Playing a bit on .880

[BadgerBadger]

So after playing a bit, there's a lot I like. My original biggest gripe was too many Mark VII planets scattered across the map, but I fixed that already.


My next biggest gripe at the moment is not really liking any of the fleets I find. I often have to play an hour or so in before I see a fleet I'm excited by. Also, in general, I want more interesting targets on the map. I really like GCAs, but I feel like we don't have much that's similar for giving fleets more power. I want more agency over the units I have access to or their quantities. I brainstormed a few additional capturables that would give players more agency over their fleets.

Fleetship ARS: Hacking this gives the player's flagship a new fleetship type with a decent number of units in it (20-40 or so?). Will not work on flagships with >= 5 shiptypes already
Frigate ARS: this gives the player's flagship a new frigate type with a decent number of units in it (4-8 or so?).  Will not work on flagships with >= 5 shiptypes already
Cap increaser Style 1: Hacking this doubles the fleetship cap of a flagship's fleetship with the smallest cap. Will not increase it over 80.
Cap increaser Stlye 2: Hacking this increases the cap of all fleetships in this Fleet by 10, but costs 2 AIP

What do people think about ideas like this?

[PokerChen]

Upvote on the ARS, although I would call them abandoned depots or reserves (successor to Zenith caches).  ...Probably needs a reliably way to give this fleet ship to the player while (A) not creating a duplicate and (B) some way to testing when all fleets have 5 ship types.

I would like to see this if there's a way to choose who gets the ship type. It would be finicky to have to send all the other fleets away from the planet.

The cap increaser can run into some problems with the large variance amongst caps:

• Strikecraft can have anywhere between ~10 (inhibition tesla corvettes mark-I) and 350+ (Gatling, Paralysers, Stignrays, etc. at mark-VII with IGC).
• Frigates range from 1 to 9 with IGC.

The base cap numbers of frigates are 1 and 2, so you're indirectly giving them a cap or two even if the increase is by 1. Similarly, the increase from 10->20 inhibiting tesla corvettes or 30->40 parasites is IMO pretty significant because of their exponential strength. Changes to the base cap either way strongly favors low-cap ship types, and I will probably just game this directly by sticking 5 low-cap ships into a fleet and then send it alone to capture the Cap Increaser. (Regardless of tech. It is relatively easy to come by.)
Also players will want to use it on a specific ship type that may or may not be the fewest. If there was a GUI, maybe.

To keep things organised from a modding perspective, I would prefer this to try to directly inherit from the fleet creation routine by adding an extra line to each ship type or picking randomly amongst the existing ship definitions.

Code: [Select]

    <fleet_membership name="BasicOffensiveMix" ship_cap_group="Strike" weight="100" min="25" max="40"/>
    <fleet_membership name="CrowdControlStrikeMix" ship_cap_group="Strike" weight="100" min="10" max="15"/>
    <fleet_membership name="FrigatesWithSupport" ship_cap_group="Strike" weight="100" min="9" max="18"/>
    <-- Use line to give from reserves or unlock from increaser-->
    <cache_reserves name="CapIncreaser" ship_cap_group="Strike" weight="100" min="25" max="40"/>
    <cache_reserves name="OffensiveCache" ship_cap_group="Strike" weight="100" min="25" max="40"/>


What I would like to see is a capturable that converts a base ship type to one of its variants. Like Raider -> Dagger, Stingray -> Paralyser, or Space Plane -> Mirage. This showcases some of the rarer variants to new players, and gives them a better chance to see the more powerful ships. It's often the case that I will have multiple caps of e.g. Fusion Bombers and cannot put them in the same fleet. Refitting one cap will allow me to stack them a bit better.
Potential problem here is that the variants don't always have the same tech unlocks as the base type, so you might be trading Mark-V for Mark-I, which is bad.

[RockyBst]

Couple of comments from a fresh game:

It's nice to be able to swap out ships, but not being able to have two of the same class in a single fleet is limiting in terms of tactical options. There are quite a few eyes in my current game, and I don't have the option of just blobbing up all my 'starship' or low-cap ships to carefully excise guardposts without first having to kill off and then no-build the higher cap ships.

One of the planets I came across had 10 stealth guardposts and an eye. Not being able to kill the eye with overwhelming firepower meant I had to go take a planet just to get a combat sentry frigate. Maybe add short range intrinsic tachyon beams on transports?

Is the 'wake-up' range on guardposts larger than it used to be? Combined with T7 planets it can be very noticeable when passing through a system or two to raid something and suddenly you have 250 more threat hanging around.

I really miss cloaker starships / assault transports / spirecraft jumpships. I had a +AIP instigator spawn three worlds away, two of which were 200+ strength. Even getting a couple of transports to the system was painful, let alone taking it out. Ended up taking me almost two hours to grind my way through to it, for +20ish AIP. In general not being able to sneak about on an enemy planet and have them always know you're there because the transport is uncloaked seems limiting.

Any plans to add high explosives back in? I also really miss being able to fling warheads and martyrs at that 200 strong warden fleet that keeps blocking my path.

Not really a complaints, more a map-gen arrgh: The first data centre was 5 hops from my homeworld (on a mark 7 world). All the rest are clustered at least 9 hops away. Arrrgh.

[RockyBst]

Oh by the way, those dark spire eidolon? Not reclamation immune. Combine with a zenith trader aberration/abomination on every planet...

I got about 150 strength worth of eidolon zombies at one point. Nice when my actual fleet is only 30.

(p.s.s, the zenith trader ship cap counts aren't working properly in this build. Always seems to read 0/1 even if I already have it built)


EDIT: Well, the warden fleet and spire seem to interact in ... interesting ways. If anyone ever wants a save with 1,000 strength worth of spire, here you go.

Even better, if anyone wants a save where I've reclaimed 400 strength worth of Eidolon after luring them into the aptly named 'Catastrophe'...

[RockyBst]

The final conclusion, if anyone is interested:

Dark spire gets stuck in a feedback loop. Spire ships move to human planets, get zombified, move back to spire worlds and die spawning more spire ships, move to human planets, get zombified...

Within an hour a 3,000 strength strong wave of spire rolls over the human homeworld. Catastrophe indeed.

[BadgerBadger]

@RockyBst I've nerfed the amount of energy the DS gets from zombies, so hopefully this catastrophe should be much harder to hit in the future.

I'm adding structures that provide "Hack this to give your fleet a new ship line". I think that will go a long way toward satisfying my desire for more objectives to be excited about and more ability to customize my fleets.