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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 - angrytigerp

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16
+1

I'll change my fleet paradigm every few months after acquiring (through whatever method) a new capital ship or otherwise special ship, and it's sad that I have to give up one of my 3 carrier officers, 2 battleship officers, 2 missile boat officers, or 3 phase ship officers (for an example of my sort of spread).

Also, it'd allow for us to change up completely for a specific mission. Wanna hit a faction with a wall of fighters? Grab your extra three carrier officers out of "storage" and get going. Feeling sneaky? Grab every officer with level 3 defensive systems, manuevering, weapon damage, power management, etc., and deploy a full flotilla of phase ships.

17
  • I would like to incorporate modded factions, but (to make perfectly clear) I will not do so without explicit permission and input from the mod author. This is to allow them the chance to set a blacklist of their choosing for what equipment they would like not to be replicable, or indeed whether they wish to be party to the mod in the first place.
As for how it's imbalanced without a whitelist, consider instead the following example: someone acquires a unique, high performance mod cruiser, or perhaps just something that's supposed to be acquired by upgrading a regular ship rather than constructed from scratch.  They save, then feed it into the deconstructor; if they get the blueprint, then they now have an infinite supply of that cruiser.  If they don't, they reload and try again.  In terms of actual effect, this basically -is- omnifactory; once you've got a blueprint, you can acquire as many ships as you have cash to purchase and time to wait for - that's exactly what you could do with the old omnifactory.

This is... the entire point of the whitelist (or blacklist, if you're a glass half-empty person). Mod creator [Guy] says "Hey, I want the player to be able to reverse-engineer X, Y, and Z 'normal' ships, but NOT [super ship]!" And I'll be like "Okay, [Guy], I will set it up that way. [super ship] will not be blueprint-able!" You mention savescumming, but frankly if that's your contention, I'm not sure I track how that differs from any other similar abuse... or using the console or something to add the BP, or hell, the ship. Sure, this can be abused... just like anything else.

I mean, I just am not sure how this is 'imbalanced' when all I'm doing is offering a method through which you can try to acquire BPs within the confines of investment in the gameplay itself. You have to invest the time, money, and resources to accomplish this goal.

With regards to just throwing money at the problem... I mean, yes, you're right, you can buy up and throw dozens of Whatever-Class Battleships at the DBE, and theoretically still fail to reproduce the BP because non-guaranteed possibility. But every single time you have to buy a new one to 'analyze'... why didn't you just stick it in your Stockpile or Fleet and just use the damn thing? If you similarly stock up hundreds of Pewpew-Class weapon to hedge your bets... you might as well just not use the DBE at all because you have plenty of Pewpews to use.

If anything, the main accomplishment here is it lets your own faction's fleets use the specific ships or weapons you want, or allow you to reproduce a specific ship you like if you fail to recover it after a big battle. Or maybe you really want [sicknasty frigate from that mod you like] filling up your small combatant slots, but don't want to have to sit at the market of the faction to buy it up every time it shows up.

I only see this being practically usable by a player who's already in a roflstomp murderfleet anyways, and just wants to be able to specifically have 3 or 4 of X destroyer for the sake of faction/thematic consistency, but also already killed off that faction from the game and doesn't want to go running around surveying for it.
That... doesn't make any sense to me.  If the goal is to get blueprints from a destroyed faction, where are you going to get the ships to deconstruct?

High-End Seller (Which up-prices everything anyways)? Random seeding in other fleets (which is at the faction's author, granted, but still possible)? Maybe you already have one of their [neat destroyer] that you looted during their last stand, you think "hmmm... I think I'll take my chances on being able to replicate this..." and stick it in the DBE. Which, as I have iterated multiple times, is not a sure-fire method, so now you have to ask yourself -- do I like this destroyer so much that I'll roll the dice on being able to reproduce it? Or do I keep it as the last legacy of [faction] in the Sector?" And see above re: savescumming, I don't really acknowledge that as a valid criticism because you can savescum for a lot of stuff in this game (accidentally engaged the wrong fleet? Wanna retry that failed 55% force balance market invasion? Try that raid again to see if you get better stuff? Etc.)

