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16

Suggestions / Neural Link minor UI suggestion

« on: February 19, 2025, 03:59:03 PM »

If the player has deployed their flagship, but not the other side of the link, there are two extra UI intries in the ship status display: "Neural Link Inactive / No Signal" and "Neural System Reset / No Signal". I think in this specific context, the entry for "Neural System Reset" is extraneous, and should probably not be displayed unless there actually is a ship to link with.

17

Suggestions / Flagship deployment allocation should include neural-linked ships

« on: February 17, 2025, 09:36:29 AM »

If you join a battle in progress with a large allied fleet, the game allocates to the player a minimum of "enough DP to put your flagship on the field". (This most commonly comes up in fights where you're supporting a star base and there's a large allied patrol involved as well.)

Where this is not good is when the player has set themselves up with their official game-designated flagship as some small frigate... but the actual flagship is, say, a neural-integrated Radiant.

Thus, this suggestion. If the player has the Neural Link skill, and their flagship has Neural Interface (or Neural Integrator*) installed, then the player should get a flagship allocation that's large enough to put their two NI ships on the field. (Or, in the case of more than two NI ships in the fleet, the player's flagship and the most expensive other NI ship.)

* Because some mod somewhere is going to make it possible to end up with the player's flagship being an automated ship, and this shouldn't break when that happens.

18

Bug Reports & Support / Colony displayed stability fluctuates with mouseover

« on: February 11, 2025, 11:15:22 AM »

Setup: A colony with Luddic Majority, a free industry slot, and not-capped-out stability.
Action: Click on "Add industry or structure...", then mouse over individual industries.
Effect: Displayed colony stability changes based on whether or not the moused-over industry would cancel Luddic Majority. This change persists even if you back out of the 'add industry' menu without adding an industry. This change persists even if you back out of the colony screen with the "Return to colony list" button, and start changing tabs in the administration UI. This change does not persist if you leave the colony screen and return to it, view any other colonies, or escape out of the administration UI and return to it. It also does not persist if you change anything on the colony screen, such as toggling hazard pay or use of stockpiles during shortages. (The change may or may not persist if you escape out of the admin UI and don't return to it; I don't have an easy way to see colony stability without re-opening the UI.)

Additional details that probably don't matter, but might:

• My fleet is currently way out on the edge of the sector, and not in range of a comm relay.
• I have not cleared the Luddic Church's crisis.
• The specific colony I'm seeing this with is a just-hit-size-five Tundra world with:
  • Habitable, Cold, Extensive Ruins, Bountiful Farmland, Rich Ore Deposits, Common Organics, Decivilized Subpopulation
  • Piracy Respite (w/ Kanta's Protection), Luddic Majority, Free Port (at max bonus/penalty level), Luddic Path Cells (currently disrupted).
  • Megaport, Waystation, Farming, Light Industry, Battlestation (high tech), Ground Defenses, Patrol HQ
  • NPC Administrator with Industrial Planning, Orbital Fusion Lamp (set to green), Fullerene Spool, Soil Nanites, Biofactory Embryo
  • A domain-era comm relay in-system and under player control, for a total planetary stability of 9.
• I am running a number of mods, but nothing that should be messing around with colony stability or crises.

...And as long as I'm here, a related query: Is there anything in-game that is supposed to tell me that certain actions will cause the Luddic Majority trait to cease functioning? Because I'm not seeing anything in the tool-tip, and if I didn't already know it would be all too easy to see myself saying "Okay, build mining next" and not even noticing that anything had changed...

19

Suggestions / Minor QoL: Reduce cooldown on Sensor Burst

« on: December 10, 2024, 03:43:50 PM »

Specifically, this is with respect to Hyperspace Topography. A common situation is a gas giant with a magnetic field, and one-or-more moons that also have magnetic fields. You sensor burst one for the +5 topography, and then have to wait on the cooldown before you can scan the next.

And it's annoying. Not a serious problem or anything, and the extra topography sources are appreciated, but it's this one weird corner case where you actually want to almost-spam sensor pings.

Maybe, if there are actual balance concerns, even just have the sensor ping cooldown reduced by specifically the act of gaining hyperspace topography credit?

Or allow magnetic fields to be scanned while you're not literally in them, just nearby? That could work too (though it'd likely lead to even more awkward questions about "Why am I not getting credit from this neutron star" when people don't realize they need to be literally in the corona or the beam to get scan credit...)

20

Bug Reports & Support / Onslaught missiles possibly mis-aligned

« on: March 09, 2024, 12:53:08 PM »

The two missile mounts on the right side of the ship are both a single pixel further forwards than the two mounts on the left side of the ship, when looking at the onslaught.ship file; and, as best I can tell, the actual mount locations on the sprite are not.

21

Suggestions / Neural Link improvements

« on: March 03, 2024, 09:34:17 AM »

So ideally a player running, say, a Neural-Linked Radiant should be able to, in the pre-battle dialog options, swap to that Radiant as their flagship and then deploy it - or even just deploy the Radiant and then transfer control to it without deploying their flagship.

