Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

1366

Suggestions / Re: A Re-Design of Ship Destruction, Boarding, and Salvage

« on: October 09, 2015, 01:19:43 AM »

Details easily figured out. In answer to your specific questions: Sometimes; no; no; it immediately switches to your side and you have to make it run to safety; no; yes but its at almost no CR so you can't really fight with it; crew is transferred, some changes to crew mechanic are needed.

Yes this could also be done by having one, very simple dialog after battle where you can decide to capture as many ships as you want with 1-2 clicks each (no options about shuttles which are a waste of time in a game of this scale)

The reason for having it in combat is that it creates actual different objectives in combat. It's another thing you can order your AI ships to do. As I said, combat is uninteresting and repetitive since you're always doing the same thing.

That's great! I can see that working woonderfully.
Now imagine how much work is going to be involved in creating and debugging this behaviour.
Why would you do all that work when you already have something that works perfectly fine in place already?

If shuttles are a waste of time then how do you even start a game? 
Sure they're a pain when you have dozens of them, but there's a thing you see that makes all that clutter go away. That thing is called: Frieghters.
If you're getting annoyed by shuttle clutter it's your own fault for dragging them around everywhere when you just don't need to. You don't need any more than 2 or 3 in a fleet for boarding anyway.

The thing about having boarding in combat is that it is very easy to turn that into some kind of "twitch" mechanic where you are forcing the player to do <thing> in a certain way at a certain time, and that is something I feel needs to be avoided at all costs.
If it's going to be a simple as get close to enemy, launch shuttles, watch progress bar until victory (or not) then that's cool.
If it's going to be a mini game of some kind, or require super reflexes and timing then it would be an utterly horrible experience.

1367

Suggestions / Re: Fighter as a Carrier's weapons

« on: October 09, 2015, 12:53:05 AM »

This is a nice idea.

I find the current implementation of fighters is a pretty decent deterrent from using fighters.
Costs are too high and there's too much micromanagement. I avoid the things because they are just such a pain to manage, even if they are amazingy cool.

I would very much like to see this.

1368

Discussions / Re: Distant Worlds

« on: October 08, 2015, 12:49:13 PM »

Fine. You can keep all the Silvermists then.
Worst thing you can find starting out: An explore event which triggers these things. Potentially even worse if one of the AIs finds it, as it doesn't have the sense the keep ships away from them so they can get overrun by "well fed" mists.
(They multiply whenever they kill something.)

On the flip-side, finding an explore event which gives you a random ship five times bigger than anything you can build and filled with tech you won't see for probabaly decades or longer (and sometimes stuff you can't even research) is quite amusing.
I always want to keep them because they are so awesome, but the sensible and correct thing to do is drag them back to your nearest base and rip them apart to see how they work (and a hefty science bonus).
I also tend to spend quite a lot of time hunting for and salvaging wrecks. There are dozens of the things in the average galaxy, sometimes in huge fields. And they are like pieces of shiny, shiny foil to my primitive magpie brain. I must acquire them. I must.
One of these wreck 'fields' is quite special, and has a very large suprise in the middle of it. You have to work to get hold of it, but damn it's worth the effort....

Explore everything!
Yeah... I love exploring. So much in fact that I use a mod that makes the early hyperdrives slower to make that initial push out into the galaxy last longer.

1369

Suggestions / Re: A Re-Design of Ship Destruction, Boarding, and Salvage

« on: October 08, 2015, 12:07:57 PM »

Here are the problems with current mechanic that need to be addressed:
-The boarding dialog is boring and overcomplicated vs result
-Not getting to choose the ship you board is lame
-Only getting to board one ship is lame.
-But having to go through that boring dialog for multiple ships would be even more boring.
-In a game about fleet battles forcing the player through a separate dialog for every salvage is dubious

I'd just like to chip in with some thought re: your thoughts.

I've never had a problem with the after-action boarding dialog. It serves the purpose perfectly and I feel replacing it with some thrice damned mini game (or some other such thing) would be not only a ton of work, but pretty horrible to actually play. Especially repeatedly.
Sometimes the simple things work the best, and I personally think the minimalist approach we currently have works very well.

