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16

General Discussion / Re: do you think Acusal Disruptor is underpowered for NPCs?

« on: November 21, 2023, 11:48:50 PM »

Phase ships are underpowered for AI. They often overextend, flux out, and die without doing anything. Doom is ok in AI hands because overpowered system and too slow to outrun your fleet. Half the time though, enemy ai deploys it late, so it has no support. It gets surrounded and dies. Shade and afflictor are also ok because they are basically a fast frigate that can go invincible and gtfo whenever they want plus antimatter blaster exists. But they are so fast, they often die on first contact or the enemy AI is too skittish to bring them out of the battle line where they can shine. We don't talk about gremlin.
Harbinger is, like most destroyers, too slow to get in, kill something, and get out; doesn't have the potential system range of doom to support the fleet; and the opening the system creates is so tiny the ai has trouble abusing it, not to mention the damage debuff from the system. If it overloaded for maybe a second longer so the AI has time to realize the enemy is overloaded and they should shoot it, it'd probably be ok. OR if it had more range and the AI could coordinate or realize an enemy has a bunch of damage aimed at it. There's also the problem of where to assign the harbinger, again like most destroyers. If the harbinger is safe in a battle line, it is too far to use its system and weapons without being in serious threat. So then what about hunting stragglers? I would prefer an afflictor or shade. Both much faster than the harbinger so they can catch even the fastest enemy running around and 2 afflictors > 1 harbinger. And both those ships work better in the battle line either swatting fighters or debuffing enemy.
If you can't tell, I just really dislike direct combat destroyers. When you need either range or speed to be effective in combat, the destroyer, which has neither, just sucks.

The exception is SO Medusa, and or System Expertise Medusa.

17

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 21, 2023, 10:00:23 PM »

Depends on your metrics.  Also, changes to SO could also impacts its maximum tanking by a factor of 2.  Monitors are literally zero offense, so they are in a weird part of the parameter space.

For many fleets which tank well enough already, adding a monitor doesn't actually make it better, as it slows down the killing speed.  And things like Tempests can approximate it with long range beams and harassment orders, using speed and distance instead of much slower damage absorption, at least against conventional human enemies.  They won't work against a Tesseract with a triple speed boost though.

Started a new save for a wolfpack playthrough. I can confirm a Scarab with five tactical lasers at 1,650 range with built in advanced turret gyros is pretty good. It never gets killed, and it outranges pretty much all cruisers, and stays at a safe distance vs capitals.
I'll need to keep testing as I currently only have one. As despite having already made multiple millions of credits, colonizing five planets and gotten them up a couple levels, and found the vast majority of blueprints, I've yet to run into more than 1 viable officer.
My only concern is that it prioritizes ships over fighters, which I need them to shoot at the fighters first. I may have to replace one or two of the tac lasers with LR PD, we'll see.

18

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 20, 2023, 09:12:51 PM »

So I went and checked Rayan Arrayo (High priority contact) in my longest running test save, and turns out the next mission he had on offer was a 700k fighter focused bounty, so I guess we kind of are in luck for testing.  It is not a full million credit bounty, but it is at least in the same family.  10 minutes later with Console commands and I had a support doctrine fleet setup, with only minor variations (tweaked the Monitor setup, removed the light mortar, switched to front shields, and 3 more vents).

Decided to try it the dumb way, simply deployed 158 DP, grabbed waypoints, deployed full 238, hit full assault.  No finesse, no orders, no trying to player tank the fighters, just see what happens in a giant furball.

Lost a single Medusa because we pushed the enemy fleet to the top, and a Legion, Mora, and Astral decided to deploy right on top of it.

Typical Medusa had 5-10 fighter kills, generally more with Heavy blaster than Ion pulser.  Doom had 110 fighter kills with mines and another 25 with Ion pulsers and Burst PD combined.

So, I don't really see a failure mode against fighter spam.

Unfortunately, world seed only affects the double Tesseract fights, it doesn't affect the mid-game spawned Tessaract + Ordo fight.

As for substitutions for Monitors, I don't think there is one.  On the other hand, you can't normally afford to stick your entire officer corp in them as you need some offense, so this is kind of a Support Doctrine or flagship focused only style.

Fair enough, I was wrong. The failure point, if there was going to be one, was going to be due to the Medusas lack of full shield coverage and low armor. Basically, the fighters would chip them to death. At which point you wouldn't have enough firepower to continue the fight.
It looks like the enemy AI made the mistake of focusing too much attention on the monitors which allowed the Medusas free rein, given how little damage most of the Medusas have.
Also, I'm saying this is fine for testing purposes and saying I was incorrect, because while that fleet wasn't a 1,000,000-credit bounty, it did have 16 officers. Which is going to make up the difference in s-mods and officer levels.

As for a substitute for the Monitor's distracting role, maybe a long-range laser Scarab build could work. I've tried short range builds in the past, the AI is too stupid to drop its shield for three seconds to use its system. While not as good as a Monitor's tanking, the ability to annoy enemies from 1650 range may work just as well.

19

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 20, 2023, 07:26:36 PM »

Spoiler

For the first question, mercenaries are a repeated skill point investment, and I frequently need those points elsewhere, even when I'm grinding ordos for skill points. Likewise, I frequently use 1 mercenary on a civilian grade hull ship to act as a reinforcement. What that ship is depends on the run.

Fair enough.  Everyone values story points different based on their in game goals.

For BOTB, you need the 240 DP limit for fighting ~1,000,000 bounties and multiple ordos. The exception is five capital fleets specifically designed to fight at 200DP. Even then you can only fight two ordos max, or you need auxiliary ships to cap points.

Can a support doctrine ship handle double its DP in everything? As that is my requirement for good loadouts for OM fleets. From everything I've seen, the answer is no, losing the third s-mod, or paying 8 skill points kills fleet effectiveness.

Why do you need 240 DP and BotB to fight Tesseract bounties?  I just slapped together a support doctrine fleet and beat one with only 220 DP deployed on the very first try (although, I did lose an Omen and a Medusa - on the other hand, they are cheap to restore).  See attached screenshots.  The fight was never in doubt, given 8 officered Monitors as the front line.  Just base 8 level 5 officers with 1 elite skill (field modulation), plus player with 7 combat skills in a Doom (mostly for clearing the fighters at the end).  Support doctrine is almost tailor made for frigate/destroyer wolfpacks.   Although, I need to remember to change Doctrine aggression to 3 or 4 when using SO ships, since they defaulted to Steady in this particular fight, which is less than optimal for SO ships.  But still worked fine.

