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16

Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2

« on: April 30, 2022, 09:27:45 PM »

I hear what you're saying, yeah. I think I'd rather - at most - make it "equal to base hull after a restoration". Otherwise, even if it's a minor edge, we get into potential "the base hull is bad" territory and I want to completely avoid that. It's ok with Pather ships because it's all small fry and SO is a style-changer so it's not quite a straight upgrade. It'd be less ok for a whole swath of midline ships up to cruiser-size. And, yeah, I get that with half-price solar shielding there'd be some question as to whether it's an upgrade, but I'd just as soon avoid it even being a question.

How much of a concern do you think that will be? XIV Lowtech ships are substantial upgrades over the base models on some of the most prevalent line ships in the game, but people are still perfectly happy using a baseline Onslaught if that's what they can get their hands on. For comparison, half-price Solar Shielding is a fairly minor 7-8 point rebate on a capital, roughly in line with the value of just the flux from the XIV bonuses, and with "special modifications" almost certainly leaves the hulls worse off than baseline until they're restored. I don't see that being the kind of bonus that people are going to feel pressured to pursue. Even if the player has reached the point in the game where they have unlimited resources to pour into inane gameplay loops crafting their ideal Dorito Fleet, farming and restoring an Eagle that saves 5 points on Solar Shielding is probably not what's on their mind.

Though to be honest, having crunched the numbers I've mostly just talked myself out of having any strong opinion just because the difference is so small either way.

17

Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2

« on: April 30, 2022, 08:23:48 PM »

I'm partial to the half-price Solar Shielding myself. It keeps the skin from being a straight upgrade since that's still OP you don't have the choice to not spend, but it gives them a neat little unique perk if you go through the trouble of acquiring one and then the expense of restoring away the less advisable alterations. It also makes thematic sense that Solar Shielding can be integrated more effectively when it's incorporated as a fundamental part of the ship by the creators of the technology, rather than installed after-the-fact by a third party. It's not a tremendous change either way, and I guess restored LG ships already have a tiny upside for an builds that do want Solar Shielding since they get it without spending a logistics slot, though I struggle to imagine that coming up as a limiting factor terribly often.

I am coming around a bit on the idea of the Lion's Guard as being primarily a parade army. The regular military has the duty of protecting the Sindrian Diktat from external threats. The Lion's Guard are responsible for protecting Philip Andrada from the regular military. That said, assuming Andrada and the Guards themselves buy into the hype of being the supreme executor's handpicked elite force, I'd bet they're one real conflict away from catastrophic defeats after being dropped unsupported onto Hostomel Airport sent to deliver a decapitation blow against Chicomoztoc .


EDIT: and for everything I've said, turning them into the KSA is still way better than accidentally making your fascists into cool badasses.

18

Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2

« on: April 30, 2022, 06:28:36 PM »

Huge fan of the update overall, but I will say that I'm a bit disappointed if Sindria is going full North Korea. Part of what I've enjoyed about the game is how all the factions are colored in greyscale. The pirates are a bunch of violent criminals who kill for profit, but some of them are also castoffs from a broken society that never gave them a chance. Meanwhile, the Hegemony might be sincere in its quest to bring peace and stability to a sector in turmoil, but they are more than willing to sacrifice personal liberties and use violence as a means of coercion in pursuit of that end.  Hell, Brother Cotton is the leader of an extremist sect of murderous terrorists and he's still written with compelling depth. Having the Sindrians be just incompetent megalomaniacs isn't really living up to the rest of the setting in that regard, so hopefully there's another side to that coin.

Similarly, having their rare, unique, collector's edition ships be objective downgrades to the standard models seems excessive. I understand that boondoggle superweapons created to fulfill the vision of the supreme dictator have an abundance of historical precedent, but at least give us something if we go to the trouble of having the things restored!


EDIT: I will say that I'm an especially big fan of diversifying the Remnant fleets even though they're already using a unique set of ships, simply because the player is likely to spend so much of their time fighting them.

19

Blog Posts / Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 1

« on: March 24, 2022, 03:41:23 PM »

I don't really know why long range is such a taboo for high tech. Conquest is fast as hell and allowed to kite with 2220 range gauss cannons, why is 1575 range Odyssey unacceptable then? Similarly, Falcons are about as fast as high tech stuff, yet they can use 1650 range kinetics.

The Conquest counterbalances its offensive potential by having one of the worst defensive profiles in the game, while the Falcon building around ballistic range has inferior firepower to destroyers.

20

General Discussion / Re: New vanilla DREADNOUGHT

« on: March 14, 2022, 07:19:10 PM »

Are we expecting Damper Field to replace the shield button? Every ship that doesn't have shields has something else for that button.

