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[intrinsic_parity]

Perma-death in rogue likes works well because the gameplay/failure loop is short.

Also, the problem with retreating for me was that the retreat scenario (where all the logistics ships get deployed) basically guarantees losing any slow ships (if you can't win the battle normally, you won't be able to defend your slow ships either). I've never had a retreat battle that didn't involve massive losses. Can you reliably avoid that scenario?

[Megas]

I do not have enough time now to reply to everything posted since yesterday, but here are (not so) quick thoughts.

With how slow leveling is in the game, bonus xp feels like full normal progression, while no bonus xp feels like half xp gain.  I feel like I need green xp to progress at normal rate.  The player is forced to do activities just to get green xp.

If I have an unoptimized fleet comparable to an endgame human bounty, I have from zero to less than +100% for the fight.  I need to fight several such battles to earn one story point.  On the other hand, if I solo the same fleet with Ziggurat (and bring very few support ships), I get +300% or more bonus xp, but I almost certainly cannot loot much (which hurts because a game like this thrives on loot).  (I would not be surprised if better players can destroy a human endgame bounty with less than 75 DP, like with four Afflictors.)  Better, but not as rewarding as Ordos.  If getting story points is the goal, and I do not want to fight Ordos, then killing an enemy fleet with a one big ship or few small ships seem to be the way.  No fleet battle, just one ship (or a few frigate) against the horde.  Kind of like 0.6 era releases, only instead of getting extreme combat power from skills (instead of a bigger fleet), you get... more story points to fuel respecs, s-mods, and colonies.

I have posted recently than I lament settings do not support bigger map size, but it is moot when trying to game story point acquisition.

So far, my Ordos killer fleet started with:  Can I solo this with Ziggurat?  So far, the best I could do was kill a double alpha Radiant fleet with half the ships in the fleet with Alpha cores for +500%.  It was hard but beatable.  Then I added alpha core Radiant.  Bonus was only a little more than +400 and I get objectives that I cannot keep but winning is a bit easier.  Then I replaced Radiant with two Onslaughts.  Works almost as well in combat, but if I lose them, then I have crew problems.  Then, if I get +20 DP from taking a point (player can get at least one without much difficulty), who else to bring?  Hyperion does not last long enough, so I tried Fury with Omega weapons, and it is quite good.  Unfortunately, adding extra ships to make the fight less stressful sharply lowers the bonus xp from about +400% to little over +100%.

Continuing from above, if I want more bonus xp while using more than two ships, I need to attack double Ordos.  I am not at that point yet.

[Draba]

Um, ironman in any game is generally for powergamers who want an additional challenge beyond what the regular game provides. Almost by definition it's for those who want to make the game the most challenging possible because it's already gotten too easy for them otherwise. Why a game needs to be "ironman-friendly" is beyond me. If a player is playing ironman, they're expected to know how to handle themselves.

That's not true at all. Games can be designed for ironman (i.e. no savescumming) regardless of their difficulty. X-com series, roguelikes and roguelites, games with dark souls like respawns, etc. Taking an average game NOT designed for ironman and slapping the option "for the challenge" is what Starsector currently is (sadly).

Agreed with Amoebka, there are games that are genuinely enjoyable (and often better) in ironman.
I think Faster Than Light is the best ironman game ever made, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup comes pretty pretty close.
Noita is also nice, it just rewards dragging your feet a little bit too much.

Perma-death in rogue likes works well because the gameplay/failure loop is short.

Never taking risky fights isn't "knowing how to handle yourself" - it's playing the game in a way that isn't fun. Good ironman games reward risk taking while also providing some means to recover from failures.

And this is what's common in good ironman games: relatively short, and doesn't reward avoiding risk.

XCOM is really bad in the length/recovery department, even the base game takes dozens of hours.
Getting the A team wiped in Long War is an instant game over, and it only takes 1 unlucky activation with a minor mistake to destroy a >100 hour save.
Honorable mention Battle Brothers, also long and it's really easy to avoid actual danger there.

[Hiruma Kai]

In my mind, a good ironman game isn't about the shortness of the gameplay loop, it's the quality of the game play loop.

Fundamentally, I see playing 20 runs of 1 hour each of a permadeath ironman game being equivalent to a longer ironman game played once for 20 hours.  You've essentially got the same thing at the end of both, namely 20 hours of game time.  The question is, did you have fun during the gameplay loops of each game?  For a good permadeath ironman, that typically means the early, middle, and late portions of the game need to be equally fun, or at least fun enough to stand on their own.  If you never make it the middle or late game, the early game better be worth it.

It also tends to require a variety of different playstyle be viable, which start being distinct right from the start of the run or something that makes each of those runs feel different enough to keep you playing (randomized levels and enemies for example).

