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[Zsar]

The endgame currently hits like a brick wall: Still fights left I find too difficult? Let's see what I can and cannot do:

I cannot

• upgrade to better ships due to DP
• add more ships due to DP
• add more officers due to officer limit
• add more S-mods due to S-mod limit
• level up PC or officers due to level limit
• throw money at the problem in any way or form

I can

• replace non-scaling Leadership skills with scaling Combat skills and fight personally
  (From what I read on the forum, this is my single strongest option... but I don't want to!?
• get a meta fleet with a meta loadout, e.g. five Executors or all Gryphons
• ... nope, I think that's it

Conversely, if I want harder fights all I have to do is not deploy all my combat ships.

It would be nice if in the future more avenues of progress remained open instead of just... ending. Currently feels like a soft Game Over. I also do not think it is a good idea to go the MMO way further than happened with Story Points and chain different progressions after one another. All that does is add clutter and make the gameplay feel obtuse.

[BaBosa]

Excluding multi ordo fights which is post end game. You should be able to beat the other end game fights (hypershunt, single ordo and bounties) by specialising your fleet for them and piloting a non cheese ship. It’ll probably take a few attempts and have some losses when you win but they are end game challenges and should be hard.

A good strong non cheese ship to pilot is the Invictus. A max flux quad mjolnir build will let you one shot most ships with LiDAR array and then immediately venting will help a lot.

[Buggie]

jesus i don't want to be the get good guy but seriously? ive never seen this kind of complaint in ANY other game ever, both as a pilot or a commander you can beat any fight in the game if you put even a modicum of effort into it man, the only things that need actual ''''meta'''' minmaxxing are insanely difficult self challenges like the vs 5 ordo fleets thingy that capn hector likes to do

i have the bad habit of exaggerating stuff with insane hyperboles, but i actually can't come up with anything more ridiculous than what you've said. i mean, unless i'm reading this wrong, and i hope to god that i am, you are suggesting that the things that limit the player should instead be infinite or that there should be some other kind of system where you could increase your strength infinitely, yes?

i've looked at this comment for like the past 20 minutes and i have realized it comes off as rude and demeaning, i will still post it anyway because it is my true unfiltered opinion on the topic, but i want to make clear that a lot of that is just my stupid impulsiveness and anger issues talking and that your opinion is equally as valid as any other. but i will say that respectfully, i do hope the game goes in the exact opposite direction of what you want it to be and that even more constraints are added upon the player.

[Siffrin]

Install mods that uncap the player level and let you adjust the DP limit of your skills (useful when you are also editing the total deployment limit)

[BigBrainEnergy]

Depends on what you mean by end-game fights. Tesseracts are endgame, while multi-ordo I would call optional content.

[intrinsic_parity]

If you've maxed out skills, DP, officers, and s-mods, any vanilla enemy human fleet should be doable with even a moderately optimized fleet. As long as you aren't trying to use weak ships like civilians or the bad pirate hulls, it's mostly just a matter of making good loadouts that synergize with skills.

It's only really the multi ordo fights, and omegas that require some significant optimization to beat. And even then, there is still some variety.

If you could beat everything in the game by throwing money at it without any significant outfitting or piloting skill, that would ruin the challenge of the game.

[Zsar]

Wow, is this for real? All you have to do for more challenge is deploy fewer ships or leave OP unspent. Literally zero effort. Yet, you lay on me that I want to expend more effort into making battles a sure thing? Like, you know, strategy?

Also you are okay that large parts of the game just end as if it was not bought but, say, time- or feature-limited shareware?

Compare this with

• Command & Conquer - you can always build more units, given the resources
• C-evo - you can keep improving your units forever
• TES 3 Morrowind - you will not reach your total skill ceiling before running out of content (even when adding ~one or two times the vanilla content via mods)
• Warlords Battlecry 3 - you and your enemies can keep leveling up forever

and somehow the inferior capabilities offered by this game are fine rather than mere placeholders to be improved upon!?

"Hey, here is a cool game mechanic - aww, now it's gone for this save" is fine!? Maybe we should just lose the capability to buy ships and supplies after a few cycles, to keep the challenge up.

Non-sarcastically: Once the player has the means to produce their own ships, harsher trade restrictions on them would seem sensible: They are now a competing power, not just some mercenary to be exploited and eventually dropped. I do not at all mind making the game harder, but I do very much mind nonsensical, arbitrary restrictions "just because". I also welcome any and all AI improvements that make combat harder, even though I struggle with some fights.

[llama]

Wow, is this for real? All you have to do for more challenge is deploy fewer ships or leave OP unspent. Literally zero effort.

Have you considered that most people don't actually want to do that? You could make almost any game harder by enforcing handicaps on yourself (hey, let's start playing one-handed and blindfolded), but it doesn't follow that this should allow the game to be arbitrarily easier for everyone.

If you think there are core parts of the game that are genuinely beyond your skill then the normal solution would be an even easier difficulty mode.

But some games do have a minimum level of enforced challenge, and in my opinion that's fine.

[Zsar]

So, you do not want to increase the challenge for yourself and that is valid. I do not want to circumvent the challenge by gamey means and that is invalid?

Why?

I want to work to solve the challenges but the game does not allow me to. I do not want easier challenges.