Here we go.
DO costs five skill points, while this is fine for a capstone, and it is a capstone, but it is locked behind 4 skills, only two of which may be useful for a rather limited number of builds. While yes 340 DP deployed all at once is huge, it weakens the ships massively to the point where it can't handle 240 DP or more of enemy ships that have level 6+ officers and three S-mods, i.e. a ~1,000,000 bounty.
Which means on average you lose three skill points for it, in return for a fleet that is far weaker than SD or OM.
It's not worth it unless you are using 1 or 2 ships for niche story point farming builds.

I'm pretty sure there are also examples of derelict operations fleets beating stuff here.  CapnHector even has a derelict operation fleet with only 66 DP deployed killing a double Ordo.  You can see it in: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27808.0.  I'm pretty sure if you scale that up to 240 DP, it will have no problem farming a double Ordo or farming Tesseracts.

The game isn't so hard that you need the absolute strongest possible fleet to beat the end game challenges, at least in this iteration.

About Support Doctrine, I think its biggest issue is that you start with 8 officers. You can avoid putting your officers on your biggest ships where they will have the most impact, but SD is not a good enough reason to do so. Your average officered ship only needs to be of 15 DP to comprise half of your force at max deployment cap of 240. If you use stronger ships, don't start with 240 DPs or have more officers, there's even less of a reason to use SD.

Well, that just makes it encourage fleets with less than 15 DP average per ship.  Like destroyer/frigate wolfpacks, which you don't generally see otherwise, because of that base line set of officers.  A high tech pack of Medusa, Omens, and Monitors will be well below that average, for example.  But it is a perfectly workable setup with Support Doctrine.

[close]

Yep sorry about that, his post was directly above your fleet post which when combined with him saying he already did it easily got me confused.

Yea, I forgot that the AI loves to focus fighters on the player, so if you deploy yourself first, and then your fleet, you can kill a good chunk of the fighter spam. Assuming of course there's nothing that will prevent a Doom from doing so. It will still be a problem during the second wave, but nowhere near as bad as I was thinking.

Heron's and broadswords with ion beam or tachyon lance support are the main concern for monitors, but that supporting weaponry mostly won't be present in a pure carrier fleet.

Overall, it's better now that I think about it than when I first looked at it.

I don't have a save currently with a harder Tesseract Ordo, I've either beaten them in the saves already, or haven't been playing long enough to get a bounty for them. I think I have a world seed for a harder one, assuming that's how it works but I'm not sure. You can ignore Tesseract bounties, and accept them when they show up later, and I did that once but I can't remember if it had the same fleet loadout. The hardest one I beat was during my Scarab/Medusa/Odyssey run which had a Radiant.

Yep, system expertise is absolutely mandatory when piloting a doom. Which is why I said you require helmsmanship. You could have swapped it for impact mitigation, but you still would require 4 combat skill total for the capstone. Which is annoying when you don't need 4, and weird given the AI captains don't need 4 and can use any skill related to combat to count towards the capstone.

For the Medusas, s-modded extended shields are probably the correct call for two S-mods. As long as the AI doesn't mess up its shield direction, which is less likely for destroyers, you get to protect your engines for the same shield arc as frontal shields. Whereas with frontal shields, you get a minor shield efficiency increase, in return for the constant risk of flameout.

I'll agree with your last point about how every fleet doesn't need three s-mods. That being said, there are still times when fleets should have access to it, but can't due to how the lower tier personal skill work.
For your build however, this isn't an issue. If you needed either of the industry personal skills, you could drop one of the tech personal skills and flux management.

Out of curiosity, have you tried this fleet loadout without the monitors? Is there anything that can even replace them? The closest is probably system expertise, polarized armor Centurion.

This is why I think you're trolling. I'm trying to increase the total number of viable or efficient builds, not decrease it. Likewise, I never said to make the game harder.
It could just be your grammar making me mistake why you're trying to say, however.

Disagreeing is not trolling. I consider falsely accusing someone of being a troll disrespectful and offensive, potentially defamatory and slander, my good sir.

I really shouldn't comment on people's grammar before I quadruple spellcheck. Whatever, it's quoted now.

I was partially assuming, and partially asking because it sounded like you were putting words in my mouth, but I wasn't sure due to not fully understanding what you were trying to say.

Given you didn't take the chance to clarify and ended your reply with "my good sir." I'm going to safely assume you're doing just little bit of light trolling. Carry on.

20

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 20, 2023, 01:55:44 PM »

I'm pretty sure at this point you're just trolling, but I will nevertheless respond to you like you aren't.

The current skill system was created with intention of discouraging people picking the "best" build and allowing more diversity. That didn't work. As expected, people who pick the "best" build would continue to do so.

Between the way that officers and s-mods work, it appears it was based on long term planning. As in the player is supposed to look at what ships and skill are available and plan their build from the start. The issue is, some builds are flat out worse for no reason, my suggestions are all centered around making those worse builds better to bring them inline with the current optimums. That is how you actually allow more diversity.

I don't consider elite bounties or tesseract ordo a threat. They might kill one or 2 ships but they can't possibly win vs my fleet. On a good day, I don't lose anything.
Another victory! My fleet is still standing, while theirs is gone. Hooray!
Since I don't see how it couldn't be done, it is not even a proper excuse.

Right up until your fleet hits a 1,000,000 credit pure carrier bounty. You lack PD, and despite how powerful the monitor is, it's not going to be able to save your Medusas from fighter spam. The only real means you have of dealing with fighters is your flagship, and the Omens. Omens are poor PD even with officers due to their short range and poor hull and armor, and you can't be everywhere.
The Tesseract Ordo you fought was an easy one, it lacked carriers, and it lacked a Radiant. Had it had either, you would have sustained serious losses, and had it had both, you probably would have lost or nearly lost.
Beyond this, if you fought a heavy Paragon bounty that spammed Tachyon Lances, or a Phase ship bounty that had a large volume of Harbingers (even as bad as they are) you would sustain extreme losses.
This is what I'm talking about. There are major drawbacks in your fleet composition, and if you run into a well designed enemy fleet that counters them, you will lose or nearly so. You need every advantage you can get when going against such fleets.
Your skills are part of the problem, you require helmsmanship even though it's barely useful. If it wasn't required for system expertise, and or officer management and best of the best was swapped, you would be able to afford to get BOTB, s-mod one of you hullmods, and have enough OP for more PD, Hardened shields if the Medusas already don't have them, or reinforced bulkheads so that the monitors don't get instantly popped when their shields go down.

