Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
Just since I'm not sure people say so often enough - seriously, you do amazing work. The content you produce is consistently far above par - interesting and well-balanced mechanics, superb art that still manages to stay faithful to the vanilla Starsector look, and all in several quite-distinct flavors of awesome. And - pretty fantastic support for us fans, as well. Thanks so much for making an already-favorite game so much more so!
I'm flattered. But to be fair, the artwork is mostly not mine; MesoTroniK, HELMUT, Psiyon, Shellster, and Tartiflette have contributed.
You probably have a sound card that doesn't support the increased number of sound channels. Go ahead and redownload; I reverted that particular change.
Oddly enough, now that I've updated to SS+ 2.4, the ambient music in space plays but as soon as I dock somewhere the music stops; the station music never starts, and in fact from then on the music system never works again (and the game hangs on exit, to boot.) I am using the mayorate mod that adds some music but I didn't see any issues at all with SS+ 2.3. Weird! I'll test in a minute and disable everything but SS+ to see if it happens with the stock music as well.
So no issues with SS+ 2.4 and the stock music (of course.) Like a total rube I just added twiglib, SCY, and the mayorate earlier today, and then promptly updated everything else (Imperium, Templars, version checker, shaderlib) so it's a big pain to figure figure out all the combinations. However, rolling SS+ back to 2.3 fixes the issue. Disabling all mods except SS+ 2.4 (and shaderlib/lazylib of course) fixes the issue. Interestingly enough, just disabling the mayorate does NOT solve the problem, so it's something else. More results to follow.
Oddly enough, now that I've updated to SS+ 2.4, the ambient music in space plays but as soon as I dock somewhere the music stops; the station music never starts, and in fact from then on the music system never works again (and the game hangs on exit, to boot.) I am using the mayorate mod that adds some music but I didn't see any issues at all with SS+ 2.3. Weird! I'll test in a minute and disable everything but SS+ to see if it happens with the stock music as well.
Hmm. I'm hesitant to open the can of worms that is a configurable AI - yeah, you might say it's just this one thing, but it never is, is it?
In this particular case, too, I like "response to order" better as a solution. Civ ships generally have such poor base stats that even a "combat" loadout isn't going to be great in the general case, so their use in close quarters seems more situational anyway.
QuoteLore-wise it's electronic warfare (you don't even need "hacking" or anything so fancy - just massive jammers, aerosol clouds to break tight-beam comms, targeted saturation of detectors, electromagnetic effects setting up resonance effects in reactors, etc.) It's charged particulate clouds clogging up navigational deflectors, inductive heating effects overloading life support environmental controls, sparring radioactive decay inhibitors, clouds of dirt-cheap transponder beacons that make targeting computers work harder, whatever - the million and one tricks that ships have for making their enemies' lives harder and their own less so.Aerosol and charged particulate clouds would need to be delivered by some kind of missile, would disperse relatively rapidly with little effort, and would likely cause little difficulty for either side. Induction heating on ship heating and electromagnetic effects setting up some kind of resonance in the reactor(s) seem difficult to use offensively without becoming weapons with EMP damage and are more in the nature of 'design flaws already covered by peak performance time and CR degredation,' not electronic warfare. Cheap transponder beacons to mess around with targeting ... remind me again why we don't have some kind of real sensor, even a passive thermal imager since we're clearly close enough that light crosses the distances separating the ships nearly instantaneously, in the targeting system and are instead relying on our opponent to kindly keep their transponders active and honest during the engagement? Targeted attacks on detectors almost certainly requires close range, in which case the use of heavier weapons is likely to have a more significant and more permanent impact, and may have difficulty getting through the shields with adequate strength to cause harm. Massive jamming is likely already the rationale for the limited view range in the command view, probably isn't sufficiently powerful to cause actual system degradation, and if it were sufficiently powerful it'd hit the ship producing the jamming first and hardest.
The proposed zone of influence thing seems way more complicated than necessary or worthwhile.
I guess I don't get what's so complicated about "each ship has a big power circle around it, and if your ship is under too much more enemy circle power than friendly, your ship's stats get weaker."
Don't make it hard to beat an entire fleet with a frigate because you just can't do it fast enough - make it hard to do because that fleet can drag you down and rip you apart.
Mh, I think that's just what would happen with a battle timer - the inferior fleet woul start losing CR, get slower and then be "ripped apart". Just with a simpler, less exploitable mechanic behind it.
If ships had zones about them players would just be motivated to seperate them from each other. Then you would have to make the zones bigger...Mh...you could actually say battle time is about the same as your idea, just with map-sized zones.