However....
Being limited to only a single capture and not being able to choose which ship to board are limitations which make the whole experience quite frustrating. Coupled with the really quite poor rate of success for such activities creates a "perfect storm" of negativity which actively encourages you to not use the feature at all.
SS+ has shown us it is quite possible to string together multiple boarding attempts and make some degree of success not quite so elusive. Still no choice of boarding target, but it's still overall a much more positive experience.
Also, going through multiple boarding dialogs is effortless and takes all of seconds. It is not at all an onerous task.

Would some kind of "boarding in battle" mechanic be fun? Yes, it very probably would be. (It is in Distant Worlds for example.) But how do you accomplish this?
If you're boarding an enemy ship and fail does it explode? Does it carry on attacking you? Does it run away?
What if you succeed? Does the ship just sit there? Does it somehow get converted to your side right there and start fighting it's former comrades? And if so, how do you go about achieving that?
It a lot of work, and for something that doesn't really add anything to the game that isn't already achieved by a simple text dialog which flat out bypasses all those problems.
Dubious? I don't think it is at all. More like a realistic assesment of what is worth spending effort on.

I'm not trying to harsh on you or anything, I would love it if the B-in-B mechanic was a thing. It would mean I could could make the mod I want to make but currently can't because it needs to revolve entirely around it.
But it's something the game just doesn't need.
Maybe sometime in the future though. Maybe....

1370

Discussions / Re: Distant Worlds

« on: October 07, 2015, 12:46:16 PM »

The AI is actually pretty good. You can set everything on automatic and just watch it do a competent job of everything, not awesome but definitely good enough.
It's pretty cool just clicking around and watching all the freighters do thier thing.

The one thing that bugs me, is that there is no terraforming.
Planets have a definite value for how good they are, but that is it. You can't improve it no matter how godlike your technology is.
There is a terraforming facility but his only repairs damage upto to original level, which to be honest was not what I expected at all. And as a primarily building focused player this was a bit disappointing, as I greatly enjoyed cramming as many people as possible onto worlds creating wonderful and prosperous city planets in MoO2.

But yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff to play with.
Except Silvermist. Which are just if you run into them early on.

Also MoO2 is awesome. I still play it now. Sometimes simple is good.

1371

Mods / Re: [0.65.2a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 2.10.0

« on: October 04, 2015, 12:17:41 PM »

You can change the ship systems to regenerate also. (You can have drones regenerate so they're actually useful.)

Regenerating flares don't really affect the ship systems though. Ships with built-in flares don't need them, and all the others have to pay a weapon slot and OP to use them.
It balances itself.

[edit]
Success!

Caught my first mod-ship, and it was the one I had wanted from the start.
On the 3rd attempt I was blessed by the RNG.

Spoiler

It's like a Sunder. But with more missiles, more cargo space, and hearts all over it. It is actually not a bad ship at all. And it's so

[close]

1372

Discussions / Distant Worlds

« on: October 04, 2015, 08:34:00 AM »

http://www.matrixgames.com/products/515/details/Distant.Worlds.-.Universe

This thing eats your time.
As you sit there directing your little empire, building mining stations, chasing off pirates, just watching all the myriad civilian ships go about thier business. You look up and suddenly it is dark outside.
There is just something so engrossing about desgining all the various things you need to get things done, and then going and doing it.
And everything you use in this game can be designed, and tweaked, and customised by you. Everything.
You want dozens of beautiful shiny guns on your space hotels? No problem.
Fighter bays on all your ships to create an endless swarm of bees? Easy.
How about making some ships into huge mobile sensor platforms to spy on your neighbours? Sure, go nuts.

I totally adored Master of Orion, both 1 and 2. And DW hits all the same buttons - you can even pirate enemy ships and either use them yourself or strip them down and learn tech from them, just like MOO2.

tl;dr - Check this game out. It's pretty cool.

I also mashed some things together for my own amusement:

Spoiler

herpderp content butchery is magic

[close]

1373

General Discussion / Re: Recommend similar games?

