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Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 01, 2024, 12:00:56 PM »
Oh yea, I'm thinkin it's phase lance time.
Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
It would help balance phase ships a bit if there were more ways to directly counter fight them, opening up the design space to allow for them to be more powerful without just breaking the game. Like say non-phase ships that have ship systems which can force phase ships out of phase for a period of time deployed by LC and TT. Maybe a ship system similar to the canister flak for LC and a lobbed bomb or charged beam for TT? These would still be usable on normal ships, they have the extra bonus of being anti-phase.
I've thought about this sort of thing a lot, and it's hard to come up with anything that feels promising. It's hard to handle for the AI (on both sides, really), and if there are things like that, then phase ships can get just totally hard-countered; I'm not sure how you end up with something satisfying down that road. I honestly don't remember all the details as the last time I've delved into this was a while ago, but it didn't look too good, and some of the ideas were initially very similar to this. Which isn't to knock the idea, it makes sense! I think it's just a very thorny problem.
Drifting was removed because it made it too easy to cheese the AI and it screwed with the intended balance of certain ships. For example, Onslaught could zip across the map at 300+ speed after using Burn Drive.
I guess we can't have TOO MUCH realism...
i've discussed this elsewhere but the speed limit in starsector is not unrealistic. It'd be unrealistic if ships couldn't accelerate infinitely without any drag, but they can. They just, don't. And it makes sense that they don't; we put speed limits and speed governors on and for almost every vehicle that we produce. We'd do it for space ships too. You don't want a hound to be able to singlehandedly annihilate a station it's trying to dock with just bc the accelerator pedal on the helm station got stuck & it accelerated nonstop until it collides going so fast it liquifies the whole station. And that's pretty explicitly noted in-game that this is what's going on by the fact that "safety overrides" increases your max speed, and the fact that ships whose engines have gone out can be accelerated infinitely & don't experience any drag. The engines are just programmed to brake the ship constantly if it goes over a speed difference of ___ with local objects.
Obviously it'd be handy for the purposes of wartime use for a ship to have no governor, but the thing is, military ships interact with friendly docks & the ships within its own fleets a lot more than it does the enemy, so any benefit gained from the removal of a governor would be far outweighed by the accidents it would cause.