To me, it sounds like Megas is not enjoying the early and mid-portions of the game, since they are describing them as a grind, as well as indicating the game takes too long to level and get to the end game.  At which point it makes sense to me that they would prefer the replayability and different options be available starting at that stage, as opposed to being at the start of the game.  Unfortunately, you kind of need that replayability to make the game a reasonable ironman game.

My question would be, what would make the early and mid-game more interesting or more fun such that it doesn't feel like a grind?

Personally, I like the early game combats, often more so than the late game.  There's a much larger range of threats compared to my combat capability, and there are situations I actively need to avoid.  The campaign map is far more interesting when you need to actually take into consideration enemy fleet positions or expenditures over time, as opposed to just barreling through everything, fleets and storms alike, with an end game death fleet funded by multiple size 6 colonies.

Gameplay duration is always a bit tough to deal with, as different players have different amounts of time they want to commit or expect to put into a game.  In that same line of thought, some players want more risk in their risk/reward balance, and others, less.  Risk is just as much determined by what you're risking, as by the odds of success/failure.  You can have the exact same fight with the exact same mechanics, but if in one case you're risking an hour of progress and in the other two minutes of progress, those two situations will feel different to the player. And some players seek out that kind of feeling of actually risking something more meaningful than a couple minutes of their time when playing.

The only way to really make a large variety of players happy is to provide a number of options at game selection.  "Easier" or "Harder" modes which change the risk/reward calculations, game length settings (speed of technology research and resource accumulation in some 4x games for example or advanced starts which start you in a mid-game or late-game situation instead of the normal early game).  Or make the game very mod friendly, which is what Alex has done with Starsector.  So now if you want a long conquer the sector game, you boot up Nexerlin instead of vanilla. If you want to get right into the end game, start with a full combat fleet with a Supership plus a faction or planet.

[DaShiv]

On the other hand, if I solo the same fleet with Ziggurat (and bring very few support ships), I get +300% or more bonus xp, but I almost certainly cannot loot much (which hurts because a game like this thrives on loot).

There's very little correlation between fleet size for XP purposes and the amount of loot that can be carried. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Atlas takes away very little for XP calc purposes because of low FP * 1/4 civilian hullmod reduction, so you could easily carry multiple Atlases for less than 10% of the FP value of Ziggurat + player levels.

Personally I carry 120 FP of combat ships in my fleet even into endgame when fighting multiple Ordos, and have zero problems with XP or SP - if anything, XP/SP gain is too easy when you're not carrying around a big bloated fleet, and can easily handle combat-heavy activities like bounties without losses instead of low-XP activities like trading. For example, you could quickly and easily max out your character to level 15 at the start of a run just by hunting large d-modded pirate fleets using a tiny fleet equipped with Alpha Site weapons and pure Combat skills, then respec your character to maxed out fleet skills and build a real fleet to take on factions/bounties. The system rewards you for efficiency with fleet composition and battlefield performance, and it's something that players are incentivized to design for.

[Draba]

In my mind, a good ironman game isn't about the shortness of the gameplay loop, it's the quality of the game play loop.
Fundamentally, I see playing 20 runs of 1 hour each of a permadeath ironman game being equivalent to a longer ironman game played once for 20 hours.  You've essentially got the same thing at the end of both, namely 20 hours of game time.  The question is, did you have fun during the gameplay loops of each game?  For a good permadeath ironman, that typically means the early, middle, and late portions of the game need to be equally fun, or at least fun enough to stand on their own.  If you never make it the middle or late game, the early game better be worth it.

Usually a big portion of ironman style games is losing being a real possibility and that's perfectly fine with games that typically last 5, 10, maybe low 10s of hours.
My guess is if a game takes more than ~50 hours that means only a small fraction of players will actually see most of it.
There are definitely people who enjoy honest, untweaked ironman runs of XCOM:LW but no clue if it's a high enough percentage to base design decisions on.

Agreed in that how long is too long changes by game, 10-20 generally isn't much (some FTL/DCSS/Noita runs can easily surpass that).
After a threshold I do think it comes at the expense of the ironman experience, too long and it locks content/promotes conservative play.

My question would be, what would make the early and mid-game more interesting or more fun such that it doesn't feel like a grind?

Early dogfights/progression and trying different fleet compositions late are both interesting to me.
Playing late more nowadays, the exploration phase (scan every moderloving pulsar/black hole/whatever) does get stale if you do it too much.

2 main nitpicks with late:
- you can tinker with fleet compositions, but there are no enemies that can challenge an optimised player fleet. No fully s-modded faction fleets with proper officers, stacked ordos come closest
- officers are set in stone, you can have (and pay!) >20 of them but can't ever rotate the active 8/10

Fully modding ships is also a timesink, not a fan of that mechanic but only really gets in the way if you want a full switch (and then your officers are borked anyway).
Player respec is basically free compared to everything else so don't agree with the premise of the thread.

