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Author Topic: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)  (Read 3962 times)

Arakasi

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Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« on: April 09, 2021, 10:23:01 PM »

After having spent way too much time exploring the ins and outs of this patch I have some general impressions that I wanted to share.


Story

The story so far is fantastic. Well written, the writing and quest content has a strong connection to the game's mechanics, gives the player a taste of the unknown, and the rewards for doing the quest-line are A+.

I did have a few gripes though. Some of the choices the player gets struck me as strange, such as throwing that guy out the airlock with/without a helmet - I threw him out without a helmet because it seemed preferable to giving him back to an insane pirate warlord, but found it odd there was no choice to let him decide his destiny. And a lack of choice regarding the obvious safety implications leading up to the gate explosion, well, I could see something like that coming a mile away and it's just a shame there isn't a dialogue option to give you a quest that lets you avoid it or something similar, especially after you talk to the researcher about it and she mentions the hardware wizard who will later just make the device. Felt as though I was a bit railroaded on that one. Finally, I noticed that the difficulty was a bit hard to determine going into a mission, it did ramp up pretty consistently, however not knowing what the likely difficulty of the mission was just meant I flew around everywhere with the biggest warfleet I could muster. Some indication of the quest's difficulty relative to your fleet might be nice (similar to the fleet 'stars' system), and/or an indication of whether or not there will be forced combat vs avoidable combat.

I also like the idea of contacts, tying in story characters to become mission-givers is really interesting, and I hope to see more of it in the future.


Exploration

With the introduction of the new stealth logistics ships I was hoping exploration might be a little harder in this patch, since in previous patches I have griped about being able to just sneak around warning beacon systems stealthily salvaging all the best stuff in the game. This had the effect of letting me skip the early-game in many patches or even quickly jumping to colony-development, which is kind of cheesy. I thought the reduced stealth effect from salvaging might force you to actually invest in those phase ships and thereby not allow you to skip the early-game. However. In practice stealth salvage is as good as it ever was, because remnant fleets can't burn to get close to you, its extremely easy with a starting fleet to sneak, salvage at just the right time, and then e-burn or even sustained burn away if they try to chase you. Further, the stealth logistics ships are unknown to any faction, so your hopes of getting them in the transition to early-midgame (where they would be at their maximum use) is more or less random (you would have to find a blueprint and get the sold production slots to build them). Overall I think good steps were made in this patch towards making exploration more risk/reward oriented, but at the moment it is still far too easy to abuse the systems.

My suggestions to fix this would be some mix of the following:
- Up the speed of Remnant fleets to be equal to a sustained burn at burn level 8 from the player. This would make them terrifying unless you invested at least a little in either faster ships or stealth.
- Give them the ability to e-burn. This could work too, but is less scary than the above.
- Let Tri-tach sell the phase logistics ships. They need to be more common if they are to be useful.
- Make it so in order to get the best stuff from Research Stations, Mining Outposts, and Orbital Habs, you need a certain threshold of salvage ability (be that from salvage rigs, or ships with the salvage hullmod). This would obviously require some UI work to warn the player that they might miss out on things if they are not properly salvaged, but it would at least put some barrier to entry on the gameplay and make it so that the best salvage fleets aren't just one fuel ship and one cargo ship (low investment).


Skills and Fleet Balance

This is a touchy subject, I know there's been multiple threads on this, so I'll just lay out some impressions in dot point form.

- I really like the idea of rewarding the player for having a balanced fleet of a certain size. I completely changed up my usual style of endgame gameplay in this patch (capitals, lots of them) to actually making use of frigates and more medium destroyers.

- The skills reward Frigates and Destroyers a lot but they do not do much if anything for capital ships, so in my experience, against the hardest fleets in the game (we'll come back to this later), capitals aside from the Radiant and the Ziggurat are extremely underwhelming. They are too slow to avoid getting swarmed by the main mass of Remnants, and you can't realistically take those fleets in a head-on battle, which makes them actively bad to bring along. This would be different if you weren't limited in back-up ships, but every ship you bring over 240 deployment points makes your main 240 weaker due to the effects of certain skills.

- Derelict Contingent and Story-pointed Safety Overrides are obviously broken - I know Alex knows this, but it can't avoid mentioning it. So much of people's response to 'the endgame is hard' is to just cheese it with these mechanics.

