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

Author Topic: Impressions of the game after a three year absence. [Now with six year update]  (Read 5606 times)

momerathe

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So last weekend, I downloaded the latest version. Last time I played - or rather last time I posted to this forum which is probably about the same thing - was in December 2013. I thought I'd post a bit about my impressions of what's changed.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

First of all, the game's still fun to play. This is not a given -  sometimes I go back to a game and think "why did I play this again?", but that's not the case here. So that's good!

I understand that there have been a bunch of tweaks and changes to weapons & ship stats and suchlike, but to be honest, I didn't notice any difference. Partly, I'm sure, that this is hazy memory, and partly not being changes to ships or weapons I use extensively.

I still prefer manually piloting destroyers. Few of the bigger ships really speak to me: either they've got a weird layout (I am congenitally incapable of flying an Odyssey), or they're too fat and slow, or they just don't have a weapons layout I like. Good to see more variety in carriers though.

Novelty is the spice of life

Officers are a nice addition, though I was surprised how fast they level up! The limited choices when levelling up is a good mechanic, as it forces some diversity in your fleet and cuts down on micromanagement. It did suck when I got lumbered with a cautious officer at the start of the game, though.

The sensor mechanic - I go hot and cold on this. On the one hand, it makes finding things to kill a considerably more tedious process. It also vastly increases the change of being jumped by an un-winnable fight with no warning. I have found it very occasionally useful to turn my transponder off long enough to sneak past an enemy fleet - assuming it's not one of the ones that will pounce on you anyway, but on reflection the downsides far outweigh the upsides.

Speaking of being pounced upon, I do like the reinforcement mechanic - it can lead to some epic battles. But it is highly non-obvious what range it's going to kick in. My little fleet of one cruise and four destroyers got entangled with three Hegemony fleets with an Onslaught in each!. What I'd like is some way of backing out of the fight, or some sort of decision point before the allies join the battle.

Missions - I didn't bother with. I tried fulfilling a couple of delivery missions and discovered that the deadlines were impossibly short given the distances involved, so I closed the tab and never opened it again.

The addition of Factions is probably the biggest change. It nice to be involved in the broader conflicts that define the setting. Although it does seem very random - I keep getting dinged by my allies for not being hostile with people.  I've never even met these guys! You want to me fly to the other end of the sector just to pick a fight with them?

In the end, though, with no real way of affecting the status-quo, all the faction mechanic does is a) give you more enemies to fight (which is good!) and b) cut down on the variety of hulls you've got available.


Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Which segues into my next comment - availability of stuff. I appreciate the fact you have to work to get into a faction's good graces and you get rewarded, but overall the availability of weapons and ships is diabolical. There's the same-old same-old in every market. Going back and forth between Magec and Hybrasil gets old really fast. Ironically, one of my last posts on the forum was about a phase-cloaking destroyer. I understand that there's been one added to the game, and I'd love to be able to fly it, but I've never even seen it.

If I've put in the work to get to a high faction rating, at least reward me with the gear I've earned, don't force me to spend months of game time waiting for it to appear. What i'd suggest is that you can "spend" reputation points to requisition military hardware - they'll give you one ship in recognition of your good works, but don't break it!



« Last Edit: February 14, 2020, 07:50:45 AM by momerathe »
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Gothars

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Re: Impressions of the game after a three year absence.
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2016, 09:12:46 AM »

[quote author=momerathe link=topic=11361.msg193021#msg193021 date=1474040170

If I've put in the work to get to a high faction rating, at least reward me with the gear I've earned, don't force me to spend months of game time waiting for it to appear. What i'd suggest is that you can "spend" reputation points to requisition military hardware - they'll give you one ship in recognition of your good works, but don't break it!
[/quote]

The idea to order specific ships was there before, but to pay with reputation is an interesting new take on it. That would give meaning to gaining rep even after it is maxed out.
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Alex

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Re: Impressions of the game after a three year absence.
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2016, 10:01:34 AM »

Hi! Always good to see someone coming back to the game after a while :) Glad you're finding it fun, and thank you for your feedback!


... or some sort of decision point before the allies join the battle.

Hmm, yeah. Made a note to look at this from that perspective.


In the end, though, with no real way of affecting the status-quo, all the faction mechanic does is a) give you more enemies to fight (which is good!) and b) cut down on the variety of hulls you've got available.

Yep, it's very much a placeholder mechanic.

Which segues into my next comment - availability of stuff.

Availability of stuff is definitely... well, it's a thing that needs to be addressed, though to what degree is a question. Let me just say that it's something I'm looking at and very much aware of, but it's going to be an ongoing process.
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Techhead

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Re: Impressions of the game after a three year absence.
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2016, 11:27:43 AM »

Missions - I didn't bother with. I tried fulfilling a couple of delivery missions and discovered that the deadlines were impossibly short given the distances involved, so I closed the tab and never opened it again.
I found delivery missions can be quite lucrative if you keep an awareness of how fast you can deliver the goods. Your odds improve a bunch if you have a stockpile of goods in storage or can buy them where you accept the mission. And even if you can't make it in time, they can hint at shortages that you can exploit the old-fashioned way. (ie. selling goods to markets)
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Dwarfslayer

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Re: Impressions of the game after a three year absence.
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2016, 03:36:13 PM »

I second the decision point on reinforcing enemies as well. Would it be possible to have a multi-stage encounter or perhaps a countdown to reinforcements so if you smash your original opponents fast enough you can scram before their big friends show up?

