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31

Bug Reports & Support / 0.9a RC10 - In the Producers/Consumers panel, Colonies shows a +1 null bonus

« on: November 27, 2018, 04:50:39 PM »

The bonus itself isn't counted, but still listed:

Spoiler

[close]

I've sent the save to your email in case it's needed.

In addition, this is the same save with the Neutron Star and K-Class star with the habitable planet if that is worth looking into you can find that here:

Spoiler

[close]

Finally, in the simulator I'm only able to deploy 80 points worth of fleet, maybe it's counting all of the ships in the simulator against my current fleet size to determine deployment points?

32

Bug Reports & Support / 0.9a RC10 - Binary Orange & Neutron Star has habitable Desert Planet

« on: November 26, 2018, 03:04:00 AM »

Just came across this:

Spoiler

[close]

Seems to be perfectly fine however:

Spoiler

[close]

Seems that the Neutron Star is orbiting around the K-Star as well; so perhaps the engine only looks at the main star when considering habitable planets?

I'm not an Astrophysicist, but Neutron Stars should be more massive than a K-Class Star (Orange: 0.8 solar masses) or G-Class Star (Yellow: eg our sun) with a minimum mass of 1.4 solar masses... so it just seems odd to have a Neutron star orbiting the K-Star rather than the other way around.

33

Bug Reports & Support / 0.9a RC10 - Luddic Path - Tithe only applies to single fleet (by design?)

« on: November 23, 2018, 11:05:43 PM »

Not sure if this is intended, so perhaps this isn't a bug; but paying the tithe to a Luddic Path fleet only applies to that single fleet, even if there are multiple fleets with in sensor range; those fleets will then accost you (immediately after paying the first fleet) and also demand a tithe.

This all happened in a system that is newly controlled by the Luddic Path (should of colonized that planet when the system was free of them...).

34

Bug Reports & Support / 0.9a RC10 - Tutorial mission - missing pirates guarding the jump point

« on: November 23, 2018, 05:39:15 PM »

On starting a new game (advanced start), I found that the pirates were missing at the jump portal that needed stabilizing (so I had just completed the salvaging quest and refitted the ships I wanted to hold onto).

Suspiciously a security detachment flies by as I approach the portal.....

I've sent the savegame to you...simply load it and head directly to the portal that needs stabilization.

35

Bug Reports & Support / 0.9a RC10 - Safety Procedures level 3 also reduces penalty on Converted Hangar

« on: November 21, 2018, 08:17:42 PM »

Not sure if this is by design, so perhaps this may be the wrong place to put it.

I haven't done extensive testing, just noticed that the Tooltip had changed to reflect the -50% reduction in penalty that Safety Procedures level 3 gives to d-mods (ie it's showing a 17% reduction in fighter speed, 25% reduction in damage).

EDIT:
I should add another thing I noticed just in case.  Using direct retreat on my Paragon caused it to drop the shields and keep them down.  I noticed this on an actual fight (which I reloaded), but just trying it now it happens in the battle simulator as well.

36

Bug Reports & Support / 0.9a RC10 Autofit profile not correctly applying capacitors and vents

« on: November 20, 2018, 07:11:24 PM »

I've got a Sunder equipped with 14 capacitors & 15 vents, which I saved as a Autofit profile.  

Profile description correctly lists the number of capacitors & vents, but on loading the profile for a new ship I find that I have 22 vents & 7 capacitors.  Deleting and recreating the profile doesn't seem to help here (Upgrade weapons using extra OP is unticked, but I don't have any spare OP regardless).

Oh I just checked and it looks like Autofit isn't even respecting the vent & capacitor count of the built-in profiles.  Granted, the extra 10% OP bonus changes things, but In all the built-in profiles for the Sunder it seems to downgrade the number of capacitors from what is specified eg:

Default Sunder "Assault" profile listed vent  & capacitor count:
Capacitors: 11
Vents: 20

Default Sunder vents & capacitors, after application of "Assault" profile:
Capacitors: 7
Vents: 24
+"Reinforced Bulkheads" hull mod to make up the OP difference.

