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[BCS]

Well, getting the two points that spawn on "your side" is all but guaranteed even without frigates. Eradicators can get there on time(and possibly even push away an enemy frigate, which AI is terrible at) and they're not even the fastest cruiser. So generally speaking, +60 DP from two points is guaranteed almost regardless of fleet composition.

IMO the whole DP scaling mechanic could be completely removed, just give each side 160 DP at the start and done. At least then it's consistent whether you're fighting full-sized Ordo or some D-modded Pirates so it's easier to plan for.

[Vanshilar]

Oh I'd love to see your fleet comp then, if you can take and hold objectives on enemy side of the map within first minute or so of combat.

Well it's not going to be within the first minute, since it takes roughly a minute for the two fleets to actually meet each other in the middle in the first place. But the key is to just note that the AI's behavior is that they will send the bulk of their fleet to only one objective at a time, while they'll only send token forces to capture the other ones, usually frigates. So you just need to send ships strong enough to displace their frigates temporarily while your main fleet bottlenecks their main fleet.

Off the top of my head, the fleet compositions I've used in 0.95.1a include:

Odyssey/Fury/Apogee/Hyperion: Various combinations of these ships, such as 2 Odysseys, 3 Furies, 3 Apogees, 2 Hyperions. A notable example is here: (video from 0.95a), a 3 Odyssey, 3 Apogee, 3 Hyperion pure AI fleet, that on a lucky run could kill double Ordos on its own without any commands, after capturing the objectives and gathering the fleet up. This meant that all 15 skill points could go toward the fleet, and I didn't really have to do anything other than issue the occasional command (mostly just to corral the fleet back together). This family of fleet setups was what I first tried out in 0.95.1a. In all cases, if there were Hyperions, the Hyperions were sent to the objectives. If there weren't any (such as 2 Odyssey, 8 Apogee, etc.), then either some Apogees or Furies would grab the objectives.

Fury/Eradicator/Apogee/Hyperion/Shrike/Scarab/Brawler: Again, various combinations of some of these ships, generally all with SO. This was focusing more on having shifting front lines, rather than large tanks that the fleet centered around (note no capital ships). As with before, it would usually be the small ships going for the objectives first.

All-Hyperion fleet: This was frequently mentioned on the forums for a while. I tried it out, it was doable, but wasn't that great. The Hyperions, even with reckless officers, just kept running away unnecessarily, so their overall average DPS was pretty low, even if they had good burst DPS, resulting in long fights (which is made worse by their low PPT). I obviously just sent a Hyperion to each of the objectives.

Eagle/Scarab: This was with me in a Medusa. Like Hyperions above, this was doable, but wasn't that great. The Scarabs grabbed the objectives.

LP Brawlers with Champions or Eagle XIV's or Furies or Eradicators or Gryphons or Apogees or Falcon XIV's: This was with me in a Sunder, or Hammerhead, or Aurora, or LP Brawler, or eventually, Medusa using dual Cryoblasters, with various combinations of ships supporting the LP Brawlers. No officers, so this fleet relied on Support Doctrine. Eventually I settled on SO Falcon XIV's with Xyphos as being the most effective out of these on a per-DP basis for supporting the LP Brawlers. This was probably the easiest start I've ever played since the LP Brawlers could easily punch above their weight in the early game, and it was easy to gradually amass them to gradually scale up the enemies I fought by going to the various LP bases and either buying them or killing them. There were so many LP Brawlers that I could afford to send 2-3 to each objective. I also regularly fought Ordos under-DP'ed (i.e. my fleet only using 40-50% of battle size) since battles would actually finish faster that way -- the Brawlers would be waiting around at the enemy spawn point for new ships to spawn in if I had sized the battle size "correctly" at my fleet taking up 60%, so I made the battle size bigger than needed just so enemy ships would spawn in more quickly. I didn't need to capture the objectives, but this made it easier to corral the enemy fleet.

Ziggurat with LP Brawlers: Me piloting the Ziggurat using Omega weapons. Solo Ziggurat works but isn't that great, since you the player have to individually chase down every ship. Adding some LP Brawlers meant that I could have them fan out to either side, taking care of the trash while I concentrated on the big ships in the middle. The LP Brawlers went and grabbed the objectives while I went straight for the main enemy fleet, then I let them roam free, which meant that they would gradually head toward the enemy spawn point as I myself gradually headed there as I chewed through the main fleet and reinforcements. Doing it this way meant that the Ziggurat increased its own overall DPS by around 15% compared with soloing since it didn't have to turn nor overkill so much against minor targets, and could specialize against bigger ones.

Gryphons with LP Brawlers as support: I started by trying a monofleet of officered Gryphons, but found it sort of lacking. Having the Gryphons grab the objectives meant that it diluted the middle main fleet too much, especially early on before my reinforcements arrive. So the first way I tried was putting in some unofficered LP Brawlers (with Support Doctrine), to capture the objectives and allow the Gryphons to concentrate their fire on the main fleet. 10 officered Gryphons and 10 unofficered LP Brawlers. On a per-DP basis, the LP Brawlers did around as much damage as the Gryphons -- even though the Gryphons were officered while the LP Brawlers weren't (though they had Support Doctrine to help).

Gryphon with Legion XIV or Legion or Onslaught XIV flagship: I then piloted a Legion XIV or Legion or Onslaught XIV as the flagship, along with 10 officered Gryphons. Because I was helping to chew up the main enemy fleet, this freed up some Gryphons to grab the objectives. This is a case where the base Legion is noticeably better than the Legion XIV, because the base Legion could fit 5 Proximity Charge Launchers to completely annihilate the Radiants whenever they showed up (by using its burn drive to yeet the Prox en masse into the Radiants), along with its fighters, etc. I eventually settled on the Onslaught XIV though because even though it only had 4 instead of 5 medium missile slots, it had more ballistic weaponry and I didn't have to deal with pressing Z to toggle fighter engage/regroup.

Conquests with Onslaught XIV flagship: In looking at the Conquest to make use of my data on ballistic weapons (and to test them further), I started off with using Conquests with me piloting an Onslaught XIV in the middle. Two of the Conquests would grab the objectives. Unfortunately, this meant that (with BotB) it was me and 2 Conquests holding off the main fleet until reinforcements came, which was sometimes a bit risky, leading to...

Conquests with Medusa (me) and Gryphon as support: 5 officered Conquests as the main damage-dealers, while an officered Gryphon and me piloting a Medusa would grab objectives and do general support (mostly chasing down stragglers). This is the current fleet setup I'm playing around with to look at the Conquest in detail in support of the Conquest Appreciation Thread and now, Optimizing the Conquest threads, and it's a monster. The 4 initial Conquests are more than enough to handle their main fleet while the Gryphon and I grab the objectives and deal with any trash that spills over the sides, and then once the 5th Conquest shows up, I just sit back and let them fight for the most part (to collect the data; around 90% of the total damage is dealt by the Conquests for my data). They have no trouble going through double Ordos with me sitting back after grabbing objectives, so this fleet could most likely handle triple Ordos as well if I wanted it to (especially if I actually bothered to get into the thick of things instead of staying back). Except there's no reason to since I'm already running up near the XP cap against double Ordos; if I wanted to I could probably push the XP bonus to over +750% with this fleet, but the XP bonus is capped at +500% so there's really no need.

