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[Megas]

some concession should be given to the people who just want to fire until the barrels glow. i understand the mindset.

Yeah, I am one of those "just give me some ships to blast."  Arcade-like action is what got me into Starfarer/sector, after I rejected my first choice of SPAZ.  That does not mean I do not want a campaign akin to Star Control 2.

[nomadic_leader]

some concession should be given to the people who just want to fire until the barrels glow. i understand the mindset.

Yeah, I am one of those "just give me some ships to blast."  Arcade-like action is what got me into Starfarer/sector, after I rejected my first choice of SPAZ.  That does not mean I do not want a campaign akin to Star Control 2.

Well i know what you mean. I think it's hard to have a complex campaign and lots of arcade-y combat within it, since the one is sort of at odds with the other conceptually; at least until you get really powerful and the universe becomes your chewtoy. So it should at least try to become strategic.

90% of my combat play-time is the "Random Battle" mission in the main menu. I adjusted the json or whatever to randomly distribute a few objectives around the map and give the enemy numeric advantage. Simple unassuming fun.

[Megas]

I cannot stand missions because ships are pathetically slow and weak.  Campaign is the only game as far as I am concerned.

[Linnis]

OP has a point. Atm it is just a tax for having ships. The gameplay implications are... Few and uninteresting.

Also at some point when industry rolls out "supplies" will have to change. If not, then everything will revolve the production of it. Overall, it's not perfect but it ain't time to worry about it yet

[nomadic_leader]

No, as stated previously in the thread-- supplies, fuel, logistics (which I kinda liked), crew management, etc these sorts of things provide impetus to try different arrangements of ships and fleets, rather than everyone just getting 25 paragons once you've grinded enough to get the money for them.

Without them, the end game just becomes aimless wandering and killing without any sense of jeopardy. I've played games like this, it's boring real quick.

Resources/taxes properly implemented means that even as you get more powerful and the threat posed from enemies gets smaller, it gets replaced by the new challenge of proper fleet management and logistics. The bigger and more powerful ships should be more supply intensive pound for pound than smaller ships, and thus punish poor management and misuse more than small ships so that only the cleverest players can use giant fleets of powerful ships without bankrupting themselves. (And to some degree this is already true in SS, which is good).

[Megas]

There is a practical limit to what your fleet can be.  Player can try to have 25 Paragons in a fleet if he wishes, but he cannot deploy more than two to six at time, depending on battle size; and he will not be able to support that much from loot alone.  He also will not be able to blast many ships that flee, if even allowed the option.  Player will want smaller ships to destroy fleeing ships.  (Half of my warships are frigates for pursuit battles.)

Also, capitals slurp much more fuel (about triple) than cruisers, even without tugs.

One or two battleships are good in Starsector because a battleship can solo a simulator-sized fleet more easily than a cruiser.

[Cik]

soloing is immensely silly in general and i hope it goes away eventually anyway.

i don't want to cause personal offense because you seem so enamored with the concept but you've admitted as much that it's possible simply because the AI perpetually underestimates how much destruction a player battleship can actually wreak.

furthermore, the concept only really works because the battlefield is just a totally abstracted box. realistically, any ship could just go around you a little bit and then blow the hell out of your rear echelon, retreat and then wait for your ship to self-destruct under it's own inability to maintain itself.

basically, tweaking the game around allowing such a thing except in rare circumstances seems like it will break more than it will fix.

[Megas]

Too many game mechanics encourage soloing fleets.  It was a real problem during 0.6 and 0.62 (excess loot required Atlas).  In 0.65, standing down bonuses made deploy all fleets very good, especially frigates.  Now in 0.7+, given meager loot and no more deploy all/stand down bonuses, soloing fleets is best if player wants to profit from combat.

i don't want to cause personal offense because you seem so enamored with the concept but you've admitted as much that it's possible simply because the AI perpetually underestimates how much destruction a player battleship can actually wreak.

Does not matter because 1) if battle size is small enough, AI cannot deploy enough and 2) after a certain point, more ships means they smash each other and/or lose CR the same time you do, and that makes the fight easier.  Walls help, but it is doable without them.  I tried simulator runs with 5000 battle size and it was easier than 500 because AI ships kept smashing into each other, and eventually the survivors were out of CR.

I am not enamored with soloing fleets per se, I prefer to deploy all and crush everything immediately.  I prefer to win battles with the least amount of casualties and resources consumed, and soloing fleets with the smallest ship possible does that.

[Cik]

fair enough, what i meant was that in a fleet vs fleet context the enemy's willingness to leroy into a paragon or other superbattleship instead of just attacking the rest of your fleet (which is presumably now alone without it's superbattleship..) makes very little sense.

like nomadic_ posted upthread, smashing your warships into the enemy's warships is a strategy of last resort, especially if the enemy's warship is an enormous rounded circle thing with an impenetrable omnishield and the power output of a small star.