How would players of non-optimized or sub-optimal builds win battle if the game doesn't allow other viable playstyle? A harder game doesn't mean a no in most cases.

This is why I think you're trolling. I'm trying to increase the total number of viable or efficient builds, not decrease it. Likewise, I never said to make the game harder.
It could just be your grammar making me mistake why you're trying to say, however.

21

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 19, 2023, 01:05:06 PM »

You pick a build that doesn't help you to fly the flagship at all and complain it doesn't help you to fly the flagship at all ...
You could but you don't want to.

More accurately combat build encourage you to fly your flagship (unless you are terrible pilot), being significantly more effective. Fleet build don't.

The problem is that if you don't need Ordnance Expertise or Polarized armor, you can get the optimal 11 commander fleet loadout. 5 combat, 6-7 leadership, 3-4 technology.
If you need either of the above two skills, you can't get the optimum due to them costing two skill points. Which means most low tech and midtech 11 commander fleet loadouts suffer because of this. I always fly my own flagship and play fleet commander.

Player needs a fleet unless he pilots the few overpowered cheese ships like some phase ships, but even those are not as optimal as a good fleet.  Fleet should be boosted too.

It's okay to play "sub-optimal" builds.

Or Are people all fighting 5x Ordos Fleet that they absolutely need the most optimal build?

Late game you start fighting near 1,000,000 credit human bounties from high importance contacts. Thier fleet comps are actually decent, frequently have 10 pure level 7 officers, and three s-mods on their ships. Thier fleet compositions range anywhere from okay, to very good. They're typically not as dangerous as the tesseract ordo, but sometimes are more dangerous. Also, for ordo hunting purposes.
Changing skill arrangements so that other fleet compositions are equally as powerful as my above response to you makes the game more fun for those of us that play well into the late game, and for those that mod their game to be harder as it opens up the number of viable builds. All while having either no effect, or beneficial effects on players that want to play with "sub-optimal" builds.

Spoiler

For the first question, mercenaries are a repeated skill point investment, and I frequently need those points elsewhere, even when I'm grinding ordos for skill points. Likewise, I frequently use 1 mercenary on a civilian grade hull ship to act as a reinforcement. What that ship is depends on the run.

Fair enough.  Everyone values story points different based on their in game goals.

For BOTB, you need the 240 DP limit for fighting ~1,000,000 bounties and multiple ordos. The exception is five capital fleets specifically designed to fight at 200DP. Even then you can only fight two ordos max, or you need auxiliary ships to cap points.

Can a support doctrine ship handle double its DP in everything? As that is my requirement for good loadouts for OM fleets. From everything I've seen, the answer is no, losing the third s-mod, or paying 8 skill points kills fleet effectiveness.

Why do you need 240 DP and BotB to fight Tesseract bounties?  I just slapped together a support doctrine fleet and beat one with only 220 DP deployed on the very first try (although, I did lose an Omen and a Medusa - on the other hand, they are cheap to restore).  See attached screenshots.  The fight was never in doubt, given 8 officered Monitors as the front line.  Just base 8 level 5 officers with 1 elite skill (field modulation), plus player with 7 combat skills in a Doom (mostly for clearing the fighters at the end).  Support doctrine is almost tailor made for frigate/destroyer wolfpacks.   Although, I need to remember to change Doctrine aggression to 3 or 4 when using SO ships, since they defaulted to Steady in this particular fight, which is less than optimal for SO ships.  But still worked fine.

Here we go.
DO costs five skill points, while this is fine for a capstone, and it is a capstone, but it is locked behind 4 skills, only two of which may be useful for a rather limited number of builds. While yes 340 DP deployed all at once is huge, it weakens the ships massively to the point where it can't handle 240 DP or more of enemy ships that have level 6+ officers and three S-mods, i.e. a ~1,000,000 bounty.
Which means on average you lose three skill points for it, in return for a fleet that is far weaker than SD or OM.
It's not worth it unless you are using 1 or 2 ships for niche story point farming builds.

I'm pretty sure there are also examples of derelict operations fleets beating stuff here.  CapnHector even has a derelict operation fleet with only 66 DP deployed killing a double Ordo.  You can see it in: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27808.0.  I'm pretty sure if you scale that up to 240 DP, it will have no problem farming a double Ordo or farming Tesseracts.

The game isn't so hard that you need the absolute strongest possible fleet to beat the end game challenges, at least in this iteration.

About Support Doctrine, I think its biggest issue is that you start with 8 officers. You can avoid putting your officers on your biggest ships where they will have the most impact, but SD is not a good enough reason to do so. Your average officered ship only needs to be of 15 DP to comprise half of your force at max deployment cap of 240. If you use stronger ships, don't start with 240 DPs or have more officers, there's even less of a reason to use SD.

Well, that just makes it encourage fleets with less than 15 DP average per ship.  Like destroyer/frigate wolfpacks, which you don't generally see otherwise, because of that base line set of officers.  A high tech pack of Medusa, Omens, and Monitors will be well below that average, for example.  But it is a perfectly workable setup with Support Doctrine.

[close]

It's for the near 1,000,000 human bounties. I've only seen 960,000 personally, but I've seen other players fighting more. Most of them are around 240DP, ten level 7 officer, and three s-mods.
Even so most of them are weaker than the tesseract bounty. Key phrase here, most of them.
Some are optimal enough that they will kill player fleets that can perfectly beat the tesseract bounty.

As for derelict operations, you just posted the niche for it. Yes, they can kill double ordos, but they will struggle against anything more than that as it will not expand efficiently. The video you are talking about makes use of mercenary officers to get around the issue of not having officer training. Furthermore, the d-mods are hand picked to be optimal. While save scumming works it is far more costly than save scumming for optimal officers as you pay crew, and supplies for every new d-mod.
The only place it has a niche outside of this area is with a fleet of pure capitals, but hull restoration typically outshines it due to HRs CR boost.

