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31

Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 1

« on: March 19, 2022, 08:08:09 PM »

I know that Lidar Array is limited ability, and has a cooldown, but it also provides other good bonuses that makes the cooldown negligible, like triple the fire rate, among other things.

Now, Invictus is supposed to be outdated, compared to the other low-tech, midline and especially high-tech ships, where Paragon is the pinnacle of the Domain's battleship designs. But i just can't understand, lore wise, how could outdated ship outrange the pinnacle of ship designs (Paragon).

Because range isn't the sole determinant of the quality of ship design - if that were the case, then most low tech ships at equivalent size classes would be simply "better" than most high tech ships, full stop. It's an extremely facile avenue for analysis.

I'm not surprised that in real testing the Paragon eats the Invictus alive, because Lidar Array takes up the active system slot, while the Paragon is equipped with both ATC and Fortress Shield. The Paragon could simply activate Fortress Shield to absorb the Lidar Array output while it's active, then once Lidar has been depleted the Paragon will easily pummel the Invictus from way beyond the Invictus's pitiful +25% passive range. In fact, beam Paragons still outrange the Invictus even with Lidar active for any weapon other than Gauss, and I highly doubt the Invictus has the flux to sustain 4x Gauss with 3x Lidar acceleration for any decent length of time (which, again, would just be easily absorbed by Fortress Shield anyway). It's quite likely that the Invictus will have trouble managing 4x Gauss even before Lidar - the posted build has less than 50% of the dissipation required for 4x Gauss alone, before even considering the other large mounts.

Personally I'm waiting to see what the flux and system uptime situation (max charges, charge replenishment, duration/cooldown, etc.) turns out to be for Invictus before passing judgement, since that's going to have a huge impact on what kind of damage output the Invictus is actually capable of sustaining across the entire battle. The Invictus obviously has considerable burst potential, but might require tons of support to keep it covered if it needs to constantly vent. Right now the Invictus reminds me of an overgrown Atlas Mk.II: amazing on paper, but tactically problematic during actual deployment. It's hard to measure how DP-efficient the Invictus would be without actually seeing how much sustained DPS it's capable of and how much fleet support it requires.

32

General Discussion / Re: Ode To A Tiny, Angry Frisbee

« on: March 10, 2022, 05:44:09 AM »

My other main problem with Xyphos in practice is that the more cluttered the battlespace is, the worse they perform. Give them a single target and they are great - give them multiple targets or heaven forbid fighters and they spin uselessly, die, and then the platform is down 37 OP for the next 30 seconds or more. Xyphos are horrifically bad against other fighters, especially enemy fighters with flares!

This hasn't been my experience with Xyphos at all. With 600 shields + 450 hull, Xyphos are one of the tankiest fighters. Since they have long range and use their mother ship as cover, I find that Xyphos will easily stay alive unless vastly outnumbered by enemy fighters or when the mother ship is knife-fighting against enemy ships. As for their efficacy against enemy fighters: unshielded fighters are immediately disabled by Ion Beam. Shielded fighters have terrible flux dissipation and are very vulnerable to soft flux, and are thus quickly overwhelmed and disabled by Burst PD + Ion Beam.

Example

A single wing of Xyphos easily shot down dozens of enemy fighters, without support from other PD weapons. Note that:

• Only direct kills are reported by Detailed Combat Results - the Xyphos received no credit for the enemy fighters that were disabled and sent helplessly drifting into the firing arcs of nearby allied ships.
• Only damage against ships are reported by Detailed Combat Results, not damage against enemy fighters. The Xyphos inflicted far more damage than reported here in order to score 38 fighter kills.

[close]

The real value from Xyphos is that they both provide long range EMP fire support against enemy ships while also replacing PD weapons outright, and are even flux-positive with Ordnance Expertise - ships gain a lot of support capability, PD coverage, and flux from the OP invested. In general, I find CH Xyphos to be easily worthwhile for the large majority of destroyer builds, because destroyers have shorter range and lower OP cost for CH. On the other hand, CH Xyphos are more situational for cruisers/caps.

33

General Discussion / Re: New player, struggling with understanding some game mechanics

« on: March 03, 2022, 08:04:00 PM »

The Sunder was engaging a mule with nothing anywhere nearby with almost full flux and damaged armor but full hull.  The mule had 0 flux, full armor, full hull.  The Sunder sat there at the very limit of its range dropping shield and shooting briefly then shielding up, but still taking damage as it did so; why didn't it just disengage and vent?

