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[Sordid]

That frigate can kill everything so I don't have to think about how to counter the enemy fleet, and I don't have to spend time developing loadouts for those ships, either.

You could do that if you wanted to, I guess. I wouldn't. You say you don't want to use that playstyle, so what exactly is your argument here? That you have so little self-control that you'd switch to a playstyle that you hate just because it uses a bit less fuel (which is even cheaper that supplies in the current version)? I don't buy that for a second and I think you should stop underestimating yourself.

The fact that people are coming into this thread to actively say they enjoy the resource management aspect of the game is clear evidence that this change would hurt other peoples enjoyment of the game. It's fine if you don't care for that aspect of the game, but at least acknowledge that other people do...

I do acknowledge it, my point is that that aspect of the game would not be lost. Unfortunately, not a lot of people seem to understand that. I have yet to see a well-thought-out argument, all I'm getting so far are knee-jerk reactions.

Every game in existence? No way. Maybe a significant portion of action/combat games have some element of this. But even in those games, there is an effort to actively design them to prevent strategies that trade IRL time for success, even if that is unavoidable to some degree. Just think about how much people hate turtling/camping/defensive play in most games. Many strategy games have no element of this at all, i.e. they are not real time and cautious and aggressive play take the same amount of time, and are differentiated by risk/reward factors.

Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but the only exception I can think of is the recent Doom remake. That does go out of its way to encourage you to play aggressively. The key word here being "encourage". One of the general overarching issues Starsector has that I've been harping on here is that it doesn't encourage anything, it shapes the player's experience predominantly by punishments and penalties.

And no, not even turn-based strategies are immune to the choice I described. On the contrary, they are far more susceptible to cautious play than real-time games, since you can spend hours mulling over your moves in a single turn. Unless there's a time limit on turns, but as I pointed out earlier, those tend to be optional in games that have them.

Sure but there are a lot of different ways games can be challenging. For me, fun games present a mental challenge, like solving a puzzle. I don't find games where the challenge is in the perfect execution of simple but difficult task to be compelling. I like the parts of starsector that make me think, and I find that most of the thinking I do revolves around solving/optimizing logistical challenges, and solving/optimizing combat challenges by choosing ships and loadouts. CR creates those challenges for me to solve. The enjoyment I get from piloting/combat is only one part of why I like the game.

I understand optimizing combat challenges, but logistical challenges? What logistical challenges are there? "Out of supplies -> buy some supplies" seems to be about it as far as I can tell. If anything, removing CR and therefore not having to deal with resupplying would leave you more time to engage with those far more complex and interesting combat challenges. Even from your point of view and for your playstyle it would be a net positive.

CR was implemented to prevent grindy gameplay, where you spend hours in a single frigate slowly killing capital ships, so claiming that removing CR prevents grinding makes no sense to me.

That's not what I said. It wouldn't prevent solo frigate battles, but it would remove any mechanical incentive to use that playstyle. The issue with CR is that it threatens to punish you if you don't use as small a force as possible and then punishes you for using a small force (because a small force takes a long time to chew through the enemy fleet, so it runs out of CR). It's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and that just doesn't feel good. Which is a problem in an entertainment product. With no CR, you'd have no reason to ever even try solo frigate other than curiosity and self-imposed challenge.

It's not like fighting those fleets in a single superpowered frigate would be faster.

Which is exactly why I wouldn't do it and why I don't believe you would either.

[intrinsic_parity]

And no, not even turn-based strategies are immune to the choice I described. On the contrary, they are far more susceptible to cautious play than real-time games, since you can spend hours mulling over your moves in a single turn. Unless there's a time limit on turns, but as I pointed out earlier, those tend to be optional in games that have them.

For what it's worth, I consider spending more time thinking about a specific/unique problem to be very different than spending more time doing the a simple task over and over (grinding), but fair enough.

What logistical challenges are there? "Out of supplies -> buy some supplies" seems to be about it as far as I can tell....

You know the answer to your own question:

The issue with CR is that it threatens to punish you if you don't use as small a force as possible and then punishes you for using a small force (because a small force takes a long time to chew through the enemy fleet, so it runs out of CR). It's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and that just doesn't feel good. Which is a problem in an entertainment product. With no CR, you'd have no reason to ever even try solo frigate other than curiosity and self-imposed challenge.

This is exactly the stuff I'm talking about when I say logistical and combat challenges. The game is a multi-objective optimization where you're trying to maximize combat power while simultaneously minimizing resource costs on the campaign layer. You can't just 'use less ships to save resources' or 'use more ships to be stronger', you have to find a balance. A major enjoyable aspect of the game for me is selecting ships and outfitting them to solve that multi-objective optimization problem and finding the right balance between multiple factors (which is substantially more complicated and interesting than just trying to make the most powerful fleet).

