Starsector General: Civilians Against War Edition

Okay, I tested it out by putting solar shields on my entire fleet. Completely immune to flying through hyperspace storms now. I still have a poor fuel economy of 40 fuel per light year to work out, but I do have two Prometheus with me.

Didn't see the modlist last thread

fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=177.0

Most of the utility mods improve the game alot by adding things that should already be there, including more music and portraits. If you are having a hard time with the combat, get the target leading pip mod and the better beginning mod which lets you start with a tempest which makes frigate battles trivial. I wouldn't add any faction mods before playing with just the vanilla ones, plus half of the good ones aren't updated for 0.8a yet.

wat

This is what happens when you don't get it via steam like a good goy

but it's a JAVA GAME.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Java, is in fact, Steam/Java, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Steam plus Java. Java is not a framework unto itself, but rather a free component of a fully functioning Steam system made useful by the Steam runtime libraries, shell utilities and vital proprietary components comprising a full content delivery system as defined by Valve.

Roll back your JRE to the latest version of 7 and try again.

Time to try this deep space exploration business again. About 700k of investment later, time to go strike out and see if I make it rich.

has anyone gotten this to work in linux?

Last time I couldn't get the linux version to work whatever I did.

The game isn't even on steam

I did that and now it's asking for a CD, I tried reinstalling the game but I still get the same message, i'm assuming that some shitty file generated somewhere on appdata or somewhere on the java folder, i'm not sure what to do at this point.

I get the exact same thing trying to run this in wine

With the high intensity laser up front at 2150 range, that wasn't even a legit fight with the station. I just had everyone escort the dominator and have the dominator escort the paragon and park the paragon exactly 2000 units away from the battlestation and proceeded to pump death rays into any modules that come into my range.

Anybody have last bread's archive?

There's a linux release, why are you trying to run this in wine?

During my last trip into the deep sectors I only cleared two sectors before running out of cargo space from all the loot I was getting (no new battleships this time though). Came back to Jangala, packed up all my crap, including the illegal ones and went straight to Culan, the nearest TT planet and got pic related for my troubles. Not to mention another 1.5 mil from my survey data I sold to Kazeron.

That linux release gives me a seperate Java Null Pointer Error

it looks like:
Error: ooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooOOOOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOOOOooooo

Your computer is haunted by a ghost virus. You're gonna need to give your Navi some Cyber Holy Water and have it sprinkle that shit all over your mainframe.

i think the problem is the crack doesn't work for the linux release, the linux release will run until you dump the crack over it.

Is there any downside to carriers with loads of D-mods?

Seems like you'd be able to spam fighters for pennies on the dollar.

Carriers aren't just their fighters; the carrier itself is a decent weapons platform. D-mods really hurt ships like the Heron and the Mora. There's also a damaged flight decks d-mod that increases fighter replacement time.

Feel free to spam damaged condors and shit, though.

aye, the destroyer sized carriers are mostly fighters plus some point defenses and missiles. Two fighter wings for under 10 supplies seems like a pretty good deal, especially if they're drones and don't cost you crew.

It seems like the D-mod variants found in stores are all of a few pre-determined permutations. Which makes sense, I guess, but it would be nice if it was random. Would also be nice if you could selectively restore a vessel instead of it being all or nothing. Like, I don't really see why you couldn't fix the engines of a ship without working on it's fucked up sensor array.

Holy shit, letting the AI officer pilot the phase frigate I salvage is one of the best choices I ever made. I just point at something to be eliminated at the tactical map and within 15 seconds the deed is done.

I started dabbling in propane sales and management.

Completely unrelated but what is the source of the webm?

Nothing personnel, kid

thanks to the user last threat that posted the skill build optimized to use (D) ships
I'm slapping together a jalopy fleet and it's actually fun

You know, you could just AVOID hyperspace storms. Unless the whole region is lit up (I've seen this rarely) you can usually dodge them while keeping moving in the same direction. Keep in mind the clouds glow before they turn into storms. Also when you are traveling at 20 burn, you typically pass through a storm too fast for it to do any significant damage. Maybe it costs you 10 or 20 supply across the fleet but that's kind of negligible

As for the perk+shield, unless there is a special exception at work here, the net result should be 12.5%. Reductions stack multiplicitively, increases are additive.

You can have waifus?

Must have been hard as hell to get the modules behind shields like that. With no one in range to do hard flux damage you are basically waiting for the 5 second window where you can angle a beam past the shield onto the emitter.

I guess I have a bit of a hate boner for high intensity lasers. Nice if they work for some cheese, but I'm relying on my larger ships to quickly flux out and destroy any smaller ones they come across, and those lasers won't do it.

So far, I haven't found personal relationship does anything. It's gained or lost pretty much any time you would gain or lose faction relationship while dealing with an individual, so turning in cores, completing quests, getting caught with your transponder off etc. Usually in a smaller amount than faction rep.

Afflictor or Shade? What weapons did you give it?

Oh, and the big downside to AI Phase Frigates is they run out of Peak Active Time extremely fast. As High Tech frigates, they already have low peak time to begin with, but whenever they are in Phase Cloak time passes 3 or 4x as quickly, and that includes active time and CR degradation. Couple that with the "delicate equipment" mod and you really have to get value out of them fast and then be prepared to have them retreat.

If you have an older version already installed using the codes you can do some registry spelunking to find it. It's described on the forum in some FAQ

I can only imagine the looks on the crew after they turn up and see the bunch of trash cans they're supposed to fly. Flying a Buffalo MkII is the equivalent of a death sentence when going against anything remotely spaceworthy.

Afflictor. I gave it two light dual autocannons, one ion cannon and one antimaterial blaster with a multilaser PD on the turret. Everything is designed to be low in flux generation so that the frigate has enough flux capacity to use the blaster any time it wants.

So, get hardened systems? With the Paragon as ultra long range support battleship (I don't even turn on shields anymore most of the time), I haven't had an extended battle for a long time. Usually what happens is the AI gets within combat distance of my dominator, gets the idea that half its fleet is getting blown up too quickly by random lasers shooting everywhere and then usually they try to retreat only to be blown up before they get out of the paragon's range or the afflictor picks them off.

On the contrary, high intensity lasers cost next to nothing to spam, forcing everyone to keep their shields up, meaning:
1) They stuck at combat top speed approaching me
2) The hypervelocity drivers slowly pumping up the hard flux are there to stay since if they take down the shield, the laser tears their armor apart with the 200% armor damage bonus.
3) Pirate spam now means nothing. I can touch them from 2000 SU away and half their fleet is unshielded. Most of them die before they even get to my first line. The worst pirate spam I had was when I went into hyperspace only to be touched by 3 attack fleets. I had 5 ships paragon included. Only 2 pirates escaped.

Another unintentional benefit is that since the laser is mounted on the very foremost hardpoints of the paragon, it turned into a standoff weapon when I need to let the ship's flux come down a bit. I just back off until the lance stops firing, maybe keep the first row of tac lasers on and continue matching the speed of the ship coming at me or trying to back off. They can't turn their shields off and I get some breathing room for more lance spam in about 10 seconds.

Also, did battlestations had shields? I didn't notice any.

Most of the second layer outer regions are entirely covered by storms when I went there on a surveying mission. Getting past them by not going through a straight line (if such paths even exist) wouldn't be worth the time spent. Even at 20 burn, only storms at the populated regions are sparse. The systems at the edges or near blackholes are fucking filled with storms. Also I'm not sure about the calculations, just that I got from losing 20+ supplies for just touching the storm to just 10-20 supplies for flying through an entire storm patch or two. It was probably chewing up so much supplies because the Paragon's CR is very freaking expensive.

