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Author Topic: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 351469 times)

SapphireSage

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #285 on: April 26, 2019, 07:55:23 AM »

Luddic Path Cells: incidents have a chance to fail depending on the stability of the colony targeted

So what would the chances of that panning out be? Would a stability 10 colony be mostly safe from Pather attempts at sabotage?

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Gothars

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #286 on: April 26, 2019, 08:54:41 AM »

Changes as of April 25, 2019

Added ambient sounds to dockside bars

Yay^^

Good changes all around. Looking forward to getting back in again. I really hope the colony balancing is effective. With the current version it felt so wonky that I kinda stopped having fun with colonies.

Can change player's name in character screen by clicking on it

That's nice so I can give myself a title that is appropriate for my current status. It felt always strange starting as an admiral etc
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The game was completed 8 years ago and we get a free expansion every year.

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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #287 on: April 26, 2019, 10:38:36 AM »

Oh no, my water world isn't going to be able to feed a hundred quintillion people now!?

Look on the bright side, it can still supply them with drink :)

Well I'm disappointed with my favourite ships strongest aspect being nerfed, but my end-game fleets always involve lots of Apogees, as their shield tanking is legendary, so I have been expecting a nerf to this ship since it's 0.9a cost reduction (The low fuel usage, excellent cargo and fuel capacity on top of it's Surveying suite make it very cheap for it's deployment costs).

Having used it as my flagship for a bit, it's still a brick!

Quote
System-activated ship engines are no longer affected by low-CR malfunctions

Are they still affected by the engine malfunction chance provided by, say, Ill-Advised Modications?

Good question - double-checked and they shouldn't be.


And I notice that in ship_data.csv Odyssey have no tags, but Legion have "COMBAT, CARRIER", what's the difference between them?

It affects the AI and some other stuff such as fleet doctrines/fleet compositions.

Could you give a little explanation about the effect on AI?

It's a lot of little things. The overall effect should be a "CARRIER,COMBAT" ship being more defensive than a ship without those tags. Also, IIRC, giving them an "Eliminate" order will work differently (the CARRIER,COMBAT won't attempt to close in recklessly), but I could be wrong about that. I'd have to dig through a lot of code to provide a more comprehensive/detailed answer :)

The good stuff! Very happy about AI cores becoming less rare, raiding changes, hyperspace storm changes, removal of Q/W hotkeys (way too many newcomers got stuck on this), emphasized pather hail, auto navigation not targeting stars anymore. Nerfed growth incentives will make passive bonuses more attractive. Good to see autofit and EW/CM fixes in particular.
   

Thank you, happy you're liking the changes overall!
   
Hazard rating was so much of an issue that now it's made not only much weaker, but can also be made 85% redundant (25% from beta, 50% from demand, 10% from industry planning). Maybe 70% redundant if we go for multiplication instead of subtraction.

Reductions are multiplicative, btw, so it's about 34%

The complaint about being unable to buy ships doesn't come from the fact that people were overloaded with hotkeys, but form the fact that they don't use hotkeys at all and used different options to access ship market and commodities market.

There were some cases where the profusion of hotkeys was confusing to people, but as far as being unable to buy ships, the change addressing that is mentioning "buy ships" in the text of the option.


Chaingun is now 600 DPS for 10 OP (albeit only 450 range)?
This is going to look fairly weird (out-DPSing probably three quarters of large weapons). But the actual change to gameplay probably isn't going to be exceptional I guess.

I guess it might, but, yeah, as we both well know, DPS isn't the end-all :) If anything, I'm not sure if this is enough to make it useful or not - curious to see how that goes.


Is there any way to work around this? I have a mod faction that lists a couple hulls by name from another mod, which currently is handled in a robust enough way that it just doesn't spawn those ships when the other mod isn't active, and does when they are.

There isn't, no - sorry! This doesn't seem like a good idea, though. If a missing ship ID is present in a faction's "known ships", for example, it's not just your code that has to be robust in handling this, but all of vanilla and every single other mod that might conceivably do something based on what ships a faction knows. It's a "random" crash waiting to happen.

If you want to do this, I think a more robust way to do it would be to manually add those ships (and remove some other ships to compensate?) to whatever fleets you want via a script (say, in a "reportFleetSpawned(CampaignFleetAPI fleet)" method, or in some other way after it spawns.)
I think you could just make the faction not know the hulls by default, and add them to faction's known ships in onNewGame()/onGameLoad() if the other mod is detected?

Oh, right, yeah, that seems like a much better way to go.


