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286

Suggestions / Re: Shield Raised and Lowered Indicator, and Toggle Shields While Paused

« on: March 26, 2015, 12:10:41 AM »

AI's crazy shield use should really be toned down a notch.  I think a cooldown or delay (affecting players too) would be the most realistic way to go rather than just hamstringing their natural AI abilities.  Likewise for fortress shields, it's crazy that an AI can instantly block every shot while never wasting any excess flux. A short cooldown after deactivation (even just 1 second) would bring it in line with what a player can do.

287

General Discussion / Re: Starsector Ship Tiers

« on: March 24, 2015, 01:57:58 PM »

I'm just not seeing the Apogee in T2 in the base game.  It doesn't excel at anything as far as I can tell, and the firepower is definitely lacking.  What kind of configuration makes it T2 worthy?

288

General Discussion / Re: Talk about command points

« on: March 24, 2015, 12:57:31 PM »

lol, you haven't seen a Vigilance fleet with 20+ Vigilances spamming Pilums.

No I haven't, but I think that might be the next gimmick fleet I try out.

Of course, I could also equip my Vigilances with Typhoons and pulse guns.  Or really any missile-dependent configuration.  Gimmick fleets can be fun, but that doesn't really make the Pilum LRMs a favorite weapon.

289

General Discussion / Re: Talk about command points

« on: March 24, 2015, 10:53:54 AM »

If you have more specialized ships then having more CP is really worth it. For example i frequently have a very dedicated pd ship that i have go where ever the most fighters are. I like to make ships that are high Explosive/Kinetic mirrors of each other and always have them pair up for assignments. The assignment system gets a little finicky so it sometimes requires fiddling. If i have an EMP ship like shade or omen i manually have it flank the big mastery ships like dominator or onslaught.

As was mentioned they're invaluable for fighter fleets. If you don't clump on targets then your fighters will be torn to ribbons piece meal. It's also handy to move your carriers to just behind the front lines. Especially now that the pilums range is effectively 7K instead of 10K SU.

You can build a big fleet of balanced ships that are all able to handle themselves in most situations, but sometimes that's not good enough. Like when you start going after combat 10 bounties. In situations like that i really wish i could apply 2 or more commands to the same ship. Like have bunches of long ranged ships harry and then have all my bombers strike them when close to overload but not have my previously harrying ships derp around and fight other things.

You can build a big fleet of ships that can handle any and all comers with minimal CP needs, but it involves exclusively t1 and t2 ships with ideal weapons, meaning that losing even one frigate in that fleet is a pain to recoup.  I do it with a Paragon, 2 Dooms, and some tempests, shades, and afflictors (I find those to all have a very high survival rate).

Anyway, the way the AI works a lot of what you suggested either doesn't work or requires tricky workarounds like grouping/ungrouping to disengage.  For instance, having those paired shield/armor killers is pointless compared to putting shield/armor weapons (or just energy) on the same ship.  Reason being they are both going to fire at once at whatever target they feel like regardless of what you tell them to do, so the net result is the same.  Specializing is more worthwhile when you have a strategy to go with it, put shield killing weapons and then armor killing missiles or emp, or send armor killers against front/no shield targets while you personally keep them occupied, but none of that actually requires CP to be effective.

On an unrelated note, not a fan of Pilums.  Putting those on a ship is like saying "this ship not participating in battle".  They are far less effective 90% of the time than simply having another frigate in the fray.

290

General Discussion / Re: Availability of cruiser class ships

« on: March 24, 2015, 06:27:07 AM »

The Aurora, Apogee, and Doom-class cruisers are all sold EXCLUSIVELY by Tibicena in the Magec system

The Dominator is sold by Sindarin Dictat and Hegemony military markets

The Eagle and Falcon should be available at ANY military market.

The Heron (fast carrier, but cruiser-level) should be Sindarin exclusive.  

The Venture class cruiser/carrier is available from most factions EXCEPT the hegemony.

Feel free to correct me anywhere I'm wrong, I'm going mostly on memory here.

I'm not really a fan of the cruisers in the game myself.  Generally speaking, I would rather use a destroyer for direct firepower, or full on battleship.  Cruisers sit somewhere in between and generally fail at both roles.

