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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 - Flying Birdy

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31
I was in the system, I saw the fleet, but I apparently missed the beacon. Oh well.

You can find the location of the cache (without looking it up) if you use neutrino detector. You can go back and find it at any point.

Edit: just realized you were talking about the alpha site system. The beacons are in the same system as the fleet; you do need to spool up neutrino detectors if the map generation created a rather large system as finding the beacons can be challenging in a larger system.


32
Suggestions / Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« on: April 14, 2021, 03:20:26 PM »
*SNIP*
That way Pirate fleets will actually be *** off if you avoid paying Pirate tariffs and chase you to collect "Kanta's cut". Also instead of random scans for contraband, it's random scans for hot loot they can extort from you... giving players the option to give up a slice of their cargo in exchange for staying alive and doing so gives you status that can eventually translate into being cleared for trade. Maybe being on a pirate trade mission makes them let you through regardless of your status.

This seems reasonable in theory but it still does not address the issue in practice; the AI needs to be buffed immensely to be able to prevent a player from just working around this nuisance. First of all, not all pirate shortage planets have patrols; many of them are wide open. Second, shortages are also frequent in core faction worlds. Third, shielded cargo holds are a thing and prevent scans. Four, fast fleets full of hounds aren't difficult to salvage or expensive to buy and they can get into any market without difficulty regardless of the mechanics in place.

I agree with you there.

That brings me to another suggestion: there should be serious consequences for buffing pirates by smuggling to them in the form of better defense fleets - including all frigate/destroyer picket fleets specifically for hitting smugglers.

I think one strategy could be to implement the defense fleet in the form of a station at every single pirate colony. This way, if the player is intercepted by a patrol, the enemy fleet will be a patrol and the station. It will also make it far harder during the mid-game to just fly a fleet that outclasses pirate patrols since it's always going to be patrol + station that a player will be up against.

If the player wants to be particularly fast about getting past a patrol, the same docking limitations should be imposed such that a player can not dock if he/she is being chased by a pirate patrol. Finally, ships with shielded cargo hold should be made rarer, or shielded cargo holds could be significantly reduced in effectiveness by the number of d-mods the ships have. This would make it far harder to abuse the smuggling mechanic in the early game. Of course, anything is possible by late game but getting 30 hounds (p)s is at least a challenge in itself and takes some effort.

Another further measure that could "up the difficulty" so to speak in addition to all the measures you suggested is to greatly increase the duration in which a planet will not trade with a player due to in-system hostilities with patrol ships. A major speed brake for smuggling early on to Garnir, for instance, is the annoying little pirate patrols that the player often blows up; Garnir then refuses to let the player trade because of hostilities but that refusal only lasts for days (scales based off on how many ships got destroyed). By increasing the duration of the refusal, the disengage choice now becomes disengage (supplies or ship losses) or attacking the patrol (locked out of the market for three months and thus miss the entire shortage). Under these types of measures, the player has to be really careful about blowing up pesky patrols because attacking them could lock out a market entirely for a really long time.

33
General Discussion / Re: Best missile ship to pilot yourself?
« on: April 14, 2021, 04:58:09 AM »
So Im looking for the best of the best :D Meaning it has a ton of Ordnance points and many Large Missile slots. I have not seen very good missile ships yet. Maybe I havent discovered them all.
Whats your best missile ship?

Odyssey is an amazing missile ship. If you fire your sabots while using plasma burn, the Sabots instantly reach stage two and are essentially undodgeable for enemies. If you time it correct, your triple Sabots always hits shields. Additionally,  Odyssey has a built-in ECCM which improves speed and tracking. If you combine the built-in ECCM with the missile skill perk and a Hurricane MIRV, there is a hilarious interaction - some of the MIRV stage two missiles that miss will continue to turn around and track even AFTER they have flown past their target.

34
Suggestions / Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« on: April 14, 2021, 02:27:03 AM »
I also can't believe people are seriously arguing that trading needs to be MORE unprofitable.

Aside from drugs and guns, there are literally no commodities in the universe that regularly trade for profit that exceeds the 30% tariffs that you pay on buying AND selling, barring market-breaking shortages. Not a one. That is a scenario that is unprecedented in the entire history of humanity.

I don't think you have had the experience of exploiting the trading system. It is definitely far too profitable.