[Amoebka]

I guess I should have specified that by "X-com" I meant the games from the 90s, not the new ones I haven't played.

I thought this was a boomer forum? 

[Draba]

I guess I should have specified that by "X-com" I meant the games from the 90s, not the new ones I haven't played.

I thought this was a boomer forum? 

I'm a boomer but still think Enemy Within + Long War is the best X-Com, fite me
Original grinded down your attention: lots of soldiers, lots of individual actions, constant "last xray waiting in the toilet to instakill your dudes" threat.
It was revolutionary in its own time, but would prefer repeatedly getting kicked in the junk to playing it in ironman today.

[Amoebka]

While the original might have had some frustrating moments, ironman was very much doable and enjoyable. Recovering from even full squad wipes was relatively painless - you just hired 14 fresh rookies and made new tier 2 armor for them (and bought a new Triton if you had to). Assuming you weren't wiping all the time, you would have all the spare resources needed to recover immediately. The grindy aspect - soldier veterancy - was more of a psychological thing, it barely mattered for gameplay, unlike s-mods in Starsector.

[Candesce]

I guess I should have specified that by "X-com" I meant the games from the 90s, not the new ones I haven't played.

Having played both, the older x-com was unlosable until the final mission if you had even a modest idea of what you were doing, and the newer ones are long and sufficiently random to make playing them ironman unpleasant.

I personally come to ironman games from a roguelike background, where neither of the above things are virtues. I don't play games for the purpose of testing my patience with grind.

For example, training up new rookies in the original is much more useful than you imply, especially once you start contemplating the end-game missions where you can't just bring fresh troops in if something goes wrong - but it's also very easy and safe, if tedious. Mind-control a muton into dropping its guns and walk it around in front of a bunch of rookies armed with the starting rifle or pistol, and they skill up fast.

[Amoebka]

Oh, I know about the exploity training methods. Thing is, you could only level 2-6 points of firing accuracy per mission, for example, so you had to do it across many different missions. Tedious stuff like this is a major design flaw, but thankfully it was unnecessary even on superhuman difficulty.

I've done countless Cydonia/T'leth clears with full rookie squads. Mind control resistance is the only stat that truly matters there, armors/weapons give FAR more power than soldier skills, and make even untrained rookies sufficient.

To draw a parallel with Starsector - recovering from a (near) full squad wipe was a lot faster than recovering from a (near) full fleet wipe. If you had money/plastics you could immediately replace soldiers and armors, but lost the grindy veterancy. In Starsector, if you have money you can replace ships and weapons (you'll have to make multiple circles around the core markets though), but lose the grindy s-mods. The difference is, s-mods in Starsector are a lot more important and necessary than veterancy in X-com. You don't have to grind stats in X-com if you don't want to, but you HAVE to grind s-mods in Starsector.

[Megas]

Warning:  A Huge Post Is Approaching Fast.  (Okay, no more Darius parody.)

After level 15, you get 1 story point per 1 million XP. It's not Vespene gas, it's basically just XP, like in pretty much any other RPG. You kill stuff, you get XP for killing stuff, you use that XP to upgrade your character. (Vespene gas is different, you farm Vespene gas which doesn't involve combat, and you don't get any more from killing enemies.) After all, such games reward the player for going out and actually doing something, i.e. killing baddies.

Level 10 Hegemony deserter bounties give around 500k base XP (assuming double from SP bonus), and the DP for the XP bonus (not the fleet's actual DP) is roughly 700 DP or so. This means if the player's fleet is 350 DP then you get +100% XP bonus (i.e. 700/350), if the player's fleet is 500 DP then you get +40% XP bonus (i.e. 700/500), etc. By the way, bounties go higher than level 10 (which corresponds to about 300k credit payout), I've seen level 13 bounties already, just that I've already collected data on multiple level 10 bounties at this point. So higher-level deserter bounties will pay out even more.

The personal bounties tend to cluster together in the same region of the map. So it's easy to take a fleet and do a lap to kill them. Say you knock out 3 of them, and they're level 10 (noting that this isn't even the highest-paying bounties). That's 1.5 mil XP right there, assuming no XP bonuses, plus whatever you get from the XP bonus, meaning you should be netting around 2-6 SP per bounty run, depending on your fleet. It's easy to get multiple SP points from doing a bounty run, and you don't need anywhere near an endgame fleet to do it. Claims that you need something specialized to get SP is completely overblown when we're just talking about regular faction fleets at this point and not even talking about [REDACTED] fleets.

I just took out a random high-end bounty, League deserter worth about 390k.  With +384% xp from soloing the entire enemy fleet with Ziggurat (would have had +397% if I left Revenant behind), I received about base 990k xp, which was doubled with the bonus xp, so almost two million total.  Had I used random stuff comparable to their fleet, I probably would have about +50% xp instead, and would have gained only about a fourth of the xp (close to half million due to bonus xp).  I would need to fight four or five such bounties to get a million xp with a fleet similar to an endgame bounty.

