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[Zakaluka]

I don't know, something happens and I lose interest.

There comes a point where it's suddenly difficult to judge how difficult an encounter is going to be. When, you have to employ more strategy than simply "bring bigger guns". When it's 150 supply vs 150 supply, the game feels different.

Then I find myself save scumming, to experiment with mechanics. Do I need different ships, high tech fleet, low tech fleet, more officers, what? Rotate ships for combat readiness? Because in that 150 vs 150 battle I am just a little bit at a disadvantage, and I want to figure out why.

But I've spoiled the game by scumming.

I delete my save, and start again. The game feels different when you hit that supply cap.

[robepriority]

yeah, having to rotate and deal with reinforcement/PPT simply because there's so much hull to chew through kinda sucks.

Smodding your flagship and officered ships really help them pull those battles off but it sometimes just feels better to turn up fleetsize so you don't have to bother.

[WeiTuLo]

I think I get stuck in an optimization trap, and I optimize the fun out of everything.

[Deshara]

But I've spoiled the game by scumming.

i think this is one of those games that doesn't do itself favors by allowing players to save scum bc at a certain point you get so invested in your run that you strategy and because it should work if something goes wrong you'll reload saves over & over again to make it "go correctly", but its also a little too emergent & systems driven (particularly in the combat) so stuff that should work goes wrong all the time bc of behind the scenes technicalities players dont have enough control over PARTICULARLY THE AI.
The game would be better off (more fun) without the ability to save scum, but it doesn't work quite well enough as-is & if you took away the ability to save-scum you'd be ruining people's ability to play the game at all.

I'm having this issue myself atm. Joined a fleet being attacked by & losing to a tritac carrier fleet one third its size of drovers + 1 astral. without the astral the tri's would lose, so I take my flagship drover with 24 hammer missiles & all speed mods & skills, my HVD brawler and my PD/Pilum Vigilance, drive thru the cloud of drones ahead of the ally fleet, get to the Astral, then all I need is for my brawler to hammer its shields and it... doesn't. I've played this fight at least a dozen times, no matter what I do I cannot get my brawler to do its job -- I have it escort me in until it's in range, then I switch it to eliminate the Astral, and I've even dug out a low-level officer with the Aggressive AI, and no matter what I do it just doesn't. It fires one or two shots sparingly at it, then it flips around & points its front-mounted shields at the nearest enemy Wasp drone behind it until I die, then it doesn't do anything against anyone until it dies. The AI & the elimination command are supposed to make it disregard how much danger it's in, but for some reason the Wasp drones are just being treated as more important of a threat than the Astral. If the combat were a little less systematized & emergent, if I were able to just select it & tell it to ignore fighters manually, tell it to ignore anything that would get in the way of it shooting at the Astral, it'd be fine & I wouldn't need the ability to save scum, but the game just isn't robust enough to be played for any amount of time without it. Which sucks bc the need to save scum is basically the worst thing about the game

[Megas]

Starsector is also a potentially long game.  It is not a short game that can be played in its entirety in an hour or two.

[SCC]

If I could not save scum, I would play the game much more safely, which means also more boring. Safe options (exploration, trading) are better than risky options already, I don't think they should be penalised on top of that.

[Locklave]

I've had the same problem. Once I get big ships I lose so much desire to play. All I look forward too after I have to switch to big ships is planets and they feel ruined. All the hard work building a fleet feels worthless as you replace your hard earned ships with store bought stuff, you couldn't keep the old ships even if you love them because of the arbitrary 30 ship limit. Gotta replace everything with higher value for that 1/30th of your space. Did you have that Mule (P) since the beginning, was it a huge upgrade that helped more that you thought it would, did you add 2 s mods because it was your best ship at the time? Too bad it needs to go.

Building planets up used to keep me going, mid-late game, but they just somehow lost their charm and I don't mean the piles of money they used to give, I mean the feeling of their growth. I can't fully explain it. I feel like I'm in an annoying struggle to find specific colony items to make them useful and the restrictions on them are tedious. This planet is good but it's too far from the sleeper ship/hyperspace shunt and I can't use the farming item because of rare metal/motes and the Orbital fusion lamp I need to remove the cold effect requires 2 planets worth of rich+ motes to power and omg this is suddenly not a great moment anymore it's a giant chore...

[Cirevam]

I feel somewhat similarly. If you don't have good planets, it almost feels like "what do I bother building here?" I have a couple like that in my current playthrough.

This topic makes my mind turn to Dwarf Fortress. That game, like Starsector, also has randomly generated worlds where you can only do certain things if you have certain materials available. But... you get to choose before you start. When you get ready to embark, you get a basic survey of the area you're about to colonize. You can see shallow metals (not which kinds), deep metals, flux stone, the presence of forests and rivers, active volcanos, and more. Many of those things give you hints that certain ores may or may not be available. You get to decide if you want to embark on a metal-poor region and have to import most of your iron.

