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31

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

« on: March 17, 2024, 10:29:00 PM »

There are minor inaccuracies, but never noticed continuous beams being overreported.

Well the bug is not necessarily that frequent, so it may not necessarily show up in a couple of tests in the sim. But it shows up pretty often in full battles. For example, attached is a screenshot of DCR reporting an Eagle with a single Phase Lance doing over 124k hull damage and two IR Autolances doing nearly 53k hull damage in a double Ordos fight. This is a fight where, if there are no player ships using any beams, the total hull damage for the entire double Ordos fleet is usually around 320k or so, but this fight registered 588k of hull damage. Obviously a Phase Lance and two IR Autolances did not do 177k of hull damage during the fight. This is in version 0.97a-RC10. So yeah you can't count on the beam damage as reported by DCR.

I *might* do some testing of IR Autolance damage when I have time, to see if there's any way to get an accurate picture of what its actual in-battle damage output is. But as I mentioned the only way I have for estimating beam damage is statistical; basically, having done the same double Ordos fight multiple times with different fleet compositions (no beams), I know the average armor damage and hull damage that is usually done to the test double Ordos fleet. They appear independent of battle time, whereas shield damage is correlated with battle time (somewhere around 1k more shield damage for every extra second of battle time, when total fleet DPS is around 3000-5000 DPS; basically, the first 1000 DPS just goes toward double Ordos shield regen while the remaining DPS is what actually goes to overcoming their shields and then armor and hull). So in principle I can do a bunch of runs with say mass Eagles using mass IR Autolances, subtract out the damage coming from projectile weapons (which are pretty accurate), and then the remainder is what the IR Autolances did. But every run inherently returns different results so I have to do enough runs to get a good average to draw any conclusions.

I've thought about making a weapon with the same stats as IR Autolance but make it projectile-based so that DCR gives accurate results. However, projectile-based also means hard flux and I'm not sure if that would skew the results.

I think the effect is on shield damage. High range beams will often fire before the enemies they are hitting are able to fire themselves. As a result this will tick up shield damage but that shield damage will be swiftly dissipated away. So there are going to be a lot of instances where a Sunder will be ticking up 450+ shield dmg/second but like… actually doing nothing*.

That's actually a different issue, i.e. how much is a point of hard flux worth compared to a point of soft flux, when the enemy ship can dissipate soft flux easily but hard flux requires lowering shields (unless they have Field Modulation or a couple of other exceptions). The bug I'm talking about affects all damage types though as far as I know.

It’s not dissimilar to a ship that has only kinetics shooting an enemy with good armor that vents in their face and puts the shields up again. The shield damage number will be catastrophically high but the actual effect on the fight will be low.

No, because it's pretty inefficient DPS-wise to wait for the enemy ship to back off, vent, come back again, etc. (even if it's different enemy ships taking turns). It's actually faster to just go ahead and kill them. Sure, you get more total damage done, but your overall damage-per-second rate actually decreases. That's because the rate of enemy ship flux regen, considering that they need to back off to a safe distance (behind other ships if need be), vent, then reenter the front lines, is very low. Your other non-anti-shield weapons can easily do more damage to armor and hull in the same time that it takes for enemy ships to regen their flux.

I never trust damage statistics. Ever since I played Overwatch, realising people who would just gun a tank instead of sniping key targets would be always claiming high damage values as a justification for their skill. In the case of Starsector numbers, weapon's value.

Sure. If you have a better metric for comparing weapons, including a way for someone else to measure it (i.e. not just "I feel weapon A is better than weapon B just because", but a way where you define the "goodness" of the weapon, and someone else can conduct the same testing for that "goodness" and come to the same or similar conclusions), feel free to share it. Until then, not only is it pointless navel-gazing as Draba said, but it's also just an intellectually lazy way of rejecting someone else's evidence without taking the time to put forth a coherent argument.

In some sense, the only number that Detailed Combat Results gives that's actually "important" is the overall battle completion time. Everything else is there to help diagnose the reasons for that time. Sure, there are some situations where the numbers may be skewed in one way or another; for example, if there's a (player-controlled) Doom spewing mines everywhere, it makes the enemy ships point their shields in the wrong direction, leading to less total shield damage (since more of your fleet's damage will go directly toward armor and hull instead of shields).

