SotS2: Your flesh is an insult to the perfection of the digital

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Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

You can research Battlerider Hangars and put them on your naval stations, or drop some defence platforms instead.

Also: Just ran into the Locust for the first time in SotS2, and... well, they're about as tough as they were in SotS1- a CR fleet with Phasers & Magnetoceramics can take them. Which is a bit underwhelming when you almost start off with that.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2012 14:09

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:37

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

You need a free construction fleet within range.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2012 14:37

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Nope! Well, a max grand menace/random encounter survival game would still work.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2012 11:30

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

What weapons are you using? In SotS1 energy weapons (plasma/fusion cannons in particular) were terrible at killing planets and I imagine that's carried over. Mass drivers are certainly still effective, though.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 18:47

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Is there a trick I'm missing with torpedos? My human ships utterly slaughter my foes when they deign to fire them, but they won't shoot until I've spent a while randomly jiggling the AI approach/facing/priority weapons settings and there doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency to what combination works.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 22:02

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Tracking, fusion specifically.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 22:04

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

AlanFrost posted:

Regular fusion, not Detonating?

Grande tracking regular fusion non-detonating with soymilk.

DatonKallandor posted:

The fire rate is incredibly slow, and if you're using tracking energy torpedos it's possible they're getting shot down near instantly in a brawl - they have very little health straight out of the barrel, and build damage and health as they travel.

That's the odd thing- I have more luck getting them to fire *in* brawls. On the runup, my ships just sit there. When they get into melee and I mess with the stance, at some point they *do* fire and the torps end up curving around in huge arcs.

Talkie Toaster fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Dec 11, 2012

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 22:20

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

AlanFrost posted:

Are you setting your ships to top (1.5x) speed? That pulls all the weapons offline for full power to the engines.

I didn't realise that- I thought it just cut the sensor range. Problem probably solved.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2012 22:36

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Well, the neutron star/'Netron Star' grand menace is murderously annoying. It spawns in the centre of the galaxy and picks a planet to target- then every system within a few light years' radius gets struck by comets or system-wide asteroid storms each turn.

E: Oooh, just found out you can build a science station on it. Well.

Talkie Toaster fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Dec 13, 2012

# ¿ Dec 13, 2012 21:05

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Keisari posted:

How do you even defeat something like that? Or do you just have to endure it for long enough?

By waiting for it to travel aaaaall the way to its target system and annihilate it. So that's victory, in a limited sense.

I think you're supposed to build a science station on it, though, but I only noticed you could the turn before it arrived.

Perhaps the 'arrival' message is supposed to tell you about it, but it arrived at the same time as a Gardener menace (overlaid over the top of it) so perhaps I missed the message or it bugged out trying to display two warnings at once. The Gardener's now just floating in space doing nothing too.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2012 21:19

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Yeah, that's caught me out a few times when the first combat was a slaver raid and the second was an invasion.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2012 19:36

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Flipswitch posted:

Yeah, prototyping is ridiculous, how the hell do you afford prototyping Leviathans?

With Rapid Prototyping it's about $10mil, which isn't unreachable if you've got half a dozen systems with full trade running.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2012 17:53

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Arglebargle III posted:

How do you have 21 colonies on turn 75. I have like 16 at turn 200. Also only 3 mil income.

Try prioritising claiming systems with multiple planets, where at least 1 is <200. Once you've got one developed colony there you can relocate a coloniser fleet to it that's pure colonisers (preferably biome colonisers), no supply ships and colonise the hell out of the rest of the system. No travel time and no command points wasted on supply or defensive ships means you can get a planet up and running in no time. 3-4 of those systems and you've hit your 16 colonies.

Actually, I wonder how long it takes to get to 100 Infra with a DN command and a fleet of colonisers? If you're at DNs and can research replicants, you should be able to turn any free system into a developed colony easily. Then the only obstacle to getting it churning out money is getting a civilian station up and upgraded, but with megafreighters you probably only ever need ~5 freighters per system, which a level 2 station should be able to cope with.