There are probably others that I've forgotten about. At any rate, most of these fleet setups fought Ordos fleets at around +400% XP bonus or higher, and all of them had a way to grab objectives early to deploy the whole fleet and then stay alive to not have to worry about DP after that. Although usually grabbing the objectives is what allows me to encircle the enemy fleet in the first place so the enemy fleet never really got a chance to get the objectives back after I grabbed them, so it didn't really matter.

(Side note: As I mentioned before, this is why I haven't really bothered to play with content mods in over a year, not because I don't want to, but because once I started getting into the game, I could see that there were far more possible effective fleet builds in the vanilla game than I have time to try. For example, for Gryphon spam with Onslaught XIV flagship, I actually tried out using different weapons as well as different fleet setups: 10 Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs triple Ordos, 6 Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs double Ordos, and 10 unofficered Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs single Ordos, using Support Doctrine and Derelict Operations. Each of these play very differently even though they're ostensibly the same fleet configuration. And I haven't even gotten into other fleet configurations like carrier spam (Heron? Mora? Condor? I'm sure each of those play differently, not to mention all the possible fighter arrangements), automated ships, fleet centered around Eradicators, etc.)

Grabbing them at first is the easy part.  Holding (more than one of) them is the hard part, especially when fast ships (frigates) run out of PPT and are forced to retreat (if they do not die first).  If some of my ships die or run out of PPT and need to retreat, and the enemy takes a point, I cannot reinforce, and the fight is likely decided for the enemy.

There's no need to hold them unless your ships die. If your ships are dying, that's the problem to solve first, not whether or not you can hold objectives for the whole fight. If your ships are running out of PPT, then that's an issue with trying to fight a fleet that's too large for your fleet (too many ships to churn through), or killing them too slowly. (Exception is if you're using SO in which case, well, you take the CR penalty as part of the deal if the fleet is too big.)

It would only be 200 DP if the map size stayed at 500 (or player took BotB).  But since it did not and max size went to 400 instead, it went down to 160 DP for non-BotB builds.

No, it starts at 160 DP or 200 DP, but your fleet should be running at 240 DP for the majority of the battle. It just means that the beginning of the battle now has an extra step of grabbing the objectives, then after that it's a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight.

I would have preferred old ship stacking because at least bringing a big fleet had a point even if I could not deploy all the ships.  Now, bringing a big war fleet is pointless and very unsatisfying (if I did not build for solo Ziggurat) because the player has the shonen elite doing all the fighting while his cheerleading ships sit on the sidelines.

This makes no sense. Because of upkeep, skills DP cap, XP bonus, along with other factors, the player is now incentivized to bring along only what's necessary and to deploy it all (except logistics ships), whereas in the past the player was incentivized to bring along a bunch of deadweight just to bulk up the fleet for that 300-to-200 deployment ratio. And you're complaining that the current system is the one that encourages having ships sit on the sidelines?

Ordos used to not break officer limits, but now they do.  The toughest recurring ones have cores for all ships, with more than half of them having alpha cores.

That's actually one of the best features of the current system, because officers give so much more XP compared with how much more difficult the fight becomes. Enemy officers slightly less than doubles the base XP of the fleet, and slightly more than quadruples the XP bonus, so each current Ordos fleet gives around eight times more overall XP than if the fleet had no cores at all. So you get 4 million XP instead of 500k XP per Ordos fleet because of the cores. Granted without cores they'd be much easier to fight, but you'd have to fight 8 times as many (or stack that many more fleets together, etc.). A big part of why leveling is so much faster now is that enemy fleets, in particular Ordos fleets, give so much more XP now, and a big part of that is the overstocking of officers. (Another reason is that SP use basically doubles XP gain.)

And the biggest problem of relying on the same overpowered fleet over and over again is if player wants to change his fleet, he needs to fire his officers and waste a lot of time training new ones to fit his new ships and lose a bunch of story points that were spent to elite skills on officers without refund.  (This is one reason I go for solo Ziggurat because I do not need to waste a lot of time and story points with officers, plus no need for Leadership.)

I don't like the officer training mechanic myself (I feel like the player should be able to directly select the skill they want the officer to learn, not choose from a list; I just directly save scum until I get the skills I wanted), but the loss of SP for new officers is minor. 8 officers each with an elite skill means 8 SP which you get back after around 2-3 Ordos fleets. (Could be two fights vs single Ordos fleets or a single fight vs double Ordos fleet.) You'll easily rack up several hundred SP throughout the course of each playthrough. Limiting yourself to soloing to "not lose story points when you fire officers" is entirely a self-imposed problem, especially if you end up getting more SP from the officers making your fleet more effective than without them.

Essentially, battle tactics come down to force concentration at any one time.  If the enemy has 240 DP to your 200 DP on the field, but only 160 DP of the enemy fleet is engaging your 200 DP fleet while 80 DP is in transit, you have the local advantage.  You just need to kill fast enough that you've killed half of the 160 DP in the time it takes the 80 DP to reinforce.  A highly mobile player ship can also distract large portions of the enemy fleet at a huge DP ratio (say a Medusa versus a Radiant and some Brilliants), and giving your AI officer ships the local advantage as well.

Basically this. What's important is the local concentration of force. When your main fleet collides with their main fleet, you want to kill some of their smaller ships right away, then work your way toward bigger ships, to establish local force superiority and to start their line of reinforcements before they get the chance to do the same to you. Once you have your kill zone established, then the goal is to kill the enemy ships as fast as they're arriving at the front lines, so they never get a chance to build up enough of a force to threaten your ships. My 10 Gryphon with Onslaught XIV flagship fleet (at 240 DP) can beat a triple Ordos at 600 battle size (360 DP) relatively easily in this way, and could probably get up to around 700-800 battle size if I really tried. It just comes down to keeping their fleet scattered and always having to bring in reinforcements, while keeping my fleet in a coherent whole to focus my fleet's firepower on their ships.

[snicka]

What I miss the most about that, as a sidenote,  is the dynamic recalculation of dp balance after destroying enemy ships. Can we have that back?

[BCS]

stuff

Why is it that every "Here's how to wipe multiple Ordo" video is from some old patch? Either way, you held a total of two points simultaneously in that battle - you just went for enemy Comm Relay with a Hyperion that can't do it in current patch and got lucky that the enemy fleet went for the Sensor Jammer instead.

Although I'll concede to the strategy because you could have also went for the Sensor Jammer on your side, which would give you a brief period of full deployment. So no, you cannot hold all four points, but you CAN make it so you get max deployment with proper fleet comp.

[Megas]

No, it starts at 160 DP or 200 DP, but your fleet should be running at 240 DP for the majority of the battle. It just means that the beginning of the battle now has an extra step of grabbing the objectives, then after that it's a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight.

