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DatonKallandor posted:Cause they've got no reload times they get to reach those numbers (with very few exceptions). Small missiles reaching those numbers can't happen, partly because they have too little ammo, partly because they don't have enough range. The problem was actually that medium LRMs or missile pods have equally powerful ammo as their small versions, but you can get around the main restrictor (cooldown) with the ship system. Kinda think fast missile racks is a bit rough balance-wise. Especially going to be with the new 4-shot missile pods next patch. SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 18:20
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OwlFancier posted:If low ammo missiles were much cheaper I think they would be a better option, being able to just fire off a couple of missiles at the decisive moment would add a lot of flexibility to a well designed ship as well as a really nice extra boost to a player ship, but you would need a regular complement of weapons to make that viable, and you can't really have that with the current one shot price points. I always made an effort to at least put a single-shot missile into the small missile slots on frigates because of that - they're really situational, but spending 1 OP on something that can turn the tide of a battle is worth the point. In late-game, I swap them to torpedoes for the same reason. Those ones in particular are super cheap, invaluable, and at least you're not wasting a slot. Lashers come to mind with this - to make them as a sustainable ship, you need to load up on Caps/Vents, but not putting at least one missile in the small slots is a waste. If the AI would stop killing themselves with Reapers, I'd probably use those but I'm not sure if thats ever gonna happen. It would be really nice if the AI would recognize that there were no Cruisers/Battleships and freely use their heavy ordinance on frigates though.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:21
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Single shot Reapers 4 life
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Oct 1, 2014 18:24
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:Single shot Reapers 4 life Too bad Expanded Missile Racks doesn't apply AFTER the +1 Missile Ammo skill. Personally, I want 6 Reapers on my Lasher for the price of 2.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:45
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The 1/2OP single missiles are pretty good, more things in that sort of price range would be nice. It could make formations more important too, as if the opening few seconds of combat involve an exchange of missiles from most of the ships in the fleet, that would encourage you to have at least one CIWS ship to shield your smaller ships from missile fire. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 20:56
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OwlFancier posted:The 1/2OP single missiles are pretty good, more things in that sort of price range would be nice. I've taken to assigning Wasps (if I have a carrier in my fleet) to my bigger ships for that reason.
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Oct 2, 2014 00:10
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Broadswords are going to be loving terrifying after the patch. They were already decently potent little bastards that could rack up the hard flux on a target that left shields up at the wrong time and put a lot of damage into exposed hull but they couldn't really kill anything bigger than a frigate by themselves since they had nothing to get through armor. With explosive damage on swarmers they're going to be monsters.
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Oct 2, 2014 07:12
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The fleet building tournament's finally about to start. 19 or so total entrants.  I guess I'll crosspost vids here as they show upAlso here's a cool Templars gif 
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Oct 8, 2014 23:58
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Voyager I posted:Broadswords are going to be loving terrifying after the patch. They were already decently potent little bastards that could rack up the hard flux on a target that left shields up at the wrong time and put a lot of damage into exposed hull but they couldn't really kill anything bigger than a frigate by themselves since they had nothing to get through armor. Spamming Broadswords with a flagship and a carrier used to be the pro strategy before they tweaked fighter repairs to require supplies so I for one am pumped to see it come back
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Oct 9, 2014 01:12
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Pornographic Memory posted:Spamming Broadswords with a flagship and a carrier used to be the pro strategy before they tweaked fighter repairs to require supplies so I for one am pumped to see it come back Well, they no longer require supplies to function in-battle (they do stop respawning after X casualties), so thats been a thing again for a while :3
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Oct 9, 2014 01:33
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As I recall they still required inordinate amounts of supply to rearm and repair though, right?
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Oct 9, 2014 04:41
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Artificer posted:As I recall they still required inordinate amounts of supply to rearm and repair though, right? Yes, and not during a fight, only after.
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Oct 9, 2014 08:53
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So, just as a first impression, the Mayorate mod is kind of neat. All their ships focus on forward fire arcs, powerful beam weapons, and missiles - small ships go for speed and (over)powerful integrated weapons, capitals are slow as rocks but made of gun. Decent sprites with a consistent visual theme, and a bit of a sense of humor to the descriptions: the freighters were designed 'in response to rumors of a coming revolution in galactic trade', and the moon of their planet is a nice little reference. -2 points for misusing the idea of a medieval mayor, though.
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Oct 9, 2014 09:56
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http://challonge.com/SectorBattlesTournament Brackets posted
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Oct 9, 2014 21:49
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I hope the pirates will take it. Even if to just flip everyone the bird. (I'm hoping they went with a Venture and just spammed bad fighters).
