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[Locklave]

I dunno man, is it just me?

This game isnt about success. Its about struggle. 'Winning everything' is game over, the destination, and im here for the journey, the process, the struggle.

YOu won though, right?

That is oversimplified. There is a fine line where elements like this can become unfun.

Can we all agree getting kicked in the balls makes it a struggle to stand? I'm not interested in that journey or process. Just saying, minutia matters.

[Dex]

That is oversimplified. There is a fine line where elements like this can become unfun.

Can we all agree getting kicked in the balls makes it a struggle to stand? I'm not interested in that journey or process. Just saying, minutia matters.

Um. Kinda interesting logical leap there, fella. Graphic, really. But ok....Is that reductio ad absurdum? well honestly im struggling to get the analogy, but lets leave that alllll the way over there, regardless.

So, like whats the deal? The end end end game content with a built-in titanium alloy is unfun hard? My argument is that this argument is unfair.

[Megas]

I get what Locklave posted.  Just because I can win a fight or struggle with it does not necessarily mean it is fun.  Last release, even though I could kill fleets with too many phase ships, fighting them was annoying and I avoided them in favor of more straightforward fights (that my AI can do well in without micromanagement).

Worst were enemy Timid officers in one of the 0.7.x releases.  Easy strategy to win?  Camp on an objective with max skilled Onslaught and wait until Timids run out of PPT and CR, then kill them.  (Everyone else just died to Onslaught.)  Fights took close to an hour.  (And fleet cap was 25 ships back then... for the player only.)

[Space Cowboy]

I felt similarly in my first playthrough on this patch, but now that I'm on to the second I think I've adapted. The issue for me is not that it's too hard necessarily but more that you are pidgeon holed into a handful of op strats. The patch is great overall but I'd like to see more options for how difficulty will scale at the game start. For example maybe a "nomad mode" where colonies and commissions are disabled but enemy fleets don't get so crazy. Or a "static difficulty" mode where there is no difficulty scaling, I think this option would be the most immersive. You would have small bandit fleets and bounty heads from early to late, which seems more realistic, but there would also be more strong fleets that you have to avoid in the early game. Static difficulty would also give you the option of keeping a small fleet and focusing on roleplaying if you're into that sort of thing.

[Rauschkind]

merc officers. lots of merc officers.
also, thats why we cant have nice things later.... like build in SO in every ship.

[Asherogar]

I felt similarly in my first playthrough on this patch, but now that I'm on to the second I think I've adapted. The issue for me is not that it's too hard necessarily but more that you are pidgeon holed into a handful of op strats.

And now the game is pigeonholed into abusing frigates with absolutely cracked officers. Whole skill tree showering you with bonuses for choosing to play smaller ships and nullifying all shortcomings of this playstyle. All the while actively punishing you for choosing bigger ships:
You want to use your range advantage? Sorry bud, all fleets now have 40-70% ECM rating that you can't counter without spamming frigates.
You want to make use of your thicker armor and more powerful shield? Sorry bud, now everything deals +40% dmg to you just because you're enjoying the game wrong.
You want to use your flight decks? Sorry bud, fighters/interceptors are utter garbage against small ships but bombers were not affected, so you can enjoy torpedo barrages from all sides.
You want to make your projectiles faster to have at least a chance to hit something more mobile than station? Sorry bud, you need to choose between essential armor skill and this one.
You want to get some dmg bonuses? Sorry bud, all dmg bonuses now work on big ships only.
You want to use energy mastery? Sorry bud, it's working only at point blank range.
Also remember those control points on a map? Sorry bud, but you either taking them with frigates or fighting enemy fleet while grossly outnumbered.

Officered frigates spam turned into fighters spam 2.0 but worse. With fighters spam player didn't got much experience of being on receiving end of it, vanilla fleets almost never used fighter heavy fleets. But with frigates? Every single one enemy fleet have dozens of them. I missed a moment when the game turned into competitive multiplayer where if you don't follow meta you need to try really hard and be very effective.

In 0.9.1a I used a fleet of single capital + cruisers + occasional destroyers and frigates with 4 decks total. So I have not used capitals spam strategy nor fighters spam. And I still was able to beat any content available. Now I get steamrolled by a single Ordo with no Radiants and after a week of adjusting my fleet I don't see any way to effectively enjoy the game without turning into frigates or turning my cruisers into sudo-frigates by baking SO in them.

Anyway I'm officially moving my residence to salt mines and probably take a couple of weeks off from the game. Maybe there's be a patch of some sort or a mod to make the game enjoyable again.

[furl]

merc officers. lots of merc officers.

Come on, I can't earn 10 story points a year just to keep up with AI fleets. And even if I can I don't want Starsector to become my second job. Games should be fun, not frustrating. And even if some people like frustrating, Dark Souls exists.

[Vind]

-20% range is big deal but with eccm integrated in each ship it is only -10% - surely more manageable?

