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16

General Discussion / Re: Bomber Balance

« on: April 26, 2017, 02:11:38 PM »

Each Flash bomber has 6 prox charges in it. OTOH they take 7.5 seconds to launch all of those charges(Piranhas take 9), so I wouldn't be 100 percent certain that they actually get all of that damage off in a typical combat situation.

One thing I think people are missing is that because rockets have only 50 HP they always die to a single flak shot, even if not aimed quite at them. Flak is probably the best PD of any type ATM, so being neutered by flak hurts them more against mid and lowtech capital ships. They do have more total HP in an attack than torpedo bombers, though. This applies to Flash proximity charges too, they have 250 HP which is just enough to survive a flak shot.

I'd probably say that Khopesh wings are probably comparable to Daggers on a 1:1 basis in a fairly narrow scenario- facing ships without very high armor that lack the maneuverability to evade incoming rocket attacks, and aren't using flak weapons against the attack. Eagles and Conquests can get caught out if they don't have jets ready, Dominators can kind of shrug off rockets due to armor and usually fitting Flak, same goes for Enforcers. Probably the most vulnerable ship is the Odyssey. Most destroyers will dodge rockets but can't dodge torpedoes, all of the fast cruisers are the same story. Onslaughts will tank and PD rocket attack, Paragons have Fort Shield and generally ignore bomber attack of any sort, Astral is a carrier and will just swamp you in interceptors.

I don't think that Dagger is comparable to its OP cost in Khopesh wings, but that's probably not a problem overall. Wing slots are pretty finite and the advantage of Daggers is that they pack more bang against many targets into a single slot, most carriers have the OP to afford this. Same reason that the Trident is fair against the Dagger despite having fewer torps and being slower per OP, it packs 8 torpedoes into 2 slots instead of 9 into 3.

17

General Discussion / Re: Talon balance

« on: April 25, 2017, 09:41:19 PM »

Talons should retain some sort of strictly anti-fighter missile capability otherwise they give up a bit too much in comparison to Wasps and Sparks. Talons with only Vulcans got melted by just about every fighter to no effect.

18

General Discussion / Re: Can anyone beat "The Last Hurrah"?

« on: April 24, 2017, 04:49:21 PM »

Sparks and all the AI fighters are kind of cheap though, they're rewards for beating up the tough fights in salvaging and for finding research stations, which aren't too common, like to hide next to stars, and require significant amounts of salvage skills and equipment to properly exploit. No Sector ships mount them in variants and I don't think they can occur in any markets.

19

General Discussion / Re: Does the Sector feel rather small to anyone else?

« on: April 24, 2017, 02:40:15 PM »

Going really far (or making the rest of your fleet go far) is the point of tankers.  Well, that and maybe carrying more fuel to trade or to move from Sindria to my primary storage base.

Yes, but it shouldn't allow you to trivialize any journey, or make the additional fuel range of ships like an Apogee or Odyssey pointless. Or at least the game should not give you tankers capable of doing that without a lot of investment(probably making 300ly of fuel the realm of ships only available via military markets like powerful capitals). That's really the bigger problem, that there's no difference between a Dram and a Prometheus except that one of them takes up fewer slots(irrelevant in the early game) and is easier to defend(if you're defending tankers....).

20

Suggestions / Re: Supply Alternatives

« on: April 24, 2017, 02:29:40 PM »

Interesting idea but why would I carry a bunch of Food, Metal etc... when I could just as easily take the more efficient supplies in their place?

Salvage expeditions tend to run into a lot of metal and sometimes food(orbital habitats give food, along with goods of both types).

21

General Discussion / Re: Favorite ships of 0.8?

« on: April 24, 2017, 02:05:50 PM »

Astral with the fighter teleport are scary in close quarters.

6 Bomber wings: Let them fire, immediately recall, start, fire, recall ... everything is dead soon.

Oh god yes the Astral is amazing now. Finally it lives up to the hype in its description. Fighter teleport is one of the most powerful ship systems- it both increases wing survivability and essentially doubles the Astral's sortie rate. It also makes syncing an entire strike package very easy.

