I like those changes, the obnoxious ships (Heron, every Damper Field-ers) got a slight nerf to what makes them annoying to fight.
Just wanted to mention that the damper field changes specifically were motivated by your feedback post; "no fun was allowed that day"
Thank you!
The Omen got further buffed with the much stronger EMP emitter, that thing is going to be a fighter's boogeyman. By the way, does the "Flamed-out missiles now have a 50% chance to bounce off harmlessly on impact" affect EMP'd missiles, or just the ones out of fuel?
EMP'ed missiles actually instantly become 100% disarmed. There's a method in MissileAPI that can be used to set a missile resistance to EMP, i.e. the number of times it can be hit with the EMP emitter before it disarms.
A question about the Tempest, does the drone reload its blaster when recalled? Hopefully not, the Tempest is already at the top of the foodchain, it doesn't needs a near instant reloading, flux-free AM blaster on top of that.
It's not a drone anymore, so recalling it simply makes it hover behind the Tempest.
Also glad to see an armor buff for the Astral, maybe this will even allow some brawler builds. Gotta find a reason to use that new torpedo launcher.
Hmm, maybe. So far the large missile slots have been great to use with the Squall - good support for fighter waves.
It occurred to me that if hullmods will be potential loot, and the only way to get a particular one is killing friendlies (for example, if Paragon is the only ship with Hardened Shields, and you are commissioned with Tri-Tachyon), then player can travel with transponder off and kill friendly ships, then laugh evilly after scooping up desired loot, and maybe board a rare ship that shops could but refuse to sell.
You can buy hullmods at markets; generally speaking the ones that are available for sale are the ones that that faction tends to use.
Maybe ships are drop modspecs they use, just like weapons.
They do, yes, though the baseline chance is pretty small.
Nice changes but "Removed crew experience levels" means ships without officers will be unable to improve accuracy and CR. I will miss my elite crew.
Yeah, but man does it make so many things on the backend *so* much easier and less bug-prone. Even if this was a subtraction in terms of gameplay (which I don't think it is - it feels cleaner now), it would still be 100% worth it just for how much it makes any related code easier, and for how many more crew-related mechanics are in the game as a result.
Nice to see you're still improving the AI. I'm hoping one of the "big content additions" will be the long anticipated addition of industry!
Not outposts, but there's something in the pipeline as far as the industry aptitude - hopefully it'll pan out, can't wait to talk about it if it does
Needless to say there's a lot of cool stuff in this patch which represents a bit step forward in the game development, like the exploration which I've been anticipating a while. Good work.
Thank you!
There are two kinds of games (for the purposes of this discussion anyway):
-Simulation games (flight sims, space world sims, mario sims, etc)
-Abstracted games (board games, chess, go-fish, etc)
I don't think it makes sense to categorize games into these buckets, or even consider "simulation" and "abstracted" to be the opposite ends of a spectrum - rather, they're both independent axes.
Consider a detailed historical board game - those clearly tend to care very much about being a simulation, but are at a high level of abstraction. Conversely, FPS games like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike are generally at a low level of abstraction, but don't care much about being a simulation.
Most games are a simulation to some degree, though: e.g. Chess - both heavily abstracted and not-very-simulation-y - is still a simulation of war.
-Random effects of hullmods e.g. Unstable injector reducing weapons range
For example, something like this - there's a clean in-fiction justification for it, "increased engine emissions interfere with targeting sensors". It's consistent with other gameplay mechanics here - the idea of engines and sensors interacting in this way comes through in multiple places. It's hardly random, in fact I think one could make a good argument that both this and PPT and other similar mechanics increase the "simulationiness" of the game. At the same time, the game is clearly highly abstracted - combat takes place on a 2D plane, bullets fade out, relative ship sizes aren't right for what they'd be in-universe, etc.
Anyway, my point here is that singling out Unstable Injector doesn't seem reasonable. It's about on par with other hullmods. Sure, you might say that those are also too abstract - which may be a fair point, but then we're talking about such a large part of the game that I'd turn it around and suggest that maybe they're too abstract for what you think the game ought to be than for what it actually is
Long story short please try to find balance motivated mechanics that have an in-game logic instead of being arbitrary and non intuitive. Though this would require overhauling the CR system and the combat vs campaign speed disparity issues however.
That's exactly what I'm doing, yeah. I just don't see the examples you're bringing up as not fitting those criteria. The one case where I'd agree is some of the rules around when PPT ticks down (not PPT in general; I'm happy with *that*). On the bright side, the "when does PPT tick down" rules only really come into play when the player is trying hard to exploit them, at which point it's not that big a deal.
So: I get what you're saying, and generally agree with it on a more abstract level. But details, man.
Also, y'know, holy *** this is gonna be a good Easter.
Oh, you.
EDIT: also really excited to see options to compel aggression out of your officers. For christ's sake guys, it's okay if the PD dings your armor a little bit, just run down the blasted Tarsus. Making them become reckless at the player's discretion is also a great workaround for all the issues that normally surround it. You might lose a ship unnecessarily because you told them to go all-in, but it will feel like the consequence of a decision you made rather than just being punished by AI mistakes you have no real control over.
Hopefully!