Arglebargle III posted:

The Tarka managed to claim a system with no planetary bodies. I'm still mystified as to how they did it.

Deep Space Construction should do it.

quote:

It doesn't help that SFS Leviathan showed up at my homeworld and killed my polytechnic station. I miss when menaces showed up on the strategic map. Like really badly actually. Now they're completely unfun because they're basically non-interactive. They show up, you probably lose unless you happen to have something there at that moment, then they're gone. Nothing fun about it.

The Ghost Ship isn't actually a Grand Menace, however much it might look like one. It's technically a random encounter, like the Herald from SotS1 except more annoying. All the actual grand menaces I've seen so far show up.

Talkie Toaster fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Dec 16, 2012

# ¿ Dec 16, 2012 19:03

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Arrrrgh Rapid Prototyping needs to be one of the 100% techs. You can live without spinal mount BRs or Q-Ships but not RP.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2012 23:16

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Nuclearmonkee posted:

For Loa especially the turn estimates are completely wrong. 18 turn patrol often seems to turn out to actually be one turn. I put a supply in now whether or not the fleet it looks like it needs one if I need them to stick around.

Loa travel times are pit-traps too. Forgot you've not yet dropped a gate on that planet you wanted to survey? Whoops, the survey mission travel time still assumes you're gating back. Enjoy a 30-turn slowboat.

It's particularly stupid because your fleet should be able to build a gate to go home through, but can't.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2012 18:46

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Dirk the Average posted:

There's a post on the official SotSII forums where a guy goes through a cost benefit analysis of armor, finds that armor is horrifically overpriced, finds a glitch in how armor is priced, and the entire time Mecron is saying things like:

When the person doing the analysis goes to the extreme of providing a scenario where armor is stripped entirely off of a ship (i.e. all armor on all sides of the ship is stripped) before doing any other damage.

Eventually Mecron admits to and fixes a glitch in how armor is priced, but it seems like he's almost actively hostile to anyone doing any analysis on the game. Oddly, the community also seems actively hostile to anyone doing analysis on the game. You'd think that developers would welcome the players going through and stress testing values, especially cases where people were paying 2.5x the cost of a ship for a maximum of 30% extra effectiveness and a practical amount of around 5-10% more effectiveness. Of course, there were people in the thread who assumed that Kerberos could do no wrong and that of course it's worth it to pay 2.5x more for a ship that's maybe 30% more effective because if you just use tactics you can dodge enemy fire. It's a very strange culture, really.

It just boggles the mind - if I were a developer and some player went through analyzing and doing a cost benefit analysis on a piece of equipment, I'd be overjoyed and look through their math. I might not ever directly comment on it, but it seems like it'd be something to encourage, not stamp out.

You see this with tabletop RPGs as well. People object to treating the game as a 'game' and addressing the mechanics in terms of what they actually achieve. Then it seems to be because people prefer to think they're simulating another world rather than just playing a game, I wonder if that's the case with the hardcore SotS fans, the ones who buy all the novels and write fanfiction and whatnot? They'd probably see a criticism of the game mechanics as an attack on the validity of the simulation and thus on their career achievements as King Magical Space Dolphin, and have to come up with justifications as to why it's totally not the case.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2012 12:34

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Going back and looking at The Pit kickstarter perks I'd actually have shelled out for stuff like the Black Section book and the mug, even the lore book. Why they felt the need to package all that stuff with a roguelike when their fanbase are strategy gamers is beyond me.

What really rounds off the stupidity of the whole thing is that Erinys post was done to lock a thread about making the game more user-friendly with sensible, relevant arguments in it with no actual explanation why. And they wonder why they have no money.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2012 20:31

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Neruz posted:

I wonder if it's even occured to them to rip out the tactical engine of SotS2 and sell it as an extra mini game or something. They seem to be really hurting for money and doing that would probably get them some extra funds for relatively minimal effort.

