"Forced". "Obligatory". you_keep_using_that_word.jpg
More to the point, what you're saying confirms what I'm saying. Yes, the point of CR is to make you use only as many ships you need, not more, not less. In other words, the point is to enforce only the dev's preferred playstyle. Wanna solo an enemy fleet with one ship? Too bad, not allowed. Wanna steamroll an enemy ship with your entire fleet? Too bad, not allowed either. If you enjoy the playstyle the game demands, good for you. But it could be so much more than it is now...
"Not allowed", in the sense not that it actually blocks you from doing a thing the game considers bad, but you lose resources for doing it
is the
norm for games. Under a broad interpretation, every game that changes the outcome based on performance does this.
Examples: every game where it's possible to 'waste' ammo (for a particularly vivid illustration, use Resident Evil 4's rocket launcher on a random monster).
Every game where, well, you lose if you don't commit enough resources to the fight, and don't have enough skill and/or favorable circumstances enough to win regardless (quite possibly every game involving military tactics/strategy ever made. When I was a kid playing Myth: The Fallen Lords, on the first level I sent my warriors one by one to the bridge swarming with thralls. None of them was a big enough hero to live.)
The only questions remaining are whether the scope of remaining "allowed" actions is too narrow, and whether the penalties for getting it wrong are too strict. (My own view is: no and no for most reasonably skilled Starsector players, but very possibly not so for new ones)
If you're one of those high-skill players who can solo fleets and have the right ship for it? Go for it. Want to stomp two Hounds in a Paragon? Well the first-order cost is only 6k credits' worth of supplies, if you really want to nobody is going to tell you how to spend your credits.
On the other hand, if there was no supply cost to deploy my entire fleet, then when I'm facing a weaker fleet, I'll just deploy the whole fleet, alt tab, come back to the victory screen. Fun. Might as well add autoresolve at that point.
Yes, might as well. There's a lot of games that have it, like Mount&Blade, Total War, and many others. There's a good reason for that, forcing the player to fight every single battle makes the game tedious and unfun. Making the player limit their own power is even worse. What's the point of having progression, of acquiring more and better ships with bigger guns, if the game is going to artificially enforce parity with weaker enemies anyway? Starsector doesn't even have the decency to just scale the enemies to match you like most games do, instead it makes you hold back with a threat of punishment. That just feels extremely unsatisfying and is part of the general problem of using negative motivation to push the player into doing something that's not enjoyable.
Forcing the player to fight every single battle? Except for things like too-weak bounties, literally nothing even asks you to fight fleets not worth the trouble to fight in the first place, much less
force you to do so. And for the fleets that are so weak they run away, autoresolve in fact already exists in Starsector.
(Aside: lol at mentioning M&B autoresolve, when I avoided it like the plague because it was perfectly capable of killing off top-tier knights that never die if the battle is actually fought.)
More broadly: if there are so many battles you need an autoresolve mechanic, that's a sign you have too many battles. To some degree this can be an unavoidable state, but if you can solve the problem at the root it's better to do so.
Point of progression: to do things you couldn't do before, of which there are many in the game. This takes three seconds to think of.
Enemy scaling: You're perfectly capable of finding stronger enemies if you need them. The bounty system (one of the biggest sources of fights) directly generates stronger enemies as you kill more bounties, and then helpfully points you to them.
Players love to optimize gameplay. The classic saying is that 'players will optimize the fun out of the game'. If you can solo every fleet in the game with a solo Hyperion, there will probably be people that do exactly that. It might be fun to do once, or a few times, but not something people want to do repeatedly.
I mean, if it's not fun for you, then don't do it? Seems a simple enough solution to me. And if someone does do it repeatedly, then it must be fun for them. Why take it away from them when that removal doesn't benefit you in any way, since you wouldn't do it even if you could?
The game mechanics should not incentivize unfun things, specifically because this will make people do them while not considering them fun. This is a well-known problem in game design, affecting any number of things (
here's a good example, involving achievements.) "Don't do it" misses the point completely and utterly.
And if "don't do it" remains your policy, consider taking your own advice:
I don't do that and am still winning fights. Its not required.
So you wouldn't mind the removal, since it wouldn't impact you in any way? Cool.
"I want to stop having to do the thing"
"You do not, in fact, have to do the thing"
"
So you wouldn't mind the removal, since it wouldn't impact you in any way? Cool."
Hopefully this will convey the value of such a response: cool story bro
What would removing it even entail? Change the game balance so that frigates are worth keeping on the field past the initial capture phase? Or make it so the follow-up big ships can be deployed without needing to rotate out the frigates? Good news!