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Oct 10, 2014 06:16
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http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8201.msg142015#msg142015 Round 1 results/videos here. Jesus gently caress HELMUT's fleet.
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Oct 11, 2014 11:07
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8201.msg142015#msg142015 Death by a thousand 
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Oct 11, 2014 12:14
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mirarant posted:Death by a thousand Somehow I never used those ships in the core game. I think I need to fix that a little bit. Also, grats Shaolin on not losing all of your Robberfly's in the first 3 seconds of combat. I think thats a new record.
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Oct 11, 2014 15:26
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Enforcers are always a bit of a pain, they're durable, well armed with long range weapons, and quite ubiquitous, showing up in a lot of fleets. They're not great at anything but they're certainly good for their cost and size.
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Oct 11, 2014 17:53
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A couple fleets were doing the same thing in their respective design spaces. Aside from maybe the last Tri-Tachyon Corp. composition (shotgun cannon  ), I think that setup is going to win out in the competition. Of those, I want to say the Enforcers have the strongest edge.
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Oct 11, 2014 18:14
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Yeah the Enforcers with the Ion Torpedos squad is probably gonna win the tournament. The only way I could possible see them losing is if they go up against a squad that can survive the ion torpedo spam at the beginning.
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Oct 11, 2014 18:34
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I notice that point defences seem unpopular with most of the fleets, which surprised me as I tend to always bring them on most of my ships during campaigns.
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Oct 11, 2014 18:36
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That tri tach fleet bought Templar weapons set and is using 4 of the biggest energy weapon in the game per ship. Note that the ruleset means each fleet can grow and have new additions per round, so the later rounds will have larger battles. This is based on how much cargo/fuel/crew your fleet has, so civilian ships will harvest you more points over the long run, but force you to risk elimination. Many fleets seem to be all-ins, though. The fleets with the most growth potential seem to be DarkRevenant's, MShadowy's and Tartiflette's. I think Valkyrial too. Brainbread posted:Somehow I never used those ships in the core game. I think I need to fix that a little bit. You gotta have Robberflies its like the glue of the entire faction. If you don't have fodder ships, your elite ships will just get ganged up on and vaporized, like what happened to Chaos Farseer's BR fleet. (Although the Irithia's recall teleporter hard counters Blackrock pretty bad) SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 18:39
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OwlFancier posted:I notice that point defences seem unpopular with most of the fleets, which surprised me as I tend to always bring them on most of my ships during campaigns. Who knows; I included pd on the bulk of my ships simply because, well, it's important, but in this kind of set up I suppose decisively killing the enemy is the ideal. SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:Note that the ruleset means each fleet can grow and have new additions per round, so the later rounds will have larger battles. This is based on how much cargo/fuel/crew your fleet has, so civilian ships will harvest you more points over the long run, but force you to risk elimination. Many fleets seem to be all-ins, though. The fleets with the most growth potential seem to be DarkRevenant's, MShadowy's and Tartiflette's. I think Valkyrial too. Mine's actually sort of middling, but if I can get my Solidarity's taken back into the rear line to act as support staff it should improve markedly. As for my match, all I can think is "Quantity has a Quality all it's own." In this case that quality was being hugely annoying. *cue Yakety Sax* MShadowy fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 18:58
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:You gotta have Robberflies its like the glue of the entire faction. If you don't have fodder ships, your elite ships will just get ganged up on and vaporized, like what happened to Chaos Farseer's BR fleet. (Although the Irithia's recall teleporter hard counters Blackrock pretty bad) I generally just use fighters for that instead. Robberflies tend to just die on me too quickly. I understand the need to include things other than superheavy capital ships, I just don't use light frigates for the support!
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Oct 11, 2014 20:20
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Only having watched the first couple videos, it seems like wolfpacks are really effective against larger ships since they can rotate out to vent while the enemy just gets overwhelmed and attrited to death. How true is this, given that it's been a long time since I've actually played the game?
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Oct 11, 2014 21:19
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Grizzwold posted:Only having watched the first couple videos, it seems like wolfpacks are really effective against larger ships since they can rotate out to vent while the enemy just gets overwhelmed and attrited to death. How true is this, given that it's been a long time since I've actually played the game? It's certainly true with the AI. Player controlled capitals tend to fair better against wolf packs because you can more effectively focus fire. This tournament is AI versus AI, right?
