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

Author Topic: New Redacted BBs ought to swap power levels, and a rant about redsec systems  (Read 1714 times)

Talgo

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So 0.9 added some new toys to the AI factions, both of them possessing more large mounts than any vanilla playable ship.
One of them has all the mounts locked forward on wide wings that mean it won't be able to bring its full firepower to bear on anything smaller than a broadsiding Conquest; the other has three out of five of them on turrets, and the last two very tightly packed at the front that let all guns fire on the same point.
One of them has a clunky front shield generator, the other has a high-efficiency omni.
One of them can turn rather quickly to more easily expose its backside to the rest of your fleet, the other can instantly reposition, teleporting away from danger while simultaneously changing its facing
One of these ships appears only once in the entire sector (as far as I know), the other sometimes appears multiple times in the same fleet.

The Radiant was a nice wakeup call the first time I fought it as part of that one quest, and after the dust settled there was a cool reward at the end. But then, much later, I tried going into red security systems and encountered multiple per fleet, and it became an exercise in frustration. I get that the Radiant is supposed to be challenging and that redsec is supposed to be dangerous but this is all in a really annoying out of control cheese wheel sort of way. Like, of course 5 Tac Lances and 4 Sabot Pods is a challenge, but that doesn't mean it's fun to fight. Just reinforces the already stale fighter meta because any ship that doesn't have fortress shield is going to get instantly sunk the moment it draws the Radiant's ire. Even after defeating one Radiant and its fleet, once you're back on the overworld there's probably going to be another fleet converging on your position, possibly even with more than one Radiant present. At that point whether or not I even want to bother clearing out the system all comes down to the question of "Is this fight worth it? Because I'm not actually enjoying myself", and so far the answer is no. Red beacon systems simply have nothing to offer me at the stage of the game where I would actually consider myself "ready" to visit them. I have colonies already, so I'm not exactly looking to settle on new planets. Said colonies already have synchros and pristine nanoforges installed from salvaging and exploring ruins in other systems, so I don't need any more of those. And those colonies have banked me more than ten mil, and I would like to stay out of trouble with the Hegemony, so I couldn't care less about finding more alpha cores to turn in or install. All there is left that I can think of is the prospect of a fun but challenging fight, and the Radiant just doesn't deliver on the Fun front- at least, not in the quantities at which they are encountered.

Meanwhile, the Guardian was incredibly underwhelming for something I've only ever seen in one place, and completely alone at that. The only one I've ever fought, I destroyed before I could even really ascertain its threat level, because when I took a Dominator around behind it to shoot its engines, it activated plasma jets, turned to face me, and got it's unshielded aft section blasted to pieces by the rest of my fleet. Maybe there are more domain relic-related plans for the future where this thing can show up, but I feel like right now it is painfully underutilized. I really think it should be made tougher somehow, either in the form of altering the ship's stats or simply giving it some allies so I can't just immediately cheese it in 30 seconds by drawing its attention with a single ship and letting the rest of the fleet do all the work.

tl;dr In their roles as boss-level defenders of the colony growth modifier and the quest planet, these two ships are fine. But I think the Guardian doesn't show up enough to be appreciated fully, and the Radiant is way too ubiquitous where it does. Also what's the point of red beacon systems again?
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Megas

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So far, I would visit red systems to get their fighter chips.  Although in my case, it is to update my 'fighters vs. big ship' topic soon.

That said, after fighting some more, I do not think I would fight there unless my entire fleet is full of capitals and Moras for carriers.  This is the sort of challenge that would be either as a final boss or deadly encroaching threat, not as yet another patrol.  ...UNLESS we can send invasion fleets of our own to wreck the place, which we cannot do now.

However, there needs to be game changing or special rewards that are unambiguously good, something like the Red Planet quest.  Not cursed items like more alpha cores.

P.S.  If the reward for destroying a Nexus is a Remnant fighter blueprint, and it can be only found by destroying a Nexus, that would be a great reward for slogging through all of the tough fleets.  Remnant fighters are a bit overpowered for their OP cost in 0.9.
« Last Edit: November 28, 2018, 06:47:11 PM by Megas »
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TaLaR

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Redacted loot is somewhat lacking (only fighters and cores are of real interest, and core drop is very low). Their fighters are still good, so I do want some (but there is no need to visit full-blown red system for that).