If you remove CR, but not upkeep and fuel costs, then you can maximize combat power with any single ship that can solo everything (there is no way to be stronger than 'I can kill everything by myself'), but resources cost is minimal with as few ships as possible (as discussed extensively). If you completely remove the resource cost, you make it into a much simpler and less interesting single objective optimization problem, i.e. there are no tradeoffs between combat power and resources in your decisions anymore, you just spam paragons or whatever. Sure you can use whatever fleet you want, but there's no interesting optimization anymore. I don't have fun trying random fleets for the sake of trying them.

For what it's worth, I would be totally ok with a different game mode (I would call it easy mode, no offense, or you could label the current game a hard mode or whatever) or mod where the entire resource management aspect is trivialized, but I don't want the base game to be that way, because I enjoy the aspect of the game I've just described.

It's not like fighting those fleets in a single superpowered frigate would be faster.

Which is exactly why I wouldn't do it and why I don't believe you would either.

People already did it, that's why CR was added in the first place. Some people spam afflictors right now for the same reason. I don't go for solo afflictor spam, partially because I don't want to spec into the skills required for it, and partially because I am hoping/expecting it will get nerfed, but I am constantly aware that I could probably make the game much easier by abusing broken mechanics like that, which is unsatisfying to me.

I do already do this sort of thing to a moderate extent in the current game though. For the derliect fleets that guard probes you can quite easily solo them with a single frigate. I keep a SO tempest around in my fleet mostly just to save supplies when killing those (or other similarly easy small fleets). I'm really grateful that the number of probes with defenders has been toned down in this release, because in the past, it became very tedious to solo those if you found 4-5 in the same system, but it also saves a lot of supplies which is pretty important when you are exploring in the early-mid game.

[TJJ]

How about a carrot, rather than stick, approach?

Renown.

You earn it by taking on hard fights, and lose it by taking easy fights. (hard/easy determined by relative DP cost of your deployment Vs theirs)
Higher renown grants bonus pay on jobs, access to more challenging jobs, and perhaps a gradual faction opinion uptick.

I seem to remember Gratuitous Space Battles did something similar; each encounter in the campaign had a set budget of 'Honor'
Deploying ships reduced the 'Honor' you could earn from the encounter.
Left over Honor was accrued, and could be spent to buy unlocks.

Such a mechanic would address the 'just deploy everything in every fight' issue that existed before CR.
Though I'm not quite sure how you'd tweak it to address the 'just have a single overpowered command ship, and chain-deploy it' strategy.
Perhaps that aspect doesn't need addressing, as it's simply a playstyle that some will relish while others won't wish to endure.
Though if you had to, you could apply a heavy renown cost to withdrawing.

[Sordid]

What logistical challenges are there? "Out of supplies -> buy some supplies" seems to be about it as far as I can tell....

You know the answer to your own question:

The issue with CR is that it threatens to punish you if you don't use as small a force as possible and then punishes you for using a small force (because a small force takes a long time to chew through the enemy fleet, so it runs out of CR). It's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and that just doesn't feel good. Which is a problem in an entertainment product. With no CR, you'd have no reason to ever even try solo frigate other than curiosity and self-imposed challenge.

This is exactly the stuff I'm talking about when I say logistical and combat challenges. The game is a multi-objective optimization where you're trying to maximize combat power while simultaneously minimizing resource costs on the campaign layer. You can't just 'use less ships to save resources' or 'use more ships to be stronger', you have to find a balance. A major enjoyable aspect of the game for me is selecting ships and outfitting them to solve that multi-objective optimization problem and finding the right balance between multiple factors (which is substantially more complicated and interesting than just trying to make the most powerful fleet).

This made me realize we're actually both complaining about the exact same thing, which is trading real-life time for in-game power. You don't like the idea of using a single frigate and grinding away at enemy fleets for hours with it, while I don't like deploying everything and then traveling for ages to replace the supplies that wasted. And while neither of us does that exact thing, the problem is that there's no satisfying middle ground to be found. "Fighting with a small force is a slog" blends right into "using a large force requires tedious resupply runs". There's no place on that spectrum of strategies where you're not receiving either of those punishments; if you move away from one, you receive more of the other. That just feels  like crap. Like I said earlier, negative motivation is bad in general, and that's especially true when you can't avoid the punishment, only mitigate it. In other words, you've just made me more certain than ever that CR is a cancer and needs to go.

