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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: Starsector 0.95a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 596126 times)

intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #525 on: October 30, 2020, 04:25:50 PM »

The only ships with large energy mounts are Paragon, Odyssey, Apogee and Sunder. I think all of those ships can use any of the large energies (ignoring paladin) effectively, except the sunder has to use SO to support PC. Apogee does not need SO to run a plasma cannon. Max dissipation with a single PC and token PD along with all the shield and range hull mods is by far the best apogee loadout IMO.
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Arcagnello

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #526 on: October 30, 2020, 04:45:21 PM »

The only ships with large energy mounts are Paragon, Odyssey, Apogee and Sunder. I think all of those ships can use any of the large energies (ignoring paladin) effectively, except the sunder has to use SO to support PC. Apogee does not need SO to run a plasma cannon. Max dissipation with a single PC and token PD along with all the shield and range hull mods is by far the best apogee loadout IMO.

The paladin is quite sad indeed, thankfully it's getting some love this patch.

Regarding all large-energy-mount-capable ships, right. They can all sort of work with the current vanilla variety of weapons, I just wish they had more options to be perfectly honest. Assuming all ships have token Point Defence, Ballistic only ships are amazing and missile only ships do disgusting amounts of work as long as they have ammo.

Energy only ships on the other hand only work because
1) the AI just likes taking the shield down when it mistakenly thinks its far enough away
2)The enemy ship can't handle the flux beams generate and probably is worth less FP individually anyway
3)your ship has such an overwhelming flux dissipation/capacity advantage over the enemy (looking at you Paragon) that it can just keep trading with its poor efficiency, high DPS weapons until the enemy is dead.

If none of those situations occur, energy only ships just stop being useful without kinetic damage sources (like sabots) and your once totally viable laser Sunders and Autopulse Odissey get run over by [Redacted] like a monster truck driving thru speedbumps. I'm not saying some energy weapons, namely beams, need a buff (not in this particular post anyway), but the fact that they, unlike the other two weapon types, can't muster up a truly universal (but also flawed) role speaks volumes on their lack of variety.

P.S: Plasma Cannon is probably the best thing you can slap in a large energy slot provided the ship can both sustain its flux and get close fast enough to use it while still in one piece. I simply like safety Overrides on the Apogee for the very biased reason it can keep pressuring ships that would otherwise be harder to keep up with and finish off. Then again the last time I used a Plasma Apogee it was without using Salamanders, it definetly was not a smart choice.

Edit: typos have been purged with a flamer
« Last Edit: October 30, 2020, 04:48:44 PM by Arcagnello »
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braciszek

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #527 on: October 30, 2020, 06:56:22 PM »

If I may ask, in terms of the story, will the faction leaders (that is, Daud, Andrada, Sun, and Kanta) have more of a purpose in the game besides sitting in their faction's capital? Maybe or maybe not they leave and bring a great fleet to do certain actions, but certainly it would be more interesting if the player has a greater interaction with them, as the faction leaders are the only individuals in the sector that compare to the player in terms of tactical prowess and personal skill. PL, LC, and LP are devoid of any named individuals, but maybe it's primarily because they are the more boring of the factions and there's not too much behind their existence. PL isn't centralized at all (though you would think there would still be a dominant figure in the PL federation from Kazeron, bullying the weaker PL members into order). LC is the most bland and boring faction with nothing unique about them whatsoever (they have nothing special to provide to the player and there is absolutely nothing interesting to obtain from commissioning with them), but I hope that eventually gets changed. That leaves LP, which could benefit from an extraordinarily radical, but competent leader to humanize them in some way instead of them just being portrayed as a mindless terrorist cell that various factions fund.
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #528 on: October 30, 2020, 08:44:50 PM »

I believe that current weapon variety is almost good enough, we need more weapon-altering hullmods though.
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Luxinus

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #529 on: October 31, 2020, 11:39:28 PM »

Hey, long time player, super stoked to see another update forming up

I have what I hope is a tiny request, could you standardize support in whatever form it needs for unicode characters in names?

I ask because in my attempt to name a planet "Earth 2: Electric Boogaloo" to fit the length requirement I ended up with "Earth²:Electric Boogaloo" which seems to render perfectly fine in small white font, but the larger blue font renders the ² as ? instead. I assume it's a font issue but I'm hopeful there's potentially a solution that isn't too taxing on you? Very minor either way.

