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[Sutopia]

I don't get the point of an super expensive neural link hullmod for radiants, just S-Mod it.

It has been mentioned in multiple threads and replies that Neural X hullmods are not S-Mod-able.

As you have mentioned, how tight is the guardrail against potential respec cheese as of S mods? There are multiple ways a player can temporarily put away a ship full of S mods for reclaiming later.

[Rauschkind]

i enjoyed reading the blog post, sounds like great improvements are comming. very exiting.

one thought i had was that i really do not care so much about safe game compatiblity. its a pre-release game anyway, i think most of us expect that any upgrade might break an older game. i mean, yeah. its nice to have, but id generally would appriciate another piece of progress then safe game compatiblity where i would most likely start a new game after major changes anyhow.

[Alex]

A small hammer torpedo slot comes with 2 ammo and a 1 second reload time, so (in theory, decent aim permitting) it can trigger the damage nerf and sneak in a full damage shot by itself, whereas that same OP worth of Reaper either needs support or gambles with hitting the damage nerf and turning into a dud.

I mean, this just doesn't hold up in practice! And if you land a single Reaper on a heavily armored capital (i.e. the Radiant, in this case), much of its damage potential will be spent on armor anyway, and calling that a dud is a bit much. I do understand your logic here, but I don't think it adds up - and playtesting bears that out. Reapers feel powerful.

(And Hammers have a slew of other practical problems, too...)

Hmm - genuinely not sure what you mean! I'm not seeing how any of these changes would make them "more OP".

Same ability and cloak CD, more HP and armor. You think that speed limit after 50% flux will do the thing, but under 50% there is no difference. And then you allow to install mod for 75% cap. What could go wrong?

Ahhh! The speed penalty *maxes out* when the ship is at 50% max flux, and stays maxed from 50 to 100%. But it begins as soon as hard flux level is above zero, so e.g. at 25% hard flux, it'd have half the penalty - so, a 33% reduction in max speed at that point already. Which, funnily enough - happens to be the exact number you're suggesting there

I agree. I d like to see more QoL stuff and, may be, some more ways to attack other factions from different "angles". Culture victory by making every citizen happy? I ll take 2! =)

I don't get the point of an super expensive neural link hullmod for radiants, just S-Mod it.

Per my earlier responses here, you can't s-mod it in! Otherwise it wouldn't have much point, yeah.

Hmmmmm
Cybernetic Augmentation... is not an officer skill

I have a few guesses

1. Increase the upper limit of coordinated maneuvers and EW
(Same effect as 0.91 Command Control level 3)

2. Allow officer elite skill reassignment and pick any personality (shown in Twitter)

3. Increase auto-fire accuracy across the board (including fighters)

4. Increase weapon hit strength during armor damage calculation

These are all just old skills but missing in latest (except for #2.)

Some good guesses, but none of them are correct

As you have mentioned, how tight is the guardrail against potential respec cheese as of S mods? There are multiple ways a player can temporarily put away a ship full of S mods for reclaiming later.

I'm having a hard time seeing how it could be avoided. It'd have to be something like a mod cloning a ship.

i enjoyed reading the blog post, sounds like great improvements are comming. very exiting.

Thank you!

one thought i had was that i really do not care so much about safe game compatiblity. its a pre-release game anyway, i think most of us expect that any upgrade might break an older game. i mean, yeah. its nice to have, but id generally would appriciate another piece of progress then safe game compatiblity where i would most likely start a new game after major changes anyhow.

I mean, fair! But I think a lot of people do care about it. And in this case it wasn't too much effort to make it work. I mean, I wouldn't want to spend a ton of time on it, either - at some point it's counter-productive - but in this case it was doable with a bit of forethought and a modicum of effort.

[Sordid]

Another mostly disappointing read. The overarching problem seems to be something that's plagued Starsector for years, stinginess with player power ("but not too game-changing"). A whole +5 top speed? Woo-hoo, that'll make all the difference in a fight! I said it for years, I'll say it again: Starsector is a power fantasy, finding ways to attain excessive power is what makes such games fun, and perfect balance is a detriment in that respect. It seems this realization was almost reached in the Neural Link + Automated Ships section ("it's way too strong but also really fun"), but then a nerf was applied instead. Fun overload detected, deploy emergency nerfs!

