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

Author Topic: 0.95a General feedback  (Read 1348 times)

Grievous69

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0.95a General feedback
« on: March 28, 2021, 02:39:06 AM »

Note: I initially wanted to complete my playthrough and see everything there is to see but I already have so many things to say I'll probably forget half of it by the time I experience everything.

New ships:
  • Fury: When I first saw this thing in a tweet and heard about its weapon layout it kinda bummed me out since it seemed just like a bigger Shrike. And it actually is in practice, but it's so much more since I'm actually having a blast flying it. You know it's a good problem to have you can't decide which ship to pilot since you're having so much fun piloting the current flagship. With Helmsmanship you can drift all over the place and feel like a light destroyer, not light cruiser, 90 speed really is a blessing. Now for the actual firepower, yeah it's not much but it honestly doesn't need more for 15 DP, it seems just right. Currently I've only tried 2 missile - 1 energy in the mediums because I built in the Expanded racks, I suppose double energy gun builds could also be good but this just seemed like a more natural way to fit it. I honestly don't have anything bad to say about it, it's perfectly fine and balanced, such a great flagship for early/mid game.
  • Champion: Yet another excellent addition to the roster, albeit this one was less of a surprise. I immediately knew this thing would be a beast judging from the gifs, the weapon slots and arcs are just too good. Very versatile ship I have to say, the amount of different builds you could pull of and it would still work is insane, I genuinely love this ship. Even though I've been mostly letting AI handle it because the Fury is just too fun to pilot, I still think it's a fun ship to fool around in since it gives me Mega Sunder vibes. Not much else to say, this ship also seems fine and balanced for its cost.
So yeah I'm surprised that I wouldn't change a single thing about these ships, they both seem like wonderful additions I didn't even know I needed until now.

Breach SRM: I know there's small and medium version but they seem fundamentally the same so I'm gonna comment on them as a whole. Anyways they're cool and I'm so glad they have enough ammo, with EMR these babies last for an entire battle. One thing I have to note is that their description say that they're tough, which they are but they seem kinda slow to me. I mean they hit their targets reliably but they also get shot down sooo easily. For what it does (and it has such a specific use) I think it could get a small speed buff, like just a tiny bit faster. Because I've seen missiles much more deadlier having far better speed than them. I've been mostly using the medium ones and even a swarm of 5 of them gets shot down easily and maybe 1 or 2 hit, and that's a hard maybe. I don't know if I should just change my Fury setup to have 2 Typhoon Reapers instead of Typhoon + Breach, it just seems flat out better to me. Yes I'd have more trouble hitting smaller ships but honestly who cares when you have a Heavy Blaster in the front.
Anyways I like the concept but I think a small speed buff would put them in a perfect place.

Contacts: Alright, so I love everything about the execution. The fact that you have actual NPCs who have a role and matter, slowly building rep (maybe a bit too slow) and getting more lucrative missions. I LOVE being able to say "yeah just give me a harder bounty mate" without having to chase frigate bounties for a while, and vice versa ofc. As a bounty hunter player this one addition made such a huge improvement. Of course everything else about the missions is also great, having more variety is always appreciated and makes the game less tedious.
Now the thing that bothers me is the presentation, we all know here that Starsector isn't the best example of good UI design, but this is a special case. When I first started my playthrough, I did some missions, bounties, bought new ships etc. and then I remembered contacts are a thing. "Ok now how do I find them?" I clicked basically everywhere only to notice at the last second they're tucked under Intel with all the other notifications and mission postings. Seriously, why the hell is such an important mechanic hidden along with the spam messages, it makes no sense to me. So when I finally found it, I saw one contact (don't even remember where was it from) and saw the option to develop said contact, and from there I slowly started figuring out everything.

This is such a weird design to me I don't know how players who didn't read blogposts were supposed to figure out everything. Other than that I love the mechanic as a whole.

EDIT: I've seen Alex says there's a 25% chance to have a contact development offer after each mission. Now I might be extremely unlucky but so far in my game I only have a single contact, and I'm sure I've done a great deal of missions from bars. I know you can get some from story mission but I'm still holding on that part (plus I failed a story mission somehow, probably not a bug but eh).

Skill points: Ok now we get to the controversial topic. So way back when we first read about it in a blogpost I was kinda sceptical about everything and thought it was a bad idea. I guess I was so convinced it would be truly horrible that now I actually don't mind it much. Hahaha the key to not being disappointed is to imagine the worst possible scenario. Anyways I suppose the goal was met quite nice, it is easier for new players to decide between 8 skills rather than every single one. I still don't like the "choose one and you may get the other one but only if you invest 5 bloody points here, when we have 15 max", it's not the end of the world tho. Skills themselves are fine although some seem weak for having to invest 5 points in a given tree, mainly the Automated Ships one where you can get [REDACTED] stuff, it's competing with the best skill in the game IMO. It needs to have less restrictions, 30 recovery cost is too low given the core penalties. Also I think there's way too much accent on small ships, I know frigates were struggling but this seems so cheap and artificial. Oh you have a frigate fleet, congratulations you have a death fleet. Oh you have a cruiser fleet, here's 1% boost instead of 20%, good luck surviving. And the cap bonuses don't even take battle size into account. Something really needs to be done here, either tone down the lowering bonuses (it actually doesn't even say what's the minimum bonus) or get rid of such skills altogether. It feels bad when you're finally building your fleet and earning cash but everything is slowly getting weaker and weaker, that's not how skills should work.
And I agree with others on the visibility stuff, the actual skill description and numbers are in faded grey and small text while quirky quotes are at the top and in much bigger font. Yet once again an UI only issue it seems.

