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[PreConceptor]

yay being helpful \o/

I've had an idea for another optional mode. I asked around hoping to make this a mod myself and I think it's beyond my highly limited capabilities, but I still think it could be cool.

Idea: in-system travel uses fuel. Hold up, hear me out. In this mode, flying around a system would use fuel by burn speed, based on fleet fuel usage reduced by a factor of say 5-10 compared to the equivalent burn speed in hyperspace. When out of fuel the fleet gets perhaps a 50% burn penalty, and maybe a supply upkeep increase and sensor strength decrease and possibly disabling active sensor burst (lore: emergency drive field messes with sensors and hits the engines hard).
It's never really made sense to me that there is no cost or risk to flying aimlessly all over a system far removed from civilization aside from the supplies/time cost, and a fuel cost could help give the feeling that adventuring away from the core is very dangerous.

I think this might make fuel management a more important part of gameplay, like having to make the choice between chasing a smaller fleet half way across the system and letting them go in order to conserve enough fuel to get where you need to go, making the choice between running away from threats and hiding from them more difficult as running is often the safest way to escape anything slower than you, costing you nothing compared to hiding and risking being found, making allowing targets to escape more punishing, making long exploration and scavenging expeditions more difficult, making searching for things more difficult and encouraging use of high res sensors to decrease the amount of time spent flying around, discouraging capital ship usage for things that aren't a known objective making their usage more strategic (especially in conjunction with Dark Sector) while encouraging smaller ships and fleets for more nebulous (he.) objectives and so much more I could think of. Main point is it would add another aspect of difficulty.
In general just making fuel a more uncertain quantity than 'get enough to go to system/constellation x and get back, no more required'.

I'm not sure how difficult this would be to implement, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on something like this. sorry for the wordy post.

[RustyCabbage]

While I kinda like the idea, I'm not sure there's any easy way to implement it at this point in time. I can think of one way to sort of do it, but the fuel cost would become a daily upkeep rather than a per-light-year-travelled cost. And even if it were possible, more significantly I'm not sure there's a way to reflect those changes in the UI.

Re: giving the feeling that adventuring away from the core is very dangerous, it seems to me that you could accomplish this by increasing supply upkeeps rather than adding a system for in-system fuel costs. The Odyssey/Iliad Mode options also attempt to tackle this very thing, although they admittedly don't quite accomplish as much as your suggestion.

For now, another alternative to making fuel management a little more important--or at least a little more strenuous--may be Sundog's Halved Fuel Efficiency and Cost, which used to be an optional thing listed alongside his Fuel Siphoning mod. You can find it here. Not sure if the current Fuel Siphoning version has it implemented, nor why it was eventually removed, so use at your own risk, but it certainly added a bit more mindfulness regarding your logistics.

Thanks for sharing your idea; I'll definitely think more on it, even if I can't really think of a solution at the moment.

[PreConceptor]

Another dumb idea: an option to make crew require small amounts of food. Lack of food could cause an initially slow but exponential loss of crew, random loss of ships or other bad events as crew gets desperate or a reduction of maximum CR fleetwide (down to say 40-45% max) as crew are forced to eat tiny amounts of crappy emergency rations (a bit less punishing), perhaps in addition to large abandonments on docking with no food in cargo. To me it makes more sense that supplies are for feeding ships, not crew (even though the description says otherwise).

In the vanilla settings there is a "suppliesPerCrewPerDay" and "suppliesPerMarinePerDay", so a food requirement seems like it might not be too difficult to implement. Personally I have set crew and marine supply usage to 0.0004 and 0.0005 respectively because it kinda makes sense that more crew means more stress on life support and other non-organic things supplies are supposed to be used for like protective equipment and tools/parts.

In addition I changed crew/marine cost to 250/500 and monthly salary to 20/25 respectively. This makes sense to me, since life is cheap in the Sector, but not that cheap (entire population of the Sector less than Earth right now and vastly more spread out). I imagine the initial cost is a mix of life insurance, contract buyouts, and equipment/transport costs, with marines getting a bit more hazard pay than regular crew.

I also changed officer cost and salaries to 200/40 to balance out crew costs, since the choice between officers and no officers is never an actual choice, and a 50 fold pay difference between a standard crewman and an expert captain seems more reasonable than the ludicrous disparity it was originally.

