Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

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

Pages: 1 ... 60 61 [62] 63 64 ... 72

Author Topic: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 249003 times)

Dragon239

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 51
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #915 on: December 21, 2021, 07:05:32 PM »

I feel like comparing a 1v1 "white room" fight of Aurora with it kiting at 1k+range forever vs anything is ...unrealistic.
How long would that even take to do, slowly beaming it to death? Especially if 25 or 50% of the damage is Frag, which does even less versus a shield (50% of a Tac Laser's 75 DPS converted to Frag is a total of 9.38 "hard" damage/second to a shield...and armor.). Eventually the other cruiser will just vent for like 8s and your 3 minutes of beam-retreating will be back to nothing, no? What kind of loadout are we working with here, and what actually would its effective DPS be?

All this also assumes the fight has nothing else going on (say, the rest of your fleets) which doesn't really happen outside the sim fights, or peak operating time concerns.
Saying that, I could still see it ending up being boring and some people might feel compelled to try it anyways (???), but so can a lot of things if you stretch hard enough in your imagination.

HSA draining your engines to kick your speed off/down (say, redirecting power to guns to hard-fluxify it or...high-tech mumbo jumbo) is an interesting way to avoid much of that though, and has obvious trade-offs in play so might prove interesting to engage with (what's it do to laser PD?).

Also must keep in mind that if if HSA were to not lower range it'd mean the long-range Beams lose potential interactions with Energy Weapon Mastery which is...not optimal, though I suspect most people just try to maximize range anyways?
Logged

SethMK

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 75
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #916 on: December 21, 2021, 08:04:41 PM »

Hmm - that's an interesting idea, and frag damage for "high scatter" is thematic! The thing with beams keeping their regular range, though - imagine something like the Odyssey vs an Onslaught. You could outrange it and deal hard flux safely (with some allowances for burn drive, but that could be managed).

Or, heck, for a better example - a beam Aurora could kite almost any other cruiser all day with zero risk and with nothing they could do about it. I'm not offhand sure if "beams + optics + cruiser-level ITU" outranges "large non-Gauss ballistic + capital-level ITU"... so that's 1000 * 1.4 + 200 = 1600 for the beams, and 900 * 1.6 = 1440 for the ballistics, right? With skills - most notably Ballistic Mastery - mixing things up a bit, but not enough. So that same Aurora could kite and take down almost any capital ship with impunity, too, the only possible exception being the Paragon. It just gets very non-interactive and boring - I'm not sure you can combine "better mobility" with "better weapon range with hard flux damage" and get good results.

Makes sense, what about still reducing the range, but maintaining it in a sweet spot where it's higher than other energy weapon, but can't get high enough to outrange everything else? Or maybe just make it so shooting the beams completely stops your engine or heavily slows you down, so while you would outrange another capital, you wouldn't be able to keep it at range anymore while still inflicting hard flux. Maybe in the lore the modification would also reroute some power from the engines to the weapon system, to explain this.

Wouldn't hampering your own mobility make it so smaller ships could kite you with impunity?

I do like having HSA affect movement but why not have it affect enemy movement by creating particles that produce drag on the target. Coding it should be easy, copy the rifts from the rift lance set damage to zero on the rifts but have them be high gravity like a giant star or black hole. Since the rifts don't last long to pin down a ship you have to keep hitting them and naturally the strength of those artificial gravity wells would scale with the damage of the beam so a tactical lasers gravity well would be tiny compared to a tachyon lance's as far as intensity goes. Also the larger the ship the more resistant it would be to those effects so more beams would be needed to achieve the same slowdown.

Would probably want to make sure it didn't hamper turning though to prevent being able to lock down a target in a spot where none of it's firing arcs can reach you. But I Don't think high gravity affects turning.

