Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Histidine]

Random thoughts on the supply of ships in Starsector, in terms of gameplay, lore and the intersection between the two.

tl;dr: If you kill a lot of ships from a faction they should have a penalty to their fleet sizes elsewhere, and those ships should have more D-mods.

This post is an old draft originally meant as a not-really-a-suggestion for the game.
But I discovered some time ago that mods can change the fleet factory, so to some extent it's possible to mod it in. The main downside is that for best use, a lot of the fleet spawning classes themselves (e.g. military base industry) would need to be changed as well. Also I can't currently change the route manager.

Faction supply of ships

Spoiler

There's been complaints in the past (in the context of Nexerelin) about factions producing large fleets out of 'thin air' so to speak, without any connection to the underlying economy. I've taken some action to remedy this on my end by implementing a 'ship points' system, where markets producing supplies/fuel/heavy armaments/ship parts generates points that are consumed to spawn things like invasion fleets. But this isn't used for most fleet types, e.g. the vanilla ones.

My idea is to generalise the system for (almost) everything:

• Every day, increment each faction's 'fleet spawning points' based on a faction's access to ship parts, supplies and fuel, with imports counting for less and local production counting for a lot more.
• When a fleet spawns, or a fleet-spawning route is created, it draws down the spawn point pool based on the fleet FP.
• When a fleet despawns at location, or a route ends without being wiped out or having failed its mission, it returns its surviving FP to the pool.
• If a fleet wants to spawn but the faction doesn't have enough spawn points left for the desired fleet size, the particular code asking for the fleet can generate a smaller fleet, skip spawning completely, or overdraw from the pool.
  The spawning code might also choose to take less than it could (e.g. patrols could enter a "conserve points" mode when the pool is low).
• Some fleet spawns could just straight up ignore the pool mechanic if they need to, like person bounty fleets.

The significance of this if that if a faction is taking a lot of losses in one location, it shows up in other places, as someone thinking about it might expect.
For example, killing a lot of patrols in Corvus will affect the number of patrols in Aztlan as well, and also the ability of the Hegemony to send expeditions against the player (and it'll work the other way around too; losing or even sending one of those oversized punitive expedition fleets should leave a dent in the sender's patrols).

[close]

D-modded ships in the Sector

Spoiler

The 'D-mod ships are the norm' thing the story (used to?) want to have can't readily be explained by inability to manufacture pristine components, now that every faction except pirates and Pathers have at least an orbital works and degraded nanoforge. Combined with 10 stability and doctrine bonuses, this gets Diktat up to 90% quality ("average 1 D-mod per hull"), and even Church gets 65% ("average 2 D-mods"). Hegemony's quality is 95% (no D-mods on average), and Tri-Tachyon is 115%.

So if the issue doesn't come from garbage being rolled off the assembly line, where is it coming from?

The answer came to me when reading this article: insufficient production/maintenance capacity for navies to consist entirely of pristine ships. During peaceful periods you could just scrap or sell anything that's too wrecked to be worth repairing (e.g. the Afflictor (D)'s description), but not in wartime (which damages or destroys the said pristine ships, while also greatly increasing total ship demand).

You know how after a battle, we players are offered a whole bunch of D-modded ships to salvage (but rarely take any of them)? That's where all the clunkers in circulation are coming from. Someone else takes the junk ships we leave behind and presses them back into service because they're needed and better than nothing.

The specific gameplay proposal:

• When an NPC fleet loses a ship, the faction's "D-mod score" is increased. Same if a raid sent by the faction fails or such. The score decays over time.
• When generating a new NPC fleet, the D-mod score is compared to the faction's ship production capacity (in my previous suggestion this would be the fleet spawn point pool; else you could take a snapshot of current production). Do some math with the two numbers to generate a penalty to the fleet's ship quality.

[close]

I think both these ideas point towards the concept of greater integration between campaign layer mechanics. Like having a faction-wide economy that the player can damage, rather than a bunch of colonies with the same banner + some disembodied game mechanics. Not sure if this counts as more 4X-ish than the game's current intent, but it's fun to think about nonetheless.

[Hiruma Kai]

I think whether mechanics like this make sense depends on what end game is eventually going to look like in Starsector and the goal of the fleet generation code in general is.