- Battle Size setting now has an even worse relationship to balance than before. What I assumed was meant to be strictly a performance setting, Battle Size now has now has a negative impact on the balance of the game. If you're smart you set the battle size such that it is as close as possible to matching up with 180 deployment points as a maximum, such that you get the most out of your skills (not that I did this, I played at max battle size the whole time). Conversely, if you set the battle size low enough, you can use it to just 1v1 the endgame threats with the Ziggurat and thereby basically avoid playing the game altogether. Unless it is actually a necessary performance setting (doubt it with modern computers) I would remove it. Decide upon the intended battle size and stick to it.

- Dedicated carriers seem a lot worse now. They were undoubtedly too strong in previous patches, but I fear this is an overnerf. The ability of them to be able to project force at huge distances is supposed to be balanced by their fragility, but their ability to project force has been sorely reduced. They are at their best now as dedicated Longbow Carriers, which while it can be useful, doesn't often make up for their battle vulnerability especially against later fleets.

- Automated ships skill - I had been looking forward to this one a lot and it did not disappoint. The Radiant is obviously an insane ship and it is definitely can be worth giving up the other very strong skill to get access to it. I also understand limiting its combat readiness and the ability to use more remnant ships with it - however I feel as though it is also the only reasonable option, and it would be nice if the balance was a little more straightforward, e.g. 'you can take 1 Radiant (w/alpha core), or 2 Brilliants (w/alpha cores), or 4 Glimmers (w/alpha cores)' etc. It is also a shame I think that there is no Domain capital on par with the Radiant that you could salvage and choose.

- Phase ships are completely off the balance scale. I'm not really speaking from experience here, but next to 'just use DC and SO' the most common response to how to beat the endgame content is 'just use a DOOM and Harbringers'. Pretty easy to see why when you think about it, they can functionally ignore range, can burst down shields, and can wield the best anti-hull weapons in the game for maximum effectiveness. Not sure how you fix this one, maybe you can do it by just tweaking the appropriate skills (perhaps to limit their max combat readiness peak time) but I'm not sure.

- Edit: Forgot to mention Reliability Engineering. It is perhaps the single most important officer skill for late-game engagements, especially for frigates, and especially given the bonuses extra CR provides and the likely length of those engagements. It's extremely strong and I don't know whether you want to make that worse or other skills like Damage Control better.


Endgame Content and Balance

I'll just lay out my points in dot point form again here.

- The Ziggurat and unique weapons are extremely cool, but since they are unique (and the weapons are not infinitely farmable) they encourage save scumming, or not playing with them if you're trying to play ironman unless you know you are going to win a battle. The risk you take as an ironman player in using them infinitely outweighs the reward. If there was some mechanic which could let you recover the Zigg despite having actually lost a battle, and some way to get access to more Tesseract weapons, this would not be an issue.

- Following up from the above, I think the final bounty fleet should be infinitely farmable as end-game content to get the new weapons. Encourages the risk reward gameplay I mentioned above - want the best weapons in the game? Beat the best fleet in the game! Bring along your omega weapons and risk losing them to try and win!

- Because of the way Remnants are (extremely strong shields, huge range, reasonably fast) the best fleets to kill them almost always wind up being high tech, not just phase, because they have the best shields, flux management, and speed that allow them to get in into range, and the speed to flee when they are overwhelmed. This makes them good at picking off the Remnants one by one and grinding these huge fleets down, the Remnants have no way to pin the high tech ships down with their central mass. They just get 1v1'd until the fight is over. Compare using a midline or lowtech fleet that has to actually contest the central bulk of remnants and its no bueno, you can't reasonably beat 2-3 Radiants in a head on fight even with a couple of long range capitals and destroyers, especially given they can just warp away behind their frontlines if things start to go wrong, or warp in to take advantage of a ship that is slightly out of position. If anyone has a midline or lowtech fleet (with no cheese, no ziggurat, etc.) that can defeat the 4x Radiant all alpha core bounty I'll gladly eat my words here, but I could not at all make it work.

- The Coronal Hypershunts being able to add 1 industry is cool, but until there's some punishment for using Alpha Core administrators or some threat to your systems that can actually theoretically force more investment in defenses over industry, its pretty useless for the amount of investment you need to do it. Just investing a lot of money and time to be able to make marginally more money when you can already make functionally infinite just by founding more colonies. Would be much more interesting imo if it supercharged your ability to defend your systems and there was some sort of threat that (while not requiring it to be defeated) would be significantly easier if you did have it. An Omega invasion that only happens once every 20 years or something similar perhaps.