« on: October 04, 2015, 08:06:34 AM »

Another series of games you might want to look at for building your own fleet are those set in the X Universe.
And when I say build, I mean build. You buy/capture hulls and then must equip them yourself either by buying stuff from AI factories which takes forever, or more likely building your own factories and making all the equipment yourself.
This is lots more fun than it sounds.

X is a one player one ship affair. You can assemble a swarm of fighters from factories you own, but that's it.
X-Tension is the earliest game where you can command any class of ship and build an actual fleet. It is rare as rocking horse s*** so good luck trying to find a copy.
X2: The Threat is the first "all in" fleet simulator with a decent command system and (somewhat) competent AI. I have spend an inordinate amount of my time playing this game and filling the universe with factories.  It is a little quirky due to the auto installer refusing to work on anything past XP. You can just drag everything off the CD patch it up and it works fine though.
X3 and it's many variants/spinoffs are not something I have any experience with, but they look like they are more polished versions of X2. Presumably with actual working installers.

1374

Mods / Re: [0.65.2a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 2.10.0

« on: October 04, 2015, 07:45:14 AM »

I have a small suggestion to make: can the Flare Gun and Flare Burst Launcher have regenerating/reloading ammo a la Sabots?  At first I thoughts these would be pretty useless, but after trying them out I actually quite like them on some ships - but it's awfully hard to justify using an anti-missile weapon that's liable to run out of ammo before the attacker's missiles do.

I've changed these two things to have reloading ammo myself, and I can confirm that they are actually useful and desireable once you no longer have to ration them.

Regenerating flare launchers alone make Wolf(D)s actually useable.

1375

Suggestions / Re: Inventory Management

« on: October 03, 2015, 03:18:51 AM »

The only thing on that list I definitely would like to see is the player holdings list.
Granted there were only a couple of systems not too long ago so something like this was never an issue, but as the sector grows this is going to become more and more of a "must have" feature.

Item stacking though, is a thing that really bugs me.
It is inconsistant.
Sometimes the game will let you pile things up in a stack as big as you like. Sadly, more often it decides that stacks of things can be no more than 1000 and so creates multiples to clutter up the space.
This also affects buying/selling - As it seems that you can only trade 1000 units of anything in one "action" via the slide bar regardless of how many units are available. (This might be intended though.)
Using ctrl-click to buy an entire stack of something will usually separate said stack into blocks of 1000 when it is tranferred to your fleet. But again it's inconsistant. Fuel and supplies almost always get split, while commodities seem to be more likley to remain stacked. But not always.
In your storage you can sometimes stack up huge mounds of things, other times you're back to a wall of 1000s.
Okay, there is infinite item space so functionally this is not an issue. But it looks utterly horrendous and is a never ending trigger for my tidy compulsion which can not be resolved. Ugh. please help

1376

General Discussion / Re: Colors of Starsector

« on: October 03, 2015, 02:48:20 AM »

Why don't you love the Tarsus and Tempest?

1377

General Discussion / Re: ---

« on: October 03, 2015, 02:37:05 AM »

Well, he changed the title and the contents of the post to "---".  Wonder why.  Did he feel embarrassed or something?

Maybe it was the two dozen or so politely worded "NO U" replies that tripped the stropswitch.

re: Faction Identity.
I don't think we have a massive problem as it stands. Sure we could use a bit of a tweak to emphasise certain ships in fleet compositions, but the overall feel of all these groups essentially using whatever they can get hold of does okay.
For example - I don't think I've ever seen a faction Onslaught outside of a neutral or Hegemony fleet. Nor a Conquest outside of a Sindrian or Luddic fleet.
(I'm not counting pirate/bounty fleets.)
All the rest seem to be a mish-mash of whatever was available and not full of holes, which could probably use a bit of tidying up but it's not the sort of thing that really screams PRIORITY.

I wonder if each ship had an entry in the .csv to declare that this ship is high/mid/low/some other category tech, like how some are marked as civilian.
And then use this to build faction fleets by requiring a minimum of x% to be one of those categories.
Not sure if this is something that would be worth the effort (for now) - Adding an extra column to a csv is trivial, but I have no idea about the code side.