Did you find one in the campaign? I'm looking for it all over...

I found one in the military market in Hybrasil.

22

General Discussion / Re: Does the Sector feel rather small to anyone else?

« on: April 21, 2017, 09:31:47 PM »

It is fine that tankers carry lots of fuel.  It is not fun bringing too many civilians to clog fleet slots just because we need their stats to function.  In 0.72, player was at a disadvantage against endgame fleets because player should reserve plenty of fleet slots for civilians or new ships, and the enemy can just combine fleets with 40+ ships to try to murder your fleet.  (Then your one battleship may solo a hundred or more ships.)

Decreasing tanker fuel quantity hurts mostly the ability to go really far, it doesn't cut that much into more moderate trips.

For a 30ly fuel ship, here's the relative number of tankers you need to travel(equation is proportion=(distance - ship range)/(tanker range - distance))
50ly-0.08
80ly-0.227
100ly-0.35

With 200ly tankers
50ly-0.133
80ly-0.41
100ly-0.7

With 150ly tankers
50ly-0.2
80ly-0.71
100ly-1.4

If you're worried about lategame fleet slots just give the big capital tanker higher efficiency or make it have higher fuel capacity and higher costs, so that a smaller number of them can do the same thing. The point anyways is to try and make range progress over the game(there should probably be fuel efficiency hullmods), so it makes sense to give ships that are gated behind costs more efficiency.

23

General Discussion / Re: Does the Sector feel rather small to anyone else?

« on: April 21, 2017, 06:18:13 PM »

Yes, it does. ATM the sector's bounding radius is something like 50 ly, so you probably never need more than 80ly of fuel in order to get anywhere in the sector from the closest fueling point. Most civil ships have 40ly of fuel already, and warships typically have 20-30, with a couple of more exploration or long-range ships having 40-50(all phase ships have 50, for instance). Tankers having 300ly of fuel means that it's very trivial in terms of fleet composition to get enough fuel to visit anywhere in the sector, or even to do tours of it. Let's say your ships have an average fuel capacity of 30ly, which is a bit conservative. For a fleet of 6 consumption 2 destroyers, that means you need only 2 destroyer tankers in order to get 97.5 ly of fuel across your whole fleet. Even for really terrible 15ly range ships like Condors can be brought all the way out by 2:1 matching with tankers.

Basically for a fairly minimal investment in tankers(and an arguably less minimal investment in fuel), you can get the range to bring any ship anywhere in the sector. I'd probably say that tankers should be chopped down to 200ly-150ly of fuel range, and some military ships should have their fuel consumption and capacity raised so that they're harder to support with tanker fleets. Tankers should also cost a similar amount of supplies in maintenance as military ships- there's really very little cost in having more tankers(they're cheap, cost little supplies, and as long as you're careful will never see combat).

For a concrete example, I'd compare Starsector ATM a lot with the Escape Velocity series. And if you were looking at Starsector's map and trying to hide something from the player with distance(and there are quite a few secrets in EV:N that are hidden purely by how far from inhabited space they are), how would you do it? There's nowhere that the player can't basically go right off the bat.

24

Blog Posts / Re: Fighter Redesign

« on: September 07, 2016, 12:25:58 AM »

WRT fighter control, couldn't we just have 2-3 groups of fighter controls? I can't see needing more than that in any practical situation, even with an Astral's 6 wings. At least to me it makes sense for fighters to work this way if they're conceptually part of the carrier's weapons fit. It'd probably take a bit longer to select a sixth/seventh "weapons" group than for the rest, but unless you need very close control of the fighters it shouldn't be too difficult.

25

Suggestions / Re: Transponder Whispers (aka "please reveal yourself to our enemies")

« on: December 17, 2015, 03:42:49 PM »

Maybe it would be nice if you could purchase a faction specific transmitter on the military market when you have high reputation. It would be an item that adds a a campaign ability that toggles a separate transmitter which is only visible to patrol of that faction.