- Unique Weapons are very cool, and I do really enjoy the idea of missiles with an unlimited capacity but that cost flux to fire. A few of them don't seem overwhelmingly broken either, and I hope to see more regular missiles like this to be employed in more protracted engagements. I would like to suggest however that the missile officer skill slightly increase the rate at which missiles reload, perhaps at a cost of less extra missiles if this becomes a change in design philosophy.

- Using story points to build in hullmods is cool and good, but I wish there was more reason to not just pick the highest costed mods to build in. Maybe a limit on the max amount of OP you can build in rather than a limit on the number of points you can spend, and each story point just gives you access to that hullmod-specific OP.


Overall

I very much enjoyed this patch and look forward to more in the future. I am concerned about endgame content and balance, but I trust you'll be able to hammer out the kinks over time.
« Last Edit: April 09, 2021, 10:43:27 PM by Arakasi »
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Ryan390

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #1 on: April 10, 2021, 05:49:48 AM »

After having spent way too much time exploring the ins and outs of this patch I have some general impressions that I wanted to share.


Story

The story so far is fantastic. Well written, the writing and quest content has a strong connection to the game's mechanics, gives the player a taste of the unknown, and the rewards for doing the quest-line are A+.


Disagree on that part, I thought the story was far to textual and wasn't a fan of the writing either. It seemed completely detached from the game's mechanics for the most part. Also you mention rewards, but from my understanding there's only one actual reward you get? It's mostly just flying from point A to B, only to talk to someone then fly back to point A.
I thought the alpha site mission was really cool but it was the only part that I felt any suspense or real excitement. It felt like a chore to me to do endless reading about characters I had no emotional attachment too, to progress a storyline that I already knew was coming.

It felt purposely dragged out and very laborious personally. happy to be the minority here who thinks that.


On a side note:
I wasn't a fan of the skill system but it was ok for the most part. The biggest gripe was getting the Automation skill and a bunch of alpha core's apparently isn't enough to have more than one Drone in the fleet and not have terrible CR.
Not transparent at all about how autonomous ships should be properly incorporated into a fleet and actually be useable.

Balance I think is the worst I've seen this version, some fleets seem un-winnable now and every single battle the player can't deploy a fraction of a fleet.
So if we had two massive fleets in space and fly into each other, half of our ships won't be able to do battle? Eh? How does that feature make sense.

I believe it's an issue with A.I officers and other skills causing a big penalty for the players deployment points. Seems unnecessary as a mechanic, just let fleets fight for god sake.

I think this'll be it for me too until 1.0 now and hopefully some of these issues can be fixed and the story picks up several knots in the meantime.
Good luck though and see you in 1.0 I guess.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2021, 05:59:30 AM by Ryan390 »
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Megas

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #2 on: April 10, 2021, 05:59:55 AM »

I just started the Galatian quests very late (after about four years) so I can roll over most fights I anticipate from the quests.  I may post a feedback topic of my own sometime later.

It felt purposely dragged out and very laborious personally. happy to be the minority here who thinks that.
I was like "Yeah! Yeah! Just gimme the missions to unlock any unique quest rewards I should get."
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Amoebka

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #3 on: April 10, 2021, 06:07:11 AM »

I wouldn't call the writing bad or good, it's merely competent. Cue the J. Carmack quote about plot in videogames. What I didn't like is how the story railroads you into playing a certain type of character - the one that runs errands for more important people and takes verbal abuse from them. Given how a player character right now can have an empire that rivals Sindria this just feels WAY off tonally. I would much prefer if to open the gates you found some early lead during exploration and then contracted scientists to work for you on your own terms.

Running around remnants has become more dangerous. Radiant is now burn 8 instead of 7, so ordos are faster.

Battle size is set at 300, pretty much. Any more, and you are making boss fights easier.

Between the unique losable ship, unique losable weapons, and s-mods I really feel like the game is becoming less ironman-friendly. We need the ability to recover lost ships after defeat, even if for an insane story point cost.
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Warnoise

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #4 on: April 10, 2021, 06:13:47 AM »

I found the writing is the weakest point of the game. So many unnecessary words and even whole parts that add nothing to the context. Some of the dialogues are also very low quality.

