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[Alex]

Do you mean a stop gap measure for the player within the campaign to overcome a specific fight, or a stop gap in game balance where you intend to implement something else?

I mean in terms of a specific fight, though, yeah, hunting up like 4-5 mercenaries at a moment's notice would not be the easiest thing in the world. (I have some other ideas for easier "win a specific fight, if perhaps uneconomically" measures, but... well, not in 0.95.)

Hmm, I wonder if making mercenary officers available in groups of 2-4 - when they *do* spawn - might not be a good idea here. Let me make a note.

I've seen this occasionally as well, sometimes the objectives are in a line or a very flat U across the middle of the battle field. It can be tough to get to them before the AI, although usually you can get at least 1-2 captured in my experience. I haven't tried farming remnants yet though, so I can't speak on that, but in normal fights, I still usually get 1-2 captured early.

Ah - if you're able to grab a screenshot next time you see that, I'd appreciate it. They can be middle-ish but at least one - and usually two - should be closer enough to each side so that each side can claim them assuming their small ships aren't just miles slower than the enemy's.

[Chairman Suryasari]

It's feel like JRPG all over again. "I have an entire platoon behind me, there is no way we can be defeated now! Wait, what is that? I can only deploy 3 underling fighting those high level barbarian across the river to die one by one because, reason?" Unlocking the battlesize is the first thing I do after playing around for two hours and hit a brick wall fighting pirate.

And I don't know why, but I have a hard time killing anything equal or slightly bigger, every battle feels like such a slog. And the enemy has ridiculous composition, even with a capital I can get either fighter spam to dead or gang up to dead. Plus some bounty really underpaid the player, unless you have instant teleport to your intended target, good luck making any money.

Selling illegal supplies to pather also feel like mandatory, if you want to survive a little bit longer, at least for me, until I hit the max credits you can get by doing that because of the taxes, if you have a bigger trading ship your supplies will run out before you can sell them back.

So fine, I said, I build 2 colony so I can get a little bit more money on the side, but I need skill to improve my colony or hire admin. If I improve my colony skill by level 8-9 I am barely touching combat skill because I dump those skill points into fleet and the colony.

I have a hard time participate in combat without proper offensive skill. I wish we had "mind control" feature so we can take control officer, benefiting from their skill buff and manually piloting the ship, thus having better experience with the combat.

Some new design choices feel strange and counter intuitive. I get what Alex is trying to do, but I dunno, I don't really enjoy it...? But then again, I cannot give comprehensive solution to the matter so please take it with a grain of salt

sounds good!

Mind telling us why don't we just cap DP at 180 and call it a day then? I'm sure by that point the game would be a lot smaller and would be much easier running on toasters no?

it's a win win.

I'm kinda agree with this. Maybe having a static DP system is better than what we currently have.

[Hiruma Kai]

In regards to capture point distribution, I think the attached png (cropped for size, but you can see the horizontal nature of the capture points) is what people are refering to.  Point Gamma is on the exact midline vertically.  Going two lines to it's left is the exact mid point of the map.  Delta is farther away from the allied side starting point than Gamma is.  (6 lines up and over 2, 6.3 units for gamma, while 6 lines up and 6 lines over for Delta, 8.4 units).

As for opposing fleet compositions, I wonder if it is worth it yet to add more fine tuned difficulty options other than Normal and Easy?  Above and beyond any tuning that these release candidates are finding for Normal difficulty.  On other hand, I realize that implies more effort in balancing/testing/coding.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Histidine]

Hmm, I wonder if making mercenary officers available in groups of 2-4 - when they *do* spawn - might not be a good idea here. Let me make a note.

Spending 1 SP to get a bag of several merc officers at once might be good.

I started playing before the late game XP curve changes; in those versions, late game SP was just so slow to come by that spending 1 SP for one temporary officer seemed like a nonstarter no matter the bonus XP.

[Alex]

In regards to capture point distribution, I think the attached png (cropped for size, but you can see the horizontal nature of the capture points) is what people are refering to.  Point Gamma is on the exact midline vertically.  Going two lines to it's left is the exact mid point of the map.  Delta is farther away from the allied side starting point than Gamma is.  (6 lines up and over 2, 6.3 units for gamma, while 6 lines up and 6 lines over for Delta, 8.4 units).

