Honestly, by this point, shouldn't the 'real' map be the default? The 'pretty' map, as pretty as it is, is sorely not useful in the least as an actual map for navigation, and without a doubt a lot of players miss that little hotkey, and generally the hotkeys on the map screen, so even the fuel limits would be helpful to come pre-loaded.
Those are all fair points. But the stars look pretty, so... look, let me have this one.
(A somewhat more salient point: I do think it's important to have a real-space view of the Sector visible in the game somewhere, just to make it feel like a "real" bunch of stars somewhere.)
I'm strangely impressed by the 'Move Slowly' change, which seems like a really elegant way to neaten up the small gameplay things around that.
Ah, thank you! (I do feel like that reduced things down fairly nicely, as far as all the movement-related *stuff* that was going on. Possibly some room for improvement, still, but at least it's in a place I feel ok with.)
I feel that plenty of people complaining about need for colony babysitting and invasions etc didn't play vanilla recently and have their experience coming from Nexerlin overdose.
Hmm - does Nexerelin adjust punitive expeditions etc? I've been kind of assuming that whenever I hear about that, it's a vanilla thing, but it'd be good to know if it's in fact different in Nex.
Hey Alex, keep up the incredible work. I'm really excited to see 4k and UI updates are coming, being one of the people that loves playing this game in ultrawide in all its glory. Thanks for what you do!
Thank you!
Besides that, I'd also like to not have too create a fully functioning colony to provide resources to the faction. I'd like the whole vast resources available in space aspect to be leaned further into - drop one lonely guy in an inflated balloon in charge of corralling a bevy of automated mining drones and their tenders in a ring system, mined out nickel-iron asteroids spun up for super cheap habitat space (no antimatter powered grav generators for the poor), lean into the whole 'these planets are *** and we have to make do' aspect of the Persean Sector. It's not as though there isn't the technology to do great things, but there's so much squabbling between the factions that no one's using the resources to do anything - until you the PC explodes upon the scene.
Hmm. On the one hand, that could work, but on the other hand, it seems tricky to integrate nicely with colonies. So just in general this is a "fairly unlikely maybe", I'd say - if there are *other* reasons that come up that make this desirable (i.e. if this resolves some other design issue), this could well happen, but for its own sake, probably not.
Basically Alex, I just want to put a particle collider around a gas giant and start mass-manufacturing supermaterials - these stars won't harvest themselves!
(Also John C. Wright has some fascinating stuff in his two space opera series)
Yeah, I can get behind that! (And, hey, you'll definitely be able to put something around a gas giant in the next release. A couple of things, actually. And the stars won't harvest themselves, indeed.)
(Thanks for the book rec!)
Definitely. Colonies requiring extra stuff is fine, just so long as it isn't overly random. Or only able to be supplied once the colony actually demands something. Imagine putting down a colony, getting halfway to further exploration and suddenly the colony goes "actually, we need...eh, let me get out a d4 here...5d100 Food to continue working!", whereas the next colony demands 4d100 Domestic Goods, the next some amount of Luxury Goods and the next Lobster (for some inexplicable reason) or what have you. That'd be...less than ideal.
Gotcha, yeah - same page here. But e.g. "you need X amount of <whatever> for the colony to get to the next step towards taking off on its own" but there's no rush/consequences if you don't do it now now now sounds reasonable.
I'd just like to note that Frigates and Destroyers individually have killed me more often than Cruisers and Capitals combined. So in terms of fleets that have an actual record of making Swiss cheese of my hull ...
I think "oh it's just a Kite
with Reapers" has a winning record against player flagships overall.
Not only do I agree wholeheartedly that the whole massive colonies thing never really felt like they fit with the game world, I'd add that I think the player should be limited to only one size 6 colony (ie, a designated capital), perhaps two size 5, and any further settlements can only be outposts (ie, for mining). Otherwise, the player will end up with a bunch of size 6 colonies and it would seem odd that the player faction's colonies are all the same size when all the ingame factions have a variety of worlds ranging from densely populated capitals to sparsely populated settlements.