The story is ok though, the characters however are bland and extremely forgettable.
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Arakasi

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #5 on: April 10, 2021, 06:22:36 AM »

Disagree on that part, I thought the story was far to textual and wasn't a fan of the writing either. It seemed completely detached from the game's mechanics for the most part. Also you mention rewards, but from my understanding there's only one actual reward you get? It's mostly just flying from point A to B, only to talk to someone then fly back to point A.
I thought the alpha site mission was really cool but it was the only part that I felt any suspense or real excitement. It felt like a chore to me to do endless reading about characters I had no emotional attachment too, to progress a storyline that I already knew was coming.

It felt purposely dragged out and very laborious personally. happy to be the minority here who thinks that.

I don't know how it could be anything much other than textual, it's sort of the old school of RPG writing which I really appreciate. Big blocks of text to sink my teeth into that get me more into the world and the characters. But I can understand why that wouldn't be someone's cup of tea. Not having an attachment to the characters I understand, but I don't think you're meant to in this moment, they're just the people providing your paycheck and you interact with them in a way that displays that for the most part. And I dunno, I was pretty freaked out when I started to see Tri-Tach death squads with full story point investment. But then again I couldn't see what was coming, I'm curious what you mean by the remark that you 'I already knew was coming'.

Balance I think is the worst I've seen this version, some fleets seem un-winnable now and every single battle the player can't deploy a fraction of a fleet.
So if we had two massive fleets in space and fly into each other, half of our ships won't be able to do battle? Eh? How does that feature make sense.

I understand and agree that it's frustrating the way DP works now, at least until you understand it and play to its strengths (and even then it still needs work for sure). Really just have to resist the urge to play the way we've been taught to up until now and play in accordance with what the skill bonuses give you. Only then can you start to tackle those so-called unwinnable fleets.

I wouldn't call the writing bad or good, it's merely competent. Cue the J. Carmack quote about plot in videogames. What I didn't like is how the story railroads you into playing a certain type of character - the one that runs errands for more important people and takes verbal abuse from them. Given how a player character right now can have an empire that rivals Sindria this just feels WAY off tonally. I would much prefer if to open the gates you found some early lead during exploration and then contracted scientists to work for you on your own terms.

This I can kind of get behind, it can be tonal whiplash to have some sniveling academic tell you what's what while you have the power to wipe all the factions she relies upon and frets over off the map. But at the same time I understand that a story like this in an open world has its limits - it can't reasonably predict what sort of player you are or risk completely missing the mark. Always has to be sort of generalised or open itself up to a tree of infinite possibilities you simply can't expect from a game of this scope (and even from the big videogame stories honestly).

Running around remnants has become more dangerous. Radiant is now burn 8 instead of 7, so ordos are faster.

Battle size is set at 300, pretty much. Any more, and you are making boss fights easier.

Between the unique losable ship, unique losable weapons, and s-mods I really feel like the game is becoming less ironman-friendly. We need the ability to recover lost ships after defeat, even if for an insane story point cost.

I haven't found it to be significantly more dangerous aside from when you engage them because they are immeasurably more powerful than they were in prior patches.

As for battle size, you set it to 300 instead of 400 and suddenly your skills become much better because you are closer to bringing the optimal DP worth of ships (180) as opposed to 400 where you're bringing 240 worth of ships if you want to compete. Certainly it'll make fights against smaller fleets easier but conversely it makes fights against bigger fleets much harder.

And yes, absolutely agree r.e. ironmanning. Really want a feature like that to mitigate this issue.
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Amoebka

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #6 on: April 10, 2021, 06:28:08 AM »

What I'm saying is that battle size isn't much of a thing to argue about. Alex said himself that he balances the game around 300. The reason 180 is the cutoff for skills is exactly because you aren't supposed to ever have more than 180 DP.
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Arakasi

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #7 on: April 10, 2021, 06:34:29 AM »

What I'm saying is that battle size isn't much of a thing to argue about. Alex said himself that he balances the game around 300. The reason 180 is the cutoff for skills is exactly because you aren't supposed to ever have more than 180 DP.

