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Author Topic: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 351672 times)

intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #765 on: June 11, 2019, 11:26:44 AM »

IM sort of ruins the only upside of d-ships which is low supply cost. It takes the choice from a trade off (reduced stats for less supplies) to a strictly worse choice.

I generally avoid d-moded ships when I have the choice, and there are several non-starter d-mods for me, this is definitely one of them. I think it would be nice if it was a little less common, but my decision is more based on whether I feel like I can reliably obtain a better ship before I need the additional combat power provided by the ship. If the ship doesn't represent a big improvement in my current combat capability (like my first couple cruisers), I'm not going to waste supplies and fuel taking a ship that I will be trying to replace asap. The fleet cap hugely rewards ships that concentrate combat power per fleet slot, so my end game fleet will almost never have any d-mod ships in it (usually nothing with more than 1 or at most 2 d-mods). I see d-mod ships as a necessary evil that keeps me alive until I can find better, so I'm always trying to avoid taking them unless I really need them.
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Serenitis

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #766 on: June 11, 2019, 11:27:55 AM »

I feel like the impact of IM is way overestimated.
It absolutely is.
When I first saw IM I thought it was horrible and just the worst thing ever and I hated it. But after seeing how it interacted with the various other mods and skills, I came to see it as kind of blessing in return for 'sacrificing' skill points in a certain way.

Even if a ship has a single d-mod (IM), you can entirely mitigate the maintenance penalty if you have:
  • Fleet Logitsics 2 (-25% maint)
  • Field Repairs 3(-20% maint)
  • Safety Procedures 3(-50% d-mod effect)
  • Efficiency Overhaul (-20% maint)
This also applies to EFI, just with Navigation in place of industry/logistics (albeit to a smaller degree).
If that ship has more than 1 d-mod, it's even better. More savings.
Having done this you can now use any ship with those two 'terrible' mods with absolute impunity. Think of it as subtle temptation towards using industry skills, and not being afraid of little orange rectangles.
Spoiler

10.
I think that's all the non carrier/phase mods. At once. On 1 ship.
Who cares? Immortal zombie ships rule.
[close]
« Last Edit: June 11, 2019, 11:31:55 AM by Serenitis »
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #767 on: June 11, 2019, 11:44:34 AM »

Increased Maintenance and Erratic Fuel Injector is a big deal, at least on big ships, with traveling far to deal with a lone colony threat or big bounty and fight one big battle, or maybe two, before doing other non-combat stuff then coming home after guzzling my supplies and fuel doing that job.  They just do not fight enough to make the deployment discount worth the extra campaign costs.

If they are on smaller ships when my best ships are capitals, fine, I tolerate it.  But if it is on a capital, and I have more capitals available to use (or can build a pristine one), then those IM/ERI capitals get placed in storage until I need to personally defend the colony where they are stored.  Then they may come out to utterly humiliate the fools who thought they could invade my homes, then go back to sleep.

Obvious exception is Legion (XIV), but those will be restored eventually if I bring them home.

Much as I like to take Industry skills to mitigate the costs, I cannot afford the skills if I want other skills more, and clunkers become obsolete at the very end once my colonies together can make a million or more per month and I can almost build as many pristine ships as I want.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #768 on: June 11, 2019, 01:28:05 PM »

Skills and hull mods to mitigate a d-mod aren't really justification. If I didn't have the d-mod, the performance would be that much better so I am still just as disadvantaged as otherwise, it's just the baseline has been moved.
« Last Edit: June 11, 2019, 09:50:02 PM by intrinsic_parity »
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Zhentar

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #769 on: June 11, 2019, 09:44:52 PM »

I feel like the impact of IM is way overestimated. It's 100% more supplies per month, so based on the *worst* parameter, it costs as much as having another ship of that type. However, this is offset by:

1) A 20% reduced deployment cost with no combat penalty; this alone can go a long way towards mitigating the supply use, depending on how much you use the ship
2) No increase in fuel consumption, compared to having a second ship
3) A 50% increase in crew required, vs 100% for a second ship

The downside is, of course, not having the 2nd ship. I mean, it's not a net benefit, but then again it is a d-mod. IMO it's nowhere near being unusable.

For a non-phase non-carrier combat ships, there are 9 d-mods to pick from. The first time we pick, there's a 2 in 9 chance of getting IM or EFI. Assuming we didn't get either, the next time we pick, it's a 2 in 8 chance. Thus, the probability of not getting either of those for 2 d-mods is 7/9 * 6/8, or around 58%. The chance of getting one or both of IM/EFI, then, is 42%. Unless I've miscounted the number of applicable d-mods? Or messed up something else?