...Come to think of it, there's also a potential conflict with Nexerelin: that mod adds a "blueprint trader", the limitations of which break down if the player can just manufacture blueprints of ships they've already got.

I'm not sure I'm following your logic here. The BP trader has a random smorgasbord of all sorts of stuff. If they have a BP for [cool cruiser] of [faction X], who you haven't even encountered in-game yet (whether on allied terms or as an enemy), you can buy it...

Unless (and I acknowledge this to be a large issue) you meant to point out that you could throw a bunch of relatively-high-chance blue-printable items into the DBE, then just offload them at the BP trader for relatively risk-free points. Was... this what you were saying and I didn't quite understand? Between this and (if I did it that way) not having mod-author-specified whitelists, these are really the only issues I see. The latter is, well, solved by whitelisting, and the former... okay, yeah, that one's a roadblock.

But frankly speaking, I really see no balance issues here, because if you have the money to afford examples to prototype, you have the money to buy them and just deploy them in the first place. If you get lucky and roll the BP the first time, cool, you still need the manufacturing overhead to produce it, and what makes [mod-added general purpose cruiser] so much better than an Eagle or something? If [mod-added cruiser] is so much better that getting its BP and being able to reproduce it wildly imbalances the game, then that is the faction author's issue, not mine.

Since you won't be able to reproduce some Arcade-mode super ship or upgraded IBB version or whatever because of the whitelisting (unless the author specifies they want it, which... I mean, whatever, their call), the only thing you'll be manufacturing is one of their 'standard' warships.

18
General Discussion / Re: Faction warfare?
« on: March 21, 2019, 07:59:52 PM »
Not without mods, but you can (using Nexerelin) get access to an additional dialogue option on things allowing you to spawn an invasion fleet, for example, at a specific cost based on size, etc.

However, no, in vanilla, your faction lacks any motivation to engage in warfare of its own volition. All it will do is protect your colonies, if present, and sometimes send trade fleets around the sector.

19
As a note, this is going to run into the same issues as mods such as Omnifactory or Vesperon Combine: it plays poorly with other mods that have either unique equipment, or special manufacturing methods (Tiandong's ship conversions, for example).

If the goal is specifically improving blueprint availability, you'll want to implement a whitelist (or, perhaps, get permission to use the same whitelist as Vesperon Combine?) so that other mods don't get messed up by the ability to generate blueprints that shouldn't exist.

Didn't we already have this conversation on the Discord? Because I already had this conversation on Discord with someone. Maybe not you, but someone. Anyways, I literally already said:

  • I would like to incorporate modded factions, but (to make perfectly clear) I will not do so without explicit permission and input from the mod author. This is to allow them the chance to set a blacklist of their choosing for what equipment they would like not to be replicable, or indeed whether they wish to be party to the mod in the first place.

If a mod author wants to opt out completely, they can. If I don't get anyone interested? It's only vanilla stuff. The only and specific reason for this endeavor is for a late-mid-/ end-game player to be able to choose, through an organic and somewhat-directed manner of their own volition, to be able to build a fleet of the ships they want with the weapons they want to 'bring home' a game where they're at the point they're just conquering other factions, with the same practical limits to BP availability as the default (which is to say: if you can't find the BP from the 'normal' methods, you won't be able to reproduce it here.)

The player is still free to go surveying for blueprints, if they wish to acquire them that way. They're still free to raid colonies, if they wish to acquire them that way. They're free not to download the damn mod, if they wish to not have the possibility. With all that said, the entire point is that the only thing this mod does vice just doing random dice-rolls for random gear, is a directed choice as to what to get BPs for... while also sacrificing the item for only a POSSIBILITY of BP-ing, astronomical costs for the infrastructure, and likely (due to procgen) having to build a colony in the middle of nowhere.

"But what if it procgens in the same system as the player starts?"

Well, what if the game procgens ruins that give you a catalog BP set in the starting system? If anything, that's even more imba than my mod concept. Many a Nex game, I've surveyed Ruins within the first 5, 10 minutes of the game that gave me something like the entire mainline SRA catalog, or the DA weapons collection, etc. etc., all within close proximity to the system I started in (with the SRA example, I found it in literally the same system as I started. How exactly is this, for example, somehow more imbalanced or more fair than

  • having to find the facility (planet condition)
  • establish a colony
  • build and upkeep the structure
  • loot or buy the desired ship or equipment
  • 'roll the dice' that you get a 'successful' BP-creation roll
  • if it was the only one you owned and the BP creation fails, bummer?

