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1

Suggestions / Small adjustement to tri-tachyon crisis

« on: March 24, 2024, 07:05:37 PM »

I had a little bit of a misunderstanding with the tri-tachyon crisis that could be cleared up really easily. When I talked to my good buddy Rayan about getting "attention" from tri-tach I assumed that his advice would only be relevant after triggering their crisis event. That's how every other crisis works, so I assumed it would be the same here. Of course, how it actually works is tri-tachyon has a separate crisis meter that you can start making progress on at any time.

The issue here is the progress meter for tri-tachyon only appears after you gain some points, which is why I didn't notice my mistaken assumption until after fighting the tactistar mercenaries. The solution here is simple: even if you have 0 points, the progress meter should show up in the intel tab when your contact gives you advice on how to deal with tri-tachyon.

2

Suggestions / Quest Planets being immune to satbombing

« on: March 24, 2024, 03:24:02 PM »

I had an idea for how to allow the player to satbomb quest important planets without any problems. One idea that sounded okay is to borrow from Morrowind and warn the player that "the threads of fate will be cut." The problem with this is the special treatment for quest related planets feels a little out of place... granted, it's not as out of place as the current immortality those colonies get, but still.

After looking at the luddic shrines scattered around the sector, I've been thinking that a better solution would be to give EVERY core world at least one quest chain it's a part of. Then instead of making all of them immune to being wiped out, you can just give the player a generic warning that reducing a planet to rubble will break ANY and ALL questlines associated with the planet that you haven't finished. You can now slap this warning on every planet because it's always true. Now if the player goes to satbomb somewhere like say, chicomoztoc, they can actually face consequences for their actions while being aware of what they're getting themselves into. For planets that are part of the main questline it's probably a good idea to retain immunity to de-civilizing from low stability, although maybe a toggle in the setting file for this would be good.

Now that I mention it, I think it's at least worth adding a toggle in the settings for the immunity, even if the rest of my idea isn't added. Casual players can have their guard rails in place and experienced players can go into the settings and take them off.

3

Suggestions / Hull restoration giving a 3rd s-mod instead of BOTB

« on: March 17, 2024, 06:10:13 PM »

While I have made this suggestion in the replies of another thread, I've been thinking about it and realized this fits even better than I realized at the time. While the industry tree does have some combat potential, it's also the only tree there for players who want to roleplay a merchant or explorer instead of a mercenary type of character. It does have some combat bonuses between the piloted ship skills and top tier skills, but that's not the focus of the tree. This is why I think hull restoration giving CR clashes a little bit with other aspects of the tree, because the bonus is almost exclusively useful for combat.

Ultimately starsector's strongest selling point is its combat, and even if you aren't focused on combat it is going to be part of your playthrough one way or another. It's fair to say that hull restoration is working fine as is, and it doesn't *need* to be changed, but consider if instead of CR it gave you a 3rd s-mod. This is still very useful for combat focused players, but is also useful for a non-combat approach due to s-mods letting you go over the normal limit for logistics hullmods. At first glance it seems like a great idea! It's thematically fitting for the industry tree and is flexible enough to be useful for both combat focused and non-combat focused playstyles.

Also, I believe part of the intention with the current design is that industry is meant to allow you to field a "wider" fleet that can afford to take more losses. With derelict operations this is obvious, and with hull restoration it's a bit less obvious, but you'll notice the CR bonus does not have a dp cap the way crew training does. This allows you to have ships over the normal 240 dp limit with full CR, and the expectation is that you're going to lose some ships but that's okay because you have replacements you can send and the d-mods will be repaired for free anyways. I understand this, but my issue is that derelict ops is already appealing for the "quantity" mindset, whereas hull restoration cleaning up your hulls appeals to a more "quality" oriented mindset.

This does leave an open question about what to do with botb, but if I get started on that it will devolve into rambling about reworking the whole skill tree and I'd rather keep this suggestion concise.

4

Suggestions / Converted Hangar changing termination sequence

« on: March 17, 2024, 03:53:01 PM »

Not an important suggestion, but it would be cool if using converted hangar to remove terminator drones would also change the ship's system. First of all "Termination Sequence" becomes literally useless, and on top of that you spent OP to remove fighters! I think it would be fair if the Tempest and Apex got "High-Energy Focus" when you use converted hangar on them. If that's too much, then at least "Active Flares" would be nice. I think someone made this suggestion before but honestly don't remember too well.

