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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - Hussar

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226
General Discussion / Re: Character Builds?
« on: April 29, 2017, 12:56:39 PM »
I spent 3 in Industry just for Salvage/Surveying too.

I didn't bother with any points whatsoever in Combat.

For Tech I maxed Gunnery Implants, Power Grid and took everything else you did except for Sensors.

For Leadership I took Logistics, Coor Man and I'm debated over spending the last few of my points on maxing Officers and Fighter Doctrine.

What was that Combat skill you spent 2 points in? Was it really worth it?

Combat endurance, +25% peak operating time for piloted ship and on 2nd point a fleetwide -50% to malfunctions on low CR. It's a skill that also officer's can take but I don't think that their -50% to malfunctions works fleetwide, at least I haven't noticed it early game when I was rocking around with just few frigates and CR related malfunctions could literally kill you.

227
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: April 29, 2017, 11:30:24 AM »
BTW Will you get officers with no combat skills?
Like officer who buff salvaging skills or scavenging, faster repairs, surveying capability outside skills etc.
Its strange that I can offset my no combat character by having combat oriented officer but can not find and bring master engineer, explorer or scavenger with me.
My thoughts exactly. This would give much more freedom and depth into our own character progression and fleet-assembly progression.

Under one condition though.

It can't be random like it is now. At least not wholly. Some skills should be specialist related. I mean, they shouldn't pop up for regular officers in my mind? At the same time a specialist would be providing us with those huge benefits shouldn't be either getting the most powerful combat skills (if any at all) as a choice.

I mean, if you're hiring a mining specialist you don't hire him to be a master of combat right?

228
Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] Ship/Weapon Pack 1.1.5
« on: April 29, 2017, 10:30:23 AM »
Will this get updated for 0.8? I don't mind waiting, I'm just asking is it planned for the future c:

229
Mods / Re: [0.8a] Raccoon's Arms Pack v1.3.2 - Mimicry
« on: April 29, 2017, 09:37:20 AM »
Pirate's still got Pigeons so I'd wouldn't say they've got off "bad" with this mod. Better Pigeons than herme'ses or mercury shuttles or even hound's.

Glad you removed SNT-Wolf from pirates altogether.

230
General Discussion / Character Builds?
« on: April 29, 2017, 09:28:25 AM »
Exactly as the title states. Let's share and talk about character builds? I haven't seen a topic about it so hence the idea, and I would be interested to see what others ended up picking up after some time of playing with the new character progression.

Guess I'll start!

Spoiler
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Strong points:
- Fleetwide +10% OP, 85% base CR, -50% to malfunctions on low CR, halved maintenance costs, -25% fuel consumption, lowered terrain penalties and +5 to sustained burn, 10 officers
- Coordinated Maneuvers capped at +25% bonus to speed, favoring bigger deployments, beneficial across the board to both bigger and slower ships as well to fast picket ships (my Kite's (A) with unstable injectors reach 298 speed at 0 flux & 353 on boosters).
- Electronic Warfare capped at +20% (as I have found that either enemy admiral contests you in EW which results in a really shallow margins that can turn around by a sensory buoy during battle or you get total domination in this regard) also favoring bigger deployments.
- Sensors: boosted by 25% and sensory profile reduced by 25% & doubled effect on "go dark" (there's no problem to actually reach lower sensor profile than sensory strength even on a sustained burn if someone wishes)
- Abilities: Neutrino detector and Transverse jump allowing us to jump into hyperspace without use of a jump point - this could be incredibly handy for smuggler playstyle ;)
- You still can endulge yourself into exploration and dismantling derelicts. You're just not proficient at this but what's the problem since moment we score our first 500k or even 1kk paycheck on Sindria?

Downsides:
- Does not support Carrier-as-a-Flagship style much.
- We miss on stronger combat-related abilities for our character.
- We took very little from the new industry path, so this isn't exactly supportive for scavenging and using a lot of D-mod ships (this affects us the most in early game i guess).