Only if my fleet can hold the points.  If my fleet can do that, then the fight was trivial, and victory is assured.

There's no need to hold them unless your ships die. If your ships are dying, that's the problem to solve first, not whether or not you can hold objectives for the whole fight. If your ships are running out of PPT, then that's an issue with trying to fight a fleet that's too large for your fleet (too many ships to churn through), or killing them too slowly. (Exception is if you're using SO in which case, well, you take the CR penalty as part of the deal if the fleet is too big.)

In other words, get Leadership because it has Wolfpack to give small ships the PPT and damage buffs it needs to last in double fights, which is where the bar is at (+500% xp for a proper fleet against double Ordos).  I do not like how the game forces Leadership if I want a conventional fleet.

Using fast bigger ships (like Furies and Auroras) to cap points is not a solution since they cost too much DP and divide fleet power too much.

This makes no sense. Because of upkeep, skills DP cap, XP bonus, along with other factors, the player is now incentivized to bring along only what's necessary and to deploy it all (except logistics ships), whereas in the past the player was incentivized to bring along a bunch of deadweight just to bulk up the fleet for that 300-to-200 deployment ratio. And you're complaining that the current system is the one that encourages having ships sit on the sidelines?

At least bulking up the fleet lets the player deploy more ships back then.  It was also an incentive to bring extra ships to switch into from worn-out ships for later fights (so player can chain-battle several encounters back-to-back like a battle-manic).  Now, with officers determining nearly all the DP, plus +xp% multiplier reliant on small fleet, bringing a big war fleet is a trap, and I like it less than the old way.

In those older releases, those without gate travel, I effectively brought two fleets, primary one for fighting, and backups for later fights when some ships got too damaged to fight later battles.  That was enough for 60% DP for me.  There was no need for me to stack extra capitals solely for more DP.  Also, I brought mostly big ships because they had more PPT, which was an option to win the PPT stall war in case the enemy tried to play that game.

Of course, extra ships mean reinforcements to deploy to replace lost ships, but the goal is flawless victory, so any ships beyond what the player can deploy are worthless.  Bringing extra ships now to rotate out for more fights is a bad idea because of xp% multiplier and DP limits from skills.

but the loss of SP for new officers is minor. 8 officers each with an elite skill means 8 SP which you get back after around 2-3 Ordos fleets.

It is only minor if I do not hoard SP for colonies.  Because I am crazy enough to consider feeding 2^n costs to have my shining empire with lots of green buildings (about 6+ improvements for each colony), wasting SP for any reason is like stealing SP meant for colonies.  So far, I have not done this yet because I do not want to waste that much time for every release, but I do intend to try it on the final release if current mechanics stay more-or-less the same then.

Well, getting the two points that spawn on "your side" is all but guaranteed even without frigates.

Not always.  Sometimes, there is the diamond pattern where one is at your side, one at the enemy side, and two vertically in the middle and near the left and right sides of the map.

[Vanshilar]

Why is it that every "Here's how to wipe multiple Ordo" video is from some old patch? Either way, you held a total of two points simultaneously in that battle - you just went for enemy Comm Relay with a Hyperion that can't do it in current patch and got lucky that the enemy fleet went for the Sensor Jammer instead.

It's just to illustrate the fleet, it works the same in the current patch. I haven't bothered to re-record it since it's a pain for me to record and it'd be more or less the same except with "0.95.1a" instead of "0.95a" in the upper right corner.

Although I'll concede to the strategy because you could have also went for the Sensor Jammer on your side, which would give you a brief period of full deployment. So no, you cannot hold all four points, but you CAN make it so you get max deployment with proper fleet comp.

The goal is to get max deployment, not to hold all 4 points. That means 2 Comm Relays, or a Comm Relay and 2 other objectives. If you got unlucky and the enemy fleet is on the only Comm Relay, then just wait until after they capture it, at which point they move on to the next objective, then grab it. Basically getting max deployment is not that hard to do.

Only if my fleet can hold the points.  If my fleet can do that, then the fight was trivial, and victory is assured.

No. There's no penalty for going over the DP limit once your fleet is deployed. It just means you can't bring in reinforcements in case you lose a ship or they retreat. So there's no need to hold on to the points other than at the very beginning.

Um isn't the point of good fleet design to ensure that the fight will be "trivial" i.e. that your fleet will win? That's what you should be aiming for, not treating it like an afterthought.

In other words, get Leadership because it has Wolfpack to give small ships the PPT and damage buffs it needs to last in double fights, which is where the bar is at (+500% xp for a proper fleet against double Ordos).  I do not like how the game forces Leadership if I want a conventional fleet.

No. Most frigates (i.e. all except Hyperion) have at least 180 of PPT. With Hardened Subsystems, that increases to 270. That should be fairly close to what you need for double Ordos with a good fleet. Even if it starts ticking down after that, you still have a lot of time after that before malfunctions becomes a concern.

Using fast bigger ships (like Furies and Auroras) to cap points is not a solution since they cost too much DP and divide fleet power too much.

It's not a great solution but if your whole fleet is Furies and Auroras and larger, then you'll have to strategize around that. As I posted, I was actually using Conquests to capture objectives since that was what I had, and it worked fine. (Though I don't recommend it.) Nowadays, with my Conquest fleet, I rely on myself in an SO Medusa and a Gryphon to capture objectives while the Conquests mulch the enemy fleet. The Gryphon is not exactly the paragon of speed. (The Gryphon is overkill, I should probably just stick 2 LP Brawlers on it instead or something, but I wasn't concerned about trying to optimize for XP or anything.)

Now, with officers determining nearly all the DP, plus +xp% multiplier reliant on small fleet, bringing a big war fleet is a trap, and I like it less than the old way.

Bringing a big war fleet is also unnecessary. I think some mods like to put in huge death fleets to make things more "epic" but it just devalues the worth of the ships. It's like that old saying, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. (There's a video somewhere on Youtube where someone talked about this phenomenon in Star Trek, where older series had fewer ships in battles, so the viewer actually cared about what happened to each one. Whereas the newer series, you have stuff like Riker showing up with a fleet of hundreds of Galaxy-class ships or something to make it look more "epic" due to advances in CG, but it just means that the viewer just treats them like ants.) Limiting the DP that each side can deploy means that each ship actually matters, rewarding good fleet composition, instead of the battle just devolving into getting huge ships to launch huge salvos at each other.

It is only minor if I do not hoard SP for colonies.  Because I am crazy enough to consider feeding 2^n costs to have my shining empire with lots of green buildings (about 6+ improvements for each colony), wasting SP for any reason is like stealing SP meant for colonies.  So far, I have not done this yet because I do not want to waste that much time for every release, but I do intend to try it on the final release if current mechanics stay more-or-less the same then.

Again, that's entirely a player-imposed problem. The 6th colony improvement costs 2^6 or 64 SP. That's more than what you get leveling from level 1 to level 15. That's more than what you need to make a whole new fleet with s-mods and officers. Colony improvements beyond the first few just means getting +1 commodity. And you're talking about getting more improvements than that, and having multiple colonies with that, amounting to hundreds or thousands of SP spent on getting +1 ore here or +1 food there. Yet 8 SP to reroll new officers for a better fleet is too tough a cross to bear?

