Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

31

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 28, 2017, 07:58:11 PM »

Hmm. I think for carriers, a right-click on empty space ("rally task force") would more or less do the job - they may choose from a lot of targets, but they will tend to choose targets already under attack, which in most cases is going to be what you want  anyway.

Maybe. Maybe not.  Generally not given how I play, but I understand that's not the case for everyone.  

I use[d] carriers as a force multiplier/rapid reaction force, not just part of the brawling mass.  Previously I could split my forces to capture seperate points or scout out the enemy fleet and then rapidly reinforce where appropriate with fighters/bombers to let the forward element punch above their weight.  Now I don't get to choose where those reinforcements go if multiple engagements are occurring.  Similarly I may want to harry something in the backline (carrier/sniper/retreating ship/whatever) when my line ships are not in a position to engage; can't do that anymore without losing control of the position of the carrier, which has an unfortunate tendency of putting itself in some pretty dangerous scenarios.  Hell, maybe I want the carrier in direct combat in one fight while the fighters are assisting in another fight so that I can get flanks or flux pressure in both fights.  The flexibility of deployment is always what made carriers so special in my mind.

Being able to set at minimum both a carrier position and separate target are important for that flexibility.  

Being able to set the vector with a fighter rally command was what gave me the feeling of being a fleet commander with a battle plan, but there's always been an abstraction of command ability in this game that I've appreciated and I could accept losing that fine level of control.  Carriers without deployment flexibility just feel like super LRM boats to me though

32

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 28, 2017, 06:19:21 PM »

I know that you can assign them to some tasks already but seriously I have feelings that AI is struggling right now and sometimes its kind of borked and totally not aggressive enough.

Let me put it this way: in this case, it probably makes more sense to fix up whatever is wrong than to make things more complex - that's unlikely to improve the situation

I'd be content if we had the ability to at least have the carrier to move to one spot while the fighters attacked another.  With most other ships, excepting the super long range ones (which should perhaps be treated similarly) you know that if you issue a defend/attack/move command the ship in question is going to move into a reasonably tight area around the waypoint. With longer range ships it may be the case that you want them on top of  that point right now, or alternatively super far away leveraging their range.  The issue with far away is that you lose control over their positioning the moment you tell them to attack (since half the sector may be in range of the attack point and they may move in a suicidal way) or, alternatively, you lose control over where they attack when you issue a movement command (since again, they can select a target spanning half of the sector).

With other ships a single order is sufficient to get both approximate position and target orders.  This is not true for longer range ships, including carriers.  That's my most significant beef with the change.  

33

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 28, 2017, 01:54:22 PM »

@Cosmitz:
I haven't noticed exactly what you're describing. I suspect it may have to do with orders given, skills picked, ships deployed, etc - if you happen to have a save handy where a battle like that is about to happen, I'd be happy to take a look.

@Allectus:
There's a blog post on the fighter redesign, here. In brief: you have control over the fighters launched from the ship you pilot, while other carriers control their own fighters. There's more tactical depth to using carriers, and more decisions about how to fit them - making them attractive flagships - but less strategic aspects.

I appreciate that you were enjoying the way they worked formerly. Unfortunately, that way had some design issues that 1) made fighters woefully underpowered and 2) made it difficult to improve them without becoming broken when fielded in numbers. There were also other issues and awkwardness in how they worked on the campaign level. Basically, the whole thing was a giant bandaid until now, even if it had some redeeming qualities.

So: all I can say is my apologies, but I feel like this change is very much for the best overall, even if it does nuke this particular playstyle.

I'm asking here because if you say "full deployment cost no matter what happens on the battlefield (besides running out of peak time)" whole idea is pointless.

Aside from a partial CR recovery if the enemy didn't fight, yeah, I don't see changing that.

That is the single most depressing blog post I have read regarding this game.

At this point fighters/bombers act simply as glorified missiles in terms of how they play.  In the blog post you even discuss flanking, _but with the carrier_.  I have a carrier with much faster tender ships, it makes no sense to flank with a big slow capital ship when we have these nice fast maneuverable ships that [used to be able to] do it on their own.  Now, like missiles, they're just point, shoot, and hope for the best.  Rather than making it more interesting to play a CV as a flagship you've just reduced the feature space by removing an entire class of weapons and replacing them with modified missiles.  

