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[Vilab]

  Hi, i wrote a very long player feedback to highlight what i loved in this mod, and also a few issues i found, when the forum decided to **** me over login and deleted everything.

  So in short : Great mod which make the Vanilla combat looks bland. Love the many small weapons slots, the widespread fighter bays, the variety of weapons (in theory );

  A list of specific issues i found :

- The Nexerelin mod make the AO modified Tutorial ( which looks very promising and gives actual weight behind the AO ) playable, but it is unfinished and unfinishable as a player, so it is quite irritating.
You migh add that Nexerelin give access to a not working tutorial on the frontpage.

- An ultra heavy gunship ( Golliath ? ) have 20 000 shield, it looks a bit too much

- The small assault autocanon is much better than the small dual and regular autocanon ( 125 dps vs 80ish and 67 ), both of the latter could get a buff, but the former could also get a slight nerf.

- The dual pulse laser is a terrible PD weapon, barely better dps than the regular one while the magazine is full, half of that on the long term

- The extremely effective Rapier missiles and effective Atropos ones are flux-free despite having better/similar stats and dps as most flux hungry ones.

- the effective range of many missiles ( rapier, atropos, ion torpedoes, swarmers, harpoons... ) is much higher than stated, providing the player with an unfair advantage over the AI.


  Personal opinions :

- The balance of missile is a bit all over the place : ( plus Rapier and Atropos being flux-free while among the most effective missiles ).
Overall : the missile are quite bad, they are very flux hungry despite not being very effective since most ships have a high amount of PD weapons. Only missiles that are fast and/or can be swarmed are a chance to reach a isolated non overloaded target and the damages they deal when they sucessfully hit them is barely worth the flux cost.
Some missiles are extremely bad : the Trebuchets are useless, the Firestorms looks decentish but have a way too long reload time of 52s.

- The overall balance of Strike/Line/Support weapons is not great : flux producing weapons are not good enough vs flux-free ones
I find that most support weapons have way too low dps to matter in combat.

Strikes magazines weapons are very rarely worth it, not only they cost flux, but their magazine are often too small to make their "burst firing time" matters, then they are stuck with often terrible long term dps. The hull mod help a bit but isn't enough.

If Weapons cost flux, then they should have similar dps as "line free flux" weapons on top of having some advantage ( range, burst or alpha  ability ), instead of only having extremely narrow advantage while being much worse on the front line.

- Too many PD weapons use slow reloading magazines : the PD weapons often have a good enough range to engage regular ship, on which they empty their magazines which then leave them useless against missile and fighters. The Shattercells are an exemple of that.

- Skills shouldn't be OP : Some skills give way too good advantage and are game changers instead of small bonus :
The 0-flux advantage at any flux level, the 15% hard flux dissipation, the massive flat max speed bonuses, the 200-300% PD effectiveness bonus, the various +50%... completely change the way you can play or how annoying an Officer led AI ship can be.

- Aknowledgment of AI limitation : The AI is limited and will often do stupid things, such as getting stuck in Black Holes and Weeeeeeeeing accross the battlefield by Plasma Burning into wrecks.
Does it really matters that the AO system have a Black Holes ? Couldn't it be a Blue or Red Giants instead so that there wouldn't be AI fleets suiciding by gravity ?
Could you switch Plasma Burn like ship ability by softer Plasma Jet like ones ( increased max speed and maneuvrability instead of  ) ?

[Morrokain]

...

Welcome to the forums and thanks for the feedback! I'll try to touch on as much as I can but there is a lot of information there so feel free to remind me if I miss anything or if you have counterpoints, etc.

I didn't know about Nex making the tutorial available so thanks for telling me! I will post a note but yes its completely unfinish-able and I was in the middle of trying to solve the bug when an update changed how things work in tutorial and I abandoned that project until a bunch of other more important things are accomplished.