If the game moves more towards a Nexerlin style "conquer the core worlds" option, then it makes more sense for fleets to become weaker the more you hit them.  If you're doing well in a war, then it ideally would present quicker buckling of enemy forces instead of a long slog.  If you've got a fleet strong enough to repel expeditions and invasion fleets, then you don't need to be constantly proving it.  The goal is the elimination of enemy fleets entirely and "winning" the game.

On the other hand, vanilla Starsector at the moment doesn't go the conquer the core route, and in fact, eliminating the core has negative effects.  While it is less simulationist, from a game play standpoint it is more satisfying that difficult fleets are available to fight as your own fleet strength grows.  Remnants and Explorium drones do the exact opposite of these kinds of mechanics as their fleets are destroyed. They get stronger and provide even harder fights rather than presenting easier fights.

I guess the question to ask is, what is the benefit to gameplay to damaging the sector wide economy and ship generation?  If it's just making the player's life harder by making ships and weapons are harder to find and buy, or leaving fewer good quality salvage ships after combat (finding only 5 d-mod ships instead of 1 or 2 d-mods after each fight), then you're just punishing the player for success.  So the answer might be there are no benefits in vanilla, but mods could certainly introduce some payoff or benefit.

Having better modding hooks built into say the route manager, to allow for different campaign level mods seems like a very reasonable request to me however.  Although I have no clue how much effort is involved in that on Alex's part, nor the specific hooks you need.

[JAL28]

On the surface, I like this. But it has a number of underlying issues mostly to do with the player. These mechanics would mean that the player, who has the ability to not only make pristine ships but keep them pristine for, basically infinite amounts of time(reinforce bulkheads on every ship, officer skills, s modded recoveries). With this mechanic, the player could easily do a David and Goliath, keep beating up patrols to weaken the faction that’s drawn their ire into 5 d mod zone, then sweep in and blitz all their territories into indie colonies. And that’s without counting how easy that already is for a player.

And if we bring Nex into this, the player could do the lazy method of sending defense fleets to enemy systems to turn their ship pool into 5 d modded piles of trash, since there’s apparently a bug that allows you to do that.

The only saving grace is that factions are actually useful to the player in profit terms due to providing market; but then again, I’m not sure if it’ll hold up if the entire sector is turned into an independent coalition by a disgruntled/bored player.

[shoi]

Would be cool thing to do IMO, but I dont think it'd work with starsector because there aren't really any kind of checks or mechanics in place to keep the player from snowballing out of control. AI will constantly take losses but 99% of playerbase will just savescum theirs away.

If there were more mechanics that were in place to hinder player more, like in...idk, rimworld, then it'd probably work out better

[Megas]

I would imagine all fleet commanders from major factions would get the new Hull Restoration skill to remove all D-mods from their fleets.  Pirates get Derelict Contingent since they are into junk (or nothing since we want them easy).

The ones that really get into "fleets out of thin air" are named (deserter) bounties.  Pirates take it up to eleven with their bases.

I guess the question to ask is, what is the benefit to gameplay to damaging the sector wide economy and ship generation?

Mitigating the babysitting problem.  Because of unlimited beef fleets that refuse to leave the player alone, I eventually want to destroy the core worlds to make them stop.

And if we bring Nex into this, the player could do the lazy method of sending defense fleets to enemy systems to turn their ship pool into 5 d modded piles of trash, since there’s apparently a bug that allows you to do that.

In unmodded game, I steal their nanoforges to reduce their ship quality and maybe dissolve their Pather cells.  Hopefully weaken them to make it easier for my system defenses to destroy their invading fleets without my help.

[SCC]

This would be a nice prelude to sieging core colonies. If they were any difficulty in the first place, that is. The hardest part right now is getting enough marines and they've just a matter of time.

[IonDragonX]

tl;dr: If you kill a lot of ships from a faction they should have a penalty to their fleet sizes elsewhere, and those ships should have more D-mods.
I think both these ideas point towards the concept of greater integration between campaign layer mechanics. Like having a faction-wide economy that the player can damage, rather than a bunch of colonies with the same banner + some disembodied game mechanics. Not sure if this counts as more 4X-ish than the game's current intent, but it's fun to think about nonetheless.

