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Baron Porkface posted:If if a projectile is it a mass driver or autocannon? Do they auto upgrade? I don't know if the current patches fix it, but if you somehow manage to skip weapon tiers, your starbases won't autoupgrade, so always backfill lower tier weapons so your stations can get to the high tiers.
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May 14, 2018 13:56
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I think carriers would be better if they could actually launch missions independent of the main fleet. Like you can launch a wave of fighters/bombers across the system to strike a fleet or station without risk to your own fleet, giving them a specific use outside of just being another overcomplicated kind of gun. Then your PD rating basically determines how effective those strikes are and how long it takes the carriers to replenish their wings before they can strike again. It's never going to be overwhelming even if you have no PD but if the fighters are unopposed then they will whittle you down faster with successive strikes.
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May 14, 2018 14:11
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OwlFancier posted:I think carriers would be better if they could actually launch missions independent of the main fleet. Like you can launch a wave of fighters/bombers across the system to strike a fleet or station without risk to your own fleet, giving them a specific use outside of just being another overcomplicated kind of gun. Then your PD rating basically determines how effective those strikes are and how long it takes the carriers to replenish their wings before they can strike again. It's never going to be overwhelming even if you have no PD but if the fighters are unopposed then they will whittle you down faster with successive strikes. I just want to be able to direct my fleets at targets in combat as it is they do all sorts of stupid poo poo like aggro every marauder station in a system because that dinky little 150 FP station is still alive.
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May 14, 2018 14:44
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OwlFancier posted:I think carriers would be better if they could actually launch missions independent of the main fleet. Like you can launch a wave of fighters/bombers across the system to strike a fleet or station without risk to your own fleet, giving them a specific use outside of just being another overcomplicated kind of gun. Then your PD rating basically determines how effective those strikes are and how long it takes the carriers to replenish their wings before they can strike again. It's never going to be overwhelming even if you have no PD but if the fighters are unopposed then they will whittle you down faster with successive strikes. I question how useful this is; it doesn’t take THAT long to get from one side of a system to the other, and with the ranges of large/X weapons you only need to get halfway across the system to trigger a fight. How often do you really expect to have two hostile fleets in a system just hanging around without one of them aiming to either force an engagement or to flee?
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May 14, 2018 14:44
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Sloober posted:I just want to be able to direct my fleets at targets in combat God I hate this. A fleet will go chasing after anything in its aggro range regardless of whether it's in a fight already or not, and will actively target new, more distant ships while ignoring the ones still shooting them. It's maddening.
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May 14, 2018 15:18
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Bloodly posted:Consider your most basic bomber-type from your first level of fighter tech. The damage is 2-8 every 2 days(Not necessarily counting time to target). A wing of strike craft is 8 craft. That's 16-64 damage. This damage ignores shields outright and does +50% to Armour. Same as a missile, really.
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May 14, 2018 15:20
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Tomn posted:I question how useful this is; it doesn’t take THAT long to get from one side of a system to the other, and with the ranges of large/X weapons you only need to get halfway across the system to trigger a fight. How often do you really expect to have two hostile fleets in a system just hanging around without one of them aiming to either force an engagement or to flee?
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May 14, 2018 15:22
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Tomn posted:I question how useful this is; it doesn’t take THAT long to get from one side of a system to the other, and with the ranges of large/X weapons you only need to get halfway across the system to trigger a fight. How often do you really expect to have two hostile fleets in a system just hanging around without one of them aiming to either force an engagement or to flee? I was thinking mostly for starbases. You might not want to fight a starbase but you might want to siege it down, or contrariwise, you might want to have a starbase be able to project damage over the entire system before you get to the giant siege guns from the DLC. At the very least you absolutely are going to force an engagement if you use them like that, which is sort of the point. But whichever side has strike craft supremacy in the system can force the other side to come to them. And that's an interesting thing, because normally it's just limited to whoever controls the FTL inhibitor or whoever has the biggest fleet. Strike craft add another dimension to that where you might have a bigger fleet and an inhibitor but if the enemy is just going to plink down your starbase with strike craft, that's a problem, you have to go out and get them, possibly away from your starbase where your fleet might be smaller than the enemy. I do play with massively upscaled systems though so my idea of how big a system is is probably off. I think it's a really good way to play though so I would suggest that could be done as well to facilitate the use of strike craft. I was kind of thinking that a carrier fleet would have the advantage of being able to skirmish the enemy before they engage at the very least, which doesn't really work with the current engagement mechanics because they can't get the fighters into range fast enough and you obviously can't have the carriers locked in combat from across the entire system, so either way you really I think want to have them be able to fight without being locked in combat, even if you don't use them exclusively that way. If you want carriers to work like carriers I think that whatever you do, you absolutely have to uncouple fighters from the normal "fleet in combat" mechanic because the range they need to operate at to be meaningfully different from other weapons is way bigger than the rest of the weaponry in the game, and locking fleets into combat is stupid at that sort of range. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:39 on May 14, 2018 |
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May 14, 2018 15:33
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tithin posted:A friend got me into SOTS1 and we were really looking forward to sots2 You’re my buddy Matt and I claim my £5. Which is less than the £25 odd I tricked you into spending on SOTS2 (I’m so sorry). I actually reinstalled SOTS2 after reading this thread. As of today it’s a bad game but not an unplayable one. The strategic game is actually figuring out how to provoke an interesting fight, because the AI isn’t much of a challenge strategically and the diplomacy is Medieval Total War 2 levels. The fights are so pretty though!