Multiple posters have pointed out to you that there's little point to getting more than the first few colony improvements (there's little benefit to it), and that the exponential nature of their cost is pretty directly saying that it's not intended for players to go past the first few either, other than when they got nothing else left to do with their SP. Treating it as an excuse to not spend SP on more worthwhile endeavors just means a bad ordering of priorities. I mean, if you want to, sure, but don't expect the game to cater to that.

And if that really is your intent, then you should be most concerned about trying to maximize your XP gain per minute, rather than using fleets that are not geared for that and then complaining about your SP gain being too slow.

[BCS]

Well, getting the two points that spawn on "your side" is all but guaranteed even without frigates.

Not always.  Sometimes, there is the diamond pattern where one is at your side, one at the enemy side, and two vertically in the middle and near the left and right sides of the map.

One is still closer and easier to get to first...

[Megas]

Bringing a big war fleet is also unnecessary.

But I like using big war fleets that Starsector used to encourage or at least make possible in some of the earlier releases.  Now, Starsector feels more like a console jRPG.  Bring a small party of dungeon-crawling fools and kill the horde, and if the player wants a big fleet anyway, he will be punished for it if he can even use it.

And if that really is your intent, then you should be most concerned about trying to maximize your XP gain per minute, rather than using fleets that are not geared for that and then complaining about your SP gain being too slow.

Which means being forced into a fleet and/or skill set I may not want to use.

If I want to use a classic fleet that can smash double Ordos, I should get max Leadership, which means I need to give up some Technology and/or Industry.  It means trading fun for power.  I do not want to do that.

I fought a double Ordos fleet with a fleet and play experience was miserable (had to carefully construct a fleet, tailor all officers for a fleet, and the right skills).  I had a better (more fun) time killing double Ordos with solo Ziggurat, but I do not want to be stuck between solo Ziggurat and switching to another fleet that takes days to construct (because of the time needed to level up at least eight new officers.)  Ultimately, I have stopped playing Starsector because I do not want to waste days leveling up new officers to replace the eight that became obsolete and were fired whenever I want to change the fleet.

Multiple posters have pointed out to you that there's little point to getting more than the first few colony improvements (there's little benefit to it), and that the exponential nature of their cost is pretty directly saying that it's not intended for players to go past the first few either, other than when they got nothing else left to do with their SP. Treating it as an excuse to not spend SP on more worthwhile endeavors just means a bad ordering of priorities. I mean, if you want to, sure, but don't expect the game to cater to that.

If it is not intended, then there should be a hard cap to improvements, not dangle the carrot like Diablo II (and likely other games) did for rare loot and high levels.  Doing so is cruel to the player (that does not use cheats), and Starsector does not have online play that wants players hooked on playing as long as possible.  Make improvements work like s-mods, but for colonies instead of ships.

I like having lots of improvements for the same reason why people love perfect items in Diablo II.  Greed trumps reason, and do not underestimate the lengths people went through to get what they coveted.  I have seen a lot of that behavior when I used to play Diablo II:LoD during its heyday.

I have seen what improvements do to colonies, and I want them all (although I probably settle from six to eight per colony if I had the time to grind for them like I once had grinding for items in Diablo II)!  If it means grinding for them like grinding for items in Diablo II, I may not like lt, but I will grind for them, or just quit the game in disgust.

I do not use cores in my colonies because I do not want to play whack-a-mole Pathers.  Whack-a-mole pirates is already enough annoyance, and I do not want to add Pathers too for more pain.  (Hegemony, I would wipe their worlds off the map to eliminate inspections permanently.)  Because I do not use cores and use minimal items to dodge Pather cells, I am left with Industrial Planning and colony improvements to bring colonies up to snuff, or at least to meet demand of my buildings.  (If I take an Industry capstone, I take Industrial Planning along the way too, instead of Containment Procedures.)

Um isn't the point of good fleet design to ensure that the fight will be "trivial" i.e. that your fleet will win? That's what you should be aiming for, not treating it like an afterthought.

That means the game is too easy, at least for those who used the top-tier builds of the game.

I expect hard fights to be a real meatgrinder no matter what the player uses, not be a joke for the top few builds while being hard for those who took trap or non-combat options (especially if they were more fun than the power options).  Especially if the top options take a long time to assemble (which it does thanks to officers).


P.S.  If officer experience stays like it is, I like to see more limited superhero ships like Ziggurat, just to have more variety of one-man army options.

[Vanshilar]

But I like using big war fleets that Starsector used to encourage or at least make possible in some of the earlier releases.  Now, Starsector feels more like a console jRPG.  Bring a small party of dungeon-crawling fools and kill the horde, and if the player wants a big fleet anyway, he will be punished for it if he can even use it.

So somehow 300 DP means "big war fleet", but decreasing it by 20% to 240 DP means "small party of dungeon-crawling fools". Uh huh.

If I want to use a classic fleet that can smash double Ordos, I should get max Leadership, which means I need to give up some Technology and/or Industry.  It means trading fun for power.  I do not want to do that.

I fought a double Ordos fleet with a fleet and play experience was miserable (had to carefully construct a fleet, tailor all officers for a fleet, and the right skills).  I had a better (more fun) time killing double Ordos with solo Ziggurat, but I do not want to be stuck between solo Ziggurat and switching to another fleet that takes days to construct (because of the time needed to level up at least eight new officers.)  Ultimately, I have stopped playing Starsector because I do not want to waste days leveling up new officers to replace the eight that became obsolete and were fired whenever I want to change the fleet.

Yeah, I already replied to this back in June, and you're repeating this same arguments again:

Yes you keep saying this in multiple threads. Apparently:

1. The game is fun and you get to do what you want how you want to do it until you get to Ordos.
2. All fleets capable of defeating (double) Ordos are categorically deemed "unfun". There's never any discussion of just what your preferred playstyle is or why it doesn't work against Ordos fleets, or why you don't like any of the many different ways to defeat Ordos fleets, but any possible player fleets are automatically considered "unfun" if they can beat Ordos fleets.
3. Non-Ordos fleets don't give enough XP to fuel your desire to put improvements on all colony structures despite the 2^n cost, whose purpose is intentionally to dissuade players from trying to put improvements on all colony structures.
4. Therefore, Alex should make it so that regular fleets give millions of XP or you'll quit the game. Oh, and the skill cap should be increased because you want to be a fighter who can also cast spells like a mage, heal like a cleric, and sneak around like a thief.

If you're complaining about how long it takes to level up new officers, then you should be absolutely loving the current system compared to the previous one. Let's compare:

Old system (0.9.1a): Level 20 officer takes 339750 XP to level up.
Current system (0.95.1a): Level 5 officer takes 560000 XP to level up, or about 65% more XP needed. But you can now get XP bonus of up to +500%, i.e. gain XP up to 6 times faster. Meaning if you're getting an XP bonus of over +65%, then you're actually leveling up officers faster now than before. If you're fighting at +500% (and you keep saying that's the only acceptable way to fight), then this means that you can now level up 7 officers in the time that it used to take for 2 officers. Over 3.5 times faster. But somehow, the system now is just unbearably difficult.

