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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); In-development patch notes for Starsector 0.98a (2/8/25)

Author Topic: How fast are new ships manufactured, and how many of the ships we see are new?  (Read 1899 times)

Bungee_man

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Initially, building new ships was described as a rare and significant undertaking, such that the Hegemony building new Falcons was worthy of note, and capital ships were all-but-irreplaceable. The presence of XIV ships bearing the original Domain colors was a constant reminder that the Hegemony was burning through the enormous but finite stockpiles of a galactic superpower that was no longer present to restock them. The implication was that the constant warring was gradually destroying material that could not be rebuilt, and civilization would gradually regress to a planet-bound state. Over time, the grimdark aspects of the setting have been dialed down, and the Persean Sector has been portrayed as more self-sustaining - the Sindrian Diktat, far from the largest or most industrially successful faction, mass-produces its own custom capital ships as a matter of course. Likewise, the Luddic Church is churning out early Domain - era supercapitals from blueprints, and, in fact, tends to bias its doctrine in the direction of having quite a lot of them.

 - Are XIV blueprints a gameplay abstraction, or is the Hegemony generating new Onslaughts on the daily and painting some of them orange? Likewise, for the other factions, how much of their fleets are being built new, versus how many are lingering Domain reserves being appropriated by their new owners?

 - I've heard it mentioned that the fleet sizes in campaign are there for gameplay reasons. That said, the menu missions, in which a single Onslaught's loss is worthy of note, are quite old, and may bear implications that are no longer canon. What kinds of fleet sizes do the factions 'really' have, at any given time? I remember looking at the League blockade and the Hegemony AI inspections, doing some napkin math, and concluding that they sent about the equivalent of a U.S. Navy carrier group's worth of personnel at me each - implying that, if you model them as having a similar budgeting setup to the U.S., (which is by no means certain) they're sending around a tenth of their collective militaries to exploit a closing window of significant opportunity or deal with a non-immediate but existential perceived threat to the sector respectively, which sounds about right - any less would seem disproportionately small given the task's importance, and any more would leave their more immediate adversaries at an insurmountable advantage if things go poorly.

 - The big question is how easy it is to replace destroyed ships. The Hegemony going out of its way to restore a destroyed Onslaught (and the player's ability to do the same) suggest that printing off battleships isn't something that's done without exploring alternatives. Can Chicomoztoc make a new Onslaught every day? Every week, month, year? Are the manufacturing rates of player nanoforges meant to accurately portray how much a faction can produce? Just the player's allotted share of forge time under the colonial constitution? A complete gameplay abstraction accelerating new ship construction by an order of magnitude for QoL's sake?
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nathan67003

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- You can probably tell how self-sustaining a faction is from their levels of production and consumption of the ship parts resource. About the XIV, afaik they're not exactly a ubiquitous sight within Heg fleets; they're most likely kept for when most needed. (Incidentally, you can compare the manufacturing costs of a normal ship with its XIV variant to have a guess at how much harder they are to manufacture)

- Missions are definitely considered non-canon nowadays, iirc. As for fleet sizes, it's intentionally left vague (there's no real way to tell how many ships are under maintenance or just simply parked at any given time) but you can have some idea of how significant the total military arm is by the amount of time it takes to assemble a strike force against player colonies. Depending on how significant said strike force is, it could well be anywhere from under 2% of total faction ships up to 50%, depending on the faction.

-  The amount of resources necessary to maintain and create fleets attached to the player's bases is reflected in the amount of ship parts required to maintain their operation. The player's custom production orders can give you a good idea of how expensive a given ship is to manufacture brand new; consider the difference between that cost and the cost of recuperating a derelict into something that can at least fly without falling apart, then restoring it in port. Wanting to restore instead of create new ships is likely a purely economic reason; afaik, the Heg is already stretched bloody thin as it is so every bit counts.
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ithis

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Has any of the developers stated that all the missions are non-canon? That would seem pretty weird, considering many of the characters and their stories remain in-game.