With all the changes I made above it accomplishes a few things, A) making carriers and larger ships more costly to operate, especially carriers as some crew are almost guaranteed to die in an engagement (thus making recovery shuttles, blast doors and other such hullmods and skills more valuable), B) making colonies more expensive to start due to crew costs, C) making planetary raids and invasions more costly and something you need to prepare for, D) making small, focused fleets without huge fighter support more efficient and rewarding compared to swarm fleets, D) making running a skeleton crew a more attractive but risky economic choice, and E) just making a bit more sense thematically to me while also increasing logistical strain AND keeping things balanced and manageable.

tldr: Food cost for crew and other crew related changes. Sorry for another wordy post, originally it was like 3 lines and it sort of got out of control. If you get all the way through it I'd like to hear your thoughts on it all.

[RustyCabbage]

It seems like the majority of the consequences of lack of food are already things that happen when you run out of supplies, so I'm not certain what the added benefit would be aside from immersion which is nice, but generally shouldn't come at the cost of making the game a hassle. Adding a fourth resource to manage which (without serious, possibly compatibility-issues-creating work) wouldn't be mitigated by skills and isn't easily obtained during long-distance expeditions would certainly fall under that purview. I don't know if you've played No Man's Sky for example, but it's a shining example of why simply adding costs and upkeep to everything doesn't make for interesting gameplay (probably advice I should take upon myself to listen to in some cases, heh).

Moreover, it's not something that would easily be shown in the UI like the way fuel and supplies and crew are currently (I'm hardly satisfied with the modifications I made to those upkeeps, in terms of visibility, let alone a brand new mechanic).

Regarding the crew/marines/officer changes, I do make personal adjustments to settings.json, but the keyword there is personal - I wouldn't want to overwrite anyone's decisions of how they play the game, especially since regardless of how much you advertise the things a mod changes, some people won't pay attention and it'll end up being a hassle for tech support trying to figure out what's happening :v.

(Also a small note regarding carriers: while most strikecraft do become more costly with those changes, they have no effect on Sparks, which also happen to be among the most oppressive of the fighters in vanilla, particularly with regards to swarmy play.)

[PreConceptor]

It is a shame there's no good way to affect drones, alas all I can do is mess with the Spark's wing data. Wish I had the know-how to build a mod, I'd build one that makes drones less effective the further they are from their carrier, among so many other things. In regards to the settings changes, if you think a set of changes would significantly switch up the game in the way SWO is meant to, couldn't they just be added as a set of uncommented lines in the config settings file with recommended values so people have to actually enable the changes? Seems like the best way to implement those kind of small tweaks.

Just want to say I really like what this mod offers, in that it tries to make the campaign-level logistic and strategic aspects a more important and engaging area, especially in relation to logistical realities and non-combat ship attributes affecting tactical choice and strategic decision-making, among other things. I think a lot of people dismiss the campaign-level resource management in both its capability and potential as part of an engaging gameplay experience, some even seeing it as an annoyance.

Personally I think that the combat is already excellent, and adding more ships and weapons, while always cool, won't change that excellence beyond adding variety. Conversely I see the campaign level management as the thing with the most potential to both be improved/modified and enhance gameplay. Basically, keep up the good work and I can't wait to see what other options and stuff you come up with.

[RustyCabbage]

if you think a set of changes would significantly switch up the game in the way SWO is meant to, couldn't they just be added as a set of uncommented lines in the config settings file with recommended values so people have to actually enable the changes?

Dunno if you've checked in the mod files, but you may be surprised
(They're pretty outdated, and I don't advertise it since they're far more experimental, but I have thought about doing that!)

And thank you very much for all the kind words! You basically completely echoed my sentiments and the general design goals I had when I first started tinkering with this mod. It's really gratifying to directly hear that it's been successful in achieving those things.

Feel free to keep sharing your ideas (though the easier it is to implement in the UI, the better heh)!

[PreConceptor]

Yeah that hidden settings file is what I meant. I love the black market changes, always thought incessant black market trading should be way more punishing, and with Nexerelin it gives a real incentive to avoid it and get in a faction's good graces to lower the open market tariff so you don't need it for commodities, and makes good weapons more risky to acquire at markets, which fits with the theme of factions not wanting just anyone and their grandma getting access to high end ordnance. Also selling to criminal elements having a huge penalty, just makes sense. Smuggling was way too easy, you should alienate every faction you come across if you only deal on their black market, smugglers rarely have safe havens. Great changes, was looking for something like that forever. Never occurred to me to look in the vanilla settings file, not sure if I could have figured out a good setup anyway.

