Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

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

Pages: 1 ... 112 113 [114] 115 116 ... 146

Author Topic: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 595861 times)

TuxedoCatfish

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 56
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1695 on: April 16, 2021, 05:25:45 AM »

Flying around on 180dp mid-low tech plus Odyssey fleet stumping everyone, ~80 ECM rating, the biggest remnant ECM I saw was 108. The game becomes easier than in 0.9.1, just don't spam big and dp hungry ships and capture points to even dp points with the enemy.

Right, thank you, I appreciate having a specific number to work with.

Naturally-spawning Ordo fleets have about 21-28 ships, of which about a third are frigates. To hit 108 ECM before control points, you'd need 8+ officer frigates who rolled Gunnery Implants -- basically every single frigate in the fleet -- or two officer destroyers for each missing frigate.

Officer placement is pretty obviously not fully random; larger ships are more likely to have officers and more likely to have alpha / beta cores, while frigates are more likely to have gamma cores or no officers at all; most fleets have 2-4 non-officer ships in total, but if even one of those missing ones is a frigate, you're gonna come up short. (This would mean that only about 10-20% of fleets even pass this stage at full randomness, and less since it isn't actually random.)

If skills are random, a draw-without-replacement probability for getting Gunnery Implants is ~57% for an 8-skill Alpha Core, ~42% for a 6-skill beta, and ~28% for a 4-skill Gamma. So even if you end up with all alpha core frigates, you're roughly looking at eight coin flips coming up in the AI's favor in a row. It has a probability of happening that is just slightly over one percent... if the frigates all had Alpha Cores.

I'm sure spending hours on finding a Very High importance contact and driving their internal bounty difficulty rating up to 10 can improve on these values a little more, but you'd have to actively go out of your way to do that, and eventually even a stupid-huge, all-alpha core fleet is going to be restricted by the battle size limit, especially if you play on the default setting of 300 instead of cranking it to 400. (Which hey, I do -- but changing a setting like that away from the default is kind of asking for problems.)

This is, bluntly, not a scenario worth balancing the game around. But as it happens, the player does have the tools to do the same thing back -- it'll cost a lot of story points on ECM s-mods and hiring mercenary officers, but if you're chain-killing dozens of Ordo fleets, it's not like story points are going to be in scarce supply. It might be the only situation in the entire game where hiring and keeping mercs is actually worth it, but there you go. You still won't need an all-frigate fleet, or even a majority-frigate fleet. You'll just need to match the AI's ratio -- or not even, in fact, because Remnant ships don't pack ECM hullmods and you do.

All of which, of course, is just a distraction from what I was actually saying earlier: is winning the ECM war interesting? Is it good gameplay? Is it a complex or deep decision? No, of course not. Everything I've described is just "make this one number REAL big, bigger than the biggest unfair, post-game, easter egg enemy the game is potentially capable of spawning." There aren't real trade-offs here; just a huge resource sink.
« Last Edit: April 16, 2021, 07:43:45 AM by TuxedoCatfish »
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12117
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1696 on: April 16, 2021, 06:05:57 AM »

All this talk about frigates is why I feel pushed to Wolfpack Tactics for more PPT (and maybe the officer skill that boosts max to ten officers, which I definitely do not want because it is permanent and ruins respec options).  I do not want to be forced to give up Industry or high Combat just to properly fight endgame fights, because I need mandatory skills instead of fun or campaign QoL skills.

I guess if I cannot use frigate spam to win ECM war, maybe I could use Doom flagship cheese.  At least I can respec away from that, even if it costs a lot of story points due to elite skills.

I guess player could put ECCM on all ships to turn -20% to -10%, but that probably does not feel good either.
Logged

Anvel

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 144
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1697 on: April 16, 2021, 07:23:35 AM »

Flying around on 180dp mid-low tech plus Odyssey fleet stumping everyone, ~80 ECM rating, the biggest remnant ECM I saw was 108. The game becomes easier than in 0.9.1, just don't spam big and dp hungry ships and capture points to even dp points with the enemy.

Right, thank you, I appreciate having a specific number to work with.

Naturally-spawning Ordo fleets have about 21-28 ships, of which about a third are frigates. To hit 108 ECM before control points, you'd need 8+ officer frigates who rolled Gunnery Implants -- basically every single frigate in the fleet -- or two officer destroyers for each missing frigate.

Officer placement is pretty obviously not fully random; larger ships are more likely to have officers and more likely to have alpha / beta cores, while frigates are more likely to have gamma cores or no officers at all; most fleets have 2-4 non-officer ships in total, but if even one of those missing ones is a frigate, you're gonna come up short. (This would mean that only about 10-20% of fleets even pass this stage at full randomness, and less since it isn't actually random.)

If skills are random, a draw-without-replacement probability for getting Gunnery Implants is ~57% for an 8-skill Alpha Core, ~42% for a 6-skill beta, and ~28% for a 4-skill Gamma. So even if you end up with all alpha core frigates, you're roughly looking at eight coin flips coming up in the AI's favor in a row. It has a probability of happening that is just slightly over one percent... if the frigates all had Alpha Cores.