Starsector does not do this. When you generate a world, you are completely blind until you start surveying manually. There is no deciding that you will do a run with crappy volatiles but lots of ore, or a food-poor run on the fringe. You're stuck with what you get in a game that can take hundreds of hours per playthrough (typically how I play), so getting a planet with farmland and transplutonics feels bad when you've sunk in dozens of hours already. There's no way to remove the transplutonics, so those soil nanites are useless. Yes, it's just +2 food which is basically just more money, but it doesn't feel good. Then there are the taps and fusion lamps that require you to use other planet items in order to bring in enough resources to run them, so there can be layers of disappointment.

Towards the end of .91, I would use the command line mod to "survey all" before I started a run proper, just to see if there were any good planets in that sector (then I'd reload so everything wasn't surveyed). Sometimes there weren't, so I would delete that save and generate a new one. I guess that's save scumming in a sense, but I consider it the equivalent of looking up things in the Prima Strategy Guide.

[Zakaluka]

If I could not save scum, I would play the game much more safely, which means also more boring. Safe options (exploration, trading) are better than risky options already, I don't think they should be penalised on top of that.

I'm not suggesting that the game should force players into a dead-is-dead mode, and that wasn't what I intended to focus on. The game could prepare the player for that drastic change in gameplay at the midgame more gradually. Simple things - make it more obvious when the enemy reinforces (to trigger an "oh I need to be doing that" moment). Officers in reserve ships comm and ask to tag in for fatigued ships during extended fights. Stuff like that.

For me it was really that everything changes so dramatically when you start running into the recovery cap. It feels so different, and that mechanic lead me to total disaster multiple times (to the point of wanting to delete save)

I think I might have gotten past that wall in my present game. Need to S-mod more, have better officers, stronger roles for my combat ships, and extra ships in fleet to rotate through. In capped fights every last stat bonus you can pack in, every bit of efficiency you can get from OP, matters. That's when it truly becomes a strategy game, I think.

[Linnis]

If there was a way to make losing ships fun.

[SCC]

I actually never noticed any drastic shift in gameplay, except for Remnants, but they are an endgame thing, they better be tough. Now, of only they were tough for some other reason than Radiant...

[Skharr]

Nexerelin has Insurance. You even can change how much you get back, if your ships blow up. So you can still kind of "Yolo" your thing, but get a a good sum back if you fail (80% default - the upfront "premium" payment) . So if you want to avoid savescumming, this is a good thing to start with.

I for my part lost a Dreadnought, some Capitals and lot of other ships. Got about 3 Million back. I lost the fight, but this dont felt like a full loss, where i dont have the chance to stand up again.

[Zakaluka]

If there was a way to make losing ships fun.

I can lose ships and move on, even take a major loss and move on, that's not it. It's the specific situation I've lined out here.

When I think the fight is even, when the game seems to think the fight is even, but it's clearly not and there's some reason I have to figure out.

This is a newbie perspective, I know, but that lends it more relevance to game design - not less.

[Vanshilar]

Eh not sure what your specific concern is.

The game starts out with pirates for fodder, then other factions, then [REDACTED]. By design pirates are relatively easy to kill so you have a way to get started with gaining XP and money. What this means is that yes, just about anything will work against them. As you move on to harder content, yes, you have to figure out better loadouts for your ships, better strategies, and get better gear to keep winning. That's how most games work. Getting to the end boss is generally designed to require the player understand the different game mechanics and challenges that the game throws at you.

I don't know what you mean by you save scum and thus spoil the game. You save scum to learn more about how the game works. Then you apply that knowledge to get better equipment, etc. So not sure where the issue is, or why you bother to delete and then start over.

There are some ways to "teach" the player game concepts, and those are gradually being introduced in each new version. The game also has lots of hints, since as the danger level of other fleets, etc., to tell you if you're about to get into a hard fight or not.

I think probably the more difficult concepts to grasp relate to fleet vs fleet combat. The role of low tech vs high tech, hammer vs anvil, flanking, crowd control, aggro management, etc. Also, since you can directly control only one ship, how to be the most effective with your ship, relating to the fleet.

On the latter point, in most games, you get to directly control all the units. You directly tell them to do something and they do it, even if it means sending them to their death, etc. In this game, however, you give more overall "objectives" or "suggestions" to the other ships. They don't do exactly what you tell them to do. So part of the issue is that a lot of times, what the AI of your ships are actually doing is not transparent at all. This makes it more difficult to figure out how to make fleet vs fleet combat work. This may be why you feel okay with smaller fights, but once it gets bigger, your fleet starts not doing well and you don't really know why.

This is part of the learning curve with any game you play though, figuring out how the game works. Eventually you *do* get around to fielding efficient death fleets that go around stomping on other fleets, but that takes time to learn and to get there.