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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 - Morrokain

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31
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I agree yeah. That particular system needs some refinement and that's part of what fleet dialogue is supposed to accomplish. In particular it will get its balancing values from settings in each faction file so that modders can heavily customize the assistance or cease fire features. That is also a good place to put any caps on the reward or whether or not rep is lost, etc.

Conceptually Fleet Dialogue is mostly finished I just need to finish converting the substantial amount of dialogue from rules to the merging spreadsheet and set up all of the code that pulls it from there for each column. After that, I will rework the portion of code you were looking at to pull info from the faction files instead of having it hard coded.

32
Suggestions / Re: Combat Bonus XP improvements
« on: April 02, 2022, 10:48:39 AM »
Just throwing this out there - no thought put into it but I read the main post and a bit of the discourse.

Would it be worth it to target the edge cases specifically?

For instance, lowering the cap for bonus XP explicitly based upon the number of deployed ships to prevent single ship soloing? Though that might cause the opposite issue where the player feels like they should just deploy a bunch of frigates like Tempest or Hyperion.

Is there a sweet spot that anyone can think of? Or is this just not an ideal route to take to tackle the issue?

33
A new experimental balance build is out on Nexus Mods under optional files!

It should be save compatible with the first experimental build. All small weapons have been looked at and almost all of them have changes. The general goal was to provide a more nuanced niche for each weapon - centered around balance factors such as projectile speed and accuracy. This is basically an extension of the concepts from the missile rework spread out across all small weapons.

I meant to release this before last weekend, but I decided an additional week of hardcore testing would be best to produce a better overall result. I haven't tested like this for a couple of years (its very, very tedious) but it seemed appropriate given the last couple of rounds of feedback.

If you're curious about how I'm testing and some of what exactly has changed from the last experimental version, here are some details:

Spoiler
The first thing I needed is a controlled test scenario. This means it has to be tests over and over and over and over again on the same ship. The Centurion is the perfect ship for this for several reasons. One, it has middle of the road stats - decent flux stats, average armor, etc. So the tests will give me a general sense of the armor penetration of every weapon. Secondly, the Centurion is one of the most flexible ships to build. It has a lot of weapon mounts that can fit multiple types of weapons. That is important since I can test literally all weapons without breaking the control. To further emphasize build diversity, I made a couple of changes and made the center turret composite instead of just ballistic and the rear side turrets universal instead of hybrid. I also gave the Centurion 5 more OP.

Here are some of the resulting builds: (yes they have been added to the campaign as well  ;) )

Spoiler









[close]

So the goal is to make weapons balanced enough that builds designed to perform similar roles perform relatively equally as a trend. After numerous tests, I think this mostly holds true. When I talk about roles, I'm not just talking about Strike, Assault, PD, and Fire Support. I am also talking about subcategories within those roles such as "anti-frigate" or "fights larger hulls well" and taking into consideration how well the builds could handle fighters and to what degree. The idea of course is that there has to be tradeoffs in each case.

The idea of subcategories of roles is a new idea that stemmed from the rework of missiles. Rockets such as the Annihilator and Javelin have been completely reworked to feel different over guided missiles such as the Rapier and Swarmer. Really, rockets in general are now designed to provide high amounts of dps spread out over a fairly wide area and are more vulnerable to PD mitigation. Swarmers, on the other hand, hit more reliably and really take a bite out of armor when they connect with unshielded targets. These traits make them ideal against frigates or even gunships. Since missiles as a whole have a lot more ammo and can last a lot longer at optimal dps, using them on gunships or bombers shouldn't feel too painful. The AI shouldn't do it as often compared to anti-fighter missiles though.

So how are rockets and torpedoes different? They now act as a heavy weapon that can give frigates a way to get closer to destroyers in damage potential - with the drawback that these weapons are more useful against larger and slower targets and hit frigates a lot less often. Some of this was already mentioned in prior posts, but the concept should be more refined and now has been implemented across small weapons as a whole.

