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.

31

Suggestions / Re: Better ways to get strong enemy fleets

« on: August 19, 2023, 06:55:53 AM »

Honestly, the thread is making me concerned about power creep. Maybe the real problem is that the player can get too many bonuses that trivialize the standard content.
 

32

Suggestions / Re: Better ways to get strong enemy fleets

« on: August 18, 2023, 09:19:52 PM »

IMO, another big problem is that the game lets the player get too strong too fast so that a lot of the enemy content just gets bypassed.

But in terms of making end-game difficulty more interesting, I'm a fan of AI-exclusive ships and weapons that are moderately better than what the player can use. In the context of nex, having faction-specific boss ships that show up in invasion fleets and can't be recovered or bought would be cool IMO. Having elite weapons or officers with specials skills is another option. But obviously that's more content that needs to be made vs just stats and modifications to existing stuff, so maybe not worth the extra work?

Also, trying to make different factions difficult in different ways is important too IMO. It's way more interesting if you need to solve different fights in different ways, than if you just find one super fleet that murders everything. The super phase fleet is the only thing that really feels that way in vanilla IMO. I like the idea of rewarding the player for specializing against specific opponents.

33

General Discussion / Re: Built for Aggression: 5 Odyssey Battlecruisers vs 5 Remnant Ordos

« on: July 27, 2023, 05:01:39 PM »

I assume you were doing it without omega weapons? Cause resonators would probably kick some butt and you could fit a lot of them.

Also, do you ever test fleets with mixed loadouts? I totally get wanting locusts to deal with small ships but having a squall or two might help vs radiants.

34

Suggestions / Re: [0.96a-RC10] Autofire settings changed by Autopilot

« on: July 16, 2023, 10:32:35 AM »

Alex, if you're reading this, please don't fix the hack

Roger that! I won't do it intentionally

If this is intended/desirable behavior, why not give the player the ability to do this in the actual UI (lock autofire on), rather than having a hidden behavior that only experience players will know about?

35

Suggestions / Re: Change "Weapon Recoil" to a term whose effect is more obvious

« on: July 12, 2023, 01:59:06 PM »

To me, weapon 'inaccuracy' or 'spread' are more precise terms.

From an FPS perspective (which is going to be fairly common among gamers), recoil is usually predictable/consistent/control-able deviation of the point of aim, while spread is the random/uncontrollable element. That's not always entirely true in every FPS, but it's pretty common.

From a physics perspective, recoil is the physical reaction/motion of the weapon due to the firing of the weapon. When I first started playing the game, I thought recoil was going to be the ship moving slightly backwards/in the opposite direction when firing, like a tank or battleship firing its guns. I only learned what it actually meant by reading the forum.

In either case, I think it's not the most clear term, but the stat is pretty niche, and it's really not hard to play the game without knowing what it is or thinking about it, so I'm not surprised it doesn't come up much.

edit: I was think a bit more and I think it would be more precise to say in FPS games, usually recoil involves the motion of the point of aim (which can be random or predicable), whereas spread is the random deviation of bullets away from the point of aim. So to me, FPS spread is a more closely related mechanic to what recoil is in starsector.

36

General Discussion / Re: Wolf design advice

« on: July 11, 2023, 10:19:03 PM »

I find it pretty hard to justify using wolves over scarab/tempest/omen.

Hector, did you experiment much scarabs? The system is amazing, basically plasma jets and accelerated ammo feeder smooshed in one system. They can do quite a bit of damage when officered.

37

General Discussion / Re: Does the Fury have broadside potential?

« on: July 09, 2023, 11:06:29 PM »

Feels like SO is almost entirely wasted there given that you are using less than half of your dissipation.

It's pretty obviously just a thrown together ship as a proof of concept. The excessive vents kind of give that away. The important part of SO for the Fury isn't the flux boost, it's the speed boost as the Fury struggles to retreat without it.

Doesn't unstable injector achieve the same thing for much less OP, and with less penalties?

38

General Discussion / Re: Does the Fury have broadside potential?

« on: July 09, 2023, 05:54:52 PM »

Feels like SO is almost entirely wasted there given that you are using less than half of your dissipation.

39

General Discussion / Re: Money balance

« on: July 09, 2023, 02:51:18 PM »

For me:

Early game is characterized by frigates/destroyers and limited access to weapons/hullmods.

Mid game starts around when I transition to cruisers. I would expect to have enough money to get weapons that I want, and start to fill out s-mods on the ships I intend to keep long term. I would usually expect to max DP during mid game, but not necessarily with the ships I want for end game. I would expect to have officer slots mostly filled but not max level. Stuff like that.

I usually consider starting to use capital ships as the beginning of end game, but I would say it's characterized by capping out the various progression systems i.e. maxing out things like the skill tree, officer levels, s-mods etc.

