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[Histidine]

Nice read!


Assorted comments on the post

I managed to not consider on my own that Alviss-kun's character is a typically feminine archetype. But it explains why he's best boy, or something along those lines at any rate.

Woah Hegemony kids are raised in creches? Just a few of them, or a lot, maybe even a majority?

I can see Cavin going on a two-page "the violence inherent in the system" rant in the ingame dialog now (with story point option for player character to grab him by the scruff of the neck and give him a good shake)

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re. the Finding Coureuse diplomatic/exploration split: TBH I feel like even someone who dislikes the somewhat lengthy dialog in the diplo route (which I don't) will find it much easier to put up with (especially when you can mash '1') than flying to a distant system and combing every location of interest (Active Sensor Burst is easier to work with than Neutrino Detector's false signals).

One thing I found mildly surprising when experimenting with the quest for the wiki walkthrough: if you mess up the questioning and don't get either of the potential leads, Siyavong basically bails you out, rather than, say, the player having to run back to Baird and switch to the exploration route.

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Surprised you like rules.csv! Most modders seem to hate it; I don't mind it since I'm pretty good at working with it (thanks to Nexerelin), but working with it in a spreadsheet does make dialog flows quite clunky. With something written in a 'proper' programming language/editor (like Ren'Py), you can just do a bunch of sequential if checks to flow through a tree chart, whereas with rules.csv each node almost needs to have its full set of requirements specified.

Incidentally, David (and Alex), have you seen SafariJohn's Rules Tool? I find its GUI makes a lot of rules editing tasks a lot easier to do.

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a character who thinks that the player of Starsector is an awful person

We kind of are! Well, Nex makes it a lot worse with the planetary conquest mechanics (hence my fanfic here). But even considering only the vanilla mechanics, a lot of players make a living by killing people, and not always groups like pirates who are genuine threats to the ordinary public either. Or being the pirates ourselves, in space or robbing planets with our hordes of marines. Or running arms to criminal organizations. Then there's things like all the times before 0.95.1's sensor array hack mechanic, where I killed the Hegemony patrol with its hundreds of crew simply because it was the fastest way to hack the Aztlan Relay.

4X

I think there's a lot of player interest in 4X (and thus the stuff Nexerelin offers) because 4X games are fun, and also some parts of Starsector are already compatible with the concept (in particular the existence of competing factions that sometimes fight each other, with the player potentially becoming one of them). At the same time, it's probably for the best that SS isn't a 4X and Alex has specifically ruled out it becoming one.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the two that are relevant to this blog post are:

• It kinda breaks verisimilitude, and the themes of the game, for the player to be this almighty conquering warlord that can stomp on all the factions of the Sector, often with the tiniest fraction of the resources that the Hegemony or League ought to be able to field against the player. (You can already do this on the space layer, crushing Kazeron or Chicomoztoc's defences and holding the planet hostage from orbit, and it's, uhh, kinda disturbing)
  
  Ahh, the good old days when Nex allowed several hundred marines to take a size 7 planet with tens of millions of people! Now you want at least 1.5 thousand to have a good chance of success
  
• On a lower level, having to account for planets no longer being under their original faction would break the dialog writing and/or mission generation processes. As it is, we already have to kludge it with the story planets having hidden immunity to decivilization.
  
  With the 4X stuff segregated into its own mod, vanilla can just assume no planet flipping, and then I just smack a "this will create a time paradox" (not in those words) warning on the invasion screen. Then it's on the player's head if e.g. they have a chat with Daud while his planet has already been conquered by Tri-Tachyon. (Fortunately none of the quests actually break in the sense of blocking progression)

Future quests

Without going into specifics:

What, the "Baird arc" has just one more quest in it? I'd figured there'd be like 3-5 more missions in it, except it isn't the Baird arc any longer, it's the Coureuse/Zal arc where we work with them on the rest of the gate network reactivation.

Will there be more quests to, in the words of the front page feature list, "determine the fate of the Sector by your actions"? Perhaps involving the major factions; among other things, I'm surely not the only one itching to strike a blow against the plutocrats of Kazeron and bring true freedom to the League (in part because the League feels rather underutilized in lore for the second great power of the Sector).

[David]

Woah Hegemony kids are raised in creches? Just a few of them, or a lot, maybe even a majority?

Not sure! But find interesting the idea that the military organization has crept into the rest of society around the Hegemony to an extent, pulling in aspects of family - if a comrade is killed in battle, would not the unit care for their offspring? Whatever the XIVth was before it was the Hegemony, and even after, it had to answer those questions within the social structures it had.