I mean, please, explain that contention, that it's somehow imbalanced to me, because I don't get it. I only see this being practically usable by a player who's already in a roflstomp murderfleet anyways, and just wants to be able to specifically have 3 or 4 of X destroyer for the sake of faction/thematic consistency, but also already killed off that faction from the game and doesn't want to go running around surveying for it.

If you and I didn't specifically have this convo already, then I had it with someone else, and frankly I just don't get the furious pushback. All you'll have is the BP; even if you give it, say, a mod's battlecruiser (say the mod author disallowed the flagship battleship, and that's fine), you would still need the industrial capacity to build it, just as with any other BP. This is not Omnifac, I'm getting sick of hearing it's Omnifac (when I literally state I'm not rebirthing Omnifac), the facility doesn't produce the product. (EDIT: I realize I didn't state that in the OP of this, I did in my other tentative one. But yeah, I do not want to create Omnifac 2.0)

Quote
If the goal, instead, is to just have some unique facilities out there that justify colonizing otherwise non-viable planets, I'd suggest looking into options that don't generate blueprints.  Perhaps a special manufacturing center that has a higher ship quality bonus than the standard Orbital Works, or a military training base that improves the officer level of your patrols - and guarantees that the local comm directory gets several high-level officers you could hire each month.

Literally the entire point of this mod is to generate blueprints. The planet thing is just the methodology for doing so.

20
" You're best off using console commands to get yourself back to the stage you were previously...."

Can you please describe how? I am not very good with console commands. Never used that before....

I believe he's talking about using the Console Commands mod (you can't access console without this), and just writing down somewhere how many skillpoints/XP/money you had, your fleet composition, colonies owned, etc. But to be clear, if you're misreading what he's saying: There is no console command to force information from a saved game into a new one. You would have to manually input every value that you cared about keeping, even down to stuff like setting faction relations, etc.

21
Reserved for probability breakdowns and other fancy math as I get to that part.

22
This is the placeholder OP for this mod. There is no download yet.

    A mildly-inebriated space veteran beckons you to his table...

    Spoiler
    You've got the look of one of those folks who wants to know everything there is to know, or maybe build everything there is to build. I think I can help you there.

    Everyone wants to find those Blueprints for their Autofactories, right? One of the more powerful 'factions' in the Sector mounts an expedition to go digging for a Domain Data Vault or Research Lab, or scurry through the mud of a planet with ruins on it, hoping that among the wreckage they'll find one of those little chips that holds all the ins-and-outs of creating a brand-new spaceship or kick-ass gun. Everyone, by this point, has the chip for a Buffalo, or a Hound; those bloody things are everywhere. Everyone's HOPING to find their own personal XIV Battlegroup hull blueprint, or a chip to manufacture Mjolnir Cannons in their own industry.

    But what if I told you about another way to get these magical little doodads? I heard from a friend of a friend of a... well, you get the idea... that the Domain DID bring the tech that created Blueprints out here to the sector with them. They're still hidden out there, buried deep within some planets. The rumor goes something like this: you stick in almost anything, the facility tears it down atom-by-atom, and creates a chip that tells an Autofac how to recreate the thing piece-by-piece... in other words, what we know today as a Blueprint.

    Does such a thing exist? Eh, who knows? It's a rumor that's been running in spacer circles for years. It's probably a load of bollocks, another one of those comforting delusions we've created ever since the Gates collapsed. But, who knows? I'm past my prime, and my days of exploring are long gone. If you happen to find one of these things out there, remember your pal here, eh?
    [close]



    Domain Blueprint Encoder

    Quote
    Everyone knows what Blueprints are, but how did Blueprints come to be? Enter the Domain Blueprint Encoder. DBEs were, for lack of a better explanation, 3D scanners on steroids that systematically catalogued everything about how a piece of technology was built, be it the meanest Light Mortar to the astounding technological marvel of the Astral. Using the "Blueprint" thus created, one could program the ubiquitous Autofactory to produce the item in question.