If you remove CR, but not upkeep and fuel costs, then you can maximize combat power with any single ship that can solo everything (there is no way to be stronger than 'I can kill everything by myself'), but resources cost is minimal with as few ships as possible (as discussed extensively). If you completely remove the resource cost, you make it into a much simpler and less interesting single objective optimization problem, i.e. there are no tradeoffs between combat power and resources in your decisions anymore, you just spam paragons or whatever. Sure you can use whatever fleet you want, but there's no interesting optimization anymore. I don't have fun trying random fleets for the sake of trying them.

Sure there is a way to be stronger than "I can kill everything". "My fleet can kill everything faster than I could alone." In the absence of an explicit motivating factor, time becomes that factor. In fact, time is a factor always, which is why those time-wasting strategies feel so unsatisfying. CR is the only reason to ever trade time for power, which is why it needs to go. That is also why I don't think Paragon spam would become the meta either. You may have noticed Paragons are quite... slow.

It's not like fighting those fleets in a single superpowered frigate would be faster.

Which is exactly why I wouldn't do it and why I don't believe you would either.

People already did it, that's why CR was added in the first place.

So what? Let 'em. Why does it matter to you what some other people do in their single-player game?

I could probably make the game much easier by abusing broken mechanics like that, which is unsatisfying to me.

Like I said earlier, I don't buy this "I'm too weak-willed to stop myself from ruining my fun by abusing exploits" argument. Even if it were true, I don't think designing games meant for a general audience around the needs of a tiny minority that suffers from that level of obsessive compulsion is a good idea.

[SpottheCat]

Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but the only exception I can think of is the recent Doom remake. That does go out of its way to encourage you to play aggressively. The key word here being "encourage". One of the general overarching issues Starsector has that I've been harping on here is that it doesn't encourage anything, it shapes the player's experience predominantly by punishments and penalties.

Doom Eternal punishes you a lot in service of the same goal as Starsector: Using the game's entire arsenal is fun. Mancubi's smash attack destroys you up close, so you can't just run around with the super shotgun. Better falter him with a grenade or snipe weakpoints or microwave beam freeze. Killing four buffaloes with 3 paragons leaves you vulnerable in a future fight, better design a nice hunter-killer group of frigates instead of just a battleship doomstack and some escorts. In fact I'd say Eternal punishes you much harder but its apples to oranges. 

The other major issue with removing CR is that its a base mechanic of the game. First, CR functions as the main "you took damage on the campaign map" meter. Of course you could just replace all instances of CR damage with hull damage but that both shifts the game's balance and complicates things. What happens if the hull reaches 0 on the campaign map? CR damage has roughly equal effects across ship type, but the impact of less health differs drastically between ship types.
Speaking of balance, CR is a huge part of that too. What do you add to balance out high tech ships/SO, etc.? Your proposed safety mode seems rather unjustifiable lore wise. Removing CR would essentially require a total rebalance of every ship in the game, which seems rather overboard.

while I don't like deploying everything and then traveling for ages to replace the supplies that wasted.

I don't really understand this argument. Past the early game supplies are cheap, you salvage more from fights, and you have oodles of cargo space to carry extra.

[Sordid]

The other major issue with removing CR is that its a base mechanic of the game. First, CR functions as the main "you took damage on the campaign map" meter. Of course you could just replace all instances of CR damage with hull damage but that both shifts the game's balance and complicates things. What happens if the hull reaches 0 on the campaign map? CR damage has roughly equal effects across ship type, but the impact of less health differs drastically between ship types.
Speaking of balance, CR is a huge part of that too. What do you add to balance out high tech ships/SO, etc.? Your proposed safety mode seems rather unjustifiable lore wise. Removing CR would essentially require a total rebalance of every ship in the game, which seems rather overboard.

Well yes, CR should've been removed seven years ago, properly reversing that now would require adjustments to everything that has been build on top of it. Not that I'm expecting that to realistically happen, but a man can dream. Nevertheless, I think balance issues that would be caused by a simple removal of CR without doing an extensive redesign would still be less severe than the issues the presence of CR causes.

As for gameplay mechanics being unjustifiable lore-wise, in games where harmonizing lore and mechanics is a concern at all (which is a minority of them), lore is written to fit mechanics, not the other way around. Retconning the lore is the easy part.

I don't really understand this argument. Past the early game supplies are cheap, you salvage more from fights, and you have oodles of cargo space to carry extra.

Maybe if you take the extra loot skill, but with the severe level cap, I find that unjustifiable.

[intrinsic_parity]

I think even a few salvaging rigs could solve your supply problems, or just being more efficient with deployment. I routinely double the supplies invested in combat... I think the current game gives you plenty of ways to avoid constantly resupplying.

[Sordid]

I mean, I guess I could get more of them? Still, that might solve my personal supply issues, but it wouldn't really expand the range of viable playstyles.

[Hiruma Kai]

I don't really understand this argument. Past the early game supplies are cheap, you salvage more from fights, and you have oodles of cargo space to carry extra.