The player's custom production orders can give you a good idea of how expensive a given ship is to manufacture brand new; consider the difference between that cost and the cost of recuperating a derelict into something that can at least fly without falling apart, then restoring it in port. Wanting to restore instead of create new ships is likely a purely economic reason; afaik, the Heg is already stretched bloody thin as it is so every bit counts.
Restoring ships is such a finicky and expensive process that it's often just cheaper to build an entire new ship, and that's reflected mechanically - it's more economical to run derelicts as is or to buy new ships (although hull restoration throws a wrench in there). Also, Daud uses it as a point of pride that the Hegemony is actively producing ships; if they were adding capitals to their fleets in addition to Eagles, the cost-calculus is the same in-game no matter the hull-size.
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Sandor057

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Not to be the killjoy here but... I feel some of the older world-building fluff just got obsolete or retconned due to "modern" gameplay being so much different and there being much else to do than in ye olde days. But crunch overwrites some initial ideas, with superships being constructed at black sites and random lv 5 captains being able to slowly restore their entire fleet to pristine working order, no matter what ships they have, well, older ideas get left at the wayside. But that's it for crunching a Lore post.

Fluffwise there shouldn't really be much pristine stuff around and the general attitude to maintenance I think would be just to keep everything running, maybe at a little better level than the bare minimum. That said there may be a lot of old stuff lying around in hangars and armories that are in different states of gutted and half-prepared. Say Chicomoztoc has its armories full with Onslaughts, Moras, Falcons, Enforcers, Lashers, etc. One Onslaught is missing armor plating as it got beaten up badly in a previous battle but nobody had the time and effort to spare to actually fix it up, while another one has one of the TPC mounts blown clean off, yet again a third is missing its engines altogether. And in the midst of it all there is the repair crew, with people like average Joe Starsector who have the know-how and affinity to fix-up these ships. Issue is, there's not a lot of them and while given time they would be capable to put everything together in good working order, time is a luxury they don't have. They need to fix up, say, a larger patrol's amount of ships by yesterday with some proper parts, duct tape, spit and vehement cursing while working.

I think sort of the same attitude is used for the orbital works and nanoforges churning out ships. Some grumpy technician is standing next to the assembly line and puts together 2 working Hammerheads from 5 defective churned out. The end result with 1-2 D-mods is what you get. The only thing one needs to keep in mind is to input the used blueprint + raw materials and out comes the ship, with most people having no knowledge of how the machine works (though I'd guess most factions keep a few tech-gurus somewhere). What's different faction by faction is what is being viewed as an acceptable output. New doesn't meen "good" or "without its quirks", right?
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Killer of Fate

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all the colony stuff feels non-canonical. So, treat crisis with a grain of salt. No sane economy would be built around a colony that requires so much fuel to get to. That is just a gameplay abstraction to allow for the player to have fun.

Generally the amount of ships you see patrolling around planets are the sane amounts. Meaning Paragons almost never appear, unless you buy them from Tri-Tachyon for a ridiculous amount of money (which the player conveniently has), but usually doesn't exist. Onslaughts and Legions are common, cause lore-wise they are hyped crap. Gameplay-wise they are an unstoppable force to be reckoned with.

Both Midline and Low Tech are theoretically cheap disposable crap. Domain doesn't seem to win by competence or technology, but by just spam. The only technology that is difficult to develop and deploy is the High Tech one, but not even always. Shrikes, Furies are also disposable crap. And Odyssey as well, it's just pretentious therefore overpriced.

The Sector is capable of making crap... But it can't make XIV (cause these are elite ships that use more advanced technology to boost their stats). Hegemony is most likely not capable of manufacturing them. And the only reason we can and we see them so often, is gameplay. It would be difficult and really depressing to see XIV just fade away as the game progresses. Though that is what happened to Legion XIV. They just ran out. Which is kinda funny, ngl.

True extremely powerful ships that Domain could deploy with the extremely potent technology they could make with their absolute amazed god-like entity omnipotence were the Omegas, the Ziggurat, XIV... And Remnants? And all of these are lore-wise finite and impossible to comprehend.

