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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)  (Read 1225 times)

Sutopia

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Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« on: July 03, 2021, 04:43:42 AM »

OP:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22185

The post is mainly for my self reference. If you want to reply, go to OP.
If this is against the forum rule please PM, let me know and delete the post


Worth noting, also, is that the Radiant is now 60 deployment points - and, of course, the Automated Ships threshold is tuned to work with that. But the point is that other automated ships may be worth another look; in particular the Rampart, which is now only 15 points and brings a fair bit of firepower.

Re: d-mods, that's a good point and something I didn't mention. The non-combat d-mods that can end up on combat ships now come with a reduction to maximum CR, so that they have *some* effect on combat performance. So, Degraded Life Support, Increased Maintenance, and Faulty Automated Systems. (None of these can roll for automated ships, btw, since that penalty would have an outsized effect there...)

I did, actually! It's now "Tactical Drills", boosts 240 points worth of ships (but with only +5% damage - I try to keep bonuses meatier, but +10% fleetwide is just... too much), and indeed buffs your marines.

I *am* prepared for this one, actually! The game doesn't limit what you can put the hullmod on - just, only the first two ships with it on the battlefield are linked, assuming you're in one of them. If one is destroyed, the remaining one can link with another ship, etc.

The hullmod also can't be built in - not to prevent exploits, but to 1) keep SO company and 2) it's a cheap mod and it's not a great idea to do it since you might want to remove it and it's a waste of an s-mod slot, anyway.

(Regarding comment about baseline should make an alpha radiant at 60%)
Hmm. Let me take a look - I might've mixed up some numbers or just mis-remembered exactly where it's at in 0.95a. ... yeah, let me just raise the threshold to 120 points, at least - so that it's at 50% and out of debuff range.

(You do have the option of giving it an extra 10% (or even 15%) CR, though 10% involves going up into Industry, and making that 15% involves going all the way up into Leadership, as well.)

I've increased the XP to get from level 1 to 5 a decent amount, and from 5 to 10 by a smaller amount. Nothing drastic, though. Oh, also - only of interest for modded games, but raising the level cap will no longer mess with the SP gain rate once you reach max level.

I'm not saying that redefining the trees by a more strictly game-mechanics-driven meta-organization is wrong or anything, I just don't like it as much as what we're used to. I suspect that Technology will still be the player's first stop if they want to make their ships into hotrods (now that I'm thinking about it, will Tech still have a +10/10 vents/caps skill?), and having the ultimate hotrod skill in a different tree, one that feels less focused on this kind of tweaking, seems pretty weird when you're not looking at it in relation to the whole design philosophy.

Fair! The 10/10 effect is now 5/5 and rolled into Flux Regulation, btw (which gives +10% instead of what it used to).

To be quite honest, you're just cheesing the battle size mechanics at that point - that's not something I can really worry about as a balancing concern. I think ideally the game would be played at battle size 400.

I don't think that's a good solution. That basically makes it so that a Reaper (1× 4K damage, reduced to 1900) will end up doing less damage than two Hammers fired back to back (first hit gets reduced to 900, second hit gets the full 1500, total 2400 damage). Not to mention that any weapon that has high per-shot damage balanced by low rate of fire (either directly or indirectly by means of high flux cost) will be severely reduced in usefulness.

The numbers are a bit off - since "-25% hull damage" from the base skill applies first. But "more small hits do more damage than fewer large hits" is an intrinsic property of the effect. For example, without the "every 2 seconds" rule, a Reaper deals 1500 out of its 4000 potential damage, while 6 shots dealing 500 damage each deal 3000 out of their potential 3000 damage.

Edit: with regards to fighters, I was talking from the persective of a interceptor/support fighter user, not the bomber user, and that +100 target leading elite bonus was soooo good
Ah! 50% of that bonus went to Fighter Uplink.

Although I do have a few questions.  Given we now have percentage reductions in deployment points for ships, will they be allowed to be fractional, or will they be rounded?  For example, does a Lasher without officer and under Support Doctrine cost 3 DP, 3.2 DP or 4 DP to deploy?  And does Support Doctrine add with or multiply with the reduction from Derelict operations (20+30=50% off DP costs?).  That will allow for some interesting fighter saturation attempts.  Assuming they add, and if you get choosy with your D-mods, you can get something like 18 Herons worth of fully operational fighters in 180 DP (or 36?! Condors).
They're rounded so e.g. 5.5 becomes 6, while 5.4 becomes 5. The Lasher thus costs 3 points. That does means that some ships will benefit a bit more or less than they "should" but I really don't want to get into fractional deployment points!