Thumbs up for removing colony skills and for phase ship changes, those were sorely needed.

[Deshara]

I'm gonna idiot-check you (boy is there ever a phrase that doesn't translate well...) on the problem with all the weird edge cases ur dealing with RE: permanent skills to prevent respecc cheesing. Why not just allow the cheese but make it cost? You could make respeccing (after you leave the skills menu) lose you the elite tier of permanent skills* you abandoned, then in order to get that elite tier back you have to spend another story point to re-elite it. Now, every time you cheese the respecc it costs you 2 story points; the game doesn't take away the things you got from the cheese, just the ability to keep getting them.

So if you respecc cheese an elite tier that gives a hullmod, the hullmod is still on the ships you put it on, but you can't put it on any other ships after that without spending another skill point & story point to reacquire that skill & its elite tier (or 2 story points to respecc & upgrade).
Or, flux vents/capacitors increase; let players respecc cheese the elite skill to unlock the increase to capacity, stick extra on the ships they want/need it on then respecc off of it. Any ships they acquire after that are stuck in normal capacity unless they re-spend the resources reacquiring it. You could even make salvaging ships have a chance to/always set their vents/capacitors down to 0 or at least back down to the cap if it's over, so that losing a ship becomes a threat when you've spent 2 story points getting its reactor past spec.
In fact, it seems like the only thing you'd need to make any permanent elite skill work fine while allowing the respecc cheese is a way -- or reason, to lose the thing you got from it. To whit, the only thing I can think of that doesn't fit that criteria rn is officers, since there's no way or reason** to lose them after u get ones u want.

** bbbbbbbbuuuuuuuuut, i happen to recall some individual who sounded pretty smart and handsome make a post suggesting the ability to sell(?) fully trained officers for story points. *eyebrows waggle suggestively*
* permanent skills would need to be renamed. Impermanent skills? Temporary skills? Transient skills? This kind of skill?

edit: also if you feel player controlled redacted is too much you could balance neural integrator a little more, not by making it less effective or cost more than it does, but by also making it guarantee that the ship is lost for good if it dies in battle. So you do get to play with the super special fun toy, but you better not drop it or daddy alex will take it away. Which would make it, not only fun, but also more tense than piloting a normal ship. (also if you were me, and thank god you arent, id make installing neural integrator toggle ironman mode on until the ship it's on has been lost. just as a small act of cruelty. call it a mysterious act of the AI god's love. even when you think you've tamed it it makes you suffer, just to prove your dedication to it)

[Morrokain]

Another mostly disappointing read. The overarching problem seems to be something that's plagued Starsector for years, stinginess with player power ("but not too game-changing"). A whole +5 top speed? Woo-hoo, that'll make all the difference in a fight! I said it for years, I'll say it again: Starsector is a power fantasy, finding ways to attain excessive power is what makes such games fun, and perfect balance is a detriment in that respect. It seems this realization was almost reached in the Neural Link + Automated Ships section ("it's way too strong but also really fun"), but then a nerf was applied instead. Fun overload detected, deploy emergency nerfs!

I don't disagree with you in concept since Starsector is a single player game, but I kind of think of it like this:

It's more that you don't want one aptitude capstone skill to be ridiculously better than all the others. It's not that you want to nerf fun, as you say, so much as it is you don't want one really fun thing to nerf all the rest of the fun of other choices - because its not really a choice then! So when most people are talking about reasonable balance (not perfect balance, mind you, as I don't think anyone is really advocating for that from what I've seen) that is mostly what they mean.

Granted I didn't play the game long, but one of Oblivion's problems for me was that going an archer (at least early game) was just... better... than anything else. Not the "optimal choice" for a min-maxer, I'm talking trivializing the content level better vs really, really, struggling if you wanted to, say, use magic primarily (what an awful, awful magic system who came up with that??).

