuracy. Light autocannon is the 700 range budget choice in terms of OP spent.

Yup. LDAC is more flux-efficient but has less range, so it depends on if you need more flux or range. LAC is less damage but better damage/OP so it's useful if you have lots of mounts but are tight on OP. Railgun has higher hit strength so it does more damage to hull, but it also is less flux-efficient, so it depends on if you want that extra hull damage. So each has their uses.

Generally speaking, though, if you're still collecting weapons, they're generally interchangeable, it won't matter that much.

108

General Discussion / Re: Wolf pack Tips

« on: September 19, 2023, 07:13:57 AM »

Hopefully this isn't a derail, but can you change the default DP max once you've started the game? I assume 240 is there mostly for (computer) performance issues?

You can adjust the battle size in Settings -> Settings, to make it go up to 400. We usually talk about 240 DP since each side deploy at most 60% of battle size, so battles go as big as 240 DP vs 240 DP. It's somewhat for performance issues but also for balance issues and because the AI doesn't fare that well once fleets get too "big".

If you'd like to make it bigger, though, you can go into \starsector-core\data\config\settings.json and change "maxBattleSize" from 400 to whatever you want. The settings.json file has a lot of game parameters that you can adjust if you want to customize your play experience. Be sure to make a backup copy of it before you change anything.

109

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: September 19, 2023, 06:54:06 AM »

You can argue that character skillsheets are all about tradeoffs and having varied playstyle, choices and power variables, and that's great when it's fun, but being weaker or cutting out flying entirely and missing that whole amazing gameplay experience is a bad outcome, very bad.

This comes up every so often. I think your observations are pretty much spot-on, but not the conclusions. The fleet skill points and personal flagship skill points are mixed in together in the same skill point pool so that the player has maximum flexibility in deciding where to allocate those points. If the player likes playing the game more like an arcade, then more points go into flagship skills. If the player likes playing the game more like an admiral, then more points go into fleet skills. This also changes throughout a playthrough; initially, I tend to take more flagship skills, but as my fleet gets bigger, I'll respec into more fleet skills, even though I'll generally always have between 4 and 7 points into flagship skills.

The whole point is that you can choose to go along many different paths, but you can only choose one at a time (or, technically, you can get up to 3 capstones, so that'd be up to 3 at a time). You can choose to be a fighter, or a cleric, or a mage, or a rogue, and play the game through that way, but you can't be a fighter/cleric/mage/rogue/artificer/bard/ranger/etc. all at once, which would make the player too overpowered and the game too easy. Each path needs to have something good, but also make you give up something good as well, so you can't do it all at any given time. That's how a lot of game balance works. If this game allowed you to do everything, i.e. say give you 40 skill points instead of 15, then a lot of the skills would have to be severely nerfed so that the game doesn't become too easy.

For a sufficiently skilled player, the flagship can generally do around 2x to 3x as much as the AI in that same ship. So the player's flagship is the single most influential ship in your fleet. That's why it may make more sense to put points into flagship skills rather than fleet skills.

It looks like your fleet is specializing in Best of the Best, Support Doctrine, and Hull Restoration. SD and HR are solid picks for the early game, but as you acquire and level up more officers, SD becomes less useful, and as your fleet gets more powerful and have less deaths, HR also becomes less useful. At that point it'll be worth respec'ing away from those skills and put your points elsewhere, such as flagship skills or other fleet skills, which will give you more points to put into the stuff you want.

110

Suggestions / Re: No SO allowed on Monitor (or increase DP cost)

« on: September 19, 2023, 12:36:41 AM »

I'm willing to bet a good portion of it come from the PVP tournaments and streams.

That's entirely possible, although I'm not aware of any post saying SO is busted based on PVP tournaments. In fact I'm not aware of any specific basis for saying that SO is busted, i.e. "here is an example of why SO is busted and needs to be changed" -- against nearly every fleet (subject to below) I can find a non-SO fleet that performs better than an SO fleet.

For example, it's easy to see that the Gryphon is busted; anyone can just console command a bunch of them (I lead the fleet with my flagship Onslaught), load them up with Squalls and Harpoons, and see that the fleet will wipe out almost any enemy fleet faster than any other fleet, at least that I'm aware of. (There are certain exceptions such as Doritos and Broccoli because those pose unique challenges and have unique methods of dealing with them; I'm talking about general fleets from the start up to and including around triple Ordos, using a full player fleet.) So the specific basis for saying that the Gryphon is busted is "Gryphon spam can kill enemy fleets faster than any other player fleet configuration, therefore it should be toned down."