TLDR General Balance Concerns: Correct me if I am wrong because I can't realistically deep test everything every update, but it seems like some of these opinions are based upon stat cards or through 1 vs 1 tests outside of a fleet context using builds that are countered by the tactical build's inherent counter. I will explain in detail below, but what would be really helpful would be specific builds against specific builds that showcase the imbalance rather than general statements. Please do not think I am saying that the feedback is incorrect, but with all the tactical synergies and the intended balance considerations of the tactical roles present in the mod, I think it is easy to get wrong first impressions based upon over relying on stat card math comparisons rather than in battle testing. I also think that if you are using single ship vs single ship comparisons it is really easy lose the sense of tactical synergy that comes from larger fleet engagements. This isn't a hard rule or anything, because not all of the variants I test are optimized or meant to counter all other builds. That is why it greatly helps me to decipher the problem if I get examples to reproduce. The recent testing I've done doesn't match up with the reported feedback imo, but there could easily be things I'm missing and so details would help me narrow this down! I hope this explains where I am coming from and you don't feel like I am dismissing the feedback as a whole. That isn't the case at all.

Details:

Spoiler

Goliath: The number itself is a bit high considering immersion, but the effectiveness is necessary when looking at comparisons to replacement times. That said, the eventual idea is to increase its replacement time so that it effectively serves as a very difficult to destroy heavy assault gunship that takes a very long time to replace. That is why its considered a legendary experimental design. I can reduce the number and increase shield efficiency and it will look a bit better. It doesn't seem imbalanced from initial tests after the change and through station battles, but if you give me a variant that you think is way too strong I will build and test it!

Autocannons vs Assault Autocannon: Range is huge in Starsector.  The 100 additional range and the fact that both of those weapons do not cost flux while the assault version has .55 flux efficiency makes a big difference. They are more for serving different spots in a build based upon how much OP needs to be saved and what the flux budget is. While this matters the most for frigates, it also can impact ships with a lot of small weapons since all of that flux build up will start to matter. So is the extra dps worth it considering those factors? Well, it really depends. It can be but it doesn't always add up to that in my experience. That is intended. You bring this up, actually, when you mention flux free vs magazine capacity weapons and their effectiveness. There you seem to reason the opposite stance where flux weapons don't have enough of an advantage. Is this discrepancy due to the idea that these impression are coming from testing specific weapons against others? (Not trying to be aggressive with that statement in case it comes across that way. I'm just trying to flesh out your thoughts overall and understand where the opinion is stemming from.)

Dual Pulse Laser: Range factors in here too. It can mean the difference between shooting the missile down or not. 100 extra range matters quite a bit from my tests. So if it didn't have the sustainability drawback, the weapon would far outshine the single barrel version with more dps, range, and a wider area of hit margin since it fires two bolts that have a wider spread. The sustained damage may be a tiny bit low, but combat tests haven't given me the feeling that one is worse or better than the other one. At least not yet. I admittedly haven't tested it extensive but I will as I add the weapon to more builds. It is very new (just this last update).

Atropos and Rapiers: The Atropos already has changes in the dev version that make it a bit easier to dodge, so that will help. The short answer is that adding flux to it makes the AI practically unwilling to fire it even when the target is overloaded. I won't argue that it seems stronger than other missiles. The Rapier is a similar story. But, other anti-shield weapons are very good as well, so that is something to consider.

Effective Missile Range: The AI also has unfair advantages over the player in many cases. The actual ranges being higher is so that fast kiting ships can't immediately kite out of missile range. Considering how PD will eventually work, I don't think it will be a huge problem, but I will keep my eye on it just in case.

Missiles in general: Long range missiles have to be hard to hit with due to their range and force concentration. If you concentrate missile strikes and saturate point defense you can take out ships at very long ranges without them being able to do much about it. I definitely see where you are coming from in a general sense of firing a couple weapons and having them do nothing. It doesn't feel good. But the opposite of that is this boring scenario that allows you to sit back and slowly pick off all the ships in the battle without much thought. That is why:

Magazine Weapons: PD weapons have magazines specifically so that there are windows where long range missiles can do some damage. Not a lot, but as a support ship they aren't supposed to deal a lot of damage unless the player or another allied shield creates an opportunity such as an overload or their own srms or rockets, torpedoes, etc distracting PD or burning through the PD magazines.

