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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Anubis-class Cruiser (12/20/24)

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Author Topic: Recall device  (Read 2351 times)

BigBrainEnergy

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #15 on: January 13, 2025, 07:29:01 AM »

There is the chronic issue that fighters get more powerful the more you stack them.
Bro's stuck in 0.9.1. Quite curiously, missile spamming never caught on like carrier spam, despite also being quite good currently.

I'm talking about the inherent nature of fighters (and missiles) to concentrate large amounts of burst damage on a single target due to their ability to fly over allies. Carrier spam's viability is entirely irrelevant, the point is that it's hard to buff carriers without running into this specific issue.
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BigBrainEnergy

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #16 on: January 13, 2025, 07:51:26 AM »

I've got another suggestion for an AI tweak.

Carriers are often assigned as escorts to keep them safe. They even have an "auto-escort" behavior when you don't assign them yourself. This is great, but it creates a small issue when you want to focus fire on a target. If I have my astral escorting a paragon and I want them both to target the same ship, this overrides the astral's escort order. To get around this, it would be nice if instead I can just give the paragon a kill command, and any carriers escorting it would automatically target the same ship.

I would not want this behavior for any other escorts, just for carriers specifically.
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eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #17 on: January 13, 2025, 10:17:02 AM »

I think I would have preferred to have Recall Device have no cooldown, but ATC and EMR are fine, too, I suppose? They certainly don't make the ship weaker, but I didn't expect this angle.

There is the chronic issue that fighters get more powerful the more you stack them.
Bro's stuck in 0.9.1. Quite curiously, missile spamming never caught on like carrier spam, despite also being quite good currently.
You have no idea. I'm currently trying out a Pilum spam fleet. I've already gone after some fairly large and healthy Church bounty fleets. With 4 Conquests, a Pegasus, 4 Vigilance, and a Wolf to capture points. I've now killed several Invictus largely will Pilums. It shouldn't work but it does because frag with high hit strength from a weapon that also does EMP at 4,000 range is exceptionally busted when boosted by skills to the max. It also has a comedic effect of causing enemy ships to panic and overload due to the incoming damage.
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Killer of Fate

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #18 on: January 13, 2025, 10:49:49 AM »

@Alex

just wanted to state for the record that this change you are proposing is in fact looking really neat. And I'm looking forward to it

Especially with the upcoming fixes to microburn and fighter AI
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Killer of Fate

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #19 on: January 14, 2025, 08:54:16 AM »

Found an idiotic way to balance the Recall Device

Okay, listen... This is gonna blow your mind.

Give the ship 22k (currently it's 12) base flux. Then set its cooldown to 10 seconds.
Why?

The Recall Device costs 0.5 of base flux. Which means at 22k, the ship will take 11k to recall its fighters. This means that the Astral will rapidly deplete its flux levels unless it heavily invests into stuff like Stabilised Shields and flux conduits.

This will also mean you won't have to have freaking Systems Expertise, and can go for Missile Specialisation instead without feeling guilty about it.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2025, 08:56:03 AM by Killer of Fate »
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Doctorhealsgood

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #20 on: January 14, 2025, 10:20:35 AM »

11k for a recall... It might end up being detrimental.
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Killer of Fate

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #21 on: January 14, 2025, 10:37:14 AM »

11k for a recall... It might end up being detrimental.
EXACTLY...
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Gothars

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #22 on: January 14, 2025, 02:25:04 PM »

recall device, its strength goes up and down based on overall wing strength

That gives me an idea, how about if the Astral gets more recalls if it has fewer wings equipped? Then you can choose between a carrier with overwhelming force (with 6 wings)  or a battlecarrier providing constant fighter pressure with 2 wings or anything in between.
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Doctorhealsgood

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #23 on: January 14, 2025, 03:14:14 PM »

recall device, its strength goes up and down based on overall wing strength

That gives me an idea, how about if the Astral gets more recalls if it has fewer wings equipped? Then you can choose between a carrier with overwhelming force (with 6 wings)  or a battlecarrier providing constant fighter pressure with 2 wings or anything in between.

What is the point of giving you the most fighter bays of any ship if you are encouraged to not use all of them?

11k for a recall... It might end up being detrimental.
EXACTLY...
I don't think a single recall is worth that much flux... Besides making the ai try to be smart about when to actually use something like that sounds like hell.
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Killer of Fate

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #24 on: January 14, 2025, 03:18:51 PM »

11k for a recall... It might end up being detrimental.
EXACTLY...
I don't think a single recall is worth that much flux... Besides making the ai try to be smart about when to actually use something like that sounds like hell.
it's an excuse to give it more OP, cause the player will be forced to spec into venting in order for the ship to be able to even use its system properly.

It's also a neat way of nerfing Recall Device in a way that would still allow it to be extremely powerful if the ship is min-maxed. Contrary to how it is now. Where the only way to boost the ship's Recall Device potential is via Systems Expertise which gives a negligible reduction in cooldown... At the waste of a skill point which should be put into missile expertise, helsmanship, Literally anything else. As unlike other ships, Astral has a lot of skills that can improve its performance. It's not a Heron. Especially considering its a slow moving, vulnerable piece of crap that costs half a morbillion credits.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2025, 03:22:13 PM by Killer of Fate »
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Alex

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #25 on: January 14, 2025, 05:38:35 PM »

There is always the heretical option of buffing it a lot, and then raising the dp 8)

Haha, yeah! Path notes: "buffed the Astral but also increased its DP, have fun sorting this one out."


I mostly like the charge-based system for player piloting, it makes it feel much more impactful as a flagship. While it does help the AI, I don't think it's going to get nearly as much value as the player can. I'll test out an astral mono-fleet with this change to see if it's an issue.