But I haven't found any specific basis for making the same claim for SO. I mean there are plenty of general statements, i.e. "this loadout does well", but nothing specific, no video of an SO fleet killing an enemy fleet that's unmatchable by any other player fleet, no screenshot of the same, etc. Specific SO loadouts are pretty rare too. As far as I can tell it's just been forum posters making repeated statements saying it's busted but not putting forth much actual evidence.

Right now I'm trying without much success to find an SO fleet that can beat my double Ordos test fleet within 5 minutes (300 seconds according to Detailed Combat Results). I've looked around at posted SO builds on the forum, on Youtube, etc., but thus far haven't been able to do it (even though, looking at the post-battle stats, it *should* be doable).

Yet thus far, playing around with a fleet of flagship Onslaught + 2 Gryphons on the flanks + "other" ships in the middle (with "other" consisting of whatever I'm trying out, i.e. Atlas2, Onslaught, Champion, Prometheus2, Executor, etc.) I've been able to beat the same double Ordos test fleet with close to a dozen different ships in that "other" slot in under 5 minutes. The fastest of these of course is just spamming more Gryphons, where my flagship Onslaught + 8 Gryphons (note: only 200 DP is used) can beat the double Ordos test fleet in under 3.5 minutes. I don't even bother using Gryphons #9 and #10 for the full 240 DP because they contribute so little by the time they get to the front lines, since the battle is more than half over by then, so they're not worth it.

It's entirely possible that I'm just not as good at controlling SO fleets compared with other players, despite my experience with LP Brawler fleets and so forth (which were not pure LP Brawler fleets, but with an SO flagship -- usually Medusa -- and some "other" support ship such as Falcons, Eagles, LP Manticores, etc.). That's where videos or screenshots of SO fleets would be immensely helpful, but I haven't seen any that can come close to what I'm able to do with non-SO fleets.

So I don't see SO as busted when I can easily find many non-SO fleet configurations that perform better, with the best one able to chew through enemy fleets about 50% faster than any SO fleet I've found. If anything, SO should get some sort of a buff when it fares so poorly compared with other player fleets.

(And as a side note, even after the known upcoming nerf to the Gryphon, i.e. reduced Missile Spec stats, it still beats the double Ordos in less than 4.5 minutes, i.e. faster than any SO fleet I'm aware of. So put another way, post-nerf Gryphon will still be stronger than SO -- which shows how weak SO is.)

I tend to believe SO is not an offensive hullmod, but rather a defensive hull mod.

Well, it affects mobility, which is sort of a fundamentally different characteristic of a fighting force, and which impacts both offense and defense. I think of it more as a mobility boost and both an offense and defense nerf. Offense nerf since it means the ship won't do much damage to enemy ships beyond around 450 range (except missiles), and defense nerf because it means the ship will take a lot of damage closing in to basically melee range in order to do any damage. While it doubles flux dissipation, a lot of that dissipation just goes toward absorbing enemy attacks, not in doing damage to enemy ships, so many times the ship won't actually come out ahead. Especially since the OP needed for SO likely goes into vents if not using SO, so SO is actually providing only roughly 40% more dissipation than non-SO, depending on the ship and loadout.

Overall time to kill also includes time to change targets, which for SO ships means physically traveling from one target to another, while longer-range ships means they just turn the ship and/or the weapon turret to face a new target, which is much faster. So the time that a weapon is actively firing is higher on a non-SO ship than on an SO ship, resulting in faster time to kill, even though the SO ship can mount higher-DPS and more flux-efficient weapons. Longer-range ships also don't have to deal with hard flux as much since they take less damage, again increasing weapon usage.

Simply put, SO isn't taken to improve time to kill, it is taken to improve the time until your own ship's death.

Yes and no. SO tends to make ships die more quickly since they have to absorb more damage, and since they are within enemy weapon range longer compared with longer-ranged ships. An SO ship has to move from 450 su to the range of the enemy ship before it is safe, while a non-SO ship has to move from its own weapon range to the range of the enemy ship, which is likely to be much smaller; the SO ship's extra speed usually won't make up for it. The close range also puts it within range of other enemy ships besides the target.

What it is is that in early fights, the enemy ships have so little offense anyway, that you might as well as bumrush them with more offense to finish off the fight faster. Also, if your fleet is heavily outnumbered (which is typical of early fights or in your example), SO works to keep the bulk of the enemy fleet away from you, where you use the differences in the enemy ships' top speeds against them, spreading them out. But running around isn't really making progress toward your goal, which is killing enemy ships. So once you have a stronger fleet, SO really falls off in effectiveness compared to the other options available to you. That's why I don't see the justification for a rework, other than maybe a possible boost for the mid- to late-game.

111

General Discussion / Re: Is there a way to keep turn/strafe keys while using Shift?