Strike magazine weapons are similar in that they are a small window of opportunity weapon that you build the ship around, and then support it with a defensive flux free weapon ship to allow the magazines to replenish and the flux to dissipate. The extra damage increase during the small strike window makes the target more vulnerable to the assault weapons of the follow up ship.

Fire Support Weapons: The same concept as above applies. Fire Support Weapons don't deal as much damage because they would be far too effective if they did. They stack damage at range and can support other ships by firing through them. This concentrates damage much more efficiently than two ships with flux free weapons in a large battle with many concentrated ships. If they did equal dps then there would actually never be an instance where a flux free build could beat a fire support build because the AI retreats from weapon range once its flux gets too high. The massive range of fire support weapons mean this happens often before the assault ship can even get within weapon range unless it is considerably more durable.

[close]

Skills: These are fairly new and are meant to be pretty powerful - more powerful than vanilla. You will find that this will become very necessary to combat end game threats if I've tuned it right. A high level officer does make a massive difference, but the enemy will have more - which makes, for instance, response fleets that have a lot more officers than the player a serious consideration that will require good decision making and tactics to overcome. At least that's the idea. It is very new and one of the least tested aspects of the mod to be fair.

Black Holes in AO system: It is supposed to factor into the eventual lore/story and that is why I haven't changed it yet. I'm curious though, is this just an immersion consideration or does it impact the campaign rig? For instance, does it mean that the AO often doesn't have defending fleets or something like that?

Plasma Burn: I'm a little confused as to what you are referring to here. Do you mean a specific ship? Or replacing all ships with Plasma Burn with Plasma Jets instead?

Thanks again for the feedback as a whole! I will keep all of this in mind as I continue to test. Every time I do a test session, I inevitably end up making some changes. (I just reduced the EMP of the Retribution interceptor weapon while testing Eagle (Sci) changes. Stuff like that.)

[Vilab]

  My opinions and feeling are based on my experience as a player in game : I play with 500 battle size, and i am often the underdog since my fleets usually consists of cruisers +1 capital carrier + 4-6 frigates not exceeding much over 200 since the slow down in storms and such is very irritating to me ( i just found ou about a x3 time multiplier, it might change my habits ).

  In my experience the ship do not often stack behind each other and support armed ships either end up temporarily in the frontline or remain far behind doing very little until they are engaged by ennemy frigate. Those frigates are not deterred by the low dps at all, especially since they can evade most of the slow firing fire. Indeed support weapons having relatively high alpha but very slow refiring make them very often miss their target ( when not beam based ), and lead to even lower than stated long term dps.

  My experience might be biaised since i often play frontline cruiser and very often ( have to ) force my other ship to push with me, the lack of aggressivity of ship with steady or without officier is slightly annoying to me, while Agressive Oficiers will suicide themself or abuse of the plasma burn ability and woink themself across the battlefield with disabled engines after hitting a big wreck.

  Cruiser level of shielding on a gunship suprised me, especially since its other stats are for now not that far from other gunships.

  I somehow missed the assault autocanon costing flux, the flux free version still looks very weak to me compared to a mass driver for exemple. They also suffer from long refiring time and often miss while the multiple 100 damages shots are not that effective against armor, so even when they finally hit it does not do much.
In my experience, a range difference of 100 do not matter, especially since they very rarely hit less than capital size at that range, and capital laught at such tiny damage.

  About Atropos, i also noticed both it and the Sabots, and Harpoons have single launcher version with much reduced OP cost, yet they behave very differently : the Sabot launcher no longer have multiple ammo in magazine, but reload time is barely increased, Harpoons's is increased, while the Atropos reload time is extremely increased. 