At the time I posted the OP, I had not fully upgraded my skills and fleet because I did not want to risk locking myself into a build or configuration that could take a long time to undo.  After seeing how slow xp gain was if I want to chill with a big fleet and smash stuff, I was really hesitant into committing into a single build.  I guess I had about 15 million bonus xp after I reached max level, and I did not have access to everything.  I took several in-game years fighting many endgame bounties with from 0% to 100% (but rarely above 70%) to clear that xp debt, although part of the reason for that was I did not have Janus device for gate travel during some of that time.

Named bounties are sometimes close, but not that much.  I rarely get more than two near each other.

Long story short: if you're finding that SP gain is too slow, then it has to do with how you built your fleet, and/or because you're wasting them frivolously and then complaining about how hard it is to get more.

In other words, I am playing the game wrong because I dare to use a fleet that is comparable to an endgame bounty fleet instead of a solo Ziggurat or something less powerful for maximum xp gain.

To me, it sounds like Megas is not enjoying the early and mid-portions of the game, since they are describing them as a grind, as well as indicating the game takes too long to level and get to the end game.  At which point it makes sense to me that they would prefer the replayability and different options be available starting at that stage, as opposed to being at the start of the game.  Unfortunately, you kind of need that replayability to make the game a reasonable ironman game.

My question would be, what would make the early and mid-game more interesting or more fun such that it doesn't feel like a grind?

Personally, I like the early game combats, often more so than the late game.  There's a much larger range of threats compared to my combat capability, and there are situations I actively need to avoid.  The campaign map is far more interesting when you need to actually take into consideration enemy fleet positions or expenditures over time, as opposed to just barreling through everything, fleets and storms alike, with an end game death fleet funded by multiple size 6 colonies.

This response probably deserves its own topic, but the short of it is while there are efforts in recent releases to slow the player's gameplay, the world progression has not slowed down.  In effect, the world outlevels the player if he does not rush or min-max things.  Related are colonies.  It takes about ten years to grow a colony to size 6 (or less time with Cyrosleeper bonus).  Meanwhile, it takes about five years to reach at least the cusp of endgame, able to crush endgame bounties without much difficulty and maybe Ordos too.

Early game feels like survival mode and making do with what you find.  Some people like that, I do not.  Midgame is a continuation of that to a point then transitions to something else as player finds more toys and builds colonies.  At this point, the world has outleveled the player and the player tries to plays catchup (or maybe not if player optimized for combat and got the hardware and skills he needed.)  Gameplay is more enjoyable if I can fight the enemy (but if I cannot, then I am forced into commodity runs for easy money), but I still do not have access to everything.  During endgame, I have access to most if not all resources and can use whatever I want, and I like this... until I hit the slow xp gain unless I use a specialized xp hunter fleet (or a flat out overpowered fleet).

There's very little correlation between fleet size for XP purposes and the amount of loot that can be carried. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Atlas takes away very little for XP calc purposes because of low FP * 1/4 civilian hullmod reduction, so you could easily carry multiple Atlases for less than 10% of the FP value of Ziggurat + player levels.

If I solo with Ziggurat, I do not want my fleet to exceed 100 DP because doing so spawns a bigger map with objectives, and I dislike objectives, especially if my side cannot stop the enemy from taking the points.  I have 25 DP left for support ships.  I can take either Prometheus, Atlas, and an Ox; or one Revenant and two Oxen.

Also, bringing support ships eats a noticeable amount a bonus xp from named bounties.  Against a human endgame bounty fleet, having Revenant in my "fleet" reduces bonus xp by 12% or 13%.  Tugs reduce the bonus by 4% per tug.  If I did not need a hauler for fuel to reach systems with named bounties, I would consider bringing only Ziggurat for maximum xp.

Bringing more haulers probably hurts less when player brings a bigger fleet and attacks at least two Ordos at a time, but anything less than an Ordos really wants a lone capital or few smaller ships.

Also, loot is not only cargo or fuel, but also the enemy ships themselves for those with Hull Restoration.  If I recover ships, then my bonus xp will drop if I fight again until I drop off the new ship(s).  I may also find myself with not enough crew if I loot a large ship or several small ships that need crew.  (If I bring Revenant, I put Additional Crew Berthing and other capacity boosting hullmods on it.)

The system rewards you for efficiency with fleet composition and battlefield performance, and it's something that players are incentivized to design for.

Unfortunately, I think the game "rewards" the player by being stingy with xp and story points, and money from non-contact bounties, unless the player utterly games the system by using only the strongest options available (which may not be available early).  In other words, Starsector punishes the player for playing the game wrong.  Currently, the game wants you to solo things if at all possible, like in pre-0.6a releases, which defeats the point of a fleet and fleet skills that need officers or more ships to work.  It seems like the only time a fleet is useful was when player fights more than one Ordos at a time, or when xp gain is not the goal (like smashing a planet's defenses before raiding it for items or sat bombing it to wipe it off the map).