I'm sure spending hours on finding a Very High importance contact and driving their internal bounty difficulty rating up to 10 can improve on these values a little more, but you'd have to actively go out of your way to do that, and eventually even a stupid-huge, all-alpha core fleet is going to be restricted by the battle size limit, especially if you play on the default setting of 300 instead of cranking it to 400. (Which hey, I do -- but changing a setting like that away from the default is kind of asking for problems.)

This is, bluntly, not a scenario worth balancing the game around. But as it happens, the player does have the tools to do the same thing back -- it'll cost a lot of story points on ECM s-mods and hiring mercenary officers, but if you're chain-killing dozens of Ordo fleets, it's not like story points are going to be in scarce supply. It might be the only situation in the entire game where hiring and keeping mercs is actually worth it, but there you go. You still won't need an all-frigate fleet, or even a majority-frigate fleet. You'll just need the match the AI's ratio -- or not even, in fact, because Remnant ships don't pack ECM hullmods and you do.

All of which, of course, is just a distraction from what I was actually saying earlier: is winning the ECM war interesting? Is it good gameplay? Is it a complex or deep decision? No, of course not. Everything I've described is just "make this one number REAL big, bigger than the biggest unfair, post-game, easter egg enemy the game is potentially capable of spawning." There aren't real trade-offs here; just a huge resource sink.
You can completely ignore it, if your ships are strong and aggressive enough they will obliterate everything even with that penalty, you have so many opportunities to make yourself op, like Wolf pack that obvious, SO ships - you can use it on any frigate-destroyer-cruiser and make it a beast, you can use phase ships(even bigger cheat than SO), you can spam missile boats, you can pick AI skill and Radiant with right loadout would kill whole fleets without your interference, you can make capitals with 30k hp invulnerable to emp and unbreachable missile protection. I mean common, look at opportunities game have, use some of those above, or find a new one.
Logged

Lucky33

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 894
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1698 on: April 16, 2021, 07:28:01 AM »

Math is not good.

Compared to 0.91, high-end fleets have absurd amount fp. And all of them are going in two things: larger ships and better officers. This is how full alpha fleets are born.

Skills are filled up like "all tiers from lower to higher left one first than right ones". This way Alphas always have GI. Betas too.
Logged

TuxedoCatfish

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 56
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1699 on: April 16, 2021, 07:49:07 AM »

Does that mean Gamma Cores never have it, or just that they might have it or they might have Combat L1 L2 L3 instead?

Either way, there's still not much call to balance around it if it'll never happen in naturally-occurring fleets and is a problem that only exists in completely maxed out contact bounties. It's like okay, you mashed the button saying HARDER PLEASE until it broke, and the game delivered. And even in that situation you still have the story-point intensive merc option or, I suppose, one of the methods Anvel offered.
« Last Edit: April 16, 2021, 08:05:53 AM by TuxedoCatfish »
Logged

Flet

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 65
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1700 on: April 16, 2021, 09:38:04 AM »

The problem with ecm is how much it takes to build around it and its all or nothing nature. If you have 60 ecm rating but the enemy fleet has 80+ then all the resource you put into getting 60, the skill points and loadout considerations, are simply worth nothing. Currently you need the ecm skill, you need some officers with gunnery implants in frigates/destroyers, and you need to build in ecm hull mods into everything at the cost of story points. Thats a big commitment.
This means then you are encouraged to either ignore ecm entirely and build around the assumption you will be at -20 at all times, or go so full hard on ecm that you are guaranteed to always have the advantage to secure the value of the investment.

This talk of simply nerfing the maximum ecm penalty only helps that first playstyle, and since the same amount of effort is going to be required to 'win' the ecm war regardless (i suppose you only need to out-ecm the enemy by 10 instead of 20), it effectively only makes going for ecm less of a viable strategy and doesnt really fix the ecm problem.

The problem i think is ecms all or nothing nature. If the enemy has 80 ecm it doesnt matter if you have 0 or 40 or 60 ecm, its all the same. I think the solution is changing the way the result is calculated so every amount of ecm has some effect on the final outcome. Going heavy ecm and coming up against an ai fleet with even more due to the officer spam issue should not negate all your investment. You aught to be able to feel like an advanced ecm based fleet coming up against a bunch of scary ais who out-do you, but of course they do they are ai, but you are far better off than a non technologically oriented fleet in that regard.
Logged

Thaago

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 7174
  • Harpoon Affectionado
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1701 on: April 16, 2021, 10:51:59 AM »

There are a few benefits to having 60 ECM if the enemy has 80 ECM: The capture points will bring the penalty from -20% to -10%, instead of doing nothing, and after killing a few enemy ships their bonus starts to drop instead of staying high the whole fight (either popping enemy ships with missile barrages or hunting down their isolated frigates with interceptor carriers works well). Its not ideal to get out-ECM'd after investing resources, but there is still a point.

