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[Thaago]

Can confirm: doubled range on the automated defenses makes them much, much more dangerous.

[Sundog]

Ruthless Sector 1.1.8

Fixed possibility for retreating to result in an "impressive victory"
Improved accuracy of ship-strength estimation for non-player [REDACTED] ships, including those added by mods

A note about how the strength of [REDACTED] ships are now estimated:
(WARNING: The spoiler below contains actual (but minor) spoilers)

Spoiler

Ship strength estimations are used for determining battle difficulty, so it's important that they're fairly accurate.
The strength estimation of most ships is equal to the supplies required to deploy them, but that value is inaccurate for many non-player factions, like Remnants, Domain Drones, and Blade Breakers (from Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering). To remedy this, the strength of any ship with the UNBOARDABLE tag will be estimated based on Fleet Points instead, but adjusted in order to match deployment cost values according to this formula:
ship_strength = FP * max(1, min(2, 1 + (FP - 5) / 25))

[close]

[Thaago]

Hmm, I would have to investigate the fleet point costs, but I think it undervalues Remnant battleships by quite a bit. Had a deep space patrol with 1 Remnant battleship, 1 cruiser, 2 destroyers, and 4 frigates against my exploration fleet of Eagle, Apogee, Falcon, Shrike, and 3 frigates marked as a 2 star threat. By weight of ship its reasonably even, but nothing in my fleet can touch a Remnant battleship (no SO cheese and I'm not a combat build this time round) so, fighting that fleet is almost certainly a wipe.

[Edit] Lol yes, tried the fight to test. It was a 5 Autopulse + Extended Racks + Harpoon Pod variant with an officer: teleports in and 1 shots each cruiser from full health to dead . No way this can check variants and accurately see whats up (not even sure if they are assigned before encounter), but a Remnant battleship with that loadout is probably a 100+ FP threat.

[Edit #2] Well, maybe not! Tried it again the second time, and after it wasted a bunch of shots on a frigate the Kinetics + Ion beams on my Eagle and Falcon locked it down! A vastly different outcome the second fight. That said, it was a 77% fight (before the penalty for reloading), which is a bit low considering the first time I tried it it was a teleporting fleet wipe

[Sundog]

Yeah, that seems a bit lopsided to me too, but the strength estimation for a Radiant should be the same as a Paragon, which I don't think is too far off. I can see a fleet like that only getting two stars if you have a high character level and a lot of good officers while the remnant fleet doesn't, but I'll have to do some more thorough testing to make sure the strength of unboardable ships is being assessed correctly. Also, there's a possibility that the danger stars weren't overridden. I've caught that happening before, but haven't identified the exact cause yet.

Ship	Fleet Points	Strength Estimation	Deployment Points
Lumen	8	9.0	4
Glimmer	8	9.0	5
Fulgent	12	15.4	11
Scintilla	12	15.4	12
Brilliant	16	23.0	25
Radiant	30	60.0	40

[Sundog]

Ruthless Sector 1.2.0 (Unstable)



Changes:
Added a battle difficulty indicator to the deployment screen that updates as ships are selected/deselected for deployment
Added setting "officerXpMult" which is set to 0.5 by default, reducing XP gained by officers by half
Changed player's fleet strength estimation so that only the highest strength deployed in a single engagement of a battle is counted
Changed reload penalty cap from 100% to 80%
Fixed battle difficulty not being calculated for certain types of battles, such as "Engage the orbital station"
Fixed strength estimation of incomplete pirate stations being far too high

Known issues:
When reserved ships exceed the default fleet size limit of 30 ships, no difficulty indicator will be shown on the deployment screen
Deployment of frigates flanking to the left is not properly detected by the difficulty indicator

[JDCollie]

This mod should be titled: "Ruthless Sector: How I Learned to Stop Savescumming and Love the XP Bonus"

[Sundog]

Done!

[Sarissofoi]

Good job.
Especially commission changes are welcomed. It was essentially free money(to be honest you could boost rewards for destroying enemy little more).

[Sundog]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of free money either. I definitely wouldn't discourage anyone from increasing factionCommissionBounty in the settings file, but I hesitate to increase it too much by default. This mod can already make the game easier for players of sufficient skill.

I think the current setting of 600cr/Frigate is too low against faction/redacted fleets, but too high against pirate fleets. What I'd really like to do is base bounty payouts on ruthless sector's ship strength calculation, but I haven't looked into how feasible that is yet.

[Kikbow]

I seem to be having a lot of issues with the difficulty rating of combats, it wont let me put up a decent front against anything with out plumeting the difficulty rating and saying I'm going to steam roll the enemy.

I'm currently in the edges of the sector, fighting mostly medium to small sized [REDACTED] and derelict fleets since I've installed the mod.

If I try to select 3 of my Sunders with a support Herron carrier I'll usually get under 100% battle rating right away, if not under 50%, which is a very small portion of my full fleet and will usually lose everytime by simply being overrun with the enemy having three or more times the amount of ships, all of which are decently powerful.

I've yet to test this mod against big faction fleets but so far I'm not very impressed, it feels like if I want to try and get a decent difficulty victory (80%+) I have to pick between chancing the loss of up to half my deployed ships or to just not win at all, with the range of fleet deployment that the difficulty rating gives me.

I've also attacked a lonely, but full power tier 1 low tech pirate station where I sent ONLY one of my capitals, and with that it was already as low as 60-80% combat rating. Adding any other decent ship made the difficulty rating plumet to EZ PZ.

EDIT: I will try and get an example picture of one of those fights where I feel I can't actually deploy a fighting force before it being labeled as overly powerful by the battle rating next time I play.

[ActuallyUlysses]

I recommend that you take a look at settings file in mod folder. OP was kind enough to explain how everything is calculated and it's very easy to tweak settings to your liking. I had similar issues, took me 5 minutes to "fix" them.

Just remember that you need to restart the game client after you save changes

Edit: also, once you look on formulas you will have better understanding of how to obtain higher rating. One thing that killed mine (and I was pulling 1 Vs 10 fights with destroyer) was my character level.

[Sundog]

@ActuallyUlysses: Thanks for explaining!

@Kikbow: Absolutely what ActuallyUlysses said. This mod is all about tweaking the difficulty to your liking. You shouldn't feel like you're cheating by adjusting it, because the default settings are balanced to make the game tougher even for players with several hundred hours of experience. If it's your first run, I'd recommend setting the following options to zero:
enemyOfficerIncreaseToShipStrengthPerLevel
allyOfficerIncreaseToShipStrengthPerLevel
playerIncreaseToFleetStrengthPerLevel
Also; welcome to the forum!

[DreXav]

Can this mod be added mid-game or a new game is required?

[Sundog]

It can be added mid-game without any issues

[Sundog]

Ruthless Sector 1.2.1

Added an error pop-up when used with old versions of Starsector
Changed: Increased default max size of hyperspace remnant fleets
Changed: Idling remnant fleets in hyperspace no longer move around
Changed: Remnant fleets of max size can now be encountered in hyperspace much closer to the core worlds
Changed: Settings are now loaded using getMergedJSONForMod, making it possible to override them with other mods (including personal tweaks mods)
Changed: Domain drones are now identified by whether or not they have the "derelict" tag rather than having the "Explorarium" manufacturere type
Fixed frigates not being properly detected for deployment by the difficulty indicator when flanking from the left during pursuit battles
Fixed partial station strength calculation to account for greater variation in station design and completeness
Fixed issue that caused the deployment screen difficulty indicator to be incorrect in battles involving a friendly station