Personally I don't really consider colonies as a marker of progression. You can start them pretty much any time. I tend to start them pretty late because I like having a strong enough fleet to wreck any threats that come up, and also strong enough to farm 250-300k bounties for income. I will just use abandoned stations before that point.

40

Suggestions / Re: Keep more means of progress open in the end game

« on: July 07, 2023, 11:49:40 AM »

If you've maxed out skills, DP, officers, and s-mods, any vanilla enemy human fleet should be doable with even a moderately optimized fleet. As long as you aren't trying to use weak ships like civilians or the bad pirate hulls, it's mostly just a matter of making good loadouts that synergize with skills.

It's only really the multi ordo fights, and omegas that require some significant optimization to beat. And even then, there is still some variety.

If you could beat everything in the game by throwing money at it without any significant outfitting or piloting skill, that would ruin the challenge of the game.

41

General Discussion / Re: A huge nerf to the missiles

« on: July 02, 2023, 08:27:22 AM »

@Grevious
Yes exactly, the fact that they can get shot down is another major downside, but the problem with missiles is that PD is not good enough to stop them. You shouldn't need skills and hullmods to make PD good enough to be functional against missiles.

Balancing with counters is much more interesting than just neutering missiles.

42

Suggestions / Re: Odyssey tweak

« on: June 29, 2023, 10:26:37 AM »

Odyssey is already one of the best flagships in the game, it doesn't need any buffs IMO. Maybe AI improvements.

43

General Discussion / Re: More random comments for 0.96a

« on: June 29, 2023, 08:56:47 AM »

I have an irrational love of scarabs and have spent a fair bit of time trying to improve my officered scarab loadouts.

Mini pulser is the god gun for scarabs, especially if you are already s-modding expanded magazines. That should give you enough hard flux that you wouldn't need HSA.

Rift lance is decent on scarabs but kind flux heavy. Maybe it would be good with HSA and a bunch of burst PD, I honestly haven't experimented enough with Burst PD on scarabs. Most of my testing was last patch before s-modded expanded magazines was a thing.

Usually I go AMB for armor/hull damage and it seems to perform better than rift lance statistically, although you need to be careful and make sure it has the flux stats to handle the bursty flux generation without overloading.

Personally, I have found that having dissipation be about 30 flux/sec higher than weapon flux+shield flux is actually very helpful since the ship system also generates flux which isn't accounted for anywhere in the loadout screen. If the scarab ever gets high on flux in enemy weapon range, it is basically dead, so I try to optimize around avoiding that scenario.

I also love anti matter SRMS on scarabs because it is super consistent damage output from a safe range. Those scarabs tend to statically deal the most damage just because they don't need to find an opening to deal damage. Although I think they lack 1v1 potential and peak/burst damage output compared to other loadouts.

Also, I think systems expertise, field modulation, and combat endurance are kinda necessary if you want late game capable officered scarabs. Its system is so crazy good, it's basically accelerated ammo feeder and plasma jets combined at the cost of PPT and a bit of flux, so I tend to optimize around that. The shields skills and hullmods are really helpful for not dying to late game enemies. Wolfpack tactics also makes a huge difference.

44

General Discussion / Re: The Dream Battle, Updated: 5 Executors defeating 5 Remnant Ordos video

« on: June 29, 2023, 08:25:54 AM »

For HVD vs Railgun, it should be pretty straightforward to put some Railguns on the medium ballistics and HVDs on the medium hybrids, and then do a side-by-side comparison of their total damage via the Detailed Combat Results mod.

Are you saying to test them by having a split loadout on one same ship? Because that seems like a flawed testing methodology. The AI is going to behave differently due to the range mismatch. If the AI hangs back at 1000 range to use HVDs, that will obviously make railguns perform worse.

The question should really be if the AI and ship can make up for the range difference with speed/positioning, but the AI won't necessarily try to do that if it still has HVDs.

Obviously the single ship approach has the advantage of ensuring the general battle situation is consistent (so you don't have one ship chase after a frigate and do nothing, ruining the comparison), but IMO, it's better to achieve that by having multiple ships with each loadout, and by averaging over multiple battles, which should theoretically converge to a representative value with enough samples. Whereas testing a mixed loadout is introducing a bias to your results (due to AI behavior) that cannot be averaged out.

45

General Discussion / Re: Insulated Engines are the new meta.

« on: June 24, 2023, 11:31:40 AM »

I'm a big fan of spending 2-4 story points on s-moding insulated engines into a few atlases and Prometheus's in the early/mid game.

Mostly for exploration. It's nice to dictate all engagements and never get snuck up on/ambushed, and with the skill that gives bonus burn for civilian ships plus bonus cargo/fuel space, it basically solves the entire logistics ship aspect of the game.