37

Suggestions / Sensors and going dark

« on: July 16, 2018, 05:00:16 PM »

Well two things in mind, the first is simpler:

1) I find it hard to figure out exactly how a large a sensor profile 82 units might be if I'm hiding in a ring system for example.  If you don't want to add clutter to the main screen, would you consider making these radius's visible via a toggle; eg click on "Sensor Range" to toggle seeing the actual radius of the sensors, click on "Detection Range" to toggle your current detection radius.

2) The Second idea is more to do with making stealth, aka "Going Dark" and hiding in an asteroid ring/nebula/etc confer advantages on the one doing the hiding.  The idea I had was pretty basic, but was to use your current "Detection Range" to give you a bonus of some sort against the enemy that finds you.

eg, with these examples the better your stealth signature, the higher the bonus:

hiding in Asteroids (don't mind the numbers I pulled out of thin air):
+5% to +20% damage reduction to your hiding fleet for the duration of the battle.

hiding in the ring sytem of a gas giant with a strong magnetic field:
+5% to +20% damage reduction (like the asteroids).
-20% to -5% flux capacity (the idea here is that fighting in a strong magnetic field affects both your fleets energy systems whether you are hiding or not, but you can mitgate this penalty by spending the time optimizing systems as the enemy fleet searches for you).

hiding in a nebula:
-20% to -5% reduction in weapons range.

I'm sure something much better can be done than my idea here, but I would like to see some sort of combat advantages to going stealth and hiding using the terrain (rather than the usual wishful thinking of hoping that an enemy fleet wont spot you).

38

Suggestions / Bribing pirates with money and/or cargo as another option for pirate encounters

« on: July 15, 2018, 12:44:01 AM »

I've recently lost several iron-man games in a row, of which in the latest I didn't even manage to get past the tutorial system.

Those 2 separate detachments guarding the jump gate that the tutorial guy seems to think you can defeat as a whole is rather severly optimistic.  Alright...if I'm honest I didn't have the entire D-class fleet with me since with the previous game I lost I was barely keeping up with the supply cost, so thought I would give myself some breathing room....plenty of room in the cold dark of space, not much to breathe....

So far the biggest threat in the iron man games to me are the unexpected massive pirate fleets I come across, giving me little to no time to disengage...and retreat is basically worthless; you are treated to watching your supply/fuel ships being popped, which in deep space is as sure as a death sentence.

The prior game I lost to this one I was on my second bounty hunt mission so very much had the initial fleet that you get from the tutorial (well I upgraded the Condor to a Drover and bought a Phaeton tanker, but otherwise stock), where I was ambushed by a fleet consisting of 1xMora, 4xFalcon's and a whole heap of other destroyers and frigates....it was easily a walk over, I couldn't even retreat what ships remained or even my supply ships after that.

Argh, I may of had this game for a while, but it is clear I'm not very good at it.  I would however love the possibility of at least being able to bribe the pirates with very large fleets relative to myself to leave me alone when it is clear engaging in combat will be certain death.  Perhaps with the new version just on the horizon this will be less of a problem, but I still think it would be reasonable if pirates demanded a tribute in some form first rather then jumping straight to hostilities.

39

Suggestions / Possibility of instantaneous transfer of command to your AI controlled ships?

« on: January 19, 2018, 09:20:14 PM »

I've bought this up in another post a while ago, but not as the main subject.  I think though as a novice so there are probably good reasons as to why this isn't an option; so I guess this post is also for my own education, but I have a few ideas about how to implement it. 

- Alow instantaneous transfer of command to any AI controlled ship (no shuttle, basically a long range VR system), so the ship loses the captain's bonuses as it does now.
- Alow instantaneous transfer of command to any AI controlled ship, but have it cost command points and possibly have a time limit after which you are dropped automatically back to your own ship.
- Make instantaneous transfer of command a learnable skill (eg VR implants), possibly have time limits on it to balance it like the above.