However, Alex has previously noted that, due to low-level implementation details, this is unlikely to happen.

Thus, this alternative suggestion: When determining player DP, particularly when allied fleets are present, the game currently assigns the player a minimum of "enough DP to put their flagship on the field". I'd suggest that, for a player with Neural Link, "the player's flagship" should count both linked ships.

(Specifically, this should be enough DP to field the player's actual flagship, whatever ship that is, plus enough to field the single most expensive other ship that has Neural Interface or Neural Integrator installed and no assigned officer.)

And as an aside, could we get the Neural Link hullmods to have a small bit of added functionality? It shouldn't be an issue to add "+15% max CR if the player has Combat Endurance and +100% missile ammunition if the player has Missile Specialization". Obviously, these bonuses would turn off if the ship also has an officer, or if the player specs out of Neural Link.

And yes, that means that a canny player could combine this with Support Doctrine, using the NL hullmods as cheap buffs to un-officered ships. Which, given that Support Doctrine is, uh, not that great compared to just using the plentiful supply of officers you naturally get access to... I feel that's fine. Still, if that's considered problematic for some reason, just use the standard "these bonuses scale down the more ships they apply to" thing; +7.5% max CR and +50% missile ammo if the player's fleet has two un-officered ships with NL hullmods, etc.

22

Bug Reports & Support / Intersecting Procgen Star Systems

« on: February 21, 2024, 04:16:27 PM »

Game seed MN-4163223385542904100 (or if portrait choice is still impacting procgen, load up one of the saves I sent you for previous bug reports), look over to the west side of the sector at the Aresius and Vucub-Came systems. I'd originally assumed this was an odd trinary system, but no, it's two separate star systems that just overlap in hyperspace (but are somehow completely separate in normal space).

23

Suggestions / Stable point contents not showing on map

« on: February 21, 2024, 03:22:14 PM »

Pretty simple bug. Load up a game, go look at some core systems: Galatia, or Aztlan, or Tyle, for example. You'll see some stable points showing as empty (when they definitely aren't), and all such structures showing as unowned (when they definitely are).

At least so far, I haven't seen this bug with systems that the player is in, or that the player controls colonies in.

24

Suggestions / Improving Crisis Rewards

« on: February 19, 2024, 12:16:16 AM »

Not as in the total magnitude - that's honestly fine. But some of the crisis 'rewards' really aren't rewarding, or are kinda boring.

• Tri-Tachyon Crisis: This one's basically perfect; it's generally-useful and highly thematic. No changes needed.

• Luddic Church Crisis: Situational, but on the other hand, if you're in the situation where you can actually trigger the crisis, then you can also profit from its reward. I still feel that mining in particular should not disrupt the Luddic Majority trait (though it also shouldn't benefit from it), but other than that I'd leave this one alone.

• Pirate Crisis: A strong reward, and generally-useful, particularly if you add in Kanta's protection. The only problem with this one is that stacking too many generic accessibility rewards gets silly, and I want to add accessibility as a reward for the Persean League Crisis. So my suggestion for an alternate Pirate Crisis reward is that trade fleets heading to or from your colonies should be less susceptible to random disruptions: the pirates know you're a tough target, and will largely leave your fleets alone.
 (And, sure, you'll still get some disruptions from, say, TT's commerce raiders if they're up, or if an actual on-camera merchant fleet runs into trouble that the player could see and intervene in. But cutting out the majority of the random trade disruptions will make the profitability of the player's colonies much more reliable, even if it doesn't add to absolute magnitude the way bonus accessibility does. Add Kanta's protection and pirates should just straight-up ignore your merchant fleets, even if they are on-camera.)

• Persean League Crisis: Probably shouldn't trigger without a size five colony, or maybe three-or-more size fours... but the reward is also rather lackluster unless you plan to join the League. So this gets the 20% accessibility bonus that used to come from Kanta's Protection - call it something like "Proven Polity" - by beating the League's blockade you've shown that you're a serious force in the sector that won't just vanish some day. (Honestly, 20% is maybe even a bit much, especially if you're stacking it with TT's trade deal - maybe drop to 10 or 15%? There is still also the opportunity to join the League on more favorable terms.)

• Pather Crisis: Currently has no lasting reward. Suggested alternative: Reduced Pather interest on all of your colonies, allowing the use of a few more colony items or AI cores without triggering the formation of Pather cells. (How much reduced? At least -8 if going with a flat value adjustment. Could also cut pather interest values in half or even down to 1/3? There are options here.) Even if beating their fleet isn't as rewarding as handing them the PK, it should still do something that you couldn't have gotten by just blowing up their bases.

• Sindrian Crisis: I haven't experienced this one myself yet, but from what I know of it, it's an appropriate reward. Probably okay as is?