BTW: Is it intentional that PirateBaseIntel.affectsMarket() doesn't check if the market is hostile to pirates (unlike various other bits of pirate base and pirate raid logic)?
This has a couple of significant effects:
  • Pirate Activity condition is also applied to markets of factions not hostile to pirates
  • Pirate base can target a system with no valid raid targets (causing pirate activity), although it won't create the raid intel in that case

Yes, it's absolutely intentional. Otherwise the player is really incentivized to be friendly with pirates. Bounties, bases to destroy, random pirate fleets to fight are all a big part of the game and getting such a bonus from being friendly with pirates would really go against that and basically force the player to avoid fun stuff to be optimal.


So what would the chances of that panning out be? Would a stability 10 colony be mostly safe from Pather attempts at sabotage?

<checks> 50% at stability 10.



Good changes all around. Looking forward to getting back in again. I really hope the colony balancing is effective. With the current version it felt so wonky that I kinda stopped having fun with colonies.

I hope so too - at least in testing, it seems to be a lot better as far as it being a slow-burn progression instead of "plop down everything and roll in credits til the end of time". I'd love to hear your impressions once you've had some time with it!


That's nice so I can give myself a title that is appropriate for my current status. It felt always strange starting as an admiral etc

(Oh, hey, that's a neat use for this.)
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Eji1700

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #288 on: April 26, 2019, 10:57:54 AM »

I'm hoping that having colonies with fewer slots will give them more of an identity.  In almost all popular scifi you have the occasional "jack of all trades" world, but very often they're specialized and that's what gives them flavor.  Having all of my colonies be "obscene money makers" with mild differences and different stations didn't make them feel special.
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AxleMC131

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #289 on: April 26, 2019, 12:55:12 PM »

Quote
System-activated ship engines are no longer affected by low-CR malfunctions

Are they still affected by the engine malfunction chance provided by, say, Ill-Advised Modications?

Good question - double-checked and they shouldn't be.

Aww ***. XD That's gonna make some evil fun for DaRa players using the Lysander with Safety Overrides.
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Gotcha!

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #290 on: April 26, 2019, 12:58:21 PM »

One small step closer to 1.0. ;)
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Dal

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #291 on: April 26, 2019, 01:17:57 PM »

Looking really good, those civ nerfs are going to be brutal to me. :-X

My thoughts, in feedback and suggestion:
Quote
Yes, it's absolutely intentional. Otherwise the player is really incentivized to be friendly with pirates. Bounties, bases to destroy, random pirate fleets to fight are all a big part of the game and getting such a bonus from being friendly with pirates would really go against that and basically force the player to avoid fun stuff to be optimal.
IMO pirate runs are amazing fun. It takes a lot of effort to become and stay friendly with pirates, but the payoff is that you get to prey on everyone else! When you're law abiding, there are very few juicy targets, faction hostilities tend to be minor or massive engagements with little in-between, but being enemies with civilization? Targets of opportunity galore! The dynamic of hiding from system authority between skirmishes is also a top notch gameplay that really shows off the fleet layer. The most fun starts I have are pirate starts, and I work to keep the rest of the factions hostile. Please don't bend the rules against pirates (or any other playstyle) just because it incentivizes more challenging gameplay. Nobody going pirate expects it to be easy, it'd just be nicer if it worked well.

Anyway, the suggestion: can the planetary interface support more than the vanilla number of industries? When colonies were released there was an explosion of creative ideas for building chains with deep industry and interactions, but they quickly hit the twelve-industry wall. Would it be possible to expose that limit and add a scrollbar when the UI limit is exceeded? There's so much potential there.
« Last Edit: April 26, 2019, 01:23:46 PM by Dal »
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ANGRYABOUTELVES

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #292 on: April 26, 2019, 01:44:22 PM »

Everything in this changelog sounds great and I'm looking forward to 0.9.1, especially the raiding BP drop chance increase. I think the Light/Heavy Needler, Assault Chaingun, and Hurricane MIRV buffs are unnecessary, but I'll try them out before passing judgement.
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Wyvern

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #293 on: April 26, 2019, 01:50:12 PM »

Chaingun is now 600 DPS for 10 OP (albeit only 450 range)?
This is going to look fairly weird (out-DPSing probably three quarters of large weapons). But the actual change to gameplay probably isn't going to be exceptional I guess.

I guess it might, but, yeah, as we both well know, DPS isn't the end-all :) If anything, I'm not sure if this is enough to make it useful or not - curious to see how that goes.
A 50% boost to both DPS and armor penetration, with no increase in flux cost?  Yeah, that'll push the assault chaingun right past useful and straight into scary.  Still niche, mind you, due to the low range and high flux cost - but scary when it can actually be brought to bear.
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #294 on: April 26, 2019, 02:30:46 PM »

If pirates, and pathers for that matter, stopped bothering the player when relations are non-hostile, I would try to be friends with everyone for 1) maximum accessibility for my colonies, 2) no more significant colony threats to interrupt exploration or stealth raids (meaning no more annoying babysitting), and 3) sneak attack on pirate/pather bases when base bounty hunting.  Then, if I wanted to attack someone, I would do it stealthily (i.e. transponder off).