Any better idea's? or should it be left as it is?

Would be great to hear your reasoning, thanks!

40

Suggestions / Making the Combat skills a little more important

« on: May 01, 2017, 01:03:22 AM »

I'm not a fan of the combat tree, as it's benefits mostly only apply to your current driven ship.  Other hired officers can easily get the same abilities as you, and so while this tree might be useful to your piloted ship, I found it preferable to invest my points in other abilities which would have an influence over the whole of the fleet.

Rather than buff the current combat tree, how about making the officers under our command, have their skill effectiveness depend on whether we have the same ability unlocked or not?

The penalty could be a simple -% modifier on the current officer's skill

For example my officer has Powergrid Modulation Level 2, but I only have Level 1 unlocked.  Assuming say a -50% reduction for skills I don't have.

Officer's current points in Powergrid Modulation (Level 2):

Before:
Level 1 - Flux +10%
Level 2 - +25% Flux dissipation rate while venting

After:
Level 1 - Flux +10%
Level 2 - +12.5% Flux dissipation rate while venting (-50% effectiveness due to having an unskilled commander)

It is basically a nasty nerf (at least early game); but I think it would definitely help pry a few points out of me to put in the combat tree.

41

Suggestions / Marine - Live combat boarding

« on: March 02, 2016, 08:50:11 PM »

I started thinking about this in the "crew mechanic" post and I really like the idea of using marines in a more active role during the real-time combat.

The idea is simple, allow marines to be launched via shuttle (or some other transport means, perhaps even have dedicated "breaching" ships) so that they can board enemy ships to carry out missions (sabotage weapons/systems, capture ship).

This I feel will add an interesting tertiary combat method for victory (ship->ship combat, fighter->ship combat and marine->ship combat).  Suddenly those large troop transport ships become a lot more useful in combat for large protracted battles against hardened battleships, where you are going to need a lot of marines in order to disable targets or capture them.

Obviously missions to capture ships would be the most difficult (risk aside from being shot down en route), but it does reward persistence and more tactical play (I was thinking an anti-personal weapon type for ships could help soften up enemy ships by killing their marines/crew), and being able to focus your efforts on the ship you wish to capture would be pretty cool (rather than having a random chance that the ship you want comes up post-battle).

I think the tactical possibilities are pretty good.  Send marines in fast shuttles to disable escort ship weapon systems so that you can then send in slower larger troop ships (perhaps something like that dedicated breaching ship) to attempt to capture or disable it's lethal armament so that you can move in your ships to finish it off.

Of course you will have to deal with the same problems, so protecting yourself with dedicated anti-personal gunships, or point defense weapons becomes a higher priority.

EDIT:

Ignore this post, I'll delete it after you all have had a bit of a laugh (since I didn't read the frequently made suggestions!)

42

Suggestions / Crew mechanic ideas

« on: March 01, 2016, 02:10:01 AM »

Rather than comment on the build thread, I thought I would start up a new thread to talk about ideas that might work instead of the current crew promotion mechanic as Alex is thinking of removing this feature.

I do like having some sort of crew mechanic (I always build reinforced bulk-heads to protect them), but I know that the value of their contribution is fairly small, so I was actually hoping that they would become more important in some form so that hull-mods like "reinforced bulk-heads" are a better choice.

To the idea...

Now it doesn't really make sense that officers have all these fancy skills; They might be good at one thing, but as an officer, I would imagine that most of what makes them great is utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of the crew below them to operate an effective command.

Why not have it so that officers require crew to be assigned to them in order to function.  Those crew would need time to acclimatize to the officers routines and idiosyncrasies, so when assigning a new officer to a ship, the newly assigned crew might apply a -50% modifier to that officers abilities (and the same penalty to their experience). 

Slowly with time and battle experience that negative modifier would drop down to 0% giving the ship the full benefit of the officers skills, with normal experience progression.