Oh really? I didn't realise he directly said that. Would be nice if the game indicated that in some manner.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2021, 06:43:41 AM by Arakasi »
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Megas

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #8 on: April 10, 2021, 06:46:44 AM »

Running around remnants has become more dangerous. Radiant is now burn 8 instead of 7, so ordos are faster.
It also means I do not need Augmented Engines on Radiant when I have it in my fleet, unlike most other capitals.  Instead, I get Efficiency Overhaul so that it gets out of the yellow quickly after one fight.  (49% CR max with beta core is brutal.)

300 battle size is too small.  Feels more like a Star Control melee tournament or Mortal Kombat endurance match instead of a fleet battle.
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Amoebka

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #9 on: April 10, 2021, 06:48:00 AM »

Quote
I generally have it set to 300 and that's the "primarily intended/target battle size". Things will be a bit different with it set low or high, yeah, but I don't think to the extent of, say, making frigates useless. With 200 DP (40% of 500; assuming an endgame fight where you're going to start out down in DP almost no matter what), you can still only deploy, what, 3-4 capitals. And if you have 300 DP, that's... still enough for *some* variety - or, rather, enough that you can't fit only caps in there. And going all caps does give up on a potential slew of fleetwide bonuses.
From the "Personal Contacts" discussion thread. Don't shoot the messanger, shoot Alex.  :D
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Megas

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #10 on: April 10, 2021, 06:52:55 AM »

From the "Personal Contacts" discussion thread. Don't shoot the messanger, shoot Alex.  :D
Since Alex reads the forums, he gets shot too!

When did he post that?  Early when Hegemony System Defense Fleet was the biggest, baddest fleet to defeat (about 200k bounty size), or during v0.9a+ with its gigantic enemy fleets.  EDIT:  Nevermind, that was a blog during 0.9.1a.  300 battle size was way too small during that release.  Fights devolved into about 3v3 that often took two rounds to finish (due to more delays and PPT countdown).  500 map size felt more reasonable during 0.9.1a.  Again, felt more like an endurance match of a fighting game than a fleet battle.

I just progressed enough that 250+k bounties are commonplace, and capital spam from 0.9.1a is alive and well today.  300 battle size is too small to have a satisfying fleet battle.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2021, 06:57:08 AM by Megas »
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bob888w

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #11 on: April 10, 2021, 06:53:13 AM »

I personally loved the story. I started it straight out of the gate since some redownloading shenanigans ment I had to redo the tutorial, so I knew about galtica right away. Starting from there the story works great, the acadmey basically gives you free loans without time limits and the missions let you meet people straight from the old lore such as Daub and Kanta. The text based adventure and long passages really let me enjoy the worldbuidling.  That being said, I think the storyline should honestly need a fastfoward feature as I think multiple playthroughs just don't fit this type of storytelling
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Amoebka

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #12 on: April 10, 2021, 07:00:47 AM »

Guess it turns into fighting matches if you insist on using nothing but capitals. Playing with 300 total I usually get to deploy 1-2 capitals and a whole bunch of destroyers/frigates.

When I got 180 dp for the omega fight I deployed 3 capitals and didn't even know what to use the rest for because I was unused to such generosity.  :D Deployed a bunch of frigates, shame they didn't make it.
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Megas

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #13 on: April 10, 2021, 07:05:31 AM »

I did last release.  Now I cannot because of objectives, and player needs DP to not get run over by the enemy.  I do not like that this release really pushes frigates, partly because they do not have enough PPT unless player min-maxes that stat.  (I do not want to retreat frigates every fight because they ran out of gas mid-fight.)  The best support for frigates is Wolfpack Tactics, which I cannot get if I want 5/5/5 in Combat/Leadership/Industry.

I like big ships because they have the PPT to last a while in fights.  Also, I like piloting a big ship and act like Godzilla smashing Tokyo.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2021, 07:08:07 AM by Megas »
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Arakasi

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Re: Final Impressions of 9.5 (Spoilers)
« Reply #14 on: April 10, 2021, 07:08:16 AM »

Guess it turns into fighting matches if you insist on using nothing but capitals. Playing with 300 total I usually get to deploy 1-2 capitals and a whole bunch of destroyers/frigates.

When I got 180 dp for the omega fight I deployed 3 capitals and didn't even know what to use the rest for because I was unused to such generosity.  :D Deployed a bunch of frigates, shame they didn't make it.

This was my final fleet setup on 240dp to be clear:
Spoiler
[close]
As I said in the OP, capitals aside from the Zig and Radiant are actively bad for the later (Remnant specifically) bounties and fleets.
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