I really do appreciate your efforts, and I understand you care deeply about your game and closely consider balance issues, but by cutting cutting CVs in this way you have removed one of the key features that differentiated your game from the myriad of competing top-down space sims.  I'm genuinely not sure why I shouldn't just play Starpoint Gemini 2 or SPAZ at this point as they treat drones/fighters in exactly this way but execute the combat much better. The strategic angle is what sold me on your game and it's being cast aside for more shallow single ship shenanigans.

I'm seriously depressed by this development.

34

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: April 28, 2017, 12:56:31 PM »

Could someone explain the new carrier command paradigm to me?  I fear either that I don't understand it, or worse, that I do understand it and it is a pretty significant regression from where we were before.  Losing the rally CV, rally fighter, and strike assignments are a very significant blow to the command style that originally attracted me to this game way back in 2012.

Am I correct in that I no longer have any direct control over fighters or their positioning?  All commands have to be issued directly to the carrier which will then pass them on to fighters?

If this is the case, and I am aware this sounds melodramatic but it is absolutely true, then you have sucked all of the fun out CV--and thus tactical--game for me.  Battles used to consist of moving my CVs to keep them safe, fighting delaying actions to screen them, rallying fighters to avoid opposing screening elements, and striking at the most tactically beneficial time from the best direction.  That entire game-cycle has--seemingly--been replaced with a single button press of "eliminate target."

I appreciate the immense progress you guys have made over the years, but this single change has essentially reduced the tactical game to be functionally equivalent to what is offered by Space Pirates and Zombies.  I already have SPAZ, I kept following and bought SS because it was different.......

35

General Discussion / Re: Post your favorite ship/fleet builds (because every forum needs one)

« on: March 29, 2012, 11:07:04 AM »

If you're going to have a discussion of fleets then you need some means of normalizing them according to your ability to actually bring it to bear.  Otherwise I'd say my favorite fleet is 6x wasps, and 20x Paragons, or some such nonsense.

I would suggest rather a topic concerning your favorite fleets for a given amount of fleet points.  Given that you can generally count on ~50 FP at the outset, plus perhaps 75 more from capturing points, it seems that probably 150, maybe 200 FP max, should be the standard in discussing these things.

36

General Discussion / Re: caping all the points...

« on: March 28, 2012, 09:54:50 PM »

I still maintain that that's not a flaw in the game, but a flaw in the AI deployment and capping priorities.

37

General Discussion / Re: Accurate reflection of damage

« on: March 25, 2012, 10:48:52 PM »

Visual damage indicates your armor damage, as does the colored silhouette in the status readout.  Given that armor resistance is directional I think that approach is ideal, otherwise you restrict the system to having, say, four facings of armor (in order to keep readouts manageable) rather than the more sophisticated approach we have now.  Your actual hull hp, which is global, is noted both as a lifebar and a numerical readout.  Given the nature of each I honestly think the representation on individual ships is near ideal tbh.

The one point where I feel it could perhaps be improved is in the tactical map--you can't tell at a glance the armor status of the ships in your fleet, only their hull HP, which can be a tad misleading in relating the actual survivability of the ship.  In the tacmap I think it might be reasonable to replace the ship icons with their respective armor grid overlays (as long as game performance can be maintained).  Though to keep ships identifiable at a glance it would probably be best to replace missing armor chunks with red grid squares, rather than black/missing.

In fact, I'd even like a little sidebar indicating status of the entire fleet even when not in the tacmap.  Something like the sidebar in sins of a solar empire (though again using the armor silhouettes instead of just simple icons, plus of course the hull/flux bars).  There have been numerous times where I've been manually piloting for just 30 seconds or so, only to come to the tacmap and realize that I somehow lost half my fleet while I wasn't paying attention...Obviously if that happens it means I positioned myself poorly, but I'd still like to know that my ships are at least on their way to going boom, rather than having the sinking feeling of noticing a conspicuous absence...

38

General Discussion / Re: Campaign Questions

« on: March 24, 2012, 09:18:37 PM »

Finally, my last major question revolves around capturing points.  From the missions I had gathered that capturing all the points would halt all enemy reinforcements.

Does it still say that somewhere in the game? If it does, I'd love to know so I can eradicate it. But yeah, it was just too abusive of a mechanic - precisely because you could take on a much more powerful fleet, without ever having to face its larger ships. Sounded good on paper, but turned out rather gamey.