22

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 18, 2023, 11:19:36 AM »

Spoiler

The most effective Officer Managment fleet loadout is the following.
5 combat skills, 4 + capstone. 6 leadership skills, three tier 1+ both tier 2 + BOTB. 3 technology skills, with the final being cybernetic Augmentation.
This leaves over exactly 1 skill point. If the player's ship needs Ordnance Expertise or Polarized Armor for the build to work, then the build can't work. If they don't need it, then they can grab another skill from the other skill branches, which will typically be Flux Regulation.
This gives 11 level 6 4 elite skill officers with three built in hullmod ships with one officer having the best piloting possible, which is the optimum loadout for Officer Managment.

An alternative to this is to drop the required combat skills for the capstone down to 3 from 4, or count tech and industry combat skills towards the combat capstone.

This is also why support Doctrine sees so little use, as it directly competes with BOTB, which is just flat out better, or you have to give up skills elsewhere. Which means OM fleets are always going to be better than SD fleets.

Likewise, don't even get me started on just how much of an ineffective meme Derelict Operations is outside of niche low DP builds.

Out of curiosity, why not just respec and take the skill point out of officer management, turn the 2 extra officers into mercenaries, spend a couple story points to keep them on every few years (just throw it on the pile of 88+ points already spent - 10 for mentoring, 40 for officer elite skills, 33 for triple s-mod ships, and 5 for elite personal combat skills) and take Ordinance Expertise anyways?  I wouldn't really call officer management a capstone, given its benefit can be trivially duplicated with a minor story point expenditure already.

Capstone in my mind draws you down the tree for something unique which encourages a different playstyle.

Best of the Best encourages slow and tall.  It of course works with other fleet compositions, but from a reward perspective, you get the most benefit for the least work if you're running something like five 40 DP capitals, to minimize story point costs, while also fitting under the 200 DP deployment limit, and thus doesn't need the support ships to grab comm relays or other locations quickly.

Support Doctrine encourages wide, reaching the ship cap, which means low average DP, which in turn means things like a lot of frigates and destroyers.  Such a fleet doesn't really need the bonus deployment DP at the start, since it has options for fast captures.  It also saves significantly on story points given you don't need to hire mercenaries, or mentor extra officers, or put a 3rd s-mod on the ships, although you do tend to want to put 2 s-mods on the larger number of ships.

Both of those feel like capstones since they draw you towards different fleet builds.  Now we can argue the effectiveness, their actual and perceived power levels, of the skills themselves but I wouldn't want to see them moved or what kind of fleet they encourage changed.

As for Derelict operations, it is admittedly a late game skill, with very little benefit before you hit the 240 DP deployment cap, but it is the single largest buff to a 340+ DP fleet with 5 d-mods each.  Paying only 70% of the DP to deploy is huge.  It is not quite for every 2 enemy ships on the field, you have 3 of the same class, but with d-mods.  Perhaps that is niche, but I think that is encouraging a different playstyle, as I think a capstone should.

[close]

For the first question, mercenaries are a repeated skill point investment, and I frequently need those points elsewhere, even when I'm grinding ordos for skill points. Likewise, I frequently use 1 mercenary on a civilian grade hull ship to act as a reinforcement. What that ship is depends on the run.

For BOTB, you need the 240 DP limit for fighting ~1,000,000 bounties and multiple ordos. The exception is five capital fleets specifically designed to fight at 200DP. Even then you can only fight two ordos max, or you need auxiliary ships to cap points.

Can a support doctrine ship handle double its DP in everything? As that is my requirement for good loadouts for OM fleets. From everything I've seen, the answer is no, losing the third s-mod, or paying 8 skill points kills fleet effectiveness.

Here we go.
DO costs five skill points, while this is fine for a capstone, and it is a capstone, but it is locked behind 4 skills, only two of which may be useful for a rather limited number of builds. While yes 340 DP deployed all at once is huge, it weakens the ships massively to the point where it can't handle 240 DP or more of enemy ships that have level 6+ officers and three S-mods, i.e. a ~1,000,000 bounty.
Which means on average you lose three skill points for it, in return for a fleet that is far weaker than SD or OM.
It's not worth it unless you are using 1 or 2 ships for niche story point farming builds.

23

General Discussion / Re: Does anyone know how to remove Story protection from planets in Vanilla

« on: November 17, 2023, 12:28:55 PM »

If you have the Console Commands mod installed, you can put this into the console to remove any and all story-critical flags from all markets in-game. It should work even when more story-critical missions get added, so it's a bit future-proof in that regard. Enjoy your disproportionate war-criming against these poor, struggling factions!

Copy & Paste in Console to remove story-critical protection from all markets

Code

RunCode 
for (MarketAPI market : Global.getSector().getEconomy().getMarketsCopy()) {
    for (Object o : market.getMemoryWithoutUpdate().getKeys().toArray()) {
        String memFlag = (String) o;
        if (memFlag.startsWith(MemFlags.STORY_CRITICAL)) {
            market.getMemoryWithoutUpdate().unset(memFlag);
            Console.showMessage("Removed " + memFlag + " from " + market.getName());
        }
    }
}

[close]

Personally, though, I see no point in sat-bombing at all, aside from role-playing reasons, as all it does is reduce your ability to profit from exports and lose a lot of accessibility from being hostile with some of the biggest markets. Sure, the expeditions are annoying, but I never really notice them becoming a problem at all, especially if you've already built up Orbital Stations and Patrols to counter both them and Hostile Activity. I don't even think they appear that often either; in my multi-decade playthroughs, I've only seen like about 1-2 expeditions every 3-5 cycles, which is basically nothing when most of them are pushovers that can be wiped with a competent fleet or a station with support. Worst case scenario, they can be brought off with either story-points (which, for me, is basically free, as I usually horde them even when I should be spending them on S-Mods, and Remnant Ordos provide a reliable source of XP for more story points) or reputation (which can easily be gained back with either 4 exploration missions or plenty of AI cores). Hegemony AI inspections are relative push-overs too with story-points and, even without them, can be silently taken down with no transponder for a minor reputation hit (it's very amusing when your own faction fleets join you against them and, somehow, the Hegemony still doesn't know exactly who killed off their AI inspectors).