An example of a non missile weapon that this concept applies to is the Photon Cannon. It now has the highest sustained dps of any small weapon in the mod except for I believe the Tactical Beam. It also hits for 500 per shot and so it has very, very good armor penetration for a small weapon dealing energy damage. However, since it has a much slower projectile speed, it can't hit frigates all that well. It performs best when it targets larger ships and there it shines as a heavy assault weapon. Something like the Pulse Cannon or the Avalanche Cannon is much better at hitting frigates, and fill the role of strike (high initial dps, low sustained dps) and assault (flux free average sustained dps) respectively. This opens up the need for a hard hitting but slow anti-armor ballistic weapon, and the Fissure Cannon fills it nicely. Whereas the Avalanche loses its initial dps more quickly, the Fissure keeps it longer at the expense of projectile speed. So now the Avalanche and Fissure don't feel as much like they are competing for the same spot on a ship where the main consideration is OP. They are used for different things and that feels nice to me.

You can make similar comparisons to the Autocannon and Assault Autocannon. (Which I need to rename at some point.) The Autocannon has really good armor penetration and like the Assault Autocannon it is cheap to install, but it is also flux free and has higher range. That said, it misses a fair amount against frigates and even sometimes destroyers. The Assault Autocannon hits much more reliably and with substantially higher initial dps, but it costs a bit of flux and its damage falls off eventually as the magazine needs to reload. Hopefully, this means that there is much more consideration about which weapon you'd ideally want on a ship - depending largely upon what you want that ship to do and the needs of the build. So maybe the Assault Autocannon would be better, but is the build already heavy on flux generating weaponry? It might be better to take the Autocannon and deal with the potential of missed shots. Or if the build is targeting larger ships, the armor penetration and higher sustained dps might be more ideal. It just depends.

Finally, looking at fire support weapons I decided to rework them a bit. They still cost a lot of flux to use, but instead of also being coupled with lower dps they now work similar to strike weapons. They have a large initial dps mitigated by the flux stats of the ship, but eventually that dps falls off to very low levels. Therefore, fire support ships essentially have a limited window of effectiveness to support close range ships hopefully without them dominating the battle from continuous concentrated fire through allies. These changes also generally improve the AI performance of allied ships because running out of ammo gives the AI some breathing room to vent or retreat, etc, in a 1v1 scenario. This means that fire support ships still shouldn't be able to beat close range ships in 1v1 scenario in most cases (there are some heavily optimized builds that can but largely they can't otherwise) and work best when used in conjunction with other ships.

To test this out, I ran simulations of 4 Centurions vs 4 Centurions and 5 Centurions vs 5 Centurions testing out a variety of builds in the same role while keeping the enemy fleet identical in each case. Yup, very tedious, but the data is worth it most of the time.
[close]

While this isn't enough data to be foolproof and I'm sure that I'll still be making adjustments as I get into medium weapons, it is enough that I'm fairly confident that weapons will feel more fun and the choice between them will be a bit harder. In many cases, I think they look better visually too. Finally, since many weapons are more difficult to acquire, finding or unlocking one will hopefully feel a bit more satisfying than "A" but a better "A" for more OP.

Alongside that thought, I'm hoping that balancing weapons first will help to expose ship imbalances in the future. If I can be mostly certain that all weapons hold their weight and are useful, and also get a general sense of how each one works on a build and what builds should beat what builds, I can better determine whether a discrepancy in ship performance is from random chance, poor build optimization, the build naturally performing worse across multiple ships when competing with a build that counters it, or is actually, in fact, a ship imbalance that requires an adjustment to stats.

That's the thought process and some detail as to what changed and why! For those who feel like trying the experimental build, thanks as always for the continued feedback and have fun trying out the reworked weapons! As another reminder, I haven't looked in depth at medium or large weapons yet and the larger versions of small weapons haven't been adjusted to match the changes in design yet.

(Now I just need to figure out a way to not see Centurions circle each other whenever I close my eyes.  :P )

34
Which drone carrier was it? I'll try and reproduce it when I'm off and see if removing any of the tags fixes it. I'd ideally like to use the tags, but I cant bring this up to Alex without having more specifics.

This happens on Effulgence. It was quite a big fight with 6 invasion fleets, so, the CR ran out and I was forced to send it back. I might also tap the retreat button too many times.

Well, I can't reproduce it using the simulator at least. I tried both retreat and direct retreat using the Shadowlord and Apocrypha. I tried it a couple of times. It must either be another mod, or something to do with the campaign context.

If you happen to run into it again, give me some specifics to the context (I already noted 0 CR and a very large battle) - preferably an exact build and what enemies are in the battle.