291

General Discussion / Talk about command points

« on: March 23, 2015, 07:48:16 AM »

Even with no skill investment, I always seem to have a surplus of command points in every battle.  All battle objectives grant bonus CP and due to the hands-off nature of the tactics system you probably never need to give more than 3 or 4 orders in an entire fight.

This especially makes the advanced tactics skill useless beyond the marine effectiveness bonus (which isn't very useful either), and it makes com relays not worth taking at all.

At this point I think complaining about the hands-off command approach is unlikely to do much good.  At the very least though Com relays need to grant some kind of bonus other than just +3cp, just to make capturing them interesting.

Or maybe I'm wrong and people give a LOT more orders in their playstyle?  I've generally found the most effective thing to do is to place a couple of capture orders on the objectives that actually benefit me (nav becons are especially good), an attack order on an objective where I want the fighting to happen to keep my ships from spreading out too much, and then never issuing another order unless I desperately need to retreat a ship or intercept (which never works anyway).  Maybe one or two more orders if I'm using carriers and fighters, but that's about it.

292

Suggestions / Re: Endgame Money Sink: Pump My Ship

« on: March 23, 2015, 05:19:52 AM »

The CURRENT endgame money sink is buying every weapon and every ship from every port (that sells anything you want ever) just so that you have a CHANCE of getting the ships and weapons you want in decent enough quantities.

If you are flying around in whatever low-tech ships you picked up along the way, that is not endgame.  If your fleet consists entirely of top-tier ships with entire spare fleets of both the same and alternative configurations based wherever you call home, THAT is endgame.

Just thought you should think about where you can go and what you can do now before you try to figure out how to go even further.  As far as end-game money is concerned, I'd like to be able to spend more money to get specific ships instead of buying from randomly generated inventories.  That could become part of a system where I have to maintain my own shipyards and bases, which would be incredibly expensive, but then along with those bases comes a means for making even more money.  As it stands basic trading and bounty-hunting earns money far too quickly.

293

General Discussion / Re: Dual Flack or Heavy Machine gun

« on: March 22, 2015, 01:27:47 AM »

I actually haven't found point defenses to be all that useful in general.  Large ships can eat missiles with shields, and smaller ones don't have enough/big enough slots to actually stop the missiles that would cause them trouble.  Even more pointless against fighters since regular turrets on auto do a fine job of swatting them anyway.

About the only things that I really want to stop with point defenses are Salamander missiles, and the only thing seems to work on those is burst lasers.

Phase ships can benefit, but they don't have the right slots either.

294

Suggestions / Re: Let's talk about ship systems/hullmods

« on: March 21, 2015, 09:01:18 PM »

There are plenty of essential hullmods in the current build.  The speed+manuverability ones are practically a no-brainer on any ship, allowing frigates to outrun and outdodge or cap ships to catch up and aim.  The shield mods too are pretty well-priced, I usually end up sticking at least one of them on every ship, and it's not always the same one.

Not every mod is useful for its price of course, or at all, so there's some room for adjustment, but the system is good.

Subsystems are probably the most integral part of a ship's identity.  I don't think being able to change those would be all that good an idea unless we are talking about a system for designing a fully custom ubership, which probably isn't that good an idea itself.  Maybe some of the mods could add an ADDITIONAL active ability, but that means more controls to worry about.

As far as for joining a faction in the future, it could give you access to unique ships and weapons not available to outsiders even with high rep.  It could also make finding the ships and weapons you want from that faction easier, giving you access to the shipyards and blueprints to order them.  Actually that's another feature I would like to see, some way to order the exact ship and weapons I want instead of checking back every couple weeks for a chance they restocked it (and buying out everything I don't want to increase the odds).

295

Suggestions / Re: More Weapon Group settings

« on: March 21, 2015, 01:46:44 AM »

I'm looking for a bit more BASIC functionality in weapon groups, rather than AI options.

As it currently stands, each weapon can only be in one group at a time, and only one weapon group can be selected at a time.  This poses a problem when you sometimes want to fire just your forward hardpoint guns, but ALSO want to combine the hardpoints with forward turrets and/or missiles against larger targets.

Simply being able to place a weapon in multiple different groups would solve the majority of my problems here.

