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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Starsector 0.7a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 574352 times)

Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #120 on: June 23, 2015, 02:44:48 PM »

Are PD and Beam weapons going to be effected by the new autofire AI? It seems like this will further nerf beams and all PD in general except flak...
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #121 on: June 23, 2015, 02:54:56 PM »

Beams do not lead the target, so it doesn't seem like this would matter.
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Wyvern

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #122 on: June 23, 2015, 03:03:31 PM »

Sabots need to do some damage to armor or hull.  Currently, with the spray Sabot, almost any ship can drop shields and tank a Sabot spray for insignificant damage.  With the old 750 sabot, a hit to hull (or even armor if thin enough) will hurt, if the ship drops shields.
Yes.  True.  Good.  Sabots are the specialist anti-shield missiles.  They're support weapons.  They shouldn't be punching holes in armor, just like a launch of harpoons shouldn't be breaking shields.

What they should be doing - and the spray version does just fine - is forcing the enemy to choose between a huge chunk of hard flux from the sabot, and armor-tanking whatever other weapons you've got lined up.  A hammerhead with sabots and heavy maulers should be a really dangerous beast.

The problem, though, is that shields regenerate.  If you've got a target with its shields down, it makes sense to pop a harpoon into it, regardless of how much armor it has left, because armor doesn't regenerate.  Sabots, by contrast, are much more situational; because of the limited ammunition, it only makes sense to use sabots when the target is relatively high on flux.  Which means you have to build up hard flux using other weapons.  Which means that ought-to-be-dangerous hammerhead I mentioned in the previous paragraph has to build up hard flux using maulers.  Imagine, by contrast, if you had to chew through most of a target's armor with needlers before it was worth firing a harpoon.

Yeah, I get what you're saying. It's just... they're supposed to be shield-breakers. Can't really do that without also giving them a chance to cause overloads - i.e. fast enough that the AI can't always react. And once you have something like that, regen doesn't feel right.

That doesn't really relate to one-shot vs spray, though. That's more of an aesthetic/subjective choice for me - it just feels better to use, and matches the weapon art. It's also a bit of a buff, sort of like ammo regen would be for the spray version. Similar end result, I think, in terms of usefulness.
Which brings us to this.  I disagree on them needing to be fast enough that the AI can't always react; they just need to be used in conjunction with good anti-armor weaponry (maulers, blasters, etc).  The interesting part isn't going "bang, haha, you're overloaded and couldn't do anything about it", the interesting part is forcing a target to choose between armor hits from other weapons versus the hard flux of the sabot.

* * * * *

That all said, I am not in favor of regenerating sabots that do their damage in a single chunk.  If it's an effective anti-armor weapon ontop of the degree to which it can threaten shields, then it should have limited ammunition just like harpoons.  But I also feel that that's kindof diluting the uniqueness of the weapon.*

(Hm... maybe add a second anti-shield missile option?  Something that uses the spray sabot mechanics, has regenerating ammunition, and - if needed for balance - maybe even make it do soft flux instead of hard flux?  "Graviton Burst Missile" or somesuch?  Is a thing to think about...)

*Edit: Specifically, the issue is, "what is the operational difference between a harpoon and a sabot?" - and the answer once this goes through is "none".  They'll both be limited ammo weapons that you only want to fire at a target that's on the edge of overloading, to force them to choose between overloading and taking a good chunk of armor damage.  The sabot is harder to shoot down, but does less damage to armor; which one you use depends more on what sort of PD you expect to face than on whether you're trying to specialize in anti-shield or anti-armor.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2015, 03:22:23 PM by Wyvern »
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #123 on: June 23, 2015, 03:43:50 PM »

Sabots have too few shots to bother with combo attacks.  They need to be effective on their own, and the current sabots sprays are not.

If I want support weapon, Salamanders are superior because they are unlimited (and Sabots are not) and mess the AI up more effectively than any Sabot can.  Sabot needs to be able to maim or kill in a pinch, if the AI is too wise to let Sabots hit shields.

If AI uses Sabots like they do now, Sabots will probably remain a playership-only weapon for the purpose of high damage strike weapon (i.e., unblockable improvised Harpoon).  AI loves to waste Sabots on shields.
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Cycerin

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #124 on: June 23, 2015, 06:05:03 PM »

Nice changes, esp. the Sabot ones. Hopefully they will be worth considering over Harpoons, Annihilators and Reapers now.

Ideally a support frigate armed with Sabots should seriously threaten enemy cruisers and destroyers and be a worthwhile addition to the fleet. If the AI no longer perfectly shields them, that will be enough - midline and low-tech ships will be seriously weak to sabots.

Too sleepy and out of it atm. to consider what the logistics changes entail, but simplification is def. good in that regard.
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xenoargh

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #125 on: June 23, 2015, 06:51:50 PM »

Overall, great stuff and I'm about as excited about this version as I'm sure I'll be about the first use for Industry- this should add a lot of depth :)

Quote
Fleet size hard-limited to 25 ships total
I really hope this is amenable to a mod-side variable change. 