Supplies, fuel, heavy machinery, luxury goods are all frequently in shortage during the mid to late game. For instance, supplies are often traded at 200+ prices on pirate planets with shortage quantities of 500+ (somtimes 2k shortages even). That's a potential riskless profit of 50k at minimum. All that's needed is a run from Chicomoztec for the surplus black market supplies at ~83 price.

And the 30% tariff is for all intents and purposes irrelevant. You don't even need to take the patrol scan relationship penalty - just enter the market normally and e-burn immediately after selling the cargo.

As another comment pointed out, it's practically impossible to do stealth missions in Hegemony space without phase ships and all-insulated/militarized fleet.

It's entirely possible. The player just needs to bait the patrol away. Stealth mechanics are poorly understood, not underpowered.

To be more precise: buying drugs and weapons doesn't trigger stealth if you're getting it from Eochu Bres, but they only have a limited supply.

That's really not true. Eochu Bres has 1000+ drugs in stock when counting the open market. Sure you pay a 30% tariff to buy drugs at around ~220, but that's more or less not an issue when prices are 450+ on drugs. And this is not even counting the 500+ available on the other tri-tech planet in the same system.

OP is right that this is an amazing way to make money but it's not without risks and honestly I'd have stopped playing the current build if this didn't exist.

It really is riskless. And it doesn't even take skill to make a riskless smuggling fleet and exploit gameplay.

In the mid game, the pirates just don't bother chasing the player because the player is too strong (and the player reaches the mid-game after just 2-3 smuggling runs because the profits are so high).

In the early game, any fleet of hounds with Augmented drives, SO, injectors will never be caught and can disengage from any enemy with zero losses because the fleet will reach 13 burn with 255 in combat speed. Pirates don't even chase when you are that fast, all they do is harry your retreat.

That way Pirate fleets will actually be *** off if you avoid paying Pirate tariffs and chase you to collect "Kanta's cut". Also instead of random scans for contraband, it's random scans for hot loot they can extort from you... giving players the option to give up a slice of their cargo in exchange for staying alive and doing so gives you status that can eventually translate into being cleared for trade. Maybe being on a pirate trade mission makes them let you through regardless of your status.

This seems reasonable in theory but it still does not address the issue in practice; the AI needs to be buffed immensely to be able to prevent a player from just working around this nuisance. First of all, not all pirate shortage planets have patrols; many of them are wide open. Second, shortages are also frequent in core faction worlds. Third, shielded cargo holds are a thing and prevent scans. Four, fast fleets full of hounds aren't difficult to salvage or expensive to buy and they can get into any market without difficulty regardless of the mechanics in place.

35
Suggestions / Re: Trade is brokenly unbalanced
« on: April 13, 2021, 08:07:35 PM »
Hi! Just wanted to say, thank you for the detailed feedback. Made a note to take a look at this aspect of things specifically; as you say, if smuggling to pirate/Pather worlds doesn't require (or even reward) engaging with the stealth mechanics, that needs some adjustment.

There is a somewhat stealth aspect to smuggling to pirate worlds in that pirate fleets will actively try and kill you early on, but as the OP partially noted, once you get strong enough pirate worlds just become free money because the patrols will flee.

Another issue is that the high value/margins of drugs make it so early players can smuggle large values of goods with extremely small fleets, which effectively mitigates all risk. For instance, even with just the most basic starting ships - wolf and a shephard - I can get access to 210 cargo space. Assuming 20 supplies, then that's 190 space for drugs, each bringing in 200-300 profit when sold at a planet with $450 drug prices. That's 40-60k profit per run with just starting ships. If I really wanted to abuse the system, I can then buy nothing but Hounds, give them cargo holds, SO, unstable injector and they are essentially unkillable runners each capable of carrying ~40k of drugs (or 20-30k of profit).

The easy access to metric tons of drugs also enables trading to be an insane money maker mid-game to late game. Due to Eochu Bres providing a supply of ~1000 drugs at any given time, a player can satisfy the entirety of any shortages at 450 drug prices. Even though some of the drugs are only available through the open market, buying drugs at 220 still allows for ~200 profit on each drug.

None of these extremes are possible with things like supplies, ore, metals, or consumer goods because those goods are lower in value. Even if supplies are sold at 100% profit, the profit/100 cargo space is still only 10k.