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May 14, 2018 15:43
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Beefeater1980 posted:You’re my buddy Matt and I claim my £5. Which is less than the £25 odd I tricked you into spending on SOTS2 (I’m so sorry). So did I actually, there's a big mod that apparently improves a bunch of stuff in it, reforged it's called? You have to turn the menu background off though or it crashes on load, otherwise seems stable  I forgot about the government screen though, where doing things like colonizing planets affects what kind of government you're running, this has virtually no effect other than to mildly influence how much the other people in the game like you, based on their "choices". Because colonizing planets and taxing your population is, of course, optional.
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May 14, 2018 15:45
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Beefeater1980 posted:You’re my buddy Matt and I claim my £5. Which is less than the £25 odd I tricked you into spending on SOTS2 (I’m so sorry). SotS 2 had a week before the expansion came out where it was a genuinely okay game, which could be modded to be a good game. After all the patching and updating, the UI in SotS 2 is actually an improvement and fleets with missions are far better than undifferentiated blobs of ships where you have to manage each ship individually. The solar system battle maps are also much better than the always-in-orbit of SotS 1. And of course having the autoresolve actually run the battle really quickly instead of abstracting the fleet into numbers and deciding who wins produces much better results. It's just a shame that the expansion broke the AI completely and it's never recovered because everything but the AI you can mod to be pretty great. But goddamn there's a lot of broken stuff you gotta mod out to get it there. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 16:24 on May 14, 2018 |
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May 14, 2018 16:22
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Splicer posted:What's the range in the actual strike ships? How far can they get from their carrier? Engagement Range is listed as 130.
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May 14, 2018 20:48
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OwlFancier posted:I was thinking mostly for starbases. You might not want to fight a starbase but you might want to siege it down, or contrariwise, you might want to have a starbase be able to project damage over the entire system before you get to the giant siege guns from the DLC. At the very least you absolutely are going to force an engagement if you use them like that, which is sort of the point. But whichever side has strike craft supremacy in the system can force the other side to come to them. And that's an interesting thing, because normally it's just limited to whoever controls the FTL inhibitor or whoever has the biggest fleet. Strike craft add another dimension to that where you might have a bigger fleet and an inhibitor but if the enemy is just going to plink down your starbase with strike craft, that's a problem, you have to go out and get them, possibly away from your starbase where your fleet might be smaller than the enemy. I don't think this idea really works, design-wise. You talk about carriers being able to force an engagement, but if systems are large enough for carriers to matter in the way you describe, what you're heavily encouraging is fast carrier forces that are built to AVOID engagements, using superior speed and range to kite slower fleets relentlessly. If carriers mean the difference between attacking the enemy with impunity or being utterly helpless, and if they're strong enough to actually make a worthwhile difference, you've basically forced the entire game to revolve wholly around carriers and nothing else. Leaving aside the issues this brings up in fleet and ship design, it also requires a whole lot more micro on the system level and requires a much more active battle AI than just "roll into system and engage/flee."
