First off: what the heck is the Codex? It’s basically an in-game encyclopedia where you can look up ships, weapons, and so on. The current implementation is very, very old and and this point really showing its age – frankly, it’s clunky and not very useful, but on the bright side, it’s also not strictly speaking a required feature, so it was fine to leave it be for a while. I’ve been on a roll with QoL work lately, though, and the game is certainly far enough along now for a proper Codex rework, so I decided to jump into it – I’d have to do it at some point!
I started working on the Codex update with a sort of standard question to get my bearings, design-wise – “why is this in the game?” That’s a question with sharp edges, because if there isn’t a good answer, then maybe it should be cut instead, and the time and effort put into other things. Obviously, that didn’t happen, or we’d have a much shorter blog post!
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The combat simulator in Starsector is essential to the experience – you need to be able to adjust your ship loadouts effectively, and being able to test out changes quickly is a key part of that. Imagine having to get into a real fight just to see how your new set of weapons performs! That simply wouldn’t do. This means that the simulator was added early on in the development process. This also means that it hasn’t quite kept up with the times, and was very much due for another look.
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Part 1 of this blog post series is here. Here in part 2, we’ll dive into making the remaining factions more memorable!
Persean League
“An alliance formed to counter Hegemony domination of the Sector. Members of the League don’t necessarily agree on all issues, domestic or otherwise, and may even come into armed conflict with one another. But the League is united when it comes to the Hegemony who they consider to be illegitimately enforcing martial law in the name of the Domain, a dead political entity. The League, by its laws, unites against other external threats such as particularly meddlesome megacorporations, warlords, and the Luddic Path.”
The League’s core identity is going to be that of using midline ships. However, because those are going to be sprinkled in throughout the other factions, the League will also have access to a brand-new missile weapon lineup: directed energy munitions, or, put more simply, missiles that fire lasers when they get close enough to their target. In addition, it’ll get a new battleship (to go along with the already-existing Conquest-class, which is a midline battlecruiser.)
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(First off: “uniquifying” is a real word! It doesn’t quite fit how I’m using it here, perhaps – more strictly, it’s about removing duplicates – but it’s close enough.)
With that important note out of the way: some factions in the game have a stronger identity than others. If you’ve played the game at least a bit, you have a pretty fair idea of what to expect of a Hegemony fleet, for example – large chunks of metal with a lot of firepower. In contrast, something like the Luddic Church is more muzzy. It’s got the same kinds of ships as the Hegemony, more or less, but they also tend to mount converted hangars with Perdition-class bomber wings, and some numbers – officer quality, ship quality, the exact mix of ship types – are adjusted. The two factions are different, but it’s not the kind of different that easily sticks in your mind – without checking, I couldn’t tell you exactly how those numbers differ, for example.
So, some factions are more unique than others; this isn’t necessarily a problem – in fact, it’ll be the case no matter what, to some degree – but it would still be very nice if each faction was memorable.
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Posted February 21, 2017 by dgbaumgart in
Lore
No, not terraforming; world-building! You know, like writing and content implementation.
In the upcoming Starsector 0.8x patch we’ve added at least one* new faction and expanded the number of hand-scripted star systems in the Sector by a significant though not quite finalized number. Alex has of course obliquely described how he has expanded the number of procedurally generated star systems from zero in the currently available build to potentially a whole bunch in the upcoming patch. This does much to embiggen the world of Starsector! My part in this has focused mostly on the hand-scripted Core Worlds, the centers of human civilization, industry, and conflict within the volume of the Persean Sector.
I’ll talk a bit about the creative process as well as design considerations that go into creating this content. We’ll cover some old star systems, some new star systems, the Persean League just a tiny bit, and whatever tangents that come up.
(*Hedging how I word this because the truth of the matter is a touch complex.)
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