    With the collapse of the Gate Network, the Domain became a distant memory in the Persean Sector, and the people reverted to a sort of techno-barbarism, having all of the technology but none of the knowledge. For some two centuries these disparate colonies grew in strength and number once again, and using the power of the Autofacs and Blueprints, were able to create massive space fleets to protect their interests and attack their enemies. However, while the primary means of acquiring blueprints is finding them out in abandoned Domain facilities out in the empty star systems of the Sector, or simply stealing them from your opponents, there is a path of less resistance -- to simply create your own.

    Scope of the Mod

    The goal of this mod is to create a new, RARE planetary condition, called "Intact DBE", with a guaranteed appearance on at least two or three planets per sector generation. It will function much like Ruins do, allowing the construction of a new Structure, tentatively planned to be called a "DBE Lab". The lore-y explanation here of why you need a specific facility will be that the DBE must be excavated out of whatever ruins it's within, powered up, and then a sterile environment must be maintained for cleaning the to-be-scanned piece of technology; this is to minimize the possibility of corruption of the Blueprint production from even so small a thing as a chunk of dirt.

    As is to be expected with providing power for such a colossal thing (imagine how large the 'workspace' must be to fit a Capital Ship inside!) and all the other logistical issues, it will cost a pretty penny to build, and have a ridiculous upkeep. Of course, use an AI Core and price AND demand goes down... and of course, there will probably be upgrades possible to the owning faction's prep facility to ensure higher success rates and a quicker preparation process...

    However, the process is not perfect: technology has diminished over the years and true sterility is difficult to achieve, and the DBE has suffered from its dormancy and lack of maintenance. Therefore, between errant contamination of the DBE, or through glitches in the system, it is unfortunately NOT guaranteed that you will get a blueprint. Obviously, the simpler and smaller the object is, the more likely the process will succeed, as it takes less time for the DBE to break down the object, and it's easier for the prep teams to clean it up to prevent contamination.

    Practical gameplay effects translation of the lore spiel (and other notes):

    • The less the OP/DP or fitting size/hull class of the weapon/ship, respectively, the less time the scan takes and the more likely it is that it will succeed.

    • Both success and failure result in loss of the item (read above re: complete deconstruction of the item), but at least with success you get a BP out of it. You must be willing to part with the thing to be prototyped, so don't give it your one and only Light Needler and panic when it fails...

    • The structure will cost a lot to build, and a lot to upkeep, so it's really only practical for mid- to end-game, so that you either have a fortune amassed or other colonies that can 'eat' the financial shortcoming.

    • The current roadmap is to use the 'unique submarket' concept you may have seen in other mods to produce a new, specific-to-DBE-structure submarket that will allow for you to input items to await the results of the Encoding. This is so that the UI of this process will be relatively graceful, and also to force the player to have to travel to the colony with the DBE to physically drop off an item (not so easy when you think you're gonna be clever and fly a mothballed Onslaught with 5 D-Mods halfway across the Sector)
    .
    • Since it would be impractical (and pointless) to have a mod that just played with your heart with an RNG curse, you'll be able to upgrade it a tier or two to increase probabilities.

    • There will be technology that can't be properly recreated because it contains advanced materials the DBE can't make heads nor tails from, which JUST SO HAPPENS to be things you can't otherwise find blueprints for anyways. Basically, there will be an allowed whitelist of replicable gear, just normal stuff you can find in markets for example; and things like [redacted] gear will be unreproducible, as only the whitelisted things can be turned in.

    • I would like to incorporate modded factions, but (to make perfectly clear) I will not do so without explicit permission and input from the mod author. This is to allow them the chance to set a whitelist of their choosing for what equipment they would like to be replicable, or indeed whether they wish to be party to the mod in the first place.

    Credits and Acknowledgements
    • So far, just SCC for giving me the idea of doing 'discovering some archaic Domain tech' during chatter on Discord, rather than my original alien technology idea.


    Stay tuned for all the inevitable name drops of folks I'm hoping for help in the more fiddly bits of code and scripting...[/list]

    23
    No, because pirates don't have battleships in .9? :)

    But, yes, pirates would get appreciably stronger if you did that. There are other details, though, so "time has an impact" shouldn't be conflated with "time is the only thing that has an impact".

