Population growth stuck at 0% forever no matter how many decades pass or what happens in those decades. It'd just look off.
(Pretty sure it'll stop showing the progress bar at max size; if not, it should.)
Actually, as far as ideas to make very large colonies possible to get but limited/hard/expensive/etc., what about Cryosleepers? New colonies without a Cryosleeper can only get so much growth from natural population growth and immigration before even Chico on it's worst day is able to make much of a dent, but Cryosleepers (optional: and an AI Core/Story Point to speed up the process) can push a colony to size 7/8/9/10/whatever makes the most sense?
It just comes down to me thinking that size 6 is about what's appropriate on the high end, feel-wise. You can have as many industries in a size 6 as you can now on a bigger colony, and items gives you industrial bonuses you wouldn't have had access to before. I'm not really sure why you'd want bigger colonies, beyond just "it's a bigger number". I mean, if you just want to have the largest colony in the Sector, that's already achievable with a size 6 colony
As to how it works right now (bugged or not), and how that relates to "go dark", i wouldn't be able to tell, considering how limited my use of it is.
Makes sense, it's got very limited usefulness right now.
Thanks for the patch notes Alex, and g'luck on assembling everything together for this release!
Thank you!
Also I just wanted to say I'm excited you've thrown me a bone with the megastructure stuff in this release, and I can't wait to engage with what's there in the release, and to see more in future versions. Also, I don't know if David or you are doing the story elements/descriptions for them, but don't forget to check out Charles Sheffield's work - his novels (Summertide) partly inspired my lifelong fascination with them (and the ideas in Jack McDevitt's stuff, even if I found all his novels dry as a desert).
Oh, funny - I'd recently read a bunch of McDevitt (the entire Hutchins series, and then the... other one about the antiques guy? Benedict, that was it) and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Lots of cool ideas! Will check out Sheffield, thanks for the rec!
The first thing I'm doing is still changing the Apogee's shield efficiency back to .6 though, the suspiciously combat effective long-range exploration vessel checks every one of my favorite science fiction tropes, and I love her so much.
*thumbs up* Honestly, I'm happy that you can easily tweak it to your liking.
still no way to restrict maximum AI fleet power?
sad
fighting a fleet with 10+carriers is not fun, it just turns game into a turn based strategy
Hmm? The patch notes talk about AI fleet composition changes.
I never thought about it, but it definitely makes more sense this way, since it's weird that an enemy fleet could detect something like a derelict ship, but not think something's off when that derelict ship suddenly turns into a debris field.
Yeah, the idea is that it should create for some suddenly-exciting situations
Scarab:
Increased flux dissipation to 250 (was: 150)
Increased flux capacity to 2500 (was: 2000)
Removed the two less than optimally placed weapon slots
It makes me happy to see the most (?) underwhelming ship in the game to get a nice buff. Also another feasible ship for slamming beams onto..
(I had one in a recent test run - funnily enough, found a blueprint and then had a contact make one - and it's such a beast of a ship. Total glass cannon, but in one fight it literally blew up 4 ships in under 10 seconds, and two of them were destroyers. I need to make a gif of it at some point if I can recreate even a similar situation, it was just so ruthlessly efficient.)
Ion Pulser:
Increased range to 500 (was: 450)
Increased damage to 100 (was: 75)
Increased emp damage to 600 (was: 400)
I'm surprised about these changes, I've always thought the Ion Pulser was one of the most effective energy weapons (and also a lot of fun to use).
This change along with the decrease in OP for the Light Needler makes me wonder if you want to promote the use of more burst weapons, or if the reasons for the changes are completely something else.
Honestly, I might end up pulling some of this back - it seemed underpowered, but using it with the changes, it's *very* good, to the point of possibly being too good.
I'm curious, is this also going to mean that we don't need to be commissioned + high relations with a faction if we want to buy their good weapons or even ships?
Right - though it'll be less reliable access, as this custom production through contacts won't always be available.
Increased XP gain from fighting more challenging battles
Does this mean challenging in the sense of really high end late game battles, or challenging in the sense of battles against fleets much bigger/higher tier relative to your fleet? If it's the latter then that sounds really exciting and a lot of fun , a really nice boost for the early game and a satisfying reward for spending the time to load out a fleet efficiently, and not as many downsides to keeping a small fleet.
Also if it's the latter, does it take into account both fleets' officer levels? I wonder, would it also take into account the player's combat skills level?
It's based on relative fleet size and officers etc. So you could absolutely take advantage of it in the early game. Notably, it's not based on what you deploy, but on your actual fleet, so it's more encouraging a leaner fleet composition than it is smaller deployments.
Can you talk a bit more about the reasoning behind increasing the growth penalties for hazard rating? It already felt to me like it could be hard to justify trying to make a colony on high hazard worlds. I noticed that the synchrotron requires no atmosphere, are there other new industry boosters with similar requirements that incentivize high hazard colonies, or are they just becoming even less desirable in the next release?
IIRC it's so that higher-hazard colonies have a lower natural size that they get to without additional incentives. It also gives you more control over growth so you e.g. don't attract attention too early or don't have a colony grow and then start paying more upkeep than you wanted to (which is more of a concern on high-hazard worlds).
Most items have some kind of requirement that's often less-than-ideal. High-hazard worlds are obviously less desirable due to the hazrd rating, but they're also more desirable due to often having better quality resource deposits etc.
Mainly, though, it's because I think "small mining colony" should be a thing.
Sounds like the old pay to increase growth which is now hazard pay lets you close the gap? Since its whatever the hazard penalty is + a few? So really high hazard worlds are no worse than zero hazard worlds. Habitable and Mild change that on top of that, but really high hazard growth isn't that bad off? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something from the notes.
Right, but closing the gap is also more expensive on high-hazard worlds.
I feel like higher hazard worlds tended to have more mineral/fuel resources.
They absolutely do, yeah.