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[braciszek]

Before I start, I want to say that I enjoy challenges, and I only complain about difficulty in a matter such as the one I am about to describe.

I accepted a Contact bounty mission for a harder challenge, and it happened to be a remnant fleet.

I thought it would be reasonable to take down like a normal Ordo using a significant fleet, but when I encountered it, I noticed that it had EIGHTEEN ALPHA CORE OFFICERS (meaning that they were all level 8 ).

Seriously? Without having a whole bunch of mercenary officers of my own, I was at a DP disadvantage, not to say that a billion high level officers would be a pain to defeat. I tried fighting several times with different ship compositions, but my ships kept on getting overrun and destroyed - there's just way too many officered ships!

I could not kill enough Remnant ships to wear down the officer count without losing a bunch of ships. I wasn't in the mood to engage this fleet until finally they had a normal amount of officers.

I decided to be lame and lower the battle size down to 200 and use the

Spoiler

Ziggurat

[close]

to destroy everything but two radiants and a brilliant. Then I was able to clean them up with only a couple minor losses from tempests after retreating and redeploying (so it was then 3 officers to my 11 and I had the advantage)

This is not great. I shouldn't have to resort to the highest cheese to be able to terminate this fleet without a stupid amount of losses.

Someone suggested that Remnant fleets should not be allowed to have mercenary officers. Would that be fair? Seriously, eighteen level 8 officers... on mostly pristine remnant ships...

[attachment deleted by admin]

[sector_terror]

Before I start, I want to say that I enjoy challenges, and I only complain about difficulty in a matter such as the one I am about to describe.

I accepted a Contact bounty mission for a harder challenge, and it happened to be a remnant fleet.

I thought it would be reasonable to take down like a normal Ordo using a significant fleet, but when I encountered it, I noticed that it had EIGHTEEN ALPHA CORE OFFICERS (meaning that they were all level 8 ).

Seriously? Without having a whole bunch of mercenary officers of my own, I was at a DP disadvantage, not to say that a billion high level officers would be a pain to defeat. I tried fighting several times with different ship compositions, but my ships kept on getting overrun and destroyed - there's just way too many officered ships!

I could not kill enough Remnant ships to wear down the officer count without losing a bunch of ships. I wasn't in the mood to engage this fleet until finally they had a normal amount of officers.

I decided to be lame and lower the battle size down to 200 and use the

Spoiler

Ziggurat

[close]

to destroy everything but two radiants and a brilliant. Then I was able to clean them up with only a couple minor losses from tempests after retreating and redeploying (so it was then 3 officers to my 11 and I had the advantage)

This is not great. I shouldn't have to resort to the highest cheese to be able to terminate this fleet without a stupid amount of losses.

Someone suggested that Remnant fleets should not be allowed to have mercenary officers. Would that be fair? Seriously, eighteen level 8 officers... on mostly pristine remnant ships...

the officer limits are -supposed- to be balanced around your options, but they really aren't. There aren't SP period to get that many, and later fleets are programed to have nothing but officered ships. Your better off just increasing the officer limits in settings.jsom and evening the score. Otherwise you will have to deal with this until a fix comes alone.

[Megas]

This looks worse than last release.  At least they did not spam officers.  Now they spam capitals AND officers better than yours (unless you luck out looting multiple level 7 officers from random derelicts).

[ApolloStarsector]

Agreed. I love a challenge, but when [REDACTED] fleets have 14+ officers and 1 or more radiant ships, the deployment disadvantage is ridiculous. I do prefer this officer system, as opposed to simply reaching critical mass of capital ships and face-rolling everything. But the high end of officer counts needs to be dialed down on high-challenge enemy fleets, I suspect.

[Sutopia]

This is fine. Taunt with max vent monitor flagship and you should be gud.

[Warnoise]

Not only that, the insane ECM ratings they have is also strange. 60%+ ECM makes it almost mandatory to build in ECM in every ship to keep up otherwise you have to deal the 20% range debuff

[Alex]

Well - this specifically is intended to be one of the higher-difficulty challenges. Though there's a version of this bounty that's even tougher. And here particularly, while one might make the argument about mercenaries and officers... it's AI cores, even if we're going with perfect parity all the way, who's to say what rules Remnant fleets should follow? It *is* beatable, though. You certainly do have enough options to take this kind of thing on - again, while it's one of the higher-difficulty challenges, it's not the highest. But if you have a hard time with it, don't feel bad - it *is* intended to be a challenge.

If I may suggest: you can take care of much of the deployment disadvantage by capturing some objectives very early on. If your fleet is generally capable enough, that's probably the missing piece of the puzzle for you. (I do have a note to make objectives spawn consistently so there's no incentive to try to reroll them until you get some highly favorable ones, though...)

[shoi]

Agreed. I love a challenge, but when [REDACTED] fleets have 14+ officers and 1 or more radiant ships, the deployment disadvantage is ridiculous. I do prefer this officer system, as opposed to simply reaching critical mass of capital ships and face-rolling everything. But the high end of officer counts needs to be dialed down on high-challenge enemy fleets, I suspect.

you can exceed the officer cap as well, y'know 
the mercenaries you can hire help out a LOT

[sector_terror]

I've been thinking this for a while and im still not 100% on it. I've had a few thoughts but I go by this. First, the far end-game difficulty, in which the fleet battles become basically just a challenge to see "Can I do it?" is not really a viable reasoning outside of difficulty 10. Now if difficulty 10 is basically a bonus boss then sure, but the mechanics dont favor that kind of gameplay since loss is incredibly severe, and there's no obvious mark when a fleet is suppose to be in that territory.

