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[Alex]

So i just realised how vague the Resistant Flux Conduits can be if you're reading it as a new player. "Decreases the amount of damage dealt by EMP weapons (ion cannons etc) by 50%. Also increases the ship's flux dissipation rate while venting by 25%". It can be highly interpreted as it decreasing /your/ outgoing EMP damage by 50%, instead of "Reduces EMP damage taken by 50%", akin to how it's written in the Solar Shielding description.

Let me replace "dealt by" by "taken from", that should clear it up considerably.

[Sendrien]

Alex, 0.9a is absolutely brilliant! This is really shaping up to the game I hoped it could be. After all the disappointments in the space genre, Starsector is a shining beacon.

I do have a question about exploration, though. What happens when all planets have been surveyed, and all probes/caches have been found? Does that spell the end of the exploration in the game? Or does the game spawn some points of interest to keep those types of missions going?

Happy holidays!

[Alex]

Alex, 0.9a is absolutely brilliant! This is really shaping up to the game I hoped it could be. After all the disappointments in the space genre, Starsector is a shining beacon.

Thank you! Really happy to hear that, it's hard to know ahead of time whether what I'm going for will match up with what you're hoping for, you know? Like it can be the same words on paper but still quite different in our respective imaginations, if that makes sense.

I do have a question about exploration, though. What happens when all planets have been surveyed, and all probes/caches have been found? Does that spell the end of the exploration in the game? Or does the game spawn some points of interest to keep those types of missions going?

Pretty much, yeah - the idea is that exploration is sort of what you do to build up into colonies and the end-game (some parts of both of the latter are still missing). There's definitely some room to do some more with making certain systems relevant again and so on, but probably not something like simply re-populating them with the same kinds of things they had to begin with. To me, respawning stuff like that would cheapen the feel of exploration on the first go-around.

Happy holidays!

Thank you, you too!

And Happy Holidays to everyone else, as well

[Stormking]

As much as I've been gushing about this game to anyone who'd listen in the past years, I want to point out some problems today. Just my two cents here after maybe twenty hours in 0.9

Fighters
--------

Fighters seem to lack a hard, asymetric counter. The best way to counter a force which relies on fighters is to have enough carriers with intercepters in your own fleet. Not something you can refit easily! I tried creating a pure anti-fighter destroyer and cruiser, but they were barely able to hold their ground, even with lots of double flak cannons.

Big Battles
-----------

Whenever I got to the deployment point limit, I felt screwed over.
When I defended my station, I was able to add maybe 30 points to the station, but when I attacked a Luddic Church base, they were fielding an entire army in addition to their station.
Not to mention that in such large battles with station, my FPS drops and it feels like a lot of inputs get dropped as well. Makes for a very frustrating experience when you can't tell why your ship won't move backwards - unless you switch on the AI and let it handle your flagship.

So there should be a way to control the deployment point limit, a preview of what you're getting into, and a chance to back out.

This probably isn't 0.9 feedback, since before I never ran such large fleets, but not being able to back out because my fleet is too large was quiet the shock. In a game that's supposed to be played on Iron Man, I hope the fleeing mechanics get a full overhaul.

Colonies
--------

Best addition ever, but on the other hand, having to defend them is a big pain. Being able to bribe them off is a good idea, but not always an option. And having to sit around your colony for 30 days and hold shift is very boring.
Having the option to leave part of your fleet to defend your orbital station would be good, as would the option to limit outside trading with other stations so this problem doesn't arise in the first place.
Other factions should have to wait until you establish Commerce to trade with a planet.
Often, I don't want a whole colony, just a hidey hole to store all the gear I have amassed without paying the 1% monthly fee.



Conclusion
----------

Star Sector is still the best space game I've played, and I've tried a lot. But a lack of something to do in smaller fights and the problems with big fights mentioned above has me waiting for 0.10 for now.

[TaLaR]

Fighters seem to lack a hard, asymetric counter.

How about player piloted Afflictor? Can delete enemy carriers fresh off their entry Burn, before main fleets even meet.

Simply drowning them in dakka via IPDAI IR Pulse Conquest or Onslaught packed with tons of dual flak works too. Just don't expect any puny cruiser or other lesser ship to do a capital's job.
Also, Devastator is a weapon specifically designed to clear concentrated fighter swarms.

So there should be a way to control the deployment point limit

There is. Default is 300 and can be increased to 500 via options. You can set more in config files too.

[Cosmitz]

Dominators do poorly when skilled up due to the recoil and precision buffs making it shoot very 'straight'.

However, the utterly best PD in the game which can almost never be used properly is the Proximity Charges. There aren't many ships with medium+ synergy slots, as in, turret missile slots, but those that gave them can do great with Charges. A single charge has the AOE and damage to erase a whole wing from the map. Not even Dominators can do it that quickly. Ammo is still a problem but given its effectiveness, it's worth it.

[Originem]

WHERE IS 0.9.1 OTL
And I found that most of intel things are hard coded, do they mean reports.csv is totally useless now?
And that's a disaster for translation, whether vanilla or mod...

[Alex]

Appreciate your feedback!

Fighters
--------

Fighters seem to lack a hard, asymetric counter. The best way to counter a force which relies on fighters is to have enough carriers with intercepters in your own fleet. Not something you can refit easily! I tried creating a pure anti-fighter destroyer and cruiser, but they were barely able to hold their ground, even with lots of double flak cannons.