You know what sucks? Losing your entire save file due to the game shitting itself with you press F5 to quicksave while using sustained burn or just randomly.

Does anyone else have this bug and if so have they gotten around it?

I got back to playing this game, last time was some years ago and, Dam i don't remember it been this hard.
How do i gitgud? whats a good starting ship i should look for? All i have are those scrapheaps you salvage.

Do not steal focus from the game when it's saving. It's clunky in that regard.

Get the Better Start mod from the game's official forums, then select the Tempest. Now what you can't kill you can definitely outrun.

Normally I would agree that Java is clunky. The last one though had my game go to save while I was in the middle of a sustained burn to a survey point. I pressed f5 and watched the bar fill up about half way then the game shit itself.

The game makes backup saves and stores them somewhere.

thanks user, this should help

In your saves folder, there is a .BAK that you can just remove the .bak extension and it will be a fixed save file.

FUCK. Thank you.

That's strange, today someone flipped the circuit breaker as I was saving and I thought my save would be gone but it was still okay.

Start with the Wolf and the Shepherd. Use your starting dosh to buy a Dram and a full load of fuel, then take a "scan x thing for 100,000 credits" mission. The scanning missions are low risk and have high payouts, usually enough to buy and equip one or two destroyers.

Potential combats include shitty pirate fleets, giant scavenger fleets that want to scavenge you, and domain defense drones if you want to salvage a probe. Shitty pirate fleets should be killable with the Wolf and the Shepherd, you can avoid giant scavenger fleets as they're most likely sub-8 burn, domain defense drones get locked down hard by any EMP damage at all and the starting Wolf packs an Ion Cannon.

Great ships to expand into include Lashers, Hammerheads, Drovers, Enforcers, and Medusas. Condors are less great but get the job done, Sunders are glass cannons and somewhat difficult to pilot, anything that doesn't have a shield is basically just fodder.

I'll add to that and say buy fuel from Sindria, and Supplies from Chicomoztoc (hegemony planet).
They'll sell for 2/3rds of the price, usually.

Oh, and if you do the tutorial and don't lose the condor you salvaged in it you can probably start taking bounties immediately. The 50,000 credit bounties are fleets made up of absolute garbage like d-mod Kites, d-mod Cerberii, and Buffalo Mk IIs. A condor with 2 talon wings can take on a hell of a lot of d-mod frigate trash with a player-piloted Wolf as backup.

Any playthrough's possible really. I started out with the wayfarer and the shepard as a scavenging/prospecting company and only bought civilian hulls that are at least burn 9. A lot of trade, express deliveries and near misses with the pirates later, I started scavenging and restoring military grade hulls (The only way I can get my paragon for example was finding one and paying 1 mil to get it restored) and formed the muscle part of my company.

what do we do with survey data?

Sell it on the black market at certain corps for mega money.

You want to sell it to a high stability black market for maximum dosh. I think Sindria at Askonia sector has a stability of 10, and basically gives you a shit load more money even for lower grade survey data compared to other markets. Plus Sindria is also a big producer of a lot of things so it's worth basing your stores there.

That must mean you were fighting a not-fully-operational battlestation. Normally they have 3 shield segments, projected by a module in the center of each of the flat segments. Only the corners stick out of the shield. Shields have capitol ship level flux and each one is independant, so when it spins around behind it gets a chance to take the shield down and vent unless you are surrounding the station.

It IS possible to take down their "protected" modules without killing the shield, but you have to angle the shot in the very narrow gap between the corner and the shield.

You aren't taking any big fights then. That's not really surprising with your game plan, but it's not a universal thing. I'm always trying to take the biggest fleets I can, and even individually large enemy fleets can take too long for my phase frigates and I have to pull them out. Keep in mind I have a Paragon, Astral (both deployed together) and all the other high tech ships I want as well, plus some support carriers.

A big single enemy fleet can consist of 2-4 capitol ships, 3-7 cruisers, 4-10 destroyers, and more frigates than I'd care to count. I also like to round up multiple fleets at once, sometimes for challenge but sometimes because it's cheaper in terms of supply/CR (and time) to kill them all in one deployment.

Also, every frigate I have has hardened subsystems, and are usually piloted by officers with combat endurance as well, and even those tend to hit reduced CR in a lot of my fights. If I can't win by the time my Tempests are malfunctioning, I'm up shit creek without a paddle.

That leads me to the High Intensity Lasers part:
I can NOT afford to have my few Big Guns spent harassing. Basically, other than my Paragon's main weapons and my Astral's bombing runs, I don't have anything to flux out larger ship shields. A swarm of Tempests/Shades with Heron support just isn't going to do it, and I need to break through as quickly as possible, so no time to play stand off.

One thing I've been known to do is run the paragon with shields down, all weapons off (so 0 flux), charge straight up the middle and wait until I can get a cruiser+ fully into my Plasma Cannon range, then unleash holy hell on it. If I can't kill it in a single flux pool I'll even vent right there in its face and do it again. Odds are the Tachyon Lances have disabled its main guns or its own flux levels will be so high it can't risk firing, while my frigates and fighters are keeping everything smaller occupied (and picking them off left and right, naturally). Even Onslaughts tend to get locked down by this and die extremely quickly.

It's not really so much that it's a complete pile of shit, and while I won't go so far as to say that it isn't, it's more because of due to some quirk of the AI in this version, the second a Buffalo mkII shows up on the battlefield, every ship immediately unleashes all it's harpoons at it like it's the fucking white whale.

It's not really a bad tactic, since the buffalo has no natural defense against that, and can be a heck of a nuisance when left to it's own devices, but damn.

...

I figured it out. I had a fleet looking to scan me, which hid the usual comm request dialogue. They took so long to show up that the mission expired and then they gave me a rep hit just to be assholes.

Should have gone dark fgt

And I dont even like the game.

Ok so maybe I was wrong about the high intensity lasers. I decided to give them a shot and they are actually doing pretty well. I can't figure out WHY they are doing well, since the current setup should be doing fuck all to shields, but if it works it works.

everytime I try to open the damn game, I just get Fatal:null

how do you fuck up in java like this

I tried attacking one of those full-on. Let's just say it didn't end well for me.

The general principle here should be "if it's exposed, I can kill it really fast" with the high intensity lasers. The high intensity laser is basically kind of a hard counter against dominion era battleships with burn drives too, because the AI just loves using them. You strip all the front armor before they come into the lance and by the time they are in the range of the lance, half their shit is disabled from direct damage to the hull. The lance is just there to salt the wound.

Also the full battlestation looks fun to fight. I hope I come into one on my next trip into the deep space. I also still need to salvage a cruiser+ carrier before I start tackling legit large fleets. I hope I come into a legion soon.

Hard flux generation is slower since it's the hypervelocity drivers doing all the hard work, but the HE properties of the high intensity laser is a large threat factor. If it tries to lower the shields, it's fucked, if it tried to fire all the heavy weapons it's fucked, if it tries to come in hard with burn drive it is fucked and if it's escorts try charging you just turn the paragon slightly and wipe out their escorts instead. And I find that ships love lowering their shields the moment the lance's secondary property hits town.

Also here's the paragon in its current form. I'm still looking for a front shield converter to save even more on flux cost though,

...

Are fighters finally fun in this game? Played since around the time totalasscancer shilled it and strikecraft always felt like a joke. Also did they finally add dynamic map sizes? Being chased by two dozen soviet battleships with heavy escorts was a motherfucker even without you hitting invisible walls.

