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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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Messages - vok3

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16
Mods / Re: Machina Void Shipyards v. 0.58
« on: November 11, 2022, 12:55:24 PM »
Dragonhunter is one of my favorite capital ships. 

And yes, the music is a little loud.  Good music though.

17
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Tahlan Shipworks 0.8.666a
« on: November 11, 2022, 12:41:54 PM »
The Legios are absurdly overtuned, like they spawn fleets faster than they can be destroyed and even with massive attrition they somehow materialize highly skilled commanders from the nether.  Just for a lark I used cheats just to see the extent of how many fleets they'd spawn before running out or letting me bombard their planets.   The answer was 48 pages of salvaged ships.  I'm not sure how you're expected to beat them legitimately, much less while running Nexelin, it just doesn't work with how the combat readiness system works.  Your ships literally cannot regain CR fast enough to keep up with how quickly new ships materialize.  While I get it's a boss faction, they should be beatable, but a combination of extremely overtuned hulls and the sheer amount of fleets that are spawned make it pretty unusable.

A few things that helped me were 1) synchronize my attack with some other faction launching an attack on the system, so the patrol fleets are busy, 2) flip beacons to decoy more patrol fleets, 3) set up an outpost on an asteroid somewhere so you can quick dock and repair all damage rather than waiting (this is a Nexerelin feature I think, but there's some uninhabited planets in the system you can colonize and use the spaceport for the same purpose if you're not using Nex), 4) again in Nex, use saboteur operatives to blow up the spaceport and military base and whatnot, and synchronize your attack with that, 5) don't attack the station directly, attack a fleeing frigate that happens to be near it - the station will support the frigate, you kill the station, and then you can kill the planetary defense fleet rather than having to face the station and fleet together.

And then you saturation bomb the planet.  Twice.  And then everybody declares war on you, and within the next few weeks most of them offer peace, whispering "we really didn't like those guys anyway". 

But it is a hassle and it forces you to pay attention to them until they're dealt with.  I sympathize.

18
Blog Posts / Re: Hyperspace Topography
« on: November 11, 2022, 12:28:32 PM »
Speak for yourself. I use slipstreams fairly frequently. As I said above, I generally plan my expeditions outside the Core around the stream cycle specifically to take advantage of them;

This might be a vanilla vs Nexerelin thing.  I cannot imagine "scheduling" which side or direction of the sector I'm going to, on a timescale of months.  I simply don't have that kind of margin, most of the time, and if I'm going out of the core, it is to go to a specific place that I need to go to RIGHT NOW and I can't afford to put it off by a month or two.

And if I DO have the time margin to play with, it's because I've opened the gates and can ignore streams entirely.

In vanilla, however, I can imagine it, because it doesn't matter how long anything takes; nothing meaningful will change.  But the last time I tried playing vanilla - just to remind myself how it works - I got two game-years in, was extremely bored, and clicked "enable all" next time the game launcher came up.

Of course Alex is designing around the vanilla experience.  But if the dynamic you describe is part of the intended goal, there should be purposeful ways to capitalize on it - not just "I'll wait a season".  That's planetside farmer attitude, not spaceship captain attitude.

Quote
IME deep hyperspace storms are way more irritating and disruptive than slipstreams,

Other way around.  Storms mean I can go fast in exactly the direction I want to go, right f'ing now, for a price.

19
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Iron Shell 1.181
« on: November 01, 2022, 06:27:30 AM »
sorry what? i dont think this mod adds those?
(though i haven't played with it myself)

It always amazes me when people make categorical statements about things while simultaneously admitting they don't actually know what they're talking about.  Why do you do that?

Of the NPCs staffing the various markets added by this faction, all except one are female.  Your main contact (with the custom missions) displays cleavage appropriate for a hot date.  The other primary contacts (with the exception of the one guy) are more sedately clothed but with prominent bulging and at least one fine case of sideboob.  The random bar contacts that I have seen are all female with plenty of spherical qualities.