Since hard numbers were raised for ECM: My current 'low tech roleplay' fleet is (officer number in parenthesis) 4(4) enforcers, 4(2) condors, 4(3) lashers, 4(0) shepherds. This isn't an endgame fleet, but has been sufficient for exploration and dealing with exploration threats and ~250k bounties (so far, haven't gotten any higher). My default ECM on a full deploy is 62%, though I often do not deploy the Shepherds as they can pop, which brings me to 54%. I have not done any investment in ECM for this fleet other than T3L as Gunnery Implants is the right skill the non-carriers anyways.
Logged

Serenitis

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1458
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1702 on: April 16, 2021, 12:08:38 PM »

Another thing to consider, is that 'forcing' the player to do a specific thing in order to not have problems is in itself very limiting with regard to gameplay options.
"If you dont have frigates and don't put officers in them, you will have a bad time" does not make for very interesting gameplay decisions imho.



Logged

intrinsic_parity

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3071
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1703 on: April 16, 2021, 12:17:49 PM »

I mean, to be fair, the whole frigate officer thing is only really an issue in super endgame against redacted and the highest levels of bounties. For 90% of the game you don't really need to care about it, and I don't think there is any content outside of those specific fights that requires you to really optimize ECM.
Logged

Xeno056

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 25
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1704 on: April 16, 2021, 12:18:37 PM »

So I know 0.95 just dropped, but I was wondering if there was any sort of roadmap in regards to the direction the game is going in in the future. I know right now the devs are in bug squashing mode but this release, as far as game releases go as of late, seemed very stable and one of the better in recent memory as far as the industry goes. I know that it's contentious, and I'm not going to pretend that I know all that's going on, but I think the recent additions could make for a decent Steam early access to drum up a bit more support, grow the community a bit. Not right now, but after the bug crunching concludes and focus is back on content development.

Regardless, I hope for only the best for all folks involved. Loved the update.
Logged

Klokinator

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 39
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1705 on: April 16, 2021, 12:28:44 PM »

I've been waiting a few weeks for stuff to get caught up, bug fixes to drop, and so on.

Any planned bugfixes, necessary updates, and whatever coming up in the near future? There's like a hundred pages here, don't have much interest in scrolling back through to check.
Logged

Lucky33

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 894
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1706 on: April 16, 2021, 01:19:39 PM »

Does that mean Gamma Cores never have it, or just that they might have it or they might have Combat L1 L2 L3 instead?

Either way, there's still not much call to balance around it if it'll never happen in naturally-occurring fleets and is a problem that only exists in completely maxed out contact bounties. It's like okay, you mashed the button saying HARDER PLEASE until it broke, and the game delivered. And even in that situation you still have the story-point intensive merc option or, I suppose, one of the methods Anvel offered.

I do think that Gamma can have it.

Natural occuring Ordos is just a hunting ground to get the ships to get ready for the unnatural shenanigans.
Logged

Lucky33

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 894
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1707 on: April 16, 2021, 01:22:08 PM »

I mean, to be fair, the whole frigate officer thing is only really an issue in super endgame against redacted and the highest levels of bounties. For 90% of the game you don't really need to care about it, and I don't think there is any content outside of those specific fights that requires you to really optimize ECM.

Frigates is the best way to level up officers (up to lvl 5 in a single fight). And to farm story points (2-3 in the same fight).

x5 xp gain from the difficulty is a great thing.
Logged

IonDragonX

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 816
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1708 on: April 16, 2021, 01:34:42 PM »

... its all or nothing nature. If you have 60 ecm rating but the enemy fleet has 80+ then all the resource you put into getting 60, the skill points and loadout considerations, are simply worth nothing.
I can see that. It certainly 'feels bad' to invest for no reason.

@Alex
How about the ECM rating work as a ratio. 1 vs 1 = no advantage either way. 21 vs 1 is 2000% advantage. Divide that by 100 and you get 20% ECM advantage. Moving on, 25 vs 5 is only 400% advantage. Div 100 and you get 4% ECM advantage. Flet's example of 60 vs 80 would be 33% advantage for 0.33% ECM.
End result : if you totally ignore ECM but the enemy invests in it = you are in trouble. If visa versa = the enemy is in trouble. If you both invest = little to no advantage doing on when the numbers exceed a certain logarithmic breakpoint.
Logged

intrinsic_parity

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3071
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #1709 on: April 16, 2021, 01:48:55 PM »

I mean, to be fair, the whole frigate officer thing is only really an issue in super endgame against redacted and the highest levels of bounties. For 90% of the game you don't really need to care about it, and I don't think there is any content outside of those specific fights that requires you to really optimize ECM.

Frigates is the best way to level up officers (up to lvl 5 in a single fight). And to farm story points (2-3 in the same fight).

x5 xp gain from the difficulty is a great thing.
My point was that you can easily beat fights without focusing on ECM for 90% of the game, it's just a small part of late game where it's a problem, and that part is completely optional.

The difficulty modifiers should probably do a better job of accounting for officered frigates, but I think that's a separate issue.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 112 113 [114] 115 116 ... 146