With CR being one of the main features (perhaps the main feature) of the 0.6a release, it makes sense to revisit it after seeing how it’s played out so far.

(If you haven’t been keeping up with the details: CR (“combat readiness”) is a percentage rating each ship has that’s reduced each time it’s deployed into combat and governs how effective it is, and whether it can be deployed at all. Recovering CR costs time and supplies, thus rewarding the player for winning with fewer ships. That’s not the only reason for CR’s existence, but there’s a whole blog post devoted to it, so I won’t talk about it here.)

Overall, I think CR accomplished its intended goals, but that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect and can’t be improved. One of its effects in the current form is that ships go from “pretty much working fine” to “can’t even deploy this rust bucket anymore” awfully quickly, without much of a transition period. For reference, right now a ship below 10% CR can’t be deployed at all, while a ship below 20% CR suffers weapon and engine malfunctions. In theory that should be the aforementioned transition period, but in practice deployment costs are high enough that it can get skipped altogether.

With that in mind, the changes:

Ships have their deployment costs and CR recovery rates halved.
This means the supply cost per deployment and the recovery time remain the same, but more consecutive deployments are possible.

Malfunctions start at 40% CR, critical malfunctions start at 20%
This is all about extending the transition period between “working fine” and “not working at all”. A ship in average shape has roughly the same number of deployments as before until it runs into malfunctions, but now it’s possible to continue deploying the ship well beyond that.

Just what are critical malfunctions, you ask? Conceptually, it’s a chance for things to go very, very badly wrong. For example, a power junction failing catastrophically, ammo exploding inside a magazine, an engine containment field failing, that sort of thing. In game terms, it’s a chance for weapons and engines to go offline for the duration of the battle, and cause major hull damage in the process. Simply deploying a ship at low CR will cause some of these, an continued use in battle has a chance to cause even more.

Say goodbye to the starboard-side Heavy Blaster and some engines; and that’s just the beginning!

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Update: Hotfix for crashes from picking up a ship in your fleet under some circumstances and from showing the tooltip for an over-capacity crew bar is up. Please re-download the game using the links below – make sure the file you get ends with RC4.

Starsector version 0.6a is now out! You can get it here:

(Alternate download links: Windows Mac Linux)

While that’s downloading, let’s take a look at what’s new in this release:

• Hyperspace, a new star system, and a new faction
• Complete combat sound overhaul
• New campaign battle mechanics – use of travel drive to enter the battle space, a new battle type for chasing down escaping ships
• Reworked logistics system
  • “Combat readiness” used to deploy ships into combat
  • “Logistics rating” combines fleet points and other supply-consuming expenses
• New logistical support ships – Construction Rig, Ox-class Tug
• Campaign UI overhaul – takes advantage of higher screen resolutions, displays more pertinent information while traveling
• Improved fighter mechanics
• Adjustable battle size
• A ton of modability improvements

The above is a rough outline; if you’re interested, the full list of changes is here, and it’s… sizable.

I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about why 0.6a took until now to get out the door. It’s been a little over 8 months, certainly much longer than I’d like a release cycle to take. The reason for this is that almost all of the features in this release are interrelated, and so 1) are difficult to separate and 2) are dependent on each other to work well.

Except for the addition of hyperspace and a new star system, this release is dedicated to reworking how the combat and the campaign layers interact. Combat readiness is central to that, as discussed in a prior post.  The new battle mechanics are inseparable from it. The logistics rating and the new fighter mechanics are, if you will, its tendrils, reaching both into the combat and the campaign.

Would it have been possible to separate out some of these? Sure. But, I don’t think introducing a feature without related mechanics that actually make it work is a good idea. Given that, the best approach was to wait until enough features were ready to make a coherent whole, which is where we are now. On the bright side, this makes the development process more efficient – the amount of placeholders, temporary UI elements, and the like is reduced significantly.  So, yes, it did take a while to get here – but would have actually taken a good bit longer if I tried to force out a couple of releases along the way.

With that said, thank you for your continued support, and I hope you enjoy this release!

Comment thread here.

In a previous post, I’d talked about combat readiness. One of the benefits of that system is that it makes it easy for other mechanics to tie into it, whether they’re in the combat or the campaign layer. I’d like to talk about what’s more or less an overhaul of the various fleet management mechanics, both fixing some long-standing issues and streamlining the approach without oversimplifying it. First, though, a brief recap of how things currently work.

The player character has a “fleet points” stat that determines the maximum size of their fleet.  (So do the AI fleet commanders, but never mind that for the moment.) The fleet has a cargo, fuel, and personnel capacity, based on the stats of the ships in it.

These are all soft caps – you can go over them, but doing so costs extra supplies every day, and there’s a risk of accidents when any of these is exceeded by too much.