Fully modding ships is also a timesink, not a fan of that mechanic but only really gets in the way if you want a full switch (and then your officers are borked anyway).
Player respec is basically free compared to everything else so don't agree with the premise of the thread.

Example:  I want to pilot Ziggurat and I have say, Point Defense and Ballistic Mastery for Combat skills.  Later, I want to store Ziggurat then pilot Doom for a while; now I want to swap those two skills and get Field Modulation and Systems Expertise.  Later, I drop the phase ships and I want to pilot Aurora; now Phase Coil Tuning is useless and I want to get Energy Mastery instead.  Each respec burns a skill point without refund if I want to be optimal with my toy of the day.  But even if respec gave +100% bonus xp, regaining that point (at max level) is too slow unless I am already at the end killing endgame enemies with a specialized hunter fleet.  So, no, it is not free.

It gets worse if I obtained then respec Best of the Best or officer skills away.  Any extra s-mods and officer skills disappear without refund.  (It is the primary reason why I do not take such skills.)

At best, it is not as bad as firing and training new officers to work with new ships, but it still hurts for most of the game.

And points spent for respecs means less green money (story points) for s-mods, elite skills, and colony improvements.

Needing to fire and train new officers hurt.  At the very least, that means more bonus xp spent to train them, and maybe new elite skills.

And I do want the option of full switch without being heavily punished for it.

[DaShiv]

In other words, I am playing the game wrong because I dare to use a fleet that is comparable to an endgame bounty fleet instead of a solo Ziggurat or something less powerful for maximum xp gain.

There is absolutely no requirement that players bring a "comparable" fleet to take on enemy fleets, because fleets from an experienced player are many times stronger than enemy fleets on a per-DP basis, due to numerous advantages that all stack to multiply the disparity:

• Vastly superior loadouts and fleet design.
• Intelligent officer skill and personality selection.
• Far more fleetwide skills, including top tier skills.
• Far higher s-mod and far lower d-mod density in most cases.
• Better usage of fleet tactics and orders.
• The impact of the player piloting itself.

And so on. I haven't encountered a single battle in vanilla that required a 240+ DP fleet to defeat without losses, which is why I run with 120 DP of combat ships. And I've "only" been playing since 0.8 so I'm sure there are many better pilots out there.

There's very little correlation between fleet size for XP purposes and the amount of loot that can be carried. As was pointed out earlier in the thread, Atlas takes away very little for XP calc purposes because of low FP * 1/4 civilian hullmod reduction, so you could easily carry multiple Atlases for less than 10% of the FP value of Ziggurat + player levels.

If I solo with Ziggurat, I do not want my fleet to exceed 100 DP because doing so spawns a bigger map with objectives, and I dislike objectives, especially if my side cannot stop the enemy from taking the points.  I have 25 DP left for support ships.  I can take either Prometheus, Atlas, and an Ox; or one Revenant and two Oxen.

Also, bringing support ships eats a noticeable amount a bonus xp from named bounties.  Against a human endgame bounty fleet, having Revenant in my "fleet" reduces bonus xp by 12% or 13%.  Tugs reduce the bonus by 4% per tug.  If I did not need a hauler for fuel to reach systems with named bounties, I would consider bringing only Ziggurat for maximum xp.

It simply doesn't make much sense to drag Revenants around for that purpose. Revenants cost 15 DP compared to the Atlas's 10 DP, and lacks the Atlas's civilian hullmod for 1/4 XP impact. Using Revenants isn't just logistically expensive, but also XP/SP expensive as well. It seems unfair to make an inefficient choice and then blame the outcome on the game, instead of the choice.

The system rewards you for efficiency with fleet composition and battlefield performance, and it's something that players are incentivized to design for.

Unfortunately, I think the game "rewards" the player by being stingy with xp and story points, and money from non-contact bounties, unless the player utterly games the system by using only the strongest options available (which may not be available early).  In other words, Starsector punishes the player for playing the game wrong.  Currently, the game wants you to solo things if at all possible, like in pre-0.6a releases, which defeats the point of a fleet and fleet skills that need officers or more ships to work.  It seems like the only time a fleet is useful was when player fights more than one Ordos at a time, or when xp gain is not the goal (like smashing a planet's defenses before raiding it for items or sat bombing it to wipe it off the map).

First of all, fighting more than one Ordos at a time is far a more efficient use of the initial CR deployment cost, as long as you're not taking excessive CR loss or ship damage/loss. Earning much better XP is simply another bonus on top of that - another incentive to play the game more efficiently.