Makes sense for it to.  Ships without an active defense are very undesirable.  There are a few that don't have something else for that button.  Buffalo MK II doesn't, and those things pop like balloons if you just look at them sideways.  Cerberus and Hound don't, and while they're nimble, as soon as you put a focused kill order on them it's over.

The ships you've mentioned are all borderline civilian hulls that aren't supposed to stand up against actual combat ships of a similar weight class or do especially well in fights in general, with the Buffalo Mk II in particular basically existing to be a terrible hull for the player to dunk on when they're starting a run. Real armor ships like the Onslaught and the Dominator can do just fine without shields, so long as you've got enough PD to keep them from getting torn open by torpedoes and have protection against EMP damage when relevant.

21

General Discussion / Re: What's a good ship for fast hunt/pursuit? (AI pilot)

« on: February 06, 2022, 07:37:23 PM »

I've had good success keeping a couple Override Lashers (preferably restored Pather Lashers) around as dedicated pursuit ships. They're cheap, fast, and put out a ferocious amount of firepower relative to their cost when they're committing to a target. Obviously you can get better raw performance out of the premium frigates like Tempests and Scarabs, but if I'm hauling around an 8dp frigate hull it's not to chase down Phaetons after the real fight.

22

General Discussion / Re: Multiplayer when?

« on: January 22, 2022, 03:43:21 PM »

To anyone who might say that it might be technically impossible, I don't believe that as it was considered technically impossible for DSP to ever get multiplayer yet it did.

Just to be clear, you're asking people to essentially rebuild the game for free while offering no contributions of any type yourself, and then trying to brush off anybody with any technical expertise who tries to tell you why this is unlikely to happen?

23

General Discussion / Re: Formations

« on: January 16, 2022, 11:09:03 AM »

I think the biggest, most obvious, and most common source of AI stupidity I've noticed is that the AI appears to consider fighters to be full scale ships instead of PD targets.

Fighters were ships until 0.8a.  Fighters became missiles or weapons since 0.8a.

And yet the AI doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, since this behavior is all observed in 0.95.1a.

Try powering through a wave of Broadswords to engage a combat ship and let us know how it works out.

24

General Discussion / Re: Formations

« on: January 12, 2022, 08:54:49 PM »

This is a constant problem, and everyone exept the "old guard" agrees that the AI needs drastic changes. I dont even thing it would be that hard to change their hardcoded behavior.

The short version is that making smarter AI is, in fact, that hard.

The old posters are keenly aware of the AI's shortcomings, but we're also aware that "create an AI with human-like reasoning skills" isn't a realistic solution to them and most of its frustrating behaviors are compromises based on the limits of its decision making (ie, the AI tends to err on the side of caution because erring the other way will get it killed and having the AI lose your ships to unforced errors would be infuriating for the player).

Can you give us examples of specific behaviors that are frustrating you? It would allows us to give more constructive feedback on how to produce the outcomes you're seeking, and in cases where the AI really is behaving inappropriately Alex has made adjustments to its priorities.

25

General Discussion / Re: We need weapons that counter fast ships

« on: January 11, 2022, 01:16:20 PM »

Alright, to post a bit more constructively: ballistic weapons typically have 100-200 more range than equivalently sized energy options, and fast ships (at least, the ones that are strong enough to risk being oppressive - we are definitely not worried about the Hound here) are given ballistic hardpoints incredibly sparingly. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the two small universals on the Medusa, which are indeed quite strong since they let it mount 700 range kinetics. That said, the Medusa still needs to get closer than that to actually finish a kill or threatening meaningful armor damage, and other fast ships have to start out there since they don't get ballistic weapons.

The only long-range options for energy weapons are beams, and while 1,000 range is nice they generally fail to do anything as a primary armament unless you have a way to generate hard flux, which we've already established that the roster of fast ships can't do at that range. The Kiting Beam Medusa is viable only in the sense that the game will not exit the application and uninstall itself if you create one.

26

General Discussion / Re: We need weapons that counter fast ships

« on: January 11, 2022, 11:39:56 AM »

This sure is a Warnoise thread in here.

-Can equip long range too, they can kite properly with them

lol

27

General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on the latest skill changes

« on: January 07, 2022, 07:08:43 PM »

I've never been happy with the player being forced to pick between personal combat skills and everything else. Every player is a ship captain and the heart of the gameplay is controlling a ship in combat, so every player is going to want to develop for it. This is only more true now in the era of officers, where a player that doesn't put at least some focus on combat skills is going to be routinely facing up against opponents with concrete mechanical advantages over them.

This sounds similar to the various suggestion threads about being able to control an officered ship, retaining that officer's bonuses, or splitting things into a personal and fleet trees.