Honestly ship and weapon availability has never sat right with me since the inception of the campaign. Hulls and weapon types are common enough to encourage boring munchkin optimisation strategies, but not so common that any given ship can be acquired with a bit of dedication. The space-economy is driven by supplies and fuel, I'd like to see a shift to have it more driven by hulls and weapons, with supplies plentiful and fuel relatively cheap. Acquiring much-needed hardware from salvage so you can finish arming your rag-tag band sounds much more exciting to me than doing the space equivalent of fighting the fridge for your lunch of supplies and tasty space-gasoline

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woodsmoke

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Re: Impressions of the game after a three year absence.
« Reply #5 on: September 16, 2016, 04:54:58 PM »

Missions - I didn't bother with. I tried fulfilling a couple of delivery missions and discovered that the deadlines were impossibly short given the distances involved, so I closed the tab and never opened it again.
I found delivery missions can be quite lucrative if you keep an awareness of how fast you can deliver the goods. Your odds improve a bunch if you have a stockpile of goods in storage or can buy them where you accept the mission. And even if you can't make it in time, they can hint at shortages that you can exploit the old-fashioned way. (ie. selling goods to markets)

Missions are the best way to make money in the game right now, provided you're set up for it and know what you're doing - which, yeah, pretty well states missions probably need some looking at.

At any rate, as noted, speed > ALL, though cargo capacity comes a close second. It's possible to make it between adjascent systems in fewer than 10 days, but only if your fleet is running at burn 10, you already have the stuff in your holds or can buy it at the market where you accepted the mission, and said market is relatively close to a jump point. My preference is for mules; less cargo capacity than buffalos, sure, but also a lot more ordinance points for get-away hullmods and no civilian sensor profile. Equip 'em all with SO and UI/AE and pilot something what can swat fighters when they get too close during pursuits and you'll never even need to use emergency burn.
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Megas

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Re: Impressions of the game after a three year absence.
« Reply #6 on: September 17, 2016, 06:06:57 AM »

Missions might also require sufficient access to the good stuff.  When I play with Hegemony commission, there are plenty of profitable missions.  When I play with Tri-Tachyon commission, most of the missions are a rip-off, and the good ones are rare enough that it is not worth tying a large percentage of my assets in commodities that I may never get to sell for a profit in the foreseeable future.
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momerathe

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Six year update

For whatever reason a Starsector LP popped up in my Youtube feeds and I thought "hey, I used to play that game - I wonder wat's up with it?". Turns out, a lot. It's almost like a whole new game.

There's obviously been a lot of work done on balancing, both in and out of combat; most of my comments from the last time I did this have been addressed in one way or another. Missions are a lot more useful due to the amount of extra information you're given and the fact that a lot of the time you can take them or leave them. The rep system works (early game - more on that later), and you can usually find the stuff you want (although I'm always critically short on certain weapons).

New stuff - Exploration

Exploring is pretty cool and a nice feature. You get good rewards, and it's a nice way to make money in the early game when you've only got a scrappy little fleet. It's nice, too, that it encourages you in various ways to build your fleet composition for somethign other than fighting.

That said, it does get pretty repetitive. It would be nice to have more unique stuff to interact with - and I don't necessarily mean big rewards or things like that, but just interesting stuff to see. It would be nice to have a roguelike element to the game where some runs you get X event and on some you get Y.

Colonies

Very cool. It's a great mid-game money sink, and great motivation for exploring systems to find nice planets. That said there are definitely areas that could use a bit of tweaking.

Firtsly, it seems like there's every motivation to build "tall" and not very much to build "wide". A system with a bunch of average resources is superior in almost every way to having multiple systems - just in terms of player time if nothing else. As such, finding that planet with ultra-rich ores is not such a big deal if you've got a population 7 planet with an administrator over the way that will supply all the domestic demand that you'll ever need. I think what I'd do is add a cap to the resource production based on the resource level, so that sparse or moderate ores are fine when you're developing your colony, but as time goes on and your demands increase you have to go father afield and incroporate more systems to keep your industry fed.

It is a little immersion breaking that the core systems are so static when colonisation is otherwise so easy, but, eh, I appreciate it's a work in progress and it's nice to be able to take things at my own pace rather than have to deal with an all-faction land-grab.

Could you just not?

Saying all that, once you get into the colony stage I think the reputation system falls on its arse. Now I'm not saying that the game needs to be Stellaris, but I do think some sort of diplomacy/treaty system is required. At the moment your relationships seem to inexorably erode with expedition after expedition, until you've got no choice but to wipe them out. There's no middle ground.

Also AI - I like the way that it's tied into the setting lore, but I feel that there needs to be a meaningful alternative - human administrators are kind of useless. I get that there needs to be an advantage to using AI in order for it to be a meaningful choice whether you want to aggravate the Hegemony or not, but still.

All in all it was nice coming back to the game and seeing all the changes. Perhaps I'll be back in another three years :).
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Grievous69

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Cya in 2023 when the game hopefully releases *waves*
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