Story points: Holy *** was this another surprise, I really liked how they turned out. There's so much you can do with them that the player is enticed to experiment with them, especially since early game gives you so much. Later on it slows down quite a bit but I guess that's the intended design. Building in hullmods is also amazingly fun, so many new builds I can try out now. I was scared that Loadout Design going away but this really makes up for it, even more actually. I have to commend UI here since it's quite easy to tell at a glance what you can improve and use story points for (I can't always be negative about UI).

I have yet to try out raiding, story missions in full (sorry David, didn't do much reading yet) and the new endgame content. I'm also still in early stages of colonies so I won't comment on them just yet.

At the time of making this post I was level 12 with most of my skills invested into Combat and Technology, in case it's relevant.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2021, 03:16:44 AM by Grievous69 »
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Grievous69

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #1 on: March 28, 2021, 02:39:26 AM »

Part 2 will go here  8)

Ehh it's easier to edit in things I forgot here.

Bars now actually feel like bars, it's not just "hey you want to know where's this base" and random trade offers. This made the game feel so much more alive than before. Now if only we could interact somehow with regular fleets around, instead of having the options to either kill them or leave lmao.

Scarab is actually pretty damn scary now. I've managed to grab one pretty early in a black market and that thing is the best escort I've ever seen. It has a lvl 5 officer now with Energy weapon mastery and it just slaps everything. It can handle destroyers and weaker pirate cruisers alone almost. I honestly think the skills made it good again, and not the buff it got, even though the buff was big.
Actually I think all high tech frigates can be nigh broken with the new skills, I don't know how to feel about that. As Histidine mentioned elsewhere you just can't visually see some skills, that AMB or a Heavy blaster from some random enemy ship dealing 50% more damage than what you're used to is pretty *** up.

Updated Mjolnir projectiles are looking good, they stand out now like they should.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2021, 03:47:49 AM by Grievous69 »
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Locklave

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #2 on: March 28, 2021, 04:57:00 AM »

Story points are... How do I even describe it? Warm feelings, freedom. Feels balanced, productive and creates countless great options that are 100% pure QoL improvements to the game.

I hope other devs steal the concept because this needs to be in every game. Assuming they can implement it this well. It's brilliant.
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SCC

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #3 on: March 28, 2021, 05:08:35 AM »

Story points are basically GM fiat. "Well, this random encounter I just rolled would totally roll you over, so you uhhh, just got away because rogue threw sand in the monster's eyes" or something.

intrinsic_parity

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #4 on: March 28, 2021, 09:21:17 AM »

I really like the way story points let you get out of situations that would otherwise be really bad. It definitely feels like a good mix of losing something significant because you made a mistake, but not having serious long term consequences for a minor mistake. I almost feel like there should be similar mechanics with bribes (money) or spending supplies to escape some situations.

I will say that the built in hullmods feel too strong to me. Unless the AI starts using them in the late game, they just don't seem fair. I'm almost at the point of advocating for +1 base built in and +2 with the skill. That might be too much of a nerf, but I'm not really sure.

I also agree with the issues with skills falling off. Some of them seem to have minimum caps that are pretty reasonable (Flux regulation seems to be 20% dissipation/capacity falling off to ~10% for large fleets (I'm at 13% currently)), but others seem to just do very little if your fleet is large (Weapon drills seems to be 10% damage falling off to... 0? at least I'm down to 3% with a fleet of cruisers, maybe that's the min). I guess maybe there's an argument that you can take early game skills and spec out of those in late game, but I think the alternative skill in the tree then needs to be guaranteed useful in any size fleet. The choice of 3% (or less) damage vs buffs to civilian ships (that fall off for a lot of the non-combat civilian ships too) just seems like a terrible choice when it's the first in the tree meaning you have to take one to get higher level skills.

I actually feel like the leadership tree is really weird. The first 2 skills are great early and fall off pretty hard if you go for a big late game fleet (tier 2 seems good until you realize it only applies to officered frigates and destroyers). The last two leadership skills affect officers and colonies and feel like they do a lot later on, and less early. That feels like I'm gonna end up with 2 mostly dead skills to get officer and colony bonuses which sucks. I ended up speccing out of that tree entirely and taking 5 in each of the other trees. I might try dropping all my industry skills late game and swapping to leadership, but I have trouble imagining not taking special modifications.

I kinda wish the level cap was 20 too. Maybe that's too strong, but it feels natural to be able to take one skill at each level in each tree.
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TaLaR

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #5 on: March 28, 2021, 09:54:38 AM »

I will say that the built in hullmods feel too strong to me. Unless the AI starts using them in the late game, they just don't seem fair. I'm almost at the point of advocating for +1 base built in and +2 with the skill. That might be too much of a nerf, but I'm not really sure.

Enemies gets insane amount of officers as compensation. For example, 14-16 level 5-7(yes, they can have level 7) officers in a fleet.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #6 on: March 28, 2021, 09:59:52 AM »

I will say that the built in hullmods feel too strong to me. Unless the AI starts using them in the late game, they just don't seem fair. I'm almost at the point of advocating for +1 base built in and +2 with the skill. That might be too much of a nerf, but I'm not really sure.
Enemies gets insane amount of officers as compensation. For example, 14-16 level 5-7(yes, they can have level 7) officers in a fleet.
Maybe I will have to play more to see, but I haven't felt like enemy officers have posed much resistance to my absurd 3 free hullmod monster ships yet. I'm also only in the midgame, so maybe fighting some more endgame fleets will change my mind.
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IonDragonX

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Re: 0.95a General feedback
« Reply #7 on: March 28, 2021, 12:04:28 PM »

Enemies gets insane amount of officers as compensation. For example, 14-16 level 5-7(yes, they can have level 7) officers in a fleet.
You can play with those numbers in the settings.json
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