Just browse through the mod's portraits folder, you'll see what I mean.  It's not in bad taste or anything - it just gets repetitive.  Is this a military organization or a mating market?

20
General Discussion / Re: Skills and the Major problem with them.
« on: October 31, 2022, 05:36:14 AM »
When I am flying my flagship reasonably well, I pretty much always do AT LEAST 50% of the total damage inflicted in the fight.  This has held true through all vanilla content up to and including Tesseracts and most of the custom bounties I've done.

This varies by a fair amount depending on what the ship is - Onslaught does tend to do more than Hammerhead for obvious reasons, although I can do an awful lot of damage with a Hammerhead - and somewhat less so based on combat skills.  The skills do provide an extremely valuable edge at times - but if I'm playing a character that isn't focused on them, it mostly just means things take longer and I have to be more careful.

The primary characteristic of the NPC algorithms controlling the ships in the player's fleet - regardless of personality settings - is that they are total f*cking morons and consistently choose the tactical option that will either be of no use to anybody or expose them to the greatest likelihood of blowing up.  When a key enemy target goes down, it's nearly always me causing it to happen.  The ships in my fleet are there as placeholders and to make the enemy waste time rather than bothering me.

The claim that the fleet skills are determinative could only be made by somebody who hasn't really tried other aspects of the game.

The claim that players SHOULD all have the same skills and SHOULD NOT be playing it as a ship captain could only be made by somebody who should be playing a different game than what this one is.

21
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Amazigh's Ship Foundry v0.7
« on: October 29, 2022, 12:11:55 PM »
I didn't realize that ability existed.  Thank you.  This will help a lot.

e: THANK YOU.  That (plus a refit to swap the flux conduits for a front-mounted shield - one less thing to worry about, and less flux) made a huge difference.  "Pocketful of Rainbows" is beaten and I have the super ship start!  And for Killing Trance I can at least see how to fly/fight the ship, though it's going to be a lot harder, I think.

(I was at a Halloween dance and I was thinking about this damn fight the whole time ...)

22
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Amazigh's Ship Foundry v0.7
« on: October 29, 2022, 06:37:44 AM »
Killing Trance / Pocketful of Rainbows:

How are you supposed to do these things?  The frigate in particular is so maneuverable the nose swings wildly from side to side with just the lightest touch of a key.  It's borderline impossible to actually aim, which you need to do because most of your weapons are fixed forward.  The destroyer is a bit more handleable but it takes me so much time to separate targets out from the crowd and kill them that I'm out of endurance with three quarters of the enemy fleet left to go. 

I'm toying with the idea of using third-party apps to force the game to slow down so I can aim and maneuver more precisely, but that strikes me as close enough to cheating to be pointless.

23
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Iron Shell 1.181
« on: October 29, 2022, 06:34:29 AM »
I just watched an Indomitable move up to a station, engage Rampage Drive, and repeatedly ram the station.

Then it thought about it.

Then it did it again.

Then it blew up.  The ship, not the station.  The station didn't really notice.

I did not bother recovering the ship.

...

That said, the overall vibe is quite good, although there's an overdose of barely-concealed anime titties.  The tech-mining expedition to Hanan Pacha is an interesting idea.  I found out by accident that Shadowyards causes that to convert into a generic and boring station assault - much less interesting, and a good reason not to use these two mods at the same time.

While the two scripted missions are good and I'd like to see more, it does make me wonder about how well that sort of thing might work with the player's ability to reshape the universe in Nex.  Like, what if Hanan Pacha is already colonized, or the Shadowyards station was forcibly decivilized?  What if Kanni gets satbombed or decivilized?  Do you pick some random planet-with-ruins and/or pirate planet to fill in the role?  The sort of contingencies necessary to make this work would seem to necessarily weaken the story aspect of it.

All the same, this is good work.

24
Blog Posts / Re: Hyperspace Topography
« on: October 26, 2022, 05:54:54 PM »
The problem is that slipstreams are, 90% of the time, not useful to the player.  They run perpendicular to the paths the player tends to take, not parallel.  So they are just a hassle, and there is no motivation to care about them or harness them. 