But that's not at play here. We're just simply looking at comparing different weapons under the same (or similar) circumstances, i.e. just the bog-standard firing at targets. The AI isn't smart enough to snipe targets or whatever to "game" the results. It's not going give the complete picture, because no single metric does. But it reduces weapons down to an easily-understood metric that people can use as a basis for comparison and discussion about different weapons. Nobody claims that a car's miles-per-gallon is all you need to know about the car, nor that it's completely accurate, but it gives an easy basis for people to compare different cars.

Or put it another way: If you don't trust damage statistics of weapons, then on what basis do you form an opinion as to whether weapon A is better than weapon B? How do you determine which weapon to put in a given weapon slot without making any reference to how much damage it does? In Starsector, the only way to win a battle is to do enough damage to destroy opposing ships (or get them to retreat). Measuring the damage your fleet does seems like a natural thing to do in this context.

Oh, you mean in-game. Uhhhhhhhhhh, well it depends. Efficiency. Passive effects like Graviton beam shield increase. Forcing the operating of enemy PD can increase flux spending, reducing their ability to deter enemies with weapon fire.

I don't see how any of these examples have any coherent connection to why you don't trust damage statistics. All of it looks like random stuff that's vaguely battle-related but nothing specific to "this is why damage statistics are misleading", or are things which measuring weapon damage already accounts for. For example, what does projectiles forcing repositioning of the enemy have to do with you using a tactical laser? Poor strategy implementation would come out in -- surprise surprise -- the damage numbers: if your strategy is poor, then your damage numbers will be low. All this looks like random examples of stuff that happens in combat without any connection to your position.

32

Suggestions / Re: Hull restoration giving a 3rd s-mod instead of BOTB

« on: March 17, 2024, 07:47:50 PM »

Yeah I mentioned this last year about skill changes, and the reasoning is pretty much the same:

I would say, have BotB give the deployment bonus and the +5% CR per s-mod, while Hull Restoration gives the 3rd s-mod instead of +5% CR per s-mod. That conceptually fits better with what each skill tree is supposed to be about, and splits up the "overly convenient" benefits of deploying more ships and an additional s-mod into different capstones.

BotB is already very useful for the beginning deployment bonus, although I think it by itself is somewhat too light for a capstone. So the "other" effect could be more minor. I figured 5% CR per s-mod would make it interesting since min-maxers would still have to take both BotB and HR to actually get 100% CR without getting Combat Endurance and Crew Training. Thematically leadership giving more crew performance fits with what CR represents, while a third s-mod is more of a production thing that would fit the Industry tree better.

33

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

« on: March 17, 2024, 12:03:35 AM »

I am not sure I would say that. It’s not exactly a “fast” armor stripper for very high armor compared to the best options in the game. But even if it’s doing minimum armor damage of 10%(skilled) the entire time it’s still doing 96 armor damage per second.

Oh I'm not saying Heph's not good at armor, I just mean that I think of it as anti-hull first, and anti-armor second. So it's more like "great anti-hull with pretty good anti-armor" as opposed to something that you get for the armor-breaking ability.

I am not sure why I cannot write this calculus (line intergrals was a long time ago) to get a theoretical armor kill time but like. Killing 2000 armor with one of these will take less than 20 seconds clearly. 10 seconds seems like a high estimate.

Well I did a derivation of it in the past (see here), assuming that each shot hits the same armor cell, and taking account the inner/outer cell dynamic. Attached is a graph of the time to fully strip armor for 1) Mjolnir, Heph, and Hellbore, using the approximate assumption of beam-like continuous DPS (as opposed to discrete shots), 2) Mjolnir and Heph plotting the number of discrete shots it takes for each armor rating in increments of 50 armor rating, and 3) Hellbore plotting the number of discrete shots it takes for each armor rating in increments of 1 (easy to find since it's just the breakpoints between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, etc.). You can see that continuous damage vs discrete shots doesn't really affect the solution that much, except in extreme cases like the Hellbore, so approximating it as continuous damage is usually a pretty good approximation (and makes it much easier to work with).