5

Suggestions / Armor damage visualization should scale non-linearly

« on: March 11, 2024, 11:08:39 AM »

Armor damage on the HUD is shown by the colour of the armor modules in the display, but right now there's a problem with this: the way the armor fades out appears to scale linearly with how much armor is left. This is a problem because it does not play nicely with the armor damage-reduction mechanic, where dealing damage to take an enemy from 2000 to 1000 is much harder than going from 1000 to 0. This gives a false sense that you aren't making progress at all with your first few shots, and then suddenly you hit a turning point where the remaining armor is stripped very quickly.

It would be better for the player if the "fade out" of armor modules in the ui scaled in a non-linear fashion, where the first points of damage have a much higher impact than later points on the visualization.

6

Suggestions / Carrier-Specific bonuses for elite skills

« on: March 10, 2024, 08:39:28 AM »

Originally posted this in killer of fate's thread, but I feel like we have different ideas for how to buff carriers so I figure I should make this it's own thread.

Officers having skills that boost fighters would be nice, but making skills specifically for carriers comes with its own problems. You could add carrier bonuses to every skill, but then the sum of 5-7 skill effects would make fighters much stronger than they are now and fighter balance has always been a delicate thing (not to mention support doctrine carriers would become a big headache). Plus, Alex has been tweaking the skills a lot over the last few patches and I imagine that if he wanted to do this he would have by now.

Instead I think the best approach is to attach fighter bonuses to the elite part of each skill so carriers don't end up too powerful, but it would still be interesting picking out the 1-3 effects you want for the fighters on that ship. Plus it gives the player a little more incentive to pilot carriers.


Imagine something like:

• Target analysis (elite): fighters get +100% damage to weapons and engines
• Damage control (elite): replacement rate floor is raised from 30% to 50%
• Helmsmanship (elite): fighters get +50% maneuverability
• Point defense (elite): fighters deal +50% damage against fighters and missiles
• Impact mitigation (elite): fighters take 50% reduced damage to their engines
• Field modulation (elite): fighter overload duration reduced by 50%
• Combat endurance (elite): reduces the rate at which the fighter replacement rate decreases due to fighter losses by 25%, and increases the rate at which it recovers by 25%
• Ballistic mastery (elite): fighters deal 5% additional damage with ballistic weapons
• Systems expertise (elite): fighters gain 10% top speed
• Missile specialization (elite): missiles launched from fighters get +25% hit points

• Gunnery implants (elite): fighters gain +100 range for ballistic and energy weapons
• Energy weapon mastery (elite): fighters deal 5% additional damage with energy weapons
• Ordnance expertise (elite): fighters gain 10% rate of fire for ballistic and energy weapons
• Polarized armor (elite): fighters take up to 20% reduced damage when near the carrier

*EDIT*
After reading most of the discussion, my current idea is to nuke the current bonuses from fighter uplink, and instead replace it with a hullmod that gives fighters bonuses based on the skills of the commanding officer. If you are a fan of the current bonuses, don't worry! Those will be attached to some of the skill effects, so you can still get them in addition to picking up other bonuses (such as: gunnery implants giving +100 range and increased target leading accuracy).

The limiting factor to prevent fighter spam snowballing into a mess would be simple: the total fighter bays affected by this hullmod cannot exceed 8 across the fleet. If you go over, all the effects shut off. A softcap works for carrier group because it applies to every hangar in your fleet, but for this bonus you have to deliberately place the hullmod on the ships of your choice so a hardcap would be better for its simplicity. The concept is already a bit complicated with a hullmod granting bonuses based on skills, so then also having to track how much of the full effect you're getting once you go over 8 bays would be a bit too complex for a tier 1 skill and potentially abuse-able in unforseen ways.

This does introduce the potential problem of accidentally shutting off all your bonuses if you salvage a ship that has the hullmod, but I would take a similar approach as phase anchor and not allow NPC/enemy fleets to use the hullmod at all. This also fits right in with the fact that enemy fleets do not use neural link, which is another hullmod that is dependent on a skill to work which also happens to set a nice precedent for this type of thing.


Here is a mockup of what that might look like:

hullmod version

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old idea

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7

Suggestions / Mercenary officers should not spawn with timid personality

« on: March 08, 2024, 06:49:32 AM »

Timid is rarely useful for specific skill sets on specific loadouts, and the chance that a merc happens to have the right skills for that is low. On top of this, it doesn't make sense in-universe that someone would choose the life of a mercenary if they have a timid disposition.

8

Suggestions / Systems expertise could reduce flux generation

« on: February 28, 2024, 06:14:57 AM »

For most ships this provides no benefit or minor benefit, but some would appreciate this. Let's say it reduces flux by 33% as an example, that would make it solid on fortress shields instead of being useless (especially when paired with elite field modulation, maybe too good in that case). For the tempest it would mean that on top of 50% more range, termination sequence would cost 400 flux instead of 600. Most other ships wouldn't care much at all about this.