Welcome to the forum, btw!
I think the hazard rating mechanics will natrually add some size spread to colonies, basically doing this - a high hazard mining colony would stay small unless you invested a lot into putting more population there. I'm not 100% sure actually how the economics of this work out - whether increasing colony size to 6 in a case like that would be a net profit or not, actually. It depends on what it's exporting etc. Since you'd be getting, likely, some flat bonuses from AI cores/items/improvements/etc, getting a few more points of production out of a higher size - at high expense, to boot - might not be worth it. Will have to see, though.
In my case, I refer to vanilla, unmodded gameplay when I talk about babysitting. I have not touched Nexerelin in any of the 0.9a releases. (Played mostly in pre-0.8a, and only once or twice during 0.8a.)
Gotcha.
Is the Devastator still going to be using shotRangeVariance for its projectiles?
And if so, is it going to be set the same as it is now?
One of the reasons a lot of people don't seem too keen on this weapon is that many of its shots are effectively 'wasted' starting at ~60% of the weapon's range.
Spoiler
As an exercise for my own curiosity I removed the variance and changed the projectile range from 30 to 52 (30 * 1.75), and it doesn't seem any more powerful. But it does at least feel somewhat more satisfying seeing most of the shots get near the target before bursting.
Recoil seems to be the limiting factor - as in the Devastator has horrible recoil stats, so the shots will form a perpendicular arc at max range instead of a stripe leading away from the ship.
If you don't feel that removing the variance entirely would be desirable, would you consider adjusting the range of the projectiles up to 40-45-ish and lowering the shotRangeVariance to match?
Well - the shots blowing up early is the Devastator's thing. The point is that it's a weapon that:
1) Is good vs fighters/missiles, which get close naturally and are just more affected by it covering a wide area, and, importantly,
2) A weapon that becomes potentially highly damaging vs ships when used at close range
(If you increase the "range" from 30 to 52, that's actually a huge nerf - it means that it can never hit for full damage with the core of the explosion, since it'll always explode before it gets close enough. So that might explain which removing shot range variance, in tandem with that change, didn't make it more powerful.)
So, basically, what the current set of changes is doing is going in the opposite direction - making the shots more powerful, but keeping its core nature, where what you've tried makes the shots weaker but removes the dropoff in effectiveness with range. Well, doesn't remove entirely - since the inaccuracy is still there - but goes in that direction.
Keep in mind that it's pretty cheap flux-wise, too!
Just want to say: Thank you Alex, for answering all these many questions, I appreciate it as always
I appreciate all the interest and the feedback!
Mh, that way you'd just dump in everything they will need at the beginning and forget about it, I don't really see the difference to the current system. To me the appeal is in actually taking care of your colony for a while. What differentiates that from annoying babysitting is that a) that phase has a foreseeable end and b) you have control over when to take growth-enhancing missions, they shouldn't distract you from what you are otherwise doing, like constant invasion fleets do.
I agree that simple fetch quests are not very interesting (but then again, some people like trade missions). But escorting your colony's very first trade fleet on its maiden voyage would be interesting, for example.
I think the key difference is "will something bad happen if I don't address this when I wasn't planning to".
I like the idea that a colony's initial requirements are influences by the planetary conditions.
Yeah, I like that a lot too.
Methinks someone has been a very naughty boy and has been cheesing pirate bases with an Overridden Hammerhead and its two Assault Chainguns
(Team Shrike all the way here. I love piloting that ship.)
Speaking of Bases and Battlestations, I'm under the opinion that the High Tech base needs a shield arc buff as the non-ultimate versions has very big gaps where the future extension would be wich results in it being overly vulnerable mid game when compared to the other base types.
Hmm - with proper weapons, a high tech station can be hard to get to, really. Pirates don't really have them, though. And having those gaps to exploit is very much the idea, so if it needs a buff, it ought to come from somewhere other than removing its key characteristic!