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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - Exasperation

Pages: [1] 2
1
Suggestions / Re: Balancing Income
« on: March 28, 2022, 04:05:39 AM »
I disagree about combat being "the fun way" to make money.  If it were, the current rewards would feel sufficient (aside from the issue of travel distance - if you're offering a 50k bounty, don't tell me that they're hiding out "just 40 light years away" and expect me to take the job) - they're high enough to turn a (small) profit, and you would be having fun while doing it, so you wouldn't feel bad about having to do more of it to make more money.  The reason that the rewards being lower is such an issue is that the combat isn't fun enough to carry the experience by itself - if you do more combat it isn't more fun, instead it becomes a tedious grind (see also complaints about grinding end game fleets for SP).  Doing one bounty can be fun.  Doing five similar bounties is a chore.

In my experience, the fun way to make money is exploring.  Not because of any specific gameplay element that's more fun than combat, but because it offers the most variety of experiences.  There are opportunities for combat, opportunities to avoid combat by stealth, more varied loot than you get from bounty fleets, etc..  That's why it's the thing I turn to doing when I don't need anything in particular; it doesn't get old as fast as the other activities, which tend to be more on the one-note side.  If I need fast cash I trade, if I need to grind rep with a faction I generally do bounties (occasionally other missions, but bounties are reliable), but if I just want to play and have fun I go exploring.

2
Mods / Re: [0.95a] Unpack Blueprints
« on: March 20, 2022, 10:27:16 PM »
Bug report: the tooltip duplicates the original tooltip as well as providing the updated tooltip with the result that the information about which blueprints are in the package is repeated and for larger packages some of the tooltip gets pushed off the screen.  This is because calling super.createTooltip() from UnpackBlueprints calls MultiBlueprintItemPlugin.createTooltip() when what is wanted is BaseSpecialItemPlugin.createTooltip().  Fortunately, the actual logic in BaseSpecialItemPlugin.createTooltip() is pretty simple, so you can fix this by replacing
Code
    public void createTooltip(TooltipMakerAPI tooltip, boolean expanded, CargoTransferHandlerAPI transferHandler, Object stackSource) {
        super.createTooltip(tooltip, expanded, transferHandler, stackSource);

        float pad = 3f;
        float opad = 10f;
        float small = 5f;
in UnpackBlueprints with
Code
    public void createTooltip(TooltipMakerAPI tooltip, boolean expanded, CargoTransferHandlerAPI transferHandler, Object stackSource) {
        float pad = 3f;
        float opad = 10f;
        float small = 5f;

        tooltip.addTitle(getName());

        String design = getDesignType();
        Misc.addDesignTypePara(tooltip, design, opad);

        if (!spec.getDesc().isEmpty()) {
            Color c = Misc.getGrayColor();
            tooltip.addPara(spec.getDesc(), c, opad);
        }

3
General Discussion / Re: Help me understand markets & raids
« on: March 19, 2022, 01:12:02 AM »
It doesn't say that they're producing 7, it says that 7 are available there - it produces 5 (4 base + 1 from administrator skill) and imports enough that's produced elsewhere to get up to 7 (it wants 8, but that truncated line says that the highest production anywhere is only 7, so it's impossible for imports to improve the value above that number).  Because of the game's trade abstraction the amount you export doesn't affect the local supply, so exporting all 5 of the locally produced units still leaves it with 5 units locally.  However, the same abstraction means that to go from 5 units to 7 units you have to import 7 units from a single source that produces that many units on its own, and no number of producers of 7 units each is ever sufficient to import 8 units from - there could be 10^8 producers of 7 units each and it still wouldn't add up to a production volume of 8 units.

4
General Discussion / Re: Stellar Shade question
« on: March 19, 2022, 12:44:31 AM »
Not quite - it should still improve the habitability, which means lower upkeep costs for any structures/industries built there.