The modifiers from DO and SD are multiplicative, as with other reductions. (Though under the hood, the SD multiplier is flat, while DO is a multiplier, but functionally it amounts to them being multiplicative...)

Hmm, the fighter thing could get a little weird, yeah. I suppose we'll see! (36 Condors would require increasing the number-of-ships cap...)

And Fury at... maybe 18-22 DP (?)... will still be a very good high tech cruiser, I mean look at the flux stats and mobility of this thing, it's a bit of a mash-up of some of the good parts of Eagle, Falcon, Aurora and Shrike.

Good guess, it'll be 20! (So will the Falcon(P), btw - another ship that's, to be honest, a bit overpowered - but also fun, and I don't want to change the ship itself.)

One step ahead of you! Containment Procedures now reduces crew losses by up to 50%, at 240 total deployment points in your fleet. With that and potentially Blast Doors (and/or Damage Control from Support Doctrine, if you want to combine top skills that way), I think there's solid options to take care of this.

Thankfully we can modify the ship cap pretty easily, though the artificial limitation of how many ships you can recover at once is still going to be annoying.

(Worth mentioning: that's going up to 24 normal + 24 difficult.)

Given three ships all with Neural Interface: A (Flagship), B and C

Transfer from A to B, A and B receive bonuses. Then transfer to B to C, is it B and C with bonuses or is it A (Flagship) and C which get bonuses?

You can only transfer between two ships at any given time. If all three are on the field, then you'd only have A and B linked and receiving bonuses.

I guess if the original ship leaves, I cannot Neural Link to another, and... can it actually swap out of a neural link ship via command shuttle?  (If so, that is some advanced cloning-on-demand technology for the player to body surf, especially on a ship that cannot support human crew.)  I get that if the old flagship leaves, Neural Linking back is impossible.

If you swap out of the "linked" (but not original) ship the shuttle will take off from the original ship or its hulk. If neither is present (i.e. if it retreated, or the hulk drifted off the map) then it'll follow the standard thing it does when you "transfer command" without having your flagship deployed - it'll just fade in somewhere near the target ship and go there.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2021, 05:53:13 PM by Sutopia »
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Sutopia

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Re: Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« Reply #1 on: July 03, 2021, 05:24:04 PM »

(Part of personal message, approved by Alex to post)
The Phase Anchor hullmod is quite different than what's in the blog post, though, and - emergency dive aside - can't be made to function quite right in the current release.
Makes me wonder  :D

Part 2 OP:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22294

For Ballistic Mastery, it has a great shot speed bonus. Is the recoil reduction still part of gunnery implants? That to me is the other half of the ballistic gun skill buffs.

GI's recoil reduction is at 25% now, with another 25% potentially coming from Armored Weapon Mounts.


I think the only thing I'm particularly hesitant about is the max speed reduction of Phase Anchor (though you've mentioned it yourself) which sounds a bit excessive at -50% speed. It feels like it's going to be in the same ballpark as High Scatter Amplifier - a relatively costly hullmod with significant downsides that outweigh its benefit). I haven't really found a good use for HSA and I sort of have the feeling that as-is I likely wouldn't bother with Phase Anchor either.

Yeah, same page here. I've got a TODO item to reduce the HSA range penalty a bit, btw.

- what are the costs of the Neutral Link/Integrator hullmods? Is it going to be an easy choice to s-mod the latter? :P

Neither is s-moddable! This and SO are really kind of playstyle-changers and outliers and it wouldn't make sense to be able to s-mod them. Otherwise the high cost is just about meaningless.

Neural Interface is, off the top of my head, something like 3/6/9/25. Neural Integrator is 4/8/12/50. The higher cost for capital is to provide a bit more of an incentive to use smaller ships.

(And, the Radiant is *extremely* capable with an Integrator...)

- unmentioned in the blog post but I kind of want to complain that Point Defense's +100% damage against fighters is rather extreme (granted I'm not a big fan of very high damage multipliers in general -

That's actually down to 50%!

Is that base hull or modified hull? Basically if I have a Sunder (4000 hull) with Reinforced Bulkheads (+40% hull, from 4K to 5600) will that effect cap at 2000 (50% of 4K/2K, whichever) or 2800 (50% of 5600)?

Modified!

Just to clarify, is this based off of the base OP cost of a weapon or the actual cost that any given weapon takes to equip? Basically did the Onslaught/Conquest and their Heavy Ballistic Integration get put on stage to be laughed at by the High Tech audience again ::).

Actual equip cost. And yeah, this interacts with HBI.

Why would an update with such a massive change to the skill system be titled 0.95.1a instead of 0.95b?

