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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 574279 times)

Gothars

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #135 on: June 24, 2015, 02:28:29 AM »

I don't think huge fleets are going to be practical even in this release.
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.


Just wan't to say that I'm very happy with this apparent trend of ship quality (officers&skills) over quantity. Big fleets are much less fun for me because a) they make the player ship less important, b) they're a pain to manage and c) they don't fit with the "decaying civilization" scenario.

A soft limit would be nice for consistency with the cargo/crew limits and to avoid the mechanic feeling "gamey" or arbitrary.



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The game was completed 8 years ago and we get a free expansion every year.

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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #136 on: June 24, 2015, 05:03:52 AM »

My current endgame fleets have been either 40+ frigates (plus Hyperion or Onslaught flagship) or 5 frigates and 18-20 Atlases.

I like big epic battles between big fleets (as long as I still have my overtuned max Combat/Tech monster flagship).  That said, I agree managing forty frigates is a pain, but curb-stomping the enemy with an overwhelming force is worth it.

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.
I made my comment based on current version, not the v0.7 to come.

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.)
I do not mind high tech being a bit cheaper.  Low tech is competitive with high tech in ship classes heavier than frigates.  Enforcer is about on par with Medusa.  High tech cruisers cannot outgun the Medusa without missiles (and Dominator outguns high tech cruisers), and Onslaught is a monster, despite lacking Paragon's defenses.  High-tech ships are bad at kiting (600 range is short), and kiting is very good in this game.

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.
Player used to be able to control how many ships the AI would deploy with that and player deploying a small ship.  Now that the AI deploys overwhelming force against your lone ship no matter what, I set battle size to the max so that if I get a big fleet, I get to deploy overwhelming force instead.  Frigate swarm does not work with 200 battle size.  I need to crank it to the max of 500, which is barely enough, but the results are glorious.
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celestis

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #137 on: June 24, 2015, 07:37:55 AM »

Quote
Augmented Engines: burn speed increase reduced to 1, now also reduces sensor strength by 50%/increases sensor profile by 50%, removed capacity penalty
Can anyone say what sensor profile is?
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #138 on: June 24, 2015, 08:45:31 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.

A soft limit would be nice for consistency with the cargo/crew limits and to avoid the mechanic feeling "gamey" or arbitrary.

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)

Well - the 25 limit is not supposed to be something that normally comes into play. (For now, I'm excluding the "you're obliterating everything" phase of the game from "normally", since that part is pretty broken, balance-wise. You'd still be able to obliterate everything anyway, just in a slightly different way.)

If it does end up being something the player bumps into more often, or if it ends being necessary to use as a tool to control player fleet sizes, then I can definitely see bringing in a simpler form of a soft limit, or even just bumping it up a bit. But unless this limit really takes an active role in gameplay, I don't think making it more fancy is a good idea.


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.

All these use the recovery cost instead. This does alter the balance of some missions a good bit, with capital ships being around 2x more expensive.

As far as battle size, it's there for performance reasons. The lower limit can't allow the player to solo AI ships 1-1, it's not low enough for that (and is going up to 250 in this release). That said, if you're using a lower battle size while your computer can handle the default value, you're basically cheating :)



Can anyone say what sensor profile is?

It's a measure of how easy a ship is to detect. The sensor profile of all ships in the fleet is added up to get the fleet's sensor profile. This, together with the sensor strength of another fleet, is used to determine the range at which the other fleet can see this one.
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Mystic

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #139 on: June 24, 2015, 10:06:15 AM »

The sensors and other system map additions alone have me absolutely fired up about the 0.7a release. I believe they will finally make the game into something I want to fire up on a regular basis.  I can hardly wait!
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celestis

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #140 on: June 24, 2015, 10:17:52 AM »

Ah, I see, thanks. Great, we're going to have stealth mode!
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Dri

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #141 on: June 24, 2015, 11:31:44 AM »

Yeah, seriously. In vanilla Starsector (which is what Alex is most concerned about) who ever got up to 25 ships? Why would you? You can easily smash any bounty in vanilla Starsector with 10 or less ships.