As for opposing fleet compositions, I wonder if it is worth it yet to add more fine tuned difficulty options other than Normal and Easy?  Above and beyond any tuning that these release candidates are finding for Normal difficulty.  On other hand, I realize that implies more effort in balancing/testing/coding.

Thank you for that shot, that's perfect. And also yeah that doesn't look right; I'll have a look.

Re: difficulty - yeah, just one primary difficulty mode is hard enough to balance. I'd rather throw in more options that someone that's having a tougher time can make use of.

Spending 1 SP to get a bag of several merc officers at once might be good.

I started playing before the late game XP curve changes; in those versions, late game SP was just so slow to come by that spending 1 SP for one temporary officer seemed like a nonstarter no matter the bonus XP.

Hmm, yeah, that's an interesting idea! Made a note. (Re: SP cost at max level, very much understood, and it's something I'm still keeping an eye on. I'd love to hear more feedback about how it feels with the new values.)

[Sordid]

Re: difficulty - yeah, just one primary difficulty mode is hard enough to balance. I'd rather throw in more options that someone that's having a tougher time can make use of.

Does difficulty affect fleet compositions? The pop-up just mentions damage reduction, sensor range, and extra loot. Personally I'd much prefer a "enemy fleets are smaller" easy mode rather than "you take less damage".

[Hiruma Kai]

Re: difficulty - yeah, just one primary difficulty mode is hard enough to balance. I'd rather throw in more options that someone that's having a tougher time can make use of.

Does difficulty affect fleet compositions? The pop-up just mentions damage reduction, sensor range, and extra loot. Personally I'd much prefer a "enemy fleets are smaller" easy mode rather than "you take less damage".

Nope, it does not. 

I was just curious from the "Can't please all people all the time" with a single game point of point of view.  You could at least imagine such a thing.  Probably can be modded.  The contact system has the potential to satisfy people who like current high end fights while allowing for typical intel type bounties and system restricted Redacted fleets to be toned down.  And there's always mods for people who want harder or easier things than baseline.  Of which there will always be people on both ends.

The damage reduction is a rather big effect, equivalent to roughly 2-3 additional skills on all your ships (shield, armor, and hull damage reduction).  Also, 50% extra loot means being able to deploy 50% more fleet while still breaking even on supplies for the fight (plus extra profit from other drops).

[Hiruma Kai]

Re: difficulty - yeah, just one primary difficulty mode is hard enough to balance. I'd rather throw in more options that someone that's having a tougher time can make use of.

Does difficulty affect fleet compositions? The pop-up just mentions damage reduction, sensor range, and extra loot. Personally I'd much prefer a "enemy fleets are smaller" easy mode rather than "you take less damage".

Nope, it does not. 

I was just curious from the "Can't please all people all the time" with a single game point of point of view.  You could at least imagine such a difficulty level that does modify fleet generation.  Probably can be modded.  The contact system has the potential to satisfy people who like current high end fights while allowing for typical intel type bounties and system restricted Redacted fleets to be toned down.  And there's always mods for people who want harder or easier things than baseline.  Of which there will always be people on both ends.

The damage reduction is a rather big effect, equivalent to roughly 2-3 additional skills on all your ships (shield, armor, and hull damage reduction).  Also, 50% extra loot means being able to deploy 50% more fleet while still breaking even on supplies for the fight (plus extra profit from other drops).

[Sordid]

Nope, it does not. 

I was just curious from the "Can't please all people all the time" with a single game point of point of view.  You could at least imagine such a thing.  Probably can be modded.

Yeah, I did imagine it, and I asked in the miscellaneous modding questions thread if there's an easy way to dial down fleet size scaling. I took the lack of an answer as a "no".

[IonDragonX]

I mean in terms of a specific fight, though, yeah, hunting up like 4-5 mercenaries at a moment's notice would not be the easiest thing in the world. (I have some other ideas for easier "win a specific fight, if perhaps uneconomically" measures, but... well, not in 0.95.) Hmm, I wonder if making mercenary officers available in groups of 2-4 - when they *do* spawn - might not be a good idea here. Let me make a note.