I'll type up an effortpost about it on their forums tomorrow, I think. It really is a good idea, would focus on the best, most enjoyable part of the game, be more accessible, and even offer the opportunity for them to use the framework for a low-effort single-player campaign where they get to show off their awful writing. A space duel where you have a budget with which to design and build fleet using a randomised tech-tree selection, with a selection of missions (e.g. colony defense, escort freighters) and the potential to have random encounters modify the battles (suddenly, a swarm queen!) or to have weird competitive-coop modes like "Who can take down the Locust Moon first/who can survive the longest against the Planet Killer" would be great. The Nexus sequel kickstarter failed but showed there's at least $150k out there for a spaceship RTS with no empire management.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2012 02:36

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Hav posted:

Link it here and I'll add some weight to the argument; I don't like Kerberos and I think they need a collective smack with a clue-stick, but this is a terrible economy to be relying on a resume that includes Fort Zombie.

Yep, though a new account's first post has to be approved- I'm currently waiting on that before posting the suggestion.
It's clear they have some competent staff, at least in the art department, and have some good ideas- it'd be nice if they could actually use them, rather than everything (good and bad) being crushed under the weight of Mecron's ego.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2012 19:12

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Right, spinoff pitch is here, with a slightly fictitious narrative behind it to make it seem less 'threatening', as I imagine otherwise they'd jump from "Want SotS2 spinoff" -> "Claiming SotS2 isn't good enough".

# ¿ Dec 29, 2012 00:30

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Personal_Nirvana posted:

I often try the genre, but i'm always being violently kicked out of it because of the vertical learning path. There's any LP of SotS II available for chumps like me?

If you're looking for a better learning curve, SotS 1 is the way to go. It's an accessible 4X that's not bogged down with overcomplicated minutiae and busywork (which makes their decision to load SotS 2 with it a bit strange).

# ¿ Dec 30, 2012 13:30

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Joe_Richter posted:

Considering they've basically stated they're totally out of money as well, I think there's a good chance we won't be getting any more patches.

I hope there's at least 1 more. The way planets keep getting jammed in an uncolonisable state is incredibly annoying. They have mentioned on the forums that they were planning some UI improvements, so it sounds like it's not been thrown under the bus *just yet*.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2013 01:48

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Dirk the Average posted:

Ideally they'd go back more to the old model by making stations a thing you tell the colony to build once and forget about, and make trade a slider that you set with a lag time before trade benefits kick in or industrial output recovers.

Really there's no significant decision points to stations other than 'Upgrade/Don't Upgrade', beyond selecting a race/tech to focus on for diplomacy/science stations. Just reducing stations to level 1-5+focus and letting systems upgrade their own stations would reduce the micro to a much more manageable level without getting rid of it entirely.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2013 14:17

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

And it only took their publisher dropping them, the abject failure of a kickstarter and facing a looming financial black hole for them to realise that maybe they should listen to their players.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2013 12:02

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

An Open Letter To The Obama Administration

# ¿ Jan 12, 2013 02:29

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Yeah, it's blatantly a joke. It's nice that some of the staff actually have a sense of humour. The forum posters, on the other hand...

# ¿ Jan 12, 2013 02:42

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Neruz posted:

Everyone assumed that when the Liir said they killed the Suul'ka with a biological weapon that they meant a plague weapon. What they actually meant was one of their number decided to become a Suul'ka and literally be a living weapon against the others.

That's sort of understandable within the context of their nonsense language as Suul'ka is more a word for 'compassionless jerk who hurts other people' than 'Immortal Giant Space Whale'. They used to call you it in SotS1 from time to time.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2013 10:15

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Inspired by Daton, I've tried to fix my pet peeves too but I'm not having as much success. I want to have stations build modules pre-installed, like how the starting Naval station is ready-equipped, so there's no need to faff around with them.