I think trying to post this kind of challenge that isn't favored by the mechanics of the game. Giving a battle in which the players are neigh-on impossible to go in without an even ability to fight is not a good idea. Dark souls has that, but loss is (mostly) cheap in that series. Tales series sometimes have bosses like that, but loss is (mostly) cheap and may even reset at the start of the battle itself making death hard cheap. Starsector makes loss severe, so adding in a challenge I have to keep reloading for to not lose half my fleet, trying experimentation like I'm in Dark Souls again, is not supported well. Instead the difficult should be in making the battle even in the first place. Getting enough capitals, levels, weapons, crew, officers(even getting enough officers at proper level and maintaining them is expensive) and all not tanking your credits, is a slow arduous process which tests your personal management and stragetic might, let alone tactical to win the battle without losing half your fleet and personal skill to not get killed in your own flagship. That is the challenge this game works well in, and making the AI have advantages the player has little to not hope of catching up to in the assumption the player will find ways to break the game on the tactical or melee levels of combat, is the reason I gave up on Mount and Blade's combat.

[Megas]

you can exceed the officer cap as well, y'know 
the mercenaries you can hire help out a LOT

And player bleeds story points.  I refuse to play that game.  Not unless they become permanent instead of the annual subscription fee.

[sector_terror]

you can exceed the officer cap as well, y'know 
the mercenaries you can hire help out a LOT

And player bleeds story points.  I refuse to play that game.  Not unless they become permanent instead of the annual subscription fee.

Indeed, the difficulty should be in that they are BETTER officers, not sheer numbers.

[intrinsic_parity]

Bonus officers do give you 100% bonus xp, so theoretically you don't loose any story points, but I'm finding spending your story points sometimes builds up bonus xp a lot faster than you spend it. I'm not sure how much this is alleviated by the recent hotfix, but I have 40 million+ bonus xp right now, so it feels like that 'refund' is a long ways off. Maybe I will start another campaign to see how it plays out with the new balance.

[Thaago]

Agreed. I love a challenge, but when [REDACTED] fleets have 14+ officers and 1 or more radiant ships, the deployment disadvantage is ridiculous. I do prefer this officer system, as opposed to simply reaching critical mass of capital ships and face-rolling everything. But the high end of officer counts needs to be dialed down on high-challenge enemy fleets, I suspect.

you can exceed the officer cap as well, y'know 
the mercenaries you can hire help out a LOT

My issue with this is that mercenaries are extraordinarily rare. Officers can come from my own fleet, or comms at planets, or exploration. At this point I have 9 officers (one I can't use), have dismissed 3 to make room for another, and have turned down multiple crew promotions and routinely don't hire people on planets. I'd estimate that I've seen 30 officers cross my path.

I've seen 3 mercenaries total, one of which was timid. If I could promote my own officers into mercenaries or if mercenaries were common, then it would be fine. But if that were the case... why not just remove officer limits and have increasing costs "bureaucratic inefficiency" as the number of officers go up.

The reason I really dislike infinite enemy officers is for 2 reasons: 1) enemy ECM that makes investing in ECM yourself actively harmful because the player is spending resources for no benefit. I dislike that the whole system of tradeoffs built around ECM (put gunnery implants officers on destroyers/frigates? Build ECM hullmod? Take the skill? Deploy more smaller ships to beef up the number?) no longer matters. Its a game system failure because the numbers get too high. 2) Massive small ship disparity. Enemy frigates and destroyers WILL kill the majority of player frigates and destroyers with little effort, because the majority of player ships cannot have officers (unless they dedicate purely to the wolfpack with all officers on small ships), all enemy ships have +20% speed and player ships may not without decent to large investment, and all player ships are at -20% range. The only role left for secondary/small ships in the player is escorting, distraction, and backline fire support: unlike previous versions, there are simply no targets left for them to engage. Because those targets have officers.

Example: I have a bunch of Hammerheads in my fleet that I have been using for a long time. They make for pretty decent escorts to keep frigates off of my flanks. But if they go off to capture an objective, or if I am busy shooting at something else and can't send firepower in that direction, they are at extreme risk of getting killed, either by an enemy mid performance frigate or if they are very unlucky an enemy destroyer, which will roll right over them. And there's really nothing to be done about it: their ships have officers, mine don't so are not going to survive outside of the area contested by my own officered ships.

[Megas]

And frigates still do not have enough PPT unless player min-maxes for PPT (like get Wolfpack and others) and/or use Remnant frigates with cores.  I doubt too many will use Automated Ships with Special Modifications as it is.  (Currently, I am using Automated Ships instead of Spec.Mod. because I cannot spend too much time grinding endgame for lots of story points and AI cores like I did during the last two releases, and looting Remnant ships is fun for now.)

I plan to ignore Leadership because it is too late in my game to exploit early Leadership skills (fleet is too big), and I plan to go Combat/Technology/Industry.

[Thaago]

I've found leadership to be much better than I first thought, so I encourage you to give it a shot. I was pretty surprised myself!

Its only 1 data point, but I did the same hard fight several times with different skill configurations. I'm at around 200 fleet size, and the leadership bonuses from skills leaders ship 1-3, left hand side, had noticeable beneficial effects on performance that made the fight a lot easier.