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Oct 11, 2014 21:29
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Grizzwold posted:Only having watched the first couple videos, it seems like wolfpacks are really effective against larger ships since they can rotate out to vent while the enemy just gets overwhelmed and attrited to death. How true is this, given that it's been a long time since I've actually played the game? It's reasonably correct, though not universally true. Generally speaking, as ship classes get larger, the amount of toughness and OP decreases relative to smaller craft; the one exception seems to be destroyers, who get the best toughness/FP ratio of everything except fighters with a supporting carrier. Of course, this is completely discounting your fit; high alpha and superior range will somewhat offset a wolfpacks advantages, particularly if the fit is capable of decisively dealing with the pack members. As GruntyThrst notes, however, the above is mostly true when you're piloting a ship yourself; the AI is not quite as capable of focused "gently caress that ship in particular." ... and of course, it's always helpful when they come at you with a bad fit. Which is largely why, excepting the case of Tartiflette vs. Foxer which basically was a wolf pack vs another wolf pack, my fleet prevailed over sirboomalot's. Though it took forever, geh. GruntyThrst posted:This tournament is AI versus AI, right? Yes.
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Oct 11, 2014 21:34
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Grizzwold posted:Only having watched the first couple videos, it seems like wolfpacks are really effective against larger ships since they can rotate out to vent while the enemy just gets overwhelmed and attrited to death. How true is this, given that it's been a long time since I've actually played the game? Pretty true. The thing about starsector in general is that any single ship must cycle between periods of strength and recovery. Ships with energy weapons especially, but any powerful vessel is going to need time to vent shield flux or recharge/reload its main guns, or wait for its special ability to cooldown, or whatever. So any single vessel will usually have a downtime where it can't really defend itself after a while, being able to capitalise on that is key to victory. If you pit one ship against multiple the multiple ships can retreat some of their number while the others keep the pressure on. Also, one ship against many is usually a single slow ship against multiple lighter, faster ships, so this makes it hard for the single ship to capitalise on the retreat of the small ones. Essentially a smaller, lighter ship can often control the pace of combat. The only ways for a big, powerful ship to kill a smaller one is to massively outrange it, thereby getting free hits before the small ship can close in and forcing it to retreat early, or to hit it with massive damage all at once and blow it out of the water before it can react. Both of these are things that large ships can do if player controlled but the AI generally can't use all its weapons optimally for alpha strike potential, so it's a little bit worse at it than the player. The other option is to get into a big melee with lots of ships on both sides which means that no side can control the battle properly, in which case your big ship's ability to spray fire everywhere is more useful because small ships are usually going to be in the range of someone when they come to fight you. Interlocking fields of fire are very good against the directional shielding of most ships and the better armor and gun redundancy of big ships fare better here, because they can take a few hits while lighter ships generally can't. Most of your losses in combat will probably come from being in the middle of a hectic fight and taking a shot to the engine, spinning out of control, and getting dogpiled by everything else in the melee. The rest will come from some tiny torpedo bomber or light frigate getting behind you and unloading some bullshit into you at point blank while you swear profusely at the monitor because the back end of your ship got vaporised by a reaper torpedo. Of course this all gets somewhat broken by the enforcer swarm because they are actually quite heavy ships with lots of guns while still being cheap and light enough to spam and retreat. Which is sort of the entire point of the really old ship designs, they're super cheap and durable for their class and they pack a lot of firepower on as long as they don't run out of ammo. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Oct 11, 2014 |
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Oct 11, 2014 21:40
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All this Starsector talk got me to re-download it and load it up again. The game is really coming along very nicely, and Starsector+ is doing a damned amazing job improving the variety that's in vanilla. Currently having a blast with the BRDY ships. I don't think many people have brought this up, but I think the AI in this game is really superb. I just watched two of my frigates approach a destroyer, then purposefully split and flank it without shooting. The poor destroyer kept trying to face its shield at one, then the other, all the while these two frigates were holding fire and watching. Then one lets it rip, overloading the destroyer before the second one finishes it off. These days I play most of Starsector from the sensor and fleet fitting screens. I can't hope to drive my ships as well as the AI can, so I just do executive control, which is what I gather the creator of the game intended. My only gripes with the AI is that it sometimes doesn't know how to quit, even with a whole swarm of missiles bearing down on it (GTFO you stupid Wolf!), and as others have mentioned, it has no awareness of ship explosions. I've lost more frigates than I care to count to both of them. The new Buffalo II loadout in Starsector+ with the racks of Hornet MRMs is an absolute killer. Z the IVth fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 00:27
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The AI is fairly good but doesn't really do hit-and-run tactics well, so it's rather bad at using ships designed for such like the Desdinova. Any sort of glass-cannon frigate or destroyer is better left to the player to pilot.
