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Author Topic: Weird issues with CR drain terrain. (eg. Efficiency Overhaul increases CR loss)  (Read 816 times)

AsterPiano

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A heads up: I'm not sure where the real root of the problem is, so I've tried to include as many of the perspectives that I've seen as I can.
Also tried to use some colourcoding to hopefully make things easier to read.

I was trying to find out how big of an effect the Solar Shielding hullmod, and the Level 2 Safety Procedures skill have on supply loss, and found some weird things.
So I went bug hunting!
I tried a few different types of fleets and all of them showed the same results, however I will be using a fleet consisting of one Apogee as an example.

The test I did to find out the total CR/Supply loss was:
Suspend repairs of all ships.
Go into some CR draining terrain like a corona or pulsar beam.
Stay in there for exactly a day.
Pause the game, and go into the fleet screen to find out how much CR was lost, and by extension how many supplies were lost.

The first thing I noticed was that Solar Shielding and Safety Procedures generally have weaker effects than expected, with diminishing returns.
(For example, testing in a pulsar beam: What should have been a 50% decrease was a ~38% decrease in practice, and what was supposed to be an ~87.5% decrease was a ~66% decrease in practice)

More testing showed that CR recovery speed is a factor that decides how much CR you lose.
Take a fleet with only one Apogee, without any skills or hullmods:
When recovering CR, the fleet uses 4.2 supplies/day (This includes the 0.6/day for fleet maintenance, so for CR recovery it's technically using 3.6/day).
When you enter any corona or similar terrain with this fleet, it will always drain at least 4.2 supplies/day (3.6/day worth of CR).
And on top of that, it will drain some extra. It is this "extra" that is affected by the type of terrain, and decreased by Solar Shielding and Safety Procedures.

Some direct results:
Testing with an Apogee, teleporting to the center of Askonia, suspending repairs, and keeping it there for a day. (repeated a few times to make sure.)
When testing with no skills or hullmods, the fleet screen says it'll cost 5.4 supplies to finish repairs. (which is 3.6+1.8)
With Safety Procedures (50% decrease), the fleet screen says 4.5 supplies to finish repairs. (which is 3.6+0.9)

Now, after installing Efficiency Overhaul, the same fleet uses 5.88 supplies/day for recovering CR. (including 0.48/day for maintenance, meaning 5.4/day for recovering CR)
Doing the same test as before, the results matched the above findings, and the fleet was actually losing more CR and supplies than before, and the numbers matched the increase in recovery speed. (That is, a bare apogee with no skills in the same test as above was now showing 7.2 supplies required to finish repairs, which is 5.4+1.8)

There is a perspective from which this makes sense, and possibly why this has stayed unreported (?). If I do the same test as before, but without suspending repairs, suddenly the values shown in the fleet screen for "Total supplies to finish repairs" and the CR lost seemingly behave as they should, with Solar Shielding reducing them by 75%, Safety Procedures reducing them by 50%, and stacking for 87.5% if both are used.
However, this is misleading because it hides the constant 'recovery speed' supply loss mentioned earlier, which in most cases hurts your supplies more than the "extra" drain which is affected by SS and SP. The only real exception I've seen is Pulsar Beams and Black Holes (Though I'm not sure if Solar Shielding should protect you from a Black Hole's Event Horizon...)

And even with this perspective, from reading the tooltip for Efficiency Overhaul I would expect that the faster recovery should counteract the CR drain to slow it down, in exchange for faster supply use, while keeping the total supply use the same.
However, it seems that the fleet recovers CR faster, but then the CR drain increases by the same amount, counterbalancing the increase in recovery speed, to make the rate of CR drain the same, and increasing the total supply use.

(Also I briefly tested with an Apogee getting hit by a hyperspace storm, and saw no change in the supply loss after I did it with both SS and SP. What's up with that? The CR loss was certainly a lot lower, but the hull took the same amount of damage. It's almost as if the CR was being recovered for free while the hull was being repaired)

PS. No crew was harmed in the making of this report.
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Morgan Rue

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So basically, being in a corona should suspend repairs and recovery instead of draining CR equal to CR recovery?
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Dauntless.

AsterPiano

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So basically, being in a corona should suspend repairs and recovery instead of draining CR equal to CR recovery?

Yeah, that might work! After writing this report I couldn't think of any specific way to fix it but this sounds like a plausible fix. Though I'm still not sure what's up with the hyperspace storms.
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Alex

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Yeah, some stuff here is a bit dodgy. As you figured out, corona CR damage is based on the CR recovery rate, and part of it (equal to the recovery rate, to effectively zero it out) is not reduced by stuff like Solar Shielding. Not having repairs/recovery be performed - and having the entire drain rate be affected by modifiers - would indeed be a fix, but currently stuff is not set up to make that easy.

It's kind of on my radar to take a look at this at some point; now it's more so :) Thank you for the report and for digging into it!
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