  As for Skills : i may not be a good exemple of the playerbase, but i dislike must-have extra abilities in games. Getting small advantage, or extras that matters in a few specifics case is great, getting abilities that completely change the mechanics of science based games is just irritating : either the game is balanced without them and you stomp everything once you get them, or it is and you struggle without them.
  Losing a few ships to End Games challenges in a desperate gamble looks fine to me, having to get and rely on abilities to survive againt them isn't, especially if getting them make standart fleets and challenges a walk in the park.

 The Plasma Burn ability make the ship "jump forward" a short distance at extremely high speed, the issue is that the AI will use it very often ( whenever it is available i guess ? ), and sometime it will use it and propel the ship against a big ennemy ship, a wreck or a battlestation, disabling the engines of the ship, and letting it go spinning accross the battlefield at 200-300 speed. By the time the engine get repaired and the ship's standart max speed is enforced, the ship crashed in the middle of the ennemy formation or is on the other side of the battle map. Odysseus Battlecruisers are extremely prone to this.
  Replacing those abilities that the AI use to suicide themself would be welcome. Yes it is a Vanilla thing, but since AO touches abilities...

edit You already did that ! I didn't touch the Odysseus recently...  don't know if other ship still have that terrible ability *

 edit 2 : Shrike hight tech destroyer do have that ability

  As for the Black hole, it is immersion breaking, and i can very easily see invasion or defensive fleets sometime getting stuck in there too ( i haven't yet, i don't go there often ). Would it be possible to add some kind of buoys with repellant effects arround it ( faking red giants... ) ?

[Morrokain]

...

Thanks for your response and continuing to flesh out your thoughts! I'm working on improving the fast missile racks AI today but I might have some time to run some tests based upon your feedback. I'll look at the autocannons and see if some improvements can be made without breaking the immersion of their lore or unbalancing them. I will say that other weapons have had a few buffs recently and so they could have fallen slightly behind in comparison. What I'm currently thinking is keeping their slow projectile speed or making it even slower but possibly further increasing their range and armor penetration. Essentially that turns them into a weapon good for hitting larger ships that can't dodge while the assault version and other ballistic weapons are more useful for nimbler ships.

The single sabot might be an oversight. I'll look into it. It may be because of the dps comparisons on the stat card. I'll also probably work on the gunships a bit more if I have time.

Question: do you often issue command orders in battle? I can see how support ships would "do their own thing" without orders being given and since the AI doesn't really recognize the different roles they would indeed likely get themselves into trouble unless assault ships happen to be nearby. Specifically, I'm talking about escort commands. You could also use defend commands and include a couple of defensive built ships to provide support through engage and eliminate.

Support ships being vulnerable to flanking frigates is intended to give them a role when built as attack ships rather than PD focused.

I'll respond to the other things a bit later, but the last thing I'll mention for now is that I have a possible idea for the Shrike.

[Vilab]

  Fury high tech cruiser also have Plasma Burn, though the issue was mostly with the Odysseus. The Shrike are so fragile that they tend to get deleted before they get close to ennemy ships, while Fury appear to be just the right size to get fluxed enough to decide to not kiss ennemy ships, and small enough to rarely hit big wrecks, or if they do they lose their velocity. I have never seen a Fury or Shrike being yeeted accross the Battlefield, while it was very frequent with Odysseus BC.

  About the Black Hole, i no longer need to imagine, i visited that sytem just when the AO planet were on the opposite side of the Black Hole, i visited both sides and there were quickly over 10 fleets stuck there. I don't know the lore you plan to introduce, could a binary system with a standart star - arround which the planets would be - + Black Hole on a lonely orbit be fine ?

  The orders i give are mostly to specific ship to eliminate an ennemy one faster, or to get out of a dangerous area, i usually order frigates to escort vulnerable ships such as carrier or weak DD in 1/1 ratio.  When the ennemy is likely to destroy a few of my frigates i order them to escort my line cruiser so that they don't get isolated and destroyed.
  I also use defend but since the AI will also defend the side there is no ennemy i only use it to keep some kind of formation until contact. When the ships are spread everywhere i will usually order a spare or damaged cruiser to escort my carrier to limit surprises.