Thanks and good luck with the well, rest of the game, aha
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Albreo

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #530 on: November 01, 2020, 04:00:47 AM »

There's this rare crash that I don't get too often when assisting an orbital station against multiple invasion fleets so large that the battle span on for multiple rounds. For virtualization's sake, the first round is full-blown very long combat, the second round is also full-blown combat with capitals that haven't been deploy yet plus the one that retreats. In the third round, the enemy just throws all of the support ship and cargo at the station until nothing left. But that's not the end, the screen prompts a fourth round that has no enemy ship in it. If I click to join said combat, the game will immediately crash.

This rarely happened (probably 4-5 times) but I still noticed and avoided not joining in the last round. It probably a NEX mod issue but you could maybe put a check code on empty combat.
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Grievous69

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #531 on: November 01, 2020, 08:31:59 AM »

Oh just remembered an old suggestion about making Mjolnir projectiles a bit more obvious. I get that visual clutter is a concern but most other deadly weapons are super easily seen. And getting hit by it is very unhealthy for your ship. Honestly, if it weren't for the sound effect, it wouldn't be nearly as scary.
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #532 on: November 01, 2020, 09:27:39 AM »

Hey, long time player, super stoked to see another update forming up

I have what I hope is a tiny request, could you standardize support in whatever form it needs for unicode characters in names?

I ask because in my attempt to name a planet "Earth 2: Electric Boogaloo" to fit the length requirement I ended up with "Earth²:Electric Boogaloo" which seems to render perfectly fine in small white font, but the larger blue font renders the ² as ? instead. I assume it's a font issue but I'm hopeful there's potentially a solution that isn't too taxing on you? Very minor either way.

Thanks and good luck with the well, rest of the game, aha

Hi, and welcome to the forum :)

Hmm - iirc the font files were generated with the same charset settings, so if a character is missing, it seems likely that that font doesn't have it at all. Even if it did, re-generating the font with added characters would actually be surprisingly tricky. The way it works is the tool (the AngelCode BMFont generator, if you're curious) generates an image with the font's glyphs, and a data file. The data file contains the various coordinates, offsets, kerning data, and so on; if you regenerate the font with different characters, a lot of this data would change. Where this gets tricky is the data files have had a bunch of manual edits over the years - adjusting individual character pair kernings, character widths, etc - and replicating that over onto a new font file would be a lengthy, painstakingly careful effort.

There's this rare crash that I don't get too often when assisting an orbital station against multiple invasion fleets so large that the battle span on for multiple rounds. For virtualization's sake, the first round is full-blown very long combat, the second round is also full-blown combat with capitals that haven't been deploy yet plus the one that retreats. In the third round, the enemy just throws all of the support ship and cargo at the station until nothing left. But that's not the end, the screen prompts a fourth round that has no enemy ship in it. If I click to join said combat, the game will immediately crash.

This rarely happened (probably 4-5 times) but I still noticed and avoided not joining in the last round. It probably a NEX mod issue but you could maybe put a check code on empty combat.

Next time that happens, would you mind posting a report and the stack trace from the log file in the modded bug reports forum? Without seeing a stack trace it's hard to tell what might be causing this, let alone fix it, unfortunately. (I do recall fixing some crashes recently that roughly fit this description, though iirc that was related to fighters/ships with converted hangars...


Oh just remembered an old suggestion about making Mjolnir projectiles a bit more obvious. I get that visual clutter is a concern but most other deadly weapons are super easily seen. And getting hit by it is very unhealthy for your ship. Honestly, if it weren't for the sound effect, it wouldn't be nearly as scary.

I think this is one of the changes that didn't make it into the list - having a look just now, they look pretty beefy! Closer to AM Blaster shots.
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Arcagnello

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #533 on: November 01, 2020, 09:44:20 AM »

Oh just remembered an old suggestion about making Mjolnir projectiles a bit more obvious. I get that visual clutter is a concern but most other deadly weapons are super easily seen. And getting hit by it is very unhealthy for your ship. Honestly, if it weren't for the sound effect, it wouldn't be nearly as scary.

I think this is one of the changes that didn't make it into the list - having a look just now, they look pretty beefy! Closer to AM Blaster shots.