For a role playing game, there honestly weren't many viable roles, imo. You could rubber-band the controller while sneaking in a corner near an enemy to get max sneak and "win" the game, or you could go archer and mostly "win" the game be running backwards and head-shotting everything. Even with better gear, if the enemy can't catch you...

Good luck being a mage, or even a paladin-like character.

So in that sense, I think the Neural Link adjustment for the Radiant is very reasonable, because otherwise that might fall into that sort of category. Go Automated Ships, Neural Link, cap Radiant - win.

Go Best of the Best - feel really let down by how terrible it is in comparison.

[bobucles]

The one issue is the Phase Anchor hullmod (the one that makes the ship slower, but with a higher phase-time multiplier) – the ship just feels too slow to fly, and the extra time multiplier doesn’t feel like enough to make up for it. So that’s something I’d like to take another look at.

This one is probably an easy fix. Its main goal is to boost brawlers, by effectively giving better flux/weapon recharge? Skip the time acceleration, and just do that:
- Weapon cooldowns +30% faster during cloak
- Soft flux dissapation +30% during cloak
- +30% ability recharge during cloak

The 4x/-speed combo also hurts the overall distance a phase ship can wander during its PPT. That can be duplicated with:
- PPT burns 30% faster during cloak
But who wants to have bad things on their hull mods? 

[Mordodrukow]

Ahhh! The speed penalty *maxes out* when the ship is at 50% max flux, and stays maxed from 50 to 100%. But it begins as soon as hard flux level is above zero, so e.g. at 25% hard flux, it'd have half the penalty - so, a 33% reduction in max speed at that point already. Which, funnily enough - happens to be the exact number you're suggesting there

Now it sounds good =)

[SCC]

I think disjoining colony and player skills is a good idea, though it leaves Industry in a funny place, since the most money-oriented tree misses any boosts to the best money makers in the game. I'm not sure if the changes will be enough to make Industry less of a "lose less" tree, but we'll see. New Industry personal skills certainly do look tasty, at least.

...On the phase ships thing, I'll just say that the current phase mastery elite bonus is very much a quality-of-life thing for me; I don't like playing phase ships without that because the fastest way to travel is using phase... and that costs you your zero flux speed boost, making it feel slow. Losing that will be annoying.

Yeah, I get that. I mean, you could get Phase Coil Tuning for half that bonus, and Unstable Injector is there, etc, but yeah. That one stings a bit but I don't think there's any good way around that.

I think it would be better to be able to switch how much time dilation you want to experience, when it comes to quality of life. Speed is an in-game statistic and it very much has an impact on the game - as I have demonstrated, the bigger, the more speed you have.

(Sadly, that notation no longer makes much sense. Maybe we can call it, like... T3C. Or just T33.)

That skill is called "Cybernetic Augmentation", but beyong that,

Or 333 even! Full on robot speak. Though I don't think this notation of mine has a long life ahead of it, mainly because of the rather substantial combat tier 1 selection. We will just learn names of all the skills and use those.

The more I think about it, the more I think an additional speed penalty on top of the of the 1/3rd at high flux sounds like a bit too much stacking penalty.  If I understand it correctly, from the pilot's perspective, a Harbinger with Phase Anchor and 50% or higher hard flux moves at a speed 13.3 (80/3 -> 26.6/2 -> 13.3), which roughly half the speed of an Onslaught for a human pilot.  That's going to feel painful to pilot a destroyer at.  Even reducing it to 25% means speed 20 (26.6*0.75 = 20), although which with 4x time dilation means standard out of phase speed of 80.

The benefits of 4x time dilation relative to 3x are: 25% faster soft flux dissipation, 25% faster weapon cycling, 25% faster ship system cycling, and 25% faster movement speed relative to real time.  Adding a speed reduction eliminates the last advantage, literally turning it into faster gun/system cycling at the cost of player patience while trying to move.