[nomadic_leader]

yea the deployment abstraction is responsible for this soloing phenomenon. Megas, about how much time does it take to win the battle soloing vs a big fleet of warships?

The campaign map could keep ticking during combat at a reduced speed and other enemies should be able to join the fight against you. As i understand expanded battles right now, it just adds any enemy within a certain distance to the battle at the beginning of it, which is a lesser implementation of the mechanic. Having them actually break in midway through would be cool (or do they do this already?)

ie if every realtime second of combat  = 100 "campaign clock" seconds  = 0.012 realtime campaign second then:

10 realtime minutes of combat would equal = 17/24ths of a 'campaign clock' day = 6.94 realtime seconds on the campaign map, which is an awful lot of time for more enemies to come, giving you more impetus to finish quickly. the ratio of time compression could be adjusted to find the right balance.

[Achataeon]

^ This. But maybe it would end up making alpha-strike-based fleets just that much potent since they can easily end fights decisively. The ships and builds that favor slow fleet actions and kiting would be hampered if there are a lot of fleets in play in the campaign screen.

[Cik]

is endless kiting really something that should be encouraged anyway

it doesn't really make any sense, just as with the soloing example, the only reason the enemy is "forced" to chase futilely after a single ship constantly playing range is that they are constrained by a fixed "box" that they can't get out of.

in reality they would just ignore you and go shoot whatever rear echelon ships you have instead of screwing around chasing something they can't catch.

anyway, kiting is only a thing because the things that used to deal with it don't deal with it anymore.

[Cik]

soloing is immensely silly in general and i hope it goes away eventually anyway.

Something to consider is that the way the early game is set up, it trains the player from the very first battle to solo enemy fleets with a single ship.  It's nice if you start a new campaign and the RNG is nice enough to give you a single pirate Hound or something equally simple to fight, but you're just as likely to run into a Hound, a Wolf, a pair of Kites and a wing of Broadswords or similar small fleet.  At level 1 this is a challenging battle, probably impossible to a new player but quite doable for a veteran.  If there's a way to beat such a fight without kiting for minutes in my single ship I'm not aware of it though.

I don't see how it's possible to eliminate this style of play without fundamentally changing the entire StarSector combat system.  When I first picked up this game, energy weapons were king because all ballistic weapons had ammunition limits.  This did even more to encourage long fights and kiting because high-tech ships could outlast anything with ballistic armament, lasers and HBs would go on firing long after every HVD and Vulcan ran out of ammo.  In an attempt to discourage players from soloing entire fleets with a single Medusa, Tempest, or Hyperion various changes were made such as the CR timer and giving most weapons unlimited ammunition.  In practice this means that half the ships in the game can now be used to solo entire fleets with the right character and player skillset.

What changes could be made that would remove the kiting aspect of combat that you don't like, but wouldn't make the early game crushingly difficult?

first, thank you for posting as it was very insightful.

fundamentally though i do not think there is really a conflict. IMO, larger fleets should mostly be required to have a dedicated support infrastructure, like repair gantries, tugs, freighters et cetera. a player fleet that consists of a single wolf isn't vulnerable in the same way a massive fleet with civilian ships is, and there is a big difference between a large fleet deploying a single ship and the enemy refusing to simply fly past the that ship, ignore it, then shoot the rest of your fleet and a fleet consisting of a single ship deploying only that single ship.

in the first case, it makes no sense for the enemy to perpetually ram their heads into the wall and die slowly when there are more tempting targets past the one they have no chance of catching, and the second case where it's just a single kiting wolf shooting you. in general though the AI has gotten less and less capable of judging winnable fights with the addition of officers and other massive skill buffs. many of the root problems in the new patch stem from it's inability to judge it's probability of victory correctly.

in my mind, there's a huge difference between a wolf kiting a few frigates to death and a fleet consisting of like 15 ships deploying a single medusa that the enemy pointlessly crashes into even though they have no realistic chance of victory and there are easier pickings elsewhere.

you can remove one without necessarily removing the other, IMO. many suggestions in this very thread would not hamper the player's ability to deploy just a single lasher or wolf, while hindering (but not removing, probably) the player deploying a single high tech ship and destroying fleets singlehandedly.

i should emphasize that soloing fleets in a medusa isn't REALLY what i'm trying to kill here, i'm just pointing out that within the current deployment system the enemy is simply incapable of deploying to attack ships that are actually vulnerable to be attacked, like nomadic_ noted, the enemy crashing their warships into your extremely high-tech murderdeathkillboxes when they should be trying to shoot support ships or weaker warships instead is foolish, and the real problem under the current deployment system is that they have no choice. the battlefield is a "deathbox" and no attacks against the rear echelon (IE, the ships the player has not chosen to deploy) is possible.

