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Author Topic: Raiding for Fun and Profit  (Read 33976 times)

FooF

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #120 on: December 02, 2019, 05:51:05 PM »

I guess it would help if I knew what kind of crew veterancy bonuses we're talking about here. It was CR bonuses in previous versions but I don't know if that's still the case. The question is "What should elite crew bring to the table, relative to green crew, if implemented?" Most of what I can come up with are already spoken for in the skill tree or CR bonuses via skills. Non-combat bonuses are fair game, I suppose, but if the mechanic is a "take it or leave it" kind of thing, why bother?

I'm keen on fleetwide bonuses, rather than individual ships (see my previous post on the subject in this thread) so that there's no management of crew at all. CR bonuses can be for individual ships while crew veterancy affects the whole fleet. I'm thinking kind of along the lines of marines: crew veterancy is more about chain-of-command so experienced crew would be spread across the whole of the fleet. In the case of small fleets, a la Gothars idea, only a few Elites would be needed to reach the full bonus. Bigger fleets would require much more to reach the same level, giving a small incentive to stay smaller but through effort, could still be achieved with larger fleets.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #121 on: December 02, 2019, 06:03:01 PM »

Couldn't officer'ed ships, including the player's ship, just always have the max bonus?

Thought about that! Kind of makes the whole thing nearly pointless, though...

Good point. Could make it a skill, maybe?

Let officers have the best crew only when using low DP ships, then the skill boosts the amount of DP the officer still has the best crew at.
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Sundog

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #122 on: December 02, 2019, 06:26:57 PM »

What I meant was if you have 100 elite marines, and want to ship 1000 marines somewhere to sell their contracts, you'll 1) buy 1000 marines and have 1100 "regular" marines with a bit of XP, then 2) sell 1000 marines and 3) be left with 100 regular marines with a bit of XP. The only way to avoid this currently is to put your marines into storage first.
To address that, and possibly this:
That's actually another point against crew XP in general; colonzing would take a chunk out of it since you'd have to replace that crew, so it's just weirdness...
...perhaps it would be best for stacks of marines to always be split such that the most experienced marines always end up in fleet inventory, if possible. That way, selling 1000 marines would be the inverse of buying 1000 marines, and the stack would end up being 100 elites again. My only concern would be exploitability, but if my assumptions about some of the details are correct then it shouldn't be an issue.

TaLaR

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #123 on: December 02, 2019, 09:21:34 PM »

From what I understand all the small fleet bonuses are going to be quite minor compared to fleet-wides as we have now. Nice to have while you still have a small fleet in early-mid game, but can't really compete against having a full size fleet.

If story points couldn't be used respec, these would dead-end skills.
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Alex

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #124 on: December 02, 2019, 09:33:21 PM »

I guess it would help if I knew what kind of crew veterancy bonuses we're talking about here. It was CR bonuses in previous versions but I don't know if that's still the case. The question is "What should elite crew bring to the table, relative to green crew, if implemented?" Most of what I can come up with are already spoken for in the skill tree or CR bonuses via skills.

...

I'm keen on fleetwide bonuses, rather than individual ships (see my previous post on the subject in this thread) so that there's no management of crew at all. CR bonuses can be for individual ships while crew veterancy affects the whole fleet.

Same, more or less. (The suggestion earlier was to have crew veterancy affect the magnitude of bonuses from high CR, btw.)

Non-combat bonuses are fair game, I suppose, but if the mechanic is a "take it or leave it" kind of thing, why bother?

In theory because the choice would bring something good to the table. I do agree that it's not compelling in comparison to the complexity it adds, though.

I'm thinking kind of along the lines of marines: crew veterancy is more about chain-of-command so experienced crew would be spread across the whole of the fleet. In the case of small fleets, a la Gothars idea, only a few Elites would be needed to reach the full bonus. Bigger fleets would require much more to reach the same level, giving a small incentive to stay smaller but through effort, could still be achieved with larger fleets.

"More effort" really just means "the player will have it" for something like this, though, doesn't it...

I feel like there are many pieces of good ideas here (in this thread in general), but every combination so far has had downsides.



...perhaps it would be best for stacks of marines to always be split such that the most experienced marines always end up in fleet inventory, if possible. That way, selling 1000 marines would be the inverse of buying 1000 marines, and the stack would end up being 100 elites again. My only concern would be exploitability, but if my assumptions about some of the details are correct then it shouldn't be an issue.

I remember not wanting to do it that way for... some reason? I think it might've been so that marine losses from raids and from other sources would not have to be differentiated. The way you're suggesting, if there's a custom event simulating marine losses from combat, it has to add some extra if it wants to ensure the losses result in a loss of XP proportional to the number of marines lost and don't just concentrate all of the XP in a lower number of marines.

That said, I think it makes a lot of sense to do it the way you're suggesting, since it's much smoother from the player perspective - you always want to have the marines in your fleet have the most XP. Well, maybe there's some edge case where you don't, but it's way, way less of an issue than the opposite which prevents you from moving marines to re-sell their contracts w/o losing XP. So: re-did it this way; didn't turn out too complicated codewise. Glad you mentioned this!


From what I understand all the small fleet bonuses are going to be quite minor compared to fleet-wides as we have now. Nice to have while you still have a small fleet in early-mid game, but can't really compete against having a full size fleet.

(I don't think that's actually true, the bonuses are pretty hefty. E.G. one of the carrier ones gives +50% fighter replacement rate at 6 flight decks or fewer. Though that's one of the stronger ones since it's more specialized, but e.g. +15% flux capacity/dissipation isn't bad either. But that conversation belongs in the other thread :))
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Sutopia

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #125 on: December 02, 2019, 09:33:41 PM »

Throwing in my two cents about heavy armament:
They can be consumables. (and should take more than 1 unit cargo space per unit)
I'd imagine the danger level of operations is discrete and you can choose to consume some amount of heavy armaments to reduce the danger level of operation.
Of course, making "Lethal" to "Extremely dangerous" would consume much more than making "Moderate resistance" to "Minor resistance". It can/should be some exponentially decreasing consumption per level as danger level go down.
By this context, you're using your property to save your men (by making lower danger level) and make clear difference from bringing ships with the ground support hull mods. (trading ship slot for general maintaining cost)


I think completely negating paying upkeep cost by placing men in storage should be illegal. They should require something like 1/2 or at least 1/5 of their normal cost when standing by in any storage, just like idle admins do. Count the men you send to planet local stash as consumed can easily solve the problem some people talked about (i.e. do not record the amount you put into local stash of any men to prevent people exploiting this to negate paying their upkeep)


People seem to hate the rep loss when raiding and deters them from raiding in early game.
An easy solution is to make rep loss depend on what you've done instead of colony size.
It's just dumb to raid a size 8 when you can raid a much easier size 5 for better loot and much less rep loss.


Marine exp actually sounds awkward to me, as it can be confusing when you're trading them (to Ludds especially lol).
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to use fleet morale instead?
Fleet starts with neutral morale, increases when you win fights with small loss and decreases when you kill a lot of your guys in any way.
The morale would have tendency to go back to neutral as time goes by so it would give incentive for players to chain battles / operations.
Offer the option of fixing negative morale with credit, just like how money can fix colony's unrest.
Using morale would also just get rid of the crew exp problem as the whole fleet shares it.
Morale can also apply to any NPC fleet to fine tune difficulty, for instance, a huge revenging armada should have extremely high morale just to crush you. (And obviously [REDACTED] have no ... well I'm not sure now lol)
The "Morale" system is inspired by the mod Starship Legends, just apply similar algorithm as a whole fleet
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Sundog

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #126 on: December 02, 2019, 11:07:41 PM »

That said, I think it makes a lot of sense to do it the way you're suggesting, since it's much smoother from the player perspective - you always want to have the marines in your fleet have the most XP. Well, maybe there's some edge case where you don't, but it's way, way less of an issue than the opposite which prevents you from moving marines to re-sell their contracts w/o losing XP. So: re-did it this way; didn't turn out too complicated codewise. Glad you mentioned this!
Glad it worked out! And yeah, from an API/implementation perspective I guess it would be pretty awkward. I hadn't considered that.

SonnaBanana

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #127 on: December 03, 2019, 11:33:50 PM »

Couldn't officer'ed ships, including the player's ship, just always have the max bonus?
That's too powerful.
Have ships with officers/player not count towards limits instead,
If that's still too powerful, then have fleet skills provide a small, flat bonus to ships with officers.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2019, 11:49:52 PM by SonnaBanana »
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Plantissue

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #128 on: December 04, 2019, 09:50:35 AM »

The longer the game goes on the more likely you will have enough officers on all your deployed ships, especially if your ships take up more DP individually.. So functionally, you would have a moment where your fleet decreases in effectiveness, till all your deployed ships have officers and retain full bonus. I doubt that such a system would work as intended.
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Igncom1

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #129 on: December 05, 2019, 10:01:10 AM »

Aren't heavy armaments used to produce marines in the fleet command building?

Wouldn't that imply that marines eventually bring their own heavy armament, id imagine like starcraft goliath walkers, and the like that can fit in the drop ships?
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Trensicourt

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #130 on: December 05, 2019, 10:55:26 AM »

I would prefer to imagine Heavy Armaments as something that work well against the bonuses of Ground Defences.

For example, a 300 base defense colony gets a multiplier of 2x by Ground Defences and 3x by Space Station. I'm just using w/e numbers are easier to understand. Therefore, the base defense colony gets a multiplier of 5x, increasing its defenses to 1500.

The Ground Defenses contribute 300 defense because 300 base * 2 = 600, meaning only 300 additional defense are added by the Ground Defense. Heavy Armaments decreases the effect of Ground Defenses by -2 defense per unit but requires 1 marine to operate them.

Against other types of defenses, Heavy Armaments only contribute -1 defense per unit. That means if there -300 defense worth of Heavy Armaments against Ground Defenses, leftover Heavy Armaments equipped by Marines will only contribute -1 defense per unit to other defenses.

There are pros and cons to using Heavy Armaments and that is cost and to emphasize that, Heavy Armaments onced used in a battle against Ground Defenses are considered "used". Only after a successful raid/invasion, will the player be able to recover a portion of the "used" Heavy Armaments and the rest will be considered lost. The portion recovered depends on how successful the raid or invasion was. This prevents Heavy Armaments from being overused but would be a way to be effective against more more powerful colony defenses without sacrificing your marines and thus your marines' experience level.
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Plantissue

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #131 on: December 05, 2019, 02:05:10 PM »

Rename "Heavy Armaments" to "Armaments". Remove reference to "mechs, tanks, and hovercraft". Then people wouldn't think it should be used for raiding.
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Morrokain

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #132 on: December 05, 2019, 02:44:01 PM »

Rename "Heavy Armaments" to "Armaments". Remove reference to "mechs, tanks, and hovercraft". Then people wouldn't think it should be used for raiding.

It used to be called "Hand Weapons" before and had a different icon of a pistol instead of a mech. Maybe go back to that if no solution can be found?
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bobucles

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #133 on: December 05, 2019, 05:02:52 PM »

Rename "Heavy Armaments" to "Armaments". Remove reference to "mechs, tanks, and hovercraft". Then people wouldn't think it should be used for raiding.
Sure, because guns would never get used in a military raid.  ::)

Morrokain

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Re: Raiding for Fun and Profit
« Reply #134 on: December 05, 2019, 05:14:28 PM »

Sure, because guns would never get used in a military raid.  ::)

For me, handguns had more of a civilian personal protection feel so it made more sense to me to not be used in raids than mechs, tanks and hovercraft. I would assume military raids would have high power rifles and assault weapons over simple hand weapons.
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