Another problem is combining turrets with hardpoints in general.  Turrets combine well with each other already.  If you are clicking somewhere where one of your selected turrets cannot fire, it will not fire, which is good behavior.  It WOULD be nice if I could make the unused turret shoot another target when necessary, but that would be a headache to set up.  HOWEVER, hardpoint weapons ALWAYS fire when you click, regardless of where you are aiming.  if I combine turrets with a hardpoint group in order to focus-fire my guns, I can only use those turrets at forward targets or else I waste tons of flux.

My recommendation for this problem is to create a toggle, "always fire" vs "selective fire".  Under the "always fire" setting, all guns in the group will fire on click, no matter where they are aiming.  With selective fire, only guns that are currently pointed relatively close to your mouse pointer will fire on click.  The targetting should not be EXACT, sticking the mouse between both onslaught fixed guns should fire both of them, but I shouldn't fire either one when clicking the side of the ship.

One more minor complaint is that when not selected or autofiring, turrets slowly return to a default position.  This is very frustrating when I want to quickly fire torpedoes off my Paragon for instance, but the turrets are all aimed in completely different directions so I have to wait 3 seconds between switching and firing.

There are two possible solutions to this.  Either make all turrets not on auto follow the mouse pointer regardless of what weapon group is selected, or after deselecting them make them remain in their last position indefinitely, allowing me to pre-aim them before combat.

296

Suggestions / Capture too RNG, suggestions.

« on: March 17, 2015, 06:23:29 PM »

I'm sure it's already been talked about to death, from what I've read SS+ increases the chances and I've read some rumbling that the system might be due an overhaul.  Since I'm new though and ship capture has been my number 1 gripe about the currently implemented content, I wanted to detail some of my thoughts on improving the system WITHOUT simply increasing RNG chances.

As it currently exists in game, in order to capture a ship you need to

• Find that ship in an enemy fleet (RNG)
• Disable that ship and win the battle
• NOT completely destroy the ship
• Chance the enemy powers back up any ship(RNG)
• Chance they power up the specific ship (RNG)
• Chance of boarding/capture success (RNG with critical failure)

Basically there are 4 separate RNG mechanics working against you.  If you want to capture any specific non-common ship without savescumming, you need on order of 1 in 10,000 rng luck

So lets break down each RNG component and see how we can put more player agency on that factor, rather than simply bumping up the chances:
Finding the ship
Increase the information available to the player before he can see the enemy fleet.  For military ships, this could be a good function for the secure comm relay (sniffer).  With a sniffer in place, fleets for that faction could display their full composition on the map screen.  For pirates, bounties could be expanded to provide some more information, which would also go a long way to help those people who don't think fighting onslaught bounties is worth it.

Chance of ship powering up
This can be improved with specialized weapons and skills.  Perhaps EMP damage can be expanded to disable ships with higher power levels, or additional damage types could be invented.  This could also work in reverse, where the base chance is raised significantly but say, explosive damage drastically reduces the capture chance.

Further, the location of damages to the hull can affect this stat. Targetting the engines specifically and doing a majority of your damage there could increase the probability, or perhaps simply a surgical strike where all the damage is concentrated in any single section of the ship.

Chance the specific ship powers up
In the current implementation, only one ship per combat has a chance to enable boarding.  This could be eliminated entirely, allowing the enemy a chance (based on the above) to attempt to flee with any or all ships disabled.  Then the player can be given a choice of which ships he wants to board, even allowing boarding of multiple ships at the same time (requiring a different boarder ship for each one).

Chance of boarding/capture success
This could be improved based on the number and type of crew/marine sent over to board, as well as a new skill governing boarding, as well as (with the above) the number of ships you attempt to board at the same time.  When using hard-dock, the class of ship used for docking could also impact this result.  Special troop-transport boarding ships could be put in the game to facilitate easier boarding

Boarding with too many OR too few troops should decrease your chance of success.  A large boarding party may be slower than a small one, giving the enemy time to self destruct, or else damaging the ship unnecessarily with overkill.  The type of ship used for boarding and the size of the target ship can both impact this, how many connecting points on the hull can troops be inserted?


The end result should be that a player who does NOT specifically intend to board and capture ships has roughly the same probability of capturing any random ship as they currently do, but one who DOES intend to capture ships could have better than 50/50 odds of taking their desired ship intact, if they play the combat right.