Could rig the effects to only apply while shields are up so the hard counter is to drop shields which is what the goal of HSA is anyways. Keep shields up and end up slowed or drop shields and take hits to armor and hull. Assuming you can't escape while keeping shields up. But that would be a bit more complex to code.
"Wouldn't hampering your own mobility make it so smaller ships could kite you with impunity?", yeah, that's the point. You gain hard flux damage on regular range beams, and in return you give up mobility so that you can't kite enemy capital ships with impunity, and enemy frigates can harrass you more easily.  It's something you give up in exchange of getting the range back and getting the beam to feel "unique" again. making them slow enemy ships would just buff them even more which was not the point anyway, since the buffing part was the hard flux damage. 
It also could be interesting build wise as it would push you towards not going full beam build, as shooting them always slows you down to a crawl, you might want at least a couple of weapons that you can use on the move to deal with escaping frigates or faster ships.

I'm more worried about it letting slower ships suddenly being able to kite normally faster ships due to HSA sucking away so much of their mobility they become sitting ducks even after they stop firing beams if the slowdown lingers. The issue is how long is the ship slowed down for, if just for the duration of firing them the solution is simple stop firing and fly off. Depends on how it is implemented. But a lot of options are available so we'll see what pans out.
Logged

Vanshilar

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 585
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #917 on: December 21, 2021, 10:15:07 PM »

A way to use beams in a manner identical to weapons you already have. It seems redundant to me.

No, it's to provide another option that has different properties, since beams have some nice properties that projectiles don't have. They have (nearly) instant shot speed and tracking (depending on the turret turn rate), so they don't miss as much as projectiles and their damage is instantaneous. Hard flux also means that they can take care of fighters and missiles much more effectively.

The issue here is how to give beams hard flux ability but without making it too strong, since beam ships are typically high tech with greater mobility -- you don't want to let them be able to snipe with hard flux from afar, which is usually the province of low tech. Low tech lacks mobility but makes it for it with long range, and along with it the ability to soften up targets from afar by using hard flux weapons. That's part of the speed vs weapon range game design.

Right now HSA is a hull mod with a strong benefit and a drawback to balance it out, and the game is to find the right level of drawback. What if it instead got a less strong buff, but with no drawback (or at least a much less game-changing one)? Something like, deals x% hard flux damage based on distance to target, from 0% at max range to 100% at point blank, and reduces range by 10%.

I think this is an interesting idea! There are also other ways that this could be done; for example, beam does pure soft flux at 2/3 of range or higher, then at 2/3 range or lower that percentage gradually increases from 0% hard flux at 2/3 range to 100% hard flux at 1/3 range, and then 100% hard flux at 1/3 range or lower. This removes the ability of beams to snipe with hard flux at long range, thus preserving the game balance in that respect; but allows beams to still do hard flux at shorter ranges, which is the intent of the HSA range nerfs.

I think the biggest difficulty would be modifying the AI to account for this, since a given beam would actually be "dual use", so the AI would have to decide if it's better to do soft flux from afar, or hard flux from close in. Definitely not hotfix material but may be interesting to see later on.

At the same time, IPDAI + Elite Point Defense gives +200 range to all small ballistics, which is a bigger bonus than BRF on ships without Large mounts. Now that BRF is more expensive than IPDAI, and given how important PD is for Low Tech IMO, I can see myself preferring IPDAI + Elite Point Defense over Ballistic Rangefinder in like 90% of cases.

Whoa the range bonus from IPDAI + Elite Point Defense can be a really potent combo, giving small ballistics and small energies a chance to shine! That may be useful for ships like Scarabs with a bunch of IR Pulse Lasers or something, or...Doom with Antimatter Blasters for a really great alpha strike ability. It's also appropriately really expensive too (costs an elite skill plus IPDAI OP) to get that range increase.

I haven't been playing the game for that long, so I can't claim any great insight or expertise, but might something like inflicting the Paladin PD's multi-beam effect work as an alternative? If I understand how that impacts armor penetration correctly, it would make beams much less effective versus armor in exchange for being much better versus shields.