In short if I'd had to call it somewhat it would be an Cruiser-Admiral build. You still can fight (and I do that often with my command Eagle) but if our ship gonna have anything going for it will come in form of mods not character skills (with exception of things like Cord.M. skill). I actually kind of like that fact because in combat this means we'll still have to pretty much watch out to not over-commit to the point where a stray sabot will overload our shields and suddenly you'll see harpoons coming at you from everywhere. Perhaps some would say it's more passive gameplay, but I'd say "only if you wish it to be so". In combat you're just going to have a more fragile ship than ones commanded by your officers I'd say. Speaking of them, ability to field 10 of them in your fleet does allow to heavy a really nice complement of carrier and cruiser/destroyer captains.

So, that was mine (:

231
Mods / Re: [0.8a] Raccoon's Arms Pack v1.3.2 - Mimicry
« on: April 29, 2017, 08:28:20 AM »
Okay, download updated, I won't mark this as a new update, it's more like a hotfix. The Wolf Sentinel is COMPLETELY removed from all pirate fleets. Its wingman is no longer a Terminator, it's a Wolfpup as it was originally (a shielded, phase skimming, slower Broadsword). I tried to fix the crash-on-launch bug but it's an issue that I cannot test.

This sounds nice, I'll add it back for my next, TT oriented play-through then. But did Wolf kept his sensors?

232
General Discussion / Re: Trading bug? 220 organics from same world
« on: April 29, 2017, 08:24:51 AM »
Just wondering if this was a bug in the trading missions.  At the start of the game, there was a mission from Eventide to deliver 220 organics to Eventide.  So I checked in their black market, and they had 500 organics just sitting there.

So I grabbed that, even though my ship is overloaded over 150 or so of organics, but it was ok, since I turned it in the moment I bought the organics, and got 22,800....from moving items from their black market to the same world.

Okay.

Is that right?  >_>;

In other words, you've turned into a fence or a smuggler.

It's not a bug, you just got really lucky to get a mission like that happening on same planet/station with enough supply at the black market.

233
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: April 29, 2017, 01:01:05 AM »
Seems like patrols that stop you for a cargo scan don't much care about any illegal AI cores on-board. :D I've been searched at least twice by both Hegemony and Independents while carrying cores around and they just let me go.
Same. A hold full of AI cores, organs, drugs, and guns, and the scan report says "nothing found".
Maybe it was all hidden by shielded holds, but I only have 1 ship which has that mod so I feel like either it was dumb luck or something isn't working.

I on the other hand have sometimes pleasure of being actually clean but having a scan that "detected" something? o_O
I tested it, and this doesn't happen again upon reload. Figures.

Edit: Ohhh I know now. This may happen if u buy a ship on a black market and get scanned soon after I think!

234
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: April 28, 2017, 11:58:25 PM »
Hmm. I think for carriers, a right-click on empty space ("rally task force") would more or less do the job - they may choose from a lot of targets, but they will tend to choose targets already under attack, which in most cases is going to be what you want  anyway.

That's what I'm trying to do but it doesn't really work. I have rally points far behind the defended point/s yet still they're going to charge the frontlines even past the actual line ships... And that lack of control over the carrier is really troublesome, even more over than lack of general strike order for carrier-borne craft which would act as a beacon for multiple wings from different carriers that would be in striking range.

235
Mods / Re: [0.8a] Raccoon's Arms Pack v1.3.1 - Mule Miner
« on: April 28, 2017, 12:01:32 PM »
I hope you won't mind a little input of mine in here?

I gave your pack a spin and quite enjoyed it gonna say. Sadly I have ultimately had to remove it for now for one single reason. Which are sentinel wolfs spawning in pirate fleets - something others have already mentioned.

I love the Sentinel Wolf, it's a great asset and I would still love it without the terminator drone but with the sensors. It's the best thing about them I think, especially early on in the game before players spec fully into sensor skills. It's just a strong desired feature of it, the drone by my taste is just a plus.