Regenerating fighters are a thing now instead of the permanent fighter wings it used to be. Carrier fleets are no joke now.

Even if you could they all look like shit.

I hope they add colonies and the ability to take decivilised planets for yourself in the next few years

Regenerating fighters
And it didn't cross your mind to put that in the OP? Oy.

The carrier overhaul was actually quite a while ago, so unless you have been out for at least 2 years (like I had) you would had known.

u wot m8
0.8 is the first release with the new fighter system. There were blogposts about the new fighter system, but no updates.

Post build

Really, because they were already talking about it when I stopped paying attention, so I thought they followed up pretty quickly as they often had for balance related changes.

choose one

I believe the red threat beacons indicate the presence of the station. Don't quote me on that though, could be the orange ones.

It's a well known and used 3 letter abbreviation (because DOS) for backup. Windows didn't use it first.

It's one guy. Name's Alex,

Time to study for finals I guess

Also does anyone know why the Sindrian Diktat hordes all the fuel?

Check the market. They're the producer of fuels and are at war with hegemony, which locks them out of most of the export markets since a lot of independent worlds exist alongside hegemony's and their trade fleets keep getting harassed by the patrols.

Define ((quite a while ago)) because last I checked (around december 0.7.2b) both the fighters and marines were different.

I clearly got btfo here

Tried this game for 5 mins and the control scheme is fucking AWFUL

Hold down shift to mouse aim and strafe when using smaller ships. Use directional controls to turn ship manually when using larger ships. Momentum works as per second law of Newton.

Or go into the settings menu and toggle the "invert orient ship to cursor key behaviour" option or whatever it's called.

Figured you deserved the benefit of a doubt. And I may have been distracted by trying to port Ironclad to 0.8.

It grows on you.

That one makes piloting a frigate with nothing but hardpoints a lot easier yes?

Yup. Means you don't have to hold shift the entire time and sprain your pinkie.

Yeah but it turns to shit the minute you try to pilot something without a frontal shield (medusa); you'll really want to get good at using Q and E to strafe.

I am used to piloting the ships with the original scheme anyway since I really like omni shields.

Medusa wants front shield emitter anyway. Increased shield coverage helps it not get fucked so bad by fighters or by getting flanked while phase shift is down, the increased shield deployment speed helps when phase shifting into combat range, and it gives free stabilized shields on top of that.

Generally speaking omni shields are best on low-tech ships with lots of armor and front shields are best on high-tech ships with high mobility. Too bad the omni shield mod is overpriced and has too many downsides.

wat

You need to hit the transponder button twice before it turns on or off.

there's no transponder button when you select tutorial when beggining a campaign. also when the patrol meets you it leads you to a dialogue screen where you can't click those hotbar buttons

It's a tutorial which means you get the skills that do come onto your hotbar introduced to you one by one. Did you by chance just pressed proceed until the game stopped bothering you with text?

...

You're thinking of a Hyperion, which literally teleports behind ships.

It's two guys, Alex the programmer and the artist.

...

Get transverse jump as soon as possible user. Even if you will lose some supplies and fuel doing so, being able to pop in and out of hyperspace nearly anywhere instead of the warp point saves you tons of time and trouble. You can even cheese sustained burn when you're doing that since it takes a little time to do the jump and you can activate the burn to start the countdown before you actually jump. Also, that skill is the bread and butter of the life of a intergalactical FedEx delivery man.

After you salvage the debris field, fight the pirate and begin to make your way to hegemony planet you get tutorial prompt for transponder.
Afterwards you will be sent to pirate station and then to some planet to get a dominion probe.
After doing all this you get all abilities and you can do whatever you want.

Also that skill how you can openly buy really illegal stuff on the black market and run away without going through an inspection. They can't flag you down for a search if you warp into hyperspace the moment you've done shopping.

Giggity.

...

The problem is all the quick save prompts. They aren't really needed and they block you from progressing if you don't quick save.

video games are hard

Space lobsters are fucking needy children.

They seem smarter with black market stuff. It will look at what you bought now andc while they can't prove anything, you still get a big rep hit

That's the thing though. I very seldomly buy any illegal shit if at all. Black market is for cheap acquisition of common supplies that I also pick up in the open market. I've been doing that since the start of the run and every time I have never been caught except for that one time when I bought a fuckton of weapons from the black market and didn't hyperspace jump straight away. They scanned my cargo, didn't find any contrabands but found my cargo suspicious, which netted me a 5 point hit to the faction relations.

that's the problem, then. the pirate wasn't appearing before

Is a Paragon worth it? I already have 2 Astrals (one for interceptors and one for bombers) and an Odyssey for killing stuff.

Yes, a Paragon can act as an anvil to the Astral's Hammer.
Speaking of which, swap out the fighter astral to bombers and get some herons for fighters instead.

The Odyssey is hot garbage and you can safely replace it with a Paragon. They cost about the same to maintain and deploy, but the Paragon is far more effective.

I've not had any problems with the odyssey and I've used it for a long time now, fighting everything. I took the standard layout and replaced the guardian PD with a tachyon lance and it seems to rape everything.

Now fight a real capital ship with that Odyssey and watch it fail spectacularly.

I like the Odyssey, but the Paragon does everything better. You don't have to deal with terrible weapon placement, and if you want to you can aim 4 heavy energy weapons at something in front of you.

Every single fucking time

Until -50 rep you have nothing to worry about.

Apply yourself

Disco paragon is best paragon

In the old builds, I remember you can actually become the food baron by buying every available shipment of food at producer worlds and it'll cause some really bad food shortages once the producer worlds just shrug their shoulders and go "It nice if we could send you those food, but someone bought all 200,000 units of them and they're locked up in his warehouse here". I used to build up relations with everyone by only giving them food when it pleases me.

Fighters are definitely a problem for the Medusa. It's only got 300 armor, so anything that isn't covered by the shield gets quickly ripped through by even interceptor-grade weaponry. 120° of Omni shield doesn't do too great when a destroyer-size carrier can field 8 Talons and attack you from all sides.

Omni shields are great on ships like the Dominator and Onslaught that are very weak from the back. An Onslaught able to cover its engines with shields means it won't get crippled by a single phase frigate. Most of the combat skills are still pretty good, especially Evasive Action and Impact mitigation.

I loved being a space jew so much. I would get hard when I heard about food shortages.

Fighter wings have regenerated, even if they were all blown up, as long as you have a carrier for at least one previous version.

The big difference in 0.8 is that now, fighter wings are now basically a piece of carrier equipment, and you don't have to pay deployment cost per fighter wing, just for the carrier itself, making them hugely more affordable to use. You send the carrier, you get the fighters equipped to it.

But wasn't that only AFTER the battle? From what I remember the only strikecraft that replenished during the actual combat were drones or other satellite like fags.

On a somewhat related note I'm really enjoying the current system, got a pair of condors running interference while I pick apart anyone silly enough to turn his back on me.

What do you guys like to listen to when playing this game?

Homeworld or Wild west music.
Both fit great.

What officer skills would you use for high tech ships, primarily frigates?

Currently I'm aiming for
Ordinance Expertise
Defensive Systems
Power Grid Modulation
Evasive Action
Helmsmanship
Combat Endurance

And one of
Target Analysis
Damage Control
Impact Mitigation

Impact Mitigation is probably the best of the three options there, but the other two are still OK and it makes finding officers easier to have some open options.

Anyway, it's always easier to level skills to 3 than it is to spread points around on a lot of different skills, so that's how I do my officers.