The naval station seems to have module entries like this corresponding to the pre-installed modules:

code:

    <Module>
      <Id>d17229f7-79d4-4903-bf94-67e1f40510cd</Id>
      <AssignedModule>
      </AssignedModule>
      <NodeName>Naval_Sensor_01</NodeName>
      <Size>Station</Size>
      <Type>Sensor</Type>
      <FrameX>0</FrameX>
      <FrameY>0</FrameY>
    </Module>

For science stations etc. the IDs are blank. So they must do something... but I'm not entirely sure what the ID corresponds to. There's no other entries matching the IDs in other files, and the IDs differ for each module slot for each race. Anyone have any idea what they might correspond to? I've tried copy-pasting them in to no avail, and converting them to ASCII but not gotten anything meaningful out.

As it stands, the best I've got is altering the .module files under assets\base\factions\*\modules\sn_*.module to zero the prices & construction costs. I've tried folding the bonuses from the modules into the station base stats & removing the module slots, but alas the module requirements for upgrade seem to be hard-coded so that didn't help.

# ¿ May 19, 2013 23:35

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Aethernet posted:

In total (yuck) fairness to Kerberos, you can get rid of pirates entirely by stationing an outpost and four cutters at every world that's trading. You can also research a tech that puts freighters and police cutters next to each in the event of a pirate attack.

Yeah, the annoying thing is that makes constructing a naval station and those cutters and then deploying the cutters mandatory, and that takes far too many turns and clicks to do. It's just busywork that doesn't add any real gameplay.

A better solution would be to only have piracy be an issue near pirate bases or maybe near Zuul (doable through commonassets.xml), so that you're given the choice of invest in defence or go out and kill the pirates.

# ¿ May 20, 2013 19:26

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Demiurge4 posted:

I still don't understand why stations couldn't just be modular in the same fashion they are in Galactic Civilizations. I resent having to micro a station and manually build labs that each give 1% research. In fact, the whole loving thing could have been abstracted to a system infrastructure panel that handled everything but Mecron loves needless micro.

In SotS1, stations were modular too. But you had a maximum of 2 modules, and there was only one level of station (what would probably be level 5 in SotS2). So, yeah.

# ¿ May 22, 2013 23:19

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Tomn posted:

He could be talking about how you can build two stations per planet, I guess?

Edit: Also how you could pack weapons and stuff on it, which I guess is technically modular, but not really pertinent to modifications for economic reasons.

Ah, that is apparently it. I misremembered the interface, unfortunately.

Still, looks like it should be possible to have constructors build effectively level 5 stations from scratch, with 0-cost modules and many of the module effects folded-in (like... why would you not build habitation modules when they effectively double the value of trade routes? Why not just double the value of trade?). Irritatingly modules can only be build at a rate of 1/turn and some of the really basic things like freighter slots can only be applied by modules, so they're still not perfect, but it's still better and a lot closer to SotS1.

E: Oh, doesn't work for triggering Admirals/Suul'Ka. It seems that the station rank in the station .section files controls upkeep + bonuses it grants, but isn't the 'rank' rank. How delightfully consistent.

Talkie Toaster fucked around with this message at 17:38 on May 23, 2013

# ¿ May 23, 2013 16:37

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Kung Food posted:

Fuuuuuck. I was thinking I might get II if it could be fixed, but the trade system is just so unfun in SotS I I think I might pass regardless.

They actually made one really good change to trade; you can dedicate a portion of your income to civilian stimulus, which is spent to automatically build freighters where needed. They just decided to directly counteract that by requiring you to build the docks for them manually.

If you could just build a single trade station and let the stimulus do the rest (or even if civilian trade stations could be built & upgraded via stimulus) it'd be perfect- but that would be too easy.

DatonKallandor: Have you made any changes to prototyping costs? I've been wondering if part of the reason the AI doesn't like teching up properly is because of the ~4x cost increase for new cruisers. Conversely, if research rates are higher and they do tech up and respec now then they could end up pouring all their money and IO into the prototyping black hole.

# ¿ May 24, 2013 12:03

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

quote:

10) In the end always give thanks for the ability to mod, for it is not something that comes free and easy for the great creators.