Potential extra sources of Mercenary Officers:
* Bars at Independent worlds
* Dialog option with an Underworld Contact
* Dialog option with Mercenary & Smuggler fleets

[TaLaR]

Barring mercenaries (which are a very stop-gap measure), capturing objectives is how you overcome the DP deficit if you really need to get deployment parity to win a fight.

But enemy fleet having 2-3 times normal limit of officers is not some exceptional rare situation. It is the norm of high end bounties.

[Golde]

Barring mercenaries (which are a very stop-gap measure), capturing objectives is how you overcome the DP deficit if you really need to get deployment parity to win a fight.

But enemy fleet having 2-3 times normal limit of officers is not some exceptional rare situation. It is the norm of high end bounties.

And while also using non-gimped ships at CR levels not exceptionally high.

The thing you're both missing, I think, is how the deployment point allocation works now. It's explained in the tooltip, but having already played the game, it's kind of natural to assume it works the same way as before, look at things in those terms, and become frustrated.

But - what primarily matters is officers, not the ships they're on. Adding an extra 10 Paragons won't help much. 10 Paragons with officers vs 10 frigates with officers also doesn't make much of a difference. If you *really* need a leg up for a tough fight, you can hire some mercenary officers to go above the limit. You're not encouraged to go with a fleet full of large ships because it doesn't help at all. Neither does trying to "match the dp" of the enemy fleet.


Barring mercenaries (which are a very stop-gap measure), capturing objectives is how you overcome the DP deficit if you really need to get deployment parity to win a fight.

Very funny.

1) Please educate us on how many mercenaries are required to really leg up in this fight.

2) Explain cost both in SP, time and capital required to amass said amount of mercenaries. (if that is possible in the first place due to contract expiring)

3) see attached picture.

Spoiler

with 7 Alpha Core's worth of officers (which wouldn't even be realistic in the first place), we are STILL at 50% DP penalty.

You're gonna need to count both hands and feet for the number of mercenaries to get a leg up in this fight.

[close]

The current non-modded cap is 240 deployment points at max battle slider, if the player gets all objectives. I wouldn't mind the skills being scaled up to meet that instead of being at 180.

(Yep - I've actually got a note to raise the skill cap from 180 to 240 where applicable. I think that'll just make more sense as the number to settle on there.)

Again, why bother implementing a DP calculation system if your *ideal* way of playing the game is to be permanently *** at 160dp?

Also, I remember correctly someone said something about how unintuitive stat-checks are in videogames and that they are definitely not the way to go in starsector?

Care to explain the difference here between a stat check and no frigate w/ officer = game over?

Frigates are useful in their own right, but as of now it's plain and obvious that they're just an excuse to add statchecks in disguise.

I could be mistaken, but your target audience for the game is not all of the 5 people that stuck around since kickstarter and would attend your birthday party when 1.0 launches in 2077.

And to the point where you would go and cap the max battle size in the ingame settings to 400. To an average player such as myself who might not be capable of building a min-maxed fleet to your ideal specifications OR someone who might not even be familiar with the concept of a config file outside the game or someone who might not even care enough because the icon is sitting the recycling and they're already back to playing Fortnite, just go figure right? because you've already got our money.

Singleplayer indie games are often one way streets to the consumer to begin with. We are talking in broad terms of course; of ten random people that purchase your game, should they encounter some kind of non-technical related issue with your game, how likely do you think they are going to take out their time, seek out the forums then make an account, get verified and then spend some more time to describe in great detail what they think went wrong and propose some kind of solution supppose they have one in the first place?

It goes without saying with all the things both mentioned and unmentioned above that QA and playtesting are particularly important if your intent is to make a wonderful game. So why do you forego it?

Alex; undeniably, you have a good following of the most hardcore and talented fanbase.

But stuff like this is just a disservice to everyone else, this release by far has been two steps forwards and one step backwards.

[Midnight Kitsune]

How IS the math for AI officer and merc limits supposed to work anyhow?

