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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Planet Search Overhaul (07/13/24)

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Author Topic: Expanding upon ship crewmen  (Read 3604 times)

BCS

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #30 on: August 17, 2022, 05:50:15 AM »

This is one of those statements where you can't tell if someone's joking or not, because there are people out there that genuinely believe that playing a game to escape the tedium of reality should be just as dull.

Why do you play Starsector then, a game all about the tedium of traveling from one place to another with Shift pressed, the tedium of smuggling to get money to get the fleet to get into the tedium of grinding Remnants for AI cores to tediously wait for your colonies to develop?

Maybe you should get into one of those games which let you skip all that tedium by paying for it.
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Grievous69

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #31 on: August 17, 2022, 05:56:22 AM »

This is one of those statements where you can't tell if someone's joking or not, because there are people out there that genuinely believe that playing a game to escape the tedium of reality should be just as dull.

Why do you play Starsector then, a game all about the tedium of traveling from one place to another with Shift pressed, the tedium of smuggling to get money to get the fleet to get into the tedium of grinding Remnants for AI cores to tediously wait for your colonies to develop?

Maybe you should get into one of those games which let you skip all that tedium by paying for it.
Absurd arguments are absurd. Also tone it down bucko, some people just play games for fun (shocking I know), no need to be elitist about it.
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Schwartz

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #32 on: August 17, 2022, 06:29:24 AM »

I have one! Or I think so  :P

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22384.msg337054#msg337054

Something like that occurred to me too, but it breaks down to a player doing badly = penalty. If by working like Marine proficiency you mean gaining XP through participation in battles, where more crew losses = more potential XP loss. There's already d-mods, supply drain, ship loss and crew loss disincentivizing poor player performance so I would be wary to introduce another one. Even if it was positive, if zero crew XP was the CR baseline and we got bonus CR for crew XP, that would still work the same way.

The fundamental problem is that we expect crew survival (a marker of player skill, either directly, or indirectly through fleet superiority) to result in better crew performance (a buff). And I don't think that works. It's logical, it would make sense to implement, but raising the power ceiling / digging deeper into the power basement is not what makes the game better IMO.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #33 on: August 17, 2022, 07:00:56 AM »

I have been playing Hearts of Iron 4 and Stalker: Anomaly lately, which are similar to Starsector in salient ways such as slow traveling and lots of early-game reloading. HoI4 was addictive, but I hardly ever had fun with it because I felt like I was wasting time for no meaningful progress. Stalker: Anomaly is much more engaging and entertaining because, while the risk of getting killed like a newbie becomes much less likely, it never goes away (playing on hard) - you must always pay close attention while traveling lest you get ambushed or waltz into an anomaly.

In Starsector, once you get a so-so fleet (which is quick and easy) you can get to many places safely by clicking your destination and putting a rock on the shift key. hyperspace storms and slipstreams basically just make it more expensive/take longer. It is boring, and one of the main reasons I rarely play Starsector.
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Grievous69

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #34 on: August 17, 2022, 07:07:20 AM »

Well you'll be happy to hear you can switch "speed up" to a toggle in settings, to rest that poor shift key. But I don't get how people alt tab out of the game when travelling, don't you get intercepted by fleets? The point when I can be so careless is when I have a full 240 DP fleet and a near max player level. If I tried to go around with my eyes close before that, I'll be sure to get whacked by a Luddic fleet or something else.
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michail

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #35 on: August 17, 2022, 07:20:21 AM »

I'd like to point out that making the player take care of the crew is not the same as making them care about the crew. If you want the latter, penalizing the player for not taking care of them is a wrong way to do it, as it will just breed resentment (for an example, look at Terraria players abusing NPCs because, among other reasons, recently-added happiness mechanics are obnoxious). If you want to humanize the crew, add some human interactions with them: shore leaves, (dis)honorable discharges, funerals. I wouldn't mind this sort of crew mechanics, if it's infrequent enough to not be annoying.
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Schwartz

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #36 on: August 17, 2022, 07:42:16 AM »

**** yeah shoreleave. Some interactive happenings would be neat, as long as they're rare and meaningful. Maybe some hard choices re: captain's law.
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SCC

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Re: Expanding upon ship crewmen
« Reply #37 on: August 17, 2022, 08:18:41 AM »

But I don't get how people alt tab out of the game when travelling, don't you get intercepted by fleets?
Outside the core, the risk is mostly of unwittingly going to a system with a pirate or pather base and being caught there.
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