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)

Author Topic: General Thoughts from a new player?  (Read 1645 times)

GlenPereira

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 1
    • View Profile
General Thoughts from a new player?
« on: December 28, 2020, 03:11:51 AM »

Early game is fun. Exploring, smuggling, fighting. Lots to do, nothing holding you back besides the size/power of your "fleet". I use the quotation marks because, at best, you only ever control a relatively minor and inconsequential amount of ships. Even in the late game, how much you can directly control/deploy is unsatisfying. And impractical.

Finally got to the point of setting up colonies and.... this is where the game completely falls apart. At this point, you do nothing but defend your colonies. No matter your standing with other factions, they will non-stop attack you. Tried to start another new colony, instantly attacked by about 30 capital ships +100 other assorted ships. 0 chance of me ever defending against it. And this is from the 'pirates'. With this kind of power and these amounts of resources, how do they not own the entire sector? And they are attacking from a system 35 light years away. Basically half the sector. And this is endless at this point. Pirates and Luddic path mostly, but the other factions send fleets endlessly as well. And the fact that they can send 3 Armadas when you can only control your own single fleet is annoying as well. Why do the AI factions have the ability to field such drastically larger forces? Why can't I created multiple fleets and order them to follow/support my main fleet?

Your standing with any given faction means nothing. They still attack. Worst is the Hegemony. For some reason they have the right to inspect any system/colony they want and take what you have. I know you can order your ships to fight them, or bribe them. But why can they do this in the first place? As far as I understand, the sector is every man for himself. Why does this faction get special privileges to act as a centralized government/police force when they are more or less on equal footing with everyone else?

Not to mention the suicidal attacks. Once the pirates target a system they will attack it endlessly until you destroy their base. But, I thought pirates were in it for profit? In some cases they turn into suicidal zealots, willing to die for nothing. I'm referring to having a system with 2 or more colonies with fully upgraded spacestations/patrol buildings. The pirate raids never win as far as I can tell, yet they still have unlimited resources to endlessly send armadas full of capital ships. I could understand this from actual zealots, the Luddics and whatnot, but the pirates, I would think, should be less willing to mindlessly throw their lives away with 0 chance at any profit to be had.

Forget trying to do the story quest. I'll spend weeks traveling to and destroying outlying pirate/luddic bases, only to have more pop up elsewhere.

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: General Thoughts from a new player?
« Reply #1 on: December 28, 2020, 04:17:59 AM »

You can increase your battlesize in the settings to increase how many ships you can deploy in a battle.
Colonies currently are a mean to an endgame that isn't there yet, so to balance free money you get from them, you also get free attacks from pirates and other factions. Pirates are currently overtuned. Other factions attack you over market shares (League, Diktat, Tri-Tachyon) or using free ports (Luddic Church, Hegemony). Hegemony gets to have AI inspection on the basis of beating everyone else into submission, though unfortunately that isn't told in the game proper. However, if you colonise several planets in a single system, their forces will support one another, so 2-3 military bases will deal with majority of threats.

IonDragonX

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 816
    • View Profile
Re: General Thoughts from a new player?
« Reply #2 on: December 28, 2020, 04:46:32 AM »

The next release is going to add a lot more gameplay.
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: General Thoughts from a new player?
« Reply #3 on: December 28, 2020, 05:09:57 AM »

Even at max battle size, you still can only deploy a small fraction of an endgame-sized multi-capital fleet.

Hegemony inspects only if you have cores installed.  Easiest way to deal with them is to bribe them.  Next release, that will require a story point, which will probably make intercepting and destroying the inspection fleet personally (with your transponder off) the ideal solution, short of wiping all of the Hegemony off them map with aggressive sat bombing (or decivilization if you are patient enough).

And yes, pirates are relentless, not only against your colonies, but also all non-pirate core worlds.  Unlike the player, core worlds are incapable of defending themselves against pirates, and if your game lasts long enough, core worlds can decivilize if pirates are not stopped.  Babysitting is a big problem in current release.  Major factions can be dealt with by your colony patrols, although you still need to grind rep to fix rep loss.  (My endgame goal is to befriend pirates and bomb everyone else off the map so I do not need to deal with raids and other babysitting annoyances.)
Logged

outdated

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 58
    • View Profile
Re: General Thoughts from a new player?
« Reply #4 on: December 28, 2020, 07:20:50 AM »

Also, if you ever sell a blueprint on the black market, pirates will start using it in their fleets.
Logged

Schwartz

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1452
    • View Profile
Re: General Thoughts from a new player?
« Reply #5 on: December 28, 2020, 07:59:06 PM »

It's not easy to find a balance here. I agree that it's a massive time sink to establish a colony at first. You have to babysit. There are several currencies in the game: Money by the time you establish your first colony will become massively less important. AI cores will become more important. And lastly, fleet battles are also in a way the upkeep that a player has to pay for this money machine.

Pirates are a stopgap measure right now; expect the pirate threat to be dialed down in future releases as more endgame stuff makes it into the game. I'd also expect more options to deal with factions and maybe even have their silly death fleets be part of a narrative that the player can influence diplomatically or by other means. That's my hope anyway.

This is the second time I'm reading about a poor newb getting his colony pirate smashed. All the pirate fleets I have ever had inbound on my colonies were absolutely toothless compared to the death fleets they field vs. core worlds. How long do you leave alive player-facing pirate bases? This afaik is the deciding factor for raid strength. If you get them early, both the bases and the fleets tend to be rather weak.

Also: If you don't want to draw the Hegemony's ire, use fewer and lower-grade AI cores. I'm not sure if they even care about gamma cores.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2020, 08:01:05 PM by Schwartz »
Logged