An easy fix I think would be to just change the base prices of drugs, organs, and weapons to 100/100/250 respectively. Shortages should be closer to ~200 rather than their current 600-1000 for drugs. Similarly, number of drugs available in Eochus Bres should be scaled down to ~500 in total at any given time.

36
General Discussion / Stealth missile nerf due to new skills
« on: April 12, 2021, 09:01:56 PM »
Having done three playthroughs now, I'm definitely feeling that all missiles became weaker than their 0.91 iterations. The missile boat builds I was previously using feels remarkably weaker now. I was not sure why until I considered the new missile skills in comparison to the old.

0.91
+25% missile speed and maneuverability (piloted ship)
+50% missile, rocket, bomb, and torpedo hitpoints (piloted ship)
+25% missile damage (piloted ship)

0.95a
+100% missle weapon ammo capacity
+50% missile hit points
+50% rate of fire for missile weapons

The loss of missile speed and damage is a significant loss/nerf. All we got in return was capacity and rate of fire.

While on paper that seems like a good trade-off, in practice missiles are never a weapon that benefits from being fired quickly (other than annihilators). Most missiles are targeted strike weapons used in very narrow time windows - for instance, firing torpedoes against an overloaded target. The ideal is to maximize the torpedo's likelihood to hit and ensure the maximum damage when it does hit and having more rate of fire certainly doesn't help. And while the missile ammo capacity is reasonable, it still feels lackluster as the loss of missile speed means less ammo hit and thus more wasted torpedoes.

A lot of the old effective missile builds are now also defunct because of this change. Double swarmer conquest used to be able to instantly knock out frigates if you had the missile damage and the other weapon damage perks; now it just barely gets past the shield. Triples Sabot + MIRV shotgun odyssey was pretty fun to fly, but the slower hurricane MIRV just feels underwhelming as a lot more of the warheads aren't hitting anymore unless it's a super slow target.

Happy to hear everyone's thoughts. Am I missing something?

37
General Discussion / Re: Is high payout bounty just not viable?
« on: April 12, 2021, 11:19:17 AM »
I agree its kind of hard to beat the higher difficulty fleets without any losses. But I think this is almost the way the game should be played now - with losses being an acceptable part of how you take on fights.

I personally run either an officer with an industry skill or reinforced bulkheads on every single ship I bring to the harder battles. I also mostly bring garbage d-mod ships to those fights so that I don't lose anything I care about. Most of the ships I bring are also ships I recovered from previous bounty battles.

Most of the costs for me in these fights are just supplies + crew losses + fuel costs for getting there. Typically, in a really scrappy battle with multiple losses, I use up about 500 supplies (repairs included), lose about 400 crew, 500 fuel and then recover about 200 supplies from salvage. The net costs are around ~60k.


38
General Discussion / Re: Is the Industry tree dead?
« on: April 11, 2021, 02:26:55 PM »
I think the industry tree is nearly all just QOL stuff for the early game as noted several times in this thread. It's kind of the perfect tree to take early on without getting any of the specializations and then re-assign by using a story point once you hit level 15.

39
What’s the point of arms dealer when you can just buy from black market????
It should be removed altogether and replaced with more frequent surplus military ship sale/ship steal missions.

The blackmarket usually doesn't give the types of ships you want - IE high rarity ships. The arms dealer was supposed to be a better black market for ships but its low frequency just made it kind of an inferior blackmarket.

40
I haven't tried this new mechanic, it sounds rather frustrating.

Incredibly so. I looked around in my campaign run for cycles non-stop checking bars for a black market dealer to sell me an odyssey. Rarely did I find a dealer and even when I did they didn't sell Odyssey.

I ended up getting my odyssey through one of the elite independent faction mercenaries that are event spawned during the story quests. Even though he would normally leave players alone, I saw that he had an Odyssey and decided that I wanted his ships and blew him up.

41
General Discussion / Re: Oh dear..
« on: April 06, 2021, 01:36:15 PM »
Uh, are high tech stations supposed to be dropping a dozen mines in 2 seconds?

Yes, they do actually. High Tech stations have 2 modules that spawn mines and an officer in command of the station affects them both with the "Systems Expertise" skill wich buffs the special ability by:
-raising its max charges by one
-recharging it 50% faster
-increasing its range by 50%
-decreasing the cooldown between its charges by 33%

Sweet dreams, think twice before raiding Tri-Tach now  or they will show you the power of a fully operational battlestation!