[Asherogar]

-20% range is big deal but with eccm integrated in each ship it is only -10% - surely more manageable?

You can bake only 3 hullmods max and there's at least half a dozen highter priority mods to bake. Baking hullmods is not an ultimate answer to all problems it's a band-aid solution at best. Also this backed ECCM countering half of an enemy single frigate. Good luck reducing ECM to at least -20%

[Sellias]

merc officers. lots of merc officers.

Come on, I can't earn 10 story points a year just to keep up with AI fleets. And even if I can I don't want Starsector to become my second job. Games should be fun, not frustrating. And even if some people like frustrating, Dark Souls exists.

No please stop with this Dark Souls nonsense. Dark souls is a completely different game and genre.(love the series though)

As a new player the challenge and struggle is exactly what attracted me to Star Sector. And I can't wait to go in blind and get my butt kicked so hard I will be wearing it as a hat.

There is a difficulty option in the game,feeling its too difficult? Set it to easy.

I am sure there are balancing issues of which I have no say in since I am new and know nothing about it (yet).
But if people find it too hard, my question is are you playing on easy? If not then I think the solution is easy by switching to easy.

[furl]

Dark Souls was just for example sake. You get the idea. Anyway, I tried messing with settings.json and found this line:

Code

"maxOfficersInAIFleet":10, # should match what a max-skill player can get

So it is a bug. Hope it gets fixed soon.

[Sellias]

Dark Souls was just for example sake. You get the idea. Anyway, I tried messing with settings.json and found this line:

Code

"maxOfficersInAIFleet":10, # should match what a max-skill player can get

So it is a bug. Hope it gets fixed soon.

If it is a bug, then I also hope it will be changed ASAP.

Regarding the example it is such a overused trope to just wave people off: just go play Dark Souls
While the game has difficulty options for people who find it too hard.

[TaLaR]

Code

"officerAIMaxMercsMult":2, # maximum "over-the-limit" merc-type officers that can be added to an AI fleet, times doctrine officer setting

Wouldn't be so sure about that. Seems up to 20 officers are very much intentional.

[Arakasi]

I wouldn't call the game too hard at the moment, just not really that balanced for the player against the endgame threats. When I ask for fleet compositions to take on the hardest threats in the game all I ever get are "just use the

Spoiler

zig

[close]

", or just phase spam", or "just abuse Derelict Contingent or Safety Overrides with story points". It should be possible to take on these fleets without abusing obviously broken game mechanics, and with a wider variety of fleet compositions provided they're well built and heavily story-pointed.

Part of the problem is that these end-game fleets cannot realistically be fought head on by most standard ships due to their officers coupled with the sheer numbers of them, they almost always have the DP advantage from the get-go and this incentivises playing the objectives much more. This would be fine, except it requires your ships to be much faster than theirs so they can can escape the central mass of enemies and flank to re-acquire the objectives. The issue with this is that (aside from it ruling out most midline and lowtech fleets  ) is that that sort of gameplay is more focused on ordering the AI around the map the whole time from the tac screen (something Alex I know wanted to avoid) AND it requires a lot of CR to be able to slowly pull apart the swarm as individual units break off. Obviously you can do better with the CR if you use skills like Wolfpack Tactics, give them Hardened Subsystems, and bring as many ships as you can, but this is playing counter to the intended design of this patch of having a diverse fleet somewhere between 180-240 DP. It just feels like older patches with capital spam, except instead you're spamming destroyers and frigates and outright avoiding capitals

Spoiler

zig excepted

[close]

.

Ideally I'd like to see it be possible for each design type (low tech, midline, high tech) to be able to tackle the threat in their own ways given they invested in, and are appropriately outfitted. If anyone has done this, especially with low-mid tech, I'd love to see it.

[Immahnoob]

I honestly think the difficulty comes from a lack of tools.
My fleet consists of 2 Champions, 2 Legions, 1 Onslaught, 2 Eagles, 2 Surges and 1 Terminator (there's more, but these are what I tend to use most).
I can beat any type of normal fleet, bounties at 300k are easy peasy, most of the times it's a matter of waiting for the enemy to come at you, but that's it... That's the problem. That's how I play pretty much most bounties until they start to run out of ships. It kind of gets boring.

But what if I meet some Redacted or even a Nexus? There's finally more of a challenge. But my fleet *** itself hard because each one of them is capable of overpowering my shields while keeping theirs up, so I would need some tactics going right?
Well, the AI has superior ships and speed, so they often tend to be able to run away and hide behind their own wall to vent, the same thing does not happen with my ships, they don't do these swaps.
Nexuses have staying power, shields and firepower, so my ships die one by one because they can't hide behind the wall or the wall isn't moving to hide the flux heavy ship, so I need to tank it, which is fine, I'll do it, but what about the other 2-3-4 directions? Those can't be covered because I'm just a single Capital ship and my AI Capitals don't know how to do this.