Things I like to see:
1) Tac bombing (but not sat bombing) does not add pollution to habitable planets.  That said, most core worlds are not as habitable as the choice worlds players tend to get.
2) Sat bombing a non-indie world does not make independents angry.  (I could not care less if major factions get angry when I want to kill the core worlds, but indies being angry is an annoyance.)  Just means that stealth raid spaceport and wait until target decivilizes is the way to go to kill worlds.  But... it is satisfying to nuke 'em when it is time to destroy the enemy.  It is the game rewards boring but practical ways (stealth spaceport headshot) to kill a world.

As for assault chaingun, it is a flux hog.  I never use it as it is.  Maybe the extra DPS might make it useful enough.
« Last Edit: April 26, 2019, 02:37:36 PM by Megas »
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #295 on: April 26, 2019, 03:09:11 PM »

I'm hoping that having colonies with fewer slots will give them more of an identity.  In almost all popular scifi you have the occasional "jack of all trades" world, but very often they're specialized and that's what gives them flavor.  Having all of my colonies be "obscene money makers" with mild differences and different stations didn't make them feel special.

Yep, that's very much the idea.

IMO pirate runs are amazing fun. It takes a lot of effort to become and stay friendly with pirates, but the payoff is that you get to prey on everyone else! When you're law abiding, there are very few juicy targets, faction hostilities tend to be minor or massive engagements with little in-between, but being enemies with civilization? Targets of opportunity galore! The dynamic of hiding from system authority between skirmishes is also a top notch gameplay that really shows off the fleet layer. The most fun starts I have are pirate starts, and I work to keep the rest of the factions hostile. Please don't bend the rules against pirates (or any other playstyle) just because it incentivizes more challenging gameplay. Nobody going pirate expects it to be easy, it'd just be nicer if it worked well.

One the one hand, I agree - but the thing is, none of this requires actually being friendly with pirates! If anything, being hostile to other pirates makes more "sense" thematically, anyway, and you're still able to trade with their bases/colonies rather easily.

Anyway, the suggestion: can the planetary interface support more than the vanilla number of industries? When colonies were released there was an explosion of creative ideas for building chains with deep industry and interactions, but they quickly hit the twelve-industry wall. Would it be possible to expose that limit and add a scrollbar when the UI limit is exceeded? There's so much potential there.

I'll keep it mind... the industry (as opposed to structure) limit based on colony size will help here, I think. I don't think adding more slots is really the way to go there - I'd much rather the player have an interesting choice about what to build, rather than "oh, and I'll build that one, too".


A 50% boost to both DPS and armor penetration, with no increase in flux cost?  Yeah, that'll push the assault chaingun right past useful and straight into scary.  Still niche, mind you, due to the low range and high flux cost - but scary when it can actually be brought to bear.

Sounds good if it works out like that :)

Things I like to see:
1) Tac bombing (but not sat bombing) does not add pollution to habitable planets.  That said, most core worlds are not as habitable as the choice worlds players tend to get.
2) Sat bombing a non-indie world does not make independents angry.  (I could not care less if major factions get angry when I want to kill the core worlds, but indies being angry is an annoyance.)  Just means that stealth raid spaceport and wait until target decivilizes is the way to go to kill worlds.  But... it is satisfying to nuke 'em when it is time to destroy the enemy.  It is the game rewards boring but practical ways (stealth spaceport headshot) to kill a world.

I prefer bombardment to be in the "things you can do, but don't generally want to" category. Heavy consequences seem right here.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #296 on: April 26, 2019, 07:17:37 PM »

Will we be able to tweak the industry limit in the settings.json file?
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #297 on: April 26, 2019, 07:26:22 PM »

The UI code would have to be changed to support displaying more than 12 industries, so that's not possible as a simple "expose this hardcoded value" thing.
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Vehemence

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #298 on: April 26, 2019, 08:18:59 PM »

Can we be expecting possible terraforming in the future updates?
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (In-Dev) Patch Notes
« Reply #299 on: April 26, 2019, 08:31:35 PM »

Perhaps, if it fits some kind of design need. The general arc of the Sector is downwards, though, where terraforming seems like it'd be more at home in a setting that had a more upward trend, so it doesn't seem like a great fit, if that makes sense.

Could be something like a one-off reward for discovering a piece of lost tech or whatnot, though. So, overall: possible, but not super likely; I'm not specifically looking for a reason to add it in, but it could be cool.
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