I can see Cavin going on a two-page "the violence inherent in the system" rant in the ingame dialog now

(Don't think I wasn't tempted.)

re. the Finding Coureuse diplomatic/exploration split: TBH I feel like even someone who dislikes the somewhat lengthy dialog in the diplo route (which I don't) will find it much easier to put up with (especially when you can mash '1') than flying to a distant system and combing every location of interest (Active Sensor Burst is easier to work with than Neutrino Detector's false signals).

One thing I found mildly surprising when experimenting with the quest for the wiki walkthrough: if you mess up the questioning and don't get either of the potential leads, Siyavong basically bails you out, rather than, say, the player having to run back to Baird and switch to the exploration route.

... Which maybe speaks more to the system being perhaps a bit distant and those probes being hard to find, huh. But I dunno, at some point you just have to force the player to fly around a bit for the sake of pacing. (Aside, maybe, I'm pretty sure that the smaller Sector size leads to a better game experience even though everyone always wants more more more stars.)

Surprised you like rules.csv! Most modders seem to hate it; I don't mind it since I'm pretty good at working with it (thanks to Nexerelin), but working with it in a spreadsheet does make dialog flows quite clunky. With something written in a 'proper' programming language/editor (like Ren'Py), you can just do a bunch of sequential if checks to flow through a tree chart, whereas with rules.csv each node almost needs to have its full set of requirements specified.

Incidentally, David (and Alex), have you seen SafariJohn's Rules Tool? I find its GUI makes a lot of rules editing tasks a lot easier to do.

Have seen, haven't used. Very cool that it exists, but it isn't for me.

I suppose it's largely that I'm extremely used to the spreadsheet, but also, as per the blog post, I like seeing everything clearly laid out, the data exposed. If I had to navigate viewing single nodes one by one then I couldn't take in 5 or 10 rules at a glance to make sure they're all doing what I want them to do.

(I did request that Alex add a few instances of error-checking in the process of the big mission arcs, and they've helped me tremendously.)

4X
(stuff)

100% to everything you said. I think it's amazing that it's a mod, and you're a madlad (that's good right?) for doing it, and core Starsector shouldn't be a 4x because making a space 4x is a classic gamedev trap unless you're really mindful about what you're setting out to do.

What, the "Baird arc" has just one more quest in it? I'd figured there'd be like 3-5 more missions in it, except it isn't the Baird arc any longer, it's the Coureuse/Zal arc where we work with them on the rest of the gate network reactivation.

Planning anything after those first four missions was outside the scope of the document, so I basically wrote [cool stuff goes here] with arrows pointing at it. Don't take what looks like a singular element in that doc to be any indication of scope.

Will there be more quests to, in the words of the front page feature list, "determine the fate of the Sector by your actions"? Perhaps involving the major factions; among other things, I'm surely not the only one itching to strike a blow against the plutocrats of Kazeron and bring true freedom to the League (in part because the League feels rather underutilized in lore for the second great power of the Sector).

... (thinking) ... to answer your specific question: Yes, we're obligated to complete that list of features on the webpage, so complete it we will.

I agree about the League (and Diktat, and Church) feeling underutilized, but can't speak to the extent that they will uh be utilized.

[SafariJohn]

I think pseudo-4X could exist in vanilla Starsector if it were based on controlling star systems with the premise that established stations and colonies are effectively impossible to take by force (with even bombardments being ineffective at suppressing military assets).

If I had to navigate viewing single nodes one by one then I couldn't take in 5 or 10 rules at a glance to make sure they're all doing what I want them to do.

I was feeling the difficulty of keeping the nodes straight when I did a semi-looping conversation chain recently.

[koprus]

soooo in the end will it be revealed that the head of tri-tachyon is a supressed omega-AI-god that was part of a greater AI that caused the collapse and the player manages to reach part of the old world that is now overrun by AI and whats left of humanity is the current sector? (Something that grandeur will be fun and open to an expansion to a new ai-verse)

[SethMK]

Getting a peak under the hood of how this game has been developed was a very interesting read.
The decision to avoid becoming a 4X space game was a smart choice especially since the game is set up so such a change could be modded on if desired and with all the people using Next, I'd say he's done a good job at it. But the choice let's the developers focus on the more important aspects of the game.

I love the fact that in this game you can play it vanilla or mod in so many factions inspired by other sci-fi stories/games. Combined with the random seed generation provides near infinite replayability as people can always swap in or out mod factions to change how things play out by adding in different missions with those mods.

[Gothars]

Interesting read, thanks for the insight. I actually held off from playing the main story a second time in this release, it will probably be the thing with the least replay value out of all the game. Especially the repetitive bits.

Mh, do you think it might be a good idea to implement a way to skip all the repetitive stuff in the story (e.g. the random missions you have to do to gain the academy's trust) for experienced players, David? Maybe if you did not engage with the story but have a really powerful endgame fleet the academy will hire you directly for the juicy parts of the story? Just a thought.