9

General Discussion / Officer Templates

« on: February 28, 2024, 03:09:08 AM »

From what I remember there's a total of 8 templates for level 7 sleeper pod officers. I don't know where to find them in the games files, so if anyone knows how please tell me. At the very least some screenshots of the templates you've found could be helpful for people wondering the same thing.

*EDIT*
For those curious, here are all the templates:

10

Suggestions / Update ECCM description

« on: February 23, 2024, 09:29:15 AM »

It says it "reduces the range penalty from superior enemy ecm" which doesn't make as much sense when you still get a small range penalty even when *you* have superior ECM.

11

Bug Reports & Support / ECM is bugged in simulator

« on: February 20, 2024, 07:35:41 PM »

Looks a lot like the old ECM instead of the current one in simulator battles.

12

Suggestions / Hellbore buff?

« on: February 19, 2024, 11:31:08 PM »

So I want to start off by saying I'm very happy with the weapon balance right now. So many weapons that seemed doomed to a mediocre existence now have distinct, valuable niches. A good example of this is the gallery of small kinteic weapons: railguns, needlers, autocannons, and dual autocannons. With this many weapons competing in the same slot with the same damage type it feels like some of them should turn out useless, but I find myself considering the qualities of each weapon carefully and picking out every one of these options for different ships.

Recent patches have extended this to a lot of weapons like the hephaestus, storm needler, heavy autocannon, phase lance, graviton, and none of these directly outshine any of the options I was using before. Except the hellbore. It still has a niche, being cheaper and having lower flux/second than the hephaestus, but that niche got a lot smaller. The difference in performance is massive, so if you can sacrifice somewhere else to make the upgrade, you will, and most of the time, you can.

Before talking about how it could get buffed, let me lay out how it shouldn't get buffed: accuracy and speed. The hephaestus is meant to be a better generalist providing good armor and hull damage against all targets, while the hellbore is meant to be atrocious against smaller targets but very effective against larger ones. Buffing the accuracy would serve make it more like the hephaestus which is not what we want to do here even if it would make it more effective.

As for how it should get buffed, I think the hellbore needs to do more hull damage. I forget who pointed it out, but someone mentioned that even against larger ships the hephy massively outperforms the hellbore because you spend a lot more time shooting hull than armor, and while the hellbore is impressive against heavy armor its damage against hull is a bit underwhelming for such a slow and inaccurate weapon. What I'd like to see is maybe an extra 750 fragmentation damage added on top of its existing damage, plus some extra flux cost to go along with it. Maybe bump up the flux/shot up to 1000. I'd prefer this over increasing the explosive damage because that would make its anti-armor capabilities too good; at present some armor setups can tank multiple hellbore shots in the same spot before being stripped. I don't think it needs any help against armor, but its effectiveness against hull leaves much to be desired. And if I do somehow hit a frigate's hull with one of these, I don't think it's too much to ask for it to pop in one shot.

13

Suggestions / Gryphon does not need EMR anymore

« on: February 13, 2024, 05:33:01 PM »

The gryphon has EMR built into the hull because the old missile autoforge made it pretty much a requirement, as you doubled both the base missiles and the reload size. With the change to missile autoforge the impact of EMR is a lot smaller and I would argue that some gryphon builds would rather have 15-20 extra op to play with instead of missile racks.

Example

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The ship already has a baseline of 3x ammo which is almost certainly getting pushed up to 4x by missile specialization, so EMR pushing it up to 5x is only going to be useful on long range versions that purely rely on missile firepower. Gryphons with shorter range loadouts that want to mix in ballistics with long lasting missiles would much prefer the extra ordnance points, and these variants are not as strong as the long range builds so they could use the help.

14

General Discussion / So how exactly is it "hot" and "mild climate" at the same time?

« on: February 08, 2024, 11:22:46 PM »

Spoiler

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I also found soil nanites in the ruins and there's a gate in the system. I didn't know they made Deserts this good.


EDIT
Mild climate being the opposite of extreme weather actually make a lot of sense. No storms, just heat.

15

Suggestions / Distress Call shouldn't be an ability

« on: February 06, 2024, 09:29:33 PM »

While it is nice having your abilities automatically switch between "default" and "hyperspace" setups, the ability bar is getting a little cramped. The distress beacon gets used so rarely it really shouldn't be occupying that prime real estate. Instead you could put a shiny red button next to the minimap for the rare occasions the player does need to signal for help. This change isn't desperately needed as everything works just fine as is, but it would help streamline things just a little bit more. Plus it would spice up the UI just little bit, because honestly I think everyone likes the idea of having a big red panic button they can click.

Here's a little mockup of what I'm talking about: