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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Tuning levers  (Read 2397 times)

Daynen

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Tuning levers
« on: January 23, 2020, 12:59:13 AM »

A phrase I heard years ago while following the development of League of Legends was "tuning levers."  Riot used this phrase to describe a tool they create when they change something from binary to a more variable state.  An example was taking an ability that was formerly simply point and click and making it require aim instead.  This gave them new "levers" like projectile speed and hitbox that could then be adjusted, rather than just the final damage numbers or duration of crowd control.  This concept opens up great avenues of gameplay and development alike by allowing finer tuning and asking more impactful player choices.  Starsector could probably use a few more levers.  One in particular springs to mind at the moment: maximum fleet size.

You can have a fleet of up to 30 ships, full stop.  Why?  I haven't been here since the starfarer days so I have to wonder how we settled on this number and more importantly...why is it static?  What would the game look like if fleet cap was something that we could affect?  What if the starting maximum fleet size was a much more humble number like, say...4 or 5?  What if a size 30 fleet was a grandiose, almost unreachable plateau that required us to commit to our build and make sacrifices for it?  It would open up options not only for progression but for balance, optimization (both fleets AND system requirements) and give us a meaningful choice to make, whereas now a size 30 fleet is basically inevitable.  It would require a bit of algorithmic adjustment for the AI (who already basically ignores the fleet cap anyway) to compensate, but would that be such a bad thing in the end?

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SCC

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #1 on: January 23, 2020, 01:14:50 AM »

As it is right now, I would go away with the ship cap entirely. We already have supplies, fuel and crew to manage, in addition to refitting ships.

Grievous69

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #2 on: January 23, 2020, 03:20:25 AM »

Yea the current ship cap just seems like a placeholder for something that will come, or get removed completely which I would very much like. You really can't have 50 big ships because you're gonna run of supplies super fast and won't be able to buy enough (in late game with only 3-4 capitals I already ctrl+click supplies and fuel on almost every market), so there's no point to limit it with a simple number. And if someone wants to have a fleet of 50-60 frigates, why the hell not? I don't see a problem with that. Besides we have an option to alter battle size which imo is more impactful that ship cap.

Ship cap and whiteout from explosions are two most common things i see people changing in settings.json, well partly due to the salvaging bug but still.
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Plantissue

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #3 on: January 23, 2020, 03:58:42 AM »

In the past there was a deployment size fleet cap that went from 40 to 200. It was rather unpopular and everybody practically went to expand their fleet cap first.

Ironically at the start of the game, you want as many ships as possible, so it is likely to want to have more than 30 ships, so it is a barrier when you most needed help. Perhaps you have a fleet of recovered kites and hounds and cerberuses and other frigates and you quickly hit the fleet cap whilst being unable to fight appropriate bounties. But as endgame approached, you have more and more cruisers/capitals, so that 30 ship fleet cap is not a barrier anymore. When 3 ships can be more powerful than that early game ragtag 30 ship fleet. Personally I am happy with just 20 ships by the end game.

My guess was that 30 ships was thought to be a nice limit for performance, as well as to stop the player from hoarding every derelict frigate they come across.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2020, 04:07:14 AM by Plantissue »
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #4 on: January 23, 2020, 05:23:04 AM »

Fleet cap will be soft instead of hard next release.
https://twitter.com/amosolov/status/1168299595891466241
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Grievous69

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #5 on: January 23, 2020, 05:55:02 AM »

But that's just to solve the salvaging issue, just having one ship above the limit will be impossible to maintain. (I know that's intended, but doesn't really help with the OP's request.
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Mordodrukow

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #6 on: January 23, 2020, 07:43:27 AM »

Ship cap is a balance mechanism just like the skill cap. What "character build" means if you can pick all the skills? The same true for the fleet: if you can take 500 ships to easy counter any encounter is it good or bad? Also remember that the game compares fleet sizes and sets deployment limit according to that. So, having 500 ships just allows doomstacks.

Cons:
- limit of 30 ships look too artificial. Really, why 30? Soft limit, if it tuned properly, looks better.
- if you wanna play strategically "faction vs faction" instead of "1 fleet vs 4-8 enemy fleets", the cap system should be changed, because of enemy doomstacks. And again: soft cap can help here.
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SCC

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #7 on: January 23, 2020, 08:16:23 AM »

I don't recall having to pay, say, 2k credits every month and every battle. Can you imagine constantly being on lookout for top level bounties just not to lose 104 000 credits monthly?

A more strategic gameplay isn't tied to ship cap, but to fleet cap. Unless Alex gives us some way to control multiple fleets, directly or not, it won't matter. There's only so much a single fleet can do.

Megas

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #8 on: January 23, 2020, 10:34:47 AM »

0.5.3a, the last release before skills, player had a 100 FP limit.  That is about twenty frigates or two or three capitals or somewhere in between.  Can be exceeded but either at the cost of more supplies or risk of accidents.  Biggest NPC fleet was Hegemony System Defense Fleet which had three Onslaughts and a variety of ships.

0.5.4a (I think) introduced skills.  Unskilled, you had 25 FP base, enough for five(?) frigates or one Paragon.  Leadership attribute and Fleet Logistics added FP, up to either 100 or 120 FP (do not remember).

0.6a added CR and Logistics.  Unskilled, you had 20 FP base, enough for four or five frigates or one Conquest.  Other capitals required Leadership just to get enough FP to pilot it only.  Also, personnel ate into Logistics.  The more crew you have, the less ships you can bring.  Player could exceed Logistics somewhat at the cost of max CR.  With max skills, and breaking the limits a bit, player could bring about forty frigates and kill everything or three capitals.

0.7a did away with Logistics and Leadership based limits, and added the fleet cap, which began at 25 ships... for the player only.  (NPC fleets violated this limit frequently.)  Now, frigate mobs could not be as big as they used to be, but you can bring a bunch of capitals if you wanted.  (Before, you could only bring about three capitals and little else.)

Keep in mind that until 0.8a, fighters were treated as ships and counted toward FP/Logistics/fleet cap.  Most fighters were the equivalent of frigates, but few like Warthogs, maybe Tridents too, were closer to destroyers.  Fighter spam could be one or few carriers and the rest of your fleet were fighters.

Sometime later, either 0.8a or a later 0.7.xa release raised the cap from 25 to 30 ships.

0.8a changed fighters from ships to missiles, and they no longer count toward the ship limit.

0.9.1a, NPC fleets usually honor the fleet cap.  Instead of a hundred frigate horde, they send eight to ten capital fleets at the player.

Quote
There's only so much a single fleet can do.
Especially when player cannot deploy everything due to battlemap size.  300 FP is not enough to deploy all big ships player may want.
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Daynen

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #9 on: January 23, 2020, 02:55:29 PM »

Not being able to deploy everything you have is more a result of the total battle size being a tug-of-war between sides than anything.  If deployment was literally just tied to your fleet, character build and such and independent of the enemy we'd have a very different dynamic, especially regarding reinforcements mid battle. The performance issue is an important point, however.  The total battle size DOES add a measure of sanity to the performance hit on our machines and I would NOT want to see a battle size of, say, 1000 on the machine I was running a few days ago (RIP my hard drive, you will be missed.)

I do want to brainstorm on this though.  I like setting a random train of thought loose from the station and seeing what it picks up along the way.

Speaking of random thoughts: what if you could only deploy ships with an officer in command?  Like a ship needed a captain to go into battle?  What would THAT look like?  What changes would it require and what new strategies would it open up?  Maybe a ship with an officer in charge wouldn't count towards our currently-hypothetical lower fleet size, allowing you to exceed the cap, but only during noncombat?  Has the game ever required officers to deploy ships in previous versions?
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Thaago

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #10 on: January 23, 2020, 03:01:53 PM »

In defense of the ship number cap: performance has much more to do with the number of ships than with their size. This isn't just FPS either: combat gets weird and bad with too many ships on the map because of traffic jams. In my opinion combat is more dynamic and fun when ships have room to maneuver. Tbh I think 30 ships in combat is too many. The 'officers required' idea from Daynen is interesting because it would limit the number of in combat ships, which is the performance/fun problem, but not the number of ships in the fleet as a whole. It would require a rework of officers of course - more numerous, less expensive, and less powerful - but might be worth thinking about.
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Daynen

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #11 on: January 23, 2020, 03:30:07 PM »

I dunno; I'm not sure officers would have to be much more numerous.  If the idea is to put tighter controls on combat size then maybe officers would be more or less okay as they are.  I wouldn't be all that opposed to having most battles come down to a generally smaller number of ships, with massive naval wars being the exception rather than the rule.  There would still BE huge fights, but they'd be a lot more special.

