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[Sharp]

Just wondering, do people make it to these forums without playing Dwarf Fortress?

It's totally fine to dislike a game, but to say that it's frustrating when you have the option to just save/load and try again, when there is an easy mode so you can learn tactics, and a guided tutorial for the concepts. It just seems totally bizarre when compared against Dwarf Fortress which is far more unforgiving and un-intuitive in how things work.

Just wondering if people find Starsector frustrating and hard to learn but not Dwarf Fortress.

[Sirus]

To be fair, they are somewhat different games. Plenty of people can handle Dwarf Fortress just fine but struggle with games that require good reflexes and predictions of movement.

[zaimoni]

Just wondering if people find Starsector frustrating and hard to learn but not Dwarf Fortress.

Unmodified StarSector is a hybrid of a fast-twitch game (combat) and slow-twitch game (campaign).  I set the frame rate to half-normal in order to make the combat slow-twitch enough.  The fast-twitch players finally got the option to run the campaign layer as fast-twitch. (This was not supported in the prior release, 200% frame rate is not fast enough and the game logic had to be reinforced to tolerate the fast-twitch frame rate range of 300%-500%.)

Also, the tutorial has a very decided case of founder effect.  Starting a new game with the tutorial is intended to remain fun even for an expert, so it can't be noob no-fail.

[Loud Whispers]

Ah damn, I got destroyed by my own greed. Tried playing a legitimate lawful astrominer (nexerellin mod) in a post-collapse world (most planets are derelict, very few human controlled planets). Things were going well; I was managing to rake in 120,000 profit each run, expanding my mining fleet until I reached 1,000 mining strength. Fool that I was, I did not see how I was eating into my own profit margins. The larger and less nimble my fleet was, the more I was losing from accidents in supplies, machinery and manpower. By the time I reached 1,600 mining strength of vessels and 17,000 cargo space, I was dumping so much ore & volatiles on markets that I was severely depreciating the price whilst increasing my running costs. Unable to cope with the costs anymore I had to keep cutting down my fleet, losing the money I invested into my optimised mining vessels, taking up trade missions and salvage missions just to keep in the red (and many times my crew kept quitting on the spot due to backpay long owed).
For a time I managed to stabilise my finances by becoming a bounty-hunter; using one cruiser to hunt small-fry pirates whilst my mining fleet acted as a salvage fleet. Things got very spicy when I discovered a Legion XIV Battlecarrier, which made me get rather too big for my boots. I attacked a bounty fleet which had a battleship and it wasn't where despite taking down most of the enemy fleet with some fantastic piloting, my lack of effective small-ship support meant I was eventually overwhelmed by the more nimble battleship.
I think I shall try a little smaller next time!

[motorbitch]

yes yes. my ships  ignore my orders cause my aiming sucks. sluggish hostile ships fly faster backward then my fast ship forward - because i cant handle the clicks per minute required.
can you maybe suggest me a nice gaymore mouse so i can git gud? i tried logitech but no good.

really. the level of arguments here is below rubbish. i would suggest some youtube videos how not to do it. namely, why not attack my point instead of my person?

[Loud Whispers]

How's your flux? Ships at 0% flux gain a huge speed boost. If you have shields up or fighters set to engage your flux will always be >0% and so you will never catch any enemy ships unless you're close enough to force their shields up

*EDIT
The other thing is that ship facing doesn't matter all that much. Hold down shift key and your ship will face whichever direction your mouse is in. This will let you control your movement with the WASD keys or arrows or whatever you set it to in settings and move like the AI does. You can pull off some nice drifting this way. As for orders, you should give all the orders you want at the same time. There is a brief window of time when you give one order that you can change all of your orders for other ships (this is represented by the COMMs OPEN bar in the top right of the screen).

Basic orders I use:

[click on ship / drag box over ships ] -> right click on place = assemble taskforce. This is really just a move command but is very useful for setting up formations instead of having a big spaceship scrum. Very useful for setting a blockade on retreating ships.

[click on enemy ship ] -> [v] = avoid this ship. Tells your AI ships to avoid the enemy ship, which they'll try to do.

[click on enemy ship] -> [c] = eliminate this ship. Your ships will try to destroy the enemy ship even if it means taking hull damage. Very risky & will result in dead friendly ships if misjudged. Alternatively you can also select your ships and right click on enemy ship to assign which ships should be diving in.