    Sorry, was just equating large fleets with battleships. General point I was making was they'd have big fleets and/or bigger ships than some *** in a single Hound trying to stick you up.

    24
    The only real "scaling" is in bounties and such,

    <checks patch notes> as of .9, there's no level scaling in bounties, either - it was a small component of their strength before, but now doesn't factor in at all. They do get stronger over time, though.

    So: there isn't any level scaling in the game at all at this point.

    So then, correct me if I'm wrong: if I just Went Dark, took a couple freighters full of supplies to a corner of a system to stay out of the way, and shift-fast-forwarded a few years, and then flew back to the active parts of the sector, there'd be a bunch of Pirate battleship fleets roaming the sector?

    25
    Can anyone guide me on building a random-gen sector with only one station or colony per sector? I'm trying to play a game where I don't have to ally-by-necessity and/or conquer whoever happens to spawn in my sector, but I think I keep messing up something about the gen options that confuses the game.

    I'll do something like "30 populated Systems", goal of "15 populated Planets" and "15 populated Stations", set 1 colonized planet per system, and the last option (planets OR stations per system) to 2, to allow some systems to have a random station just to spread stuff out.

    I might be messing up the numbers, but all I know is I spent like 20 minutes crashing and restarting till I dialed in something that worked, which ended up with me in a system with a Junk Pirate base and Tri-Tach with a planet, and me owning the planet (I think I just kicked down number of colonies, although I could be wrong -- I didn't write down exactly what I had).

    Anyways, short version: does anyone have values for a one, MAYBE (but not always) 2 colonies/stations per system sector generation? I just want to own a system without having to waste money buying Marines to conquer the random faction Nex sticks with me.

    26
    (Obligatory "there isn't any meaningful level scaling in the game" every time this comes back, to avoid confusion.)

    Shhhh! Who do you think you are, the developer? /Sarcasm

    Yeah but like you said (I mean, you did design the system after all...), The only real "scaling" is in bounties and such, and it'd be boring as hell to me to take my 30-ship capital death fleet to go stomp on a couple deserters in some frigates. It's just silly. I like that you get harder and more difficult bounties as you progress, as they present a means of "advancing" gameplay-wise if you don't want to fight a Hegemony deathball over Jangala or something.

    If the few things that do scale didn't feel organic, I might have a bit more gripes with it, but my in-universe explanation is you're more likely to be given details on bounties involving people with full capital-led fleets as you gain more fame and notoriety in the sector. Or like, your comms officer doesn't even bother sending up bounty info about 300 DP fleets when they know you're only 100 DP.

    Quote
    But at its core this game is a fleet bashing simulator, eventually you're just going to have a big fleet and will bash it against the biggest fleets in the area, there's no real way to resolve that currently.  At least that I know of.

    Very true. Perhaps we could get dial-a-condition starts, where you can choose from a list of end goals ("Conquer 3 Hegemony-owned colonies of size 7 or greater by year X", "Own # of colonies size 7 or greater by year Y", ) something to encourage "domination" or "economic" win conditions.

    Right now, you kind of have to set your own goals or "win conditions", otherwise yeah, it's "race to get a full 30-ship capital fleet and you win".

    27
    General Discussion / Re: Starsector purchase and product
    « on: March 20, 2019, 09:53:43 AM »
    wouldn't this allow multiple people "owning" the game with a single common key?

    Technically, yes. There's nothing stopping you from just giving a bunch of friends your key.

    It's sort of on the honor system, but I prefer that over draconian measures that involve all kinds of sketchy DRM programs running in the background or something.

    It's not really a secret, it's just part of having this sort of validation method. Just know it'd be a *** Move, and Super Uncool.

    28
    it will be obvilion, literally, and getting more ships will make you weaker...

    i hate scaling, just hate it, this is cheap and crappy design move,

    It's not "cheap and crappy", it's a design choice by Alex. The alternative is having "stronger" presences in certain sectors, and for me that's not compelling because while I appreciate the sort of linear advancement of challenge the first time I play, in subsequent play throughs I feel I'd get bored and feel like it's a grind to get through the "early stages" until I'm at a point where pirates, for example, hold no threat to me.

