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[Dri]

I think we're danger of heading into hyperbole territory. >_> 

Removal of the flux damage boost is really the only noteworthy issue and I do agree that there needs to be some compensation in that regard (perhaps just a simple +% damage blanket to all energy weapons). As for the ammo thing, in vanilla Starsector, VERY few battles last long enough that you start to run out of important ammo. I honestly can't remember a single time I lost a battle because I ran out of ballistic ammo and I've been running low tech fleets 80% of time for years.

[Thaago]

Yeah... the whole "energy weapons have high flux usage cause they made their own ammo" thing isn't true. Their high flux usage is part of the balance they share with the high tech ships they live on. Also, while the flux boost is gone, energy weapons got a static DPS boost to compensate. In some cases (plasma cannon) its a little short, but for most things it works.

Energy weapons as main guns still works fantastically. Pulse lasers have just fine DPS and excellent accuracy but struggle against armor a bit. Heavy blasters have large slot damage for very few OP's but eat flux. Phase lances are amazing armor killers and burst damage dealers.

[Megas]

For small mounts, energy weapons are generally terrible.  The only ones that are useful are beams, and that is only for anti-missile or anti-small ship.  (Occasionally, AM blaster is useful for overloading AI due to its terribly predictable flux management.)  Ballistics, on the other hand, have gems like railgun and light needler.  Even the crummy light (dual) AC and LAG beats the more expensive IR pulse laser.

For medium mounts, heavy blaster is great, and is probably one of the few energy weapons that can compete with the best ballistics.  Phase Lance is great *IF* you have both Advanced Optics and other weapons that hit for hard flux.

For heavy mounts, Mjolnir outclasses all heavy energy weapons at overall performance.

In the next version, non-missile shots that fade out before hitting shields do soft-flux only.  This will hurt energy weapons more.

Well, guys, lets not forget high tech ships tend to be much faster, have superior flux stats, and most come with greatly superior shields.

For frigates, I agree.  Lasher is one of the weakest ships in the game, and the other low-tech frigates are hybrids, and midline frigates are specialists.  For destroyers and capitals, low-tech and high-tech are about on par with each other, and midline is weak.  For cruisers, low-tech is excellent (especially Dominator), midline is good, and high-tech have somewhat underpowered specialists (Apogee for hybrid, Aurora for missiles, and Doom for strike).

As for the ammo thing, in vanilla Starsector, VERY few battles last long enough that you start to run out of important ammo.

As someone who chains lone flagships until level 50+, I definitely ran out of ammo frequently if I did not use energy weapons before ammo became unlimited.  Now that most weapons do not use ammo anymore, I sometimes use Enforcer or Sunder over Medusa, and I usually use Dominator or Eagle over the high-tech cruisers.

Also, while the flux boost is gone, energy weapons got a static DPS boost to compensate. In some cases (plasma cannon) its a little short, but for most things it works.

Pulse lasers and heavy blaster made out.  AM blaster, mining blaster, and plasma cannon got shafted.  Beams did not get any damage boost, but cost less OP and some got more range.  PD laser made LR PD laser obsolete.  Burst PD is overpriced.  Tactical laser is very good.

[orost]

I hope that when more of the campaign is in place and the game can support a real notion of hull availability we can have high-tech ships be more difficult to obtain but also get buffed. The current situation where availability is as simple as "% chance to appear per month" means that ships must be mostly balanced with each other no matter what, because otherwise the player would be strongly incentivised to sit around for months waiting for that Aurora to appear, which would be very bad. (that still happens... but it's not nearly as bad as it could be)

Once obtaining a rare ship means doing something difficult, fun and interesting like exploration/theft/establishing an advanced manufaturing outpost then rare ships can actually be powerful and high-tech can really sweep the floor with low-tech... if you can get your hands on it.

[Megas]

Shields > armor in most cases.

Superior speed and shot range are better than both, something better low-tech and midline ships can do better than most high-tech.

The best low-tech and midline ships have mobility systems to compensate for lower base speed and can mount long-range ballistic weapons.  (No non-beam energy weapon has more than 700 range.)  They can kite very well and avoid taking hits.  High-tech ships that can mount blasters tend to rely on superior agility and/or high DPS to overpower defenses.  Sometimes, that works; sometimes, not.  High-tech ships with mobility systems (or high speed in case of frigates) can lay down the hurt very quickly, but they need to get into enemy weapon range to do that; high-tech ships that cannot use ballistics cannot kite, except maybe against other high-tech ships.

Sometimes, I prefer to use Onslaught over Paragon because, aside from being much more common and more CR efficient, it has burn drive to get to the fighting faster.

[zenstrata]

Not 100% sure but I think CR is ultimately a very long and winding method of putting an end to kiting entire enemy fleets with impunity while in very fast ships.