I was under the impression that some level of modability is something that should be a fairly natural outgrowth of development tools. Like, if you need to recompile to change the AI's spending priorities then you can't rapidly test a range of them to figure out which works best, that kind of thing. Except Kerberos, testing etc.

Also I like how whenever the Kerberos hate starts feeling a bit bandwagony something always comes up to remind you that no, they deserve every single bit of it.

I think SotsOS has access to the database and should be able to fix the stupid funding distributions, but the documentation seems a bit thin on the ground.

# ¿ May 26, 2013 08:12

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Neruz posted:

I'm pretty sure that is a straight up lie...

Let's be charitable (and probably more accurate) and say he doesn't know the first thing about his own game instead. I just checked again (I'm Kwaanza Loa there). After scrapping everything I got an AI to have nothing but stimulus/security/savings/research going out. It allocated 100k to stimulus and put it all into trade (despite not having it unlocked), then 100k to savings, then only made 100k next turn (just over, which probably includes pop growth or something; certainly not 50k over).
Turn 2:

Turn 3:

# ¿ May 28, 2013 13:51

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Taerkar posted:

I'm being very charitable here but maybe he's saying that the funds will be spent on something else in that category? So even though trade isn't available the game will dump it all into colonization instead?

I tried modding the colony stimulus requirements down to $1. Putting any money into stimulus instantly spawns a civilian colony; but the setup as it stands doesn't.

# ¿ May 28, 2013 14:17

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

DatonKallandor posted:

Yes. Although I wish people would remember me for SOEM, not working on PDS.

And does anyone know what Mecrom meant "by alter their economic variables in the strat files."? Does he mean there's actually something modable about how the AI spends it money?

The best I've been able to find is this under faction.xml, but it claims to be about research:

code:

<!-- Research Rates for AI-->
  <ResearchRates>
    <EXPANDING>0.5</EXPANDING>
    <ARMING>0.7</ARMING>
    <HUNKERING>0.6</HUNKERING>
    <CONQUERING>0.7</CONQUERING>
    <DESTROYING>0.7</DESTROYING>
    <DEFENDING>0.6</DEFENDING>
  </ResearchRates>

They seem to broadly correspond to the <AIResearchModes> tags in the techtree file, so it's unlikely they're actually misnamed and handle everything. Otherwise there's just multipliers for global values in the strat file, no AI stuff.

# ¿ May 28, 2013 20:47

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Yeah, it seems like something like SotSOS with access to the databases could simply implement its own halfway sane AI to handle the economics, but the effort required would probably outstrip the reward. It wouldn't be so hard in a nice accessible scripting language like Bethscript/Papyrus from the Elder Scrolls series, but of course that's not an option.
(Comedy option: If it's in FORTRAN I could give it a shot, and of all the companies most likely to write videogames in FORTRAN...)

:sigh:

At this rate, it looks like the most plausible fix for SotS2 is to use the skins in SotS1. That'd make me happy. Except the models are in an inaccessible format, and they haven't released the tools to read them.

# ¿ May 28, 2013 23:15

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Taerkar posted:

Who wants to brave this?

Woah. Was Mecron's 'sigh' in that thread actually a 'sigh we have to fix this poo poo now' rather than a dismissive 'sigh these peons question my game, carved as it is from flawless crystal by the finest artisan jewellers'?

# ¿ Jun 26, 2013 02:01

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Apparently the latest patch has 'fixed' the undue preference for early-game ship designs. Has anyone been optimistic enough to check if that improved anything?

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 17:48

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:37

Talkie Toaster: Jan 23, 2006; May contain carcinogens

Oh, so Kerberos are voluntarily kickstarting junk rather than working with Paradox? Now that's interesting. I thought Paradox would have cut them off- sounds like Mecron isn't a fan of their updated oversight policy then (no big surprise).

# ¿ Oct 24, 2013 15:22

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > SotS2: Your flesh is an insult to the perfection of the digital

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