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Messages - Candesce

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16
I've found that setting my fleet to move on a bearing, zooming in all the way, centering the screen on my fleet, and mousing over the spike I care about is a very quick way to spot false positives. Even at extreme distances, they'll move a little bit - and zoomed in with the cursor as a point of comparison, "a little bit" is plenty.

Certainly wouldn't object to an upgrade, though.

17
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.97a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 26, 2024, 10:16:17 AM »
I suspect it's more likely to happen with very short-ranged ships, so Escort Package does a lot to prevent it.

Something like a Ion Pulser / Burst PD laser Wolf set to escort is going to have to choose between staying near their escortee and finding something to shoot at a whole lot more often.

As I understand it, if a player wants a few fast short-range frigates to use a bigger, tougher, and significantly slower ship (an Eagle, say) as a mobile bunker to vent behind, the proper command would be Defend, right?

18
General Discussion / Re: What do contacts do for you?
« on: January 25, 2024, 07:11:40 PM »
What is the difference between Very High Importance and Low Importance contacts?
The difficulty and pay for the missions offered, usually. Higher importance give tougher bounties, larger shipments, bigger and more expensive discounted ships. And as mentioned, there's that unique bounty that only shows up for high and very high importance contacts.
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I gather that the VH Military guys give stronger bounties. What about the other classes?
Different contact types give different missions. Military guys give bounties and sell warships, trade guys want shipments hauled and sell civilian ships, agents and other shifty types want you to place spy satellites, that kind of thing. Any given contact can offer a few different mission types, not all.
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And does the faction matter, besides getting rep towards the faction?
Faction matters for what kinds of blueprints they'll let you use when manufacturing (from military contacts), what kinds of discounted ships they'll sell you, and what kinds of ships you'll fight when doing deserter bounties.

19
General Discussion / Re: What do contacts do for you?
« on: January 25, 2024, 06:18:48 PM »
Contacts can give you opportunities to build things from your blueprints, if you'd rather stay out of the colony game.

Contacts are a reliable source of missions and cash. And the occasional heavily discounted ship.

Contacts are a reliable source of reputation.

It's mostly all stuff you can get from visiting bars, but, y'know, more or less reliably.

20
There are some game systems where jacks of all trades function effectively; Starsector isn't one of them. Here, being a jack of all trades means being a master of none.

That said, the Eagle certainly has a "support" role in zone control, which it does just fine. If you don't want that role, only caring about how good a duelist any given ship is, sure, you're not going to want Eagles - but to be blunt, that sounds like a you problem. Buffing the Eagle won't ever fix that issue, either - only one ship is ever going to be the best duelist.

21
General Discussion / Re: Colony basics
« on: January 24, 2024, 07:23:07 AM »
Strictly speaking, you can personally administer as many colonies as you can found. You just take a -2 Stability hit to ALL of them for every extra colony you're administering.

... In practice, that means those colonies aren't going to be making you money and will eventually collapse; you want to keep Stability at least 5. But you can certainly go over two personally administered colonies. Two is just the point where your colonies have the same base stability as ones administrators are managing for you.

If you want to paint the entire map blue, you can also assign Alpha Cores as administrators, if you don't mind severely ticking off the Hegemony. That's technically unlimited.

22
Suggestions / Re: Add Shielded Cargo Holds to the Revenant
« on: January 23, 2024, 11:37:25 AM »
Same standard would give it to the Phantom, too.

I don't think it would break anything; most of the time I'm paying to run Phantoms or Revenants over more efficient logistic ships I'm not going to be found by patrols to be scanned in the first place, anyway.

23
General Discussion / Re: Colony basics
« on: January 22, 2024, 08:42:48 AM »
And what is the equivalence between "miss one good" and the goods I deposit? Is it also exponential, i.e. if they miss one food, it means 10 food used per month, while a lack of 2 foods would mean they want 100 ?
Depending on your colony's accessibility, it's possible for the implicit background traders to be unable to supply it fully, which results in various penalties based on just what you're short of. Accessibility is treated as being much higher if you've a different colony producing the goods your first colony needs, rather than having to ship from the Core, but this usually isn't necessary for, e.g., food, organics, other critical stuff, unless you've put your colony really far out, are at war with major factions, or your spaceport hasn't finished constructing yet. Building waystations and upgrading the spaceport to a megaport will increase accessibility; so will turning on Free Port, but that comes with its own issues.

Sometimes explicit, actually-extant trade fleets will show up at your colony; if they get blown up, you'll take a temporary penalty to the supply of whatever resources those fleets were bringing.

As to knowing exactly how much will be burned from the stockpiles to buy off those penalties... I don't think there's been much research, beyond "highly impractical to do for any resource the colony doesn't produce for itself." If your primary concern is the economic hit, I don't think burning stockpiles is net positive.

24
General Discussion / Re: Dominator and Dragonfire fun
« on: January 21, 2024, 04:37:16 PM »
Just to check - Ordos use Elite Combat Endurance, yeah?

25
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 19, 2024, 06:24:22 AM »
Isn't there something about the Dominator's size/layout that also gives it an unusually high number of armor cells, too? I have a vague memory of that.
Something something armor cell size is proportionate to the LENGTH of the ship, and so the Dominator's are smaller than you'd expect?

You're not the only one who remembers that from somewhere. Don't remember where, at the moment...

26
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 17, 2024, 02:46:25 PM »
Personally, while I haven't used the Dominator much previously, I'm absolutely looking forward to finding out what it can do with dual Storm Needlers.

They're pretty flux efficient, and now that they're getting magazines, having one of them not pointing at my target at any given moment doesn't mean it's not accumulating damage...

27
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 11, 2024, 05:46:09 AM »
Quick reminder that the jackhammer burst does almost the same (hull) damage as one (1) reaper (500 damage difference, 4500 vs 4000).
Yeah, the big difference is the refire delay.

Having gone and looked, that's a smaller difference than I thought it was, though still there; might be worthwhile making it somewhat shorter.

28
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« on: January 11, 2024, 05:38:51 AM »
The point of Jackhammers is to burst down defenses in a way Reapers or other missiles can't really without large quantities and then use the resulting numbers advantage to take on everything else.

If that's not the combat role you want out of your missile slot, you probably want a different missile, yeah?

The "I want a torpedo that will reliably crack any armor it hits and will last me the whole battle" launcher is the Reaper, and the difference between the two is the Reaper isn't as good versus non-Armor defenses; it's slower and easier to shield-flicker and while it's got more HP than a single hammer there's only the one of it, and you won't be able to follow it up with a second for a while.

But complaining the Jackhammer isn't just a discount Typhoon seems kind of pointless.

29
Yeah, the Heavy Mortar is a very flux-efficient source of HE damage. Only HE weapon with better than 1:1 flux efficiency, at least before the Hephaestus change goes through. It's for chewing through hull while not being terrible on armor.

If you look elsewhere on the forums, you'll find people complaining about just how hard it is to kill Pirate Eradicators. Anything like that - high armor, high hull - still has to be killed, and specializing in winning the flux war won't help you much if your opponent can get away with dropping shields and just taking it while hammering you. Mortar does a much better job of punishing that kind of thing than the Mauler.

That's not particularly important vs. Ordos, of course.

30
Something big, large transport capacity, but quite a decent weapon loadout, enough to deter a frigate and give a lot of trouble to a cruiser? A wayfarer on steroids probably (bigger and meaner)... From vanilla or mods? Or a converted pirate freighter?
A Venture or Mule, surely? Depending on if you want a Cruiser or Destroyer sized hull.

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