This sounds like a loadout issue. In order to dictate the terms of combat (for example, being able to successfully disengage and vent), ships generally need some combination of speed and/or range advantage, ideally both. Mules have the Maneuvering Jets system to keep up with your Sunder, so if you want your Sunder to be able to create enough space to maneuver against the Mule, you'll probably need longer range weapons.

Pulse Laser Sunder vs Mule puts the Sunder at a significant range disadvantage since Pulse Lasers have poor range and Mules have ballistics to create an even larger range imbalance. For a Sunder loadout that's more capable of skirmishing, you'll want either HIL (High Intensity Laser) or Tachyon Lance backed by Graviton Beams, with some combination of ITU, Advanced Optics, and/or Unstable Injectors. This will give the Sunder the combination of range and/or speed that's needed to situationally adapt to different flux situations against a Mule.

In general, non-beam energy weapons work best on ships that have high speed for their size class (like Medusa or Shrike), due to their significant range disadvantage. Sunders also don't like to get too close to their targets, due to their poor shields.

Edit: The above obviously applies to 1 vs 1 engagements - with more ships on both sides, it becomes easier to retreat behind allied ships for cover to vent even if you don't necessarily have range/speed advantage.

34

General Discussion / Re: Can't install omega weapons?

« on: February 20, 2022, 01:18:28 PM »

I probably misunderstood something but can't see what. [...] The weapons I mentioned above are medium, so I assume I can't because omegas only allow exact size match install? Seems unnecessarily restrictive. Maybe it is a bug?

Not a bug, just that downsizing is more restrictive than you think.

Mounts can only downsize 1 size for matching weapon types. That means the large ballistic on the Mudskipper Mk.II can mount large ballistic weapons, large hybrid weapons (such as Volatile Particle Driver), large composite weapons (don't exist in vanilla), or downsize with medium ballistic weapons only, not medium hybrids or composites.

For medium hybrid weapons (such as Cryoflamer and Cryoblaster), they can only be downsize mounted in large hybrid mounts (found on Prometheus Mk.II), or on medium ballistic, energy, or hybrid mounts.

35

General Discussion / Re: Wobbling Player AI

« on: February 15, 2022, 01:38:42 PM »

More likely trying to use broadside large slots that cannot fire forward, or trying to take damage on undamaged armor cells rather than take hull damage.

I think this is right - it sounds like the AI is trying to fire the side Hellbores via the broadside AI, not understanding that the Onslaught turns way too slowly to make up for the fact that side larges don't reach forward.

The default AI loadouts that use Devastators mounted on the side larges don't seem to have this problem.

Edit: If the wobbling stops with one side Hellbore removed, then the wobble could be due to the AI trying to decide which side to broadside from with Hellbores mounted on both sides.

36

General Discussion / Re: I loved the combat in the game, but the rewards were lackluster

« on: February 15, 2022, 05:14:30 AM »

One thing the game does well with colonizing is by using multiple mechanisms to tie it back to the main combat gameplay loop: not just pirate raids, but Luddic Path interest, expeditions tied to market share, AI inspections, etc. On the other hand, exploration has fairly weak combat ties and trading/smuggling has virtually none whatsoever.

For exploration, this seems pretty simple: combat risks should ramp up the further away from the Core Worlds one ventures, and there are a lot of fun possibilities (for example, extra spooky hyperspace ghosts). For trading, there definitely needs to be more reactive mechanisms so that trading isn't so completely divorced from combat consequences as it is now, so that serious trading (on par with bounty rewards) would carry the same degree of risk/reward considerations as there is for establishing/growing colonies or hunting bounties. For example:

• Buying a lot of commodities at once above a certain threshold could spawn pirate fleets (proportional to the cargo you took on) to hunt and plunder you, with an actual option when they catch you to surrender your cargo. This makings finding "free" cargo during exploration (or using combat to plunder convoys) a lot more meaningful, since it doesn't attract the attention that comes from loading cargo portside.
• Selling a lot of commodities at once above a certain threshold could spawn guild/mercantile reprisal fleets from affected commodity producers to protect their economic interests, similar to expeditions with market share for colonies.
• Relations impact for supplying commodities to factions that are hostile to other factions could be much more meaningful, again based on volume sold. Supplying the Hegemony if they're hostile with the League should drop your relations with the League; supplying Pathers or Pirates should make all lawful factions take notice. Obviously this shouldn't mean instant hostilities from a single small trade, but war profiteering to the tune of millions from Pathers/Pirates should eventually make you an enemy of all lawful factions. Right now there's a weak "trade with enemy" impact for all trade, but for commodities that are purely economic (that is to say, not tied to the player equipping themselves for combat but instead active commodities trading with a clear profit motive) the relations consequences should be much more significant. After all, supplying one's enemies is an indirect act of war, and thus should be viewed as a milder form of attacking a faction's fleet with transponders on.
• Excessive suspicion levels from smuggling could spawn bounty hunter fleets, instead of a mere cargo scan.