For certain values of armor, Heph actually beats Hellbore in time to fully strip armor. Of course, Heph also uses up more flux, but at this point, raw damage is going to be more important. You can also see that even at higher values of target armor, Heph takes only around 25% longer than Hellbore to fully strip armor. Plus this doesn't account for Target Analysis, (elite) Ballistic Mastery, etc.

The fatal flaw in this analysis is the assumption that all shots will hit the same armor cell. That's never going to happen, and different weapons will have a different spread. Mjolnir has a very high hit rate due to its faster projectile speed, with Heph not far behind, while the Hellbore's slower projectile speed and its wider spread means that a lot of shots will hit all over the target ship or simply miss. CapnHector's "probability wave" approach (in the threads here and here) accounts for different projectile hit distributions, and I think represents the most sophisticated analytical model of Starsector combat to date.

However, I've been going more toward analyzing the results from the Detailed Combat Results mod, since it represents actual, experimental data on how each weapon performs. That's where it comes out that the Hellbore's higher hit strength relative to the Heph is pretty much canceled out by its lower hit rate, so in practice they end up doing about the same damage per point of flux spent (this was in 0.96a, Heph is probably actually better now). And Heph's much higher DPS is what kills enemy ships faster, which is what you're looking for (the weapon set which maximizes the ship's kill rate of other ships, or alternately, minimizes the time-to-kill). Hence why I say, in practice, it's always been Mjolnir or Heph that ends up being the best in the large ballistic slot, at least thus far for the ships I've tested. Their high DPS is simply better than anything else you can put into that slot. Maybe the new Storm Needler is good, but then you'll have to find some good anti-armor and anti-hull weapons to complement it, and I'm not sure what you'd put in the other slots to make that work.

My bad, HB means Heavy Blaster to me. The comparison certainly seemed a bit random, but looked on brand after thumper and ACG

Oh, fair enough, however in the post you were replying to, "HB" was referring to Hellbore, heh. Another example where OoA (overuse of acronyms) leads to more confusion, not less.

Regarding the inner/outer cells, Vanshilar is 100% correct. However, it’s hard to eyeball a weapon’s performance when you have residual outer cells contributing fractions of the total armor well past the failure of the inner cells. All that to say, even though armor doesn’t work in way that I outlined in the guide or how it’s being presented above, it’s useful to estimate a weapon’s damage over time using the simplification and comparing it against other simplified examples.

Oh, I think the way you outlined it is correct, it's just that it didn't account for the inner/outer cell in some of the analysis. For 100% to 20% of the base armor, the results end up being the same (if multiplying the DPS by 80%). It's going from 20% to 0% armor (when the damage to inner cells are passing through to hull, while the damage to outer cells are continuing to hit armor) where it's different.

All that to say, the HAG is still doing the Lord’s work and doing it well, despite other options being equally good or better. I don’t compare the Hellbore and HAG against each other but I do make comparisons against the Mjolnir. They share some of the same space. Likewise, I don’t think the HIL or Plasma Cannons are direct competitors.

Yeah I feel like it depends on what the ship needs. Mjolnir is better than Heph at anti-shield and anti-hull, but Heph is better at anti-armor. Against [REDACTED], Mjolnir does something like 20% more DPS to hull, but Heph is something like 25% more flux efficient spreadsheet-wise. But in practice, high DPS leads to flux efficiency on its own, since the enemy ship has less time to generate flux and thus does less damage to you, plus has less of an opportunity to retreat and regen. So it's always a bit of a toss-up. On my flagship Onslaught I use center Mjolnir with Heph on the sides to get the best of both worlds in a sense; if I'm focusing on finishing off ships and flux is an issue, I can turn off my anti-shield weapons and the Mjolnir usually does enough shield damage to keep their shields down, while Heph is more flux efficient. But either one is usually pretty good.

Eh based on the discussion above I'll also include a graph using the continuous DPS assumption for time-to-kill, hitting same armor cell, for the Mjolnir (533 DPS, 400 energy hit strength), Heph (480 DPS, 120 HE hit strength), Plasma Cannon (750 DPS, 500 energy hit strength), Hellbore (250 DPS, 750 HE hit strength), and HIL (500 DPS, 250 HE hit strength). No bonuses of any kind. It's noticeable that up to around 1000 armor or so, the Heph, Plasma Cannon, and Hellbore all have similar times. HIL is best but it doesn't do much to shields since it's a beam (soft flux). In theory, the ballistics will actually do a bit better by comparison since they can have (elite) Ballistic Mastery.