Also like the raid penalty reduction, and the detection range settings (haven't tried the battle detection changes). CR changes seem cool, but in practice they massively favor shields and fighters and massively discourage armor defense and smaller ships (since they tend to get damaged more in big engagements), most lower tech ships seem to become 0 CR cripples after a single long engagement due to hull, weapon and engine damage, while the higher tech ships are still going just fine thanks to shields when it should be the other way around with high techs having to retreat earlier as skirmishers. Doesn't help that since it's based on CR, ships with higher CR per deployment cost less to recover from similar damage. Also hard to manage well. Still neat, just not tuned well.

I haven't used Slow CR since it seemed overkill with all the other masochistic changes I made, does it affect enemy ships too or just your own?

sidenote - back to the food/crew cost: I think it would be good to have a logistical requirement that doesn't fluctuate as much as others, especially with the additional costs that Iliad or Odyssey mode (and potentially in-system fuel costs in the future) bring. A commodity that you can't find easily outside civilized space that puts a clock on all expeditions and takes up valuable cargo space (making the choice to exchange food and crew for efficiency and risk), causing you huge issues if you run out. It also wouldn't necessitate a UI element, as it would be a a very optional feature with a relatively unchanging (much more likely to go down than up) value that can be easily calculated for whatever expedition you have planned. Would also make farming a much more valuable industry and make finding food caches while exploring much more interesting, as you have to choose between more time or more cargo space. Meanwhile Crew 'powers' your powerful fighters and is a resource you want to avoid throwing away if at all possible (unless you don't want to pay salaries), Supplies limit your engagements and encourage smart navigation choices, and Fuel usage makes good information and effective search patterns imperative. Sorry I'm stuck on this idea now.

[RustyCabbage]

I haven't used Slow CR since it seemed overkill with all the other masochistic changes I made, does it affect enemy ships too or just your own?

Only your fleet for the moment. I may expand it to include other fleets in the future, but I a) don't think it would see much use, and b) don't really have an incentive to make enemy fleets strictly worse.

I still don't see food costs being well integrated into the game, and I don't see it being especially wrong that rimward expenditions don't have a specific timer on them? Especially since the modes already available do a lot to slowly push them into unsustainable territory anyways. I don't think the effort involved in balancing your food upkeep for "efficiency and risk" would be nearly as engaging as you suspect, especially if it's a simply calculated cost (in which case it's just tedious) and/or if it's poorly visualized. The dynamism already provided by supplies/fuel and to a lesser extent crew do a far better job and are well supported by the game's systems to boot. I'll also note that food is already among the most lucrative commodities, second only to fuel (ignoring the Free Port-only Drugs & Organs). Sure if you use alpha cores you'll probably do better with the other industries, but if you're at that point you're already aways into the endgame and this change wouldn't be impactful. Ultimately, I'm still not convinced that it would be a worthwhile addition.

[QuinnDexter]

Hello, thanks for making this mod. I made a forum account to report a bug. Using the current version (0.5.1) with default settings that are in the download, I encountered a bug where I found the second wave modspec that adjusts the chance for recovering ship hulls, despite not having the option enabled in the settings. I only encountered the modspec later in the game (around lvl 40-45), so there might be a time or level based trigger causing it to spawn.

[PreConceptor]

Ultimately, I'm still not convinced that it would be a worthwhile addition.

Thas cool, you're the person who has to make the changes in the end, if you don't think it would be a good change I'll defer to your judgement. When I think about it, it sounds like a thing that would take a lot of work for a potentially sub-par/mostly-unused feature.

Keep up the good work, I shall wait with bated breath to see what's next.

[RustyCabbage]

Hello, thanks for making this mod. I made a forum account to report a bug. Using the current version (0.5.1) with default settings that are in the download, I encountered a bug where I found the second wave modspec that adjusts the chance for recovering ship hulls, despite not having the option enabled in the settings. I only encountered the modspec later in the game (around lvl 40-45), so there might be a time or level based trigger causing it to spawn.

Welcome to the forums! That's really annoying; I thought I had it fixed at least for Nexerelin raids, but couldn't test if it was happening through regular salvage. I'll try to figure out some way to stop that, thank you for the report.

Keep up the good work, I shall wait with bated breath to see what's next.