Overall, this works well; there’s no reason to throw out the system and start from scratch. I’d actually started writing out the issues with the current system, but since it does work fairly well, it’s hard to build a compelling case against it. So instead, let me outline the new approach, and point out how it’s better.

Logistics
The general idea is to replace fleet points with something based on supply consumption, and since supply consumption already plays a role in other places, it can all be rolled together to clean things up. Enter the new stat, “logistics”. It’s a measure of how many units of supplies per day your character can manage to distribute efficiently. So, supply consumption up that limit is fine, but going above it introduces penalties.

The things that consume supplies are:

• Ship maintenance – ships have a new stats that indicates how many supplies per day they require for maintenance. More on that later.
• Crew and marines; marines consume more to reflect the cost of keeping those armored suits in good repair
• Ship repairs
• Combat readiness (“CR”) recovery
• Being over-capacity in fuel, cargo, or personnel – a fixed supply cost per unit

The daily supply expenditure on all of that is added up, and together with the logistics stat, is used to produce a logistics rating (“LR”), which is a percentage value. Use up to the logistics value results in an LR of 100%, and it goes to 0% when supply use double the logistics value. For example, if your logistics stat is 50, and you’re using 75 supplies per day, the LR is 50%.

LR has the following effects:

• When below 100%, reduces the maximum combat readiness of all the ships in the fleet by up to 50% (at 0% LR)
• When at 0% for more than a day, there’s a chance of an accident happening (note that simply being way over capacity in something is not enough to cause one now)

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In a previous post, I talked about combat readiness (“CR”) as a means of tying the campaign and combat layers closer together, but also as a means of cleaning up existing mechanics. The mechanics surrounding battle are a perfect candidate, both because they need cleaning up, and because they wouldn’t work well with CR as they now stand. Changes to these aren’t just a consequence of adding CR; rather, they’re part of that process.

First, a quick recap of how things work now. When the player encounters another fleet, they can choose to attack them or leave. If either side wants to attack, the fleets engage, and each side has three options: “attack”, “defend”, and “escape”. Without going into too much detail, there’s a rock-paper-scissors mechanic there where attack beats escape beats defend beats attack. (“Escape” beating “defend” simply means a clean getaway, with “beating” in general meaning having an advantage in the battle, not automatic victory.)

Playing rock-paper-scissors vs the computer isn’t fun. The computer is either predictable or random, but in either case you don’t get the mind games that make it interesting vs a human opponent. The “escape” mechanic also doesn’t work well. The escapee has to run their ships across the map and retreat them off the enemy side, which is much more difficult than “attacking” and then retreating ships off their side of the map – which they could do without seeing a single enemy. If they do that, their ships take some automatic, random post battle damage to simulate a chase after this retreat, but that’s a problem in itself.  Either it does enough damage so that retreat from a real lost battle is disastrous, or it doesn’t do enough damage to stop “attack to retreat” being viable.

Adding in CR, the current setup is also open to being gamed. For example, a single Hound-class frigate fighting against an Onslaught-class battleship – the Hound could engage, then immediately retreat, causing a CR loss for both ships for being deployed in battle. However, the Hound both costs less CR to deploy and recovers it faster. So, it could reliably beat an Onslaught without firing a single shot but wearing down its CR.
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In this post, I’m going to talk about one of the new mechanics we’ve been working on; but first, a little background. Starsector has been designed starting with the combat layer and working up, and this has both up and downsides. We get to work out the combat layer first, and make reasonably polished releases with combat as the centerpiece – that’s a good thing. On the other hand, this means that as the campaign comes into focus, we can either 1) force it to fit in with how combat currently works or 2) adjust the way combat works to make it a better fit for how we want the campaign to work.

Option one is unquestionably faster and easier, but also seems likely to result in a tacked-on campaign because of the compromises that we’d have to accept to make it fit. Option two is more work, but is the one most likely to result in a campaign that’s a game in its own right, on par with combat. Do I even need to say which option I find more appealing? (Hint: it’s the second one.)

Enter combat readiness (“CR” henceforth), a mechanic specifically intended to improve the connection between the campaign and combat layers. There are already mechanics that link the two – for example, the persistent fleet, ship damage & repairs between battles, and character skills. So, we’re not talking about anything radically new; just taking stock of what’s there and cleaning it up, smoothing over the rough edges. While this involves some changes to combat mechanics, the goal is to enable the campaign to exert a greater influence on combat (and vice-versa), rather than to rework combat for its own sake. We’re giving the campaign tools to work with, levels to push, knobs to turn, analogies to abuse.

Conceptually, CR represents weapon and system maintenance and repair,  securing the magazines, making sure there are no cargo crates knocking about in the hold, that sort of thing. In-game, it’s presented as a percentage. A good way to think of it is as a “stamina” mechanic on the campaign level.

So, how does it work?

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