Oh, I also removed the crew costs for the Shadowlord and Apocrypha. I'm pretty sure that was just a copy paste oversight.

35
Hey, love the mod! Great work! :)

Is there a way to join the Adamantine Consortium early game? I like to start off on my own with just a single ship or two, no colonies, not allied to anyone, and work my way up into their faction organically, kind of like in Mount and Blade Warband. Of course at the start, AC is at -50 and hostile. Any tips on how to get them to like me without joining them at the start through Nex?

Thanks!

Thanks and welcome to the forums!

There should be a faction start option for the Adamantine Consortium when using Nex unless something has changed that I'm not aware of. It is flagged as a playable faction within the mod's exerelin faction config. There should also be an option to start with a single Acolyte (Ad) frigate as well. However, it will set you as cooperative and commissioned iirc.

If you want to role play a neutral player joining them though, it actually is possible, but very, very difficult. In the mod, there is the option to bribe fleet officers to avoid battles. It has a low chance of succeeding for the Adamantine Consortium, but if you throw a ton of credits at them each time (largest bribe or tributes both work I think) and run from any failed bribes either through the escape battle mode or the story point option, the successes will slowly improve your reputation until you get to the point of the fleets not being hostile (inhospitable). From there you can do all of the normal things to improve your reputation with them until you can take a commission.

I think you may also be able to use Nex's agents feature to increase reputation as well.

Finally, there occasionally should be missions given from that faction when flying near their systems. Completing those successfully will also improve your reputation.

36
Quote
This happens on Effulgence. It was quite a big fight with 6 invasion fleets, so, the CR ran out and I was forced to send it back. I might also tap the retreat button too many times.
Ok noted. Sorry for all the follow up questions, but do you remember what wings you have equipped? Specifically, did you have gunships that attack from the side?

37
Had one crash so far. Trying to retreat my drone carrier from combat. Not sure if it's related or replicable. Also, REDACTED can somehow equip Shadowloard and Apocrypha even though both require pilots.

Quote
1032240 [Thread-3] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at java.util.HashMap.put(Unknown Source)
   at java.util.HashSet.add(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.D.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.D.Object(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.FighterAI.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advanceInner(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatState.traverse(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Looks like it might be related to those new fighter tags that change fighter AI. The drones on drone carriers all use most of them. I discovered that "attack_at_angle" can't be used in conjunction with Termination Sequence or a similar nullpointer happens.

Which drone carrier was it? I'll try and reproduce it when I'm off and see if removing any of the tags fixes it. I'd ideally like to use the tags, but I cant bring this up to Alex without having more specifics.

38
So, you adopt the Hurricane approach for Thunderbolt as well. I think it will do but can the sub missiles despawn a little later. I want the leftover to be able to smash into ships in the rear. Also, in one instance of firing at a backtracking ship, the sub missiles stop working before it reach the target.
Sure I changed it from 1 to 2 seconds flight time.

Quote
The new Annihilator is pretty cool and strong. Although it misses a lot, like half, it's great at suppression.
Nice that's what I was going for! It is supposed to be a way to "punch up" a hullsize a bit. It has medium weapon dps while its ammo isn't regenerating but it misses a lot and is fairly easy to shoot down by PD.

Quote
The Breach pod is too expensive performance-wise and also clashes with a lot of other options. I think it can have the corrosive mod build in.
I haven't made it to medium weapons just yet since I'm working from the ground up and still have a few more small weapons to look at. That sounds reasonable though. When I was testing station battles I added breaches to the Trade Guilds stations to test them out and they were ok enough. But that's a little different than ship vs ship so I'll take a closer look at that part once I finish small weapons.

39
The experimental balance update for small missiles (also affects some larger ones) and frigates is now available on NexusMods under the "optional files" under version: 1.4.1.2 if anyone wants to see the general direction I'm taking as far as missiles go. It also includes a few ship and small PD weapon balance tweaks iirc.

40
General Discussion / Re: No autosave? Seriously?
« on: March 14, 2022, 05:28:28 PM »
I empathize with the lost progress as I've had similar experiences in other indie games and it is frustrating I agree. When a night of free time is precious, having it feel wasted is awful!

