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[Auraknight]

I remember awhile back I coulda swore that Alex had posted something about fixing asteroids so you won't run into them when you enter battle,
(At least, not nearly as much as it used to be)
and I agree, the effect has been much reduced.
But it's still extremely annoying when you have your ship flying in, out of your control, and it bashes into a rock, totaling your Armour and possibly disableing a weapon.
Maybe something further should be done to prevent ships from such things for the first wave?
(Enforcements can suffer. Anything done to save them might save them from drifting wreckage, which is just something you should be aware of, and is rare anyways. what I'm talking about is -totally- out of player control.)
My first idea would be having a box on both ends of the map where asteroids would be pushed towards the middle of the map from in the first, oh, I dunno, 3 seconds of combat? That should be long enough to ensure safe ship entry, without removing the great things asteroids can do.
Sorry if this topic was made before, a quick search brought me nothing.

[nomadic_leader]

I like the collisions. It reminds me of that rule of WWII movies where if they're parachuting somewhere, one guy will always break his neck parachuting in (c.f. Dirty Dozen, Bridge over the river Kwai, et al.)

Looking a little closer, battle should have elements of randomness. Players should deploy sufficient force to cope with bad luck like this, as real armies do. They should not engage in fights where they can't allow for bad luck, except when desperate. The asteroid collisions happen so seldom that they actually add more than detract to the game.

Games are more fun when they can occasionally surprise you. This "feels" fun to me since collisions are a natural, unintended byproduct of the established game world. (Conversely, it wouldn't feel fun if a RNG docked hull points from your ships before battle with a text message saying "your ships were damaged by asteroids")

If you eliminate all randomness, it becomes nothing but minimaxing, where everything can be reduces to a totally predictable equation, and the correlation of forces between you and the enemy never has to be more than 1.001:1 for victory.  Then you are playing a spreadsheet, and I play spreadsheets enough in real life.

I'd be a bit sad to see this amusing 'bug' go in the name of austere, Aristotelian balance. It'd be a step towards making starsector a perfect, boring chess game with 10 rules that never vary, and with nothing unusual or remarkable ever happening. That only makes sense for a pure contest of wits against another human, like chess is.

[Megas]

I do not like collisions while helpless and burning in at the start of a battle.  It is aggravating, and makes the game feel somewhat unpolished like the developer was lazy and did not care.  If it is intentional, it feels like malicious design.  I would be very glad to see it go.

[Auraknight]

Nomadic, while I understand what you are saying, and i agree that Starsector shouldn't become something too akin to chess
I specifically remember that Alex had attempted to remove this from happening?
Also, not every fleet can always AFFORD to field enough, either via not having it, or having ships that they need to send out which are damaged enough, or malfunctioning enough,
ti be severely negated by this. If it's stated as intentional that you can be smited, completely out of your control, while entering combat by happenstance which is totally reliant on RNG,
then so be it, feature, not bug. I can accept that entry into combat won't always be smooth, but it's a risk that should be stated to the player, if they bother to look.
If the average person took a hit at the -very- beginning of combat, which was totally unavoidable due to RNG, before any combat started, opening up a likely significant gap in defences,
what would you expect them to do?
Most likely?
Reload. game was mean and decided to put you at a random handycap out of control due to glitchy mapspawing (it is stated to be buggy after all)
as opposed to being a feature, where the average, uncareing person would more likely go along the lines of 'Damn, oh well.'

[Thaago]

I find it to be not so much a problem in vanilla, but in mods that up the asteroid content it becomes insane. Anyone remember the US missions in Uomoz's Sector, where the armor/hulls of the ships were tiny, the masses were high, and the asteroid counts were off the charts? I would lose half of my fleet on every deployment ! That was just a mission though - the campaign didn't have the issue.

[Auraknight]

Uomoz's Sector... That's something I miss in general. SS+ just doesn't cut it for me, IMO.
But, alas, that's a topic for a diffrent day.
Yeah, I can see how that would accelerate the problem, if it even was a problem. I suppose one of the bigger things here that i'm asking is just that:
"Is it a problem? Or is it a feature?"

[Alex]

I specifically remember that Alex had attempted to remove this from happening?

IIRC there was a bug that occasionally caused a solid a line of asteroids to spawn across the map, and that's what I was fixing. (It's mostly fixed, there's still a bug that produces an occasional vertical line of asteroids, but it's not really an issue in practice.)

I could be mistaken, however. I can picture past me wanting to "fix" this, despite current me not being enthused about the idea.

Yeah, I can see how that would accelerate the problem, if it even was a problem. I suppose one of the bigger things here that i'm asking is just that:
"Is it a problem? Or is it a feature?"

Well, it could be both I don't see it as a big issue, though. It mixes things up a bit, doesn't come into play very often, and can be mitigated - the player can decide not to fight in an asteroid belt or deploy sturdier ships when they do, and it's a rare ship indeed that would be crippled by it.

A bit of unexpected adversity can be fun. If we were talking about something that insta-gibbed a full-health ship, that'd be one thing. If you take a bit of damage now and again, or lose a near-dead ship you deployed to it, that's something else entirely.

If the average person took a hit at the -very- beginning of combat, which was totally unavoidable due to RNG, before any combat started, opening up a likely significant gap in defences,
what would you expect them to do?
Most likely?
Reload.

That's a fair point, but it could be made about any negative event happening, random-ish or not. When balancing just about anything, I've got to assume the game being played in iron mode. Otherwise, you have to work under the assumption that any bad event will be reloaded out of, and while that's a legitimate way to go, it closes the door on lots of interesting design choices (mostly having to do with various failures/setbacks) which, imo, can bring the most interesting experiences.

But, anyway, I don't want to talk it up so much as to make mountains out of molehills. It's not like it was a major design choice to have it work this way, it's just how something worked out and is (once again, imo) pretty minor besides.

[xenoargh]

Removing every asteroid from XY distance from the edges at the start of a fight would fix this problem and it's simple enough to do.  Might look at this.

[Auraknight]

Agreed, it is pretty minor, and yeah, adversity does make the game interesting.
I also totally understand where you come from when you say you design the game with iron mode in mind,
(I mean, it says that in game, iron mode is the intended way to go)
I've kinda changed my mind and stance about this, due to whatever,
I care less about that it happens, and more about if it's intentional or not, and you anwsered that well enough, thank you, as always Alex!
(Sorry for any bother caused!)