Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
And reckless captains will be great for pursuit ships.
Actually, this is where I have problem with whole personality idea. You have just 10 Captains -> you can't afford specialized ones for pursuit, they need to perform well in any situation you throw at them.
Or at least scenarios that really matter, like surviving as long as possible against overwhelming enemy fleet.
Which means only Steady or preferably Cautious officers are fit for my fleet.
why not just instead of having the option of reverse behavior, make it in to an option to turn it into a 1 press toggle?
generally speaking you shouldn't tell people what's fun, considering it's subjective.
megas is a weirdo, but he's our weirdo and he has a deeper knowledge of this game than probably anyone else here.
he's totally correct on the mechanics of nearly everything, incl. the profit motive to solo.
it's not even a criticism to say the mechanics encourage X so you shouldn't get offended about it.
Use a modified version of the "old" logistics pool to control boarding. (Also, bring back logistics)
Have each ship in a fleet contribute toward a pool of "points" or however you wish to describe it.
Every ship can contribute something, but some ships are naturally better suited to the task of docking and delivering angry shooty spacemans into other ships. These would be your shuttles, armoured transports, and other specialised vessels.
And whatever they contribute scales with thier current CR.
At the end of a battle you have won, all your ships have thier "pirate points" added up and modified by CR, which gives you your pool for this battle/instance.
Then all the disabled ships from the defeated fleet are presented to the player using the "deploy" dialog or something similar, with each ship costing a certain amount of points to recover - bigger ships and more intact ships = more points required.
The player can then pick as many ships to board as they like so long as they have the "points" left to do so. So you might choose to take a handful of frigates, or you might prefer to use all your resources to recover the cruiser you just put holes in.
This gives the player agency in what is currently a frustrating luck-bound endeavour while not overly skewing the difficulty/balance (as ships are generally not worth boarding unless you specifically want a particular one).
The only significant balance change would be that rare/desirable ships would become easier to acquire, which could in turn be balanced by making them exceedingly fragile and prone to outright destruction.
Also, this same mechanic could be flipped around and used against the player if they get beat down. This would have to be watered down though, in order not to be completely obnoxious.
Maximum fleet size can be changed in some configuration file. (I do not resort to this myself because I would change much more than that to cheat more.)
The most dangerous threat in the simulator to an Onslaught or Paragon is a fleet of about twelve frigates with mostly Wolves and Tempests, with a few phase ships, an Omen, and maybe a ballistic bruiser mixed in.
Boarding in 0.6x was hideous, enough that few posters here got banned for their uncontrolled outrage. Chance of success for hard dock and boarding a useful warship was 37.5% at best. (25% self-destruct, then 50% chance of success afterwards.) If you were lucky, you board on the first try. If not, you could spend over an hour replaying battles and fail boarding attempts more than ten times in a row (each with 37.5% chance of success) before you succeed. Assault teams only had 9.375% chance of success and required too many marines to be a viable option. I abhorred boarding during the 0.6x era once I experienced multiple failures in a row even with the most favorable save-scumming conditions.
Burn speed is a critical stat for the campaign.
It doesn't have to be.
Lately I'm operating according to the principle "If they don't attack you on their own, they are not worth fighting". Meaning I fight only fleets that are as strong or stronger than me, cause anything else is boring. For that burn speed is mostly irrelevant, it only serves to make travel a bit faster.