Please try to remember that this is a 1-2 person dev team however. You could easily get lost in the number of feature requests that are possible yet take a substantial amount of work to implement. You have to prioritize in that situation and the feature being in the modding community at all is reason enough to not spend unnecessary time on it imo- especially when that makes the feature completely optional.

(I also manually save regularly even in games with autosave because autosave can sometimes screw you where you are stuck in a scenario you cannot realistically beat.)

*EDIT*
I wouldn't want it forced either. Before coming here I fully expected I'll rant about autosave being default off in options, not it not existing at all. ;)
Eh, I restarted the game, looked at my sad pathetic fleet and amount of credits, and called it quits. Anyway, that's my $0.03. Do with it what you will.

Just throwing this out there in case you change your mind, but you can use console commands to get your progress back for the most part.

41
Dev blog for today:

I spent a fair amount of time on modding during the last couple of days as I have had some off time. Today in particular, I decided to investigate the reported issues with missiles a bit more in-depth from a small scale perspective. I have to admit that they were pretty broken at the frigate stage of combat from what I've seen. It could be that the bonus damage to missiles from the frigate and destroyer designations was too much to begin with. Since I'm moving in the direction of adding missile interdiction as a specific role instead of delegating it to smaller ship classes, I might reduce that bonus to make testing missiles more reliable as a whole. I have mostly been testing at the larger side of the combat spectrum when it comes to missiles and they seem roughly ok at that stage - when capitals are engaging capitals or stations, etc. Some of that could have been from changes that weren't in the most recent update however. I plan to spend the next couple of weeks fine-tuning that particular portion of the mod as I have time - alongside working on the portrait pack request and other roadmap items.

I made some additional weapon changes with the intent of giving more distinct roles by adjusting projectile speed and further fine tuning damage values along the ballistic and energy weapon lines. I have also taken a specific look at missile-emphasized ships that have fast missile racks since I recently made changes to the AI of that system.

In short, ugh... Even with some serious defensive buffs, they don't hold their weight via a DP comparison even with the fast missile racks improvements at the frigate level. At least not 1v1. Design-wise, I would ideally like to bring missiles to a state where they are a unique weapon type that increases total dps short term while being somewhat mitigated by PD and especially by ships emphasizing PD via the hullmods related to that. Missile regeneration is a feature of the mod and I don't want to change that just in case that was the impression. I also don't want to completely remove missile interdiction from the frigate designation in order to keep that ship type useful in more roles in the late game. The bonus may inevitably need some adjustments however, and I want the interaction between the damage potential of missiles and the PD component of ship builds to continue to mean something.

I want to also take this time to give individual missile weapons some more interesting nuance. Example: A question I asked myself was "what is the functional difference between the swarmer and the annihilator?" and the answer was "not much" since both are designed to break armor and both were reasonably accurate before I reduced the annihilator's speed. So one goal was to take a look at these issues and try to address them. The added wrinkle of course is maintaining a relative faction balance while fleshing out these nuances.

Feedback as always is welcome. I will probably release a stand-alone experimental version of the changes over the weekend at some point later this week. It won't be an update to the main download but instead it will be a test bed for the recent changes for those interested. If they prove useful, I will release them in the main update at that time alongside the roadmap items.

42
...

Ah ok thanks for clarifying. It sounds like you are issuing commands mostly as intended. I'll do some fleet tests at some point. The ones I've seen recently have confirmed that support weapons are working as intended, but there may be some outliers. Those ships definitely need support though.

Skills: I have the opinion that it's more interesting to change the dynamic of what is possible through upgrades. I think it gives excitement to gaining levels and keeps the game feeling fresh. This is just my opinion though and I get where you are coming from. When I start deep testing the campaign I may make changes as I see imbalances or things that didn't quite work.

Black Hole: It might be possible to do a binary type thing and still keep the intended lore there. Hmm. I'll consider this more as I make changes.



The next update will have improvements to the Fast Missile Racks system's AI. It should be wasted a lot less often, and now takes into account things like the ships flux level and whether or not the missiles weapons cost flux to fire to determine whether its worth it to reload all missiles. There is probably additional improvements I could make, but I'm leaving it at this state for now.

I also buffed the armor penetration/dps of the small autocannons and reduced projectile speed a bit. I then increased the assault autocannon's projectile speed and increased its alpha dps while reducing sustained dps. That should hopefully differentiate the two in their roles.