1378

Bug Reports & Support / Menu Elements not appearing on screen transition.

« on: October 02, 2015, 03:23:50 AM »

This is the first time I've seen this beahviour and since it was immediately after installing a mod I was under the impression that was the cause.
I've since been told this is a problem with native SS rather than any specific mod.

Ref:

Found something that might need looking at....
Docked at Macau in Magec and got this: http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a224/Tifi78/iamerror_zpsbtpke127.png
The superchill port music was playing, but no menu elements appeared and there was no response at all from the game and it had to be process killed from taskman.

And this is the log that was generated.

Spoiler

4928174 [Thread-11] INFO  sound.O  - Creating streaming player for music with id [TiandongMarketInteractionFriendly.ogg]
4928185 [Thread-11] INFO  sound.OooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  - Playing music with id [TiandongMarketInteractionFriendly.ogg]
4938478 [Thread-5] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.TradeInfoUpdateEvent  - Picking market updates
4938478 [Thread-5] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.TradeInfoUpdateEvent  - Adding Hand Weapons(Macau)
4938496 [Thread-5] WARN  com.fs.starfarer.campaign.rules.oOOO  - Problem with command of class com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.OpenCoreTab: null
java.lang.IllegalStateException
   at java.util.ArrayList$Itr.remove(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.comms.PlayerTransactionLineItemData.øÕ0000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.comms.IntelTabData.performCleanup(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignEngine.super(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignEngine.reportPlayerOpenedMarket(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.D.I.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.D.O00O.showCoreInternal(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.D.O00O.showCore(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.OpenCoreTab.execute(OpenCoreTab.java:39)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.rules.oOOO.execute(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.rules.O0OO.runScript(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.FireBest.applyRule(FireBest.java:97)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.FireBest.execute(FireBest.java:47)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.FireBest.fire(FireBest.java:53)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.RuleBasedInteractionDialogPluginImpl.fireBes t(RuleBasedInteractionDialogPluginImpl.java:110)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.RuleBasedInteractionDialogPluginImpl.optionS elected(RuleBasedInteractionDialogPluginImpl.java:142)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.D.O00O$1.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.D.super.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.thisnew.super(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.H.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.V.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.new.Òôo000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.oOOO.oOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.Ò00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.D.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$2.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

[close]

1379

Mods / Re: [0.65.2a] Tiandong Heavy Industries v1.0.1 - Updated 9/27/15

« on: October 01, 2015, 03:40:07 PM »

[edit]
moved to bug reports

1380

Mods / Re: [0.65.2a] Tiandong Heavy Industries v1.0.1 - Updated 9/27/15

« on: October 01, 2015, 12:58:56 PM »

Off topic here, but the Assault Chaingun is considered mediocre?  What else do you suggest for a brawler-range explosive-damage ballistic weapon? (ex. for an Enforcer)

I generally use heavy maulers if I use an HE medium slot. More commonly I have heavy needlers and either a large HE weapon or missiles. The assault chaingun is problematic because of its spread and tiny per hit damage; it's much better to let a weapon "cool" and fire a somewhat-accurate high-damage shot to the edge of the weapon's range than to fling lots of tiny ones all over space.

^ this.
AC is at best an irritant because it just can't hit hard enough and consistently enough to be a threat to anything capable of movement.
In vanilla SS, if you want to mount a medium ballistic gun with HE damage which isn't a waste of time you have to mount a mauler.

Thinking on it, the Haephestus is really the large version of the AC so it's probably not worth the effort duplicating it unless someone can come up with a fun gimmick for it.
Keeping the not-AC to medium and giving it a short range and higher fire rate with quite a hard hit, but with a cooldown/reload period might be useful? Kind of like a future volley gun.

[edit]

Found something that might need looking at....
Docked at Macau in Magec and got this: http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a224/Tifi78/iamerror_zpsbtpke127.png
The superchill port music was playing, but no menu elements appeared and there was no response at all from the game and it had to be process killed from taskman.
Not seen this before.