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[Histidine]

Summary of a group discussion thing on [redacted by COMSEC] earlier today. I think the proximate trigger was someone getting clapped by the Tesseracts and malding about it, but there may be some valid concerns nevertheless.

• The Tesseracts are stat sticks
• The AI interacts poorly with the Aspects
• In some ways the encounter seems designed around the Ziggurat?

Tesseracts
I'll just copy the Discord messages Nia wrote about this:

yeah tesseracts never feel fair
cause they just delete some ships
and there's nothing you can do
you either can tank the insane burst (which few ships can)
or you can evade most of it (which even fewer ships can)

(Histi's recommendation: consider consulting your nearest mod about a suitably overpowered supercapital)

At the same time you can just cheese them with a phase ship that has strong burst firepower: bait the Tess into using its temporal shell, wait it out in phase, then slag it. Nia's specific example (which "completely trivialised" the fight after a very difficult first attempt) was Ziggurat with AMBs and Reapers.

Aspects
Apparently (I haven't watched them closely and can't personally verify this, but it seems consistent with the way my fleets end up in Omega fights):
Aspects screw with ship AI by herding them around and causing them to get separated. Ships try to back away from the Aspects, which may work with other fighters but not these ones because they aren't tethered to a carrier with limited engagement range and don't have to rearm. So you end up with a bunch of widely separated ships getting bitten to death. Only partly mitigated by defend order.

Also is "normal" ballistic PD any good against them? They seem to move way too fast for MG/Vulcan and equivalents to hit effectively.

Ziggurat
Was the hypershunt encounter specifically designed for Zig? Aside from generally being a hugely powerful ship, this thing hardcounters Omega; it stunlocks one Tesseract and can nuke either if they overextend near it, and the motes are easily the most efficient way to swat Aspects.

It's hardly the only fleet combo that can beat the Tessies (there's a video of two Onslaught XIVs doing it) but I feel there may be an overly large gap between this and any other potential solution for comparable DP cost or player investment.

[robepriority]

I don't think having the ziggurat as the definitive solution for the hypershunt encounter is bad - in fact, it should be telegraphed harder that being able to beat, retrieve, and use it is easier than fighting the aspects.

[Megas]

I do not mind Ziggurat being overpowered for its DP cost when it costs 50% CR to deploy (and takes nearly two weeks to recover) and it cannot be used to stealth fight non-hostiles without setting rep from 100% to -50% in one go.

P.S.  Also, Ziggurat's restoration costs are insane - nearly two million!  Almost requires Hull Restoration if player wants to have pristine Ziggurat without breaking the bank.  (Another reason why I love Hull Restoration.)

[Alex]

Ziggurat
Was the hypershunt encounter specifically designed for Zig?

(Just, real quick: not at all! But I don't think it's a bad thing that it's available as an easier option to deal with them.)

[smithney]

(Just, real quick: not at all! But I don't think it's a bad thing that it's available as an easier option to deal with them.)

Bless you if that's the case ^^ I've been looking forward to see in what non-combat ways can I abuse the Wunderwaffe. Having it be the default skeleton key to winning lategame fights would be bad news for me.

[Amoebka]

Having it be the default skeleton key to winning lategame fights would be bad news for me.

It still will be. Zig is just an unfair ship in general. Pretty much any enemy fleet you can imagine is easier to beat with Zig + supports than with a fleet without it.
And yes, I agree with the "malding". The burst is too punishing and restricts the set of viable strategies too much.
On a more general note, pretty much ALL endgame fights are the same - super high burst large ships that are too fast for their size. Tesseracts are just the most obvious.

[Megas]

The biggest enabler for Ziggurat cheese (beyond motes and Exp. Phase Coils) is the double speed reload from Phase Anchor.  Other phase ships without elite Field Modulation have trouble abusing that part because weapons other than AMB or Omega missiles are limited by cloak's recharge delay.

Ziggurat can exploit Phase Anchor to reload lances and/or Omega missiles quickly.

Maybe best to split Phase Anchor between faster reload and escape.  I get Phase Anchor mainly for the escape/avoid d-mods for normal phase ships.  For Ziggurat, it is to buff weapons.

[prav]

I'm not sure I agree with the underlying presumption that fighting the Tesseracts should feel fair. They're the weird extradimensional late-game challenge - cheapshots, new strategies, and simply raw power are not uncalled for. Ok, I got my ass kicked after I poked the strange space obelisk, and now I know that some of my ships are going to get bursted down - how do I deal with that?