Tachyon is more difficult to analyze due to the scripted damage. For what it's worth though, I took an Executor, used a practice target that's 1750 armor, 100k hull, stuck a Tach and a HIL on it, so there were 3 distinct damage areas: the Tach hit area, the HIL hit area, and the Tach's scripted damage which hit at the center of the practice target. None of them overlapped so they were totally separate. No bonuses of any kind. Firing both weapons simultaneously and continuously, when the practice target blew up the HIL had done about 52k hull damage. So the Tachyon's main beam (hitting its armor area then hull underneath) and the Tachyon's scripted damage (hitting its own armor area in the center and then hull underneath) combined did around 48k hull damage. So pretty close to the HIL in overall damage output. However, on an actual target, that scripted damage hits all over the place so it's hard to account for it analytically (it'll waste a lot of its damage on hitting armor all over the place, but it'll also disable weapons and engines which help quite a bit), and unfortunately, Detailed Combat Results does not report beam damage accurately, so it's hard to know if it's better or not.

Since this has turned kind of into a weapon balance thread, I'm going to throw out a hot take: I think the IR autolance is actually slightly overtuned right now! Gravitons are in a good place for what they are, but that hull melting, intelligent AI, instant hit blamo is just really good.

Even hotter take: The IR Autolance + smodded Expanded Magazines is in a pretty decent spot, but Detailed Combat Results' buggy reporting of beam damage (usually inflating beam damage) makes people think it's better than it actually is. Oh I use it all the time, I think usually I use it more than Graviton, but I sort of ballpark it as being roughly 1-2 times the armor/hull damage of an HVD (since I use HVD pretty frequently, this lets me ballpark what the actual damage likely was from DCR), and pretty-close-to-zero shield damage since it's soft flux. It's hard to tell though since DCR results are inaccurate for beams; I haven't found a good way to test it. In theory I can gather it statistically (compare battle results of no-beam runs with battle results of many IRAL) and infer the hull damage dealt, but that takes a lot of work.

In 0.96a my Conquests used s-modded Expanded Magazines just for the one IRAL on their medium energy slot, to help kill off smaller targets more quickly. That's a good complement to their projectile weapons.

34

Blog Posts / Re: Simulator Enhancements

« on: March 13, 2024, 02:32:55 PM »

Nope, and also not the Guardian. I think those are the only vanilla ships that are excluded.

...what about the mothership?

Edit: wanted to mention, Java upgrade sounds good! Yes it's good for 32-bit compatibility, in case people are still using it; I myself play on a desktop that is over a decade old (though it's 64-bit), so there are probably quite a few people who are managing to squeak along on older computers.

35

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

« on: March 13, 2024, 04:58:05 AM »

I threw together a quick program that simulates armor mechanics, since they're simple and Hellbore is such a thresholdy weapon that you basically kind of have to.
This is what the armor TTK comparison looks for full fire cycle.

Real briefly, no. That's not how armor works. You need to account for how armor works with inner/outer cells. Inner cells take full damage and contribute the full amount toward the armor value, outer cells take half damage and contribute half their amount toward the armor value. The seminal post about how armor works can be found here, though others have extended that work later, such as one of my posts about it here. I'm pretty sure I've covered it more thoroughly later on, that's just what I could find real quick. There's an Excel file that I attached which simulates it accurately for assuming hitting the same spot, but looks like it's been removed since (probably due to how long ago it was or because the forum doesn't accept that file type now? not sure the reason), so I'll have to look on my computer for it.

Even if you're assuming the simple case of shots always hitting the same spot, what happens is that the inner armor cells will get depleted first, so there will be a number of shots where the outer cells are still providing some protection, while the shots are already hitting hull in the middle. Armor basically takes a bit longer to deplete than would be predicted by neglecting inner/outer cells.

36

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

« on: March 12, 2024, 07:59:44 AM »

Eh real quick, Hellbore's effective hit strength should actually be 1500, not 500. The plot should look something like attached.