That might be an interesting penalty for HSA -- reduce the hit strength of the beam. Right now it looks like one of the concerns of HSA is that it makes burst beams like Phase Lance too strong. Usually weapons are good vs shields and bad vs armor (i.e. kinetics), or bad vs shields and good vs armor (i.e. HE). HSA gives burst beams like Phase Lance a relatively flux-efficient way to deal hard flux, yet do a lot of damage to armor if the target decides to drop shields instead. If HSA reduced beam hit strength by say 1/2 (keeping in mind that the hit strength is already 1/2 of the DPS), then that would make beams more like a kinetic weapon, so it removes this conundrum for the target.

It didn't work? You couldn't kill the Fulgent? That's a bit disingenuous. The HSA strategy is more dangerous, yes. I realized *and* recognized that a full loadout of ASM would be safer in my post, there's no need to make such a sweeping generalization. At least you were willing to try it, I guess.

It's not that I couldn't kill the Fulgent, it's that I had to stick around for a second burst (whether or not I bothered to phase the cooldown in between), instead of unloading one burst and then skedaddling.

Though I think this is simply the wrong use case for showing that HSA is overpowered. This is basically a single, sudden, massive flux burst on the target, preferably when the target's shields could be redirected via mines or because it was already engaging another target or because its flux was already high. In which case the hard flux ability of HSA didn't really come into play in the first place (it was really about bypassing the shields to kill the target's armor and hull). And the purpose of a big alpha strike, to dump a bunch of flux on the target suddenly to force it to drop shields (to prevent overloading) and take a bunch of damage to armor/hull, inherently means it doesn't really matter if that flux were hard or soft (they don't have enough capacity to absorb it is the whole point). So it's simply a bad use case for demonstrating HSA's power, obscured by the fact that the beams under discussion like the Phase Lance are burst beams, more suited to these kinds of alpha strikes.

As an aside, since IPDAI works with Elite Point Defense to boost the range of small energy weapons, this means that there's another potential high-burst Doom loadout: 6 antimatter blasters. This is almost enough to one-shot Brilliants, and it doesn't need Omega weapons to do so (although I back it up with 2 Cryoblasters). But it is really expensive, which is appropriate; it costs an elite skill (Point Defense), as well as IPDAI (12 OP), on a Doom that is already very OP-starved due to Phase Anchor. You can do this without IPDAI and Elite Point Defense but then you're risking getting caught in the explosion since it's so short-ranged, but IPDAI and Elite Point Defense make it so that you can do this from a safer range now. It's really expensive and without the niceties that AMSRM provides (such as more range, shooting from behind friendly ships, etc.), but it's a potential way to get even more alpha strike ability.
Logged

THEASD

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 42
  • *Confused Cat Noise*
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #918 on: December 22, 2021, 12:17:43 AM »

is "asking for APIs" still welcomed now? or some days later?
Logged
Also known as AnyIDElse.

Timid

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 640
  • Personal Text
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #919 on: December 22, 2021, 01:01:40 AM »

is "asking for APIs" still welcomed now? or some days later?
only in the super duper secret api request thread

vladokapuh

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 127
  • Cabbage
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #920 on: December 22, 2021, 01:33:54 AM »

i feel shunt+PA combo was barelly worth it at all on very few high armor ships arleady, namely legion, onslaught, dominator.
With current numbers, i just dont think giving up on shield is worth it, as shieldless ships in general are just not that good.
The PA nerf was definatelly justified for shielded ships, but along with shunt nerf, makes it never really worth it to remove the shields.

The number for unshielded ships should go back up, and shunt should either provide more armor, or a bit of emp resistance added ontop of armor it currently gives.
Logged
Cabbage

SethMK

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 75
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #921 on: December 22, 2021, 02:22:56 AM »

What if Shunt also installed some sort of EMP ability or something. Could have a flux cost if needed for balance reasons but it would be a set value and not affected incoming hits and would be toggled like a Shield but it could provide some defense and some sort ranged offense depending on how it is setup. Could be based on the Omen's ability just far more unrefined as instead of powering a shield the emitters just arc wildly tuning a defense into a makeshift energy weapon that has some PD properties. Could call it a Lightning Field or something.