Why a hard limit anyhow?  I presume this is to limit certain obvious tactics with cheap Frigates that can be combined to do massive missile spam, but it appears to me that the obvious answer is to simply make them CR-inefficient for their size rather than to have an absolute upper limit on fleet sizes, so that the tactic is available, but expensive. 

That makes those ships newbie traps, however, in the sense that taking them early will lead to a slow growth curve for player incomes if they fight much at all; perhaps the ultimate Right Answer is to simply make Capital-level PD much more effective so that this is simply not viable against endgame content.

Moreover, where does this leave AI fleets, where 25 ships may not be much of a threat?

Quote
Nice changes, esp. the Sabot ones. Hopefully they will be worth considering over Harpoons, Annihilators and Reapers now.
I'm still not certain that this will work out well, but it's a good step in the right direction.  I really think that the ultimate answer on Sabots is that they'd be the best at actually penetrating Capital-level PD because of the stand-off range, making them a good one-two missile punch, with Reapers / Harpoon spam following up when the ship doesn't have Flux left.  However, that means that they'd have to have considerably longer ranges than they do at present.

Also, wherefore the Hurricane?  It's still fairly lame for what it costs.


On the quad-strip issues, thanks for fixing the NPE.  Not sure why there'd still be artifacts, though; can't it simply orphan / kill the trails when the Engine isn't being given a forward command, for both Engine types, which would resolve it?  I mean, they both get commands through what appears (from the outside) to be practically identical code, so this seems like where to address that and have identical behaviors.
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #126 on: June 23, 2015, 07:03:10 PM »

Cheap upkeep, fast CR recovery, and fast burn speed is why I use frigate-only fleets numbering over forty; and I deploy them most if not all of them in every fight to curb stomp the enemy then recover 50% CR after standing down.

Bigger ships would be more attractive if they did not move so slow and take forever to recover CR.
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orost

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #127 on: June 23, 2015, 07:52:29 PM »

What's wrong with the Logistics Rating mechanic? The tradeoff of smaller number of ships at higher CR versus a larger fleet at lower CR has always felt like a very natural and core mechanic to me, soft-limiting fleet size in exactly the way I would expect it to. Here's a laundry list of problems I have with this change:

  • With no CR impact, supply use will be the only important factor in deciding whether to add an available ship to the fleet or not. If supplies are plentiful, then it's a non-decision - there's no reason not to.
  • I want to capture ships. Will I have to constantly keep track of exactly how many ships I have to make sure that I have free slots? Tedious micro. Let's say captures can put me over the limit. If I'm over the limit, and I put a ship in storage, I presumably won't be able to take it out again. Makes no sense.
  • Under the current system, if I want to make a huge transport run, I am allowed to do so at the expense of doing it at low CR, which makes me vulnerable to attacks. Interesting decision. Under the new system, I am arbitrarily prohibited from doing it at all. Boring. (I can still play with risk by choosing how slots I want to dedicate to escorts, but the decision range is much smaller)
  • It leads to a loss of symmetry between player and AI fleets, with NPCs of supposedly equal status in the world being able to do something the player is, for no justifed reason, physically unable to do. Unforgivable, if you ask me.
  • Perhaps most importantly, once the player reaches a certain level of power, this restriction will start distorting their fleet composition, forcing it to grow in ship size in disproportion to ship count, as the player reaches the hull count limit and is forced to replace ships with larger ones to grow in power. Soon, the late game player's fleet will be severly unbalanced, suboptimal and nothing like a fleet that would have been designed without such artificial restrictions. At the extreme, it inevitably leads to an absurd fleet composed of nothing but 25 battleships as the pinnacle of power. I don't want to be forced to do illogical, inefficient things to progress just because an arbitrary hard limit doesn't allow me to do the natural and optimal thing.

It seems like such a huge step backwards. Starsector is designed with care for enhancing player choices and with awarness of how hard limits negatively affect gameplay (there was a whole blog post about this, when the cargo system was being developed!) and this goes directly against those principles. I just don't understand how that's not a terrible idea.

The only way it makes any sense is if the scale and economy of the game is going to be different so that a player is unlikely to ever be able to have 25 ships, let alone 25 large ships - but as it stands now, that's not at all a large number for the late game.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2015, 08:08:48 PM by orost »
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #128 on: June 23, 2015, 08:07:22 PM »

Quote
Fleet size hard-limited to 25 ships total
I really hope this is amenable to a mod-side variable change. 

As I mentioned in one of my previous, it is - a value in settings.json.

Why a hard limit anyhow?  I presume this is to limit certain obvious tactics with cheap Frigates that can be combined to do massive missile spam, but it appears to me that the obvious answer is to simply make them CR-inefficient for their size rather than to have an absolute upper limit on fleet sizes, so that the tactic is available, but expensive. 

Mainly UI concerns, actually. It's just not meant to handle huge numbers of ships.

Also, wherefore the Hurricane?  It's still fairly lame for what it costs.

