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General Discussion / Re: HEF interaction with weapons
« on: Today at 08:20:48 AM »
Thanks for clarification, always good to hear when game mechanics make sense.
Fractal Softworks Forum
- October 03, 2023, 09:18:20 PM
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News:
Starsector 0.96a is out! (05/05/23); Blog post: Wormholes and Sundry - Getting Around the Sector (08/31/23)
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General Discussion / HEF interaction with weapons
« on: Today at 05:56:38 AM »
Or honestly any damage boosting ship system, but HEF (High Energy Focus) is what brought me to this question. To clarify, I'm asking at which point can you activate HEF so that it still affects the gun you're firing. This isn't an issue with most weapons but with Gigacannon I found I'm not 100% sure how it works. I know I could test it myself when I have time to launch the game but I reckon someone might already know the answer here. So in the example of Gigacannon, would activating HEF after the chargeup already begins count as using it in time? I'm pretty sure this is how it works since the projectile is still not out, but it might have some weird interaction since technically you already clicked and "started firing".
Posted this question because I remember always waiting for the sound cue of Gigacannon charge, then hitting HEF to boost the damage. Hopefully I haven't been wasting all those system charges on nothing.
Posted this question because I remember always waiting for the sound cue of Gigacannon charge, then hitting HEF to boost the damage. Hopefully I haven't been wasting all those system charges on nothing.
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Suggestions / Re: UI suggestions
« on: October 02, 2023, 08:21:14 AM »
I'm not even from Poland and I agree that the UI needs a bit work to make it more intuitive and maybe less convoluted. One topic I see often is specifically the window listing all planets, that one is rough.
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Suggestions / Re: Suggestions and Review by a New Player
« on: October 01, 2023, 07:18:10 AM »
Very well written review, especially the formatting part. Some people just write walls of text, this was a lengthy post but incredibly easy to read. I just have to comment on one thing.
Your explanation of mid game is my late game basically - having multiple colonies, capital ships in my fleet, harder bounties and all system interacting with these things, like Hostile Activity, expeditions and so on. On the other hand, your idea of late game is the point where I stop my current playthrough. If I'm earning so much cash, already have a fully built fleet and don't have any problems in any fights, there's hardly a point in continuing unless I want to fool around and curbstomp other factions. Not saying your critique in this part is not valid, I just wouldn't call it "late game". It's basically choosing the option of continuing the playthrough in a normal game where you've already seen the victory screen and now you're just goofing around. Although we could get a chance to call this phase the true late game when the devs implement a true end challenge to finish up the playthrough.
Oh and btw, have you completed the main menu combat tutorials before the campaign? You mentioned piloting being really hard, and I get that since some start up the campaign without ever flying a ship on their own. I really wish the game would teleport you to the combat tutorial if it detects you never completed the main menu ones. Or, even better, just integrate the main menu ones at the beginning of the campaign with an option to skip them if someone wants to play the tutorial but knows how to pilot a ship.
Your explanation of mid game is my late game basically - having multiple colonies, capital ships in my fleet, harder bounties and all system interacting with these things, like Hostile Activity, expeditions and so on. On the other hand, your idea of late game is the point where I stop my current playthrough. If I'm earning so much cash, already have a fully built fleet and don't have any problems in any fights, there's hardly a point in continuing unless I want to fool around and curbstomp other factions. Not saying your critique in this part is not valid, I just wouldn't call it "late game". It's basically choosing the option of continuing the playthrough in a normal game where you've already seen the victory screen and now you're just goofing around. Although we could get a chance to call this phase the true late game when the devs implement a true end challenge to finish up the playthrough.
Oh and btw, have you completed the main menu combat tutorials before the campaign? You mentioned piloting being really hard, and I get that since some start up the campaign without ever flying a ship on their own. I really wish the game would teleport you to the combat tutorial if it detects you never completed the main menu ones. Or, even better, just integrate the main menu ones at the beginning of the campaign with an option to skip them if someone wants to play the tutorial but knows how to pilot a ship.
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Suggestions / Re: battlegroups
« on: October 01, 2023, 02:53:15 AM »
Press F, the command is "Watch video feed" or something. Honestly it's one of like 5 things you can press for a singular ship and even the tutorial shows you how do to this. Experiment a bit lol.
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Suggestions / Re: battlegroups
« on: October 01, 2023, 02:17:34 AM »
You already can. Select multiple ships, press CTRL+X number, and then pressing that number will select all ships from the group. So it works just like in RTS games.
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Fan Media & Fiction / Re: Recording games/battles
« on: September 28, 2023, 11:48:48 PM »
If you have an NVidia graphics card you should have Shadowplay. Probably doesn't have as much as options as dedicated capture software but this one is free and already comes with your graphics card installed unless you have AMD or Intel.
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General Discussion / Re: How has the allied AI gotten more antagonistically dumb?
« on: September 27, 2023, 09:56:27 AM »
Every time I see someone claiming "AI is worse than before" in each new patch, I suggest they play older versions a bit. Unless a new bug emerges, AI keeps getting better, it's just that players sometimes have unrealistic expectations. Like from your post, you seem to order your ships a lot and assume it works like an RTS but you still want that independence so they don't die stupidly. Maybe just try giving less orders? AI can handle equal fights just fine, unless you're up against something brutal, in 90% of scenarios there is hardly a need to micromanage your ships. That 10% is left for giving Eliminate commands and pulling ally ships out of overextended positions.