Wait so a colonial admin gets those skills? How are they assigned - is it random or do colonial admins automatically get all of the skills?

42
I made a post about this regarding the black market arms dealers being too rare. Alex did respond- the weights assigned to it are the same as any other missions hence why they are kind of rare if you are specifically looking for something. (Source: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20375.msg312243#msg312243). He said he's working on it.

43
General Discussion / Re: The game became too hard
« on: April 06, 2021, 12:09:41 PM »
Personally I've never bothered capturing the relay points and just take a defensive position nearer to the bottom. usually (at least they used to) rush you with the smaller ships which you can destroy before the bigger ships come down.

I'm noticing now that the A.I seems to stick together a lot more so its much more overwhelming and challenging.

A lot of people are taking about these capture points so I might actually have a go at trying to win them and stick some fast frigates in the fleet?

Both strategies are valid. At the same time, both strategies have their own weaknesses in this new "meta" of AI officer spam. Capturing the buoys pretty much always mean that you have a temporary parity in deployment points if you overdeploy frigates, but that parity evaporates very quickly because its really hard to bring down any cruiser+ ships with just frigates and the AI death ball just retakes buoys.

44
General Discussion / Re: The game became too hard
« on: April 06, 2021, 11:55:26 AM »

My biggest problem is with enemy officers - not only they reduce your DP to 160 but they also greatly improve survivability of smaller ships and with carriers not nearly as strong as in the previous patch you can't get rid of them quickly. That way my capitals are always distracted and can't focus on larger ships. Smaller ships then surround my larger ships and I'm dead.

I think there is a problem with having to deal with too many officers with the combination of both impact mitigation and the shield perk - the emergent "meta" is a significant nerf has been made to ballistic HE weapons. The combination of both skills really skews the need for high shield damage & high damage/shot weapons. It's a significant meta change in favor of heavy blasters due to its fast projectile speed and high dmg/shot and its ability to still damage shields. In contrast, ballistic HE weapons are less effective because you need to now deal more shields and, even when you get through to the hull, lower dmg/shot ballistics HE like mortars and chaingun, and assault gun are significantly less effective due to the armor boost from impact mitigation.

Quote
I also tried to focus on Tempests / Medusas rather than capitals, but to win I had to capture and hold all the map points which proved to be very difficult with late game fleets as they just moved to comm relay in one big deathball, I couldn't stop them, lost the point, they deployed more ships and overwhelmed my fleet.

I've not had trouble capturing the buoys, but I agree holding the buoys are more difficult given that a lot of early deployment are devoted to frigates in order to capture those buoys in the first place. The result of this "meta" is that the I needs to deploy frigates early, capture as many buoys as possible, and aggressively bring down the number of enemies before those buoys are lost and I can no longer reinforce.

I'm not sure if this is a change for better or for worse from a gameplay standpoint. On the one hand, it's been really fun playing against the clock every battle to try and win before I lose a war of attrition and lose my numbers advantage from holding no buoys. On the other hand, it is frustrating sometimes to always be on a timer in these fights and sometimes even losing a battle completely purely because the buoys are deployed closer to the center of the map.

45
General Discussion / Re: Frigates and overnerfed Sparks
« on: April 06, 2021, 11:26:30 AM »
I've actually found that frigates are easier to kill than ever.

Now it's true that the tools you mentioned have been nerfed into the ground. Drover spam no longer works. Personally, I also don't think beam was ever an effective option in both 0.91 and 0.95 because the AI will usually disengage to vent before the beam can kill the frigate. But My favorite 0.91 strategies for dealing with frigates, twin locusts on a conquest with all the missile damage perks, also no longer works because the +50% missile damage perk is now gone and a single salvo of two locusts no longer kills all frigates.

However,  so many other tools are now available. All of the safety override ships that can absolutely menace frigate (even in 0.91) all received a huge buff thanks to the built-in hull mods and energy mastery. You can absolutely menace frigates clusters by killing one after another after another after another all without ever venting. SO aurora is such a beast now that most frigates don't stand a chance - you just burn in and they die. At least pre-0.91 Aurora had to expend a decent portion of your flux to bring down a frigate and made itself vulnerable. Now, in 0.95, it no longer matters because Aurora does so much damage so quickly that any frigate just evaporates.

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