So if no CR... then how to prevent massive kiting cheese?

Kiting?  I'm not sure how this was ever really a problem to begin with?  I mean, if the fleet is too tough for a player to destroy, how does kiting help?  Perhaps dragging fleets into each other to cause battles?  But even then, the player would not get any reward from doing this, so it seems pointless...

I played back before the combat readiness mechanic was put into the game, but I don't remember 'cheesing' anything due to its absence.  I am frequently frustrated however when I have to fly pointlessly around for a while till the readiness restores itself enough for me to fight again.

Or do you mean a small ship using its agility to fly around and shoot a larger ship from behind after eliminating its escorts?  I did not consider that kiting, That was more about using your speed to create a tactical advantage.  Also the amount of time needed to defeat a large fleet this way was long and difficult enough that I felt the rewards gained were justified.  An easy way to prevent this would be to give larger ships weapons which track faster (missiles) or put some mounts on larger vessels that can shoot at whatever is behind them.

[Tartiflette]

Kiting?  I'm not sure how this was ever really a problem to begin with?  I mean, if the fleet is too tough for a player to destroy, how does kiting help?  Perhaps dragging fleets into each other to cause battles?  But even then, the player would not get any reward from doing this, so it seems pointless...

Heh, so you didn't saw all these videos about people defeating a full Hegemony System Defense Force with a single frigate or destroyer before?

[zenstrata]

Kiting?  I'm not sure how this was ever really a problem to begin with?  I mean, if the fleet is too tough for a player to destroy, how does kiting help?  Perhaps dragging fleets into each other to cause battles?  But even then, the player would not get any reward from doing this, so it seems pointless...

I played back before the combat readiness mechanic was put into the game, but I don't remember 'cheesing' anything due to its absence.  I am frequently frustrated however when I have to fly pointlessly around for a while till the readiness restores itself enough for me to fight again.

Or do you mean a small ship using its agility to fly around and shoot a larger ship from behind after eliminating its escorts?  I did not consider that kiting, That was more about using your speed to create a tactical advantage.  Also the amount of time needed to defeat a large fleet this way was long and difficult enough that I felt the rewards gained were justified.  An easy way to prevent this would be to give larger ships weapons which track faster (missiles) or put some mounts on larger vessels that can shoot at whatever is behind them.

Heh, so you didn't saw all these videos about people defeating a full Hegemony System Defense Force with a single frigate or destroyer before?

Edited Note: You cut out a large part of my previous post in your 'quote', it is not a proper quote if you don't include the entire thing, as doing that can allow for quotes to be taken out of context.  I re-inserted the missing text in my quote, of your quote, of my previous quote - to fix this problem

I do recall watching the video where 1 ship does this.  You are referencing this video http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=7212.0  Which takes the player nearly an hour to do 1 battle!
Imo, if a player wants to invest that amount of time in 1 battle, then that is their choice.  I personally see nothing wrong with this.

I have a lot of fun taking on very large fleets and defeating them with 1 properly equipped cruiser and a high level captain.  (captain around level 40-50).  In fact I think this is a Good thing!  I enjoy playing the game with 1 ship that I fly exclusively and take on everything with.  I hate micromanaging fleets and find it much more entertaining flying a single ship in combat.  Of course in my ship the combat times are much shorter, a cruiser has much higher defenses and firepower than the ship in that video does.

Alex (one of the developers) also posted the following on this very topic,  (source: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=9254.15 )
"Ultimately, I'd like solo ships, small fleets, and large fleets to all have a place. That doesn't mean they have to be equally good at everything, though. I think we're going to need more high-level campaign mechanics/gameplay to be able to differentiate campaign playstyles effectively - right now it's more or less about combat.

One thing to note is that the only two aptitudes reasonably fleshed out with skills are combat and technology, which combine to give you a very strong flagship. Leadership is lagging very far behind, so a "large fleet" playstyle that'd be enabled by leadership + tech or leadership + (nonexistent) industry is working at a disadvantage from the get-go. Officers will enter the picture at some point, too, altering the balance of flagship-vs-allied-ship strength.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's too early to draw any conclusions about how these relative styles are shaping up. The stuff that's currently in place (and, perhaps more importantly, the stuff that's *not* in place) favors flagship play in a lot of ways.

(As far as a skill revamp: some of that *might* come with officers, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it. I think I'd rather hold off on it until industry and such; less chance of having to redo it again. The current skills definitely have some issues, though. Some bonuses that are too strong, major bonuses that are clumped into the span of a level gain or two, skill levels gained that don't mean much, etc. I'm looking forward to addressing all of that.)"

Reading that, it seems that the game designers want both large fleets, and single ship playstyles to be viable options.  I feel this is the best way to go, it gives players the ability to choose how they want to enjoy the game.  And since this is a single player game, it really doesn't matter if one person plays with a large fleet, and another plays with only a single ship.