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May 14, 2018 21:17
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OwlFancier posted:I think carriers would be better if they could actually launch missions independent of the main fleet. Like you can launch a wave of fighters/bombers across the system to strike a fleet or station without risk to your own fleet, giving them a specific use outside of just being another overcomplicated kind of gun. Then your PD rating basically determines how effective those strikes are and how long it takes the carriers to replenish their wings before they can strike again. It's never going to be overwhelming even if you have no PD but if the fighters are unopposed then they will whittle you down faster with successive strikes. I would be concerned about replicating Sins of a Solar Empire's carrier-supremacy issues. If one ship type can attack without committing to battle, why use anything else? Combat in Stellaris struggles with not really having a purpose for each ship type. I think that carrier sections would need to differentiate from missile sections in some way beyond range. Personally, I'd lean towards having fighters debuff enemy defenses and make them take more damage from attacks, as part of a larger move to having cruisers buff / debuff ships with their sections. Give them the carriers, point defense, EW/CNC type sections. That would give them a unique and useful purpose, and also encourage mixed fleets. Similarly, I'd organize the other ships along similar lines, with corvettes being efficient bruisers that are a good value for minerals, destroyers being effective artillery, and battleships being expensive tanks that are a good value for fleet cap. This would go a long way toward fixing the aimlessness of the current combat dynamics. Kaal fucked around with this message at 21:44 on May 14, 2018 |
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May 14, 2018 21:39
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They should leave strike craft in the dumpster and bring up the atomic rockets page whenever you click on the module.
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May 14, 2018 22:22
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hobbesmaster posted:They should leave strike craft in the dumpster and bring up the atomic rockets page whenever you click on the module. quote:Since they don't operate in an essentially different medium, the way aircraft operate in a different medium from surface ships This sentence just blew my mind even though it's completely obvious.
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May 14, 2018 22:37
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I'd so love a space 4x with even the slightest nod towards actual space and actual physics/science. But everything has to be trek/wars/B5 pure fantasy with planets as islands/continents, spaceships as navy ships, and what good navy ship doesn't have a WWII era carrier??
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May 14, 2018 22:39
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Baronjutter posted:I'd so love a space 4x with even the slightest nod towards actual space and actual physics/science. But everything has to be trek/wars/B5 pure fantasy with planets as islands/continents, spaceships as navy ships, and what good navy ship doesn't have a WWII era carrier?? Getting hung up on sci-fi space combat being unrealistic is weird, considering space combat is silly in the first place. If you can accelerate a ship to speed X, you can do the same to an asteroid and ram it into stuff. And it scales incredibly well with improvements to technology, so coming up with a viable defense that isn't magic forcefields is super awkward. Just suspend your disbelief and enjoy space navies battling it out with space insects and space whales and space dragons.
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May 14, 2018 22:47
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Cynic Jester posted:Getting hung up on sci-fi space combat being unrealistic is weird, considering space combat is silly in the first place. If you can accelerate a ship to speed X, you can do the same to an asteroid and ram it into stuff. And it scales incredibly well with improvements to technology, so coming up with a viable defense that isn't magic forcefields is super awkward. Just suspend your disbelief and enjoy space navies battling it out with space insects and space whales and space dragons. Like in fantasy, the goal shouldn't be realism but verisimilitude. The Expanse (at least up to book 4, which is where I'm at ATM) does this pretty well: it's not hard sci-fi, but it has enough of a hard sci-fi flavor to actually feel like the whole scenario fits well enough with reality to be accessible.
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May 14, 2018 22:55
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Cynic Jester posted:Getting hung up on sci-fi space combat being unrealistic is weird, considering space combat is silly in the first place. If you can accelerate a ship to speed X, you can do the same to an asteroid and ram it into stuff. And it scales incredibly well with improvements to technology, so coming up with a viable defense that isn't magic forcefields is super awkward. Just suspend your disbelief and enjoy space navies battling it out with space insects and space whales and space dragons. If you can ram things into things you can also move things away from other things, which is at the heart of realistic space combat. If the enemy can attach huge engines to an asteroid, you'll see that and move your poo poo out of the way since you also have access to huge engines presumably. Are you close enough range to shoot your unguided projectiles at the enemy in such a way that they don't have time to move out of the way? Does your missile have enough fuel/power to keep on target vs an enemy trying to avoid it? Does it have enough fuel to dodge incoming point defence weapons? Children of a Dead Earth manages to make realistic space combat interesting. The Expanse manages to make fairly realistic space war interesting. It's possible, we're just little baby birds imprinted on certain very wrong and tired tropes of how a space 4x game should look and work. Perfectly serviceable since MOO came out, but why not try something a little fresher?
