Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[PerturbedPug]

Hey guys,
The title really says it all. Just say three things you want improved in Starsector and why. I will start it off.

1. I want the AI not to be able to tell if someone is aiming at them at all times. It gets really annoying when you have perfect shot at an enemy but then they magically realize you are aiming at them, even with a long ranged weapon.
2. I want the simulator to have every ship and variant. The menu for it would look more like the codex so it would not be a crowded mess.
3.I want the game to tell you when you don't have enough crew, fuel and supplies. It gets frustrating when you roll out with a brand new ship, only to find out when you encounter someone that it doesn't have enough crew.

Thanks for reading

[Sordid]

1. I'd like to see map borders gone. It makes absolutely no sense to me that a ship that's slower than mine is somehow able to get away from me just because it crosses some arbitrary line, despite the fact that I'm right up his exhaust pipe and unloading on him with all my guns.

2. Better AI, "better" in this case meaning "more human". This goes right back to your point #1 but it's more than just that. Enemies seem to have an absolutely perfect awareness and instant reactions. A human being simply can't keep track of everything that's going on on the screen, all the missiles, fighters, laser blasts, and all the rest of it. Often I get hit not because I was outsmarted by the AI per se, but simply because I didn't notice the impending threat among all the other bright colorful pyrotechnics going off. AI ships should overlook things, fixate on their targets and ignore incoming threats, etc. This could tie nicely into the character and crew experience system, with low-level guys being more prone to such errors than high-level ones.

Not only that, enemies are apparently psychic and able to outright see the future, too. Observe:

Spoiler

[close]

I'm fighting a phase frigate and I'm about to fire on it with a pulse laser. Now the pulse laser doesn't fire immediately, it takes a moment to charge up, as indicated by the little progress bar at the bottom. The bar is about 2/3 up and the frigate's phase drives (or whatever those purple glowing things are) are already lighting up. There are bull@#$% reaction times and then there's dodging a shot before it's even gone off.

Here's an example of a developer who has a pretty firm grasp of the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaxiKobmAR8#t=1m4s

3. More automation of tedious, repetitive tasks like buying and selling things. I'd like to be able to set my preferred 'loadout', for example, and just sell all the vendor trash, buy new supplies, fuel, and crew (or sell surplus thereof) with the press of a single Resupply button. A neat idea from Kingdoms of Amalur that I'd like to see is the Junk section of your inventory. You find something and if you don't want to keep it, you can just put it into Junk with a single click. Then you can sell all Junk at a vendor with a single click. I want to be blowing up spaceships, not shuffling little pixel art icons back and forth.

[BillyRueben]

1. A few more low end hull-mods to better push ships in to a niche. A few more "beam-only" ship hull mods, a few more missile boat hull-mods.

2. Audio. Both SFX and music. It was mentioned that the combat music was going to be ambiance and something you could only really hear when there isn't much going on onscreen, rather than something (IMO) that really pulls you in to the experience. The sound effects we have so far are good, I'd just like to have more.

3. The combat escape mechanics. Although Alex has already hinted that he is working on it in some form.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now to address what has been said so far that I disagree with:

1. I want the AI not to be able to tell if someone is aiming at them at all times. It gets really annoying when you have perfect shot at an enemy but then they magically realize you are aiming at them, even with a long ranged weapon.

2. Better AI, "better" in this case meaning "more human". This goes right back to your point #1 but it's more than just that. Enemies seem to have an absolutely perfect awareness and instant reactions.

I think that is a perfectly fine way to have the AI. They have a few advantages over you to counteract the large advantage you have over them: the ability to reason. Think of how many times a few AI frigate blindly charged your capital ship only to be destroyed in five seconds without even putting a dent in your ship.

3.I want the game to tell you when you don't have enough crew, fuel and supplies. It gets frustrating when you roll out with a brand new ship, only to find out when you encounter someone that it doesn't have enough crew.

The game already does that. Every time you get a ship, through boarding or purchase, it tells you that you don't have enough crew.

3. More automation of tedious, repetitive tasks like buying and selling things.

In the game's future, there is a good chance that pricing will be different depending on where you are buying and selling. A "one-button sell all" button would be good for things like fuel and supplies that are both A) needed a lot and B) probably going to be close to the average price at 90% of the stations. However, a lot of the other commodities that you are going to be dealing with probably couldn't be automated without some serious drawbacks and a lot of dev time.

[Sordid]

I think that is a perfectly fine way to have the AI. They have a few advantages over you to counteract the large advantage you have over them: the ability to reason. Think of how many times a few AI frigate blindly charged your capital ship only to be destroyed in five seconds without even putting a dent in your ship.