[hkmist]

It is fun to see when people point out a problem about they can't get a fair fight BEFORE enter a battle because enemy fleet can run at 3 time of the fleet size(compare to player ideal fleet size), 2 time officer DP weigh and don't need to worried about supply, the reply are about what you can do AFTER you enter field and follow a set of playstyle(spend some of your lesser than normal starting DP pt to field small ship w/ officer to capture pt, the only way to win DP race)

The solution of buying merc officer to even the field is just another prove that late game balance heavy working again the small fleet idea, not to mention this way make the already low paid bounty much more unprofitable

[Thaago]

Its really hard to tell from that map pictures, but are the capture points centered there or are they very close to the enemy edge? Because close to the enemy edge is a bug. Otherwise just... capture some of those points? You have a fully officered core of mobile capital ships and a whole swarm of frigates right? The Paragon is a bit slow, but the Conquests are not. I was just fighting a Remnant fleet with 2 Radiants before typing this out and I captured half the points just fine, and my frigate and destroyers are a heck of a lot slower than yours (1 wolf, 1 lasher (no officer), 3 Hammerheads, Sunder). I didn't do anything fancy, just pressed C on all the points, then removed the orders on the 1 the enemy deathballs was at and the one right next to it while driving my cruisers towards the enemy. I did take some losses in that fight so its not like it went perfectly, but I was able to grab DP for reinforcements.

Mercenaries are handy for my fleet (I only have 1) because it lets me boost my ECM and Nav ratings while having my custom better officers be on cruisers, and it roughly doubles the power of one of the destroyers or frigates in my fleet. Both make a decent difference, especially the ECM (which is a heck of a lot more important than it was last version, really caught me by surprise!). I can't really speak to your fleet because I haven't played with my own automated ships: I don't know how good those AI cores on the remnant frigates are (do they have energy weapon mastery? Benefit from wolfpack? I have no clue). But if you are worried about getting more DP, a mercenary would let you keep the rest of the fleet the same while deploying a high performance high speed frigate (tempest, omen, hyperion, afflictor though thats a bit specialty) to grab points and smash the enemy frigates while your big ships are coming up.

While I haven't played with the new DP system enough to totally understand it so I'm sure I'm missing things, I'll note that the new system has the potential to work on a 'normal' difficulty curve: easier early/mid game, harder later game. Having systems with that curve is a really big improvement for the game, which has suffered foreverfrom having an inverse difficulty curve of brutal early game, trivially easy lategame.

In the early/mid game, when a player might just be getting by with what they can find, haven't played the game much so don't know how to handle the ecm/nav system, don't have much experience piloting, etc etc. In that part of the game, enemy fleets should have fewer officers (hopefully! I think I've encountered some bad ones that break this that I hope get patched out to more reasonable levels) so the player isn't at a DP disadvantage. Then, as the game progresses and the player gets more resources, things get harder. The enemy gets more officers and more DP, forcing the player to improve their tactics and fleet synergy to keep up.

In theory, that kind of 'normal difficulty curve' DP system would be really good to stop the late game from being trivially easy (just spam caps like last version). I agree that it needs careful playtesting - I'm pretty sure I encountered some early/mid game pirate fleets with massive officer spam that breaks my above analysis, and I would like to see those gone! But lategame fleets = harder because of DP limits is a good mechanic for a normal difficulty curve.

It is fun to see when people point out a problem about they can't get a fair fight BEFORE enter a battle because enemy fleet can run at 3 time of the fleet size(compare to player ideal fleet size), 2 time officer DP weigh and don't need to worried about supply, the reply are about what you can do AFTER you enter field and follow a set of playstyle(spend some of your lesser than normal starting DP pt to field small ship w/ officer to capture pt, the only way to win DP race)

The solution of buying merc officer to even the field is just another prove that late game balance heavy working again the small fleet idea, not to mention this way make the already low paid bounty much more unprofitable

I think the reason people are saying things about how to fight is that by fighting better, the fight becomes "fair". Because really, "fair" is subjective based on how good the player fleet is in the fight vs the enemy. As an extreme example: for an endgame player fleet with fully powered player and officers, is equal DP with pirates really a fair fight? Not even close, the player is going to absolutely stomp them. "Fair" might be giving pirates 300 DP to the player's 100 but lets be honest, even thats just going to resort in more pirate pinatas to pop.

Remnants are a lot tougher, but the same principle holds: is the fight be "fair" at 240:160 + reinforcements in battle, and 480 DP to 240 DP outside? The better the player fleet, and the more efficient they can be with DP, the more "fair" it is.