I make very limited use of Missiles. Most of these ships don't have fighters unless the Tempest's drone counts (probably does), but I don't think the 1 drone is worth the skill investment. None of them use kinetic weapons and any point defenses tend to be done with lasers, so gunnery implants would be for 15% range only, which isn't even very significant for a frigate. Advanced Countermeasures looks to be crap. That narrows the possibilities down to just the 9 skills I listed being useful at all

All fighters were replenished by carriers during combat. Having more carriers meant faster replacement/rearming, but even a single Condor or other small carrier could support an entire army of fighters technically.

The downsides to this new system are that you are required to field more carriers to get more fighters where before you could get by with just 1 and semi-slow replacement, and that you must now spend Ordinance Points
to equip fighters, where before they cost Deployment Points instead.

oh, also the old system fighters had their own CR to worry about. They still technically do, but I don't think it affects much. Fighter CR would drop whenever a fighter was destroyed and replaced, so eventually it would hit 0 and no more replacements would be made for that wing. Now it's only the Carrier CR you have to worry about. You still don't get replacements once it hits 0, but I don't notice that losing fighters has any impact on it at all.

That looks pretty good, for a high-tech frigate officer. The Tempest's Terminator Drone does count as a fighter; it's literally a built-in fighter wing. The Terminator Drone has a massive re-build time of 20 seconds and it's a significant part of the Tempest's combat power, so I'd add Carrier Command to the "nice to have" list just for dedicated Tempest officers but not any of the other fighter skills.

My fleet is a couple of Shades, a bunch of Tempests, a few Herons, a Paragon or two, and an Astral. The Herons don't get officers. As useful as the fighter skills are, the Heron's fighters are mainly fill and fodder (usually I go with 2 Talon wings + 1 Claw) and the ships themselves aren't expected to do much in a fight other than providing some long range PD coverage via tac lasers.

Of that fleet, only the Astral has a particularly specialized officer. The Paragon has the exact same loadout (with impact mitigation), but that officer is Reckless because I want my paragon right in the middle of the fight, dealing and taking as much damage as possible

TBH, I'd prefer to fight a Legion than a Mora. The Mora's ship system just makes it take too fucking long to kill, plus it has an Omni Shield on top of that, so my frigates are pretty much useless.

Legion has a front shield only, and all its ship system really does it put it directly into my killbox faster. I'm not saying the Legion is a bad ship, as a carrier/cruiser hybrid it does its job admirably, the AI just doesn't make very effective use of it and I'm perfectly equipped to rip it a new one.

Can someone please give a working copy of the game.

Basically follow the old rule of "if your paragon isn't lighting up the party like a disco ball, you're doing it wrong?"

I hated it because of the retarded (and typical) anime theatrics.
It was nothing more than gundams with a different skin, and gundams are fucking retarded.

3rd post in the thread.

I fucking love this game.

Sorry, 14v3 originally.
Then
6 Combat ships versus 14 pirate scum.
Didn't stand a fucking chance.

Has this updated since the last thread? Because I want to use the 4X mod

no_

I get this.

Like some user explained in the first thread you have to download the original game and install it. Once it's installed launch it and write whatever in the cd key then after you got the message telling you it's not working close the game. To finish you just have to put the crack in the game folder and it should be working.

yes i know how to pirate a game, i was hoping to be lazy and get it from a mega link here and not have a bad one uploaded and some einstein using a lot of words just to say pirate it

I was explaining how to solve the error problem you nigger,not how to pirate it.

Is this Ironclads mod any good?

Maybe after the user who has picked it up because the dev abandoned it ports it to 8.0 yeah.
is that user trashman?

I is.

Debugging the thing now, but all the basics are there. It will take some more time, but should be ready soon.
Also I have to make new station now that they are actually part of the gameplay

We soon to have MURICA… in SPHESS again?

what use is capturing objectives? what do they give you?

Bonuses that can be substantial in the course of the battle. Examples that maybe relevant for ships from small to big include:

Alright, thanks. I think I will wait for either this Ironclads or that other nazis in spess mod to update to start playing again.

Disagree. All of the capture objectives are largely useless or inconsequential.

Orders are rarely relevant. If you have a strong, self sufficient fleet you only rarely need to give any orders at all. Either to retreat individual ships or to try to eliminate or push large ones. Only the AI doesn't really listen to the "eliminate" or "move" orders except as a very general direction of travel, so they aren't even very good when they are used. You want to avoid losses you focus on more "elite" fleet builds.

Both speed and ECM are capped by player skills to very low levels. In many cases, you will find that you are already at the maximum level of speed/ECM as soon as the fight starts. At best, capturing one of the objectives can deny it to the enemy, but at a 5% difference in range/speed it probably won't even matter for your AI ships who often don't use such mechanics to the best they can anyway.

In previous versions, Com relays granted instant CP, which was occasionally useful if you had run out. Nav buoys granted flat speed boosts that were essential to capitol ships, and sensor relays (not jammers) revealed large areas of the battle map, which could occasionally be useful. Mainly it was just the nav buoys that were worth capturing every fight.

That's really not a complaint at all user.

Really? I think the highest I've driven the ECM rating was up to 15%. That's a 150-300 range reduction for any capital ships. And that's without installing more ECM ratings onto my ships.

Maybe it's a difference in playstyle, but mine kind of reflect naval battles where the skirmishing phase is a lot longer than the decisive phase and I don't force a battle until I'm sure of the flow.

Some jap twitter

I pirated the game to see how it plays and it warned me it detected a pirate copy and warned me RNG may be affected negatively, is that a bluff, right?

Enemy capitol ship range doesn't matter at all. They are never going to outrange my Paragon at 2400su, and they are never going to be outranged by the frigates and fighters

I think I sit at something like a 21% base with a 10% cap most of the time on ECM. Either I'm way over cap, or the enemy fleet has ECM of its own and they are way over cap on me instead, because I'm always fighting fleets 4x my size or bigger.

Every ship starting from frigates contributes to ECM IIRC, so a carrier fleet actually has less ECM rating than a battle fleet.

I still hate having normal escort frigates though. They really like strafing into my lasers.

FIFY

Frigates are an absolute necessity because of their speed. You need something to outflank the enemy and clean up stragglers. Tempests work best I think

Yeah I use them for chasing down stranglers. I'm talking more about the fast PD/shield biter escort platforms like centurions that you usually use to plug the gaps of the flanks that comes from using shit tier cruisers like dominators.

I still prefer it if they were fighters though since I'm quite sure friendly lasers/projectiles don't hit your own fighters.

I just want to point out that my fleet is
6 Tempests
2 Shades
1 Paragon
1 Astral
3 Herons.

That's it for combat ships.

Yeah, fuck this game.

It would be nice if salvaging ships was an actual way to earn money. As it is they start at like 100-300c

1 Paragon
1 Dominator (D)
1 Enforcer
1 Afflictor
2 Centurions
(1 Hammerhead in storage)

Then again, I'm not buying my combat vessels so all of those are salvaged and restored. Technically, I can buy military hulls from independent military bases since they don't have a commission mechanic, but it feels like it'll be cheating

Or ships or weapons or actual goddamn salvage. He killed boarding and with all the (D) bullshit you might as well forget any prizes, especially since fuel isn't worth the cost of capturing it.

What am I supposed to do for my money, do these shit randomly generated survey missions?

Farm Remnant fleets for AI cores. Don't kill the battlestations because then the fleets won't spawn.

And yes, you can do missions. Survey is fine if you have the tech for it, otherwise the ones that ask you to scan some random probe/derelict etc are just free money. I don't think domain probes respawn though, so you might NOT want to destroy/salvage them on the way out. Missions do repeat on the same probe if it isn't destroyed.