Do you win all challenges with just the starter fleet? No? Then apparently you engaged with some game mechanics. Like getting more ships or getting more officers or leveling up. Leveling up is in the tutorial, did you know that?
Why should these suddenly stop working? Why is using them longer than you do bad and using them less long than you do also bad?

When you look at games like FTL or The Ur-Quan Masters, these are outright time limited with a doomsday clock, but they do not halfway through suddenly switch off parts of the game. Why is it good to do that?

How about a "hard" difficulty mode, if you think an "even easier" mode is a good idea? I always play on normal, I do not want arbitrary anything. Not arbitrarily harder, not arbitrarily easier. Not arbitrary.
tl;dr: Not arbitrary. Arbitrary-not. Double-plus-un-arbitrary. That would be nice.

[llama]

Yes, a lot of us would like the game to offer more challenge rather than less. And personally I find that in this game challenges that are more symmetric are more satisfying to solve.

But frankly, you're also overstating the difficulty of the existing challenges in the game. The game does not "switch off", the game doesn't require you to use a fleet composed solely of Gryphons or anything like that. You can get by with just a little thought and optimization, and manage everything the game asks of you.

[SafariJohn]

Pretty sure you can beat Tesseracts by just spamming whatever capital ship you want at it with a half-way decent loadout. I would not be surprised if 10 Atlas Mk.II can do it.

[Koldo27]

When you look at games like FTL or The Ur-Quan Masters, these are outright time limited with a doomsday clock, but they do not halfway through suddenly switch off parts of the game. Why is it good to do that?

FTL gives you a maximum number of systems you can install in your ship, maximum number of times you can upgrade each system and the reactor, maximum number of crew that can level up a maximum number of times. How exactly is this different from starsector "switching off its mechanics halfway through" when you reach their maximum numbers?

[SCC]

It's worth pointing out that colonies are ultimately meant to let you use them for things other than passive income and creating equipment from blueprints, but that functionality hasn't been implemented yet. So yeah, the game is unfinished.

[Ruddygreat]

These are awful ideas that would remove all challenge from the game and you should feel bad for having them! (/sarcasm)

Though to be more elaborate, infinite progression tracks & removing "arbitrary" limits would replace the challenge of building a good fleet with the challenge of grinding out incremental upgrades against weaker enemies (or just straight up AFKing at in orbit of your colony while it prints money). While they is very much a form of difficulty, imo they're boring and bad ways of doing it, especially since there's nothing in the vanilla game like them.

for a direct comparison - you mentioned 2 rts games in which player / ai units can be upgraded forever and I think that they're entirely irrelevant because that simply isn't progression. If I get an upgrade which increases damage dealt by 5% and the AI gets an upgrade that reduces damage taken by 5%, no "progress" has been made either way; sure the numbers are bigger but no changes have actually been made.
(and frankly, I just think stat-stick balancing is awful, I'd much rather have unique enemies that require me to think to fight them.)

as for any actual lategame progression suggestions, tbh I don't think that the game needs any fancy-schmansy special research mechanics or anything, letting the player get better by just straight up learning more about the game is a much more rewarding progression track than forcing them to wait for incremental stat bonuses to unlock.

(also your complaints about features "disappearing" are kinda incomprehensible; just because you've filled out your fleet / hit level 15 doesn't mean that you can't go back and change things :p)

[BaBosa]

Wow, is this for real? All you have to do for more challenge is deploy fewer ships or leave OP unspent. Literally zero effort. Yet, you lay on me that I want to expend more effort into making battles a sure thing? Like, you know, strategy?

Also you are okay that large parts of the game just end as if it was not bought but, say, time- or feature-limited shareware?

Compare this with

• Command & Conquer - you can always build more units, given the resources
• C-evo - you can keep improving your units forever
• TES 3 Morrowind - you will not reach your total skill ceiling before running out of content (even when adding ~one or two times the vanilla content via mods)
• Warlords Battlecry 3 - you and your enemies can keep leveling up forever

and somehow the inferior capabilities offered by this game are fine rather than mere placeholders to be improved upon!?

"Hey, here is a cool game mechanic - aww, now it's gone for this save" is fine!? Maybe we should just lose the capability to buy ships and supplies after a few cycles, to keep the challenge up.

Non-sarcastically: Once the player has the means to produce their own ships, harsher trade restrictions on them would seem sensible: They are now a competing power, not just some mercenary to be exploited and eventually dropped. I do not at all mind making the game harder, but I do very much mind nonsensical, arbitrary restrictions "just because". I also welcome any and all AI improvements that make combat harder, even though I struggle with some fights.

While infinite growth can be cool. It quickly becomes very samey and as others mentioned, just because numbers go up doesn’t mean anything actually changes if the enemies improve in step with you. Sure there could be an element of trying to grow faster than enemies but implementing that would require significant changes to the game to make it good.
Adding to the progression system in any meaningful way would require more dev time to make it not just more of the same and more importantly, is difficult to do so without making other stuff obsolete. This is already an issue with destroyers and most frigates being basically irrelevant in end game.
If you do really want that infinite growth factor in your game though there are mods for it, starship legends, exotica technologies and a new level come to mind.
Links respectively.
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=15321.0
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=24660.0
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20535.0

As for increasing difficulty either normally or after getting a colony. Starsector does really need more difficulty settings in general but it’s just not really worth it until the game is mostly complete.