I've derived the analytical time-to-kill formulas for armor before, will have to look for the Excel on my computer when I have time. But I think CapnHector's "probability wave" approach was better since it accounts for hitting multiple armor cells, whereas all the other approaches assumed you were hitting the same armor cell. Will post them when I have time. Nowadays I just rely on Detailed Combat Results though.

37

General Discussion / Damage Bonuses

« on: March 11, 2024, 12:38:52 AM »

Just wanted to make a note of this since I did some testing.

Damage bonuses generally modify the base damage. So if the weapon does 100 base damage, Tactical Drills gives 5% bonus damage, and 100% CR gives 10% bonus damage, then the damage will become 100 * (1 + 0.05 + 0.10) = 100 * 1.15 = 115 damage.

However, certain bonuses modify the whole thing instead of the base damage. For example, if you have the above, and then add Tactical Analysis, say against a capital ship (20% bonus damage), you might think it'd be 100 * (1 + 0.05 + 0.10 + 0.20) = 100 * 1.35 = 135 damage. But instead, it'll actually be 100 * (1 + 0.05 + 0.10) * (1 + 0.20) = 138 damage. It basically added +23% of the base damage since it's also multiplying with the other bonuses.

There are a couple of those types of modifiers, but thus far, they all multiply with each other. In other words, as far as I can tell, the damage boils down to (base damage) * (1 + X) * (1 + Y), where X are some modifiers like the CR damage bonus, and Y are some other modifiers like the Target Analysis bonus. Since X is easier to get, I'm going to call them the "regular" bonuses, while Y is more rare, so I'll call them the "special" bonuses. I could probably call them something more descriptive but this is just to organize it. The mathematically astute reader would notice that I could've defined it the other way too, but there are more in X than Y so I think it'll be easier to think of it this way.

Testing is done via the simulator in version 0.97a-RC10, by looking at the damage numbers of weapons against a target from the Practice Targets mod and against a sim Hyperion, and then calculating out what it needs to be for the given bonuses to match the observed damage numbers.

There's probably a way to just look in the code to see the list of all possible bonuses or something, but this is relying on empirical testing instead.

The "regular" bonuses:
CR (assuming CR > 70%)
Ballistic Mastery (regular and elite)
Tactical Drills
Energy Weapon Mastery
Cybernetic Augmentation
High Energy Focus
High Scatter Amplifier (regular and elite)

The "special" bonuses:
Target Analysis (regular and elite)
Wolfpack Tactics
Advanced Turret Gyros s-mod -- note that this also benefits missiles, not just ballistic and energy

Of particular note is that fighters are not affected by any of the "regular" or "special" bonuses above *except* for CR.

Targeting Feed (shipsystem on Heron) seems to be its own modifier, and thus multiplicatively stacks with everything else. Most damage modifiers don't apply to fighters, though.

Graviton Beam's effect is a damage taken modifier by the target ship, as opposed to the above which are damage dealt modifiers by the firing ship, and thus will multiplicatively stack with all of the above.

Since the "special" bonuses multiply all the other bonuses (except each other), and they're more rare, they are in some sense better than the "regular" bonuses. Note also that if the ship is a capital, then with elite Target Analysis and s-modded Advanced Turret Gyros, the ship is basically doing +20% against all targets, multiplying with the "regular" bonuses. On the other hand, frigates with elite Target Analysis and Wolfpack Tactics get +5%/+30%/+35%/+40%, multiplying with the "regular" bonuses.

38

Suggestions / Re: Colony building that gives SP

« on: March 10, 2024, 12:58:41 AM »

High passive credit gain requires building colonies

Once a player reaches level 15, if they have a commission then they gain over 1 million credits every cycle just for sitting around. They could go out exploring for a while and come back rich even if they don't find anything.

Having two currencies when one of them is supposed to act as universal currency for anything tangible is more complicated than it needs to be.

Again, one of them is starter currency so the player can always get going even after a wipe, while the other is gated behind actually doing something within the game. This is not that different from RPGs where you can buy some weapons/armor from the shoppies, but to get the best weapons/armors you have to go out and kill some difficult monster or boss or otherwise actively fulfill some mission. This is a pretty common approach in games and is not at all unique to Starsector. In fact in many such games, money becomes essentially worthless later on because it's so plentiful.