There's a clue if the ship you get presented with is a (D) or a legit one.

If the ship's detailed description says pirate modified or decommissioned/defective, it's a legit (D) hull. If it just says "too damaged", it's a legit hull. I found the new restore mechanic pretty fun since it gives me more use for my money in restoring ships I want to keep and just scrap the others for supplies, fuels, metals and machinery. Also some ships also give me hull mods if they came with it.

I haven't caught up with the full extent of the changes made, but do marines still play a role currently?

Not like i care, 25mil, 3 more brand new in a garage, and scrapping every other astral/legion, but whole logic, eh
Alex really like errand quests and/or has been bullied by classmate in days of Sid Meier's Pirates for capturing ships and not just buying them after successful privateer-trading, it seems.

Of course if you can farm fleets like that, you are already at the endgame anyway so it hardly matters how you get money.

Used to be trade was the big money maker, especially food. You would stock up on food at one of the major producers, wait for a random food shortage, then sell it all at once because you would get the full price on everything. Of course it would cause an instant food glut and piss off the faction you just did that too, but you could make millions at a time.

Also there used to be big pirate bounties. As far as I've seen you are lucky to get a 100k bounty now, and the actual fleet is so small that you could wipe them with a couple of frigates. Used to be you could find 1m+ bounties for pirate fleets with Paragons and shit. Of course

Do bounty missions while you do scanning missions. They're easy fights most of the time, and you might grab a decent ship or two as well as weapons.
Try and grab missions that are close to bounty targets and to eachother. I once got two bounties and a scanning mission in a single system, I made a huge profit right there.
Survey missions are also good money, but they require a skill point investment that isn't really useful in other situations. Salvaging at least lets you get items from larger stations and wrecks even after you're swimming in money..

marines do nothing right now

Of course the current 50k bounties, considering you can kill them easily with a couple frigates, combined with a fetch quest or two in the same general area, still a decent startup money maker.

Shit, if I want to run errands I might as well reinstall space rangers and actually enjoy it. And it's not like selling captured fuel or crew made tons but it gave you a reason to do the only remotely fun thing in this fucking game - fight.

commodity

I've haven't seen any 100k bounties at all, and was almost thinking the bounty system got axed. So it did? Because having a million dollar bounty target show up in corvus used to kill jangala's economy when it started going rape and pillage on every fleet going in or trying to get out of the system

Nice, keep it up man, I always liked ironclads.

Oh well, I'll still keep a contingent of them as security guards for my fleet.

Which kept the economies in flux and generally made the game more interesting.

These days bounties pretty much only show up outside of the core worlds, and most of them are very small. I don't know if I've seen anything over 80 or 90k myself.

no

Forget about any ships in your fleet bringing fighters of their own or your medusa having burst PD lasers.

If you let them flank you on an Onslaught/Dominator you fucked up and omni shield isn't going to help you.

Maybe if you deployed more than a single ship you wouldn't have issues with fighters/frigates flanking you.

#!V4FSmR5A!omDTlCFYWlPCPWs0aVtLxTNfyL7h_y2588cVxViwXX8

Animu portraits to the rescue, it works in conjunction with the portrait pack mod you just need to edit it to add them (edit the files in Portrait pack/data/world/faction).

The Portrait Pack mod is on the official forum, no need to have an account.

...

Jangala is a shithole anyway

Honestly, I'm okay with bounties being in non-core worlds as long as the previous system is supplemented with exerelin styled attack/invasion fleets from pirates or enemy factions.

>Hegemony is putting out an emergency bounty at make it like 3x-5x the value of a normal system wide bounty starting for every frigates destroyed by any interested private parties. The destruction of the flagship of the invasion fleet will gain you x amount of money and Hegemony will forever be in your debt make it so they allow you to get away with smuggling once or something substantial like that alongside an increase of relations.

Please turn off your transponder before you start smuggling shit.

Shit like the knights templar and Imperium do that anyway, it cant be that hard to make.

you need bigger warfleets to see bigger bounty, i've been at ~420k bounty when i've dropped game, nothing new or remotely interesting to do, eh
5 eagles + 2 falcons (2hvd+2ionBeams are wonderful harassment)+3dedicated to PD medusas+2 harons (2 sparks+trident each; all after being fucked by 4 enemy carriers (12 decks that are 4 broadswords to turn off my symbolical PD with flares and 8 fucking torpedo-bomber wings)+4 ships (about 5-12deploy cost each) that i've changed around to see what better suits, afflictor w/AM blasters in non-aggressive AI hands goes full retard and would just phase around mostly, disabling and shit)

ffs, forgot to mention for everyone, that the game has built-in Battlesizer, just like MnB, and it's set to 200 by default while game natively supports 600 (300vs300 that could easily turn into ~250vs350, all because AI has priority at deployment, and gonna drop main bulk of ships first)
also, 30 ships are limit to your fleet

Yeah, the Medusa needs a carrier with its own fighters to get the enemy's fighters to fuck off because the Medusa can't kill the enemy fighters on its own. You're admitting the Medusa is shit against fighters and needs carrier support, but you're acting like that supports your position? Also,
Most assault fighters have PD-distracting flares, and Talons have Swarmers which do much the same thing as PD prioritizes missiles over fighters.

Wrong and wrong. Phase frigates can flank anything they want anytime, and omni shields do help the Onslaught/Dominator not get crippled by Reapers to the tail or a Shade's EMP emitter before your escort can force it away.

So would increasing overall fleet sizes for everyone increase the amount of huge fleet battles?

I still hoped we had boarding mechanics where we could wastefully launch torpedos/assault frigates with marines in them.

It could happen with mods, make Marines the ammunition and have it equippable on missile slots. Main problem is how long the boarding state should last, how to determine the winner and how to get the game to recognise boarded ships as ships that are unfit for combat.

I have a feeling it's coming back, or else they would have removed marines too. The old system was just too heavily RNG

Marines are for ground combat probably, that's definitely coming soon.

What I can think up the board is maybe design a new class of missile cruiser that's actually a troop transport or retrofit the Valkyrie for the job

Now there's a few things to a mechanic like this. Mods like heavy armor, bulkhead compartments and thick hull becomes extremely important to prevent boarders from coming in and taking over. There also needs to be a change to how crew numbers are simulated (have a slider for number of crew in ship from minimum to maximum number of crew, you need to assign every crew to a ship, maybe a frigate gets a skeleton crew while a battleship gets more spare crew members). Then you can either assign the remaining spots for marines or park them someplace else, giving a paragon a complement of marines on top of the crew can help reduce the number of crew who die from fighting off boarders since marines will take the hit first and in the case of a troop transport/boarding ship, you have slightly more than a skeleton crew and the rest is filled with marines. Make it so new combat damages to the hull (so that beam spam to one spot doesn't kill off the entire crew) has a chance to kill a number of your crew immediately (including the unlucky marine stationed there), making it result in the same effect of as the loss of standing CR if you try to pilot the ship with less than the required crew in the current version. This presents a very new way to defeat large ships despite being outgunned. If their ship has a less than optimum number of extra crew members to replace the ones who died from combat damages, their CR start dropping and eventually, a ship stripped of all its armor and damaged around the hulls but not fully damaged, kills enough crew to get the CR level to suboptimum levels, which causes penalty to stats, causes malfunctions and eventually when it crosses the minimum crew threshold, the ship just stops functioning, giving you the disabled message. This will prevent everyone from immediately using skeleton crews and parking any excess crew members in logistic ships since now maintaining a good crew numbers play a part in combat CR level.