If sufficient numbers of your crew dies, perhaps you might lose some of those crew members working closest to the commander; and so a few new slots open up, creating a new -% modifier by averaging the overall experience of the older more experienced crew with the newer recruits required to fill the gap of those that died while being assigned to that officer.

In addition have the number of crew required by that officer scale with the ship crew size. 

An officer may only need 15 crew assigned to them to function at 100% with the wolf; but assign them to the onslaught and suddenly they need another 500 crew to function.  This has the side effect that the officer needs time to work with the new crew and ship systems to get back up to 100% efficiency; this means that transferring officers to new commands is a fairly painful process.  I'm not sure if this will be a good thing or a bad thing.

I would expect that having more crew on a larger ship command would take longer for an officer to get comfortable and to be able to push his/her crew to their maximum, but perhaps this -50% penalty could require the same time & combat experience in order to get back up to 100% regardless of the assigned crew size in order to simplify things.

I also like the idea of crew having a small chance to be promoted to an officer if that ship is currently not under command; though that will probably complicate things...as would the idea of having multiple officers..so I'll leave that for now

Oh and I had an even more complicated idea, we could assign crew to the actual skills that the officer has currently learned so that the penalty only affects the new skill which has a fresh crew assigned to it. (this means your officer will need more crew assigned to them as their skills and experience grows); but I think this might be time consuming to implement.

I'm certain there are others with better ideas out there, so feel free to share!

43

General Discussion / Armour revisited

« on: November 28, 2015, 12:21:12 AM »

I thought I might move this topic to here (since I started thinking about it after posting in suggestions).  After a bit of digging I found that damage is actually applied to 21 squares (instead of the 8 as implied by the wiki):

Armor calculation is actually based on the ship image, not the bounds. The bounds are used to determine whether a hit is registered, but armor is done by examining the alpha transparency of the pixels in the ship's image. Your total number of pixels > 0.5 alpha determines your "total armor area." Each pixel is grouped into a larger grid of armor, with each grid section tracking its own armor value.

All you'll accomplish with overlapping bounds is potentially double-hitting (though I doubt that's possible either).

Slight correction - there are actually armor "cells" outside the ship bounds, you just can't see them. So, it's not per-pixel based, just based on the grid. Each hit damages 21 cells around the hit location, like so:

 OOO 
OOOOO
OOXOO
OOOOO
 OOO

Where the 'X' is the location of the impact - based on the ship's bounds. A weighted average of the armor in these cells is used to determine the "effective armor rating" which then mitigates the damage dealt.

I'm wondering if when i'm seeing armour and hull damage at the same time, what i'm actually seeing is the total damage of the cells that are depleted of armour (the red text) and the total damage of the cells still with armour (yellow text) in this 21 square grid surrounding the point of impact.

Is this correct, are we dealing with 1/21th of the armour in each of these 21 cells and when we see both red and yellow floating damage we are seeing squares with different levels of damage?

Oh and just in case, this formula:
Damage multiplier = weapon damage/(armor + weapon damage)

that is definitely correct?

Thanks!

44

Suggestions / Hull mod suggestion for Hardened Shields and Blast Doors

« on: November 27, 2015, 07:51:49 PM »

Hull mod suggestion 1 "Hardened Shields":
It seems to be priced a bit too expensive for what it actually does (I've tried using this hullmod quite a bit, but it never seems to be worth the cost).

For example, a Medusa has an excelent shield that converts damage -> flux at a rate of *0.6
If we then add hardened shields we can reduce the flux/damage ratio down to *0.45, but it costs 12 Ordinance to employ this mod.