The Enforcer, Manticore, Lasher, Gemini, Mule and Medusa have had a buff to their max flux. Shield efficiency remains the same I believe.

43
Is there a way to alter rate of fire on a weapon-by-weapon basis?
I'm trying to increase the rate of fire for ammo-reloading weapons, but the closest I can find is setRefireDelay, but there's no matching get, and even if there were, I think I would need to unapply it afterwards (this is for a ship system)? If so, I've no idea how I'd do that.

Does float getCooldown(); from WeaponAPI work? That's the only thing I see that could be it anyway. To unapply it I would store the original value in a map before you set the increased rate and reset the original value in the unapply portion using the weapon id as a key or something like that.

44
...

Thanks for your response and continuing to flesh out your thoughts! I'm working on improving the fast missile racks AI today but I might have some time to run some tests based upon your feedback. I'll look at the autocannons and see if some improvements can be made without breaking the immersion of their lore or unbalancing them. I will say that other weapons have had a few buffs recently and so they could have fallen slightly behind in comparison. What I'm currently thinking is keeping their slow projectile speed or making it even slower but possibly further increasing their range and armor penetration. Essentially that turns them into a weapon good for hitting larger ships that can't dodge while the assault version and other ballistic weapons are more useful for nimbler ships.

The single sabot might be an oversight. I'll look into it. It may be because of the dps comparisons on the stat card. I'll also probably work on the gunships a bit more if I have time.

Question: do you often issue command orders in battle? I can see how support ships would "do their own thing" without orders being given and since the AI doesn't really recognize the different roles they would indeed likely get themselves into trouble unless assault ships happen to be nearby. Specifically, I'm talking about escort commands. You could also use defend commands and include a couple of defensive built ships to provide support through engage and eliminate.

Support ships being vulnerable to flanking frigates is intended to give them a role when built as attack ships rather than PD focused.

I'll respond to the other things a bit later, but the last thing I'll mention for now is that I have a possible idea for the Shrike.

45
*SOLVED* Ok... it does work when testing that way. Let me see if it works in the mod now... yes it does work there too... sigh I must have messed up the test the first time and took the skill before looking at the original number and then tied it to the captain because I was used to it working that way. I only assume that because I just did the same thing when testing the isolated mod and then it dawned on me when rechecking the actual code for the skill file that taking the skill immediately applies the effect to all ships... Either that, or I fixed it at some point in between and didn't test in the campaign because I was working on Rugged Construction tests. Arrgh at least its fixed now!  :P

*EDIT3* I created a small mod to isolate the change: Test Mod

Other effects use the same implementation for all ships in the fleet and they work as intended. Is it maybe because I am not extending something else, such as FleetTotalSource? I was under the impression that was just to implement an OP threshold and didn't have anything to do with the skill effect except to calculate the value based upon the OP returned. Is that not accurate?

*EDIT2* SOLVED: Confirmed that the ordering is the factor by adding the hullmod to the .skin file. Therefore the likely cause of the original issue is ordering unless I hear otherwise from Alex. You cannot edit the D-mod effectiveness dynamic stat through skills. (It might be a good idea to add this note to the documentation.)

Hmm, forgot about the second part of the below post saying skills are added before... I suppose I'll have to look at whether or not I'm inadvertently changing the order? Or it's something else.

Perhaps this is an ordering issue? "rugged" needs to be added before any of the d-mods, i.e. if you're specifying:

"builtInMods":["comp_armor","rugged"],

It won't work. But the other way around it will.

I will check yes it definitely could be! Are skill effects ordered after ship effects? That would explain why adding the effect to a skill wouldn't work in practice.

*EDIT*

Details of implementation just for ordering reference:

Code
	public static class Level5 implements ShipSkillEffect {
public void apply(MutableShipStatsAPI stats, HullSize hullSize, String id, float level) {
            stats.getDynamic().getStat(Stats.DMOD_EFFECT_MULT).modifyMult(id, DMOD_EFFECT_MULT);
}

 - so is the overridden "apply" method of ShipSkillEffect applied before or after the ShipAPI is created and the dmods effects are applied when updating the tooltip or creating the entity in the battle? If it's after (and it seems like it would likely have to be), then editing that dynamic stat in a skill is impossible.

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