25 ships for vanilla Starsector is crazy huge.
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #142 on: June 24, 2015, 12:02:24 PM »

Starsector+ balance (which involves somewhat larger than average fleets due mainly to the greatly increased ship variety) will probably dictate a limit of 30, by comparison.  25 ships actually is about the upper limit of what most players can tolerate anyway.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2015, 12:40:14 PM by Dark.Revenant »
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #143 on: June 24, 2015, 12:03:35 PM »

Yeah, seriously. In vanilla Starsector (which is what Alex is most concerned about) who ever got up to 25 ships? Why would you? You can easily smash any bounty in vanilla Starsector with 10 or less ships.

25 ships for vanilla Starsector is crazy huge.
Me.  Either with frigate hordes (frigates, in numbers, are faster and more efficient than bigger ships) or absurd Atlas fleet to haul 30,000+ cargo (to exploit shortages and disruptions).

Because over-deploying has its advantages, and they are rewarding enough that I prefer to over-deploy when possible.  In case of Atlas fleet, there is no such thing as too much cargo.  More cargo sold equals more XP, and more XP equals levels, and MORE LEVELS EQUALS POWER!!!  And there is no such thing as too much power if it is obtainable.

Depends.  If I chain-flagships and have max Combat/Tech, sure.  If I use big ships backed up by skills, sure.  If I want to let AI use ten frigates to fight the hardest endgame opponents, I lose.  If I want to use an Atlas fleet but I get stopped by enemy, I better hope my flagship can solo the entire enemy fleet.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2015, 12:08:10 PM by Megas »
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Az the Squishy

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #144 on: June 24, 2015, 05:59:36 PM »

frankly... the highest I've managed to get to before losing the damn file... was about 12? So the 25 hard limit isn't so bad in my mind...
Otherwise, I'm wondering about the mod's... Will they be broken outright without the DP and such? Or will the numbers related to that not simply load?... or will the mod's not load at all?
(this is coming from a modder who is pretty much still a green-horn in all respects.)

SafariJohn

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #145 on: June 24, 2015, 08:26:40 PM »

With my mid-tech fleet I have 28 ships (1 cap, 2 cruisers, rest frigates) and 10 fighter squadrons which is exactly 100 logistics points. I like my grand space opera.
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Thaago

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #146 on: June 24, 2015, 09:09:23 PM »

I rarely have more than a dozen ships... but I sometimes have a huge number of fighter wings. In particular, if fielding an Astral I'm usually using around 20 wings. Fighters are really easy to manage so I don't mind 'stocking up' on them, while with ships it gets to be a pain to manage all of their loadouts (and source the weapons and find replacements...).

I think 25 ship cap will be fine for now and it can always get tweaked later. I'm always in favor of simplifying mechanics when they don't add enough depth.
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Mazuo

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #147 on: June 25, 2015, 12:55:34 AM »

I don't really like the change to removing supply cost on crew.  With food still being grown on planets and shipped around, medicines, training and everything else that keeps them doing their jobs their cost really does not seem negligible compared with ammo and spare parts for the ships themselves.  Later on towards release I believed in my head some of the tradeoffs between elite crew and green would be their required supplies and things like marines would be expensive too to keep in large numbers.

Terrain effects and combat officers are great additions and looking forward to see what the latter becomes when the skill revamp happens and when SS+ makes use of them as well.
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #148 on: June 25, 2015, 03:11:03 AM »

^^^ Come to think of it, this is very strange that a valkyrie with 10 person skeleton crew uses the same amount of supplies as a valkyrie with 500 crew. Maybe something could be done with crew using cargo space instead of 'crew slots'? 

It doesn't seem right that tonnes of extra crew/marines don't  have any cost; but i'd be interested to hear a little more background on the decision.
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Linnis

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Re: Starsector 0.7a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #149 on: June 25, 2015, 03:39:48 AM »

^^^ Come to think of it, this is very strange that a valkyrie with 10 person skeleton crew uses the same amount of supplies as a valkyrie with 500 crew. Maybe something could be done with crew using cargo space instead of 'crew slots'? 

It doesn't seem right that tonnes of extra crew/marines don't  have any cost; but i'd be interested to hear a little more background on the decision.

It actually makes more sense now, supplies are not magical machine parts and food interchanged. Now its just ship parts and ammunition or weapon fuel or whatever you want to think of it as.

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