Thank you, that solution is a lot closer to ideal. As for the reason for sat bombing, 1 high command is not enough to stop the later and larger expeditions. In order to guarantee expeditions are stopped you typically need at least two with a Cryoarithmetic Engine on a hot world plus at least a battle station on all worlds they might target, and it's still iffy. I have become incredibly paranoid over the years after having expeditions succeed even though I was told their space forces were outmatched.
The PL is the biggest offender, and removing their military planets removes their expeditions. Which only leaves the SD and TT expeditions, which are infrequent enough, and weak enough to typically not be a problem. It's also for role play reasons.

24

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 17, 2023, 11:09:40 AM »

Spoiler

BOTB has too much.  Third s-mod and 200 (or 50%) DP minimum.  It is what a capstone should be, but none of the other capstones seem as powerful (caveat: no idea for Derelict Ops.)  Currently, almost every build I see posted has it.  Combat capstones get cheapened by officers getting them more easily than the player can.

Gunnery Implants, Energy Weapon Mastery, Ordnance Expertise, and Polarized Armor all need to be added to Teir 1 so Players that pilot their flagship don't have to waste a skill point on something they don't need.

I think both Gunnery Implants and Ordnance Expertise are overpowered and worth almost two skills (more like one-and-a-half), so being tier 2 for them is fine, although like Combat capstones, I am jealous officers can get them more easily than the player.

On the other hand, Energy Mastery is lame for beyond short-ranged energy users (beams, capitals with heavy weapons, Onslaught with TPCs) and should be changed, at least swap elite and basic so that long-ranged users are not robbed.

But I am not opposed to moving those skills, along with all tier 3 Industry skills (which do nothing for combat), to tier 1.

In particular, Industrial Planning should be tier 1.  It is a huge opportunity cost for players not after an Industry capstone to get it at tier 3, and it is likely vital for those who do not want to use AI cores in their colonies.  (Yes, almost everyone use alpha AI cores.)  Commodity demands for colonies all seem to expect the +1 from Industrial Planning.

[close]

I'm perfectly fine with BOTB getting nerfed so it doesn't have 200DP minimum in return for being swapped with OM. Most fleets will incorporate enough point capping frigates to ensure the full 240 can be deployed, which leaves the current 200DP bonus only being useful for niche loadouts, like the five capital fleets.

While both GI and OE are powerful, having them both on tier two reduces the flexibility of builds and makes some fleet loadouts better than others only due to how the character skills are distributed.

The most effective Officer Managment fleet loadout is the following.
5 combat skills, 4 + capstone. 6 leadership skills, three tier 1+ both tier 2 + BOTB. 3 technology skills, with the final being cybernetic Augmentation.
This leaves over exactly 1 skill point. If the player's ship needs Ordnance Expertise or Polarized Armor for the build to work, then the build can't work. If they don't need it, then they can grab another skill from the other skill branches, which will typically be Flux Regulation.
This gives 11 level 6 4 elite skill officers with three built in hullmod ships with one officer having the best piloting possible, which is the optimum loadout for Officer Managment.

An alternative to this is to drop the required combat skills for the capstone down to 3 from 4, or count tech and industry combat skills towards the combat capstone.

This is also why support Doctrine sees so little use, as it directly competes with BOTB, which is just flat out better, or you have to give up skills elsewhere. Which means OM fleets are always going to be better than SD fleets.

Likewise, don't even get me started on just how much of an ineffective meme Derelict Operations is outside of niche low DP builds.

25

General Discussion / Re: Does anyone know how to remove Story protection from planets in Vanilla

« on: November 17, 2023, 10:22:35 AM »

Sat bombing to begin with is just seen as a *** thing because it is. You're literally dropping nuclear-level explosives on heads of civilians.

Rebel or die. If a governing body hires terrorists, who then mess up a simple raiding run attacking the head of the opposing state, and the main forces of the governing body assist the terrorist resulting in a full blown war, it is on the citizenry to step in and stop their government. Lore wise, if they don't it will clearly escalate until sat bombing, as their government is resorting to terrorism over tiny market shares, and when I say tiny I mean less than 10%.
There also is no alternative in Vanilla.

I would definitely agree that story protection at the barest minimum needs to be explained in vanilla (it is in nex) it's extremely frustrating to dominate a planet into what should decivilize them, wait for a long time, and nothing happens. So I continued to build up even more negative stability and wait again. Nothing happens, no explanation, it just looks like a bug. so @eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef install nex, even if the game is functioning as intending in your case (it was in mine) installing nex fixes unintended, unexplained behavior that decreases the quality of your game, you aren't installing a mod at this point, you are installing a patch.

I've played nex a lot in the past. I may reinstall as I'm reaching that point of annoyance, but nex comes with its own problems. The combination of bickering with the core worlds when they try to expand into a perfect system is very annoying. As I always have to check the system when I notice them trying to expand, or I have to spend multiple IRL hours conquering the system and defending it against the faction I stole from and their allies.
Likewise the Sindrian Diktat almost always gets killed by the Hegemony, which means I either have to baby sit the SD, or fight a super powered Heg late game as it always comes to conflict with nex due to the random rep increase and decrease. Furthermore, the Heg may flat out become the new Domain if the SD falls, as if the SD falls the Heg is going after the Persean Legue, and the PL can't handle a super powered Heg. Which of course is insane to deal with. I have done it in the past, it is not worth the time.
It doesn't always go this way due to how faction relations work with nex, but it's like 85% of the time.

Sat bombing to begin with is just seen as a *** thing because it is. You're literally dropping nuclear-level explosives on heads of civilians.

Which does not bother them when they do it.  Currently, not a problem since they seem to sat bomb only on squatters (player colonizing in their territory).  But one topic showed a teaser pic with the Diktat eager to sat bomb the player's fuel planet at max Hostile Activities.  Currently, only pirates and pathers use HA, but it looks like majors are joining in HA next release.

I do not buy the excuse of majors vs upstart after the so-called upstart has grown to superpower status and can wipe all of them off the map.