Hmmm...maybe we need to move away from the sheer ship limit and tie it closer to the value and relative size of the fleet, like with total ordnance points or something.  Managing 30 frigates would realistically be a logistical pain because that's thirty ships, but three capital ships would be an equal but different chore because that's still hundreds if not thousands of crew and massive vessels to maintain.  Making players find their sweet spot on the bell curve seems like a good design choice, no?

Can't wait to see the skill rework next update.  It's supposed to affect fleet sizes in a way so DO WANT.
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Megas

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #12 on: January 23, 2020, 04:15:45 PM »

In defense of the ship number cap: performance has much more to do with the number of ships than with their size. This isn't just FPS either: combat gets weird and bad with too many ships on the map because of traffic jams. In my opinion combat is more dynamic and fun when ships have room to maneuver. Tbh I think 30 ships in combat is too many.
During the 0.7.x releases, I remembered boosting battle size to an absurd number to deploy the entire simulator at once against Onslaught, which was a borderline god-ship (with max skills) back then.  All it did was make the simulator easier to solo because 1) enemy killed themselves colliding each other trying to reach my Onslaught in the corner and 2) they all ticked PPT/CR down at the same time.  My Onslaught was still active while ship after ship ran out of CR first and it was easy cleanup.
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Thaago

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #13 on: January 23, 2020, 04:24:04 PM »

In defense of the ship number cap: performance has much more to do with the number of ships than with their size. This isn't just FPS either: combat gets weird and bad with too many ships on the map because of traffic jams. In my opinion combat is more dynamic and fun when ships have room to maneuver. Tbh I think 30 ships in combat is too many.
During the 0.7.x releases, I remembered boosting battle size to an absurd number to deploy the entire simulator at once against Onslaught, which was a borderline god-ship (with max skills) back then.  All it did was make the simulator easier to solo because 1) enemy killed themselves colliding each other trying to reach my Onslaught in the corner and 2) they all ticked PPT/CR down at the same time.  My Onslaught was still active while ship after ship ran out of CR first and it was easy cleanup.

Yeah exactly! More ships really doesn't equal better, either for the AI's behavior or total power level. Hull regen Onslaught was fun to fly around while cackling madly, especially with multiple speed boosters and all those offense skills... just crazy good. :D

I dunno; I'm not sure officers would have to be much more numerous.  If the idea is to put tighter controls on combat size then maybe officers would be more or less okay as they are.  I wouldn't be all that opposed to having most battles come down to a generally smaller number of ships, with massive naval wars being the exception rather than the rule.  There would still BE huge fights, but they'd be a lot more special.

Hmmm...maybe we need to move away from the sheer ship limit and tie it closer to the value and relative size of the fleet, like with total ordnance points or something.  Managing 30 frigates would realistically be a logistical pain because that's thirty ships, but three capital ships would be an equal but different chore because that's still hundreds if not thousands of crew and massive vessels to maintain.  Making players find their sweet spot on the bell curve seems like a good design choice, no?

Can't wait to see the skill rework next update.  It's supposed to affect fleet sizes in a way so DO WANT.

DP limits make tons of sense - so much so that Alex tried several variations on the concept - but just in practice they don't work that well. I think that maybe a separation between ships allowed in the fleet and ships allowed to deploy in combat could be interesting though: a big fleet overall doesn't cause many problems, its only once combat becomes a crowded mess that the game starts to break down.
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Megas

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Re: Tuning levers
« Reply #14 on: January 23, 2020, 04:26:51 PM »

Yeah exactly! More ships really doesn't equal better, either for the AI's behavior or total power level. Hull regen Onslaught was fun to fly around while cackling madly, especially with multiple speed boosters and all those offense skills... just crazy good. :D
Full skilled Onslaught during 0.7a was so powerful it could kill everything without taking hull damage.  (All damage, which was not very much, was absorbed by armor.)  Yes, it was fun.
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