Low volumes of trading to help the player get on their feet should not risk attention from factions, but high volumes of trading with the aim of getting rich should carry colony-level consequences. At bare minimum, there should be active considerations and strategies such as "playing both sides" with trade to avoid angering warring factions. In terms the campaign-level gameplay, trading as an activity is currently too easy, safe, and divorced from the combat loop. At the end of the day, the game should be primarily about combat.

37

Suggestions / [REDACTED] fleets should always assist each other. (Spoilers)

« on: January 27, 2022, 04:36:01 AM »

When fighting/farming full-strength Ordos (not the baby Ordos initially encountered the first time in a system), it's frustrating to run into arbitrary limits when fleets refuse to engage via assisting each other: for example, if your fleet is too small (such as flying a solo Ziggurat with only logistics ships), nearby Ordos won't even assist at all. You're forced to either engage one Ordos at a time or add a lot of bloat to your fleet just to entice them into assisting each other. Likewise, once you have a large endgame fleet, you can transverse jump right next to a Remnant nexus into a huge pile of spawning Ordos and still only have ~1.2-1.5k DP worth of Ordos actually willing to engage at once.

This mechanic appears to be based on an evaluation of your fleet strength vs enemy fleet strength (for example, full-powered Ordos seem to avoid assisting when they're all rated at 5 stars difficulty due to fleet point difference), possibly to protect players from stumbling into "impossible" battles too early, and there's a limit to how many are willing to fight you even when you have a very strong fleet. However, with warning beacons and the recent story point disengage mechanic, these guardrails for Ordos fleets feel completely artificial, unnecessary, and prevent the player from seeking out epic endgame battles in a sandbox game. It's especially jarring and a complete let-down when going from huge fights with many thousands of DP against human faction fleets that have no problems assisting each other (such as Nexerelin invasion or defense fleets) only to go into so-called "high danger" systems and fight puny Ordos battles, and this also frustratingly slows down Alpha Core farming with lots of unnecessarily small battles.

IMO Ordos fleets are supposed to be endgame challenges and should always assist each other to pile-on the playerfleet, regardless of fleet strength evaluation and how badly the odds are stacked against the player - this is exactly what high danger systems (and story point disengage) are supposed to be for! Until there's such an update, if there's a way to make Ordos always assist each other either via editing settings or mods, I would love to find out where/which changes need to be made, or if a modder has already solved the problem. Thanks!

38

Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Detailed Combat Results v5.2.1 (2021-12-23)

« on: January 27, 2022, 02:31:45 AM »

One significant discrepancy is that the combat results refer to "Deployment Points", but is actually using the fleet points value instead. For example:



Total destroyed ships were 11 Radiants, 20 Brilliants, 15 Fulgents, 14 Glimmers, and 14 Lumens. You can see at the end of the video that the combat results report "1054 deployment points" (which is the fleet points total of the destroyed ships per ship_data.csv), but the destroyed ship deployment points is actually 1451. This is confirmed by the Clean Disengage window:



The discrepancy comes from the variance between DP and FP: for example, Radiants are worth 60 DP but only 30 FP, while Lumens are worth 4 DP but 8 FP. Fleet points aren't actually used by the player in any way (since the game uses them internally for things like autoresolve and combat difficulty/XP) while deployment points are critical to players as a measure of odds during live combat.

Would it be possible to update the report using actual deployed DP instead of the FP from ship_data.csv? I noticed that Alex has started to display actual deployment points in the Fleet and Refit screens for players as well, so it seems much more consistent to use player-facing DP than the internal FP measure in the results. Thanks!

39

Suggestions / Re: Wolfpack Tactics: Small Problem and Proposed Change

« on: January 21, 2022, 11:08:31 PM »

I like the DP pool idea as well, since it also helps curb officer limit bypass via mercenaries and AI cores. If we're talking purely frigates, then 20-30 DP is plenty since most frigates have such low DP to begin with.

However, destroyers also benefit from Wolfpack Tactics and they take up quite a bit more DP than the average frigate, and a handful of destroyers would completely hog the DP pool away from frigates. Separate DP pools seems like a rather clunky workaround - there should be a better way to make frigates and destroyers play nice with the DP pool.