That however I found that SNT Wolfs are stronger than tempests for that simple fact they don't degrade CR as fast as them. So if I had to change things about the SNT wolf it would be 2 simple things:
- Total removal of those from pirate fleets, if they had to show up I would treat them as kind of minibosses in highly damaged D variants (damaged hangar as a must have then). They're simply too OP and they do severely affect the balance. One tempest is scary but those hunt in pairs and it's just simply frustrating to seeing them left and right in every pirate fleet there is...
- The terminator drone itself... It should be a weaker version of the one from the tempest otherwise tempest is out of job really. Degrading the drone's engines and cutting i's firepower is one thing... But what was frustrating me the most was it's range. Separating 2 SNT wolfs was doing nothing because drones from both ships were still attacking a single target - so I would cut the W-SNT's drone range in half at least in comparison to tempest? I think this would make it way more balanced than it is now.

But other than that I really liked the SNT Wolf and I would like to see it in the future. If tuned, would it be possible to have an option for a separate SNT-Wolf mod, without the rest of the gear? They were nice but heh... I gave the artillery swarmers to all my shepherds ships... The map... Just... Saturated with hundreds of kinetic missiles. Even with such low damage... Kind of OP xD

236
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: April 28, 2017, 11:45:10 AM »
Hi - welcome to the forum, and thank you for your feedback!

(Hey, someone's using Operations Center! That's really cool.)

<3 and I thank u for your work :)

Imgur
I personally found it to be a must have when a fleet gets big so yes. But even with combined 300% faster CP gain I still sometimes manage to ran out of orders xD
I hope to find an XIV Onslaught or Dominator in the future but guess I'll stay on my Admiral class command Eagle while other ships will be more specced for frontline combat. The Enforcers fully uparmored can be a really tough nut to crack already (I found out that they more often hinder themselves than enemy threatens them if I sent 2 of mine against single even cruiser size target? kind of funny), so I'm interested to see what an uparmored Eagle or Onslaught can do :)

Made a quick note re: carrier AI and orders - I think they may not be obeying "eliminate" properly with regards to fighter targeting, I'll take a look. Will think about the other stuff some more.
I'm not sure how much of it is real and how much is confirmation bias but I have a feeling that officer personalities might be causing some trouble with carrier AI. My Cautious carrier commander seems reluctant to send fighters to engage, preferring to keep them withdrawn or escorting a friendly ship, which results in him not getting much done compared to a Steady officer. Given how expendable fighters are it's not desirable behavior, Cautious or not. (if it's real)

That's interesting. If that's true then I wonder what will happen if I spec a reckless captain into carrier? This could be interesting, but I don't think I have an Atlas to support "her" in that :O

I still have space for a 3rd carrier commander so maybe I'd shall look out for an agressive one to check. But yeah, since carrier-borne craft are now handled as weapon mod and benefit from officer skills - it might be it.

237
Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes
« on: April 28, 2017, 10:48:34 AM »
This gonna be my first post on this forum so I guess I’ll quickly say “hi!” to everybody :)
I might be new but I’ve remember buying SS back in 0.6.2a-RC3 version, and I’ve since then loved it and played both vanilla and with mods regularly. I regard this purchase as probably my best spent money on games as your work Alex have gave me countless hours of pure fun. For that reason I’ve also been lurking on the forum for all this time (:

But since you’ve dropped the 0.8 update I just had a feel for a past week urging me to come out and write what everyone will read below.

Spoiler
So, in general I wanna say that I simply love it. The update is so massive and changes so much that I actually have a great time playing just “vanilla” (I mean, I’ve installed the Venture (A) mod and I think you could expand on the hegemony auxilliaries and other - but I’ll touch on that later) which honestly I never did since 0.65 like. I was pretty much always playing with mods, most often with/as SCY.

Currently I’m having a blast flying for hegemony with my XIV themed fleet since the new hegemony skin for the wolf is absolutely gorgeous (and I would wish to see more skins for other ships as well, it would be nice to see for example hegemony aurora [as codex says few were seen in Hegemony DF). As everyone knows the XIV battlegroup ships are generally slower but that’s where skills come into play. So I guess I’ll start with those!