If it is not intended, then there should be a hard cap to improvements, not dangle the carrot like Diablo II (and likely other games) did for rare loot and high levels.  Doing so is cruel to the player (that does not use cheats), and Starsector does not have online play that wants players hooked on playing as long as possible.  Make improvements work like s-mods, but for colonies instead of ships.

I mean "not intended" as in "not something the game is balanced around", not "something that should be forbidden". For example, a player could choose to colonize all ~600 planets if they wanted to, but that's not something that the game is balanced around, and in fact there are multiple mechanisms in place (stability penalty, diminishing returns with market share while upkeep increases linearly with number of industries, etc.) to discourage overdoing it.

Greed trumps reason

And that's the problem right there. People should be doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not different goals in a game are worth achieving, instead of just doing stuff "because it looks cool" or whatever. Or well, they can, it's their own time they're wasting, but they shouldn't expect the game nor the general playerbase to cater to their own peculiar interests or goals. I can say "hey a Kite looks awesome, I should be able to solo endgame fleets with it, otherwise the game isn't fun" but I shouldn't expect Alex to cater to that, especially when the only justification I ever bring up is to automatically declare "anything else is unfun". As I already mentioned, it's a single player game, if you want that kind of game you can just set "xpGainMult" to 100 or whatever you want in settings.json.

That means the game is too easy, at least for those who used the top-tier builds of the game.

No, that means that the game rewards players who take the time to understand and develop good fleet compositions, as it should. Good games will make it so that the endgame challenges can be beaten in multiple ways if the player knows what they're doing, which this game does.

I expect hard fights to be a real meatgrinder no matter what the player uses, not be a joke for the top few builds while being hard for those who took trap or non-combat options (especially if they were more fun than the power options). 

Then you need to first figure out if you're arguing that the current game is too easy or that it's too hard. You complain that the game no longer allows players to roflstomp enemy fleets by fighting at a 300 DP to 200 DP ratio, but then you say you expect hard fights to be hard no matter what the player uses. Those two positions are mutually contradictory. Not to mention, I posted a bunch of different fleet compositions that can beat Remnant fleets at +400% XP bonus or above, and mentioned several that I haven't tried but should be able to do it as well, so apparently we have a very different definition of what "top few builds" means.

-----

By the way, attached is a screenshot of my 5 Conquest plus me in Medusa + Gryphon fleet mid-battle against a double Ordos fleet. The exact amounts varied throughout the battle, but in the screenshot there are 127 DP's worth of enemy ships transiting from the spawn point to the front lines, while there are 111 DP's worth of enemy ships at the front lines actively engaging my fleet. So I have 220 DP's worth of ships fighting 111 DP's worth of enemy ships (and my flagship is sitting out, whereas I'd be the biggest contributor if I had gone in).

The distance between Conquest 2 and Conquest 3 is roughly 2000 su, so within those 111 DP's worth of enemy ships, there are several whom my fleet is firing on, but are unable to fire back since my fleet is still out of range of their weapons. So it looks like I'm taking fire from only around 77 DP's worth of ships (89 DP if you count the Scintilla). Basically, only 1/3 of their fleet (2 Brilliants, 2 Fulgents and a Glimmer) is actually attacking my fleet, while I can bring all 240 DP to bear on their fleet. That local concentration of force is how you mulch through enemy fleets.

My fleet is slightly above the midpoint of the map (my Medusa, to the lower left, is next to one of the objectives which is in a diamond formation). So this means that if my fleet is at around the midpoint, then over half of the enemy fleet is stuck in transiting, and I'm only dealing with less than half of their fleet at any given time. I can stretch their line out even more (and thus deal with only a smaller portion of their fleet at a time) if I stayed lower on the map. So yeah, once you start killing a couple of enemy ships and get the ball rolling, then you're really only dealing with a fraction of the enemy fleet. So 240 DP vs 240 DP is actually more like 240 DP vs 80 DP if you can kill some initial ships and then set the battle up correctly.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[BCS]

Old system (0.9.1a): Level 20 officer takes 339750 XP to level up.
Current system (0.95.1a): Level 5 officer takes 560000 XP to level up, or about 65% more XP needed. But you can now get XP bonus of up to +500%, i.e. gain XP up to 6 times faster. Meaning if you're getting an XP bonus of over +65%, then you're actually leveling up officers faster now than before. If you're fighting at +500% (and you keep saying that's the only acceptable way to fight), then this means that you can now level up 7 officers in the time that it used to take for 2 officers. Over 3.5 times faster. But somehow, the system now is just unbearably difficult.

Come on dude, you're not going to send level 1-2 officers against double Ordo.

On a slightly related note, I don't mind the leveling speed of Officers but I do mind the skill lottery. Not getting the last skill and having to retrain the officer from level 1 is pain. This happens way too often(~30-40% of the time?) even with Mentor on.

Basically, only 1/3 of their fleet (2 Brilliants, 2 Fulgents and a Glimmer) is actually attacking my fleet, while I can bring all 240 DP to bear on their fleet. That local concentration of force is how you mulch through enemy fleets.

Yeah, but the first time the forces meet it's 240 DP for the Ordo vs. 240 DP(or less) for you. So to achieve the "force concentration" you need to be able to beat the enemy fleet in an even(or uneven) fight first anyway. At best you could say that this favors burst weapons like Sabots, since by the time they run out of them you should have a local advantage and not need them anymore. But simply saying "just have a local avantage bro" is rather meaningless.

By the way, have you tested any of your anti-Ordo fleets against other enemy "types" like Derelicts and Omega? I guess Derelicts would be fine since Gauss does so much raw damage even against armor but the Omega could be problematic because of their speed and extremely strong fighters that can all but ignore regular PD.

[Megas]

So somehow 300 DP means "big war fleet", but decreasing it by 20% to 240 DP means "small party of dungeon-crawling fools". Uh huh.

Not 240, 160 (or 200 with BotB).  Going from ship-based 300 DP to officer-based 160 DP is a huge cut.  I have to capture and hold the points.  That means I need fast ships to capture them, which probably means frigates.  I cannot do this in fights that I cannot totally dominate.  I can reliably hold one point for +20 or +40 DP, in case of diamond pattern.  Maybe two for at least +40 if the map gives two points on my side instead of one.

In older releases, that did not matter, and I did not need fast ships just for capturing.  Since frigates had low PPT, I did not use them past early game in earlier post-0.8 releases.