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May 14, 2018 23:05
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I always thought the space combat in the Neutronium Alchemist books was fairly realistic: Ships are super fragile and comparably slow since they can't accelerate faster than the human body can handle. Nuclear missiles are fast and don't actually have to hit a ship, just get close enough to fry it's electronics with EMP, irradiate it's crew with gamma/x-rays, etc. A space battle comes down to whoever makes a mistake or runs out of counter measures first.
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May 14, 2018 23:33
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Nevets posted:I always thought the space combat in the Neutronium Alchemist books was fairly realistic: sounds like a real fun game
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May 15, 2018 00:08
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It actually does, haven't you ever played a submarine sim? The Hunt For Space October would be dope as hell.
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May 15, 2018 00:23
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Baronjutter posted:If you can ram things into things you can also move things away from other things, which is at the heart of realistic space combat. If the enemy can attach huge engines to an asteroid, you'll see that and move your poo poo out of the way since you also have access to huge engines presumably. Are you close enough range to shoot your unguided projectiles at the enemy in such a way that they don't have time to move out of the way? Does your missile have enough fuel/power to keep on target vs an enemy trying to avoid it? Does it have enough fuel to dodge incoming point defence weapons? Sure, ships can move erratically enough to dodge poo poo. But getting into a space war means all your stationary assets are toast. Like, say, planets. "But wouldn't they want to conquer the planet?" No. The cost-benefit of pacifying a hostile planet is absurd. Especially if we are talking about aliens with different environmental requirements. Space wars makes the MAD of the cold war era look like peanuts in comparison, especially with how much more powerful a first strike would be and the lack of collateral damage to your own population and assets from your strikes. And even if we discount the space war scenario and just look into the near future with space flight being more common, all it takes is one nutjob with a ship and a couple sizable asteroids to make Earth uninhabitable, even with our current technology. Realistic space combat is terrifying on so many levels and would end up with everyone turning into space nomads real fast.
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May 15, 2018 00:50
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Using it for the first time and I'm really coming to the conclusion that the Shroud might be... bad? I'm gonna dump another 30,000 energy in and maybe I'll get something besides pissing the poo poo out of my militant isolationist FE neighbors.
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May 15, 2018 01:43
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uPen posted:Using it for the first time and I'm really coming to the conclusion that the Shroud might be... bad? I'm gonna dump another 30,000 energy in and maybe I'll get something besides pissing the poo poo out of my militant isolationist FE neighbors. I did my first psychic run over the weekend. Shroud is pretty great, it gave me really good targeting computers, T6 shields, and psi-jump which is really great. It also let me be free of the tyranny of being an inward perfection government when I reformed my government over The Chosen One.
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May 15, 2018 01:51
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uPen posted:Using it for the first time and I'm really coming to the conclusion that the Shroud might be... bad? I'm gonna dump another 30,000 energy in and maybe I'll get something besides pissing the poo poo out of my militant isolationist FE neighbors. The Shroud is entirely luck-based. Yes, it's bad.
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May 15, 2018 02:04
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McSpanky posted:It actually does, haven't you ever played a submarine sim? The Hunt For Space October would be dope as hell. I don't recall the name of it, but there is a space sim like that in development that supports making your own irl instrument panels for it. Seems cool.
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May 15, 2018 02:14
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Is habitability bugged in that it is only one factor of happiness rather than the max? edit- and the factor is only a small fraction of what it should be, such as a 55% habitability giving a 12% malus.
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May 15, 2018 04:24
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Tomn posted:I don't think this idea really works, design-wise. You talk about carriers being able to force an engagement, but if systems are large enough for carriers to matter in the way you describe, what you're heavily encouraging is fast carrier forces that are built to AVOID engagements, using superior speed and range to kite slower fleets relentlessly. If carriers mean the difference between attacking the enemy with impunity or being utterly helpless, and if they're strong enough to actually make a worthwhile difference, you've basically forced the entire game to revolve wholly around carriers and nothing else. Leaving aside the issues this brings up in fleet and ship design, it also requires a whole lot more micro on the system level and requires a much more active battle AI than just "roll into system and engage/flee." You can't make a fast carrier fleet because obviously cruisers and battleships are going to be the slowest ships? You can also obviously make it automated if you want, same as you have the aggressive stance? Just have carriers automatically strike things unless you set them to hold.
