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Author Topic: Help get more dmods on ships for Derelict Operations  (Read 386 times)

BaBosa

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Help get more dmods on ships for Derelict Operations
« on: April 05, 2023, 02:51:07 AM »

So I have been trying Derelict Operations after talking about it on another thread and I have found that it is just really frustrating to use. You really want most if not every ship to have 5 dmods or the skill is not really worth it but getting 5 dmods on most of your fleet is really tedious even with cheats let alone without.
Getting a pirate or LP fleet is slightly easier as they tend to have about 3~4 dmods after killing them but that's still not 5 and most of their cruisers and capitals were unrecoverable, also you can't really buy their cruisers and capitals as most of them are just not available and those that are have few or no dmods (at least when I checked once with cheats). It is worse with normal ships as they tend to have 1~2 dmods and there aren't many heavily dmodded good cruisers and capitals for sale.
So it's really hard to get proper cruisers and capitals with 5 dmods but getting more dmods is also really hard. I found that every single time I recovered one of my own ships, they always just got one more dmod. So you need to destroy almost every cruiser and capital 3 or so times and that means each fight you have to wait 5 or so minutes for your weaponless ships to get destroyed before you bring in other ships to kill the enemy fleet and you have to do this more than 3 times as you have to keep those other ships alive to kill the enemy and you have to pay a huge amount of supplies to repair capitals fully after each fight. Even with cheats so I could just use the kill and nuke commands, this was tedious and the supply cost was like 1000 per fight.

So a recovered ships have more dmods but require 5% less supplies to repair per dmod effect is really needed for the Derelict Operations skill.

The ability to lock in dmods so dock restoration and hull restoration ignore them would also be cool. Maybe on the smod screen.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2023, 11:14:21 AM by BaBosa »
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Serenitis

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Re: Help get more dmods on ships for Derelict Operations
« Reply #1 on: April 06, 2023, 02:25:07 AM »

Forcing ships to accumulate d-mods is a very frustrating task, which is potentially an indicator that maybe its not the correct approach.
I've played with 'derelict' fleets quite a bit and I just play the game and treat Derelict Ops the same way I'd treat all the other scaling skills - take what's given and don't worry about it too much.

I usually get my ships from salvage, so they're already damaged.
I'll just put bulkheads on them & use them as normal, eventually they're going to get unlucky and have to be picked out of some battle debris.
If any given ship survives combat - great, job done.
If it doesn't - great, its cheaper now and I can use more stuff next time.

It might take many cycles to flesh out a fleet like this, it's not a fast process by any means.
Trying to minmax it probably isn't going to be 'fun'.
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Rusty Edge

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Re: Help get more dmods on ships for Derelict Operations
« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2023, 04:05:44 AM »

Another option may be building heavy industries and NOT improving it at all. No nanoforges, no Orbital works. Start printing out defective ships and enjoy. Get the Industry administrator skill to increase how much you can spend.
 I think purchasing from planets with very low stability can also yield more d-mods.

And like Serentis said, Derelict operations mainly rewards playing recklessly and taking whatever you want, regardless of quality.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2023, 04:14:34 AM by Rusty Edge »
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smithney

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Re: Help get more dmods on ships for Derelict Operations
« Reply #3 on: April 06, 2023, 02:51:33 PM »

I've already posted in the other capstone's thread, but I think it'd be wiser to move the Derelict Ops topic over here. I too find the skill frustrating to use and I'm fairly sure it's because of the poor way it's integrated into the gameplay. It reminds me of the slipstream issue in that most players don't know how to take advantage of them because the game doesn't comprehensively teach how to do that (yet). At the same time I remember Alex talking about how he wants to teach the players the value of D-mods. Derelict Ops sounds like the perfect vehicle to do that, but that means it needs to stop appearing like an enabler to a fringe playstyle. When there is an entire faction based around making the best of a poor bunch, then there, too, should be an easy, early gateway to the playstyle, don't you think?

Speaking of which, I got an idea how to make capstones more individually expressive. Though at the risk of streamlining players into a pre-established playstyles. Gonna make a new thread about that.
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