1. Skills
So, my first reaction wasn’t too fond of the new overhauled skill system honestly. But it was all because of the new levelcap and the fact we’ll have to make substantial skill choices in the game so my initial reaction was more of a spoiled kid that had his sweets taken away - I’ll admit.

But oh golly how wrong was I. Since in general I do absolutely love it in fact. Before it was just a matter of time till we got “everything” we might have needed, plus the skills itself were only meaningful at 5 or 10th level mostly. The fact that right now every skill level gives a meaningful bonuses is something I do very much like. The only thing I’d would argue with is the levelcap, as I have found that it’s really hard to assemble a really good set of skills and the way I came to my current one was pretty much by means of consoling my way to the 40th level to have the full pool of skillpoint to play with and assess it’s impact. Yet even now when I’m on level 40 via normal means, as you can see HERE. I have not yet found a place for last 2 points to spent in as there’s simply too many good skills yet left to pick.

I would really much like to see level cap increased in the future by like maybe 5 levels, since my current set of skills is pretty much effect of things I’ll talk in detail below. But shortly it’s an effect of introducing the remnants, slower paced & harder battles and carrier overhaul. All of these are very much positive things but in my first playthrough I have found that going full/half industry path cripples my fleet more in the later game than benefits, as the battles were simply too tough to handle..

For sure it will have to be raised if you’re planning on adding any more skills related to the outpost and hopefully colonies (:

As for my choice of skills, everyone can deduct from the screenshot that I have wanted to be able to survey planets and salvage derelicts while being still able to fight effectively. My commander is not a best fighter but I’ve chose a fleet-wide skills allowing me to field 10 officers (which are really valuable and meaningful now), as well as to boost my fleet’s handling (vel ECM warfare and coordinated maneuvers - which counters the downgrades of XIV hulls) in battle. At this point I’ve chose a style to command from a cruiser or other similar class of ship, and leave carrier handling to my officers in the fleet. At this point I’m not salvaging ships at all unless it would happen to be hegemony auxilliary (as I said, playing hegemony themed playthrough this time, something I never did before really) or or better, an actual ship of the XIV battlegroup. But other than that I don’t, mainly because of the flaws in the d-mod system which I’ll describe.

2. D-mod ship system overhaul
In general? It’s great, totally new concept and I do very much like it. Sadly it feels a bit handicapped that unless someone specs for full industry, they’ll still suffer from the simple fact we cannot restore single d-mods of our choosing. It’s either none or all, and this in my opinion cripples the usefulness of it in the long run. Yes, with full industry we can salvage more and more often with less d-mods but it still costs absurd amounts of money to fix them - especially if we happen to grab a hull with a really undesired d-mod. Like for example degraded engines. I personally wouldn’t mind a battleship to have glitched sensors and weakened structure as long as it’s engines, armor and weapon mounts were fine. This gives a nice spin on the thing, that we got for example an onslaught but one that’s weaker structurally so it would demand better care. But if it happen to have one of the undesired mods - good luck fixing it? Well, in my current playthrough I could go this and I’ll go this route with any XIV battlegroup ship for RP purposes and simply because I’ve scored an absurd haul netting me 2 million credits in survey data, AI cores and transplutonic metals and fuel. But at this point having so much cash you won’t care for derelict ships anymore much because you can buy brand new ships instead.

If we could instead fix d-mods one at the time at the shipyard this would add more depth and attachment for those ships to the player. At least that’s how I think. Reasoning is that finding them, even crippled with 4 d-mods or more wouldn’t be gamebreaking for the player. Yes, as said, with full industry we should cut in half the number of d-mods in general, but the early game finds would be simply more meaningful to the player if he knew that he can patch the ship up one d-mod at the time - in turn growing attachment to this particular ship they have found in a far flung corner of space. For example I have found Odyssey in a far flung remnant infested system. I ditched it in corvus at the abandoned station and totally forgot about it because it happened early in game and the ship had every d-mod possible. The fix bill was simply horrendous. If I could fix it one d-mod at the time, I would most likely end up restoring it to it’s full (or almost full) glory and include it in the fleet (I can even think of the name like Invincible or something along those lines to mark the fact that remnants didn’t pulverized it and here it comes striking them back and continuing the fight).