Thanks, and please do keep sharing your thoughts. I'm an intensely uncreative person so sharing ideas is very much appreciated.

[PreConceptor]

Idea: a setting that makes Transverse Jump way more costly in terms of supplies and fuel and/or take way more time to fire. Personally I think TJ makes the game way too easy, even as an L3 skill, since it means you can bypass so many obstacles, save so much time, avoid so many patrols, and you don't even need to think about using it.

Jumping into or out of a system without a jump point seems like something that should put serious stress on your ships, and be something that you really need to think about whether it'll worth it before you do it, i.e. using it to escape a patrol and throwing away a bunch of supplies or trying to lie low and creep to a jump point, or making in-system travel times relevant again, or making the choice between approaching a market from a jump point or spending a bunch of resources to drop in where nobody will be watching, in addition to making illegal and black market trading more difficult as the 'get out of jail free' button would have a serious cost.

[Singrana]

just wanted to say thanks a lot for this mod, the game needs some way to gradually grow more challenging which this mod addresses, in addition larger ships are better in all ways that count for most things which this also fixes by incentive's the player to not use them all the time with the slow CR recovery for ship sizes option i run with these settings myself;
####################
###### SLOW CR CONFIG ##
   ####################
   "slowCRPerDayMultFrigate":2.0,      #Float. Default 0.5. Vanilla 1. my setting is 5 days
   "slowCRPerDayMultDestroyer":1.333333,   #Float. Default 0.5. Vanilla 1. my setting is 15 days
   "slowCRPerDayMultCruiser":0.444444,   #Float. Default 0.33. Vanilla 1. my setting is 45 days
   "slowCRPerDayMultCapital":0.185185,   #Float. Default 0.25. Vanilla 1. my setting is 135 days

and its great, i actually feel i need destroyers and frigates now, i keep larger ships in reserve for when i encounter a fight where i NEED to bring them out or take annoying losses (i also play with a house rule limit on the NUMBER of carrier ships i can bring into a battle at any one time of 6, encouraging the use of large carriers (which this mod makes costly) to spam fighters instead of just bringing droves of drovers)

[NARC]

Another dumb idea: an option to make crew require small amounts of food. Lack of food could cause an initially slow but exponential loss of crew, random loss of ships or other bad events as crew gets desperate or a reduction of maximum CR fleetwide (down to say 40-45% max) as crew are forced to eat tiny amounts of crappy emergency rations (a bit less punishing), perhaps in addition to large abandonments on docking with no food in cargo. To me it makes more sense that supplies are for feeding ships, not crew (even though the description says otherwise).

In the vanilla settings there is a "suppliesPerCrewPerDay" and "suppliesPerMarinePerDay", so a food requirement seems like it might not be too difficult to implement. Personally I have set crew and marine supply usage to 0.0004 and 0.0005 respectively because it kinda makes sense that more crew means more stress on life support and other non-organic things supplies are supposed to be used for like protective equipment and tools/parts.

In addition I changed crew/marine cost to 250/500 and monthly salary to 20/25 respectively. This makes sense to me, since life is cheap in the Sector, but not that cheap (entire population of the Sector less than Earth right now and vastly more spread out). I imagine the initial cost is a mix of life insurance, contract buyouts, and equipment/transport costs, with marines getting a bit more hazard pay than regular crew.

I also changed officer cost and salaries to 200/40 to balance out crew costs, since the choice between officers and no officers is never an actual choice, and a 50 fold pay difference between a standard crewman and an expert captain seems more reasonable than the ludicrous disparity it was originally.

With all the changes I made above it accomplishes a few things, A) making carriers and larger ships more costly to operate, especially carriers as some crew are almost guaranteed to die in an engagement (thus making recovery shuttles, blast doors and other such hullmods and skills more valuable), B) making colonies more expensive to start due to crew costs, C) making planetary raids and invasions more costly and something you need to prepare for, D) making small, focused fleets without huge fighter support more efficient and rewarding compared to swarm fleets, D) making running a skeleton crew a more attractive but risky economic choice, and E) just making a bit more sense thematically to me while also increasing logistical strain AND keeping things balanced and manageable.

tldr: Food cost for crew and other crew related changes. Sorry for another wordy post, originally it was like 3 lines and it sort of got out of control. If you get all the way through it I'd like to hear your thoughts on it all.

How do I actually change officer's cost?