Yes you keep saying this in multiple threads. Apparently:

1. The game is fun and you get to do what you want how you want to do it until you get to Ordos.
2. All fleets capable of defeating (double) Ordos are categorically deemed "unfun". There's never any discussion of just what your preferred playstyle is or why it doesn't work against Ordos fleets, or why you don't like any of the many different ways to defeat Ordos fleets, but any possible player fleets are automatically considered "unfun" if they can beat Ordos fleets.
3. Non-Ordos fleets don't give enough XP to fuel your desire to put improvements on all colony structures despite the 2^n cost, whose purpose is intentionally to dissuade players from trying to put improvements on all colony structures.
4. Therefore, Alex should make it so that regular fleets give millions of XP or you'll quit the game. Oh, and the skill cap should be increased because you want to be a fighter who can also cast spells like a mage, heal like a cleric, and sneak around like a thief.

They are not fun because I need to carefully construct the right combination of ships, skills, officers, and s-mods, and lock them in.  If I want to change the fleet, I need to get new officers, ships, and s-mods.  Maybe a single change may not cost that much but changing several times (which I will want to do eventually) will bleed story points.  Raising several new officers takes days to do (I do not have the luxury of playing as long as I used to), and I need to bring extra ships for officers to set in.  I did not need to do this much careful planning or dedication in prior releases.

I feel pushed to use overpowered ships (those that punch higher than their DP value) to win.  Being balanced is not good enough if I have a quality and quantity disadvantage.  Weaker stuff like Eagle (which used to be good but not overpowered in older releases) gets pushed to the wayside.  That hurts when such ships were legitimately good in previous releases.

I need to devote all of my skills points to the power direct combat skills (that are not prereqs for tier 2 Tech/Industry), so any fun skills that do not directly add to combat power must be passed over.  So no Automated Ships if it is not Alpha Radiant or Alpha frigates, no Neural Link that is not Radiant (with Systems Exp.), no Industry skills beyond tier 2 (unless I attempt Derelict Ops strategy), or no additional low-tier Tech/Industry (like no Sensors if I already have Navigation and/or no Bulk Transport if I have Field Repairs).

Against non-Ordos fleets, once I get Ziggurat (and the weapons it needs), it is the only thing I use because I get close to +400% xp from an endgame human bounty.  Until then, I use a more conventional fleet that gives around +50% xp against human bounties.  If I want a proper fleet, I need to hit double Ordos for the full +500%.

Even if I do not want to buff colonies, earning story points without +500% xp is a real slog at max level.  Before my fleet was powerful enough to kill Ordos, it took several in-game years of grinding human bounties with no more than +50% (because I built my fleet like in previous releases) to earn little more than ten million xp to turn the green bar blue.  With progress slow like that, story points are effectively finite, and I am opposed to spending story points for anything like respecs or making officers (that will be fired eventually) elite.  Only when I can kill endgame fleets with high +xp% multiplier (fleet vs. double Ordos or lone Ziggurat vs. any endgame fleet) that I consider burning skill points without refund for the fleet (instead of banking them for the colonies I covet) maybe worth it.

I quit because I do not like the gameplay.  Slow story point gain, fun but weak options (and giving them up for required power options).  Gameplay seems to be all about Ordos at the end.

I preferred some of the gameplay features from previous releases that were more fun than today.

As for 4.  It is more like pilot/combat, leader/fleet, or meta/non-combat for the player.  Enemies late have high combat, and they have some fleet power.  Non-combat is irrelevant for them.  Player can already get plenty of combat stuff provided he dumps all of the non-combat or weak combat stuff.  The enemy has full combat by the end, so players who do not use autopilot will want high combat to not be a weak-link.  That leaves fleet or non-combat.

If you're complaining about how long it takes to level up new officers, then you should be absolutely loving the current system compared to the previous one. Let's compare:

I did not need to fire officers for a new fleet back in older releases, except maybe for general-purpose warship vs. carrier (and only if I wanted to go from balanced fleet to pure carrier spam or vice-versa).

Releases before 0.7 did not have officers.

In 0.7, officers were bench warmers to keep CR up since I soloed everything with a single ship.  I did not use a fleet in battle back then (which required Leadership to use a single capital without CR penalties).  The one exception I considered would be ten Timid officers for Pilum Vigilance spam (when it was still effective), which I did not do because I did not have the patience to level them up only to fire and replace them after the novelty wore off.  Not when max skilled Dominator could solo a single endgame fleet, and Onslaught could solo more than a hundred ships faster than Paragon can.

In 0.8, I did not need officers to kill fleets.  Back then, the strongest enemy was red system Remnant Nexus.  (Ordos did not have Radiant back then.)  Sparks were overpowered (armed with two full-strength burst PDs), and Astral with Sparks was probably the strongest ship that release.

In early 0.9, I had no incentive to kill Ordos, since they had nothing I want (aside from Sparks for carriers) and Pathers and Pirates were the primary recurring threat.  (I favored anti-armor builds that could chew through pirates fast.)  In the release infamous for Drover spam, I used large ships only (I did not take carrier skills for Drover spam).  In 0.95, which I did not play until late, I barely made it to endgame (i.e., able to kill my first human bounty with a capital) when 0.95.1 was released.

Before 0.95, officers did not need to be specialized beyond warship (no carrier skills) or carrier (has carrier skills).  Now, I need officers with specific skills for specific ships.  Also, there were no elite skills before, so I did not need to agonize whether to burn a story point without refund for officers.

I mean "not intended" as in "not something the game is balanced around", not "something that should be forbidden". For example, a player could choose to colonize all ~600 planets if they wanted to, but that's not something that the game is balanced around, and in fact there are multiple mechanisms in place (stability penalty, diminishing returns with market share while upkeep increases linearly with number of industries, etc.) to discourage overdoing it.

It should be discouraging, but it is about on par with (or perhaps less than) the grinding required to get many of the best and rare stuff in Diablo II, at least for those who do not cheat.  (Yes, there were plenty of cheaters then.)  I have spent many days grinding for items and levels beyond 90 in Diablo II.

Greed trumps reason

And that's the problem right there. People should be doing a cost-benefit analysis of whether or not different goals in a game are worth achieving, instead of just doing stuff "because it looks cool" or whatever.

It is unrealistic to expect flawed human beings to do the right thing every time.  We would have much less crime and sin in the world if people could be relied on doing the right thing instead of falling into temptation or following their desires over reason.


P.S.  Until the current release, I was only compelled to grind Ordos if I wanted lots of alpha cores for the mad quest to colonize the entire sector.  Now, I feel the need to grind Ordos for max +xp% gain if I want to play with a classic style fleet.

[Vanshilar]

Come on dude, you're not going to send level 1-2 officers against double Ordo.

Actually, some of the fleets probably could, but realistically there's not that much need to. If the officers are low-level then they're also not impacting your XP bonus as much so you could get away with smaller double Ordos or just go for single Ordos. The point is that leveling up officers now is much faster than before. Even a large full fleet (240 DP's worth of ships, 8 level 5 officers) is going to get over +100% XP bonus against single Ordos, and the bar to clear was getting at least +65% XP bonus. Not to mention I forgot about mentoring, which doubles the officer's XP gain, if the player is willing to spend a SP on it.

On a slightly related note, I don't mind the leveling speed of Officers but I do mind the skill lottery. Not getting the last skill and having to retrain the officer from level 1 is pain. This happens way too often(~30-40% of the time?) even with Mentor on.