« on: September 18, 2023, 11:44:49 PM »

Well, turn-to-cursor means the ship always tries to face the cursor regardless of what keys you're pressing. But, Q and E always means strafe left and right regardless of turn-to-cursor, while A and D changes behavior (strafe or turn) based on whether or not you have turn-to-cursor active. This can be changed in Settings -> Controls.

112

General Discussion / Re: Seed ...finder? Mapper?

« on: September 18, 2023, 11:37:21 PM »

If you happened to have ever taken a screenshot of your character screen, the seed can be found on the lower right of the screen.

113

General Discussion / Re: 0.96a World seed

« on: September 18, 2023, 11:36:05 PM »

Newbie Q: where do I find the universe seed? I remember seeing it when I started the game but havent since. Cheers

It's at the lower right of the character screen (press "C").

114

General Discussion / Re: Tell me, where did we go so wrong? [Story spoilers]

« on: September 08, 2023, 07:58:49 PM »

Well it wouldn't be a challenge if it weren't, you know, challenging. And yes it's a pretty unique challenge so it requires some unique approaches, so most typical fleets won't do well with it.

Having said that, someone's already figured out the easiest, most effective way of handling this fight:

Spoiler

Take a single Falcon (P), arm it with 4 Proximity Charge Launchers, and spam them at the Ziggurat until it dies. The motes will (usually) go after the PCL's instead of you, so you just need to wait until the Ziggurat runs out of flux so it'll be forced to uncloak and dies.

[close]

115

General Discussion / Re: On SO Eradicators

« on: September 06, 2023, 08:32:29 AM »

I specifically said that they were an example, there is no need to make wild assumptions about my fleet composition unless you're just trying to facilitate a pointless argument. I also never said anything about struggling, but of course someone who wants to argue is going to make that assumption.

So you create a thread complaining about SO Eradicators, saying things like "Pather SO Eradicators are just insanity to me" and "they really are an outlier in performance by comparison - and by how much I fear them", but now you're saying you don't really have trouble with them when people point out that they're not that hard? Then why make the thread?

The reason why people are pointing out about your fleet composition is that if you're having trouble with any enemy fleet, the most likely culprit is how you set up your own fleet, i.e. the mix of ships you have, their weapons, hullmods, and officers, etc. So when giving feedback like this, your own fleet composition is very important to provide, and the only hint you've given is that they took out some Pilum Ventures, which are very much not suited for this. As I said, putting SO on Eradicators actually makes them worse and easier to kill, especially with shield shunt. These fleets are really there as warmup fleets to help the player learn about combat and are not really meant to be difficult obstacles.

116

General Discussion / Re: On SO Eradicators

« on: September 06, 2023, 06:52:50 AM »

No, my problem is not using Pilum Ventures; if you have a few for exploration and need to pull them in to support your combat ships and give them the extra edge is works well until past mid game. I could have used another example like an Eagle, or Furies, they can be taken out all the same, but I guess it doesn't really matter to someone who cherry picked something out of my post just to attack it. As far as Eradicators go, they combine low tech cruiser armor with good mobility even without SO, and they are not sluggish enough to flank that easily. Not to mention they have the burn speed of a light cruiser and don't need to to have ADF built in, but they are NOT a light cruiser.

Eh it's not really cherry-picking when Pilum Ventures is the only thing you mentioned about your fleet composition. If you struggle with SO Eradicators, then it's almost certainly due to how you laid out your fleet. Putting SO on Eradicators actually makes them weaker then non-SO versions, which is easy enough to see in sim (i.e. test out SO vs non-SO Eradicators in sim) or in fleet battles or whatever. That they have Shield Shunt is a big hint in how to handle them; you won't need any kinetics so put more anti-armor and anti-hull weapons on your ships for them.

I haven't had any issues with LP fleets, in fact they're my go-to in the early game as a good source of LP Brawlers which are good for the early- and mid-game before I make my death fleet.

117

Blog Posts / Re: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector

« on: September 05, 2023, 08:50:12 PM »

The "normal" space it roughly maps to is empty, but the hyperspace in that area is "deep" and difficult to traverse. If concepts such as density applied to the hyperspace medium, it would make sense to think of it as being very dense. So it's quite conceivable that it might "press in" more around the Sector, encroaching on areas with gravity wells, which normally keep it at bay - for whatever reason.

If abyssal hyperspace makes fleets slow down and reduces their sensor range (and maybe use more fuel), I think it makes more sense to think of it as being "dense" in some sense, like a thick soup. The reason why it's at the borders is easy: in the same way that a gravity well tends to push deep hyperspace away (and thus the area around stars are clear of deep hyperspace), a cluster of stars -- such as the local cluster that the game takes place in -- also tends to push abyssal hyperspace away.