Because "a" stands for "alpha" :)

Also, I don't think speed reduction at 50% hard flux is actually a notable nerf to player-piloted assassin builds - I rarely go above 25% hard flux in current version.  Short approach ( a bit hard flux) - unload AMs (soft flux close to the cap) - short retreat (a bit more hard flux) - vent - repeat.

Just to clarify, the speed reduction *maxes out* at 50% hard flux. At 25% flux, you'd be at -33% speed. But yeah, these things are still quite doable, which is intended.


Question: does Polarized Armor "turn off" when a ship is overloaded or is it passive-passive to the point of protecting you a bit during such unfortunate circumstances too? I guess it'd be weird to have a skill 'disabled' in such a way, but it's not exactly completely unprecedented (the no-flux-generate speed boost ended up doing that, IIRC?) so I could see that one go either way.

It doesn't!

(For Helmsmanship, technically it wasn't a change to the skill to make it not apply, but a fix to an oversight in the underlying mechanics!)

You still haven't revealed what T4L does.

(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, :-X

Any changes to Shield Shunt?

Nope.

One thought though, two of polarized armors bonuses only work with hard flux, so for ships that can't generate hard flux (the new Vanguard for one!) it might be an idea to add a cheap(?) hullmod, that converts some/all of soft flux into hard flux (and/or possibly tie this into shield shunt?)

Hmm - the issue with that sort of thing is it encourages firing randomly to build up flux levels. Still, I do agree that it'd be nice if the skill benefitted unshielded ships.

Edit: made it so that for unshielded/non-phase ships, the skill always behaves as if they had 50% hard flux.

"Cybernetic Augmentation"? And it's a strikecraft skill.....

It's not!

Speaking of Guardian, can't anything be done to it to make it recoverable? From my experience, the only thing it had over Radiant was too high a number of ordnance points and the fact that I had to conciously not put small sabots in medium missile slots since those are a bit broken when they don't run out due to extremely high DPS. The first problem can easily be solved by reducing OP to slightly less than Radiant, the second can be solved by changing medium missile slot into medium synergy/composite/universal, so that missiles couldn't be downsized.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a choice between 2 different Automated capitals?

That could be interesting, though I'd have to have another look at the Guardian. The missile-reload thing would have to go, for one. Another possibility is that the Guardian just needs to be stronger. Still, worth thinking about.

If the 15% CR skill (Crew training) is still around (and I see its icon, no idea if unchanged) they can both be taken so they will stack. And with both of the fighter boosters being in leadership now (cool!) they serve as handy prereqs for support doctrine, which gives combat endurance for another 15% means that unofficered carriers can be at 100% (while being at a DP discount!). If I understand the skill structure correctly, that means that a carrier centric playthrough is only going to need 1 noncarrier skill in leadership to reach the first peak.

Yep! Crew training lost the +30 seconds peak time effect, so it's now just +15% max CR.

A) [REDACTED] do not have the standard AI, and no combination of commands and officer personalities can replicate how they behave to my own satisfaction.  In vanilla, [REDACTED] and {INCREDIBLY REDACTED} are the two situations for which you really want to bust out capitals, and ironically to me, seem to be the situations they are weakest in.

They have the "reckless" AI combined with a few additional tweaks (that make them a bit more aggressive) that apply to all automated ships. This applies to automated ships in the player's fleet, as well.

B) I suspect that enemy fleets are run by an invisible 'fleet commander'.  It seems, based on how fluidly they behave, that this invisible fleet commander has an absolute metric ton of command points.  You can replicate how enemy fleets behave, but you don't have the command points to come close to the sustained behavior.

They are run by a commander, but that commander is subject to the same command point limits and generally doesn't do too much. It does however trust the ship AI to do its thing more than some players tend to, which probably accounts for the fluid-looking behavior :) It also orders a full "Search & Destroy" a fair bit.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2021, 06:10:27 PM by Sutopia »
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Alex

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Re: Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« Reply #2 on: July 03, 2021, 05:29:24 PM »

(Not a problem! And this is not against the forum rules by any means, and it seems like a good idea. Though I'd say people should feel free to reply here too, both to discuss these, and to possibly add other bits of info...)
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Dal

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Re: Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« Reply #3 on: July 04, 2021, 06:13:49 PM »

Cheers for the list, this is really useful for referencing everything in one place.
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Morrokain

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Re: Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2021, 03:16:59 PM »

Thank you for taking the time to do this. There are so many times where I forget where I saw a quote either about how things work or future changes and then can't find it anymore because it is deeply buried somewhere.
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Sutopia

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Re: Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« Reply #5 on: August 03, 2021, 06:11:18 PM »

Updated - up to date
Please let me know if I've missed any important information
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