Yeah I don't care for it myself. I feel like the player should just be able to pick the skill at will (and also store officers at planets or something if they're not currently needed). I've been save-scumming officer skills since 0.9.1a. I mean back then you had to choose 1 skill out of the 2 given, and do that for 19 levels. Nowadays it's choose 1 skill out of 4 (or 6, if mentored) for 4 levels, and there are some patterns in there. For example, when choosing a skill, I always pick Systems Expertise or Missile Spec last or unless I'm forced to, since they're guaranteed to always be there (after the first few picks). Since they'll always show up, I'll try to pick the others first, unless none of them are what I want. But yeah I just save-scum most of the time.

Yeah, but the first time the forces meet it's 240 DP for the Ordo vs. 240 DP(or less) for you. So to achieve the "force concentration" you need to be able to beat the enemy fleet in an even(or uneven) fight first anyway. At best you could say that this favors burst weapons like Sabots, since by the time they run out of them you should have a local advantage and not need them anymore. But simply saying "just have a local avantage bro" is rather meaningless.

Yes I knew that this was the case (i.e. that after the initial clash, it's just a matter of enemy ships streaming in as I kill them, so I'm not actually facing the full amount of ships) but I was surprised by just how few enemy ships were actually at the front lines fighting when I actually took a screenshot mid-fight. What this means is that when planning out your fleet, you may want to have some burst weapons (Harpoons, Sabots, etc.) that you know won't last the whole fight, but just to get you through the initial clash. Then after that, it basically becomes "steady state" with a continual stream of ships coming in and dying, and then you won't need to worry as much about having overwhelming firepower.

So for example, a question for the Conquest build was whether the Harpoons should be in their own weapon group or in the same group as the Squalls. Testing it both ways, the Harpoon's hit rate wasn't really appreciably affected either way, so the Harpoons did more or less the same amount of total damage either way. But the AI does conserve the Harpoons more (fire them less frequently) if they're in their own weapon group. Based on this, it's probably better to put them in the same group as the Squalls, to encourage the AI to spam them more at the crucial beginning of the fight.

So it comes down to how to survive the initial clash. Fortunately, you're not really dealing with the entire 240 DP enemy fleet anyway. A couple of ships will split off to grab objectives (although it's the same for you), plus they don't move together in a uniform line -- they sort of move in a clump, so you're dealing primarily with the side of that clump that's closest to you. As I mentioned, generally speaking I pick off the smaller ships first, since they're quick and easy, and then I work my way up to the larger ones.

Make sure your own ships are survivable; for example, for my LP Brawler fleet, I max out their capacity (including Flux Regulation) and also stick on Hardened Shields and Solar Shielding, so they go from being able to absorb 3000/0.8 = 3750 raw damage to being able to absorb 6300/0.68 = 9265 raw damage, or 6300/0.68/0.8 = 11581 raw energy damage (which is what the Ordos will mostly have). Basically tripled the damage they could absorb. That makes it so that the enemy fleet loses ships while I keep mine alive, and then it'll gradually snowball from there.

By the way, have you tested any of your anti-Ordo fleets against other enemy "types" like Derelicts and Omega? I guess Derelicts would be fine since Gauss does so much raw damage even against armor but the Omega could be problematic because of their speed and extremely strong fighters that can all but ignore regular PD.

Not much. They'll probably do well against some other stuff but might not be able to handle things like Omega. I know for example that the LP Brawler fleet couldn't handle stations, since they don't know how to maintain range properly and kept running into the stations and overloading. But say the Gryphon fleets worked fine. Realistically though I'm not concerned about trying to optimize my fleet around Omega, because those are basically one-off (or, two-off) fights, not something that I'm going to do continuously like with Alpha core farming. So with them, I don't mind if I lose half my fleet or whatever, since I'm just going to go back to base and repair afterward anyway. To me, it's the Ordos that's worth building a fleet around, since I know any anti-Ordos fleet can handle faction fleets, so I know it'll be able to handle pretty much any general purpose battle, excepting only the special and occasional fights that I can prepare specifically for (against stations, against Omega, etc.). They've handled pretty much all of the custom bounties pretty well so far as well.

Not 240, 160 (or 200 with BotB).  Going from ship-based 300 DP to officer-based 160 DP is a huge cut.

No. 160 DP or 200 DP with BotB is only at the beginning. The rest of the time is a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight. I gave a bunch of examples of fleet compositions above that could get full deployment no problem and beat Ordos fleets at over +400% XP bonus. As I already said, you don't need to hold the objectives, unless you're losing ships. You can use frigates if you want but you don't have to; a lot of the fleet compositions didn't use them. (I was even capturing objectives with Conquests, although I don't recommend it.) It's not that hard to modify a fleet to be able to grab objectives. You can either wallow in a 160-DP prison that is entirely self-imposed or figure out how to grab objectives at the beginning to make your fleet into a 240-DP fleet.

They are not fun because I need to carefully construct the right combination of ships, skills, officers, and s-mods, and lock them in.

You make it sound as if accidentally hiring an officer with the wrong name or getting a ship with a bolt loose will mean the whole fleet will fall apart and result in a fleet wipe. There are countless combinations of ships, officers, etc. that can beat Ordos or whatever other fleet you want to take on.

Officer leveling is "free" in that every battle will give officers XP if there are any officers that need it, so you don't need to fight "just to level officers up", you can go about your regular business and let the XP accrue naturally. Again, complaining about "oh my gosh I might change my mind in the future and have to redo my fleet" and therefore refusing to commit to any fleet is entirely a self-imposed problem. You're going to level up and gain SP naturally just by going around fighting anyway. (And if you're not fighting, then you don't need to worry about building the "perfect" fleet.)

I feel pushed to use overpowered ships (those that punch higher than their DP value) to win.

So your complaint is that...some ships are better than others? That different fleet compositions lead to different results, some better and some worse? That the player is encouraged to use better ships over worse ships? Um, all this is going to be a feature of pretty much every game where there is sufficient variety in what the player can choose to play. There would be little point to trying out different builds or offering different varieties of ships if they all gave the same result. This complaint makes no sense.

Not to mention, I listed around two dozen different ships above in my compilation of fleet compositions that I've used to beat Ordos fleets in 0.95.1a. Apparently a large portion of the vanilla ship roster is "overpowered".

I need to devote all of my skills points to the power direct combat skills (that are not prereqs for tier 2 Tech/Industry), so any fun skills that do not directly add to combat power must be passed over.

There you go again, equating "power" with "not fun" and "not power" with "fun".

Even if I do not want to buff colonies, earning story points without +500% xp is a real slog at max level.  Before my fleet was powerful enough to kill Ordos, it took several in-game years of grinding human bounties with no more than +50% (because I built my fleet like in previous releases) to earn little more than ten million xp to turn the green bar blue.