this provides a disincentive for many theoretical types of fleets that could exist, but currently don't, like convoy raiding fleets, dedicated pirates, escort fleets, etc.

there are many ways to sort of break up this current meta, my favorite probably being a tactics system that allows you to affect the enemy's deployment ability (or improve your own) such that you can force them to deploy ships they don't want to, or force them to deploy in certain areas of the map, etc. this would buff the leadership tree (which sorely needs it) while making fights more interesting than simply "two warships enter, one warship leaves"

furthermore, it would provide a use for combat freighters, blockade runner ships, flak-based escorts. fighters. all things that need alot of help. as it is, pretty much the only ships that are useful are dedicated warships with as hard armor/shields as possible and as many guns as feasible (while still retaining decent fluxstats to fire them)

in short, it would improve the ship diversity in the game, improve battles to be about more than "move to center, fire gun" and add in new tactics and new fleet compositions.

[nomadic_leader]

^ Two nice posts from Cik and network Pesci summing up the design challenges -- and this stuff leads to lots of other issues like the supply/economy around which this thread was formed.

I don't see how it's possible to eliminate this style of play without fundamentally changing the entire StarSector combat system.

This may have to happen if SS wants to fulfill its full potential. Combat is not designed for campaign.

I'm repeating Cik. To solo when your fleet is one ship is fine. To solo WHILE you have other ships safe outside 'the box' is not, and we've made suggestions to address this. (I think it should be all or nothing deployment for all sides)

Combat only works, and only seems designed for, main menu missions without outside context, where every engagement is 'the big pitched battle'. When you put it in campaign it doesn't hold up. Everyone has support ships, yet they're 'outside.' It is exploitable and combat feels like an unconnected minigame since it doesn't match campaign reality.

If ships are close enough to be in one fleet, they should be in combat together. If they're far enough to not be in combat, then they should be outside the fleet and vulnerable in campaign.

Instead, they're in an invulnerable, intermediary 'safe space.' This severely limits the type of engagements played and thus types of tactics used. And it creates tonnes of immersion and balance issues. This why we need all these rules like CR and so on. It's all a way to staple combat to campaign.

[Megas]

Also, duing the 0.6x days, you had a Logistics score.  You started with 20, and Leadership and Fleet Logistics raised it to 100.  20 points is only enough from a few frigates to one Conquest and nothing else.  For die-hard fans of Combat and Technology (like me), they were forced to solo fleets with one smaller ship.  To make matters worse in early 0.6x, fleets dropped so much loot that the only way to take it all is to bring an Atlas.  During 0.62, my fleet was basically one Medusa, and the rest were Atlases because of excessive loot drops.

Today, with player limited to 25 ships, but AI can have up to 40 or so ships and combine with other fleets for me, player will usually be outnumbered, and AI performs somewhat poorly if outnumbered.  If your primary goal is to conserve resources, and you are skilled enough to kill everyone with one ship, or at worst, chain-flagships, you solo the fleet.

yea the deployment abstraction is responsible for this soloing phenomenon. Megas, about how much time does it take to win the battle soloing vs a big fleet of warships?

Simulator-sized?  Varies.  If I have the displeasure of facing a slow trickle of Timid captains, maybe from thirty minutes to an hour due to waiting for ships to run out of CR and lose their engines so my battleship can catch up and kill them!  (Thankfully, enemy Timids are out in 0.7.2.)  If the AI is more aggressive, probably about fifteen or twenty minutes.  Capitals need Hardened Subsystems to fight lots of ships in prolonged battles.

If it is about twenty or so ships, I can send Medusa or Hyperion and finish in a few minutes.  If a full-sized fleet, I might get away with sending a Dominator or Eagle.  Multiple fleets requires Onslaught or Paragon.  During my last game, I favored Paragon, but after grinding the simulator, I am beginning to like Onslaught more - Onslaught with lots of PD is nearly as good defensively as Paragon, but Onslaught can snipe, get to places faster, and just simply kill fleets faster than Paragon, or at least waste less time stalling for dissipation.

Back in 0.6.5, I deployed about thirty to forty frigates and slaughtered everything.  With 50% CR refund after each fight, and frigates being cheap to deploy, deploying that much was worth it.  Now, you almost never get CR back at all.  Also, in 0.65, you only needed to fight named bounties after a certain point.  You can deploy whatever you want, fix your fleet, go back to food runs until the next bounty.  Now, in 0.7+, you may very well be in hostile space, and you might need to chain-battle your way through, and deploying all when ships break down after a few fights is not very smart.


As for problem of champions only allowed to fight champions, I suppose the game could force all sides to deploy all.  Game would need to eliminate battle size and possibly deployment costs.  Stubborn players might try to bring only one ship instead of a fleet.  Those that do not want to stick with just one ship may refuse to bring support ships of any kind, especially if they become priority targets.