Some people hate that kind of challenge, and won't agree. Others consider IWBTG game of the year 2007 and laughed their ass off when that apple fell upwards (or, less extremely, the entire soulslike genre - fans of which will swear up and down it's perfectly fair while stumbling into yet another evil trap). And some just want to vent after a good ass-kicking before trying again.

If the Tesseracts don't make me take a moment to reconsider my approach and my assumptions, what will?

[smithney]

I'm not sure I agree with the underlying presumption that fighting the Tesseracts should feel fair. They're the weird extradimensional late-game challenge - cheapshots, new strategies, and simply raw power are not uncalled for. Ok, I got my ass kicked after I poked the strange space obelisk, and now I know that some of my ships are going to get bursted down - how do I deal with that?

I think this depends on whether Tessaract is supposed to be faced by every player going through the story, or be a challenge reserved for players looking for one. I'm confident that most players aren't looking to have to spend time engineering a cheese fleet to deal with a technically unavoidable enemy. Or have to decide which 70% of their carefully pimped up fleet are they going to sacrifice to defeat the death god they had no chance of seeing coming.

That said, you're right that surprise rulebending MFers are a heck of a thrill if done well. Psycho Mantis and Omega Flowey jump to mind ^^

[Network Pesci]

I wish there was more of them and they were even worse.  I don't care for the Dark Souls style, IWTBTG level of difficulty in a whole game, but I don't mind there being a super secret optional challenge, I love that kind of thing.  I wish that activating the Hypershunt opened up a portal in the system you use it in and Ultra-Redactoids would randomly pour through leading fleets of Remnants so I could have a semi-regular source of superweapons and overpowered unfair boss fights.

In StarSector, once you're in the endgame, you choose your own difficulty level.  I never considered the eldritch horrors of hyperspace to be all that difficult, since by the time I needed the hypershunt or could remotely afford to repair it, I've always had multiple size six colonies.  Oh big deal, this fight's too hard, I might have to throw half my industrial production for a few months at it.  O woe is me, since I can only build one and a half paragons a month it will take three months to replace the gratuitous losses from that fight.  I feel a little bad about the thousand or so imaginary crewmen that died as I casually threw reinforcements at a fight like a WWI general, less bad about the imaginary shareholders that will get slightly smaller dividends this cycle.  My point is, by endgame, casualties from any fight are just a rounding error in my profits for the month since I can crank out battleships.

If this battle is too difficult, cheat.  Crank up the battle size to whatever your rig can handle.  I usually have my battles on 500 to look properly cinematic like the background of a Star Wars action sequence or whatnot.

I use the Ziggurat as a novelty, not as a main part of my fleet.  I bring it out to take on truly overpowered boss fights from mods, but my standard Tesseract fighting fleet is a Tach Lance Paragon, a beam Aurora, and (piloted by your humble narrator) a Safety Overrides Triple Heavy Blaster Aurora.  I've also pulled off the battle with only cruisers as part of a challenge run, I think it was two Dominators, two Champions, and as many Auroras as would fit in the battle.  Admittedly on the cruiser run I used a ton of S-Mods and had some really good luck with the hidden weapon cache.  I think I had two of the lightning PDs and one each of the small and medium antimatter missiles.

Man you want an overpowered unfair boss fight go play the Xhan mod and fight Thousand Eyes.  I wish Thousand Eyes was part of vanilla, or at least vanilla had something that rule-bending and unfair.  I wish vanilla had some Evil Otto kill-you-in-real-life Absolute Virtue Pandemonium Warden type dude to fight.  Something's gotta be making those slipstreams in hyperspace after all.

[Serenitis]

I think this depends on whether Tessaract is supposed to be faced by every player going through the story, or be a challenge reserved for players looking for one.

This is very important, as far as design decisions go.
Do you make extra-hard content mandatory, or optional?

In every game, at least half of your player base is at or below median skill level. Making hard content mandatory effectively locks those people out of anything beyond that point.
While some may argue that making hard content optional diminishes the experience.
It's basically the same argument as "should there be an easy mode?", just with a slightly different framing.

Being firmly in the lower half of the demographics, I favour permissive systems and optionality.
I've tried to mess with geometry a few times, not got anywhere, and because I don't have the interest, the patience or the time to bounce my head against a problem until a solution pops out any more, I'm content to leave them be and let other players have all the fun they like with them. It's just not for me.
If I were forced to engage with this at some point, I would likely be considerably less content.

[Megas]

I chase Tesseracts for Omega weapons.  Omega missiles combined with Phase Anchor is a huge powerup for Ziggurat.  Omega weapons in general are also good for high-tech ships that are held back by crappy weapons.  I consider killing Tesseracts mandatory for those nice Omega weapons.