If the two currencies stay as they are, the Story Points ought to be renamed to something more apt like "Action Points" or "Upgrade Points".  Do not record every use of SP on History, only those that are accomplishment worthy and not mundane stuff like character or fleet upgrades.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this many times before. Oh yes I did, here for example. Regardless of their name, the main source of gaining Story Points is via XP which is mostly from fighting, and their main use is upgrading your fleet (through smods and through elite skills). So they're basically just another way to level up or improve your fleet, but gives bonuses that you can't really get any other way. Thus, passive SP gain is a bad idea. They should be from actively doing something within the game.

39

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

« on: March 09, 2024, 11:30:30 PM »

Not sure why this topic seems to come up a lot lately. The Heph has been in a good spot for a long time; even when I started testing weapons and optimal builds in 0.95.1a, it and the Mjolnir generally performed the best for large ballistics. I don't know why Alex keeps buffing it, although he's mentioned before that he feels like players keep sleeping on it.

It's not really an armor-stripper per se, it's basically a DPS weapon geared more toward anti-hull rather than anti-armor. But winning in combat tends to favor the ship that can put out more DPS, in addition to flux efficiency, especially against hull when the enemy ship is backing off and you're trying to finish it off before it gets out of range and/or retreats behind another enemy ship, so you have a very limited time window. So it should be your general go-to large ballistic if you already have other weapons doing anti-shield, and Mjolnir instead if you don't. That covers most cases, with the other large ballistics essentially getting niche use for particular circumstances or builds.

Having said that, as I've mentioned elsewhere, when looking for what weapon set makes a ship the best in combat (as measured by what minimizes battle time against the same double Ordos test fleet), thus far it's always ended up being Mjolnir or Heph. Even the Manticore, which I thought would be a poster child for using another weapon (due to its low base flux), ended up performing best with Mjolnir or Heph.

40

General Discussion / Re: What is SU?

« on: March 09, 2024, 08:40:35 PM »

There's also the picture of the Abandoned Terraforming Platform by Asharu, of the Hermes.

41

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

« on: March 09, 2024, 08:32:58 PM »

I haven't seen any evidence that the Onslaught is so substantially stronger than other capitals that it would be deserving of a nerf. Testing against double Ordos in 0.96a, under AI control it was pretty much on par with the Conquest, Legion XIV, Executor, etc. on a per-DP basis. I personally prefer piloting an Onslaught XIV and then having Conquests under AI control since I the human player am better at gauging when to take incoming damage on shields or armor than the AI, and since I'm diving into the middle of the enemy fleet, it allows the AI Conquests to just sit there and unload on the enemy ships. But that's what I've found works for me; there are plenty of other valid ways to go about it.

The Onslaught gets better armor, but it also can't maneuver as well, so it has to tough it out; the Conquest can simply move away. Also, armor is a finite resource, which affects the Onslaught more in longer battles. So it's a tradeoff of the Onslaught.

Have you ever tried to kill an Onslaught with like a Fury? Or maybe just a frigate or a destroyer? It's a nightmare. On the other hand once you flank the Conquest, its squishy enough and has such poor shield durability, that it will have trouble venting hard flux. And will just easily die. In fact, I would be able to deter a Conquest with a Dominator. Not kill, cause Dominator is too slow, but deter. Which, like... If you put up a Dominator against an Onslaught. Good luck.

Huh? People using frigates and destroyers to kill the sim Onslaught is practically a meme on the forums. The Conquest can simply turn around, it has omni shields and manjets.

That all said? I'm not much a fan of the Onslaught myself. But claiming its value is limited to four mediums and no shield is absolutely the sort of thing that's going to get you called out.

Yeah methinks someone was basing their opinion on spending too much time in the sim.

42

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 08, 2024, 10:12:05 PM »

Awesome! Yeah usually I test various stuff while hotfixes are going on, and then wait until the final hotfix before I start a full playthrough. So it's good to know that I can now start a full game. (Going to be trying out immediately putting some colonies in the core worlds at the very beginning, and see if I can fight off saturation bombings, colony crises, etc. when I do it "wrong".)