It's not in as bad a spot as the Sabot (it's fairly useful, and there's less competition for the slot), but I might take a look at it eventually.

On the quad-strip issues, thanks for fixing the NPE.  Not sure why there'd still be artifacts, though; can't it simply orphan / kill the trails when the Engine isn't being given a forward command, for both Engine types, which would resolve it?  I mean, they both get commands through what appears (from the outside) to be practically identical code, so this seems like where to address that and have identical behaviors.

The artifacts generally come from the kind of movement ships can do that missiles... well, could, but don't. I.E. moving in one direction, turning around, and then engaging the engines. The trail also moves - it looks much better this way than if the points stay in one place after they're generated - but, well, it gets very complicated very fast. The campaign version of the engine trails is doing things like line-line intersection between adjacent point perpendiculars to detect potential artifacts and fade out before they become visible, and is not quite 100% successful at that. With completely free movement as in combat, it's even more troublesome.


The only way it makes any sense is if the scale and economy of the game is going to be different so that a player is unlikely to ever be able to have 25 ships, let alone 25 large ships - but as it stands now, that's not at all a large number for the late game.

Yes, that's exactly it. You're right that it's not the case now, though. On the other hand, starting higher and lowering the limit later is likely to not go over very well :) Beyond that, managing that many ships is a pain, but you kind of have to - but now you can't, even if it's for a gamey reason. So, I think just by that alone it'll result in an improvement. And then, at some point, the difficulty curve of the game will even out to where this limit doesn't come up much.
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CrashToDesktop

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #129 on: June 23, 2015, 08:08:18 PM »

Bigger ships would be more attractive if they did not move so slow and take forever to recover CR.
Well, the first complaint should be fixed - as far as I can tell, Alex has more or less leveled the playing ground for burn levels.  At least, with the last few patch notes and blog posts.  The smaller ships are slower, largers ones faster, but the smaller ones still have a very slight advantage.
« Last Edit: June 23, 2015, 08:10:25 PM by The Soldier »
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Histidine

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #130 on: June 23, 2015, 10:05:54 PM »

I won't say it's broken now or anything, but I broadly agree with orost's criticisms of the new system. (On the plus side, it does at least remove the oddity of high-tech ships being cheaper to idle than low-tech ones.)
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #131 on: June 23, 2015, 10:36:11 PM »

I don't think huge fleets are going to be practical even in this release. You'd frequently need to use "emergency burn" to catch things, and that costs fuel and as many supplies as deploying your entire fleet, in CR recovery costs.

That said, I *could* see adding some kind of soft limit to fleet size, but at most on the level of, say, increasing maintenance costs more than linearly beyond a certain point. If that proves necessary. Which I don't think it will, but we'll see.

Basically: if your fleet size is getting up above 25 ships in vanilla, then chances are you're in the "I won the game" phase of the game anyway, i.e. the portion that's really not tuned very well at this point. If it's not vanilla and larger fleet sizes are more necessary/common, well, a mod can increase that limit.
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Az the Squishy

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #132 on: June 23, 2015, 11:43:00 PM »

Oh one word Alex, one word.

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSS!!!!

Tartiflette

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #133 on: June 24, 2015, 12:33:13 AM »

About that hard cap on fleet size, why not limit the fleet by max crew? That would naturally balance the fleet composition: if the cap is at 2000 you can only have a couple a Capitals... Though that's a lot of frigates! Okay it would require to re-balance the crew complements, but since they do not consume supplies anymore they are mostly there for flavor now: take the old FP, multiply by 10 and voilĂ , you have a balanced skeleton crew requirement!

Another suggestion from DR was to use a ship size weight like 1/1/2/3/5 so a 25 fleet size would translate to 25 frigates or 5 capitals, witch is somewhat close to the current values without the Logistic Rating tedium.
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #134 on: June 24, 2015, 01:27:42 AM »

Eliminating DP is a really good idea, since the maintenance/repair cost are a built in way of doing this as you say.

What about missions? Aren't they based on DPs? They are very fun as set-piece battle designed challenges, which campaign sadly lacks. If campaign gets storyline/branched set-piece designed battles as part of campaign missions (which it should), then we could wave goodbye to normal missions without too much sadness.

What about the "Battle size" preference, which is based on DP, right? I'm uncomfortable with that preference, since it allows player to manipulate combat and reduce it to soloing 1v1 a trickle of the AI ships. It undercuts modders/content designers trying to make specific encounters, battles, or set-pieces, if the size of the battle can be altered by the player.

As for the hard coded limit, I can see the UI problems, but also its a bit odd that you can have 25 fighter wings or 25 paragons. This is quite different. I like the soft limit idea. If your fleet gets big enough, don't you run into the problem of Xerxes' giant army drinking rivers dry? Where would you get enough supplies for a really big fleet? This is what keeps most armies from getting too large. Speed, stealth, and emergency burn penalties also seem logical at some point, perhaps even more so than maintenance costs (which would realistically decrease with scale)
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