5
Suggestions / Re: Some mechanics feel really outdated
« on: March 16, 2022, 06:44:09 PM »
When the player pilots a ship, that player's piloting skill should be decisive. If it's a 30 capital vs 30 capital slugfest then as other people have pointed out it's more about metagaming the AI than your own skill. Isn't Starsector a game of tactical space combat? How is it tactical if it's a 30 cap vs 30 cap 1000 DP slog?
Tactics is the part where you're giving commands to your fleet.  All the things you spend command points on are tactics.  The part where you decide what ships to put in your fleet, what loadouts to use, where to fly to, and what fleets to engage are strategy.

The people who want a single player-controlled ship to do most of the work and the player's piloting ability to be decisive specifically don't want tactical combat, they want a dogfighting simulation.  Sending a single individual to fight an entire army is, from a tactical (and strategic!) perspective, lunacy.

6
Suggestions / Re: Eat burger, shuffle events
« on: March 06, 2022, 09:27:56 PM »
After spending many in-game months trying to get a mission - any mission - with a two-colony faction in hopes of gaining a potential contact I would definitely love to see something along these lines.

I suggest you could also try installing a Comm Sniffer on the Com Relay in that star system, that way if any exploration or bounty missions are randomly generated you will be able to pick them up as long as you are in range of Hypercom.
I don't think that would help at all - as I said, the point is specifically to develop a contact with the faction, which as far as I know can only be done via bar missions.  The problem is that the faction doesn't have very many bars to visit, and almost all of the missions available in those bars are with pirates/independents.

7
General Discussion / Re: Autofire and AI
« on: March 01, 2022, 11:34:45 AM »
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_(video_games)#Alpha_Strike
In this context, it refers to firing all of your weapons at once to attempt to overwhelm the target's defenses.

8
General Discussion / Re: "Flight of Murder"
« on: February 28, 2022, 10:42:19 AM »
If you mouse over the name ("flight of murder" in this instance) it should give you a tooltip that says what type of feature it is and what the effects of being in it are.  The purple corona might indicate that it's a magnetic field, but I don't remember for sure.

9
Suggestions / Re: Eat burger, shuffle events
« on: February 19, 2022, 09:01:06 AM »
After spending many in-game months trying to get a mission - any mission - with a two-colony faction in hopes of gaining a potential contact I would definitely love to see something along these lines.

10
Suggestions / Re: Hellbore is not a PD weapon
« on: February 12, 2022, 01:52:19 AM »
I know it's not really an answer to the problem, but I feel like it might help advance the discussion of how viable something like this would be and how the UI for it might work to point out that someone's making a mod for this.  Excerpt from the mod description: "Ever got into an argument with your gunnery officer, because they insisted that they could hit a Broadsword with a Hellbore Cannon?"

Also, I think that (in addition to the missed opportunities arising from shooting at fighters when there are more important targets right there) I personally have lost more ships to this sort of behavior than to enemy fighters.  I know I won't forget the first time I saw a Paragon unload a plasma cannon directly into the unshielded aft of a friendly Wolf to "help" with the fighters attacking it.  This sort of thing is also how I learned that there's a reputation penalty for friendly fire incidents.

11
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Nexerelin v0.10.4b "Dissonance" (hotfix 2022-01-30)
« on: February 06, 2022, 04:27:12 PM »
As for Paradox games: Stellaris has just a conquest condition (which includes the option of vassalizing others or adding to a federation). It actually had some others in the past but they removed them for some reason. Personally, Stellaris late game is pretty boring and tedious, I would prefer to have something other than conquest to go for, but oh well (they do have "crisis" events in the late game that keep you busy).
I think Crusader Kings doesn't have a victory condition per se, I am not 100% sure.

For Starsector it's probably better to have conditions that are not quite fast to achieve as the game is naturally pretty slow (all this rep grinding, exploration and colony development will always take quite some time).
Stellaris has a timed score-based victory condition - you set a target year, and when that time arrives the empire with the highest score (including non-conquest factors like technology) is declared the winner - and you have the option of disabling it completely.  Conquest is certainly the easiest way to win, but not the only one.

