Starsector 0.98a is out! (03/27/25)
I have genuine fear of something like this ever coming to pass. Starsector imo is a game that as is has problems with challenging the player, if i could have all the insane things you get out of the combat tree AND being able to pick all the fleet skills i want instead of having to sacrifice parts of one to get the other, i fear the game would simply not have any difficulty at all at that point.I am 100% against splitting fleet and personal skills into different tracks/pools. It chops off the builds at both ends of the scale of pilot to admiral while adding nothing.
The fallacy that many new players fall into is that because personal skills only boost 1 ship while fleet skills boost all of them, the fleet skills are way better. This depends completely on the player's pilot skill and the ship they are using, so for them it may even be true! But as players get more experienced, they become better pilots and start using more powerful "playerships" for themselves. Those combat skills go up in value massively, to the point where only the very best fleet skills compete.
As things stand, players can win with pure combat builds, pure admiral builds, and everything in between, which is way way better than a system which forces an even split.
Beautifully said.
Phase coil tuning is fine, because you can get a lot of value out of itYou can get a lot of value out of combat skills, too. By that measure, they are fine. With fighters I would say it isn't the skills that are underwhelming, but fighters themselves. To make them really good you need to spam a lot of Flashes.
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At least 2-3 people confirmed the issue on Discord, and I personally see that (aggressive+) AI straight up gets itself surrounded almost on purpose.
As far as I know, while there were some incremental AI changes (and more will come in a future update), I don't think there were any fundamental changes to AI personalities from 0.95.1a to 0.97a.
Reckless AI specifically ignores other enemy ships for threat calculation purposes - it's basically the ship assigning itself an Eliminate order on whatever its current target is. That alone makes Reckless-piloted ships liable to get themselves surrounded by other ships unless you actively wrangle them using your own orders.
You also have to consider that both Aggressive and Reckless personalities specifically want close in within the range of their own PD weapons, meaning they'll treat, for example, Vulcan Cannons and PD Lasers as actual anti-ship weapons. Naturally, this also tends to get them surrounded by enemy ships too, although Aggressive does try to respect other enemy ships while closing in.
If you want ships to not actively put themselves in danger, I'd suggest sticking to Steady or Cautious personalities, as well as start looking into ship loadouts that don't force them into close-quarters combat. Also keep in mind that enemy fleets using faster, more numerous, or more aggressive ships than yours will, by their vary nature, typically surround your ships anyways, so there's never a guarantee that your own ships will stop getting into sticky situations.
Fearless is a Reckless equivalent, not Aggressive (although that wouldn't explain a difference between game versions).
Anyway it's probably easier to ask in General Discussion if people have noticed any such changes. You could also check out the AI Tweaks mod, although it doesn't seem like it touches on your issue.
(I didn't notice any mods in the list that should be tampering with AI ship behavior, but I can't guarantee none of them are)