You know this is one of those things that would warrant having a pen and a piece of paper to the side if your keyboard while playing. I've always felt the same way about the Mjolnir but it was always such a fleeting thought that it never made it into an actual discussion. Bravo :)

On a side note, I feel like it's more or less the same situation with the Gauss cannon where you only realize it's shooting at you in a busy battlefield by the sound and/or having your small ship immediately overloaded, altough my opinion could be somewhat biased given I'm playing with low settings.

My idea would be to make the blue glow around the shell a bit bigger and also extend said glow to form a "teardrop" shape by also expending the glow to form a stubby trail directly behind the shell, in addittion to the current long, faint trail we have?
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #534 on: November 01, 2020, 11:54:15 AM »

Re: PC Sunder
Sunder does not need Safety Overrides to use Plasma Cannon, but without it, it probably needs to sacrifice every other mount and focus hard on flux stats (max caps and vents), not unlike no-missile Aurora with two heavy blasters (or two pulse lasers and one heavy blaster).  Non-SO plasma Sunder is another poster-child of naked hull/empty mounts.  In essence, a bigger, energy version of Mudskipper II.

Re: Weapon Variety
Weapon types I wish for...
* Non-kinetic medium beam with 800+ range.  Sometimes, tactical laser gets put in medium mounts because there is nothing better - lame.

* Medium HE beyond low-end with 800+ range (and maybe faster than Mortar).  Heavy Mauler used to be it, but now it is too slow and no good except as a long-range sniper like HVD, and Mortar is low-end like Arbalest.  There is no medium HE that feels more elite than Heavy Mortar.  Complimenting medium 800 range kinetics without heavy HE is a pain.

As for large energy, it is pretty good.  The only one that is bad there is Paladin/Guardian only because of its terrible efficiency (that can overload Paragon).  The rest are a pain; no good medium options without overwhelming flux advantage, and small is mostly PD-only.
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Shoat

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #535 on: November 01, 2020, 03:30:22 PM »

Are wars between factions going to be possible at some point? That's one thing I always wanted to see in Starsector.

Honestly, I don't really see doing that - that's veering into straight-up 4x territory, and the game isn't really designed around that / it's not a direction I want to go in. I could see something more event-driven happening along these lines, but not for example a fully dynamic situation where colonies are changing hands left and right and so on.

I do agree that this is a good angle to implement wars from.
I could totally see there being small to medium sized conflicts (some really big battles in one system, followed by an attempted siege, followed by a temporary ceasefire treaty as both factions recover), implemented as a dynamically-generated event between factions that are very hostile to each other.
On their own, not a big difference, but maybe someone playing very very long campaigns could see a faction grow much more powerful and another faction wiped out?

This could help give the sector some feeling of there being bigger conflicts, without the issues (difficult-to-implement, hard for performance, chaotic for player to be caught in) of a full-blown war.
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FabianClasen

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #536 on: November 01, 2020, 03:44:06 PM »

Can someone explain, what "REDACTED" means in this context?
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Arcagnello

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #537 on: November 01, 2020, 05:57:18 PM »

Can someone explain, what "REDACTED" means in this context?

Ah, of course I can, that term is commonly used to describe [Redacted]!

I'm sorry.

I am not making this up when I tell you that [Redacted] will make sense to you in the endgame of your campaign, you just have to get there first and I'd hate to spoil you anything  :)

Edit: Also, Hey Hey People
« Last Edit: November 01, 2020, 06:01:42 PM by Arcagnello »
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FooF

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #538 on: November 01, 2020, 05:58:17 PM »

Can someone explain, what "REDACTED" means in this context?

Its the informal way of talking about the
Spoiler
AI Remnants
[close]
(or any other spoilery stuff) in-game. Since 0.8 has been out for what, 3 years now(?) it's not like it's a secret anymore but it's better to say [REDACTED] than be too on-the-nose. The new REDACTED stuff probably is a secret so it'll be best to use spoiler tags when talking about the new missions or whatnot.

In-game lore usually has the Hegemony purging documents of sensitive information but redacting documents is a time-honored tradition among all clandestine organizations. :)
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Starsector 0.95a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #539 on: November 01, 2020, 06:51:50 PM »

Please make logistical hullmods built-in using story points not count towards the two logistical hullmod limit.
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