So, to answer your question. Garbage can be made fast. Hegemony can probably make 3 Onslaughts per month, I would guess. 5 Dominators... And they would sprinkle a Legion on top. Luddic Church cause it's not an industrial society probably can make 1 Invictus or 3 Retribution per month. But they most likely just assemble Low Tech garbage like Eradicator, Venture spam. Pirates most likely can't build anything interesting at all, they just scavenge, steal, recover and throw whatever *** sticks to the wall. Persean League is led by the mighty Kazeron which can manufacture amazing fleets. Therefore 5 Conquests, 2 Pegasus per month I would guess. Tri-Tachyon is at a horrible position. But I would guess 1 Paragon. 10 Shrikes or something... And Sindrian Diktat has a might industrial population which can make like 3 Executors per month...

So, something like that? But... Who knows...
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happycrow

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That is a great way of also answering "why does Galatia get so much leeway and teach the VIPs of the whole sector?" Because they're the only people who kinda-sorta-maybe understand how any of this tech works. The infamous international arms bazaar at Peshawar is pretty impressive, too!  Unless you've seen the absolute shenanigans  a fully-modern DIB can not only crank out, but modify for-purpose on the fly.  And the DIBs are all gone.
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Killer of Fate

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That is a great way of also answering "why does Galatia get so much leeway and teach the VIPs of the whole sector?" Because they're the only people who kinda-sorta-maybe understand how any of this tech works. The infamous international arms bazaar at Peshawar is pretty impressive, too!  Unless you've seen the absolute shenanigans  a fully-modern DIB can not only crank out, but modify for-purpose on the fly.  And the DIBs are all gone.
Galatia is extremely important in terms of preserving galactic technology. Especially considering it was the first to even get close to reactivate the gates. It's sort of confusing why Luddic Path won't come over there and just blow it up. Considering security seems minimal. I assume it might have something to do with pirates being students there. And all the important factions being part of that society. Maybe LP is playing it long-term. Which would be kinda ridiculous...

Maybe I missed something.
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happycrow

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Galatia is extremely important in terms of preserving galactic technology. Especially considering it was the first to even get close to reactivate the gates. It's sort of confusing why Luddic Path won't come over there and just blow it up. Considering security seems minimal. I assume it might have something to do with pirates being students there. And all the important factions being part of that society. Maybe LP is playing it long-term. Which would be kinda ridiculous...

Maybe I missed something.

I suspect the degree to which Pathers vary in their small-scale motivations, many of them happy to just loot and pillage "the bad guys" (everybody else).
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Killer of Fate

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Galatia is extremely important in terms of preserving galactic technology. Especially considering it was the first to even get close to reactivate the gates. It's sort of confusing why Luddic Path won't come over there and just blow it up. Considering security seems minimal. I assume it might have something to do with pirates being students there. And all the important factions being part of that society. Maybe LP is playing it long-term. Which would be kinda ridiculous...

Maybe I missed something.
I suspect the degree to which Pathers vary in their small-scale motivations, many of them happy to just loot and pillage "the bad guys" (everybody else).

they attack any form of attempt at rebuilding the Domain. And yet the Galatia Academy seems to be relatively free from them. Maybe they have some sort of deal? But I don't know how that's possible considering the main goal of Galatia is to restart the gates. The very thing Pathers were glad shut down.
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Bungee_man

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they attack any form of attempt at rebuilding the Domain. And yet the Galatia Academy seems to be relatively free from them. Maybe they have some sort of deal? But I don't know how that's possible considering the main goal of Galatia is to restart the gates. The very thing Pathers were glad shut down.

Pathers do show up in opposition to the Academy in many missions, they just don't directly attack it. Given that it's reasonably deep in Hegemony territory, with a colony that has a defense fleet right next to it, that's not entirely unreasonable - it just relies on the assumption that the defenses the player sees aren't all the defenses there are, against an out-and-out attack. The presence of un-stolen nanoforges makes the same assumption. At present, the game is built for the stage in which the player is not yet strong enough to take on a star fortress and stick around thereafter.

Ties back into the topic - the little fleets of a few ships each guarding colonies are just the anti-smuggling contingent, it would seem, and an organized attack would face something more substantial. 
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Killer of Fate

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they attack any form of attempt at rebuilding the Domain. And yet the Galatia Academy seems to be relatively free from them. Maybe they have some sort of deal? But I don't know how that's possible considering the main goal of Galatia is to restart the gates. The very thing Pathers were glad shut down.