So what you're saying is that it's okay for the AI to have serious shortcomings because they cancel each other out? I'm sorry, I don't see the merit in that idea.

In the game's future, there is a good chance that pricing will be different depending on where you are buying and selling. A "one-button sell all" button would be good for things like fuel and supplies that are both A) needed a lot and B) probably going to be close to the average price at 90% of the stations. However, a lot of the other commodities that you are going to be dealing with probably couldn't be automated without some serious drawbacks and a lot of dev time.

Then give me three buttons, Sell All, Sell if Price is Good, Resupply Supplies and Fuel only. There's plenty of screen space and the keyboard has over 100 buttons.

[BillyRueben]

I think that is a perfectly fine way to have the AI. They have a few advantages over you to counteract the large advantage you have over them: the ability to reason. Think of how many times a few AI frigate blindly charged your capital ship only to be destroyed in five seconds without even putting a dent in your ship.

So what you're saying is that it's okay for the AI to have serious shortcomings because they cancel each other out? I'm sorry, I don't see the merit in that idea.

That's exactly what I'm saying. "Serious shortcomings" is making mountains out of mole hills. There are a few things the AI can do that you can't, and you can do a few things that the AI can't. A "more human" AI is also an easier AI, and I think they are easy enough as it is. Also, at some point the combat AI has to be "finished" so that work can start on other aspects of the game.

Then give me three buttons, Sell All, Sell if Price is Good, Resupply Supplies and Fuel only. There's plenty of screen space and the keyboard has over 100 buttons.

Now that I look at it again, I could see it working. The "Sell All" button could be constrained to items not locked by the player in their inventory, so anything a player would want to keep they could just lock. A "Resupply" button could work if the player could set an amount of supplies and fuel they want and/or a percentage of their capacity. And, a "Sell if Good Price" button would work if the player could set a % profit margin. This would lead to a few time where a product falls just below that threshold to a player's annoyance, but it would still be largely beneficial.

[Histidine]

1) Better fighters - add some skills for them; improve their AI, increase synergy with carriers.
Currently there's no reason for me to use fighters over frigates or destroyers, especially given that the latter get skills and the former don't. Bombers are especially bad; they like to waste their payloads on shields (assuming they even manage to perform an attack run at all instead of zipping about doing nothing).
Carriers, too, need to be more interesting (as in I want a reason to take a carrier other than the smallest one I can get). Plenty of topics on that subject already, though.

2)

I'd like to see map borders gone. It makes absolutely no sense to me that a ship that's slower than mine is somehow able to get away from me just because it crosses some arbitrary line, despite the fact that I'm right up his exhaust pipe and unloading on him with all my guns.

3. The combat escape mechanics. Although Alex has already hinted that he is working on it in some form.

[Lordzias]

1. As some people already said- fighters. Personally I don't see much use for them now other than capping things in bigger battles.
2. More vanilla ships- the more the better, the most the best.
3. Enemies. I know that the difficulty level is something that will be improved in future releases but now the game becomes too easy too fast imo.

[Gothars]

1) The ability to tell stories with mods.  Right now we can create awesome ships and a bit of lore, but no real narrative. Maybe just in (strung together) Missions at first, but even better would be if you could import quest lines into the campaign. It would require a flexible text, dialog and quest system and all sorts of event triggers. That would be twofoldly awesome:

 a) It would finally give me a reason to dig into modding. I like coming up with characters (ie ships), but without the ability to tell stories they would feel like actors without a script (or in a play that was not written for them).

 b) It would expand the long play value of the game so much. I've got the impression that the game narrative in  the final game will not have much handcrafted stuff but be composed of dynamically meshing game mechanics, Mount&Blade style. That's fine and the only way to fill a huge gameworld, but handcrafted stories are still more spicy and if they are fan made they allow for continues growth.

[PerturbedPug]

but even better would be if you could import quest lines into the campaign.

I really like your whole idea Gothars, but this part really catches my attention. I would absolutely love being able to add fan made quests on the fly in the middle of my campaign. It would definitely help late game when it would most likely start getting stale (you have a large fleet, control over a few worlds/station and tons of supplies and credits).

[Iscariot]

Not to be a party pooper, but isn't this more like a suggestion thread?

[Lordzias]

Not to be a party pooper, but isn't this more like a suggestion thread?

I would say that this is more of a wishlist than a suggestion thread.

[Gaizokubanou]

Fighter/bomber wings and their relationship to carriers.  Right now it just feels so bare boned and doesn't match up to how well direct fire ships control and function.