Loved the writing in Brigador. I spent all my merc-bux on unlocking lore instead of useful things.

Interesting that you mention Brigador as an example of good writing - it barely has a story, just tons of lore tied into the missions. I would love to see more of that in Starsector, too - just small story arcs unrelated to the main story, that expand on the lore of the various planets and factions. At the moment I feel there's a disconnect between the almost storyless "old" game where you never engage with individuals on a meaningful level and things stay quite abstract, and the story proper where you connect with tons of individuals and learn many tiny details.

[Darenkel]

Taking the entire post out of context... it seriously looked like you were already writing "Starsector 2" and my initial reaction was, "Oh snap, here we go again."

[David]

Mh, do you think it might be a good idea to implement a way to skip all the repetitive stuff in the story (e.g. the random missions you have to do to gain the academy's trust) for experienced players, David? Maybe if you did not engage with the story but have a really powerful endgame fleet the academy will hire you directly for the juicy parts of the story? Just a thought.

I guess this comes to a question of where to slice the cake, as it were. It's hard to say what exactly the repetitive part is - the generic Sebestyen missions?

Anyway, making story skip options work completely in-fiction would likely require too much work for what they are. So I imagine this would look more like a "skip to this part in the story" (which I basically hacked together anyway for development testing, though not up to the testing requirements for public use _at all_).


So maybe the way to approach this is we find out what the state of the world is at the maximum sandbox point and give a start option that lets people skip to there? Hmm, probably.

Interesting that you mention Brigador as an example of good writing - it barely has a story, just tons of lore tied into the missions. I would love to see more of that in Starsector, too - just small story arcs unrelated to the main story, that expand on the lore of the various planets and factions. At the moment I feel there's a disconnect between the almost storyless "old" game where you never engage with individuals on a meaningful level and things stay quite abstract, and the story proper where you connect with tons of individuals and learn many tiny details.

(I guess I could expand my thoughts on Brigador: my absolute favourite part is the soundtrack, then the writing, then the gameplay. I actually found the arcade-style not quite to my taste; it's fun enough in the moment, but I like a bit more 'building' in my games. Plus action gameplay destroys my already destroyed wrist, so I can't 360 noscope like I used to.)

I understand the disconnect, for sure, and there are obviously dev reasons why there was no real story before we had the code to implement real story. And a linear story at all is probably some degree of insurmountable contradiction to people who want a sandbox game vs. people who want a story. But ... maybe part of the problem is that there is just one more-or-less linear path right now. I'd like to make it so there are a lot of plot threads in the world that players can find and follow, and others they can miss. This gets really complex, of course, if major Sector-changing events are contingent on other things being done or not done, so it's definitely going to be A Process. And of course it makes the most sense to invest more time into whatever the most players will see.

So, I guess that's a rambly way to say: we talk about such issues a lot and are trying to find the most workable compromise between all playstyles. And we won't take away the sandbox.

Taking the entire post out of context... it seriously looked like you were already writing "Starsector 2" and my initial reaction was, "Oh snap, here we go again."

Haha, yeah uh. I could have titled that better eh?

[SCC]

I think the funniest quirk of this disconnect is that there are no mandatory fights in the storyline, when SS started with just combat and it remains pretty important still - just not to the main story, where it's just a roadblock you're better off avoiding

[Histidine]

As an aside, I was mildly amused to think about

Elissa changed personality and wasn’t even slated to be a woman, but I couldn’t find an “E” name that I liked better within the selection I was using, so I rolled with it.

so the reason Scylla and Elissa are a same-sex couple is due to the vagaries of a name list (whereas I might have done it for representation, or because I already had the characters and then later decided to ship them together). Tail wags the dog!

I think the funniest quirk of this disconnect is that there are no mandatory fights in the storyline, when SS started with just combat and it remains pretty important still - just not to the main story, where it's just a roadblock you're better off avoiding

Hey, gotta remind the player not to be violent once in a while (or more seriously, not lock non-combat characters out of the main plot)

[Megas]

I guess this comes to a question of where to slice the cake, as it were. It's hard to say what exactly the repetitive part is - the generic Sebestyen missions?

For me, the generic ones.  I had to do several, and it felt like a slog doing them when most of them sent the player to the far fringe.  The only one that felt rewarding was spend one story point to get the Beta core to surrender (so I can stuff it into one of the automated ships I looted from the Red Planet).  Overall, it felt like too much grinding, too many missions.