From a UI standpoint, I'm sure this could be reinforced in some way, perhaps even by putting the fleet behind some sort of a semi-transparent veil, instead of being pure black, to reinforce that it's not so much blackness as that the fleet's sensors can't penetrate it to detect much beyond the fleet.

With a "soft" border, I'm sure some wag is going to spend time traveling to coordinate 2,147,483,647 to crash the game...

118

Suggestions / Re: Better ways to get strong enemy fleets

« on: August 18, 2023, 11:59:13 PM »

Yes I think more enemy fleets with s-mods could be interesting, however I think there should also be some "carrot" for it too. Right now each d-mod decreases the "worth" of the ship for XP bonus purposes by 10%; maybe each s-mod increases it by 10% or something to make up for it.

Overall though I think right now the factions could feature some more difficult battles. The most direct way would be that if you try to sat bomb them, there's some super planetary fleet for defense that you have to defeat first. It doesn't make sense that you can instantly wipe out millions of people and they don't put up any sort of defense about it. So that can at least create a bigger fleet, and help showcase the different fleet philosophies of each faction.

What may make it more challenging would be if the planet conveys some sort of bonus for the enemy fleet. I mean, the enemy fleet is near its home planet, it's got to have more resources available than fighting in open space. Not to mention, since it's a last-ditch defense, they're probably willing to run the ships more "hot" than usual. So the enemy fleet could gain some bonuses such as:

* More flux dissipation representing that it's a last-ditch effort so they'll run their systems more "hot" than normal.
* Weapon range increase/decrease representing that terrestrial sensors helping them are going to be better than what you can fit on ships.
* More speed, shield efficiency, etc., representing the ships are going to be better maintained due to being next to a planet with better facilities.

And so forth. The bonus could depend on faction and/or planet size. Maybe a missile-heavy faction could have double missile capacity or faster missile fire rate, etc. There really are a bunch of possible ways to add bonuses to the enemy fleet that could make sense in this scenario, and it would help show off the differences between the factions.

119

Suggestions / Re: No SO allowed on Monitor (or increase DP cost)

« on: August 18, 2023, 11:53:08 AM »

I also do want to keep SO and non-SO builds separate in terms of a balance conversation; with how SO is right now, the only thought I can really have about a busted SO build is "yeah, that figures"

The thing is, I know there's a vocal contingent of the forum who keep saying SO is busted, but I have yet to see a single demonstration of it, such as a video or Detailed Combat Results screenshot of the battle results. Pretty much every SO fleet I've tried against a given enemy fleet, I could beat the enemy fleet faster using a non-SO fleet with equal or less DP. I've tried it against Ordos fleets, faction fleets, junk pirate fleets, stations, etc., and have yet to find a "niche" where an SO fleet is unquestionably supreme outside of the early game. It's hard to claim something is busted when there are other options that can do the same thing in less time and with less or equal resources.

The one situation where SO seems to be the most useful is the early game, when the player's fleet is small, and the enemy fleet is some junk d-modded pirate fleet or is otherwise there just to get stomped on. But in that situation it's more that the player is limited in what they can get, and the enemy fleet can't put up any meaningful resistance, so SO just helps the player fleet roflstomp through the enemy fleet faster. Once the player has access to more high-powered ships and weaponry, and the enemies get tougher, then SO becomes less useful and it's better to transition to non-SO fleets.

In that light SO as it currently exists is actually pretty useful; it's a good way to get a new player into the game without having to be overly concerned about flux mechanics, and the extra zero-flux speed boost helps the new player get out of situations more easily when he misjudges the situation and gets overextended. That's a good thing for the game to have, to help new players with the learning curve, since understanding the "flux war", weapon ranges, fleet ship positioning, etc. are more difficult to grasp but provide a lot of the richness of Starsector battles. So it's good to have a way to let new players ease into the game using SO in easier battles.

The other uses I've found for SO is for helping capture objectives and in pursuit situations, but these are hardly situations to claim it's busted in (i.e. needs a rework), since those are working with the edges of the player fleet rather than the main player fleet. Even in the current context of SO Monitor, it's not really SO, it's how it interacts with Flux Shunt (and Fortress Shield). In other words the issues are more related to the Monitor rather than to SO itself as a concept.

120

Suggestions / Re: friendly fire bug with dragonfire missile

« on: August 14, 2023, 10:03:16 AM »

That's not necessarily a bug -- if I remember right, once missiles run out of range, they'll be unguided for a bit and can hit any target, friend or foe, before they finally disappear. So yes there's a certain range where if they doubled back toward your fleet, they can come back and hit your ships.