Now let us hit the shields with different weapons:

Tachyon Lance (2249 Damage, ignoring EMP):
2249 * 0.6 = 1349 Flux generated (i'm not sure if this is right, since it is technically a beam weapon, maybe the flux could be less?)
2249 * 0.45 = 1012 Flux generated

Heavy Blaster (500 Damage):
500 * 0.6 = 300 Flux generated
500 * 0.45 = 225 Flux generated

The situation improves for low efficiency shields though; for example with the Sunder:

Tachyon Lance (2249 Damage, ignoring EMP):
2249 * 1.2 = 2699 Flux generated
2249 * 0.9 = 2024 Flux generated

Heavy Blaster (500 Damage):
500 * 1.2 = 600 Flux generated
500 * 0.9 = 450 Flux generated

Still 12 Ordinance points, 120 additional flux dissipation or 2400 more flux capacity is quite a significant tradeoff.

We could fix this by decreasing the cost, or increasing it's efficiency, but I also thought it might be a cool idea to have the hullmod instead reduce a single type of damage like kinetic, down from 200% to 100% or even 75% depending on balance.

Hull mod Suggestion 2 "Blast Doors":
I will just start by saying, I utilize these in all of my ships; I like to preserve the life of crew members on my vessels and i'm rewarded by a larger pool of more experienced crew as a result.  But it is a pretty expensive hullmod and I think it's pretty easy to treat crew members as disposable (especially later in the game). 

I think with how much money is going around in mid-late game, I would like to see experienced crew cost *significantly* more to recruit (Veterans costing 10x or more the cost they are at now).  In addition increase the fatality rate on damaged ships, or at least the threshold at which this comes into effect. 

For example losing 50 Elite crew on a significantly damaged Falcon is going to cost you $50,000 to replace (I'm not sure if you can purchase Elite crew...but assuming we purchase 50 new veterans @ $1000 each).  With blast doors and an officer with damage control we could of reduced this down to 13 (assuming it works 50 crew members * 0.5 (blast doors) * 0.5 (damage control) = 12.5) a cost of $13,000 to replace.

Other:
There are also some other hullmods which I can't seem to find a good use for, but that is probably due to the way I play (and i'm still learning!):

Integrated Point Defence AI - Seems to be a bit of a liability as your high damage weapons are constantly being distracted by tiny missiles (SRM's, Annihilators..)

Augmented Engines - I used these quite a bit in the previous version, but with the new sensor mechanic, the penalties are rather extreme, considering you can just use Unstable injectors for better effect (though without the burn bonus)

Heavy Armour - Pretty expensive for a fixed amount of armour; more valuable for weakly armoured ships, but those ships seemed to benefit more often by distributing ordinance points elsewhere.  Perhaps changing this to a % improvement might make this a bit better.  For example Hound's have 400 stock armour, I can add an extra 100 armour by choosing 'heavy armour' for 8 points; or add an extra 40 armour by choosing Armoured weapon mounts for 3 points which gives me better weapon protection and I don't lose out on ship manuverability which could be considered a better tradeoff to the slower turret tracking.

Front Shield Generator - Seems a bit of a liability since those ships that don't have shields tend to be heavily armoured instead.  With this equipped on a hound, you are going to have a bad day as that hound will avoid taking damage to it's hull, only to end up overloaded and vulnerable in battle.  Perhaps if the AI for hounds would only put up the shield for serious threats to damage, it may be useful.  Alternatively making it much more efficient might help make these useful.

Solar Shielding - This is new, so i'm not sure what this is about.  It sounds pretty cool if we might be visiting systems that have serious radiation problems (black hole acretion disc, neutron stars, etc).  At the moment though, I guess that 10% damage reduction from beam weapons helps a bit, but it doesn't really seem worth it at the moment.

For most of the rest i've found them useful at one time or another, but it helps that they tend to be cheaper then the above hullmods.

45

General Discussion / Universal medium slot on Heron can not be equipped with smaller weapons?

« on: January 05, 2015, 09:42:47 PM »

Just wondering if this is by design, or if it is actually something that needs to be fixed.  I can select only medium weapons to put in the "medium universal turret" socket on the Heron I have (I have no other ships with universal medium sockets to see whether this happens to other ships).

Cheers!