So yeah. That’s pretty much all issues I have with d-mod overhaul.

There’s also a fact of that some ships like pirate afflictor that doesn’t loose (d) upon fixing. But you’re aware of this, and at the same time I believe the matter of making other skins (example hegemony aurora) and perhaps even allowing the player to choose other paintjobs on their ships to either get them all “hightech’y”, “rusty ol’ buckets” or to simply mark their in game alliance - is totally separate thing and I understand not the most important right now from the point of game development. So I’ll leave it be and on a note that I really like hegemony colors on the Wolf frigate :D

3. Carrier overhaul
This one was a surprise and a really nice one I gonna say. Confusing at first but making so much more sense now. In previous playthroughs with for example Scy or DME I was trying out carrier doctrines and every time it was ending up in high maintenance cost becuase skills weren’t cutting supplies on fighter and bomber wings. This problem is right now gone, even if for a price that we can field less of “planes” now, but this isn’t a bad thing in my oppinion. It’s more logical right now that wings are tied to the hangar space of the ships we field, so this makes ships like Astral a true powerhouse and gives an actual benefits and reasons for fielding bigger carriers. So I really do like that.

What I don’t like is the problems they brought in with new CV skills. By which I mean it’s random but I’d wish we could get a option on the “advance menu” to turn them on or off for a desired officer. Because there’s nothing more frustrating than training a perfect assault ship captain that will eventually end up with a battleship/cruiser/destroyer command, and having him reach level 17 with all skills full and then got a choice between 2 cv related skills. Which popup really too often honestly - especially if we don’t want them on this officer. It’s kind of important since with for example my current skill build, which is clearly a “fleet command” oriented, it’s really important to have officers with few crucial skills on my frontline ships. So if we could get an option for “profiling” upon officer advancment it would be nice.

Further, what I think is missing is some sort of carrier command options for those who field those under AI command. I have many times situations where AI was in range of enemy ships but wasn’t supporting the allies or attacking the target even upon manual assignment of said cv to attack that ship specifically. The AI to my taste is really wonky here a little, as said I can either have a carrier that sits back and does little - or one that ends up charging into the line. Which can be troublesome if that’s a light carrier for example. I know this is new and completely new AI mechanics, but if it was possible to give players a bit more control in CV behaviour it would be nice. For example things I’m thinking off would be orders that would affect CV and their carrier-borne craft. Orders like attack marker for all carrier-borne craft in range, while the cv itself would keep itself behind the screen of cruisers and destroyers instead of pushing itself to the front to rub it’s omni-shields with the enemy ship… Or special tab for carrier focus with options telling cv’s to cover their allies or R&R all craft and sending them all together instead of pouring the wings one by one into enemy PD’s. Things like that, though I guess others with more carrier experience could give more specific and more elaborate ideas on what exactly could be added here in the future.

But that said, in general I do still very like the changes. They’re good base, and carriers make for more interesting assets to play with right now.

4. Combat
There has been a lot of changes here. The skill overhaul, changes to the combat itself making armor more meaningful (I never had so much fun with Enforcers before!), cv overhaul & more. Everything resulted in that combat is slower, more tactical and in depth than before and I do very much like it. As many, I have found myself more and more staying on the tactical screen issuing commands and leaving AI to it. The AI got more competent as well I have noted, as I would never before dare to use Kite’s (A) in a fleet combat… While I do now, I got 4 of them to screen 4 wolfs or run solo as harassers. And I’m really happy with them, I have lost one of them maybe once or twice on my road towards 40th level. And there has been many battles and usually they were coming out unscatched or maybe with minor damage to armor. Rarely they got themselves dunked hard, but then I was still able to issue retreat commands to them and they did exactly what has been expected from them. I even had a reckless captain on one of them for a time being… Yeah he was the one I was calling off all the time but she did not die! AI is surprisingly competent this patch, I have to say. I even had battles forced upon me which I’ve been starting on retreat. Told my auxilliaries to bunch up with carrier, all destroyers and cruisers were to cover them while frigates were running around this blob covering everybody from the pesky harrassers. I was managing to break off without losses (sometimes the only loss would be my ship via issuing retreat commands to other ships too early and getting dunked but still - a huge progress I reckon).