If you base the energy damage (no actual emp dmg unless you want it to actually have that ability) upon the of flux per second, range off the shield's arc coverage in degrees and the size of the ship, and the flux conversion as the base for the rate of fire of this 'energy weapon'...and it shouldn't be too hard to code. While a shunted makeshift shield generation might make a decent omnidirectional PD and small craft weapon... put that sucker on a Paragon and it might mulch even a destroyer that gets to close to it... At the HUGE cost of no longer having a shield but hey, it could be done. Naturally numbers would need to be tweaked to keep it useful without being broken but so many variables that can be tweaked. Range, damage, number of arcs per second, does the arc Tavel through a target like a beam and could hit multiple enemies at once, does it fire around allies or not, etc.... Wouldn't make omen useless as omen gets an emp field (not just an energy weapon) plus it's shields... So Shunt could be viewed as a knockoff attempt to mimic it but failing so spectacularly people kept it around for a different usage.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2021, 06:05:39 AM by SethMK »
Logged

Undead

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 89
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #922 on: December 22, 2021, 07:56:05 AM »

Decided to try out this update with my old save, and encountered a bug: some of my level 6 officers now only have 5 skills, and I cant seem to figure out how to fix it. Restoring both officer training and officer management that were resetted along with all other skills of my character didnt help
Logged

Rojnaz

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 25
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #923 on: December 22, 2021, 11:40:09 AM »

Maybe the existence of "Makeshift Damper Field" would make Shield Shunt more atractive, even if Shield Shunt became somewhat weaker.
Logged

PureTilt

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 54
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #924 on: December 23, 2021, 02:01:58 AM »

Not sure what role for HSA you have in mind but there wield idea:

caps beam weapon range to 500/600/700 (depending on weapons size)
increases damage and flux cost by 10-20% for every 100 range over cap
(no hard flux)

that way you keep already low range weapons from being more powerful but making long range beams into short range high DPS high flux weapons more akin of non-beam energy weapons
Logged




JUDGE! slowpersun

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 614
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #925 on: December 23, 2021, 10:04:05 AM »

Maybe the existence of "Makeshift Damper Field" would make Shield Shunt more atractive, even if Shield Shunt became somewhat weaker.

Hhmm, how has no one suggested this yet...?
Logged
I wasn't always a Judge...

intrinsic_parity

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3071
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #926 on: December 23, 2021, 11:22:21 AM »

Probably because damper field is a really strong ability that would be incredibly difficult to balance for something like an onslaught while keeping it at all relevant for any other ship.
Logged

Rojnaz

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 25
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #927 on: December 23, 2021, 12:02:09 PM »

Just like Makeshift Shield Generator, "Makeshift Damper Field" could reduce speed by 20%,  maybe have more cooldown (30 secs) and have access to only one stack of use for the same OP cost as Heavy Armor.
At least I don't think it's hard to balance, it should not be usable with Shield or Phase, and it should never become a fully functional Damper field (20s cooldown, 2 stacks and 3 second duration).
It could work more like an emergency button for unshielded ships than a proper defense system.
Logged

Fenrir

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 213
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #928 on: December 23, 2021, 01:15:13 PM »

Somehow I got a lvl. 6 officer from cryopod in a derelict ship during exploring, but I believe that only lvl. 5 or lvl.7 officers can be obtained and all my enabled mods should not change that. Sorry I couldn't provide a save bc I had terrible saving habit and didn't save for past 2 hours :P
Logged
*cough* try tossing the PK into a black hole *cough*

wsdude

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 33
    • View Profile
Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes
« Reply #929 on: December 23, 2021, 04:10:45 PM »

Is the leveling super slow now?have nexerelin and jumped in at lv6 and I've done quite a number of battles but im still like 75% trough lvl 6.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 60 61 [62] 63 64 ... 72