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May 15, 2018 05:09
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Baron Porkface posted:Is habitability bugged in that it is only one factor of happiness rather than the max? Wha? Habitability is supposed to be only a small amount of total happiness. Like, on game start, without joining a faction and having perfect habitability for your homeworld, your pops only have 55% happiness. So yeah without +happiness boosts 55% habitability is not going to give much happiness. OwlFancier posted:You can't make a fast carrier fleet because obviously cruisers and battleships are going to be the slowest ships? You can also obviously make it automated if you want, same as you have the aggressive stance? Just have carriers automatically strike things unless you set them to hold. Carriers would be a hundred times better if Carrier AI let them sit in place like 200 units out, rather than closing in on a target even when set to long-range AI because of the fact that they can't field large weapons and that seems to make them want to be all cuddly with the enemy ships. Edit: if the enemy ships are faster than the carrier (they will be) obviously they can just close in and shoot regularly but the carrier doesn't need to help them out by going over and saying hi. Black Pants fucked around with this message at 05:27 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 05:12
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Black Pants posted:Carriers would be a hundred times better if Carrier AI let them sit in place like 200 units out, rather than closing in on a target even when set to long-range AI because of the fact that they can't field large weapons and that seems to make them want to be all cuddly with the enemy ships. If you just want that, you can try this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1366244440 It adds a 250 range 0 damage "weapon" for carriers that makes them sit at very long range. It also adds planetary defence guns which shoot at things bombarding a planet.
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May 15, 2018 05:21
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Tbh what Stellaris really needs is the ability to design components like in Aurora.
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May 15, 2018 05:41
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Black Pants posted:Wha? Habitability is supposed to be only a small amount of total happiness. Like, on game start, without joining a faction and having perfect habitability for your homeworld, your pops only have 55% happiness. So yeah without +happiness boosts 55% habitability is not going to give much happiness. The ingame text says that habitability is max happiness but that isnt what the results show.
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May 15, 2018 06:12
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It was changed recently so the tooltip may be outdated, though "habitability determines the max happiness of a pop" doesn't require it to be 1:1.
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May 15, 2018 06:28
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At the same time, I imagine today's armchair military physicists can predict space combat about as well as regular armchair generals can predict regular combat. (  )
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May 15, 2018 07:27
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hobbesmaster posted:They should leave strike craft in the dumpster and bring up the atomic rockets page whenever you click on the module. I mean obviously there's a lot of good points to be made here, and sci-fi writers often are lazy when it comes to exploring outside WW2 combat tropes. But just to defend space fighters a little bit: As long as manuverability is important they're going to exist. Just in purely mathematical terms, there's an inherent advantage in a vehicle having a high thrust to mass ratio. And in an environment where projectiles are devastatingly powerful and accurate, being able to quickly change your velocity will be very important. And while lasers and other forms of radiation will present unique problems, it should be recognized that those issues are endemic to spaceflight even outside of combat. If a vehicle can't shield its occupants against a reasonable amount of radiation, then it won't be capable of dealing with solar flares or other common extraterrestrial phenomena. Now depending on the technology those fighters might only have limited use - perhaps only in gravity wells, or only against certain targets - and it certainly could be true that drones will replace manned fighters whenever possible, but I wouldn't ring in the glorious age of space battleships just yet.
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May 15, 2018 12:00
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Beefeater1980 posted:You’re my buddy Matt and I claim my £5. Which is less than the £25 odd I tricked you into spending on SOTS2 (I’m so sorry). Jesus christ Matt, when did you show up here? we need to catch up sometime or maybe we can play SOTS1 (or maybe Stellaris? or ES? I'll let you choose)
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May 15, 2018 12:21
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Kaal posted:I mean obviously there's a lot of good points to be made here, and sci-fi writers often are lazy when it comes to exploring outside WW2 combat tropes. But just to defend space fighters a little bit: As long as manuverability is important they're going to exist. Just in purely mathematical terms, there's an inherent advantage in a vehicle having a high thrust to mass ratio. And in an environment where projectiles are devastatingly powerful and accurate, being able to quickly change your velocity will be very important. So you basically re-invented missiles. Congrats. Edit: That being said, 4X games should adhere to two rules: is it fun and is it cool? BadOptics fucked around with this message at 12:37 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 12:35
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BadOptics posted:So you basically re-invented missiles. Congrats. A drone is similar to but not the same as a missile. A drone can do things other than explode. i mean it can also explode but that's not usually the purpose
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May 15, 2018 12:46
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