43

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 07, 2024, 10:51:41 PM »

Just wondering, is it looking like there will be another hotfix, or is the current 0.97a-RC11 sort of "it" for a while?

44

General Discussion / Re: Persean League Crisis, and Crises in general, killed my desire to play more

« on: March 07, 2024, 09:38:31 PM »

The thing is that it's not going to be just two fleets by their lonesome, since they're very consistently surrounded by fleets patrolling the jump point, and by extention the supply fleet which never moves from there.

Don't know what you're talking about, I'm having no problems finding the supply fleets on their own. In fact without really studying the AI for the fleets, it seems like the other fleets will go off and pursue pretty much any random fleet they find to harass them, while the supply fleets just stay by the gates, so if you're seeing the blockade fleets hang around at the gates, chances are there's not enough "activity" (i.e. other fleets) around for the blockade fleets to chase. You just need to wait until some other fleet saunders by and the blockade fleets go away to chase them. Since each fleet has their own detection range, it's easy to see them running off one at a time as each sees a different fleet to harass.

You aren't wrong about that, but they should probably have toned down the amount, since if you don't have a lot of jump points (<3) you'll have to slowly peel them off one by one to avoid being dogpiled.

Okay so let's talk about the actual amount. People keep saying a bunch of death fleets or whatever. In my case, I got 15 fleets, which consists of:

* 1 Grand Armada fleet (319 FP), which consists of 6 capitals and 5 cruisers, among other junk.
* 6 Detachment fleets (245-273 FP), each of which consists of 1-2 capitals, 3-5 cruisers, among other junk.
* 1 smaller Detachment fleet (142 FP), which consists of no capitals, 3 cruisers, among other junk.
* 2 Patrol fleets (92 and 79 FP, respectively), which consists of 1-2 cruisers and smaller ships.
* 3 Fast Pickets (12-15 FP) which are just several heavily d-modded frigates.
* 2 Supply Fleets (262 and 257 FP, respectively), each of which consists of 1 capital, 4 cruisers, among other junk.

Unless the poster is counting d-modded frigates as death fleets, it should be pretty obvious that there's not *that* much to handle; only around half the fleets are actual fleets to contend with. Level 10+ intel deserter bounties are roughly 300 FP or so (haven't done the stats yet on 0.97a, but that's what they averaged in previous versions). They can easily have multiple capitals. So these fleets in general are at or below the difficulty of a regular level 10+ intel deserter bounty.  So the player gets multiple deserter bounties (or easier) delivered to their front door without having to travel for them. I have no trouble isolating them as they run around either.

In terms of just tanking the 60% accessibility, I mean it's 60% accessibility, that isn't exactly nothing.

So just what are you losing by -60% accessibility? Some credits, some colony growth, what else? If you've spent the past two years just building up your colony and never making a combat fleet, you should have enough credits to absorb that.

In terms of incentives, it's just two bad options. I went through this in more detail in the same comment you took that section from, but here's it paraphrased. 60% accessibility isn't a small amount, and the marginally better alternative of capitulating and joining the league is essentially pigeonholing all the new players in a game that's supposed to be open-world.

Why is that a bad thing? I'm not an expert on faction lore, but far from "expect most other factions to be in the red with you", the Persean League is hostile basically only to the Hegemony. (The player is likely already hostile to pirates and Luddic Path anyway in most regular playthroughs, especially new players.) The game itself sort of hints at the player to get a Hegemony commission at the start, which makes even more enemies. I don't see how offering to join the League as an option counts as pigeonholing, especially when commissions are easy money and they're generally recommended. (Fun fact: in this test run, the PL 20% membership fee amounts to 38903 credits per month, but my PL "forced" commission is paying me 95000 credits per month. So if I'm having trouble with money or if I don't know what I'm doing, it's actually better to just take the commission.)

I could understand that if we were talking about someone on their 4th run, where they know what they're getting into, but my issue was with how this crisis isn't good for new players. The ones who are on their first run.