40

General Discussion / Re: Anyone tried this wild idea with Support Doctrine?

« on: January 21, 2022, 11:01:01 PM »

Unfortunately I'm running into a problem where the total fleet points ("fleet pts" in ship_data.csv) are so small that nearby [REDACTED] fleets refuse to assist, making it difficult to do multi-fleet testing for the full +500% XP bonus. Sigh. I know this is purely a fleet point issue since if I change the fleet points of the Monitor from 5 to say 15 and make no other changes, or if I change the fleet points of the Ziggurat from 40 to say 400 and make no other changes, then the other fleet will join just fine. (Doing so does not affect the XP bonus, since this is fleet points, not deployment points i.e. DP.) Not sure how the "nearby fleet assist or not" code works, so I don't know if frigate fleet points is reduced or something making this fleet considered too "small", even though my regular fleet of say Odysseys/Apogees for example can attract multiple fleets just fine.

I've been running into this same problem for a long time now - it's weird that I can't fight 2k+ battles against Remnants even though I could get mega-battles against human factions (especially with Nex invasions), and the problem is even worse in 0.951 since running d-mods with Derelict Operations lowers the fleet FP for assistance thresholds even more. I wish there's a modder who could make an "always assist" mod that negates these fleet restrictions for the playerfleet, assuming one hasn't been made already.

41

General Discussion / Re: Phase Anchor is absurdly overpowered.

« on: January 21, 2022, 09:39:20 PM »

I mean, even PA itself is ridiculous. It's like SO, give you x2 vent, but also x2 weapon recharge, and it doesn't have any penalty like PPT or range.

A Ziggurat bullying non-Remnants while somehow still needing to be propped up by a supporting fleet? Eh, I don't know what that's supposed to show, but it's the opposite of noteworthy.

This has very little to do with with Phase Anchor: the Ziggurat has always been more or less a cheat ship long before Phase Anchor was added this patch, and people have been soloing everything in the game using the ship since the day it was introduced. (The only debate has been whether it's more cost effective than the Doom, before the recent Mine Strike nerf anyway.) The Ziggurat is the quintessential "noob cannon" that's never seriously considered when it comes to discussions about balance or comparative builds, and a person would be laughed out the door if they tried to use the ship in one of the community AI fleetbuilding tournaments.

Just for fun, I dusted off the Ziggurat from storage, slapped on some weapons, respecced some skills, and visited a high danger system to hunt some Radiants:



Took out 11 Radiants and over 1k DP without taking a single point of hull damage. Clearly the Ziggurat is a non-serious cheat ship, and a crutch to help new players defeat content they don't yet have the skill and experience for. It's not a useful basis of comparison for how Phase Anchor should function with phase ships collectively, other than noting that the Ziggurat is already so ridiculous that just as with Safety Overrides, capital ships shouldn't even have access to Phase Anchor to begin with.

Re: Phase Anchor

Setting aside the Ziggurat, I think Phase Anchor is reasonably well-constrainted by the mount limitations of phase ships. Afflictors, Shades, and Gremlins only have access to small mounts, and AMB is the only non-missile small weapon that has the combination of long recharge and strong finishing ability to take advantage of Phase Anchor. Of course, AMB's tiny range and the weakness of frigate armor also makes these ships extremely impacted by the mobility restrictions from the recent Phase Field nerfs and thus they also really want the competing Adaptive Phase Coils, so this is a pretty fair tradeoff.

Harbingers and Dooms have more weapon options (up to mediums), but Phase Anchor doesn't really break either of them because the larger phase ships have such lower base speed that it can be hard for them to rush in and out of danger to take advantage of Phase Anchor - they tend to put themselves at risk doing so by running their hard flux up too high. It's really only with the large weapon options (Tach Lance, Autopulse, large Omegas, etc) where Phase Anchor's cooldown reduction boosts weapon performance to an oppressive extent, and weapon range also becomes long enough that there's not as much risk to hang out in-range and brawl with Phase Anchor; however, large weapons aren't generally available on phase ships.

The main outliers are Omega missiles, and not because of raw DPS: AMSRM and Resonators have great burst DPS but poor sustained DPS. Rather, it's because Omega missiles have such long range that there's no required exposure to danger for enjoying the flux/recharge bonuses of Phase Anchor, compared to the short range of other small/medium weapons with long recharge + strong finish. As I previously posted, this means that even the AI can easily pilot a phase ship to stay out of danger while milking Phase Anchor, completely risk-free:



The solution seems obvious: Phase Anchor should only boost ammo replenishment (reload) of non-missile weapons. (IMO, missile ammo reload shouldn't be affected by phase, Temporal Shell, or any other effects.) Note that I'm referring to the ammo reload and not to the refire delay - I think it's perfectly fine for Phase Anchor to burn through limited ammo faster on missiles like Typhoons. Of course this will also impact Pilum and Salamander use with Phase Anchor which... is not really a thing anyway. Yet.