I personally think having an option to disable victory conditions entirely would be great.  I don't play with Nexerelin to "win", I do it primarily so that I have a dynamic world to play in, where meaningful non-deterministic changes are occurring (there are other nice features too, but that's the main draw for me).  For me, the victory conditions are just unnecessary (albeit minor) annoyances which pop up and briefly interrupt my gameplay at some point, but which I otherwise ignore.

12
It was my understanding that ships with the civilian-grade hull modifier are supposed to gain suppport XP regardless of weapons (i.e. if you put weapons in the small mounts of an Atlas, it should still get XP as long as you don't also give it militarized subsystems - right?).  Are fighter bays just different than normal weapon mounts for these purposes?
Yeah, that was my intent as well, but I ended up just using isCivilian() while not really knowing how exactly it works. I now believe isCivilian doesn't even check for civ-grade hull mod, it simply returns true if and only if the ship has no fighters or weapons equipped. So I just manually added the case for civ-grade but no militarized subsystems.
It turns out that whatever it's doing is more complicated than that; I've just noticed I had a ship without civilian-grade hull that I forgot to remove the point defense weapon from its only weapon mount - and it was still getting the support XP (and also the +2 burn from bulk transport).  So whatever triggers isCivilian() is considering something outside of those factors.  Looking in the ship_data file for that mod, that ship has "CIVILIAN, FREIGHTER" for its hints entry - and looking in the base ship_data, the Shepherd doesn't have the CIVILIAN hint.  I guess maybe isCivilian() checks for that hint first, and there's no need for an override since anyone (i.e. me) could just add that hint to any ship that they feel it fits, no recompiling needed.

13
General Discussion / Re: Formations
« on: January 16, 2022, 12:11:44 PM »
I think the biggest, most obvious, and most common source of AI stupidity I've noticed is that the AI appears to consider fighters to be full scale ships instead of PD targets.
Fighters were ships until 0.8a.  Fighters became missiles or weapons since 0.8a.
And yet the AI doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, since this behavior is all observed in 0.95.1a.

Try powering through a wave of Broadswords to engage a combat ship and let us know how it works out.
I have tried it.  What generally happens is this:
1) my ships panic and run from the fighters.
2) since the fighters are faster, they catch up to my ships anyway.
3) my ships kill the fighters in a couple of seconds.  If I'm lucky, none of them manages to plasma cannon a friendly in the process.
4) with the fighters gone, my ships realize there's nothing to be afraid of and return to chasing the nearest Kite instead of following their orders.

14
General Discussion / Re: Formations
« on: January 15, 2022, 11:54:21 AM »
I think the biggest, most obvious, and most common source of AI stupidity I've noticed is that the AI appears to consider fighters to be full scale ships instead of PD targets.
Fighters were ships until 0.8a.  Fighters became missiles or weapons since 0.8a.
And yet the AI doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, since this behavior is all observed in 0.95.1a.

15
General Discussion / Re: Formations
« on: January 14, 2022, 11:45:54 AM »
I think the biggest, most obvious, and most common source of AI stupidity I've noticed is that the AI appears to consider fighters to be full scale ships instead of PD targets.  I recently had a fight where a pirate Colossus got separated from the other pirates.  I told a capital ship to engage, and it moved towards it along with two destroyers and a light cruiser that didn't have any specific orders.  The enemy launched its fighters and my capital ship, despite specific orders, an aggressive captain, 8 LR PD lasers and 2 Paladins, and supporting friendly ships turned around and ran away from the fighters.  This isn't even unusual behavior - I've seen my ships repeatedly ram friendly vessels, just plowing into them over and over in a panic, because they were approached by a single wing of enemy Talons, and I regularly see friendly fire incidents because my ships insist on trying to shoot down fighters with Mjollnir Cannons, Plasma Cannons, Thermal Pulse Cannons, and whatever other heavy weaponry is at hand (that's how I discovered that there's an opinion penalty for having too many friendly fire incidents in a battle with allies).

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