Sure seems like the game already gives the player multiple outs. If the player doesn't have a fleet that can taken on regular bounties yet, then taking a commission is actually a pretty good option -- not only will it give you extra credits for fighting, but you also get access to their military markets. If the player ragequits from seeing fleets which run around and don't do much, that's on the player. Are you saying that a first-time player to any game should expect to beat any challenge the game throws at them, first try, without understanding how the game works and/or without preparing for them? If I'm trying out a game for the first time, I expect to do a lot of things wrong and get caught by surprise a lot. That's just part of being a new player to any game, that's part of the learning curve. I don't expect to throw ten strikes my first time bowling.

You aren't wholly wrong, but I think the issue is the difference in fleet size compared to the others, rather than people completely failing to prepare. For my pirate crisis at 300 I got two fairly small raiding parties which immediately died to the patrols and that was it. I'm not entirely certain, but I think the largest ships they had were cruisers. I can see that being enough for someone to get a capital and look into getting more, but it's not exactly telling someone to build a multicapital, 30-ship nuke fleet which seems to be what is necessary to beat the league crisis (what I needed to use, anyway...).

That's not the "real" pirate fleet, that's just a warmup fleet at Colony Crises 300 to tell the player to expect fights to happen, as far as I can tell. The "real" pirate fleet (for Colony Crises 600) consists of 10 fleets, 5 of them being pirate Armadas (4 of them are 272-278 FP, the 5th is 228 FP). As far as I can tell, unlike the PL, there is no "shortcut" combat-wise to make the fleet go away, you have to kill all 5 Armadas. In my test run, the fleets total 1832 FP, compared with the PL's 2765 FP, so while the PL is the biggest, it's not like it dwarfs the others, and it offers several combat shortcuts.

I think the issue is less with the detachments and normally with the larger fleets that often have 1, normally 2-3 capitals. They aren't rare and they compose a significant fraction of the blockade.

The Detachments I'm talking about *are* the blockade fleets.

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General Discussion / Re: Persean League Crisis, and Crises in general, killed my desire to play more

« on: March 06, 2024, 11:58:32 AM »

There's the option of directly fighting, which is what most people seem to take if they don't want to larp as the persean league. This option has already been discussed in detail on this thread as to why it's not ideal for new players.

Eh direct fighting just means taking on two fleets, separately if the player wants, each of which consists of one capital, four cruisers, and then random junk. After something like 1-2 in-game years, more likely 2 years unless you rushed colonies. I don't think expecting the player to have a fleet that can handle that after 2 years is all that onerous.

I'll agree that there's some shock value in seeing so many fleets, but the reason why there are so many fleets is so that the player can separate them and take them one at a time, or lump them together for more of a challenge, whatever the player chooses. The player isn't forced to fight them, so they can be defeated on the player's own time.

Now if you spent the first two in-game years trading goods, making colonies, etc., and never bothered to build a fleet, then yes you'll have trouble with this, so you'd have to wait it out or join the League or whatever. But that's entirely of the player's choosing. So it's another one of those problems where it's not a really a problem, it's that if the player doesn't prepare for it nor plan around it, then of course the player will be caught flat-footed. That's just part of the learning curve of any game. So as I mentioned elsewhere and as Alex concurred, it'd be nice to have some sort of heads-up about it (such as when the player first founds a colony, or when a colony reaches size 4, etc.) to expect some combat in the future. Apparently the Colony Crises meter slowly building up to 600 isn't enough of a heads-up for players to realize that they should make a combat fleet. So hopefully that'll be there for the next version of the game.

I made a fleet of my usual flagship Onslaught XIV, 2 Gryphons, and 4 Conquests, with no officers and no smods, using Support Doctrine. That's 200 DP even though I could use 240 DP. Took on 3 PL detachments (plus a Fast Picket) with that fleet. Killed it first try in around 5.5 minutes. The same fleet, against a single Ordos, takes around 4 minutes, and against a single PL detachment, around 2.5 minutes, and against a 271.5k intel deserter bounty (Sindrian Diktat), about 3 minutes. So I would roughly rate each PL detachment as "about half an Ordos" in difficulty, and a bit easier than a regular level 10+ intel deserter bounty. Seems about right to me for the minimum bar of a player's combat fleet after 2 years of a colony. Obviously if you go for the two easy fleets to make it a quick end, the bar is that much lower, and obviously after two in-game years the player's fleet should have some smods and officers if the player bothered to make a combat fleet of any kind.