Also it's unreal how many players think the enemy AI has some sort of an advantage. They're literally the same, this isn't a shooter where the enemy has aimbots lol.
Vast majority of AI rant threads end up being loadout issues, fleet composition, or not understanding how orders work with AI in this game (which is fair since it's honestly not super intuitive). I assure you there ain't some special scripted stupid juice that made your fleet's AI suddenly derps of the year.
Also it's unreal how many players think the enemy AI has some sort of an advantage. They're literally the same, this isn't a shooter where the enemy has aimbots lol.
Vast majority of AI rant threads end up being loadout issues, fleet composition, or not understanding how orders work with AI in this game (which is fair since it's honestly not super intuitive). I assure you there ain't some special scripted stupid juice that made your fleet's AI suddenly derps of the year.
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Discussions / Re: is midnight dissonant alpha or beta core?
« on: September 26, 2023, 11:47:46 PM »speak more coherently than N...MS. OBAMA GET DOWN
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Suggestions / Re: Please add some kind of pre-battle tactical deployment system
« on: September 24, 2023, 01:16:09 AM »Maybe ships could just deploy the way they are arranged in the fleet menu. Their position in that menu doesn't play much of another role anymore anyway.I wouldn't be a huge fan of that because I like ordering my ships by size and how often they are deployed in battle. Ships without officers always come later even if they're bigger than something with an officer. This also matters when you're low on crew partially, so the priority is on ships that come first.
Pretty sure there's others with their own system of sorting the fleet so this would just take options away.
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Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: September 21, 2023, 05:42:18 AM »hey are there any new updates for the game? been awhileThere was a blog post 3 weeks ago.
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Suggestions / Re: More and useful info before and after battles so the player can learn the game
« on: September 21, 2023, 05:00:17 AM »
The problem is people use autofit but sometimes they won't have everything that it needs (weapons, hullmods, fighters) so they end up with bad wonky builds.
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Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.96a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: September 20, 2023, 10:09:20 AM »
Worth noting is that minor polish updates have lately become a bit more meatier (Alex likes to introduce/rework some things to test them for the future, and in a minor update you get more focused feedback), so those initially had maybe 3-4 months delay after the big one, but now it's more like 6-9 months.
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Suggestions / Re: More and useful info before and after battles so the player can learn the game
« on: September 20, 2023, 06:12:02 AM »
You could also make it flavourful in game by paying a small fee to gather more information about the target (officer levels, loadouts), I kinda like not knowing everything before the actual fight but I get that might be cruel for some.
Unfortunately, I do not see how the game could tell you what to improve after a battle. Unless it's something stupidly obvious like get more officers, you honestly don't learn much if the game told you "you need better weapons, your ship loadout isn't optimized, get x hullmod for this fight" etc. That is all meaningless without the WHY behind those tips. That is just something you have to learn for yourself or by watching or reading enough about the game. Can't really expect the game itself to manually refit you a whole fleet ship by ship.
And even with damage stats, kills and such, what is a newb supposed to do with that information? They don't even have an expectation for each weapon/ship. Many can even be misleading like beams or missiles. I feel like there's no elegant way to go about this without introducing another layer of confusion.
Besides the topic, but how did you manage to play 270 hours and not once make it to end game? Every single new player topic or rant I read focuses on early game and how it's too punishing. This is the first time I hear someone passing through the hardest part of the game yet struggling later.
Unfortunately, I do not see how the game could tell you what to improve after a battle. Unless it's something stupidly obvious like get more officers, you honestly don't learn much if the game told you "you need better weapons, your ship loadout isn't optimized, get x hullmod for this fight" etc. That is all meaningless without the WHY behind those tips. That is just something you have to learn for yourself or by watching or reading enough about the game. Can't really expect the game itself to manually refit you a whole fleet ship by ship.
And even with damage stats, kills and such, what is a newb supposed to do with that information? They don't even have an expectation for each weapon/ship. Many can even be misleading like beams or missiles. I feel like there's no elegant way to go about this without introducing another layer of confusion.
Besides the topic, but how did you manage to play 270 hours and not once make it to end game? Every single new player topic or rant I read focuses on early game and how it's too punishing. This is the first time I hear someone passing through the hardest part of the game yet struggling later.
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General Discussion / Re: Why not put it on Steam Early Access?
« on: September 11, 2023, 11:55:59 PM »I think the extra revenue that Alex would gain from steam right now is probably enough to hire a part time developer to fasten up the work or for simply mainaining the steam sales, probably even more.This has also been discussed to death and it's well known that hiring another person at this point would actually take more time to get to 1.0 and the dev team might lose focus, not to mention extra costs. The game is in a late stage of development and you'd need to catch up that person so so much where you'll waste half of a patch time just so another dev can join the team. You also then lose time on communication and organization that didn't exist before.
Only thing I could ever see them getting is extra help for PR stuff. If somehow the game explodes in popularity once again before 1.0, and this forum gets many new users, that would take a lot of "free" time from Alex. I know how he likes being personally involved here so hopefully it doesn't come to that, but that honestly the only thing I could see that gives a net positive on time saved.
Good thing there's a ton of knowledgeable people here so most questions get answered by forum users, and pretty quickly. Alex needs to come in here and there to clear up confusion but I like to think we help out a bit on the forum hours side.