I can almost imagine it now, valks with burn drives going up to fleeing and damaged enemy ships and shooting marines at them until you get new ships.

It does not increases fleet size, it increases amount of "deployment points", which in turn does increase amount of ships you're gonna be able to deploy in battle at once, as well as AI parties, much more clusterfuckery with big ships pushing their small support escorts into enemy Onslaught face.

This is pretty good. If I had a forum account and wasn't phoneposting I'd post it there. I can't imagine it being too complicated to implement either.

Check out the "Frequently Made Suggestions" sticky. There's a subsection specifically about why in-combat ship boarding will never ever be a thing.

I made a cursory read, their suggestion is pretty out there in that they're solving all their problems by implementing completely new system. However those posts were made in around 2012 when degrading CR didn't exist in combat as a system and was just a flat penalty to stats if you didn't achieve minimum level. My suggestion is just a new approach to existing EMP damage and CR mechanics.

Yeah I think a new suggestion that plays to the current system without adding way too much would be good. I wouldn't do it quite as you said, I'd simplify it further. To put it into simple terms

I think this is all simple enough that a mod could do it. It's also somewhat flexible in that reducing enemy CR has value in normal combat even if you can't fully disable a ship. The hardest part I think would be (for a mod) coding the pods to properly cost and consume marines. In gameplay terms the hardest part would be making sure not to waste pods and to target the right ships.

And the worth of EMP weaponry would come into play there, because the doctrine of this play style would be

The issue imo is more how the AI utilize or react to this system as like you said, mechanic wise it's pretty simple. A mod like this might actually convince alex that making a meaningful boarding system is possible.

Actually I think this part might need revising. Currently,

Even without special-disabled being a mod implementation, 0% CR already not only cripples the ship from malfunctions but it is no longer able to keep shields up.

The only code that probably needs to be added is for those 0 CR ships to stop being aggressive and your ships to stop being aggressive to it?

And to make them recoverable. The primary purpose here is to take those ships after combat ends. It does mean a slight change to the CR system, where 0 is basically death rather than just waiting to die. But on the other hand dropping to 0 and then winning the fight lets you take those ships back yourself at no real cost.

Not a coder, but math logic says something like,
>If n/25

I think currently the salvage system is a random chance, so wouldn't it be rig-able?

It's a random chance on the ship being disabled, and being at 0 CR doesn't instantly disable the ship. However low CR ships will suffer from damaging weapon malfunctions, which will eventually disable or destroy the ship on their own. The biggest issue would probably be getting the system to consider 0 CR ships as disabled for the purposes of claiming victory.

This system will also make phase ships and frigates incredibly vulnerable. Are you sure a balance change that massive is worth the ability to board ships?

Looks like the code is already there, but it just needs a new status and getting the weightage changed to +1.00 instead of the penalty amount from getting destroyed

Phase ships getting hit by missiles is nigh impossible though if they have proper lines to withdraw to

Frigates on the other hand. Have you seen them get hit by say, a pilum? I have never

Yeah getting the game to recognized 0 cr in battle as lost may be a challenge there.

On the other hand, both are very likely to hit 0% CR and lose their shield/cloak leaving them vulnerable to a one shot kill.

They will get killed by malfunctioning weapons and engines before that happens

It would have to involve a change to malfunctions, removing the damage component.

Frigates would really be the hardest things to board. Easiest would be shit like the Onslaught, which you can just go behind and expect a salvo to mostly get through PD intact.

Again, the idea is that even if the boarding is successful, if you lose the fight they keep the ship. That means that hitting 0 CR on a frigate would actually be MORE forgiving, because it won't blow itself up and as long as you win the fight you can keep it yourself. Anything that doesn't hit 0 hull would keep all of its weapons etc too.

I'm really enjoying what I've played of this game so far but jesus christ I don't really know what I should be doing. I've got a couple of mods and I'm just killing pirates to try to make money because I'm not sure how else I can with guns, but it feels like I'm constantly struggling to make any money at all

Big ships would be harder to board because they won't run out of CR as quickly as a frigate or a phase ship would. Frigates keep running out of peak time for me even during small engagemrnts and with hullmods extending their time.

Bounties or AIs for their AI cores. Or piracy, everything else is a net loss of resources.

Yeah, I had a feeling it was. I'm worried about doing proper bounties because I feel like I'd get fucked, so maybe I'll try the piracy thing. Even though I still might get fucked. Thanks

Is it a good idea to take all the fleet-wide skills on the main character ?

I was thinking taking all the leadership ones minus the 3 lasts (the ones for carriers) and all the tech ones except gunnery and power grid.
Leaves me with 7pt for surveying or some other shit.

Bounties are scaled to your fleet. The in-game excuse is that you aren't interested in bounties that are too hard or not rewarding enough.
Just make sure your fleet isn't retarded and you're good to go.

Not quite. Bounties are also scaled by the number of bounties you've done. So if you've never done any bounties at all, even if you've got a huge murderfleet you bought with your surveying money, you'll still have to start out killing 50,000 credit bounty fleets made up of 3 D-mod lashers, 2 D-mod kites, and a Buffalo Mk II.

Oh sweet, I didn't know that. I'll give some bounties a go, then. Thanks again. Is there a way to store ships aside from mothballing them, by the way? I've got a cruiser or something that I can't afford to run at the moment, and I don't know if that'll jump up the difficulty even if I keep it mothballed.

Oh that sounds fun. I guess I'll go hunt some pirates. I'm getting tired of massacring Hegemony all day, no matter how many I kill in Samarra they just keep coming.

Buy storage at a planet or find abandoned station in some systems. Go to the fleet menu and there will be a storage button on top right. Buying storage from others cost 5k credits once per planet , it's free if you use an abandoned station with no downsides that I can tell, and storage is not shared between planets. You can also store items, weapons, and crew.

Trying to play a game only using ships salvaged from combat and stuff available on the open market really makes me realize how shitty some of the AI has become. I've got my frigates refusing to back off when they start taking damage, and my condor refusing to send its fighters after the last target, despite being given a direct order.

Ah, nice. I'd already bought some storage earlier so I must've missed that. Thanks

What's the best cargo ship that has reasonable speed? I'm rolling around with 4 pirate Buffalos with solar shielding and insulated engines, on top of the shielded cargo holds. I'm totalling 1200 cargo space while spending 6 supplies/month and 8 fuel per day (not counting the rest of the fleet of course).
I'm not really strapped for cash or anything, I was just wondering if there was something more efficient that still gave me a max burn of 8.

"Orders" are more like suggestions in this game. The only orders that actually work reliably are Retreat and Avoid. Everything else and they will be distracted by pretty much anything.

The Buffalo is the most efficient freighter with a max burn of 8. It pays for it by being absolutely terrible at anything other than being a cargo pod with an engine stuck to it. The Colossus is more efficient in both fuel and supplies per unit of cargo (6 supply/month and 3 fuel/ly for 900 cargo space), but it has a max burn of 7.

To be honest, if I ever get to the point where I need to defend myself with Buffalos then I fucked up somewhere along the way. I considered using a couple of Colossi with Oxes but very quickly realized that is the opposite of an efficient solution.
Ah well, time to hunt for more pirate Buffalos.

You really shouldn't have to worry about speed at all. If you take the perk to improve sustained burn you get 20 max burn regardless of what ships you have.

As for fucking up, the alternative is to use combat freighters like Mules. Not only can they actually support you in a fight, but if you ever find yourself needing to run away there is a good chance at least some of them will make it out with you.