I hope not. Lore wise the SD is keeping the two main powers balanced in the sector, which can be seen when playing Nex. If the SD falls the Heg will ultimately beat the Persean Legue. If the SD is still alive, the PL and Heg stalemate.
If you are correct and it goes through, most players will be safe rather than sorry and genocide the SD in vanilla, and invade and transfer the SD worlds to independent polities in nex. While this won't be an issue in vanilla, it will be an issue for nex players for the stated reasons above, i.e. a super powered Heg.

26

Suggestions / Re: The currant character sheet discourages and nerfs players flying their own ship.

« on: November 17, 2023, 01:14:54 AM »

-has a 400+ DP fleet
-the game is tedious without Industry skills

You're not supposed to lug around a giant death fleet, then suggest a level cap of 20 to make it a no brainer choice for yourself. Obviously the system works fine, you just need a smaller fleet.

Ehh, mostly. BOTB needs to be swapped with Officer Management. Almost all builds either want OM or Support Doctrine, but not both. Whereas almost all builds using OM or SD need BOTB.

Gunnery Implants, Energy Weapon Mastery, Ordnance Expertise, and Polarized Armor all need to be added to Teir 1 so Players that pilot their flagship don't have to waste a skill point on something they don't need.

Beyond that it is fine.

27

General Discussion / Does anyone know how to remove Story protection from planets in Vanilla

« on: November 17, 2023, 01:04:16 AM »

I've had enough.
The Persean League and Luddic Path are getting saturation bombed.

While I'm here. @Alex mining + refining + a domain artifact should not cause an active Luddic Path cell and an increase to Hostile Activity. It also shouldn't cause LP armadas to pop into existence from nowhere in my system the moment it happens.
Also, "expeditions" should never be sent from planets with story protections, or those protections need to be removed and replaced with a warning. At this point it is a large portion of the military planets in the game. Furthermore, same faction fleets and stations should never aid expeditions. As it currently stands if you get jumped by an expedition that you forgot about, members of the expedition faction will aid them if in proximity.
Before anyone suggests otherwise, the expeditions are supposed to be "rogue actors", if their faction supports their attack against you, they are no longer "rogue actors", and it is now an act of open war.

28

Suggestions / Re: High Scatter Amplifier thought

« on: November 14, 2023, 08:05:03 PM »

Spoiler

you slightly misunderstood the suggestion. The point isn't to make every ship the same, the point is to give every ship something they can be good at in terms of offense. Currently, as it stands, most ships serve as target practice. Whether intentionally like the Gremlin or Cerberus, or unintentionally like Heron with Piranhas or Shrike.

The latter two ships can be made viable under most circumstances, but the thing is that in the end it always comes to extreme outliners on what is good and what is bad. Try to use a Guardian on Paragon and everyone will point and laugh at you, because fighters aren't threatening enough to justify using a proper PD network. And most missiles were comically ***. Mostly due to poor fits. I built that variant for the Better Variants mod where ECCM Squalls and Hurricanes were a constant threat. But no one really understood that reality, because in Vanilla most ships are like... Meh...

Another issue I have with vanilla game is the ridiculous difficulty curve. Most of the game you grapple with enemies that can barely hold their body together, if you expose them to too much heat, you'll see most enemy fleets turn out to be nothing but candle wax. Tri-Tachyon doctrine causes them to be awful. Persean League mostly relies on cheap tricks such as spamming missiles.

Spoiler

And you keep fighting these morons. Pirates with a spam of Afflictors with light mortars, and then you walk 2 meters to the left and are suddenly facing off against the biggest *** *** you have ever seen... It's just so frustrating. Starsector really fails to teach the player anything. Not because it doesn't have a way to learn it, but because it proves to the player time and time again, that it is not worth investing time into. Because first of all, most enemies you'll fight are trash, and second of all, most of the equipment and hulls you're given are trash.

[close]

Hegemony is ridiculously proactive, only tanking most things, and being defenseless against an actual offensive strength. And also most of the fleets in game rely on large slow ships... These may be boring to fight, because in the end it's not about outskilling your enemy in a vicious battle of wits and circus performance, and more about who has the better counter to the enemy loadouts. Mostly caused by the fact that there are so few viable options, most of the designs are too binary... Etc.

Like... Think of most things in Starsector and how they are designed. Space stations are either indestructible, or blow up instantly. Capital Ships are either impossible to kill or you can just ignore them. Fighters are either unstoppable or all die in a microsecond cause they decided to fly directly into a mine, all of them... At once. Cobra torpedos either instantly kill enemies or don't hit anyone... Even though they have fired like 20 nukes already. Gremlin bad, Fury bad, Shrike bad, Centurion meh... Onslaught good. Use Onslaught. Don't bother using the Conquest I guess, unless you really really really want to. Not because it's bad or anything, but because it's frustrating to use. Unlike something like... Eh... You know, the whole game is just frustrating.

Everything is broken. Everything is imbalanced. Nothing works properly. Missiles always miss, ships are too slow, everyone keeps missing.

Spoiler

https://youtu.be/nr2GeWiDrdY

[close]

No one bothers engaging. You just have a staring contest with a Radiant before it proves to you that it is the only real functional ship in the game... And that everything else is just there to be laughed at for being bad... And like 90% of the game's content is a noob trap.

 

[close]

Fair enough, my mistake, as long as there are some extremely defensive ships and offensive ships, I'll be happy. As for the rest part of what seems to be the issue for you is ships have specific roles they fill, there are very few generalist ships, and fewer that are good. That's why you view the Radiant as being the best ship, as the Radiant is the best generalist ship in the game, it has no role beyond wrecking ball.
Certain ships like the Gremlin and Cerberus are stopgap ships. Their role is to be cheap until the player can get something expensive or fill excess DP in a fleet composition. Their role is to be there and provide dirt cheap support, just like the hound. As for Heron's with piranhas, piranhas are bad against ships, but great against stations when used in large volume. So again, they have the role of being a stopgap until you can get something better, or being cheap if you need something cheap.
Shrikes are a generalist, but that's due to their wide range of loadouts, not overwhelming power. In the early game they are brawlers, in the late game they are long range support. With enough OP to reliably fill any role, and enough speed to avoid most ships, they are always a good choice if you have 8 DP to spare.