I feel like you are way underestimating the impact of IM  :) That is costs as much as another ship of that type, without providing any of the benefits of another ship, is exactly why it's so awful.

1) A 20% reduced deployment cost doesn't come anywhere close to mitigating the supply use. Even assuming no other d-mods, you'd have to deploy it 5 times a month to offset the maintenance cost; few ships repair & recover fast enough for that to be remotely viable (never mind the improbability of encountering the battles to enable that). 'No combat penalty' is also debatable, since I assume the increased crew requirement also translates to increases crew losses with hull damage.
2) Sure, this is fine, but it's also true of every other d-mod aside from erratic fuel injector, and the other d-mods don't double the supply cost of your ship. It's also a pretty minor benefit: fuel is much cheaper than supplies, doesn't compete with salvage for cargo space, and requirements are pretty straightforward to predict, even aside from the significant assistance the UI provides for it.
3) This is not a bonus, it's a severe penalty. I don't care about the absolute number of crew required past the first few months of the game, I care about the size/ratio of the buffer between minimum crew and maximum crew. For nearly every ship, an additional ship is a benefit here; they increase the maximum by more than they increase the minimum. IM on the other hand strictly shrinks the buffer, on top of consuming it faster if you try to leverage that reduced deployment cost.

The increased supply cost carries the same problem as the crew: it consumes the precious buffer between supply requirements and total cargo space, while a second ship grows your buffer. And planning supplies for an expedition is already a challenge; underestimate your requirements and face potentially disastrous consequences, overestimate and you have heavy upfront costs and have to throw away loot and/or return early.


Taking a closer look at the d-mods, there are 9, but 3 are mutually exclusive structural damage mods. So my calculation is overly pessimistic, yours is too optimistic, and the right answer is more trouble to math out than I want to deal with :P (I think yours is closer to right than mine, though)

Even if a ship has a single d-mod (IM), you can entirely mitigate the maintenance penalty if you have:
  • Fleet Logitsics 2 (-25% maint)
  • Field Repairs 3(-20% maint)
  • Safety Procedures 3(-50% d-mod effect)
  • Efficiency Overhaul (-20% maint)

This is exactly what I mean. You need Field Repairs 3 and Safety Procedures 3 for IM to be tolerable. And every other d-mod also benefits from them as well; IM is still significantly worse than the others, just the margin is shrunk by enough to get away with not worrying about it. Most of the other d-mods can be mostly/entirely mitigated by just 1-3 points in a single combat skill, and easily supplied by an officer instead of the player character.
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Kanil

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #770 on: June 12, 2019, 03:41:09 AM »

IM sort of ruins the only upside of d-ships which is low supply cost. It takes the choice from a trade off (reduced stats for less supplies) to a strictly worse choice.

Very much this.

You could probably argue that it doesn't really matter that much, and maybe it doesn't, but it sure feels terrible.
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Histidine

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #771 on: June 12, 2019, 04:34:35 AM »

The comparison between Increased Maintenance and having an extra ship is strange. As a rule, I wasn't going to have the extra ship in my fleet anyway, so this isn't meaningful to bring up.
(Also what Zhentar said)

I don't know if IM is actually particularly bad, but I think it feels bad because of how it works.
With normal D-mods you get a ship that's weaker but also cheaper to field, so the player decides whether the tradeoff is worth it in any particular battle.
An Increased Maintenance ship burns a hole in your pocket just by existing and sitting there in your fleet.
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #772 on: June 12, 2019, 06:44:09 AM »

Quote
I feel like you are way underestimating the impact of IM   That is costs as much as another ship of that type, without providing any of the benefits of another ship, is exactly why it's so awful.
This was why old Automated Repair Unit, when it increased costs by 50%, was so awful.  I rather get another ship, instead of the hullmod.  Onslaught with Dominator escort was better than Onslaught with ARU that ate 50% more Logistics.  Granted, you had to pay OP to install that lemon mod on your ship, and had a choice in the matter.  (I do not want it, keep it away from my ship!)  You do not with Increased Maintenance, aside from reloading the game if your ship gained it and you do not want it. 

IM sort of ruins the only upside of d-ships which is low supply cost. It takes the choice from a trade off (reduced stats for less supplies) to a strictly worse choice.

Very much this.

You could probably argue that it doesn't really matter that much, and maybe it doesn't, but it sure feels terrible.
Ditto for Erratic Fuel Injector, especially on capitals or Dominator.  Makes Navigation even more must-have than it already is just to get the fuel discount.  Player already needs so much fuel if he wants to haul capitals to deal with endgame threats.  Erratic Fuel Injector on big ships makes that worse.