What crack?

Yeah, I just like being fast. Sustained burn is nice but I'd rather put the skill point elsewhere since it's not much of a difference.

I used Mules at one time, but if you have as many combat ships as I do then it's cheaper to use Buffalos. The few times I've had to retreat I've been able to cover my cargo ships and tankers well enough.
If I was playing like Civilian user then I would definitely use Mules, they're fine ships.

There was a question last thread about fighter pilot losses. I just learned from reading the settings file that the default loss rate is 50% before any skills or hull mods. Keep in mind all of those will be multiplicative, so two -50% mods = 25%, not 0.

Shouldn't that be 12.5%?

That would be 3 -50%s I'm was counting the base value as one of those 50% modifiers.

Regenereting fighters and infinite ammo. Shit design decisions.
SHIT.

But bombers have to reload? I am confused.

I'm thinking about making a portrait pack with a bunch of waifus and stuff. What or who do you want to see on it?

Some missiles reload, others do not.

All ballistic weapons now have unlimited ammunition.

Not all, a mod can still add in ballistics with reloading or limited ammunition. Some mods balance super weapons with this.

Cute anime girls

I already have a massive one that will be ready soon.
But that's a nice image. I might "borrow" it.

Make sure it's space themed somehow. Otherwise all we have is a portrait pack full of waifus.

Filthy pirates :)

Space hitler, try to make it subtle

At least one jugallo or replace the pirate faction with them.

The best solution would be to do weapons like what it used to be until you get to capital ships, where small/medium weapons used in capital ships should have unlimited ammo.

(checked)
what about that space nazis mod? you think it will be updated some day?

I think that sort of thing works better with hullmods, otherwise we get our current situation where ballistic slots are superior to energy slots unless you want to do something fancy with HIL or antimatter blasters.
Why not a hullmod call "munitions store" which increases maintenance but gives unlimited ammo?

Why not just go full 40k and go munication fabricator.

Why not go full 40k and make a mod where we can order an Exterminatus upon heretic planets?

On the planetary combat front, I actually prefer stardrive's viral bombardment. It cleans the planet of the filth of other species and allows you to resettle there. I missed playing with my weeaboo bears.

This is my biggest gripe with the fucking game.
A consumable reloader that's single use, making it no better than an extended magazines hullmod.

And the dev is so ass on hat retarded that he's made carriers the most OP ships in the game for anything less than capital and station engagements.
Going against anything with missiles or small shit? Drovers with wasps.
Going against anything with hull integrety? Moras with 2 Daggers and the bombers with one burst PD laser and anti-shield missiles.

I'll upload my autoforge mod here. Let me give you a hint: If you ever face a Gryphon, you're going to need lots of PD, or shut it down ASAP.

So the vanilla autoforge wasn't as the description suggested (exchange flux for missiles).

Nope. In fact, I thought it was going to be that awesome after I found 2 Gryphons for sale, but found out it was shit after I bought them.
FFS they're a cruiser that should be as powerful as a bomber carrier.

my.mixtape.moe/vqhizr.7z

I'll post some webm's after they convert.

Wasp interceptors are insanely powerful, more powerful than even Spark interceptors, or Lux fighters.
PD lasers are normally 4 points, but you get 6 of them for 5 points, with a bonus 6, 500 fragmenting proximity mines that act as flares while doing massive damage to fighters and missiles.

With only 5 second (base) rebuild times, and no crew requirement, 4 Drovers with this loadout can completely overwhelm the PD of massive fleets.

Lol was your original plan to spam harpoons until everything stopped moving?

I already do that with Moras.

Damn I can't wait until I manage to loot a mora.

And when I can't keep a big fucker down, I deploy my AIDS ships.

Wasps have no burst, though, so they can't chew through armor like the Spark can. Because Burst PDs deal their damage in a very short burst, they penetrate armor as if they do 175 damage even though they only deal 128 damage.

You're not missing too much.
Mora has a tad bit more points than a heron, but the dampening field is nice.

Sparks chew through destroyers and low-grade cruisers far better than Wasps can, while being just as effective in a fighter interception role. Using Sparks means you don't need bomber carriers unless the enemy has a capital.

The wasps serve as meat shields for missiles, and with as many as I field, they can deal with everything up to Cruisers.
Even with the Spark's shields, my same deployment gets wrecked by anything with decent fighters.
Never underestimate the power of weapons that PD prioritizes.

please restore your D ships, it's triggering my autism something fierce

I have a hard time believing Sparks can get wrecked by any conventional fighter.

Fucking hell user.

Since everyone is being a smug faggot instead of explaining, I'll put it in simple and doable terms.

Download the real game and download the mega. Install the real game, replace starsector-core with the same file from the mega download. Voila.

The Tempest spam was the major reason I swapped from Sparks to Wasps.
Half the rebuild time, with 500 hull damage, and an extra fighter proved to be superior in every engagement.

My 3 Herons with 3 Sparks each have never had problems with Tempests, no matter how large the Tri-Tach deserter fleet.

(D) ships are cheaper to maintain. If they never see combat, it doesn't matter.
28 ships at only 4.4/day
900 cargo space for 1.23/month
3000 fuel capacity for 3.2/month

Faulty power grid is the only really bad debuff, and I ignore ships that have it if I don't need them.

Curious

You're Herons were doing damage if you have Sparks on them.
None of my carriers have weapons.

8ch ate my images.

This hammerhead build can take on Cruisers, and Onslaughts.
The heavy machine guns are the hardest part to find, but you can make due with light dual machine guns.

AI and officers do surprisingly well in this.

There's something to keep in mind about EMP damage:
If you continue to do EMP damage while a ship system is disabled, the EMP damage doesn't extend the disable time.
The most effective way to do EMP damage is in continuous bursts, so the AIDS build works best with the forward guns alternate firing.

Well, yes my carriers have guns on them. Why wouldn't I put guns on them? This is my entire fleet, minus one Phaeton that didn't fit on the screen. It fucks up everything short of a Battlestation, and I've got a Paragon in storage I pull out if I want to kill one of those. Depending on the opponent's fleet, I'll deploy either the Astral, 1 Hammerhead to escort the Astral, and the 3 Herons, or the 3 Herons with 1 Hammerhead escorting each one.

The Tempests and the Sunder are for chasing only. The Sunder is a SO Plasma cannon build, the Tempests have Swarmers, 1 Pulse Laser, and 1 Phase Lance.

Ayy lmao, looted myself a non-D condor. Time for bomber wings.

Unless I'm reading this wrong. There is simply no point to use Prometheus tankers over a bunch of phaetons. Am I missing something? At a certain point is Prometheus more effective than Phaeton?

A Prometheus holds 3000 fuel and costs 10 supplies/month. You need 5 Phaetons to hold 3000 fuel, which will cost you 15 supplies/month. If you really need tons of fuel, and don't care about the lower burn (i.e. you have Navigation 3) or the increased sensor profile, the Prometheus is more efficient.

Consider this

You need 5 phaetons for the fuel cap of 1 Prometheus, however you end up with 5 more supplies/month on maintenance and carry 100 less cargo space. Logistically speaking, flying 3000 fuel around takes the same amount of fuel no matter which tanker you're using.

Guns on carriers limit the fighters you can deploy.
You spent 32 points on PD when you could have spent it on fighters. 1 Spark could have replaced all that PD, and the extra points could go into 2-3 Tridents.
You could replace the Gravitons with Ions to synergize with the damage from your bomber spam.