• Hegemony and Remnant Crises: I haven't experienced either of these so... Assuming that there is a permanent way to resolve the Hegemony inspection fleets without just going to war with them, that honestly seems like reward enough: being able to freely use AI cores is powerful. (...Hm. If joining the Persean League lets you use AI cores, why aren't there any already in use in the existing League planets?)

25

Suggestions / Military Base should be a structure again

« on: February 15, 2024, 01:09:00 PM »

As I recall, this was turned into an industry in order to make it be a little bit less optimal to just build up a single star system full of military bases and get enough system defense strength to ignore faction expeditions.

However, with the current Starsector version, those faction expeditions don't happen anymore. Instead, we get crises, which scale up with the number of colonies you have in the targeted star system - rendering stacking military bases a non-issue (and potentially even counterproductive.)

So, is there any need for this to still be classified as an Industry? I don't think there is.

(High Command, by contrast, I'm okay with still counting as an Industry - or, alternatively, perhaps the player should only be able to build one of them? Just for purely thematic reasons it shouldn't be something the player can build everywhere.)

26

Suggestions / Cut flux costs on Disintegrator & Minipulser

« on: February 09, 2024, 03:54:40 PM »

Minipulser: Reduced flux cost would bring it in line with the recently-buffed Volatile Particle Driver, and make it actually a competitive option in small ballistic slots (which it's currently not), without making it notably stronger on high-tech ships (for whom its flux cost is already pretty low and not a serious limitation of the gun).

Disintegrator: The only one of the omega weapons that I still look at and go "I'm never going to use this," the disintegrator just... does not have a place on any hull I use. And when I do try using it, what tends to happen is that, due to its high flux cost relative to its listed DPS, it's the first weapon the AI turns off when its getting high on flux... and as a result, it ends up being fired at enemy shields and then not fired when the enemy is also high on flux and actually turning their shields off. (Well, unless I do something silly like tie it in to the PD group- which would be a lot easier to justify if it wasn't quite so expensive.)

27

Bug Reports & Support / Starsector RC8 on MacOS reporting read-only file-system

« on: February 09, 2024, 01:35:57 PM »

So, just to verify the obvious: I don't have it installed in a read-only filesystem. This is in the same location as I had RC7, and RC7 worked fine. (And still works fine, too; just double-checked that while I was at it.)

If I run the application by double-clicking on its icon, then attempting to save nets me things like:

Code

Error creating new game:
Error saving game. See starsector.log for details.

Error message:
[../../../saves/save_AresRoy_2302674571779981268/campaign.xml.inprogress (Read-only file system)]

Except, of course, that there is no starsector.log, because it couldn't make that, either.

So I opened up terminal, cded all the way in to the MacOS folder, and ran ./starsector_mac.sh directly, figuring that'd give me a log even if it couldn't write starsector.log. Of course, in the best tradition of a proper heisenbug*, when run this way, the game works fine - starsector.log gets generated, the game gets saved, no problems.

* A heisenbug is the computer-programming equivalent of classic quantum behavior: a bug that, when you attempt to look at it in detail, goes away.

28

Suggestions / Tri-Tachyon Security Codes and the Scythe of Orion

« on: February 07, 2024, 05:02:05 PM »

So, this run-through I actually picked up the Scythe of Orion quest, and then wandered over to the Remnant Nexus it directs you to.

Then - having read mention of this particular path on the forum - I constructed a comm relay and tried the "attempt to remotely hack into the Nexus to retrieve the location of the planetkiller".

Which gave me a screen with the option "Use Tri-Tachyon security codes to make the task possible" as one of the options.

My first reaction: "Neat! By pure chance, I just bought Tri-Tachyon security codes off an underworld contact! Great, let's do this!"

My second reaction: "Wait, why is this option greyed out?"

Tooltip: "Requires a Tri-Tachyon commission".

Me: "But... but I have Tri-Tachyon security codes! Aww."

So I suggest either making purchased security codes work here, or just changing one word - if the option read "Use Tri-Tachyon command codes..." then I wouldn't have expected my security codes to fit the bill.

29

Suggestions / Ruins Datacore Swap time limit...

« on: February 06, 2024, 03:05:22 PM »

...Should be more clear that this is how long you have to get out there and get back. Or, alternatively, remove the time limit on the return portion of the mission.

I picked up a Ruins Datacore Swap & a Raid Secret Outpost mission at the same time; both had the same time limit, and I knew the raid mission was just "go there, do the thing", so I figured I'd be fine to go out and then putter around exploring for a while - assuming, as it turns out incorrectly, that a "go and come back within X time" mission would have a longer time limit than one that was just go there with no timed return trip.

30

Suggestions / Mercenary Marine bar encounter on player colonies

« on: February 06, 2024, 09:09:23 AM »

I feel like this should have some different text, here. I don't need to smuggle them off-planet, I just need to tell the port inspectors that these fine folk are my problem, now, not theirs.