It especially doesn't come anywhere in the same order of magnitude as the advantages to be gained from having multiple colonies supporting each other in one system with an integrated economy.  I mean ... just not even in the same universe in terms of utility or motivation.  You'd have to have something like Roiders operating from a colonized planet to exploit resources in the rest of the system, and having other colonized planets in the system would significantly decrease the benefits you get that way, and for this benefit to more than compensate for the expected losses from having interstellar convoys getting attacked.  That might justify it. 

But not slipstreams.  Slipstreams are not desirable.

25
General Discussion / Re: Cruiser-class ship with a built-in fighter bay
« on: October 26, 2022, 05:44:50 PM »
What's wrong with pirate Falcons?  Yes, you have to stick a converted bay on there instead of having it be the default loadout, but that is what the pirates all do with theirs, and the result is pretty close to what the poster is asking for.

Also pirate Falcons can generally pick fights and disengage at will, which means you don't need to worry too much about them.  You don't need to load them up with missiles either - IIRC when I first got a few I put 2 Arbalests / 2 IRs / 2 Salamanders /  2 Harpoon pods on and they handled all sorts of situations very nicely.

26
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Roider Union - Expeditions - 1.4.4
« on: October 20, 2022, 07:14:02 PM »
What was the issue with old MIDAS' asteroid interactions again? I'm struggling to really traverse Roider added core systems with the EMP based MIDAS/

Alex broke access to the stuff it needed to modify.

I was just coming here to complain about this, I couldn't figure out why I was having so much trouble with asteroids, then I looked at the tooltip, thought I was going crazy, then I reinstalled 1.3.13 and looked at the tooltip there and went "ah-ha, I DID remember that" ... Do you mean that the 1.3 MIDAS simply doesn't work, or is crashy, or what?  Because if it works in any kind of sense I am totally ready to ditch any other fixes and upgrades and roll back to 1.3.  Asteroid impact protection was the single most interesting thing in this mod.

27
Artillery was a bad idea.  It adds nothing to the game - no interesting or meaningful choices at all.  It's just a hassle whose net effect is to avoid gameplay.  And there's way too much of it in an area that supposedly was a thinly colonized frontier.

And having read through the settings file to figure out how to disable it, gratuitously insulting your users is about as low class as you can get.  Don't do that.

28
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Tahlan Shipworks 0.8.666
« on: October 12, 2022, 12:36:17 PM »
Starting as the Legio renegade, with the new "you f*'d up" description, you start at rep +50 with Legio.  Maybe that should be -50?

idk, shouldn't be the case. Random sector maybe?

Just checked - standard start puts me at +50 with Legio.  Random puts me at +80.

29
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a-RC6] The Xhan Empire, version 2.4 Thousand Eyes
« on: October 12, 2022, 08:55:40 AM »
When I start a game as Pamed (usually I pick the combat - large start, with the destroyer) about half the time my starting contact lists fine in my contact list but is not present in the comms screen on the planet where it claims he is.

So far my workaround for this issue has been to just restart until I get a contact who is actually there.

edit: having just poked at this a lot more, it looks like if I take the destroyer start, this ALWAYS happens [edit2: not always, see below], and if I take the freighter start, it NEVER happens.  I also notice that at Oka, the comms panel has 6 Pamed staff including a Quartermaster and Administrator, whereas at Pamed itself there are only 4 people including the generalissimo himself, and no quartermaster or administrator - and the military contacts I've been given tend to be those two positions.  So maybe something is being done to the list of people at Pamed that somehow is hiding the NPCs that are being chosen for the player's contact.

edit2: After trying the destroyer start enough time I got a contact who was the station commander.  That worked.  Talking to the station commander got me the "do you have any work" prompt.  But definitely, quartermaster / administrator contacts are not working.

30
General Discussion / Re: What happened to Odyssey's?
« on: October 11, 2022, 07:46:10 PM »
As I understand it, there is ONE guaranteed Odyssey in the game.  So if you want one, you can get it.

Anything beyond that one is luck.

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