You can still take on more powerful fleets - it's just that now, you'll have to actually fight them, instead of cheesing it out.

It's in several of the mission descriptions--the tactical briefing for "Hornet's Nest" for example.  I also saw some mention of its use in the campaign in some of the youtube videos I've seen posted.

It's a shame you decided to take it out--it sounds (as you noted ;-) ) like an interesting mechanic  that should only really come into play if you really outmaneuver the opposition and at least holds the appearance of significantly increasing the tactical depth of the battles. It seems the gamebreaking nature of it could be addressed by just giving the defense of the last held point (or decaping another point) a much higher priority to the AI.  Being a dev you certainly know a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do, so I won't complain too loudly though vOv

39

General Discussion / Campaign Questions

« on: March 24, 2012, 07:48:26 AM »

So, I just bought the game, and am absolutely loving it (as an aside to Alex, I would suggest setting up a donate option like the SPAZ devs did, I would gladly pay more to see this effort completed), though I have a few questions:

What's the difference between Attack/Defend/Escape?  It seems like there is some interplay between the 3 options for both sides.  If one side escapes and the other defends -> no combat; if one side escapes and the other attacks -> combat.  I've also heard, but not checked myself, that attacking gives you fewer initial fleet points than defending (not sure where escaping lies on that spectrum).  There also seems to be differences in the retreat mechanic--if you attack you can retreat off of any edge, defending only lets you retreat off of your starting edge, while escaping only lets you retreat off of the opponents starting edge.

So, first of all, is all of the above correct?  If so it seems like a fairly robust system with one exception: if I were truly interested in running, whats to stop me from selecting defend/attack and then simply exiting off of my edge immediately?

Secondly, what determines the number of fleet points you'll have available without controlling any points?  I've noticed it does seem to vary.

Finally, my last major question revolves around capturing points.  From the missions I had gathered that capturing all the points would halt all enemy reinforcements.  I rather like that mechanic as it is a direct incentive for keeping and deploying some faster ships in the fleet as opposed to an all heavy fleet being strictly superior.  However, it seems that this mechanic doesnt hold in the campaign...  I had a very rude awakening when I spent half my fleet fighting a massively numerically superior fleet, while capturing all the points, only to wipe the wave and have two fresh battlecruisers dropped on me.  Is something else going on here or does that mechanic really not hold?  If it doesnt hold I'd really like to petition that it should, as otherwise there is virtually zero incentive (and very little hope) in attacking fleets larger than yours.  I know that there have already been discussions about the wonky difficulty curve, but although this would ostensibly make the game even easier once you acquire a fleet composition capable of capturing the points, I feel it vastly improves the game if only because it means I can actually do more than either save-scumming, or spending the entire game trouncing unchallenging inferior fleets only because I have no hope against superior fleets...

40

General Discussion / Re: Some Questions about Difficulty and Command Points

« on: March 22, 2012, 07:49:15 PM »

I just wish that assigning specific ships was a bit more forgiving--a full CP seems a bit harsh.  Either a free assign ship per standard order or a separate pool of CP specifically for assign ship would make me very happy as the computer will often send the complete wrong ship for the job (such as an intercept order taking a squadron that is half a second from finishing a cap and rerouting a second squadron from my overpopulated assault command to run halfway accross the map for the cap: I'd much rather just have the assault squadron take the intercept, for instance).

As another example, I'll often times I'll use frigates as a wolfpack to ensure a cap on far nav points where I know I'll hit opposition, but not sufficient opposition to warrant a full assault order that would drag all my destroyers/cruisers out there too.  Usually such a capture order will result in a single interceptor squadron being dispatched (and subsequently decimated as it runs into 3+ fighter squadrons on the way).  Instead I'll take my otherwise subpar 3-4 hounds that always seem to end up in my fleet,  set one as the escort target for the others and then assign the escorted frigate to the capture....that alone would be on the order of 5 CP for the full capture and just isnt worth it in most cases, which makes me sad.

Also, as an aside, is the enemy now allowed to reinforce even if you hold all the points in the campaign?  I had a very rude awakening when I spent half my fleet fighting a massively numerically superior fleet, while capturing all the points, only to wipe the wave and have two fresh battlecruisers dropped on me.....