42

General Discussion / Re: We need weapons that counter fast ships

« on: January 13, 2022, 05:24:50 PM »

The window of opportunity isn't much shorter than other ships - PPT time is vastly outweighed by CR decay time, especially for SO ships.

...The recent Wolfpack Tactics nerf to PPT was clearly aimed at Hyperion, without considering how minor the impact is when post-PPT CR decay rate is so easily countered by Combat Endurance + Hardened Subsystems without Delicate Machinery.

Against that 537 seconds, an SO Hyperion losing 20 seconds of peak time from the recent Wolfpack Tactics change was basically chump change. In the attached graph, you can imagine the blue line being shifted to the right by 1/3 of a square; that was the effect of the change.

Thanks for illustrating with the actual numbers! I think it clearly demonstrates how ineffective the current PPT/CR constraints on Hyperion really are. IMO if we want both the "window of opportunity" idea that TaLaR alluded to and the "hangar queen" per the Codex description, then Delicate Machinery and a reduction to daily CR recovery would be consistent. Despite all the Hyperion spam fleets being posted here (and on Reddit) lately, I still don't think Hyperions are actually overperforming - they're just insufficiently CR-constrained.

43

General Discussion / Re: Support doctrine, wolfpack and frigate armor

« on: January 13, 2022, 05:13:01 PM »

Support doctrine
Lots of situational picks on the way: 2 carrier skills you might not want and 3 tied to officers(2 boosts+wolfpack) that aren't that good with support doctrine. CM also needs officers, but plopping 3-4 in kites already maxes the boost. Means that if you do not want carriers just reaching it already can have duds, and getting both Best of the Best and Support Doctrine includes tons of waste.

I agree that there's a lack of synergy between officered skills in the Leadership tree being required for non-officered Support Doctrine. If we want to encourage players to use Support Doctrine for cheaper small ships so they can reserve their officers for more important ships, perhaps Coordinated Maneuvers could be changed to "All ships with officers and unofficered ships with Support Doctrine, including flagship" so that it'd still be useful to take as a prerequisite for Support Doctrine.

I would suggest that this does not apply to the damage from Wolfpack Tactics, since that would scale very dangerously with potentially huge numbers of unofficered frigates.

Wolfpack
My problem with it is similar to support doctrine.
I'd like to include more Lashers, Centurions, Brawlers but they are pretty squishy and an officer for a 4-5 DP ship is just not that good.
Wolfpack bonus also being tied to officers pushes eco options out for the high DP, high impact ships that are pretty good at staying alive(and doing damage) anyway.
Would open up more options and make the cheap frigates more attractive if the bonus didn't need officers (reduce the bonus damage if needed).

I'd imagine that the design intent behind the officer requirement is to prevent the damage bonus from Wolfpack Tactics from scaling too much, since frigates are so easy to mass and deploy.  IMO it's currently pretty fair - it's compensation for "wasting" your officers on smaller, lower-impact ships, not a reward simply for using smaller ships at all.

That said, I wouldn't mind if non-officered frigates/destroyers with Support Doctrine and Wolfpack received the PPT bonus (but not the damage bonus) so they can better keep up with larger officered ships.

44

General Discussion / Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?

« on: January 13, 2022, 04:39:20 PM »

I'll just add that I've got a note to make rugged construction start recovered ships off with some hull and CR; I think that should help it along nicely.

That sounds like a nice buff! A reduction to crew lost (a la Recovery Shuttle) would also help make those ships more economically feasible as well.

45

General Discussion / Re: The best wolfpack - Hyperion Vs End game(Space Dorito, Ziggurat, unique bounty)

« on: January 13, 2022, 08:31:50 AM »

It also feels kind of wrong to see SO hyperions fight for what I believe in real time is 14+ min? When I tried to use SO with my hyperions they straight up didn't last long enough to finish the fight.

There's no real mystery to it - Starship Legends gave his ships all kinds of bonuses, including CR decay reduction. 14+ minutes with SO Hyperions is, indeed, comically different than the vanilla experience and nowhere close to comparable.

As someone else noted in another thread, when he tried fighting Remnants without the mods, he took huge losses. There's nothing special here.