[RustyCabbage]

Second Wave Options v0.5.2
This update is save compatible.

Changelog:
Additions
-Doctrine Evolution: applyNewTechnologies now also allows for variations and additions in commander skills as factions develop. Commander skill shuffle probability now increases with OfficerQuality (0/10/20/30% for OfficerQuality <5/5/6/7). This means, for example, that in the late game Hegemony fleets will rarely come with Electronic Warfare.

Balance
-Doctrine Evolution: if applyNewTechnologies is true, maxOfficerQuality is increased from 5 to 7 (beyond 5 has no effect on fleet inflation - simply used for commander skills). Net nerf.

Fixes
-Hopefully a fix for the hullmod BP dropping

Other/QOL
-Doctrine Evolution: slightly better logic for allocation of points.
-Added more sim opponents

Variant Changes

Radiant | Standard | 1x Plasma, 2x Autopulse->2x Plasma, 1x Autopulse. Ion Beams->Sabot Pods. Added rear PD Lasers.
Radiant | Strike | Revamped. Now same as new Standard variant, but 2x Tachyon, 1x Plasma instead of 2x Plasma, 1x Autopulse.
Paragon | Elite | Annihilators->Salamanders. Removed rear Burst PD Laser.
Paragon | Escort | Gravitons->Tac Lasers. Removed Side Tac Lasers. Annihilators->Salamanders.
Paragon | Raider | Removed side Tac Lasers.
Enforcer | Fighter Support | Thumper->HAC
Enforcer | Overdriven | Adjusted cap/vent distribution.
Eagle XIV | Elite | Fixed weapon groups.
Gryphon | Fighter Support | Thunders->Wasps.
Hyperion | Strike | IEA->Accelerated Shields.
Medusa | Close Support | Tac Lasers->LRPD.
Shade | Assault | Removed AWM.
Shepherd | Frontier | ECM->Militarized Subsystems, Blast Doors.
Shrike | Support | Removed rear PD Lasers. Middle LRPD->IR Pulse. Side LRPD->PD Lasers.
Tempest | Attack | Removed ITU. Added Extended Shields. Ion Cannon->Tac Laser.
Venture | Balanced | Removed ITU.
Wayfarer | Standard | No longer a cheesy SO build.
Mudskipper | Standard | Added.

[close]

Sorry for the lack of updates - was feeling a bit burnt out on Starsector. Not much included in here, but I think the notable extant bug was fixed.

Idea: a setting that makes Transverse Jump way more costly in terms of supplies and fuel and/or take way more time to fire.

Heya PreConceptor, thanks for sharing the idea. That said, for the time being I'm not too keen on adding any new features. Honestly, if I were to release this mod today I'd probably walk back on a few of the ones that are already in the mod.

just wanted to say thanks a lot for this mod, the game needs some way to gradually grow more challenging which this mod addresses, in addition larger ships are better in all ways that count for most things which this also fixes by incentive's the player to not use them all the time with the slow CR recovery for ship sizes option i run with these settings myself;
####################
###### SLOW CR CONFIG ##
   ####################
   "slowCRPerDayMultFrigate":2.0,      #Float. Default 0.5. Vanilla 1. my setting is 5 days
   "slowCRPerDayMultDestroyer":1.333333,   #Float. Default 0.5. Vanilla 1. my setting is 15 days
   "slowCRPerDayMultCruiser":0.444444,   #Float. Default 0.33. Vanilla 1. my setting is 45 days
   "slowCRPerDayMultCapital":0.185185,   #Float. Default 0.25. Vanilla 1. my setting is 135 days

and its great, i actually feel i need destroyers and frigates now, i keep larger ships in reserve for when i encounter a fight where i NEED to bring them out or take annoying losses (i also play with a house rule limit on the NUMBER of carrier ships i can bring into a battle at any one time of 6, encouraging the use of large carriers (which this mod makes costly) to spam fighters instead of just bringing droves of drovers)

Super late reply, but thanks for sharing! I like the idea of giving frigates and destroyers an even faster CR recovery rate, rather than simply a smaller decrease.

How do I actually change officer's cost?

I believe TechPriest explained this to you early, but for future reference to anyone curious:

starsector-core\data\config\settings.json

Code

	"officerSalaryBase":500, # per officer per month
	"officerSalaryPerLevel":100, # per officer per month per level

Change numbers appropriately to your liking. Savegame compatible.