The disadvantages are 25% faster hard flux accumulation, and 25% faster peak performance time tick down.  Say it's a 25% speed penalty from the Anchor mod, so real time speed stays the same.  The hard flux cost per unit distance covered in phase has gone up by 33%.  Which means such a mod makes it more likely you simply get killed when it comes time to run away as your hard flux will be higher than compared to a ship that didn't have that hull mod.

...

What I'm thinking about is having it reduce the hard flux threshold instead, so that it hits max speed penalty at 25% instead of at 50%. That way you'd have a tougher time getting into an "assassinate" type position, but would have enough room to back off and vent, especially with some support to hide behing. Reducing the phase cloak cooldown could be good here, too, or perhaps just overall reducing the damage taken. And perhaps combining all this with a 5x multiplier. Need to try a bunch of things and see how it all feels, though - that's just assorted ideas at this point, nothing concrete.

Something for brawlers would be something that reduced cloak cooldown, cloak activation cost or time dilation in phase, or all of the above.

[Sordid]

I think the Neural Link adjustment for the Radiant is very reasonable, because otherwise that might fall into that sort of category. Go Automated Ships, Neural Link, cap Radiant - win.

Go Best of the Best - feel really let down by how terrible it is in comparison.

Yes, but that's a reason to buff Best of the Best, not nerf Neural Link. This comes back to the overarching point of Alex being stingy with player power. He accidentally opened this particular tap more than he intended, saw that it was really fun, and then proceeded to close it again rather than open up all the other ones too. That's just... wrong. On every level.

[bobucles]

It's certainly more fun to play with over tuned talents than under tuned. Star sector is a single player campaign after all. If it feels like good, fun talents stand out because other trees lack that same punch, it may be worth trying to improve those trees instead.


For example, safety overrides is one of the most game changing hull mods there is. Perhaps a talent should target it directly? The concept of reckless ship design doesn't fit in leadership, combat or technology. It'd be right at home as an industry skill.

[Megas]

As you have mentioned, how tight is the guardrail against potential respec cheese as of S mods? There are multiple ways a player can temporarily put away a ship full of S mods for reclaiming later.

The blog says cheapest one gets removed for those not in your fleet, while you choose for those in your fleet.

I see BotB useful for removing built-in Augmented Engines from Ziggurat (if player added it but then later needs to remove Augmented Engies for another s-mod and more combat power), since player can get only one.  Respec to get BotB, add third s-mod, respec again to get old skills, remove Augmented Engines.

For example, Augmented Engines and Heavy Armor for Ziggurat, but player needs different s-mods but cannot get another Ziggurat to replace the one he got.  Respec skills and get BotB and third s-mod, say... Hardened Subsystems.  Respec skills again and get original skills without BotB.  Remove Augmented Engines.

With s-mods being able to be removed by respec-ing BotB on and off, it would be nice if there was another easier way to remove s-mods, especially from unique or limited ships like Ziggurat.

[Sutopia]

Yeah I was referring to ship clones, or somehow ship stored as variant instead of actual ship, as those may not be referenced by the collection you built.

But I guess that’s mod’s responsibility to keep track of that. Is there an API for mod to log or query the collection?

[EclipseRanger]

I think the new skills changes are a step in the right direction:agency for the player and emphasis on their general playstyle without forcing absolute overspecialization.

Just one question if it can be answered:Is Auxiliary Support changed in any way???It felt relativey weak in its current implementation,mostly because of the crippling DP limit.6 DP is barely enough to fit one small civilian ship,and since no one in their right mind would run Auxiliary Support to buff,say,a Phaeton,that leaves Combat Freighters,which means an entire skill point is spent making a Gemini somewhat stronger which feel immensely weak.

[Sutopia]

I think the new skills changes are a step in the right direction:agency for the player and emphasis on their general playstyle without forcing absolute overspecialization.

Just one question if it can be answered:Is Auxiliary Support changed in any way???It felt relativey weak in its current implementation,mostly because of the crippling DP limit.6 DP is barely enough to fit one small civilian ship,and since no one in their right mind would run Auxiliary Support to buff,say,a Phaeton,that leaves Combat Freighters,which means an entire skill point is spent making a Gemini somewhat stronger which feel immensely weak.

Removed.