Secondly, there's a vast middle ground between "solo everything" and "matching comparable enemy fleet size" - it's simply designing and using a smaller, more efficient fleet for everything.

More importantly, you choose to negatively label making choices you don't like as "punishment", whereas I think it's more productive to view it in terms of which player actions are being incentivized. The old system of "lug around a bunch of undeployed Paragons for easy deployment advantage leading to easy XP gain" was ridiculous and incentivized undermining the combat layer using campaign layer cheese. The current system incentivizes player competence in designing and utilizing better and more efficient fleets, loadouts, and combat tactics to overcome initial deployment for better XP gain. To me, this is a far superior gameplay approach than the "punishment" of being obligated to fill up my fleet with junk Paragons to game the system.

And I do want the option of full switch without being heavily punished for it.

Considering that respec was previously not an option for... many patches, now that there's a respec is available it's suddenly a "punishment" because there's a tangible cost for using it? That doesn't seem like a very fair or reasonable assessment. At what point during the game's development was there an expectation or precedent established for unlimited free respecs?

FWIW, in my view respec costs in Starsector are pretty mild compared to other games, especially for those who are experienced with the combat layer of the game to be able to quickly and easily earn SP.

[Megas]

About hours sunk...

Funnily enough, I was going to use xcom as an example of horribly done ironman: it just has the option and a masochistic community, but nothing else about the ironman feature other than strict anti-save scum is actually well designed. Failure in xcom is much more luck based and so much more punishing than failure in starsector, with a single bad die roll or mission destroying a hundred hour save (or multi-hundred hours for long march) on the harder difficulties, as the game can actually be lost. In terms of not engaging in risk, watching ironman playthroughs of that game is both enlightening on how to reduce risk as much as possible and also horribly tedious because of it.

XCOM is really bad in the length/recovery department, even the base game takes dozens of hours.
Getting the A team wiped in Long War is an instant game over, and it only takes 1 unlucky activation with a minor mistake to destroy a >100 hour save.
Honorable mention Battle Brothers, also long and it's really easy to avoid actual danger there.

Usually a big portion of ironman style games is losing being a real possibility and that's perfectly fine with games that typically last 5, 10, maybe low 10s of hours.
My guess is if a game takes more than ~50 hours that means only a small fraction of players will actually see most of it.
There are definitely people who enjoy honest, untweaked ironman runs of XCOM:LW but no clue if it's a high enough percentage to base design decisions on.

Agreed in that how long is too long changes by game, 10-20 generally isn't much (some FTL/DCSS/Noita runs can easily surpass that).
After a threshold I do think it comes at the expense of the ironman experience, too long and it locks content/promotes conservative play.

I played a JRPG-style game a few months ago.  By the time I finished it, it recorded over forty hours of play by the time I finished, and I played the game off and on for about three weeks.  Much time was spent either grinding up experience in encounters or collecting items (sometimes lots of them) to unlock new locations.  I considered that game long.

For Starsector, it took at least a week (probably longer) to go from start to endgame when I am comfortable enough to kill endgame bounties easily with an unoptimized fleet (Ziggurat with no Combat skills and most ships without any s-mods).  Then I took time off before I resumed to play to experiment with stuff and help me decide which skills, ships, and s-mods to get.

Anything that needs ten or more hours of casual play (no speed-running) to finish is a long game.

* * *

Switching gears...

There is absolutely no requirement that players bring a "comparable" fleet to take on enemy fleets, because fleets from an experienced player are many times stronger than enemy fleets on a per-DP basis, due to numerous advantages that all stack to multiply the disparity:

The point was if I use a conventional fleet to fight the enemy, the xp gain for story points is too slow.  For me to get close to a million xp from endgame bounties (not Ordos), I need to solo them with Ziggurat (or perhaps something even cheaper and less powerful), which is easily capable of doing if I have found the weapons and s-modded in two 25+ OP hullmods (and did not get Augmented Engines).  But if I do that, I cannot bring enough support to haul all the loot.  It is very constraining to be stuck with Ziggurat only if I fight anything other than Ordos just so I can get more story points in my lifetime.

It simply doesn't make much sense to drag Revenants around for that purpose. Revenants cost 15 DP compared to the Atlas's 10 DP, and lacks the Atlas's civilian hullmod for 1/4 XP impact. Using Revenants isn't just logistically expensive, but also XP/SP expensive as well. It seems unfair to make an inefficient choice and then blame the outcome on the game, instead of the choice.

I not only need extra space for cargo, but also fuel.  Atlas is not a tanker.  If I did not use Revenant, then I need not only Atlas, but also Prometheus (or maybe Phaeton is good enough if I do not recover enemy ships).

I take Revenant because it is 15 DP, while Atlas and Prometheus combo is 20 DP, and both need more fuel than Revenant.  With Revenant, I have 10 DP left for small combat map.  I can bring two tugs for more burn or whatever, provided I am okay with giving up +4% xp per tug.  Maybe a Phantom (or a passenger ship like Nebula) to haul more crew or marines.