Pathers do show up in opposition to the Academy in many missions, they just don't directly attack it. Given that it's reasonably deep in Hegemony territory, with a colony that has a defense fleet right next to it, that's not entirely unreasonable - it just relies on the assumption that the defenses the player sees aren't all the defenses there are, against an out-and-out attack. The presence of un-stolen nanoforges makes the same assumption. At present, the game is built for the stage in which the player is not yet strong enough to take on a star fortress and stick around thereafter.

Ties back into the topic - the little fleets of a few ships each guarding colonies are just the anti-smuggling contingent, it would seem, and an organized attack would face something more substantial.
Honestly, considering we can land on Galatia Academy easily, and there doesn't seem to be that much mention of defences of that thing. And the nearby Hegemony world is a lesser one that seems to barely matter. I think it would be really easy for a Pather fleet to just descend using the gas giant's gravitational field, deploy a squadron of a hundred people and just butcher enough people there to put the Galatia Academy a few years back. Maybe even kidnap the Provost.

This does sound incredibly edgy, but considering Pathers were capable of ramming space infrastructure to kill tens of millions of people. They would totally do it.
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Bungee_man

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Honestly, considering we can land on Galatia Academy easily, and there doesn't seem to be that much mention of defences of that thing.

Chalk that up to conservation of detail. There are plenty of stations, and orbital habitats that don't have extensive defenses explicitly mentioned but are nonetheless still intact. You can assume they've got large mercenary fleets on standby for any serious threats that pop up, but the player's fixed as a friendly, and no serious threats ever pop up nearby, so the player doesn't see them.

That said, a one-off interaction at the first orbital habitat the player interacts with describing post-Mayasura changes in security procedures, maybe with a special variant where the player's transponder is off but he still takes care not to approach too fast, or with too many ships at once, would be an interesting bit of worldbuilding.
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Killer of Fate

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Honestly, considering we can land on Galatia Academy easily, and there doesn't seem to be that much mention of defences of that thing.

Chalk that up to conservation of detail. There are plenty of stations, and orbital habitats that don't have extensive defenses explicitly mentioned but are nonetheless still intact. You can assume they've got large mercenary fleets on standby for any serious threats that pop up, but the player's fixed as a friendly, and no serious threats ever pop up nearby, so the player doesn't see them.

That said, a one-off interaction at the first orbital habitat the player interacts with describing post-Mayasura changes in security procedures, maybe with a special variant where the player's transponder is off but he still takes care not to approach too fast, or with too many ships at once, would be an interesting bit of worldbuilding.
as a writer I think inserting things after writing them to fill plot holes is a nightmare. And I hate how George Lucas goes back and "fixes" the details of his franchise to make events have less errors.

I'm content with the way things are. However, if I really wanted to fix this. What I would do is add a mission that would hint Galatia and Luddic Path have some sort of history that makes LP directly attacking Galatia very unlikely. Attacking their mercenaries or scientists operating in deep space on the other hand is free gain.

Something like "oh, the LP leader's son ran away from him cause he was an abusive dad and started to learn at Galatia Academy" or "after the events of Mairaath LP wanted to rebrand a little, therefore unprovoked attacks against people who clearly just want to learn and not harm anyone are considered taboo nowadays. Industrial targets that serve the military-industrial complex on the other hand are okay".

Something like another minor mission in which we steal bees from a volcanic world. And one of the idiots there mumbles something nonsensical. You know what I mean?
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Bungee_man

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as a writer I think inserting things after writing them to fill plot holes is a nightmare. And I hate how George Lucas goes back and "fixes" the details of his franchise to make events have less errors.

That's not what I said - there's no plot hole to begin with, as long as you make the (reasonable) assumption that the amount of defenses the player sees is the product of the game still being in development, and of it being a game. Chico isn't *really* guarded by just a handful of wide patrols and a station that a moderately-sized fleet can overcome easily enough, or someone would've taken the nanoforge a long time ago. We don't see the "real" defenses because the game is, to a degree, designed around the player, and the in-game presence of various things varies based on what would be a suitable obstacle rather than what would be logical. For the same reason, since Galatia is always friendly to the player, and it never gets attacked, implementing a bunch of logic for fleets to pop out of it and defend it when attacked isn't a priority. Mentioning some post-Mayasura changes to station security early on would just be nice set-dressing.
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