[click on enemy ship] -> [e] = engage this ship. Same as before, your ships will try to keep the enemy ship in battle but will take much less risks when doing so. Your ships will try to stay at a comfortable engagement range where they can recharge their shields when the going gets rough.

[click on enemy ship] -> [I forgot the default key binding, think it's s] = carrier strike this ship. Your carriers will send bombers and fighters after this ship.

[click on your ship] -> [t] = retreat whilst keeping weapons trained on the enemy.
[click on your ship] -> [d] = retreat as fast as you can regardless of the enemy.

Lastly, ships will try to carry out your orders whilst respecting their own capabilities. So for example, frigates will try to get behind enemy ships larger than themselves, big ships will tend to ignore capture orders and focus on hunting down enemy ships, and all ships with shields will do their best to avoid taking hull damage (which means they will retreat when their flux is high and go back into the fight after they've vented/recovered). What's happening is when you tell all of your ships to engage one enemy ship, and there are many enemy ships in the way, most of your ships are unable to safely engage the selected enemy so they're just going skirmish with the enemy ships blocking them. Spreading out the enemy line to pick off isolated pockets, getting a good concave on them with your big ships and keeping your small ships in the back until you've dealt with the enemy big ships are all good ways to maximise your hunting!

[forsaken1111]

yes yes. my ships  ignore my orders cause my aiming sucks. sluggish hostile ships fly faster backward then my fast ship forward - because i cant handle the clicks per minute required.
can you maybe suggest me a nice gaymore mouse so i can git gud? i tried logitech but no good.

really. the level of arguments here is below rubbish. i would suggest some youtube videos how not to do it. namely, why not attack my point instead of my person?

Honestly I'm guessing most people feel no need or desire to help you because you come off as rude and insufferably childish. I'm sure you're a lovely person and are simply frustrated but you appear to have made no effort to understand the game's systems. NPC ships obey the same rules for maneuverability that the player does. Orders to ships are more like priorities than orders, because a ship in danger will ignore your order if it needs to be defensive instead. That also depends largely on the type of officer you have assigned to the ship, if any. I hope you give the game enough of a chance to learn it because it's quite good, but if you're having no fun with it you may just want to move on to something you enjoy.

[Damiac]

yes yes. my ships  ignore my orders cause my aiming sucks. sluggish hostile ships fly faster backward then my fast ship forward - because i cant handle the clicks per minute required.
can you maybe suggest me a nice gaymore mouse so i can git gud? i tried logitech but no good.

really. the level of arguments here is below rubbish. i would suggest some youtube videos how not to do it. namely, why not attack my point instead of my person?

We should let use more grown up words like "gaymore" I guess, we can't all be so mature.

You act like the most negative connotations of the second half of your extremely mature and well argued username.

Address what? "Wah wah game is bad because I'm not immediately successful, I'm gonna uninstall!"?  Ok, yes, good idea, please do. Please uninstall whatever software you use to make these posts too.

Toady is just gonna delete all your whiny posts anyway, and this excellent and witty response. But it doesn't have to be like this. Stop being an aas and you'll notice you get better responses.

[motorbitch]

lots of usefull stuff

i am grateful for your efford, but the thing is, i knew most of this. i did actually try to make sense of the keybindings, get some guides etc.

i think most of what i complained about is very legitemately bad. like the fact that for speed it does not matter which way the engine points, or the fact that orders are just suggestions, or that so few orders can be given at all.


i think the hint that the game was designed as a batle simulator first and that the campaign was just added on that explains a bit.
if i just play a custom battle, and at the end i have one ship left and the other side none, i win.
if i play campaign and i lose all my ships but one, i am bankrupt and even if i technically won the battle, i lost the game.

aaanyway. thank you and the other guy who where helful, but indeed at this point any further advise to me is wasted. o7

[Loud Whispers]

Ah no worries fam. The campaign mode is a bit roguelike in the sense that although you can't ever die, you can lose all of your progress with one bad fleet action. Winning with high casualties isn't much of a bother for me though, since I add reinforced bulk heads and blast doors to all of my ships so that I very rarely ever lose a ship unless I've lost a fleet action completely. And most fleet actions I don't lose unless I had an unlucky warp in on top of some dirty pirates or filthy remnants with my ramshackle salvage fleets.
Gotta say even when bankrupt it's really fun RP'ing as the hammer of Ludd, amassing a horrifying armada of shit low tech ships with which to scourge the galaxy

[Damiac]

Just wondering, do people make it to these forums without playing Dwarf Fortress?