[Morrokain]

...

Ah ok thanks for clarifying. It sounds like you are issuing commands mostly as intended. I'll do some fleet tests at some point. The ones I've seen recently have confirmed that support weapons are working as intended, but there may be some outliers. Those ships definitely need support though.

Skills: I have the opinion that it's more interesting to change the dynamic of what is possible through upgrades. I think it gives excitement to gaining levels and keeps the game feeling fresh. This is just my opinion though and I get where you are coming from. When I start deep testing the campaign I may make changes as I see imbalances or things that didn't quite work.

Black Hole: It might be possible to do a binary type thing and still keep the intended lore there. Hmm. I'll consider this more as I make changes.


The next update will have improvements to the Fast Missile Racks system's AI. It should be wasted a lot less often, and now takes into account things like the ships flux level and whether or not the missiles weapons cost flux to fire to determine whether its worth it to reload all missiles. There is probably additional improvements I could make, but I'm leaving it at this state for now.

I also buffed the armor penetration/dps of the small autocannons and reduced projectile speed a bit. I then increased the assault autocannon's projectile speed and increased its alpha dps while reducing sustained dps. That should hopefully differentiate the two in their roles.

The Enforcer, Manticore, Lasher, Gemini, Mule and Medusa have had a buff to their max flux. Shield efficiency remains the same I believe.

[Morrokain]

Dev blog for today:

I spent a fair amount of time on modding during the last couple of days as I have had some off time. Today in particular, I decided to investigate the reported issues with missiles a bit more in-depth from a small scale perspective. I have to admit that they were pretty broken at the frigate stage of combat from what I've seen. It could be that the bonus damage to missiles from the frigate and destroyer designations was too much to begin with. Since I'm moving in the direction of adding missile interdiction as a specific role instead of delegating it to smaller ship classes, I might reduce that bonus to make testing missiles more reliable as a whole. I have mostly been testing at the larger side of the combat spectrum when it comes to missiles and they seem roughly ok at that stage - when capitals are engaging capitals or stations, etc. Some of that could have been from changes that weren't in the most recent update however. I plan to spend the next couple of weeks fine-tuning that particular portion of the mod as I have time - alongside working on the portrait pack request and other roadmap items.

I made some additional weapon changes with the intent of giving more distinct roles by adjusting projectile speed and further fine tuning damage values along the ballistic and energy weapon lines. I have also taken a specific look at missile-emphasized ships that have fast missile racks since I recently made changes to the AI of that system.

In short, ugh... Even with some serious defensive buffs, they don't hold their weight via a DP comparison even with the fast missile racks improvements at the frigate level. At least not 1v1. Design-wise, I would ideally like to bring missiles to a state where they are a unique weapon type that increases total dps short term while being somewhat mitigated by PD and especially by ships emphasizing PD via the hullmods related to that. Missile regeneration is a feature of the mod and I don't want to change that just in case that was the impression. I also don't want to completely remove missile interdiction from the frigate designation in order to keep that ship type useful in more roles in the late game. The bonus may inevitably need some adjustments however, and I want the interaction between the damage potential of missiles and the PD component of ship builds to continue to mean something.

I want to also take this time to give individual missile weapons some more interesting nuance. Example: A question I asked myself was "what is the functional difference between the swarmer and the annihilator?" and the answer was "not much" since both are designed to break armor and both were reasonably accurate before I reduced the annihilator's speed. So one goal was to take a look at these issues and try to address them. The added wrinkle of course is maintaining a relative faction balance while fleshing out these nuances.

Feedback as always is welcome. I will probably release a stand-alone experimental version of the changes over the weekend at some point later this week. It won't be an update to the main download but instead it will be a test bed for the recent changes for those interested. If they prove useful, I will release them in the main update at that time alongside the roadmap items.