It's hard to say without knowing what you're looking at - is it a 1-1 type situation, or a fleet situation? Fleets in general can counter fighters, but it takes giving good anti-fighter capability to a bunch of ships.

Flak actually isn't very good vs most fighters; PD in general is good for anti-missile, but anti-fighter is a different beast. In particular, PD that does kinetic or frag damage is really hampered even by fighter-level armor. Stuff like Phase Lances, Tactical lasers, or even Light Assault Guns is likely going to be more effective. Locusts are great, too. And the Doom - while unique in that - is about as close to a hard counter as it gets.

Big Battles
-----------

Whenever I got to the deployment point limit, I felt screwed over.
When I defended my station, I was able to add maybe 30 points to the station, but when I attacked a Luddic Church base, they were fielding an entire army in addition to their station.
Not to mention that in such large battles with station, my FPS drops and it feels like a lot of inputs get dropped as well. Makes for a very frustrating experience when you can't tell why your ship won't move backwards - unless you switch on the AI and let it handle your flagship.

So there should be a way to control the deployment point limit, a preview of what you're getting into, and a chance to back out.

(Right, there's battle size in settings, as someone mentioned. Basically, the bigger side gets the bigger chunk of it to deploy stuff.)

I don't think it's possible for inputs to get dropped - well, I guess anything is possible, but it's definitely coded in a way that should avoid that, and I haven't seen it myself in low-FPS situations.

Is it possible you're holding down too many keys at once? For example, if you're holding A, S, and ... let's say X, or another nearby key, chances are your keyboard is only going to be capable of registering at most two of those presses. That's just a physical wiring limitation on most keyboards. If anyone else is seeing input be dropped, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

This probably isn't 0.9 feedback, since before I never ran such large fleets, but not being able to back out because my fleet is too large was quiet the shock. In a game that's supposed to be played on Iron Man, I hope the fleeing mechanics get a full overhaul.

I've got a TODO item to look at it! In the meantime, you could deploy some stuff, lose it, and then retreat - not a particularly elegant workaround, but it's there.

Best addition ever, but on the other hand, having to defend them is a big pain. Being able to bribe them off is a good idea, but not always an option. And having to sit around your colony for 30 days and hold shift is very boring.
Having the option to leave part of your fleet to defend your orbital station would be good, as would the option to limit outside trading with other stations so this problem doesn't arise in the first place.
Other factions should have to wait until you establish Commerce to trade with a planet.
Often, I don't want a whole colony, just a hidey hole to store all the gear I have amassed without paying the 1% monthly fee.

Tweaking/tweaked a number of things here. For the time being, though - if you don't build up a colony beyond a spaceport, I think you should be able to have a hidey-hole that doesn't get harassed - it might not even have positive population growth, but even if it gained a couple of size points, I'm not sure it'd get to the point of being noticed.

WHERE IS 0.9.1 OTL

As I mentioned a bit back, I got sidetracked by some hardware issues, plus there's just a lot to do for .1, but: back up and running, and making progress Maybe I should post up some in-dev patch notes... hmm.

(OTL?)

And I found that most of intel things are hard coded, do they mean reports.csv is totally useless now?
And that's a disaster for translation, whether vanilla or mod...

Yeah, reports.csv is no longer used. It's just really awkward to put together dynamic text while pulling strings from there, so it's all in code. I thought the translation effort had some automated way of pulling strings from class files, though?

[Originem]

Yeah, reports.csv is no longer used. It's just really awkward to put together dynamic text while pulling strings from there, so it's all in code. I thought the translation effort had some automated way of pulling strings from class files, though?

It's okay when we do vanilla translation, but for mod? Most of our translators doesn't know "code" well and they don't have ability to understand how that works. So I have a headache.

[Volfgarix]

Looks like "Random Battle" mission doesn't roll Shrike at all.

[Cosmitz]

Looks like "Random Battle" mission doesn't roll Shrike at all.

I don't think it's in the pool of ships to choose from. To be fair, i think we could use a 'freeplay' mode similar to the Simulator but scanning and using all the variants, mod or not, availible and allowing refitting.

[Grievous69]

I actually used this quote in one of my posts:

rather than a way of temporarily removing skills, i'd like to see a simulator that's accessed directly from the main menu, with access to all ships, weapons and hullmods, and the ability to use a specific skillset of any level. yes, missions do work for that (minus the skills) but you need to click through them until you find the ship you want to test, which can get rather tedious, especially with mods installed -- and some ships just aren't part of any missions at all.

As you can see this was way before and since then, similar suggestions have appeared but I don't recall Alex saying his opinion on this topic. Honestly, I understand it's not a big deal but maybe after 1.0 gets released, such a feature would help new players since imo knowledge is the biggest factor here. Having a place to test out how useful a ship is with certain skills before doing that in campaign and finding out too late makes a world of difference.

[TaLaR]

It's easy enough to edit mission definitions to add ships for testing. But having test setup by default would be convenient.

[Megas]

Question:  Does the condition "Recent Unrest" disappear after it is acquired?  I have seen that even after the penalty decays to -0.

[Alex]

Question:  Does the condition "Recent Unrest" disappear after it is acquired?  I have seen that even after the penalty decays to -0.

I seem to recall fixing this for .1 - yep, looks like I did, yeah.