It's totally fine to dislike a game, but to say that it's frustrating when you have the option to just save/load and try again, when there is an easy mode so you can learn tactics, and a guided tutorial for the concepts. It just seems totally bizarre when compared against Dwarf Fortress which is far more unforgiving and un-intuitive in how things work.

Just wondering if people find Starsector frustrating and hard to learn but not Dwarf Fortress.

I mean... sorry to burst your bubble but dwarf fortress isn't hard, at all. It's complicated as hell, and has quite a learning curve, but once you know what you're doing it's trivially easy.  Players who know what they're doing have to go out of their way to make challenges. I enjoy it a lot but it's not because of the challenge.

You cannot build a wall around your system in starsector and just grow and grow your fleet in complete safety. It takes much less time to learn the game systems, and to understand what's going on than dwarf fortress, so it's less complex, but it's still challenging to find an opening, land some shots, manage flux, and keep from being overwhelmed in battle.

[Salmeuk]

Damiac, I think your point is correct, since I would agree that DF is not 'difficult'. However I think Sharp was referring specifically to that horrifying early learning curve a DF newb might have experienced circa, like, 2010? It used to be MUCH harder to pick up and play.

And, despite things like the Lazy Newb Pack and DFhack, as well as video tutorials and walkthroughs, DF is still a frustrating thing to learn. Starsector has significantly more crunch, sure, and the learning curve is much more appropriate for a game, but to completely deny the difficulty involved in learning the various interfaces and menus of DF seems disingenuous.

Sharp was merely attempting a 'soft' gatekeep, you know, like, how did you even end up in this neck of the woods, newbbbbbbb??? Which I'll allow since it's kinda funny.

[motorbitch]

all right all right. today, i bought this game. ive been using sseth key for the first few days.

yeye. love this little shit game to death. but damn i just drove me crazy at first. no joke. sometimes i wanted to smash in my monitor with my mouse.

i still have a few complaints. mostly, this weapons not shooting someties, i am sure there is a bug. two actually, i had one instance, where i had set my weapon group 2 to autofire an 1 to manual. whenever i started a battle, autofire for group two was off. i could reproduce this by reloading the game, i tried 3 times, i verified groups where set as described, and every battle group two started autofire off.
i made a savegame and reported a bug, but sadly its not reproduceable. it seems restarting the game fixed it. aaanyhow:

this game is great. i still think it is extremely hard on new players becasue it is very complex and a lot what seems broken at first is indeed very well designed just not very easy to understand.

speaking of it: officer spam!

so, i only played since 0.95 so i never played the game without officer spam or build in mods. but i did read a lot and i think i now understand it all. ALLL OF IT. ive seen it with my 4.th eye:

so, build in mods make safety overriden ships insanely op. but they cost a lot of story points. for the early  to mid game, the player has a lot of story points, but little money. so giving the player the option to use story points to get a few really powerful ships is great, because that facilitates a high risk high rewad (or rather: high risk low maintanance) game play at first.
but late game, this is not longer feasable. because of the officer spam, the player cant spend the story points on hull mods. the player has to spend the story points on mercenary officer upkeep to get deployment points.
so this is inded rather ingenous, because it forces the player to change strategy over the course of the game. i think its brilliant and i love it.

that said: i still dont like the skill tree. the +2 officer skill is mandatory, this makes 4 or 15 skill points mandatory and thats 100% bad becaus you could just give the player these perks form the start and reduce skillpoints to 11. its a pseudo choice and a noobtrap. i hope this gets tuned.


anyway. great game.

[Majestic7]

If you put your own ship on autopilot in battle, it can mess up with autofire groupings. Other reason for weapons not firing is, of course, damage that can disable weapons temporarily. (Low CR can cause malfunctions akin to battle damage.) Could be a bug too, of course.

Hint: you can easily make minor modifications to the game by editing the settings file in the config folder. I always increase battle size, fleet size and maximum officer number for all fleets.

[Dostoevsky]

From reading through Alex replies (Alex Mosolov, the main dev) on the official forums, sounds like built-in SO (safety overrides) is going to get a nerf (likely by saddling you with Ill-Advised Modifications, like the Pathers have on their SO ships), and officer spam is going to be addressed in some form. ECM will be a bit less bonkers in some cases as well. And mercenary officers sound like they'll be hired in batches instead of one at a time, which should help.

And yeah, skill tree is going to get some tuning. Generally the arc of major patches like this is a balance pass or few over the next couple of months before things settle into chugging away on the next major patch.