This would make a lot of sense. "Coded IFF" or something, shorter range but tells ships of a certain faction that your identity. Good for edge cases like this, also good so that when we get more war mechanics, military fleets can switch their transponders off while still being identifiable if you're allied with them.

26

Suggestions / Re: Reduce Harpoon Pod Salvo Size

« on: September 15, 2015, 04:22:29 PM »

Missile regen... That black plague originally only meant give a small boost to salamanders... And now you can have fleets that only rely on long range highly damaging weapons that create no flux while firing and can't be tanked when you need to vent because it's a death sentence.

On topic though I'm a big fan of the idea of the interruptible burst for the harpoon pod!

But Salamander missiles don't have regen... they have a long reload time and infinite ammo.

27

Suggestions / Re: On Travel (long)

« on: September 12, 2015, 05:01:39 PM »

Right now, the sector is fairly small. ATM, 2x compression can be a little bit of a drag, but it's not too much of one. I'd say that in terms of time compression, we can push it a couple times higher before it starts to become a problem(i.e. before you can't react to a threat at high compression). Given that this is a 2D starmap, that will probably set in if the world gets around thirty times bigger than it is. OTOH, we could just have it that if you are on high compression and you don't react quickly enough, them's the breaks. Don't time compress heavily in unsafe areas. That might be a little bit of an issue if the unsafe fringe is very large, but it probably isn't too much of one.

Overall, I can't see how a fast-travel system becomes necessary unless the world becomes far larger than it is now. Travelling isn't very painful now, and higher time compression might have some risks and issues, but it probably won't be too painful until we get into a seriously huge world.

28

General Discussion / Re: Heavy Missile Mount

« on: April 28, 2015, 06:20:44 PM »

If you want, just make a weapon that spawns a high-speed and long bolt. It'll look kinda beam-ish.

29

Blog Posts / Re: Sensors

« on: April 24, 2015, 06:40:59 PM »

Question, are we going to get access to stealth ships? I.e ships that don't show up on campaign map sensors and can only be spotted via vfr, or ships that (in battle) don't show up as blips and can't be locked on to. Just a thought.

No stealth ships at tactical level, but phase ships get a hullmod that makes them less visible to sensors.

30

Suggestions / Re: Want more ships specializing in missiles

« on: April 22, 2015, 05:33:17 PM »

Err no? It should be compared against average ships of the same class. A ship able to kill any ships that don't have a loadout specifically tuned to counter it is the definition of overpowered. And even if you do find a loadout that can survive your missile ship, if it can't counter attack it's useless.

Specialists will generally overpower generalists if they're allowed to stay in their specialization. Otherwise, specializing would have no rewards. If you're mounting(or a hull is such that it's only possible to mount) only long-range missiles and hull mods that buff them, then by all rights you should overpower a fleet that doesn't have a counter to that. The danger is that a fleet that does have counters available to it will wipe the floor with you. A missile heavy fleet pays for the better range of missiles in that if its opponent has sufficient PD coverage, the missile fleet's firepower is neutered.

Say Omens + Astral + Bombers/Attack Fighters. The Omens are fairly safe against missile fire and can draw fire away from or cover the Astral, while the fighters can't be hit by the missile fleet almost at all and should be able to wreck the launching ships. What's better is that this fleet is more broadly applicable- it's basically a typical TT carrier fleet, and can fight plenty of things other than missile fleets.

EDIT: Went and tried it with a Paragon. 1 Paragon can take around 15-18 pilums worth of missiles and remain flux-neutral(w/o fort shield). The PD will shoot down up to around 12 launchers worth. So a ship needs to have more than 1 med missile launcher per 1.5 DP before it starts to become capable of killing the Paragon with missiles. No, the Paragon isn't using all PD weapons- still has 4 heavy blasters and 2 Autopulse Lasers.