Fighters are good if you don't use bombers. Heavy fighters and interceptors are good against everything, either being a damage sponge, distraction, or killing smaller ships and other fighters.
Bombers are good against slower larger ships, but it's so rare that you'll fight doomstacks of enemy capitals that it just isn't worth using them unless you know that is what you're going to fight.

As for the faction doctrines and loadouts, yea they aren't great but that's what high end bounties are for. Also, mods.

Basically, try to envision all fleet layouts as a puzzle, with ships being the puzzle pieces. You can modify those pieces slightly, but they will always have a shape of their own and have to be fit into the fleet puzzle. The Radiant is the easiest thing to complete the puzzle with, as it is a giant square, that does not however mean it's the best puzzle piece to use, just that it is the easiest.

I do care, however I also like the extreme dichotomy. It makes things interesting and more dynamic when the difference between extremes is massive.
The Hyperion didn't use to stand alone with Remanents, Omega, and Gaurdians. It used to be right alongside phase ships in terms of power relative to its cost. The old phase ships weren't overpowered in my opinion. The issue from what I can see is that players don't want to adapt to dealing with something unconventional, and so they go straight for asking for the nerf bat.

How old?  They went a few big changes since 0.5.  During 0.5, phase raised soft flux instead of hard flux, which made them useless.  Cloaking did not have time shift and cooldown until 0.72.  Old cloak made them better for brawling and (ghost/evasion) tanking instead of assassination.  Afflictor had Active Flares, Harbinger did not exist, and Doom had Fast Missile Racks, then Interdiction Array before getting Mine Strike.

Modern phase ships under AI are not too bad, but player-controlled phase ships can do evil things with most of them (i.e., not Harbinger).

I want to say .9a, but looking at the dates, they don't add up so I'll be safe and say I started playing during the 0.9.1a update.

29

Suggestions / Re: High Scatter Amplifier thought

« on: November 14, 2023, 02:17:41 PM »

You partially stumbled on one of the better ways to balance the Hyperion without realizing it. For what it can do and what it can yield, the Hyperion has too much OP, but you don't want to just nerf its OP as that reduces the total number of viable builds. The solution is to give it omni shields and reduce its shield arc so that both frontal shields and extended shields have to be added to give it 360 degree shielding. This is of course assuming that delicate machinery is removed.

Yes, I have also removed Delicate Machinery, and gave the ship 180 peak operating time. I have also replaced its mounts with 2 composites and 1 energy. I have also overhauled its mobility stats and health stats. I've reduced the amount of flux it has and gave it more armor, at least on the level of a Cerberus vessel. Took down High Maintenance, increased crew amount (important as I am testing increasing crew salary to something like 0.5-1k credits). Etc. But you see, I have also done other things to nerf the Hyperion. I have buffed fighter numbers by giving them higher health and armor stats and better deacceleration and turning. Don't worry though, I was also planning to buff some and simply rework most PD weapons to make up for that fact, and overall the point is to rework the game so it operates on a completely different axis of existence.

The issue with Hyperion is very similar to the issue of Remnant ships. It belongs to a completely different game, so it has to have many drawbacks to justify its existence. Justify it against the fact that it is overpowered. Most vessels in Starsector are slow, immobile, possess extensive PD networks and they also have large range. You have ships like Paragon, Onslaught, Eagle, Retribution, Mora, Heron, Fury. Each of these ships has a large focus on their defenses. The amount of stupid useless PD slots a Fury has at the cost of actual good weapons, the fact that Eagle's medium energies are positioned in such a way that they are usually meant for simple support role. Ships of this kind do not kill their enemies, they exhaust them. They fire, and then reload and keep doing so until they finish. With the only way to actually conclude someone is to have excessive firepower, or access to ridiculous strike potential, such as a Paragon with Reapers and a Missile Autoloader. Quite effective.

Hyperion, Radiant, Glimmer, Tesseract, Guardian on the other hand are very different ships. Yes, they are good at retreating, but they are also ridiculously mobile, impossible to catch up and they have weapons systems that de-emphasize point defense and emphasize the ability to kill their target. At least, in theory. Current theory. Imagine it this way. Onslaught fights the weather. Hyperion simply ignores the storm.. And proceeds to run through it in order to stab you in the back with a random level of success. But then, what does any of this mean? It means that offensive ships are way better than defensive ships, and before you say that Monitor is an exception, yes. Yes it is. Why? Because flux toilet is *** broken.

In order to deal with this issue the current solutions have been "who cares" and "plz, nerf". A ship like Hyperion vanished from existence. A ship like Astral is kept from existing in the first place. A ship like Guardian is inaccessible, also because it uses broken hullmods, like space station missile amounts. However a ship like Radiant is still accessible, however in order to pilot it, you must dedicate an entire character skill tree to doing so. There has never been any other solution. A ship that fires guns will also have an advantage over a ship that is meant to be universally protected against all kinds of threats, especially ones that aren't really that dangerous at all, such as reaper missiles. (Talking about Onslaught). The only way to solve this problem once and for all is to rework everything. Redesign all ships to posses the sort of aggression we crave from Hyperion. So that Hyperion finally is not the exception of Starsector, not the black sheep of the family, but just another member of these highly strange designs. Each a hostile raptor of its own.

But, you probably don't care about all that...

I do care, however I also like the extreme dichotomy. It makes things interesting and more dynamic when the difference between extremes is massive.
The Hyperion didn't use to stand alone with Remanents, Omega, and Gaurdians. It used to be right alongside phase ships in terms of power relative to its cost. The old phase ships weren't overpowered in my opinion. The issue from what I can see is that players don't want to adapt to dealing with something unconventional, and so they go straight for asking for the nerf bat.
The first time I lost an Onslaught to a phase fleet, my reaction wasn't to run to the forums and ask for a nerf, my reaction was to slap two assault chainguns on the back of my Onslaught and give it an Omen escort, and later a Centurion because Omens explode upon contact an Onslaught. It worked, and phase ships were never a problem for me again, and all for an insignificant OP cost and DP cost that I would have had to use anyways for frigates.

I agree that such powerful ships should be behind extreme costs like the Radiant, however they still need to be extremely powerful. In phase ships current state, not only do you need to invest into them massively to bring them to their full potential, but their potential is also still terrible. The only reason player piloted phase ships are good is due to the AI dropping shields when the player isn't pointed towards them (seriously why), poor station design leading to gaps in shields and armor, and poor ship loadouts. If all of this is fixed, phase ships are universally terrible, and have an exceptional investment to make them not exceptionally terrible.