When your cost per light year of fuel and monthly maintenance exceeds that of a Prometheus, then it's time to swap.
Eventually you'll stop finding decent, damaged Phaetons and you'll be forced to swap.

It's almost time to launch another deep space exploration. This time with a carrier and bomber wing at hand.

Yeah probably.

The only thing that matters now is fighters; if a carrier has to use PD it means it has no fighters and it's already dead.

why

Tridents are less effective than Sparks at what I want the Sparks to do; blenderizing the fuck out of frigates, destroyers, and light cruisers. Tridents are also really fucking slow. If the Sparks are acting as PD for the carrier they're not killing things; putting PD and some guns on the carrier means its fighters can be more safely aggressive.

Have you ever flown an Astral? You want low-flux guns so you can spam the fuck out of Recall Device and flatten everything. The beams are really just there to make frigates and destroyers not want to engage the Astral.

Or it's fighters are killing something over there while the carrier is killing something over here. Carriers can basically be in two places at once and they can get flanks off of themselves. Not putting guns on the carrier means you're giving that up.

wait, there's a way to remove the (d) on your ships?

This.
And that's why I modded Missile Autoforge. The dev made fighters/carriers the objectively best build in game.

AI doesn't always raise shields for Sparks.
AI always raises shields for missile spam.

If the AI shield soaks missile damage, they're done.
If the AI doesn't shield soak missile damage, they're done.

Sparks are garbage tier, only good for using with converted shuttle hangars.

Have you considered that you might have brain problems?

Drover+Spark:
64*2*8=1024 DPS
Base replacement rate: 10 seconds
Shields, no flares

Drover+Wasp:
75*9=675 DPS
Base replacement rate: 5 seconds
Stinger class proximity mine: 2
500 fragmentation damage, which does 25% damage to shields and armor
500*.25*2*9=2250 Burst Damage

Spark swarm engages heavy PD
Spark swarm uses shields
Spark swarm spends flux on shields rather than lasers
Spark swarm gets disabled from overloads and destroyed by PD

versus:

Wasp swarm engages heavy PD
As soon as Wasp swarm fires, they drop 2 bombs, which act as flares
Maybe they do damage, maybe they don't, but the bombs distract PD, allowing Wasp swarm to continue doing damage when Sparks would have been disabled from flux usage
Enemy launches swarm missiles to deal with Wasp swarm
Wasp bombs detonate missiles, protecting Wasps doing damage

Yeah but it costs more than just buying an undamaged one.

Pic related

Here, try this. Load up an Astral with nothing but 6 Wasps and no officer, then try to kill an Onslaught with it in the simulator. Now do the same with an Astral that has nothing but 6 Spark wings.

With a carrier officer, the 6 Spark Astral kills the Onslaught in 50 seconds. The 6 Wasp Astral never kills the Onslaught because the Wasps get fucked by flak, Stinger mines or no.

*nothing but 6 Wasps and a carrier officer
And by carrier officer I mean an officer with the 3 fighter skills.

Capturing other stations and something to do when?
Fuck all endgame ships making the game boring. I'll let those shitty paragons and astrals rot in some random market from now on.

...

I put it in green text, do you understand now?

Oh, and if you target your Sparks while they're attacking something, you can see that they do not generate soft flux from firing their lasers. They have more than enough flux dissipation to keep their shields up and fire their weaponry at the same time, without generating any soft flux buildup. So you're objectively wrong, Sparks can spend flux on shields while still firing.

Go fight a battlestation user?

Shit was easy when you have a storage full of capital ships.

Oh, what's the best mod for a masochist?

Templars. It's not out yet, though.

So are all of you using carriers and Paragons or do you fly smaller ships?
The Diable Avionics mod has the Vapor frigate. It's perhaps my favourite frigate right now. The silly thing has somewhat lower stats than a Tempest, but it has an ability similar to phase shift which grants it a ton of mobility and makes it look even more like a shitty anime character. Between the Arbalest to wreck shields, the IBIS for PD and the phase lance plus my speed and dash I eat other frigates alive and can easily disable cruisers for the rest of my fleet.
When I don't need speed I use the Gust-class cruiser. It's not finished, I need to find the integrated PD AI for the tac lasers to do their job properly. Even so, it packs a hell of a punch with that thermal pulse cannon.and even has room for a single strike craft squadron.
bump

Didnt that faggot give his weebmachines, oh I'm sorry. Wanzers swords? Some of his shit is just so unfun to fight, like that frigate with will say juuuust out of range of your guns.

I'm flying a beat-to-shit Eagle with a rack of Phase Lances. It's very, very slow.

K, now I'm board. This shit really needs mods to plaug the holes, hopefully the fag finishes up the basegame shit so he can add more ships and what not.
Hurry up ironclad fag, I need more but not the same.

Fighters were supposed to get a hullmod that stop weapons from building flux. Looks like it's working for that fighter.

Its a nice fleet but, I feel like I should point out, you should dump those salvage frigates and bring 4 salvage gantries so you get 100% salvage bonus.

I always fit the sensor profile engine insulation on all non-combat ships if possible, then add the survey/solar rigs to the cargo/fuel haulers as it fits.

Personally I decided to use command console to give myself skill points after reaching lvl40 to enjoy the entire skill set. I don't agree with the cap as it prevents you from getting any combat skills, given that for example having 10 officers at level 40 riding 10 powerful ships is better than you driving a super paragon with "normal" AIs. Why yes, I'll have my cake and eat it too.

Haven't found a paragon yet so I use either an Aurora or the Astral during battles, and Tempests are the go to ships to pursue, Moras/herons for the swarm.

My Astral setup is 1 dagger 3 kopesh 2 gladius, but considering going full bomber loadout and let escort carriers carry fighters.

I want to build outposts in the far corner and grow my supplies/fuel already. Don't care about colonizing planets, the dev will implement that when he is ready.

Does the +15% weapon dmg from Ordnance Expertise increase the dmg of missiles ?

It doesn't specify weapon type, so I would assume it does.

Paragon user, I've gotten two plasma cannons fighting the ships spawned by the station. Lost the heron and a centurion in the process though. I think I'm almost ready to call this expedition short and bring the fleet back to the known domain. You reckon the plasma cannons will let me play with the big boys?

Find Settings.json in the game's install folder (\Starsector\starsector-core\data\config). Open it in notepad. Find "playerMaxLevel" and set it to whatever you want.

is this one of those space sandbox games

PLASMA CANNONS ARE SHIT! SHIT!
t.Tachyon

PLEASE RESPOND

well thanks

pls just buy the game its only like 10 bucks and much better content than most 60 bucks releases out there, even if its not "ready" yet.

well, it would be nice to try it before i buy it. is there a demo?

They're okay, but they take a lot of flux to fire. Tachyon lances have the advantage of emp + range and autopulse cost less flux to fire than they do damage.

8.1 FUCKING WHEN

GOD DAMMIT ALEX YOU LAZY FUCK AT LEAST FIX YOUR GAME SO THE MODDERS CAN MOVE FORWARD

well no, you can torrent i guess, because you dont have the "drm" which is just a check, it will keep pestering you about it in game.

Weapons with larger per hit damage work better against armor though.

I would agree that the High intensity laser on the fixed mounts of the paragon are probably the best bet, with the tachyon lances on the swivel mounts, having the max range mods installed.

Maybe phase lances, tactical laser and burst PDs, with auto-swarm missiles on the leftover mounts Ordinance permitting.

Range is very powerful in the game.

I already explained how to make it work anyways.It honestly can't be made any easier for you at this point.

See here:

8.1 will probably not come out until 4-6 months later looking at his history