I consider the Ziggurat much like The Vindicator from Star Control 2 (and I sometimes rename TTS Xenorphica to ISS/The Vindicator), and once I get it, it eventually becomes my final flagship (because it is an obvious overpowered and unique hero ship just like the Vindicator) unless I need to raid a core world for blueprints (in which case, I probably pilot an Onslaught XIV or Paragon to maintain anonymity).  In this current release, Ziggurat is fun to use, especially with Omega weapons.

If anything, I would like to see more unique hero ships so that Ziggurat is not the only Vindicator the player can use.

[FooF]

I took on the hypershunt encounter way earlier than I expected in my All Midline run. 3 Champions, Eagle, Gryphon, 2 Herons, Falcon, 3 hammerheads, 3 Sunders, 2 Centurions, 2 brawlers and 2 Monitors. Threw the whole fleet at them because I knew I’d need it.

I crushed them. I was gobsmacked to be honest because I’ve taken way more powerful fleets against them and not had as good of results. I lost almost every Destroyer and Frigate, yes, but I think a Heron was the only cruiser lost. I had the Monitors harass one and sent everything else on an Eliminate order for the other. I think having a lot of smaller, faster ships meant they couldn’t back off forever. We took the first one down surprisingly quickly. And after that it snowballed to victory.

I think the magic was that every Champion had 4 Burst PD up front and the Eagle had 3. They shredded the Aspects once it came to that. Having reliable anti-fighter PD is probably the key to the fight and since most of my ships were decently mobile, I don’t think they got too strung out. The only ship I lost track of was the Eagle which went to the lower right of the map and after most everything was mopped up, it came back to the fold unscathed. So whatever it did, it did well.

Thanks to Skills, I recovered everything with minimal d-mods and got a host of Omega weapons.

I think the fight is more of a measure of fleet robustness than raw power. They’re so slippery you cant rely on lumbering Capitals and as they split into new ships, you find out whether or not your PD is up to snuff. I went into the fight thinking I’d lose, as I didn’t have a fleet I’d consider “endgame” but it was the right combination for this fight.

[Brainwright]

Well, there are two factors in the Omega fights that make them a pain :

1. Time acceleration is the easiest way to break the game.  Not only does temporal shell allow any given ship to engage and withdraw almost any time they want, but the captain skills also get to proc at a much faster rate.  Accelerating elite Damage Control and elite Combat Endurance at the same time leads to some insane durability, as I've seen with Nia's Legio Infernalis.

2. Engaging fighters is pretty awful with the current suite of point defense weapons.  Most are circling around for the next pass outside of 400su, which is well outside of most PD weapons' range.  Then, when they do close, they hover around the center mass of the target ship, which is outside the weapon arcs of most mounts.  Even just passing back and forth through the center will throw off most PD, as it's still too fast for the weapons to track.

Challenge in a single engagement is a tough thing to track in Starsector.  The combat script defines most NPC behavior, so the battle more or less has a script based on the relative strength of the fleet.  You can often adapt to that, but the script gets obscure in a number of areas, and it has a tendency of sending ships to suicide themselves after a period of fairly level engagement.

Also, the player typically runs a much smaller fleet than the NPCs, which greatly hampers their ability to respond to exotic threats.  If you have to build your fleet specifically to fight an exotic threat, it's just not much of a challenge to be honest.  It's just crunching numbers.

Logistical challenges would be easier to manage.  Bring enough ships to drive the opponent around until it either kills you outright or retreats because of expended PPT.  Then keep reengaging until you win or are driven away.

Losing is also ridiculously expensive.  Some way of recovering ships after being defeated, such as disabled ships still being able to fly, but at mothball-level of readiness, would be greatly appreciated.  Especially if you can select particular ships you like to have special favor in not being lost to a captain who decides to suicide a ship as you retreat.  Totally never happened to me before, honest!

[HUcast]

I agree with many of the thoughts above that it should be a fight that tests you. Your player gets abilities that can eliminate d-mods and make ships always recoverable for a reason, and you can use money to remove d-mods too (and you WILL have money at this point in the game.). If there were common reliable strats to consistently kill them without losing any ships at all, it would completely lose the impact of feeling completely outgunned by an unknown foe. Losing ships in star sector is more like taking HP damage in an RPG, you have the resources to recover it. It's fine if one or two of your ships get annihilated in the opening exchange, who doesn't remember the scenes in space media where a couple forward ships get suddenly vaporized by a new foe?

Star sector shouldn't be balanced like a PVP game where every fight is on fair ground, not doing so allows for so many more tools and ways to express itself in gameplay.