I don't have anything against Radiant itself(except un-capture-ability), but REDACTED fleets kind of do provoke officer-envy. Like whut? These guys can afford level 20 or so officers in like every single frigate, why am I limited to just 10 officers...
« Last Edit: November 28, 2018, 07:47:21 PM by TaLaR »
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Talgo

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I don't have anything against Radiant itself(except un-capture-ability), but REDACTED fleets kind of do provoke officer-envy. Like whut? These guys can afford level 20 or so officers in like every single frigate, why am I limited to just 10 officers...
That's really the thing that makes fleets containing them such a slog. On paper the ship is "merely" very powerful, but on top of its impressive stats it's always accompanied by about a dozen other ships with LV15+ officers, and carrying one itself. Leads to frustratingly unpredictable fights where no two of the same ship class behave the same because of officer skills that as far as I'm aware you have no way of checking.
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Megas

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@ TaLaR:  Their ships run on cores, and since Remnants appear to be legalized Templars or attempt at a boss faction, I have no problem with them exceeding the officer cap.  This is a case where I can see the boss faction that can justify breaking some limit that applies only to the player and NPCs similar to player, unlike the fleet cap that pirates and invasion fleets like to break often.
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Wyvern

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As Talgo mentions, there's an -enormous- degree of power-swing between different [REDACTED] battleships - and it's not -just- the officers.  I've been farming a red-warning system for AI cores*, and I've seen ones that were armed with just paladin PD units.  Which were... not scary.  And I've also seen one with five autopulse lasers, four harpoon pods, and (I think) missile spec on its officer, that - without very careful handling - proved quite capable of just outright deleting a Paragon.

* Take a moment to consider how this must feel from the AI's point of view.  You're sitting there, minding your own business, building some friends... and then this unidentifiable war fleet shows up.  You can't talk to it; you reach out, but its electronics are just... mindless, empty, too small for your words.  And yet somehow, it still moves with purpose: it murders the people you've made, picks through their corpses, and steals their brains.  So you build bigger, better people... and eventually they chase it off.  For a time.  And then it's back again, and this time you can't stop it; the very greatest of your children fall before this enigmatic juggernaut... and still, eventually, it leaves.  But this time you didn't chase it off; it just... had collected enough.  It will be back.  It will always be back.  And you have to keep making more children, or it might come for -your- brain...
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

RedHellion

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I've seen ones that were armed with just paladin PD units.  Which were... not scary.  And I've also seen one with five autopulse lasers, four harpoon pods, and (I think) missile spec on its officer

I feel like this means some tweaking of the auto-loadout and auto-generation system to better mark ship weapon hardpoints as "PD preferred" (and correspondingly "No PD preferred") is required, especially with some of the new [REDACTED] ships. Doubly since there are PD weapons for all slot sizes, so if it just semi-randomly picks weapons of the required size it could end up as you said. The closest I've seen with "standard" enemy ships was an enemy Dominator cruiser that had Devastators in both front mounts: could get messy if handled incorrectly during a fleet action, but it wasn't armed with Sabots or enough focused Kinetic or Explosive weaponry itself to take down shields and armour for the Fragmentation damage to get to my hull.

... You're sitting there, minding your own business, building some friends... and then this unidentifiable war fleet shows up.  You can't talk to it; you reach out, but its electronics are just... mindless, empty, too small for your words.  And yet somehow, it still moves with purpose: it murders the people you've made, picks through their corpses, and steals their brains.  So you build bigger, better people... and eventually they chase it off.  For a time.  And then it's back again, and this time you can't stop it; the very greatest of your children fall before this enigmatic juggernaut... and still, eventually, it leaves.  But this time you didn't chase it off; it just... had collected enough.  It will be back.  It will always be back.  And you have to keep making more children, or it might come for -your- brain...

I love this write-up. It's like a horror movie from the AI perspective.
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