[Morrokain]

The experimental balance update for small missiles (also affects some larger ones) and frigates is now available on NexusMods under the "optional files" under version: 1.4.1.2 if anyone wants to see the general direction I'm taking as far as missiles go. It also includes a few ship and small PD weapon balance tweaks iirc.

[Albreo]

So, you adopt the Hurricane approach for Thunderbolt as well. I think it will do but can the sub missiles despawn a little later. I want the leftover to be able to smash into ships in the rear. Also, in one instance of firing at a backtracking ship, the sub missiles stop working before it reach the target.

The new Annihilator is pretty cool and strong. Although it misses a lot, like half, it's great at suppression.

The Breach pod is too expensive performance-wise and also clashes with a lot of other options. I think it can have the corrosive mod build in.

[Morrokain]

So, you adopt the Hurricane approach for Thunderbolt as well. I think it will do but can the sub missiles despawn a little later. I want the leftover to be able to smash into ships in the rear. Also, in one instance of firing at a backtracking ship, the sub missiles stop working before it reach the target.

Sure I changed it from 1 to 2 seconds flight time.

The new Annihilator is pretty cool and strong. Although it misses a lot, like half, it's great at suppression.

Nice that's what I was going for! It is supposed to be a way to "punch up" a hullsize a bit. It has medium weapon dps while its ammo isn't regenerating but it misses a lot and is fairly easy to shoot down by PD.

The Breach pod is too expensive performance-wise and also clashes with a lot of other options. I think it can have the corrosive mod build in.

I haven't made it to medium weapons just yet since I'm working from the ground up and still have a few more small weapons to look at. That sounds reasonable though. When I was testing station battles I added breaches to the Trade Guilds stations to test them out and they were ok enough. But that's a little different than ship vs ship so I'll take a closer look at that part once I finish small weapons.

[Albreo]

Had one crash so far. Trying to retreat my drone carrier from combat. Not sure if it's related or replicable. Also, REDACTED can somehow equip Shadowloard and Apocrypha even though both require pilots.

1032240 [Thread-3] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at java.util.HashMap.put(Unknown Source)
   at java.util.HashSet.add(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.D.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.D.Object(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.FighterAI.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advanceInner(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatState.traverse(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

[Morrokain]

Had one crash so far. Trying to retreat my drone carrier from combat. Not sure if it's related or replicable. Also, REDACTED can somehow equip Shadowloard and Apocrypha even though both require pilots.

1032240 [Thread-3] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at java.util.HashMap.put(Unknown Source)
   at java.util.HashSet.add(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.D.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.D.Object(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.ai.FighterAI.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advanceInner(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatState.traverse(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Looks like it might be related to those new fighter tags that change fighter AI. The drones on drone carriers all use most of them. I discovered that "attack_at_angle" can't be used in conjunction with Termination Sequence or a similar nullpointer happens.

Which drone carrier was it? I'll try and reproduce it when I'm off and see if removing any of the tags fixes it. I'd ideally like to use the tags, but I cant bring this up to Alex without having more specifics.

[Albreo]

Which drone carrier was it? I'll try and reproduce it when I'm off and see if removing any of the tags fixes it. I'd ideally like to use the tags, but I cant bring this up to Alex without having more specifics.

This happens on Effulgence. It was quite a big fight with 6 invasion fleets, so, the CR ran out and I was forced to send it back. I might also tap the retreat button too many times.

[Morrokain]

This happens on Effulgence. It was quite a big fight with 6 invasion fleets, so, the CR ran out and I was forced to send it back. I might also tap the retreat button too many times.

Ok noted. Sorry for all the follow up questions, but do you remember what wings you have equipped? Specifically, did you have gunships that attack from the side?

[Alexhandr]

Hey, love the mod! Great work!

Is there a way to join the Adamantine Consortium early game? I like to start off on my own with just a single ship or two, no colonies, not allied to anyone, and work my way up into their faction organically, kind of like in Mount and Blade Warband. Of course at the start, AC is at -50 and hostile. Any tips on how to get them to like me without joining them at the start through Nex?

Thanks!