It IS fun to think about! I'd agree with it as the game is in .95 but it might be unnecessary in future versions.

[Amoebka]

Hopefully weaken them to make it easier for my system defenses to destroy their invading fleets without my help.

Does disrupting shipbuilding even weakien expeditions, though? I was under the impression they always get the same amount of fleet points regardless, and ship access/quality only determines what those will be spent on. It might be 30 D-modded ventures instead of 5 pristine onslaughts, but the autoresolve strength is the same.

[Histidine]

I think whether mechanics like this make sense depends on what end game is eventually going to look like in Starsector and the goal of the fleet generation code in general is.

If the game moves more towards a Nexerlin style "conquer the core worlds" option, then it makes more sense for fleets to become weaker the more you hit them.  If you're doing well in a war, then it ideally would present quicker buckling of enemy forces instead of a long slog.  If you've got a fleet strong enough to repel expeditions and invasion fleets, then you don't need to be constantly proving it.  The goal is the elimination of enemy fleets entirely and "winning" the game.

On the other hand, vanilla Starsector at the moment doesn't go the conquer the core route, and in fact, eliminating the core has negative effects.  While it is less simulationist, from a game play standpoint it is more satisfying that difficult fleets are available to fight as your own fleet strength grows.  Remnants and Explorium drones do the exact opposite of these kinds of mechanics as their fleets are destroyed. They get stronger and provide even harder fights rather than presenting easier fights.

On the surface, I like this. But it has a number of underlying issues mostly to do with the player. These mechanics would mean that the player, who has the ability to not only make pristine ships but keep them pristine for, basically infinite amounts of time(reinforce bulkheads on every ship, officer skills, s modded recoveries). With this mechanic, the player could easily do a David and Goliath, keep beating up patrols to weaken the faction that’s drawn their ire into 5 d mod zone, then sweep in and blitz all their territories into indie colonies. And that’s without counting how easy that already is for a player.

Would be cool thing to do IMO, but I dont think it'd work with starsector because there aren't really any kind of checks or mechanics in place to keep the player from snowballing out of control. AI will constantly take losses but 99% of playerbase will just savescum theirs away.

If there were more mechanics that were in place to hinder player more, like in...idk, rimworld, then it'd probably work out better

Good thoughts there!

Alex has indicated before that the game isn't necessarily focused on conflict with factions,  which is the area primarily affected by these changes. I expect the future endgame enemies (e.g. Omega) will visibly exist outside the existing Sector economy and wouldn't be expected to follow the rules of the normal factions (like Remnant patrols already do, although it still gets a little weird for one base to spawn unlimited enemies).

(The lack of a vanilla use case is a large part of the reason I didn't post this as an actual suggestion)

Also players typically win any conflict with the NPC factions easily as it is. It really should be significantly harder to make the player faction the kind of industrial powerhouse that can match or exceed the almighty Hegemony, but even without that, at some point no non-boss NPC fleet other than an implausible, rule-breaking wall of capitals (or multiple fleets summing up to such) can defeat the player fleet in combat. (I disliked the capital walls and it's nice to have reduced their occurrence somewhat in vanilla/Nex)

I guess the question to ask is, what is the benefit to gameplay to damaging the sector wide economy and ship generation?

Mitigating the babysitting problem.  Because of unlimited beef fleets that refuse to leave the player alone, I eventually want to destroy the core worlds to make them stop.

I'm expecting that in the final version of the game, expeditions will be a temporary occurrence or replaced completely. Right now they're a (thinly justified) mechanic for connecting the colony layer to combat, which overstays its welcome (as Hiruma Kai mentions in the earlier post).

Does disrupting shipbuilding even weakien expeditions, though? I was under the impression they always get the same amount of fleet points regardless, and ship access/quality only determines what those will be spent on. It might be 30 D-modded ventures instead of 5 pristine onslaughts, but the autoresolve strength is the same.

Their fleets get the same amount of FP, but the added D-mods reduce autoresolve strength.

For a faction that chooses to sacrifice quality for more ships/officers in the doctrine, the fleets might end up about the same strength (not sure if one doctrine element gives more autoresolve strength than the others), but if they just straight up lose their heavy industry, they don't get anything in return and lose a lot of power.