The time doing FedEx quests felt like time wasted not fighting bounties, raiding worlds for blueprints, or doing black market runs to build up ships and money I needed to deal with endgame fleets.  The only reason I bothered with the quests was to get Ziggurat and Janus Device.  And Janus Device and the gates are a prime consideration where to build colonies.

Hey, gotta remind the player not to be violent once in a while (or more seriously, not lock non-combat characters out of the main plot)

The reason not to be violent is it probably easier to do the Janus chain early with a small fleet when they turn you into FedEx boy and go all over the place.  I just want to build up my fleet to endgame strength so I can run over all of the bullies that get in my way, especially the infamous elite phase fleet.

Now, there was one encounter I had to run from, the special Tri-Tachyon investigation fleet.  I finished Kanta's Den, and all the pirates were swarming in, and I wanted to slaughter them all.  (Wanted to test drive Ziggurat with Phase Anchor)  Then all of a sudden, a big Tri-Tachyon fleet appears, makes contact, and demands I hand over the Ziggurat.  Obviously, I would not do that.  However, fighting was not an option since it would crash my high rep all the way down to hostile.  Since I already had a massive debt of green from overspending story points, I was in no mood to spend another, and I reloaded the game to leave the system and drop off Ziggurat.  I came back, ready to obliterate the Tri-Tachyon fleet that dared to interrupt my killing spree, but it lost interest after I no longer had Ziggurat in the fleet.

[Melrabo]

In terms of games writing, hmm. Disco Elysium was astoundingly good. Not sure about any other game really impressing me by just the writing; as the cheeky line goes, "If you think [any game] has good writing, wait 'til you read a book; It'll blow your mind." (I'll note, I haven't actually played the Sunless Seas/Skies games.)

Edit: Wait, no: Loved the writing in Brigador. I spent all my merc-bux on unlocking lore instead of useful things.

One of the great abilities of Fallen London / Sunless Sea is tell as less as possible, but suggesting a vast world you're only barely seeing. Of course, Failbetter games have a subtle and delightful sense of dark humour, which matches the universe where their stories happen. But also, every word adds to an incredibly solid worldbuilding of a place habitated long before your arrival. As an example, Let me quote the description for the starter ship:

"This tramp steamer has served well, but for a long, long, long time."

Or the description for a port called Station III:

"We may infer a Station I and a Station II. We may conjecture a Station IV."

In the same way, one of the strengths of Starsector Writing is how every small dialogue or description serves its own purpose, but also adds a drop to the mood and the worldbuilding pool.

There's a dialogue where someone tells how they hit an escape pod when their ship was destroyed. One of the things I've thought playing this game is "¿what happens with the crew of ships in distress?". That line of dialogue answered me. Escape pods exist, but they're omitted from the ship design for gameplay reasons. It's great to have a peek at the process of creating those story arcs and meaningful texts.

¡Thanks for sharing!

[BrassBadger]

I am a longtime writer and copy-editor, is there any way to help support Starsector's writing team? I would love to contribute if possible.

[Wyvern]

I guess this comes to a question of where to slice the cake, as it were. It's hard to say what exactly the repetitive part is - the generic Sebestyen missions?

For me, the generic ones.  I had to do several, and it felt like a slog doing them when most of them sent the player to the far fringe.

For me, I actually quite like the 'generic' Sebestyen missions, and am disappointed that they go away when you clear the plotline. There are two contributing factors to this:

1: They never time out. I don't have to worry about 'is this mission in a direction I'm going', I can just accept the mission and get to it when I get to it. (Well, okay, the urgent delivery ones exist, but those are all in-core and thus not too far out of my way.)

2: There are a lot of variations; sometimes you're sent out to collect a probe and you just collect it; sometimes you have to hunt down scavengers or pirates; sometimes the probe blew itself up and you just report that, and so on. So it's not just a bunch of exactly the same thing all the time, which keeps it interesting. If there was just one collect-a-probe mission, and one deliver-researchers-to-an-outpost mission... that would be a lot less fun.

[Megas]

Most of the missions have that randomized and repeatable job feel as done in Transcendence, Endless Sky, and possibly other games.  In Transcendence, most of the CSC fleet missions have that generic mission feel like "kill Ares over there" with few unique story ones like "get ROM from Juan Carlos" or "save the scientists from Rogue Fleet" mixed in.  Endless Sky has stuff like fetch quests or kill Marauder Falcon or Leviathan fleet within three systems away, with one unique job that is a silly logic puzzle or joke with cabbage, goat, and wolf.  Starsector has a similar thing going with the Sebastian missions.  Something like the "stop Beta core" might be a one-off (don't know), but I had to do multiple find this probe or make a deal with pirates or Luddic Church.

It is nice that most have no time limit.  Player still needs to do more than a few before Baird takes notice and let the player off the gopher train for Sebastian.