Considering that respec was previously not an option for... many patches, now that there's a respec is available it's suddenly a "punishment" because there's a tangible cost for using it? That doesn't seem like a very fair or reasonable assessment. At what point during the game's development was there an expectation or precedent established for unlimited free respecs?

In 0.95a, some of the better skills (like the one Tech 5 that combined both BotB and Flux Regulations) were permanent and could not be respecced out.  Barely better than no respec at all.

Today, I think the current cost is still too great unless I have an optimized "fleet" that can smash endgame fights because story point gain is much too slow unless I have the correct fleet.  If I fight something less than Ordos, then it is solo flagship or forget it.  If I fight more than one Ordos, I need to find the right combination of overpowered ships, hullmods, and skills to pull it off, and it certainly not the equivalent of a random NPC endgame bounty fleet put together.

And if I am grinding multiple Ordos in a single fight, then I am at the very end of the game, unless my ultimate goal is full Sector colonization via alpha cores.

FWIW, in my view respec costs in Starsector are pretty mild compared to other games, especially for those who are experienced with the combat layer of the game to be able to quickly and easily earn SP.

It also costs more than one game I played too (and I would not be surprised if there are others), an indie JRPG-like game (same one that took more than 40 hours to reach near the end of currently finished content) that allowed free respec of skill points while not in combat.  Probably because the player can use only four party members at a time in combat, while many more sit in the sidelines.

In Starsector, player can have a hundred or more ships in storage, while he can only use about a dozen or so at a time.


P.S.  And if player has an Ordos killer fleet, he probably made heavy investment into s-mods and officers.  If I want to change the fleet or skills because I want to play with a different fleet, then the cost will probably be more than a single story point.  If player had BotB previously and does not now, his third s-mods from all of his ships disappear.  Then, player will probably need new officers for his ships.

Some of the advantages the player has over NPC fleets require the player to lock in his choices that are difficult or costly to undo, which hurts.

And NPCs have one major advantage over the player, and that is unlimited resources (for replacements).  If enemy fleet suffered a total wipe, no problem, the game will conjure a replacement fleet out of nothing.  If the player wiped similarly, he lost far more than any bounty would pay.

[Vanshilar]

That's not true at all. Games can be designed for ironman (i.e. no savescumming) regardless of their difficulty. X-com series, roguelikes and roguelites, games with dark souls like respawns, etc. Taking an average game NOT designed for ironman and slapping the option "for the challenge" is what Starsector currently is (sadly).

My point is "a game doesn't need to make it easy for ironman players", especially when the mode is optional, so any player who doesn't want to take that risk can skip it - it's for players who choose to take on that risk. Nor does Starsector make it difficult to recover from failure. Unlike "permadeath" games (where once you die, the save game is erased), you get to restart with a couple of starter ships, and if you're restarting from a fleet wipe, presumably you had some extra ships/weapons stored away and/or colonies able to print ships for you, etc. to get you going again, along with credits, etc. And fleet wipes should be fairly rare, when you can spend an SP to get out of any fight you deem too risky.

I think people in this thread keep taking the underlying assumption of "my fleet needs to be full of s-mods to fight", and then using it as the basis for arguing that getting SP for the s-mods is too difficult (or too slow), as if somehow they can't play the game unless they have a full set of green bars. No, like any other XP system, it's meant to be a gradual improvement of your character as you do more battles, not something you need in order to fight battles in the first place. It's the reward for winning battles, not the prerequisite for them. You can fight [REDACTED] fleets without them if you want. They're certainly nice to have and make your ships more powerful, but are by no means required, and are incremental improvements to your fleet.

I just took out a random high-end bounty, League deserter worth about 390k.  With +384% xp from soloing the entire enemy fleet with Ziggurat (would have had +397% if I left Revenant behind), I received about base 990k xp, which was doubled with the bonus xp, so almost two million total.  Had I used random stuff comparable to their fleet, I probably would have about +50% xp instead, and would have gained only about a fourth of the xp (close to half million due to bonus xp).  I would need to fight four or five such bounties to get a million xp with a fleet similar to an endgame bounty.

So you got 1980k XP at +384%. Which means base XP was 409k. Which means +50% XP bonus would be 614k. Which means 2 fights is all you need.

Named bounties are sometimes close, but not that much.  I rarely get more than two near each other.

Depends on your save game seed I suppose, but for me they've been pretty consistently in a string north of the Core Worlds, with usually 1 of the 5 to the south instead. Attached is an example, with 4 of them in a line and a 5th bounty for a pirate base if I care to do it. For the 3 ~300k bounties, each are around 500k base XP (assuming double XP from SP) and my current fleet would average around 1.8 mil XP from each of them. Hence 5.4 story points from doing a single run, and my current fleet is nowhere near an "endgame bounty fleet" yet nor are these the highest-level (i.e. biggest) bounties possible.