Maybe if you take the extra loot skill, but with the severe level cap, I find that unjustifiable.

That is not true. You certainly don't need any loot skills at end game.  Early to mid-game, possibly, depending on how well you do in the combat portions of the game. 

I've taken all 8 Combat skills and 7 tech skills from start to end, didn't respec nor did any trading, and was able to go from beginning to end without any issues mostly doing bounty hunting and exploration missions in a general direction, and then come back to the core after exhausting the missions in one direction (needed to come back simply to refresh for more missions anyways).

At end game, I'm getting 400 or so supplies from high end bounties (350k-400k).  400 supplies is enough to deploy 6 Paragons.  If that's not enough, and you don't want to spend skill points, there are ships like the Shepherd and Salvage gantry which merely cost credits which can improve your salvage - but that does involve doing a trade off analysis of running expenses versus expected extra supplies/fuel along with distance estimates.  Which is yet another decision to be made.

So to give a concrete counter example, my end game fleet from my last run with 5 Capitals, 4 cruisers, and 6 cruiser logistics ships carries up to 6680 units of cargo, at 15 supplies per day.  Assuming 10 deployments of 240 DP each (Odyssey, Doom, 2 Paragons, Legion XIV say), that's still 4280 supplies left over, for 285 days of exploration time, assuming you don't pick up a single piece of cargo during all that time.

Can you give some in game examples of what you want to do and how you've actually been limited in a real game run?  With numbers?  Like, after 2 months, I was forced to turn around my fleet of X,Y,Z due to lack of supplies?

While the game does push you towards more efficient play (use minimum resources) it doesn't absolutely demand perfection.  There's a wide range of efficiencies which will still improve your game state, just not as fast.   Especially later in the game with a fully developed colony or colonies behind you.   I mean, there are a number of problems with the game balance wise right now (and Alex admits that), but CR and supplies I feel overall are in a good place, at least in my experience.  Get far enough in the game, and you can pretty much do whatever you want inefficiency wise.

Out of curiosity, are you just looking for more and better missions (missions as picked from the start screen, not campaign quests).  Maybe an easy to use arbitrary mission generator?  A selection of 100 interesting missions, perhaps with some progression?  At that point, there's no travel time, there's no supplies, fuel, credits, nor any limitations on what fights what.  It's simply whatever two fleets have been picked fighting it out, with no long term consequences.  If you want a string of Paragon vs frigate fights, you can do that.  If you want an even fleet vs fleet with identical DP, you can do that too.  If you want an last stand lone Paragon versus a low tech fleet, that's already in the game.

[Igncom1]

The concern about Combat Readiness, amusing that what this topic is about, I have is that it makes it currently hard to use frigates in long battles that do involve larger ship types.

I get not wanting to play ring around the roses for 40 minutes with an enemy phase skimmer because you DARED not to bring a carrier, or have lost it in the actual battle. But when there is still a proper battle to be fought I can't see a good justification as to why my tempests shouldn't be operating for as long as my onslaughts. I do like the idea of the crews getting tired and everything getting run down over an extended battle however.

I would be nice to almost have a way for larger ships to prop up smaller ones as long as they exist to keep them going during a battle. Like a buff to their CR time when a larger ship type is present that counts down before their own timer. That way mixed size fleets, combined arms if you will, become a little better then 90% of an AI's fleet going limp after a while among the perfectly fine battleships.

[SCC]

I wonder if Alex experimented with shared PPT. If you deploy a Tempest and an Onslaught, they would both get 450s of PPT. Well, maybe not that, because it's silly. There'd have to be some mechanic to split it in a way that doesn't screw over high-tech (a proportional to DP split, for example, would take away 30s from Tempest and give it to the Onslaught).

[TaLaR]

Imo, something like "PPT of smaller ships doesn't tick (or ticks at reduced rate) as long as they are close to larger ship(s) with higher current PPT. Ships with currently active phase cloak/temporal shell or SO always tick at full rate (maybe SO get a partial tick rate reduction in 33-50% range)." would make more sense.

[shoi]

Aren't there already skills to buff frigate PPT?

I've had a hyperion with built-in SO since nearly the start of my .95a run and it's very rare for it to run out of PPT before the majority of the fleet is effectively beaten. That said, I haven't bothered dealing with any death stacks.

[Megas]

Aren't there already skills to buff frigate PPT?

Leadership 2, and it conflicts with Coordinated Maneuvers.

In my case, it hurts because I want Combat/Tech/Industry.  No room for Leadership.

[intrinsic_parity]

I was thinking it might be cool if there were in-battle objectives that increased all ships PPT when you captured them. That could give ships some extra staying power.