Talking further, I have found CR to be crucial right now, to the point almost all of my ships run on hardened subsystems. For some it’s a must even, as harrasing types of ships like phase frigates or my Kite’s are constantly in contact with the enemy so having higher starting CR and hardened subsystems is kind of a must for them to endure the fight. I found it not being as much of a problem for bigger ships or carriers as you have added more complexity to the system aka battleship won’t feel threatened as much by a lurking frigate, while frigate will be under heavy stress for staying in contact with the said battleship. It makes sense and I very much like it.

Further since the overall pace and AI has been pretty much changed (improved for me), having a good skilled officers adds a whole new spin to the combat itself. Same goes for perks like ECM Warfare and Coordinated Maneuvers. The latter for example compensates for deficiences in engine power of some of my ships while giving a boost to all others. ECM is also meaning much, especially that now pretty much all fleets (except for pirates?) contest us on this field. Despite maxed out skill here I had many battles where the crucial combat was going over the sensory buoy to compensate for enemy’s advantage in that regard. The only thing that’s lacking in this regard would be an actual ECM destroyer like the one we can find in the modded factions - since now ECM warfare is pretty much a thing.
But with all that praise there’s one thing I’d would like to see improved upon. The tactical screen is somewhat barebones right now - I haven’t been using it in previous versions of the game much, while today I’m (and others as I have read) making more and more use of it - letting AI to do the actual combat while limiting myself to tasking targets and relocating ships on the map. In short directing the flow of battle. One thing that’s missing from the tactical overview would be the already mentioned lack of CV orders. Second, and perhaps more crucial would be the lack of on-screen information we get while being in combat mode. I have often found myself jumping into my ship (without disengaging the autopilot) just to check on current bonuses (or penalties) to ECM ratings and Coordinated Maneuvers. It would be really nice if we could get those sort of informations also on a tactical screen, since as I have said I have fought uphill battles where my fleet had it’s range decreased so fighting over sensor array was actually meaningful. But we dont’ get those informations at the tactical screen.


Hmm so that would be pretty much it? I won’t comment on the expanded world and alike since those great additions that were awaited for so long really. You’re doing a really good work on the world building Alex. This patch was sort of radical change to the game and I do really like it. There’s some flaws that I hope you can address in the future, but overall? A mighty good job man! If you’re planning to make the outpost/colony patch as big as this one… Damn, I’m already excited! (:

Edit: Oh I forgot to mention the new guys on the block, but that's what I meant by world building. Someone also found the Domain flag in the files so I'm interested how you'll progress with that in the future :D

Edit2: I also like the changes to the modifications. That some will come with skills, some we may buy on the market, others we can find after battle or via means of salvage from a research station. It's a really nice and well thought change that motivates the players to actually think over their skill choices since they can still get a desired hullmod even if they won't spec in missiles for example to get the ECCM or expanded missle racks. I also like that TT holds the best shield related mods while hegemony have the armor etc. It all makes sense giving the profiles of the said factions. I would only say that operations room mod is kind of costly. 30pts is a huge deal on a cruiser size hull, and I was thinking wouldn't it be more in line with the rest if it was 20/30 points (everything<battleships) cost instead? Just a thought, as I still managed to make a decent Admiral class Eagle (XIV) with it installed that can handle itself in battle.
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I'm hiding it in a spoiler since it's kind of long and kind of messy xD

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