At the end of the day, all these things alternatives look like a more restrictive skill setup to me.  Right now, you can go almost completely into personal skills (with 2 QoL picks gate keeping some strong personal skills like Gunnery Implants and Ordinance Expertise), or you can go completely without them, skipping all personal skills.  A system which partitions the decision making, by forcing a player to take X personal skills where they like it or not, and Y non-personal skills is just less flexible.

I'm am actually curious if people would be happier if players were forced to pick exactly 5 personal skills, and exactly 10 non-personal skills from the existing skill trees?  That matches the power level of what is currently possible, and would also have players no longer being able to decide between the two types of skills.  Although perhaps I'm misunderstanding what people are asking for in these kinds of alternate skill setups?

Campaign skills and personal skills should just be on separate tracks rather than competing with each other for the same resources. The question the player is asked should be "what part of combat do you want to specialize in?" rather than "do you want to specialize in combat at all?" because everyone should be flying ships in combat. The various campaign skills do a pretty good job of letting the player pick their specialization, and to be fair the existent combat skills do too - it's just that frequently a competitive option is not getting to take any of them and then struggling a little bit in what's supposed to the heart of the game.

There's still a lot of room to simulate some of the functionality of the current system. The various combat skills buried in Tech and Industry would probably get moved to combat, but if you wanted to keep their affiliations you could still make them require X points in their respective trees as a prerequisite (and maybe even add a couple for Leadership if we liked that sort of thing).

28

General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on the latest skill changes

« on: January 07, 2022, 03:38:00 PM »

I've never been happy with the player being forced to pick between personal combat skills and everything else. Every player is a ship captain and the heart of the gameplay is controlling a ship in combat, so every player is going to want to develop for it. This is only more true now in the era of officers, where a player that doesn't put at least some focus on combat skills is going to be routinely facing up against opponents with concrete mechanical advantages over them.

29

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: December 31, 2021, 12:03:35 PM »

... pretty much what you said, yeah. It's also possible that the "not noticing" is either simple self-preservation or the result of you pulling some strings behind the scenes. Btw - once you recover the Ziggurat, there are a number of core world encounters that are basically what you describe - so I at least at this point, the Ziggurat is a bridge too far when it comes to being ignored, while the other stuff isn't.

See, I always interpreted the Ziggurat a bit differently.  It's so far outside the box that nobody knows what it is or what to make of it, so it's at least plausible that their response is some kind of indignant confusion rather than outright hostility (and also the Tri-Tachs have tried to kill you for poking around their business at least a couple times by then). At a more basic level, even if the hull itself is an unsettling morass of alien nightmares, it's at least being piloted by a human that you can talk to.

Conversely, even if their existence isn't publicly acknowledged, there have been multiple wars fought against them, so there has to be people on various naval commands across the core worlds who know exactly what a Remnant warship is, know what operates one, and have some very pointed questions about exactly what you think you're doing with one (and don't you try to say you put a limiter on it because they said that the last two times too).

30

General Discussion / Re: What is the most effective Automated Ship group we can deploy in .95.1a?

« on: December 31, 2021, 11:42:07 AM »

Remember that the Brilliant trades the Champion's large missile slot for a medium missile and a medium energy, which is a more reasonable exchange. I've got mine running HVDs up front with an HIL and an Ion Beam to punish once the shields drop and it feels pretty good, and nobody ever got embarrassed showing up to work with a Sabot pod.

The fighter bay is honestly pretty meh - Remnant fighters in general haven't been anything to get excited about ever since Sparks got reigned in, and only a single bay (because we sure aren't running any Scintillas) means they aren't going to get a lot of work done in any case. If there was some kind of automated Xyphos analog that would just hang around like a disembodied medium mount it'd be a lot more useful, but as-is their fighters seem to spend a lot of time dead. At least they don't have crew, and it's not like most Champion builds were doing a whole lot with all those extra small mounts anyways.

0.6 Shield Efficiency is also a big flipping deal. That's way, way, way less flux:damage and I know we've all fought enough of these bastards to know what it feels like burning one down in practice.

Active Flares is a pretty big dud of a ship system, no denying that, especially on a cruiser with excellent shield overage. It's a little hard to build the Champion all the way around HEF, but even just setting an HIL to overdrive packs a wallop. Honestly, it feels like Alex deliberately gave it a blank here to keep it from going over the top.

It's unquestionably the baddest *** at Burn 9, which doesn't always matter but is extremely relevant when it does.


HEF might still make the Champion stronger in the end, but given that the Champion is already broadly accepted as a top-tier Cruiser it's not exactly an insulting comparison. The real problem is that a Brilliant's eventual competition isn't standing out from the other Cruisers - it's fighting for Automated Ship points with the absolute monster that is the Radiant.