In other words, I am playing the game wrong because I dare to use a fleet that is comparable to an endgame bounty fleet instead of a solo Ziggurat or something less powerful for maximum xp gain.

No, it means that it has to do with how you built your fleet, and/or because you're wasting them frivolously and then complaining about how hard it is to get more. Your topic for this thread is that you want to be able to frequently switch between different sets of character skills for different flagships, so that you can keep the ship's fighting ability optimized regardless of whichever ship-of-the-day you want to use. You also want to spend a lot of SP on colonies, which, other than storage (which could be done for free anyway) and the ability to print your own ships/gear, essentially serve as credit factories -- when credits are basically unlimited at the endgame anyway. Therefore it boils down to spending SP to gain more credits, which is a bad trade.

So you want to spend a lot of SP on these unnecessary things, but are unwilling to make the adjustments to your fleet and your playstyle to accommodate it. You don't need a solo Zig for max XP gain. You need a fleet that can take on multiple times its DP, and win, regardless of its size. After all, why should the game bother giving you bonus XP if you're taking on even odds? That's what regular XP is for. The whole point of bonus XP is to reward the player for when the fleet takes on heavy odds, and can still win. So that can be a small fleet able to take on a single [REDACTED] fleet for 5 mil XP per pop, or a large fleet able to take on triple [REDACTED] at once for 15 mil XP per pop. Three smaller fights or one large epic battle, but the same amount of XP gain. That's where the game rewards good fleet compositions, player skill, and so forth.

If I solo with Ziggurat, I do not want my fleet to exceed 100 DP because doing so spawns a bigger map with objectives, and I dislike objectives, especially if my side cannot stop the enemy from taking the points.  I have 25 DP left for support ships.  I can take either Prometheus, Atlas, and an Ox; or one Revenant and two Oxen.

The point was if I use a conventional fleet to fight the enemy, the xp gain for story points is too slow.  For me to get close to a million xp from endgame bounties (not Ordos), I need to solo them with Ziggurat (or perhaps something even cheaper and less powerful), which is easily capable of doing if I have found the weapons and s-modded in two 25+ OP hullmods (and did not get Augmented Engines).  But if I do that, I cannot bring enough support to haul all the loot.  It is very constraining to be stuck with Ziggurat only if I fight anything other than Ordos just so I can get more story points in my lifetime.

Here's another example of complaining about an entirely self-imposed problem, artificially limiting yourself to 25 DP of support ships if you're soloing with Zig, and then complaining about how that's limiting your loot. (Obviously, large fleets can have all the support ships they want.) There are multiple solutions, such as 1) centering the fight over one of the objectives, ensuring that you get some benefit from it 2) not caring about the objectives as you fight 3) changing the "maxNoObjectiveBattleSize" in \starsector-core\data\config\settings.json to whatever size you like so that you don't have to worry about them. But you end up choosing none of them so that you can set up a Zig "XP but no loot" or large fleet "loot but no XP" false choice to complain about.

In reality, XP, fleet size, etc. all operate on a sliding scale. There's no "either or", it's how much you prefer. The larger your fleet, the less XP bonus, because presumably the easier the battles become and the faster you can do them (so that while you get less XP per battle, you can do more of them per hour of playing time). Conversely, if you use a smaller fleet, you get a larger XP bonus but each fight is harder, with more risk of losing ships or losing the battle entirely, and each fight takes longer because you have less firepower to chew through the same amount of ships.

Also, bringing support ships eats a noticeable amount a bonus xp from named bounties.  Against a human endgame bounty fleet, having Revenant in my "fleet" reduces bonus xp by 12% or 13%.  Tugs reduce the bonus by 4% per tug.

And those percentages are measured against the +384% XP bonus. In other words, the Revenant means less than 3% of your overall XP gain (0.13 vs 4.84 multiplier on your XP, 0.13/4.84 = 2.7%). Tug means less than 1% of your overall XP gain. You probably get more XP per hour from the tug moving your fleet faster on the campaign map than what you lose from its contribution to the DP. That's hardly noticeable when each bounty's base XP varies by around 15% (in other words, when fighting the exact same bounty repeatedly by reloading the save, the base XP varies by around +-8% of its average).

Revenants cost 15 DP compared to the Atlas's 10 DP, and lacks the Atlas's civilian hullmod for 1/4 XP impact.

Just a side note, Revenant does have the CIVILIAN tag in ship_data.csv, plus it lacks any weapons. Either of those conditions means its DP counts for 1/4 of its original value for XP bonus. (Thus just-recovered warships, as long as you remove all weapons and fighters, will also count for 1/4 of their DP for XP bonus.)

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