Still, relatively insignificant if stored at home until you want to smash enemies that come to you, but that happens rarely or not at all once your colonies can take care of themselves.
« Last Edit: June 12, 2019, 06:53:52 AM by Megas »
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Serenitis

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #773 on: June 12, 2019, 09:06:54 AM »

This is exactly what I mean. You need Field Repairs 3 and Safety Procedures 3 for IM to be tolerable. And every other d-mod also benefits from them as well; IM is still significantly worse than the others, just the margin is shrunk by enough to get away with not worrying about it. Most of the other d-mods can be mostly/entirely mitigated by just 1-3 points in a single combat skill, and easily supplied by an officer instead of the player character.
And if you're intending to take industry and logistics anyway you lose nothing, and gain access to ships that would otherwise be 'bad'.
As mentioned previously it's a buff toward taking those skills.

An Increased Maintenance ship burns a hole in your pocket just by existing and sitting there in your fleet.
This is true. If you don't take steps to mitigate, or eliminate that cost.
As mentioned above, not everyone is going to want to pursue industry skills or set up thier ships for maximum cost savings all the time. And that's fine.
But in that case then yes, IM and EFI are probably going to be pretty harsh and you're going to want to either fix up the ship or ditch it.

Folk are just having a bit of a panic because ships are getting these involuntary mods on them that just happen to be bad when you don't have skills that everyone's been avoiding because they don't do anything useful for you or give you good enough benefits. Well, now those skills give you something useful.
We've been collectively clamouring for some kind of incentive to entice players into taking industry skills, and when it gets handed to us we're like "oh no. I don't want to do *that*."

Personally, as someone who actively pursues the industry/logistics path because I want the lowest possible supply costs on the widest possible range of ships for being away from the core for extended periods and want to be able to use whatever junk I find, IM and EFI are more-or-less irrelevant because the skills I need to be able to do that are the same skills which mitigate the bad effects of these mods. Which turns these two mods into essentially free cost savings with no further loss of combat ability.
That's kinda the point. It's an ability you unlock by having what a currently 'normal' player would consider 'non optimal' skills.
And even if it still bothers you, you can always restore the ship.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #774 on: June 12, 2019, 09:29:37 AM »

And if you're intending to take industry and logistics anyway you lose nothing, and gain access to ships that would otherwise be 'bad'.

You don't lose nothing. If the ship didn't have the d-mod, it would use less supplies so you're still losing out on those supplies. The ships are still bad because they still cost more supplies than the same ship without the d-mod, you've just moved the baseline of how much that ship costs. It's not impossible to use IM ships even without skills, they are just strictly worse than ships without IM.
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #775 on: June 12, 2019, 12:08:49 PM »

3) This is not a bonus, it's a severe penalty. I don't care about the absolute number of crew required past the first few months of the game, I care about the size/ratio of the buffer between minimum crew and maximum crew. For nearly every ship, an additional ship is a benefit here; they increase the maximum by more than they increase the minimum. IM on the other hand strictly shrinks the buffer, on top of consuming it faster if you try to leverage that reduced deployment cost.

The increased supply cost carries the same problem as the crew: it consumes the precious buffer between supply requirements and total cargo space, while a second ship grows your buffer. And planning supplies for an expedition is already a challenge; underestimate your requirements and face potentially disastrous consequences, overestimate and you have heavy upfront costs and have to throw away loot and/or return early.

Fair point about the buffer, but the absolute number of crew is a direct cost in credits and is similar to supply cost in that sense. Doesn't take extra cargo capacity, of course. Still, might make sense to look at that aspect of the mod.

The comparison between Increased Maintenance and having an extra ship is strange. As a rule, I wasn't going to have the extra ship in my fleet anyway, so this isn't meaningful to bring up.
(Also what Zhentar said)

I was just thinking of it in terms of what else you might get with the same amount of supplies instead, i.e. the opportunity cost. An extra ship is just one way of looking at it since it's the same monthly supply cost.

Probably a better comparison is between having the ship and not having the ship. If you have the option to get a ship with another d-mod, then, yeah, the IM one is pretty likely to lose out, especially for larger/more expensive ships (depending on the d-mod, anyway; I'd probably pick IM over a fighter-affecting d-mod on a carrier). But if you don't, it's a viable choice, if not a ship you want to hang on to long-term.


Taking a closer look at the d-mods, there are 9, but 3 are mutually exclusive structural damage mods. So my calculation is overly pessimistic, yours is too optimistic, and the right answer is more trouble to math out than I want to deal with :P

In full agreement :D

IM sort of ruins the only upside of d-ships which is low supply cost. It takes the choice from a trade off (reduced stats for less supplies) to a strictly worse choice.

Very much this.