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Oct 14, 2014 01:12
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 BRDY.jpg
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Oct 14, 2014 01:53
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Tarezax posted:The AI is fairly good but doesn't really do hit-and-run tactics well, so it's rather bad at using ships designed for such like the Desdinova. Any sort of glass-cannon frigate or destroyer is better left to the player to pilot. I can't quite get the hang of driving the fast ships. I find the controls too sensitive and I end up slewing all over the place. I can do the "hit" or the "run", but not both. Any tips on what I'm doing wrong? Edit - Is there a way to do custom skirmish missions? I.e. I select both fleets before the match?
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Oct 14, 2014 01:56
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Z the IVth posted:I can't quite get the hang of driving the fast ships. I find the controls too sensitive and I end up slewing all over the place. I can do the "hit" or the "run", but not both. Any tips on what I'm doing wrong? A ship doesn't have to be fast to be hit and run focused, you can do it just as well with a heavily armed but slow cruiser, as long as it has a good shield and maybe a burn drive. Hit and run is more a function of blowing your load all at once and wrecking something, then holding off for your flux to wind down without getting ganked. You can do it with a normal ship if you have support to fall back on.
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Oct 14, 2014 02:03
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OwlFancier posted:A ship doesn't have to be fast to be hit and run focused, you can do it just as well with a heavily armed but slow cruiser, as long as it has a good shield and maybe a burn drive. I can drive the slow ships fine. It's controlling the fast ships that i have a problem with. I keep getting ridiculous oversteer and either i concentrate on moving and my shots go wild, or concentrate on aiming and I get wasted.
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Oct 14, 2014 02:10
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Z the IVth posted:I can drive the slow ships fine. It's controlling the fast ships that i have a problem with. I keep getting ridiculous oversteer and either i concentrate on moving and my shots go wild, or concentrate on aiming and I get wasted. Do you know if you hold down shift, the ship will orient to your mouse cursor? That makes steering much easier.
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Oct 14, 2014 02:24
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Yeah, knowing to use the shift key is crazy in how much it changes your ability to control. You'll pretty much go from awkwardly flailing around to doing crazy tricks with minimal effort.
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Oct 14, 2014 03:07
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By the sounds of things there's no substitute for good old practice then. I do use the shift key with variable success. How are the tournament battles being set up? Are they individually coded or is there a custom mission designer?
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Oct 14, 2014 09:31
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You have to code missions in java individually, though Dark set up a mission that automatically sorted the fleets to fight against each other. Starsector does not have and is unlikely to receive some kind of mod development app beyond utilities like the Ship Editor Trylobot came up with and a java IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse. Speaking of the Tournament, I'm afraid it's been cancelled due to outstanding balance problems--mostly related to missiles: Dark Revenant posted:I suppose I should preface with this: I am cancelling the Tournament. That being said he released the tourney mission and associated variants, so everyone could see how the fights would turn out. E: Essentially, the problem with organizing a tourney such as this in Starsector appears to be, beyond balance issues, the fact that you would literally need proctors to evaluate each fleet at each stage of the competition and declare it tourney legal/non-cheesy before it could proceed. MShadowy fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 17:47
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MShadowy posted:E: Essentially, the problem with organizing a tourney such as this in Starsector appears to be, beyond balance issues, the fact that you would literally need proctors to evaluate each fleet at each stage of the competition and declare it tourney legal/non-cheesy before it could proceed. Which also has the issue since missiles in themselves are not the problem - the basic variants use them perfectly fine - but the players building ships around them. And how would you evaluate it to not be cheesy without having some arbitrary standards? "It feels like there are too many missiles" isn't exactly a great standard. That, and certain things like Reapers are often useless in the hands of the AI (this ship isn't big enough for me to annihilate, despite none of the enemy ships being "big enough"), which really limits the effectiveness of some weapons. Oh, and lets not forget that some factions are just straight up unbalanced, which makes PvP... kind of hard. Valkyrians are a good example, since you need to drastically outmaneuver and out firepower them to actually have a chance, which means that a standup fight is pretty much a loss for you. Same goes for a lot of the hi-tech factions. BRDY and Lotus are probably my favourite to fight against, since they're squishy and maneuverable and playing well has great rewards. As in, they explode really nicely when you catch them offguard. It was an interesting idea though!
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Oct 14, 2014 18:39
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