    Once you cross those thresholds, it becomes a chore to have to keep fending off little d-modded fleets challenging you. The game, being meant to have a dynamic sector evolution, isn't supposed to be linear in this fashion.

    Ideally, and hopefully as Alex tweaks things in subsequent releases we get to this point, factions will build up organically and it'll make sense to have three thirty ship fleets orbiting a homeworld, joining in when you do a station assault. Until then, I like how you're consistently challenged, because let's face it: once you have ten fully skilled officers and have full skills yourself, even if skills aren't as OP as before, pretty much the only challenge comes from the enemy overwhelming you with numbers.

    29
    So the whole "Heavy Industry", specifically the "Custom Production" part is super cool. Within the bounds of what blueprints you've found, of course, you can make ANYTHING you want to help kit out your personal fleet. Awesome!

    ... Buuuut, I find it a bit too convenient the way it works right now. As it is, as we all know, you just have a production capacity defined by number of Heavy Industries (and, if I understand it correctly, colony size), you click on whatever you want from a couple vulcan cannons to an Onslaught or two, and presto it appears magically in your chosen 'delivery site'. Cool and all for the ease of use, but not really immersive in my earnest opinion.

    First of all, I wonder if it is at all a possibility to divide the three production categories (fighters, weapons, and hulls) into three unique structures? I am a fan of the idea of having a sort of 'classical' space empire where you have planet X that is known throughout the galaxy for its weapons, planet Y for its shipyards, etc. As it is, adding Heavy Industry is pretty much a given on ANY colony I conquer or start, because it just adds to my generic flat cap of production.

    I realize the goal is to minimize death by interactive menus, but I wonder if it can't be done to have each of your planets selectable from a list (maybe a scrolling list like the Fitting menu has), and then the main part of the screen populates with applicable tabs? So you can select "Hulls" only if the planet has a "Shipyard" industry; you can only select "Weapons" if the planet has a "Weapons Plant" industry; and "Fighters" if there is a "Small Spacecraft Factory". Then you can have generic "Heavy Industry" as a structure that specifically adds to your Production cap; so if planet X has a Weapons Plant, and can produce $80,000 of goods, and you add a Heavy Industry that adds a 1.5X multiplier or something, you can therefore produce $120,000 worth of weapons a month. Something like that.

    As for delivery... I understand that this part's trickier, and it might seem like an unfair RNG penalty if it gets accosted by a Pirate fleet, but it'd be cool if planets either kept manufactured goods on-site; OR if the player ordered a gathering point, they were placed into a convoy of suitable size and for the total value of goods. Obviously, you can very easily shove $80,000 worth of high-cost weapons into an Expanded Cargo Hound or something, but for simplicity's/balance's sake (to avoid the unfairness implied above) just have a gate where <$10k is a collection of small freighter ships capable of carrying the goods ordered (Shuttles and Hounds, etc.) with frigates in the escort force; $10k-$35k is a few destroyer sized cargo vessels with a mix of destroyers and frigates escorting; $35k-$60k is cruiser cargo ships and similar escorts; and $60k-$80k is transported by Atlases et al and escorted by at least one Capital warship and applicable escorts.

    Or have it by percentage (to scale with the Heavy Industry upgrade thing I mentioned above). Whatever works. Maybe have fleet size, composition, and quality dictated by the source market's Fleet value.

    I can imagine warships being delivered in mothball status with a similar tier-ing of escorts, ditto fighter LPCs.

    I just find it too brutally dishonest to the meta that I could, say, establish a colony in literally the corner of the sector, have a few core world colonies that can put down serious production numbers, and at the end of the month... the goods they produced just magically appear in my destination colony. Seems a bit immersion-breaking to me.

    30
    I think a good middle ground might be to rework industry a bit more. Right now, as it stands, if you have enough banked to survive the first month or two of unrest and/or repairing or constructing a port (assuming you captured one), it will very rapidly and easily go into the green, and you'll be pocketing 6 figures on a monthly basis. It only increases as you build more industries and/or add more cores.

    I could definitely see just reducing industrial profits by like 50% even helping avoid the exponential wealth curve once you establish an empire.

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