But to return to what started us on this path, Combat Readiness is an interesting mechanic, it is mirrored in some shows (such as the recent battlestar galactica) - where fighting and constantly doing things without rest can have an effect on your performance.  But it bothers me as a player because as I am playing, it introduces forced downtime where I have to fiddle around doing basically nothing in the game while the 'readiness' number is restored before I can go out and have fun battling things again.  I also do not think it should ever make a ship completely helpless.  Otherwise it introduces a new mechanic whereby a player can dog and harrass an enemy fleet by entering combat and exiting again repeatedly - by sending in several single fast ships 1 at a time to quickly enter and exit the combat zone (without ever fighting at all) until the enemy readiness is so low they can't fight back.  Which does not really feel right either.

Although, recently playing again, it isn't toooo bad because we can go to a station and use supplies to reset our combat readiness, but this thread is about things that annoy or frustrate us about starsector, and this is the only thing I could think of to contribute   Everything else I am happy with in the current system.  I and the things I want to see added are planned to be added already.

[Tartiflette]

You do realize that I quoted a specific part of your post to reply to this very specific part? (also I find quoting huge chunk of text to reply only to a small part of it extremely annoying, especially when it is about the post just above. Imagine I quoted your whole post here...) It was just a small reminder of the HUGE debates that occurred before and after the CR implementation about kitting being the most efficient technique. I had certainly no intention of starting another argument/counter-argument debate on an issue already settled.

[Megas]

Reading that, it seems that the game designers want both large fleets, and single ship playstyles to be viable options.  I feel this is the best way to go, it gives players the ability to choose how they want to enjoy the game.  And since this is a single player game, it really doesn't matter if one person plays with a large fleet, and another plays with only a single ship.

For that to be viable, there needs to be a way for a single ship or small fleet to rack up lots of experience as quickly as big fleets can after level 40.  Currently, the fastest way to gain XP is trade, and player gets the most by hauling 20,000 or more cargo in a big Atlas fleet.  Even in combat, big fleets finish fights faster than smaller fleets.  In other words, by endgame, if you want more levels (I do - no such thing as too much), big fleets are mandatory for further leveling in a timely manner.  I suppose black market trade is suppose to fill this niche, but you will get caught eventually and lose valuable reputation (no access to markets for powerleveling, or to amass more rare ships and weapons); and it is still chump change compared to hauling 25,000 food from Tartessus to a starving market or 30,000+ supplies from Jangala to Ashura or Tibicena for disgustingly massive profit in experience (and credits).

Yes, CR recovery is usually slow (and aggravating) without stations.  This is another reason why I use frigate swarms.  Aside from being very fast, they recover quickly too.  Until ammo became unlimited, I really, really loathed CR.  Now, I sort of tolerate it.

I have soloed fleets before 0.65.  It was disgustingly easy with a Medusa.  It was doable with Tempest or Afflictor but hard due to peak performance (which only frigates and Buffalo 2 had at the time).  Today, Hyperion can solo most fleets, but only with max Missile Specialization (thanks to four 6000 damage Reapers).  Aside from Hyperion, I probably need a cruiser to solo the biggest fleets.

[zenstrata]

ok, I understand not wanting to quote huge blocks of text.. ..  blargh.

About the end-game.  So everything becomes about trade?  No offense meant, but that sounds boring to me.  Ferrying large amounts of material around from station to station just to gain experience does not feel like an entertaining way to proceed level-wise.  There should be a method for accomplishing the same thing through combat without making most of the factions hate the player.

[Megas]

Assuming you fight every bounty and exploit most trade events, combat is about 20 to 25 percent of your experience income.  XP gains from combat were doubled recently, but the bounties usually do not give twice as much as old Hegemony System Defense Fleets; and bounties are harder than old defense fleets due to skilled enemy flagship with Combat 10, which is harder than the rest of its fleet combined.

I agree that XP from trade should not be so lopsided.  I like to see combat more rewarding (i.e., give more XP).  However, I will trade for XP so that when I do fight, I get to enjoy my super-powered demigod of war.

[SafariJohn]

@zenstrata
Keep in mind that Megas is all about min-maxing and the campaign is still barely developed. With missions in the next update along with the various other new stuff things will be a lot more interesting.

I got up to level 50+ by mainly smashing bounty fleets over and over with a fleet of doom (not Dooms) before I got bored, so you don't have to trade.

[Plantissue]

You can call other people's playstyle whatever you want, it's just a bit silly that trading is risk free and gives both more money and experience than combat.

[Cycerin]

Trading certainly wont be risk free with sensor mechanics and whatnot. You could probably make it so if you played ultra-conservatively, but it's a single-player game, you do what you enjoy the most.