Yeah, this makes sense. My thought here is that even if the AI is not great with using the system on a lone Astral, the behavior *might* become more effective when it reaches critical  mass, for whatever reason.

First test
This is without the recall device change, just the ATC and missile racks (and 0.7 efficiency).
astral
[close]
combat screenshots




[close]

The [4 astrals + support] is doing worse than [3 paragons + support], but they can at least beat ordos. Next I'm going to test a mixed fleet [2 astral + 2 paragon + support] to see how it does.

Interesting! Worth keeping in mind that the Astrals can probably be optimized more just due to a bunch of this being new and as-yet not figured out entirely.


*Side note:*
There is the chronic issue that fighters get more powerful the more you stack them. The current carrier skills somewhat mitigate this by giving larger bonuses when you run a smaller number of carriers, but the numbers could be even more aggressive in that direction. For example, you could increase the carrier group bonus to 75% and reduce the max number of bays to 6. On top of that, you could increase the officer multiplier from x1.5 to x2. The result would be that running 1 astral would get you +150% replacement speed instead of the current +75%. A similar change to fighter uplink would net you +60% top speed instead of +30%.

That might sound very strong, but if you're investing in fleet skills to buff a specific ship type they need to come out more powerful than other ships as long as you respect the skill's soft-cap. This approach works perfectly for phase coil tuning, so it should be possible with the carrier skills too. For herons and moras, 6 bays comes out to 40 dp which is the same as phase coil tuning.

I was actually thinking about exactly this the other day, as a buff to carriers that doesn't scale. The same line of thought here. For Fighter Uplink it does get a bit weird because for some fighters getting too fast ends up being partially bad due to missing/insufficient turn rate/etc. Possibly resolvable by also buffing the turn rate, but there's also stuff like "now this bomber doesn't have the time to release all of its payload during an attack run", hmm.


Second test
I don't know about the speed, but compared to running 4 astrals this felt a lot safer. Both the paragon and the astral escorting it had nothing to fear from pretty much anything the remnant could throw at it.
fleet screenshots


[close]

Also interesting! Thank you for all the testing and info.

I'll think about it a bit more! Leaning towards sticking with it as-is, just to avoid overbuffing the ship, since what it's already getting is substantial and realistically, it didn't feel to me like it was *that* far off from being viable already. Well, I'd say it's already viable (depending on one's definition), just on the lower end of the spectrum unless you build it like a battleship and go very hardcore with micromanaging it.
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Thaago

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #26 on: January 14, 2025, 05:57:57 PM »

Wild idea: have a combat capstone skill (for player or officer) that increases wing count by 1.

That handles the lack of an increase in fighter offense/defense/ordinance HP by having more fighters, while for the vast majority of wings is still less of an increase than what missile spec does for missiles. I think the cobra is the only exception as it is a 1 count wing, but otoh it could really use a buff and with 2/wing might be useful.

Inherently limited by being a skill that takes up an officer slot, and if it is a capstone then no officer will be able to stack it, missile spec, and system expertise at the same time, so will have to give up something.
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kaoseth

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #27 on: January 15, 2025, 01:28:30 AM »

That does look very fun! I'm concerned that'd be too strong, though, especially combined with the other buffs; you might see an Astral mono-fleet just deleting things!

I'm surprised to hear you don't have a fleet composition testing scripts already. I'd expect you'd to have created away to automated fleet vs fleet using specific loadouts loaded from a file for QA purposes. 

Here's some extra suggestions on that. 
Have the method for testing be a command line for the game exe that designates a file to load that has all the ship/station/officer/fleet info. 
Have the results output in a .csv so you can easily load it into excel. 
After you make it, go back and make a large quality set of ship configurations and fleets using the .97a release, run the tests, so you have a baseline. 
Have a progress bar/console text update regularly so you know if it is stalled. 
Maximize how fast the combat can run, don't have it draw anything, etc. 
Have different sections in said file so you can tightly control what is different.  Splitting 40,60,80,100, 150, 200, 240, 300 dp fleets into different pools is a start, but it's also really good to limit as many variables as possible and just change one thing.  Like x fleet vs y fleet, just with ion pulsars instead of gravitons on mediums energy.
Have a little flexibility in ship design input such as "fill the rest with vents", so that there's flex for automation to change out parts and still be in OP budget for the ship. 

And for mental fun, do a genetic algorithm option too.  Randomly create fleets, ships, officers, etc, have them fight each other, and save the top 30? or so winners.  Create a copy of the winners to randomly mutate them a small amount. Then have them fight the originals along with 30 more new random entries.  Take the top 30 from that, and repeat.  After some 1000 iterations you should have some moderate fleets, and in 50000, you should have a solid top 30 fleets list.  Then you can look at those and see why. 
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SCC

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #28 on: January 15, 2025, 01:45:22 AM »

Automated means no player involvement, which is not how Alex expects game to be played

Sir Nitoh

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Re: Recall device
« Reply #29 on: January 15, 2025, 01:57:17 AM »

Another fun thing that has not yet been considered is that a rework of the Recall Device might make Scintillas viable (or at least memeable) !

It would require quite an investment in skill points (Fighter Uplink, Carrier Group, Automated Ships), but then with 5 Scintillas piloted by Gamma Cores you get 10 Flash bombers (bolstered by skills and 100% Combat Readiness) that could endlessly pummel individual targets from multiple angles, and that's not considering the missile spam capacity of the Scintilla. All of that for 60DP ! Meme tier strategy, but still !

(I've been scrolling the forum for some time, but it's my first message here, hello people !) 
« Last Edit: January 15, 2025, 05:07:40 AM by Sir Nitoh »
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