To me, the Hyperion behaves like the old phase ships. It is a ship that against proper loadouts should be severely less effective. The issue is there aren't many generalist loadouts that can deal with it. The chaingun was useful against almost all frigates and fighters meaning you didn't lose much when equipping it. For the Hyperion however, you have to use a mix of mass kinetic fighter swarms, large escorts of kinetic Centurions, mass use of light and heavy needlers, mass use of sabot missiles, omni shields, the new laser missiles, shield piercing weapons, mining blasters, and IR lasers.
While this gives plenty of options, none of them are great options, investing heavily into them reduces the generalization of a fleet, and many of them can be countered by the fleet supporting the Hyperions. The phase lance would be the answer to all of these problems for midline and high tech if it would wait to fire until the enemy dropped their shields (i.e. when the Hyperion starts its teleport). Low tech would still have issues however and needs a similar weapon.

So, TLDR: I agree that ships like the Hyperion are an outlier. I disagree that this dichotomy should be removed, sometimes I want to play slow and weather the storm, sometimes I want to be the storm. I agree that if this dichotomy should continue it should have heavy investment costs, and my solution to very powerful ships is that they should have good generalist counters.

30

Suggestions / Re: High Scatter Amplifier thought

« on: November 14, 2023, 12:15:35 PM »

Any percentange of hard flux on long-range beams will enable a ship to kite and kill an enemy as long as it takes.  I have seen it when I tried one of LazyWizard's quick mods years ago, which added hard flux based on distance, and even at max range with minimal hard flux, I was still able to endlessly kite, slowly grind down, and kill enemy ships safely.


What annoys me most about my NPC Hyperion, if I try non-SO, is it spends about a minute backpedaling away from the enemy instead of teleporting when it can, burning nearly all of its PPT trying to escape once.  I have to use SO on Hyperion just so NPC Hyperion can run away fast enough without teleport (and also get enough dissipation to use three non-missile weapons).  Since it now has Delicate Machinery, I do not bother using it anymore.  CR decays way too fast.  Even with all the CR decay reduction boosts, anything with Delicate Machinery decays faster than a normal ship without Delicate Machinery and without any reduction.  There are better ships to use.  Hyperion needs more PPT if it keeps Delicate Machinery.

As for enemy Hyperion, it gets squashed flat fast, compared to earlier releases.

Related, non-SO NPC Fury is a disaster.  Fury gets in, but cannot get out fast enough when it loses the flux war.  Fury gets locked into backpedaling then gets slowly picked off and dies.  At least Aurora can avoid this with its Plasma Jets.

Yep, for NPC control, a Hyperion needs to have SO and a reckless officer, anything less and it will do nothing for most of the fight. The issue is that the Hyperion will always have low range due to the weapons it is forced to use, be over fluxed due to the expensive nature of the weapons it has to use, and not have enough effective combat time to be useful without SO.
I ran the numbers and non-SO only has 1.5 times more effective combat time than SO. The formula is PPT+80/.25, with elite system expertise a ship can function without issue during minor malfunctions so the effective CR combat range is 100% to 20%. For non-SO you get 10min 50 seconds. For SO you get 7min 9 seconds. 650/429=1.515~
SO gets double the flux and a faster move speed, meaning it's at or more than twice as effective as non-SO.
These numbers assume you have every skill needed and hardened subsystems to max out combat effectiveness time.

Spoiler

Any percentange of hard flux on long-range beams will enable a ship to kite and kill an enemy as long as it takes.  I have seen it when I tried one of LazyWizard's quick mods years ago, which added hard flux based on distance, and even at max range with minimal hard flux, I was still able to endlessly kite, slowly grind down, and kill enemy ships safely.


What annoys me most about my NPC Hyperion, if I try non-SO, is it spends about a minute backpedaling away from the enemy instead of teleporting when it can, burning nearly all of its PPT trying to escape once.  I have to use SO on Hyperion just so NPC Hyperion can run away fast enough without teleport (and also get enough dissipation to use three non-missile weapons).  Since it now has Delicate Machinery, I do not bother using it anymore.  CR decays way too fast.  Even with all the CR decay reduction boosts, anything with Delicate Machinery decays faster than a normal ship without Delicate Machinery and without any reduction.  There are better ships to use.  Hyperion needs more PPT if it keeps Delicate Machinery.

As for enemy Hyperion, it gets squashed flat fast, compared to earlier releases.

Related, non-SO NPC Fury is a disaster.  Fury gets in, but cannot get out fast enough when it loses the flux war.  Fury gets locked into backpedaling then gets slowly picked off and dies.  At least Aurora can avoid this with its Plasma Jets.

I've been redesigning Starsector a bit recently... Doing major changes. Things that cannot be really applied into the vanilla game without them being concluded and without drastically changing the face of the game, but one thing...

One thing made me wonder...

LP Colossus has this tag called "always_panic", I took it up, cause I assumed it causes the ship to be ridiculously aggressive and put it on Hyperion... The thing though is that I do not have this thing isolated in a vacuum, and I'm trying it on a modded version of the Hyperion, so I'm unsure what exactly it does yet...
I can only say that it causes Hyperion to fire all of its missiles much more freely, as if it is stuck in a state of permanent Strike behavior.

Take a look

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=forNZkCfuEk

[close]

On it's own though, I don't really believe it changes much. Hyperion seems to be afraid to teleport behind enemies as long as it is engaging more than one enemy. Which is reasonable considering the fact that it may have doubts about being surrounded or stuck out of place. Better safe than sorry I suppose.

In case you want to do some testing for me, go to the ship.data, take up the "always_panic" hint and paste it in the Hyperion hints section. Then tell me if this has worked. If it did... Well... We might be on to something.

[close]

You partially stumbled on one of the better ways to balance the Hyperion without realizing it. For what it can do and what it can yield, the Hyperion has too much OP, but you don't want to just nerf its OP as that reduces the total number of viable builds. The solution is to give it omni shields and reduce its shield arc so that both frontal shields and extended shields have to be added to give it 360 degree shielding. This is of course assuming that delicate machinery is removed.