Then that's just poor gaming strategy. If you're going for XP, then your goal should be Ordos-farming. If your fleet can't handle Ordos fleets and you're going for XP, then building it to handle Ordos fleets should be a priority. So you basically went XP-farming very inefficiently and then complained about it being too inefficient and slow. It took you several in-game years to get a little more than 10 mil XP; by comparison, as I posted earlier, in my Brawler playthrough, I had gained around 198 mil XP in 6 in-game years, or around 33 mil XP per in-game year.

As for 4.  It is more like pilot/combat, leader/fleet, or meta/non-combat for the player.  Enemies late have high combat, and they have some fleet power.  Non-combat is irrelevant for them.  Player can already get plenty of combat stuff provided he dumps all of the non-combat or weak combat stuff.  The enemy has full combat by the end, so players who do not use autopilot will want high combat to not be a weak-link.  That leaves fleet or non-combat.

And what's the point of this? Is it that the player needs to choose between A or B, and somehow that's a bad thing? Yes, that's the whole point, if the player didn't have to give up anything meaningful for not taking certain paths, then the choice itself is meaningless.

I did not need to fire officers for a new fleet back in older releases, except maybe for general-purpose warship vs. carrier (and only if I wanted to go from balanced fleet to pure carrier spam or vice-versa).
...
Before 0.95, officers did not need to be specialized beyond warship (no carrier skills) or carrier (has carrier skills).  Now, I need officers with specific skills for specific ships.

I don't know how you could have had only one general-purpose warship officer and one carrier officer skill setup, I had something like 6 different officer profiles depending on the type of ship for 0.9.1a. Having to fire and retrain new officers now is the same as then.

It should be discouraging, but it is about on par with (or perhaps less than) the grinding required to get many of the best and rare stuff in Diablo II, at least for those who do not cheat.  (Yes, there were plenty of cheaters then.)  I have spent many days grinding for items and levels beyond 90 in Diablo II.

Sure, I played Diablo II too when it came out. Has little to do with this though, since grinding for levels actually had gameplay impact there, however limited it was from a practical standpoint, while here, colony improvements beyond the first few only serve to increase commodities, which only serve to increase the player's passive money gain per month. Spending SP to gain credits is a bad trade. You can probably make more from a single trade run than all the credits that you'll get from a +1 commodity over the course of the playthrough.

Regardless, Alex has directly said that the "worth" of an SP is balanced around using it for putting in s-mods into ships. That means it is not based around players trying to spend hundreds of SP in one mouse click to get +1 food. The player is welcome to do it if he likes, but it's not going to be held as a legitimate basis for complaining that SP gain is too slow.

It is unrealistic to expect flawed human beings to do the right thing every time.  We would have much less crime and sin in the world if people could be relied on doing the right thing instead of falling into temptation or following their desires over reason.

That's a complete non sequitur. I'm talking about when playing a game (or most other endeavors), the player should look at what's the benefit of doing something versus how much effort it takes in terms of setting achievable and worthwhile goals, and then you go off on some morality thing.

[Modo44]

You need officers to deploy more ships effectively? Oh no! It's almost as if commanders are important in a battle.

[Wyvern]

So, getting back to the original topic...

As I understood it, the goal in having officers affect deployment points was to keep the 'larger fleets get more deployment' feel, but without letting the player swing that in their favor by bringing 'extra' ships they never plan to actually field.

However, this lead directly to the current game's issues where the deployment distribution feels* unfair due to the enemy fleets not needing to respect the same limits the player has on number of officers.

* Note that I'm not necessarily saying that it is unfair, only that it feels that way. Kindof like the smuggler fleets; would it be 'fair' if the player could just run around with transponder off and have the patrols ignore them? Probably not. But it absolutely feels unfair that the AI fleets can do just that.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the player just treats extra ships differently than the AI. For the AI, having a spare paragon or two means they can deploy those once their frontline has been destroyed. For the player**, having their frontline destroyed means they already lost the battle - reserves aren't useful if you're going to be reloading anyway.

** Or at least for me, personally, excluding Ziggurat and Omega fights: Those have unique and valuable rewards such that losing a few ships can still feel like a win, albeit an extraordinarily expensive one.

As such, I don't think that you can have these systems work in a way that preserves 'larger fleets get more of the deployment pool' and feels fair to the player and doesn't encourage the player to haul along 'dead' ships that they won't deploy just to get their fleet size up.

Given that, were I looking at revamping this mechanic, I'd probably make a few specific changes:
1: Remove the current deployment scaling with fleet size and officer count/level. Just scrap that entirely, let the default state be that both fleets get equal shares of the available battle size.
2: Give high-level supposed-to-be-a-threat enemy commanders access to the Best of the Best deployment bonus; this probably includes all remnant fleets.
3: Make the deployment limits tilt in the AI's favor if it has multiple full fleets - more than 30 ships total (with a station counting as a full thirty ships worth on its own) - let the player fight against the numerical disadvantage if they're trying to fend off multiple battle fleets at once, or gain that advantage if they're supporting their own planet's defense platform.

Edit: Alternatively, just roll back to the fleet size based calculations of last patch, and if the player wants to drag along an extra couple of paragons - well, let them. All the skills with DP limits will be weaker for it, and if they decide that tradeoff is worth getting the deployment advantage, so be it.

[Vanshilar]

However, this lead directly to the current game's issues where the deployment distribution feels* unfair due to the enemy fleets not needing to respect the same limits the player has on number of officers.

Well, I'm not sure that it's necessary for a fight to feel "fair", especially endgame fights. In some RPG's, endgame bosses can have over a million HP while the player party is limited to around a thousand HP or so. The conceit in those games is that the player wins "against all odds" through ingenuity, better preparation (the player gets to prepare against the monster's strengths and weaknesses, whereas the monster doesn't get to prepare against the player), better tactics, etc. If the fight were "fair", the enemy fleets would have as many s-mods as the player's fleet, the AI would be as good as the player's ability to play, and the AI would be able to select ships and weapons that counter the player's fleet composition, in the same way that the player gets to prepare against the AI. It's precisely because of these factors (and others) that the player gets to prevail against the AI despite such lopsided numbers.

If anything, the deployment distribution is actually incredibly unfair...to the enemy fleets. It's possible to create different fleets that can take on triple Ordos and win with no losses. We even got people complaining about anything less than +500% XP vs double Ordos being too slow. In either case it means the player fleet is around 1/4 the size of the enemy fleets and around 1/6 the number of officers, depending on fleet composition, yet still prevailing. If we were actually adjusting deployment points based on ship DP, the player should only be able to deploy 80 DP to the enemy's 320 DP when players go up against double Ordos with these types of fleets. It's only because the deployment distribution is even (each side gets to deploy up to 60% of the battle size), allowing the player to deploy his whole fleet while the enemy fleets are bottlenecked to the deployment cap, that player fleets can handle such odds.

In other words: the current deployment system is precisely what allows the player to rack up such huge XP bonuses in fighting huge fleets. So if you're arguing for "fairness", then Alex should actually just remove the minimum of 40% of battle size for the smaller fleet, so that players doing multiple Ordos for XP (or complaining about it) have to actually have a fleet that can handle multiple times their DP at once.