You could probably argue that it doesn't really matter that much, and maybe it doesn't, but it sure feels terrible.
I don't know if IM is actually particularly bad, but I think it feels bad because of how it works.
With normal D-mods you get a ship that's weaker but also cheaper to field, so the player decides whether the tradeoff is worth it in any particular battle.
An Increased Maintenance ship burns a hole in your pocket just by existing and sitting there in your fleet.

Hmm. But with normal d-mods, you *still* get a ship that's more expensive to maintain, relative to its combat capability. It's just that instead of the maintenance being higher, the combat capability is lower. For IM the difference is disproportionally higher, but I still want to be careful with a "cheaper to deploy, but pristine in terms of pure in-combat performance" mod. If the penalty is not high enough, that'll make it desirable.

So all in all, this is probably a combination of 1) it feeling worse than it is and 2) it also being over-tuned. Like, it's definitely not "unusably bad", but it's probably also worse than it needs to be. I'll give it another look at some point!
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Hiruma Kai

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #776 on: June 12, 2019, 05:31:20 PM »

I'm curious about how close to broke are most people running their fleets?  I feel like for myself, I make far more in credits than I spend in terms of supplies/fuel.  On the other hand, I've played a number of iron man spacer starts, so when I play a normal run, I feel rich with that 15,000 credit stipend.  I'm presuming the typical game is not a spacer start.

Have people analyzed what % of their monthly income they spend on supplies?  Generally when fighting fleets, I deploy just enough ships, so I generally make a net profit on the supplies, and only salvage an enemy ship occasionally, so the credits I spend monthly on supplies is usually just the monthly running cost.

For example, in the early game, against starting bounties, where you get 30-50,000 credits, a ~20 maintenance destroyer is completely reasonable, as its only an extra ~1,250 credits a month over a pristine destroyer.  Compared against a 60-100,000 bounty credit income in a month.

I feel like supply cost is generally a small fraction of income, and if someone doubled supply running costs on me, it wouldn't be a big deal, although perhaps I should take some notes the next time I do a run to get a better feel for mid-game.

Certainly if I look at my last game that went to the later stages, I was making so many credits I didn't know what do with them (had piled up something like 11 million and didn't really need new ships, given I had a whole pile of capitals stored at my planets I wasn't using).  End game fleet for that game was like 2 Odysseys, 2 Conquests, 1 Doom, 5 Herons, 5 Apogees, 2 Phaetons.  I guess thats 401 supplies per month, at a cost of ~40,000.  Doubling that to 80,000 wouldn't have put much of a dent in my 700,000 credits per month just from my 3 colonies, let alone bounties or exploration missions.  That was a combat focused character, with basically all pristine fleet boosting skills plus 8 maxed personal combat skills, 1 more than the highest level officer, so I don't know if that makes a big difference.  No Industry or colony skills (Alpha cores for the win).
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #777 on: June 12, 2019, 06:08:10 PM »

Supply consumption is mostly just annoying because it is sometimes the limiting factor on exploration for me, but yeah I don't have trouble making enough money to cover supply consumption.

For me the issue is more that nothing in the game demands me to make my fleet stronger immediately. I can always grind/wait a bit longer to get ships that will more valuable later, and the fleet cap ensures that d-mod ships are always less valuable later. I do use d-mod ships but only when I feel like adding a few ships will have a significant impact on combat performance. Adding a d-mod ship when I already have enough ships to win the fights I need to is a waste, particularly once I have enough ships to hit deployment limits. Then the only concern is chain battling which is an endgame problem that I can solve with colony income.

The time I actually consider adding d-mod ships are early game because fleet power scales with numerical advantage at the beginning fairly linearly. I will take some d-moded destroyers and my first cruiser because those represent significant increases in combat performance, but my experience is that I am able to buy ships more than fast enough to match all the scaling in the game. For me, it's about what the game requires now and what I want eventually, and d-mod ships are neither of this things.
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Lucky33

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #778 on: June 15, 2019, 06:25:40 AM »

I'm curious about how close to broke are most people running their fleets?
...
Have people analyzed what % of their monthly income they spend on supplies?
...

Apart from the very start, I tend to get surplus even when running a full battlegroup.
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Legion0047

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Re: Starsector 0.9.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #779 on: June 17, 2019, 11:19:48 AM »

You can easily turn a tidy profit by doing the bar delivery quests for 50-300k per pop once you've done some pirate system bounty hunting for a collosus and a extra tanker to actually deliver the stuff. I do that until i can get my hands on something in the eagle class and then its ruins/good colony spot hunting.
A nice boost to income that can completely break early game if you're lucky is working your way through the ruins on the central planets. You get free survey data for them and now that the empty planet bug is gone they can spawn with ruins on them.
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