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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); In-development patch notes for Starsector 0.98a (2/8/25)

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Topics - BaBosa

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16
Suggestions / More com sniffers
« on: January 22, 2023, 02:27:15 PM »
Hey Alex, can we have an option to spend story points to make com sniffer’s permanent? Maybe with a scaling cost? Currently I like them because I can get some missions while out exploring but either I have just one which doesn’t give much or I have multiple and they get found part way through my travels and don’t give much.

17
Suggestions / Variable malfunction thresholds.
« on: January 21, 2023, 11:52:32 PM »
The cost to recover and regain CR is quite odd currently as low tech ships often cost more than high tech ships due to it being inversely proportional to the CR lost per deployment. This is quite frustrating as it makes it expensive to recover derelict low tech ship despite them supposedly being simpler and easier to maintain.

My dubious idea is to standardise all ships CR/D (~15%) and instead limit their back to back usage by giving ship’s different malfunction thresholds. For example the Hyperion, instead of a 40% CR/D and the standard 40% malfunction threshold, it has the standard 15% CR/D and a 65% malfunction threshold. Both ways mean that the Hyperion is on the malfunction boarder after one battle but the second makes it more expensive and longer to recover 

The implications of this is that the derelict recovery cost is proportional to battle recovery cost.
CR increasing skills have a greater impact on how many back to back battles a ship can have.
CR damaging effects like hyperstorm strikes have a proportionally greater impact on delicate ships like the Hyperion which makes a lot of sense.
This means that more reliable ships can last longer after PPT, again makes sense to me.

18
Suggestions / What could be done with Safety Overrides
« on: January 15, 2023, 02:42:43 PM »
With even Alex agreeing that SO needs to change, I have some ideas of how to keep the good parts while getting rid of the problems.

SO is really two hullmods put together, a more extreme version of unstable injectors, increasing speed and decreasing range and a hullmod that increases dissipation but decreases PPT, trading long term power for more short term power. This effects push ships towards more reckless/desperate and in your face fighting.
It is the increased dissipation that is the real issue. Dissipation’s importance is obvious as it directly increases damage output and defence. This is how SO makes an otherwise a bad ship/build into a strong one.

The simple fix would be to just remove the bonus dissipation and reduce/remove the PPT penalty. Keeping the core range for speed trade part.
I think this makes it too similar to unstable injectors though and has the same issues with not having enough flux after taking fire getting into close range.

Another is a simple nerf, reduce the dissipation bonus to like 1.5x and possibly reduce the PPT penalty or OP cost while keeping everything else, including preventing venting, the same.
This feels better when I tested it as it still helped making close combat work when using good ships, builds and tactics but didn’t make *** ships good.

A better idea that I didn’t test is to make the dissipation bonus only apply to soft flux. This keeps the increased damage output but doesn’t help with defence so it adds to the frantic feel of SO.

Another idea I had was to make SO increase fire rate of all non missile weapons by like x1.5 instead of increasing dissipation to emphasise the damage boost directly. Possibly add a malfunction risk at high flux.

More could be added to this like a damage multiplier proportional to flux level, either both ways or just to the ship with SO to add more to the fearless/reckless feel of SO.

19
Suggestions / Neural link
« on: December 31, 2022, 05:38:39 AM »
So I’ve been thinking about neural link lately and looking at other people’s opinions about it lately and I’ve had some thoughts (dangerous I know).

As far as I can tell, Neural link’s philosophy seems to be to give the player a second ship for them to control but it doesn’t do it that well for a capstone skill, though it also allows piloting remnant ships which it does fine.

So the hullmod lets us switch between the two ships, share most personal skill effects and gives a bonus charge to ship systems.

One of the issues I and others have found are that it doesn’t really feel like controlling two ships as the other ship is controlled by the AI, not a human, and it inherently cannot coordinate with or predict the players plans reliably. This prevents a lot of the best combos as the AI often won’t do exactly what the player wants. So while the instant/quick transfer is good, it’s not powerful capstone good.
A obvious solution would be to make it free to give them free commands but that won’t work with how the game is set up now, as when you cancel a direct ship order, the assignment it created stays and other ships will follow it. So a solution is to make assignments created by giving neural ships orders a different colour and then make all non neural ships ignore them.
So most players can use this to make the AI do what they want but also RTS players can put it on other ships to get the free commands for an OP cost.
An extra idea is to allow the player to change the linked ship for a seperate command point cost. This can then be used to bolster troubled ships.

Another issue is that it requires an expensive investment into personal skills to make the most of the skill. This is hard to deal with as you don’t want to give bonuses to players without combat skills as that devalues the combat skills.
A possibility is to make it so you can put an officer into the linked ship and it gives the flagship their skills. This gives some of the benefits of sharing skills but it isn’t as good as using player skills as they can’t have as many, especially elite skills and it’s more inconvenient. Plus if you change the linked ship then you lose that.
Of course AI cores should be exempted.
I’m not too sure of this idea though.

Also the hullmods really shouldn’t be available for loot.

20
General Discussion / How does damage actually work?
« on: July 21, 2021, 02:29:49 AM »
So a bit of background, I'm currently learning a programming language (MATLAB) and I figured I could practice by recreating how damage is programed in Starsector and find out roughly how long it actually takes for a ship to die from a weapon.

I thought I knew how damage and armour works in Starsector but I found while trying to recreate it that I actually had no idea.
So I want to share where I am at the moment and what I'm missing and I hope someone can help me.

So what I've picked up is that every ship is split into cells and each cell starts with the armour value of the ship (or 1/8 of it, I remember seeing that somewhere but can't find it again) and then when a projectile hits a ship, SS checks what cell it hit, finds what cells are in the 8 neighbouring spots and what cells are in the 12 adjacent but not diagonal spots from those. This gives a maximum of 9 and 12 of what I'm going to call major cells and minor cells respectfully.

Once the cells are found, it sums together the current value of the major cells and half of the current value of the minor cells, (unless the current value is less than 5% of the original value in which case it uses that 5%, maybe?). Then it divides that sum by the number of major cells contributing plus half the number of minor cells contributing.
This gives the average armour value. Add here any bonuses to armour.

That's used in the damage calculation, (damage squared divided by damage plus armour (Edit; unless that would result in less than 15% of the damage dealt, in which case it uses damage times 0.15)).
The resulting damage is then subtracted from the value of every major cell and minor cells take half that damage.

Then I'm not sure how hull damage works, I know how it works if all the armour cells are stripped but I haven't noticed any mention of how it works if some cells are gone but others are still there, but my guess is that
If the damage takes a cell below a value of 0, that number is recorded and then after the damage to each cell has been calculated, the excess damage past 0 from each cell is added together and then divided by the number of major cells and half minor cells and that average is dealt to the hull.

With HE damage, the damage in the armour damage calculation is doubled but then the excess hull damage is halved to compensate due to only doing 100% damage to hull not 200% like armour and the opposite for kinetic and similar to that for frag.

Is that right or did I hur dur somewhere? I'm not sure if the 5% minimum armour value is applied to the individual armour cells or the average armour value. And as I said, the hull damage calculation is a complete guess.

Thank you in advance  ;D

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