[0.95.1a] Nexerelin v0.10.3i "SpaceLand Battle" (update 2021-12-17)
Author Topic: [0.95.1a] Nexerelin v0.10.3i "SpaceLand Battle" (update 2021-12-17) (Read 1900289 times)
SpaceDrake
Mio Harcourt: fixin' the Machine.
Re: [0.95a] Nexerelin v0.10.2c "Mercenaries and Patriots" (fixes 2021-06-12)
« Reply #4050 on: July 24, 2021, 08:10:08 AM »
So just to be clear, the "story victory" is as definitive as any other victory, right? Like if I clear the story, conquest for victory et al. won't be tracked anymore?
Quote from: SpaceDrake on July 24, 2021, 08:10:08 AM
(note that you can remove any existing victory with the ResetVictory console command; conquest/diplomacy victories will be reapplied if their conditions are met, but story one won't)
Fuzzatron
I have big problems with the Vulture Scavengers (which I believe are added by Nex, if I'm wrong, by bad)
I don't have problems with opportunistic scavengers trying to muscle me out of debris fields, etc.; my issues are:
1. Killing them hurts my rep with the independents. This is nonsensical. The independents are, by definition, an unaffiliated, misc. category of peoples. Why would they all care if I blow some random scavenger fleet? Also, they were going to kill me for the scavenge too! Why am I a bad guy for defending my own business and livelihood but when they do the same thing is "lawful."
2. It's "lawful" because neutral pickets will join the fights on the scavengers side. This is also nonsensical.
If this isn't making sense, let me tell you a story that happened to me this morning:
I'm TT and at war with the Heg. I joined a fight between a couple Sindrian fast pickets and a Heg invasion force and saved all the Sindrians' lives. A vulture scavenger fleet happened to be right there and claimed the debris field (literally the one from the battle I just won) and I had to fight them for it. This is already ridiculous and unfun. But then, the Sindarin pickets (whom I had just saved and were literally involved in the battle that created that debris field) all were willing to join the battle against me. That is absolutely ridiculous, irrational nonsense.
Anyway, they're all dead and I glassed Volturn for good measure. *** lobsters.
Well, you are killing a bunch of independents, they're going to notice that even if they don't become insta-hostile. (It's the same penalty in terms of code and the rep loss amount, as when you kill some random smuggler)
I can see how other fleets joining the fight on the scavs' side would be annoying, yeah (though non-Independent fleets should only join the scavs if that faction likes indies more than you for whatever reason).
I have a notion to disable fleets from joining either side in a battle with scavengers, the idea being that if two groups of people want to kill each other over some debris that's a "them" problem that the third parties don't want to touch.
I mean, the real problem here is that what it should really call for is a certain granularity that the current game engine isn't quite set up to do; if you and some vultures get into a fight over battle salvage in Hege space, for example, the response of the local Heggies should be to warn both combatants to knock it the f*** off or they'll be engaged, and then to enter a three-way battle if you and the other guy insist. But the current scripting doesn't support, well, a whole shedload of that, so Histidine has had to make do with what can be done in the current engine.
In general I understand the gameplay purpose of the vultures; they're there to make big fleet battles in which you are neutral less loot-pinata-y. Even as it stands it's possible to vulture scavenge your own way to some killer fleets without even having to explore much, and the NPC vultures just help provide some pressure and make you think a bit about how to best get your hands on some hardware (and potentially risk local po-po getting annoyed at you running silent or whatnot). I definitely understand the frustration of being there first and then the NPCs roll up and assert this is THEIR salvage, though, or your indep standing having no relation to how they react to you.
Helldiver
Quote from: Fuzzatron on July 25, 2021, 05:57:47 AM
Indies being mildly unhappy about you killing their buds is sensical, and it's only a reduced loss with no outright hostility. Just because their fellows are being a-holes in how they try to get their salvage doesn't mean they won't stick out for them, same as how people will help a friend in a fight outside a bar without thinking of whether their friend was in the right or the wrong. The writing also shows that many indies are one step removed from pirates and that they can have an "us VS them" mentality towards other groups.
Also, people act like it blocks them from salvaging their own battles, but you already salvage from your battle at the battle-end screen. The additional campaign debris is anyone's grab, same as how you can grab it from other factions' fights.
In general I understand the gameplay purpose of the vultures; they're there to make big fleet battles in which you are neutral less loot-pinata-y.
Besides making free easy loot less of a thing, it also creates emergent opportunities for battle which is good in a game focused on space combat. It also adds the crucially missing aspect of fighting over salvage and AI actually caring about salvage in the base game (vanilla only has this in some scripted events for missions) which contributes to making the game world alive.
You can still get plenty loot though, since scavs don't arrive immediately. You need to be quicker however, which sometimes leads to choices (beelining for a wreck that you really want restored for your fleet first over other wrecks even if they're closer).
I think that part of the frustration with these features comes from players being used to being able to do whatever they want to the AI unopposed. When the AI is no longer stupid and no longer bends over all the time, they feel threatened.
« Last Edit: July 27, 2021, 07:28:52 AM by Helldiver »
Nex is life, and my helm is pointier than yours!
DownTheDrain
Quote from: Helldiver on July 27, 2021, 07:26:13 AM
I'd argue that scavengers trying to claim debris from the fleet that literally blew all those ships up in the first place is pretty damn stupid.
Admittedly that's a special case, but it's clearly the AI trying to bend the player over here.
« Reply #4057 on: July 27, 2021, 10:20:58 PM »
Let no one else tell you vulture scavengers are bad they are a major part of immersion. And I'm happy I'm not the only one scavenging ***! It's a necessary evil for the player whether they like it or not.
idiotekque
I think the issue here lies more with the base game than anything, in how it handles Indies and your rep with them. I feel like people (and the game itself) forget their lore blurb:
"Not a unified faction as such, the Independents are a loose category of polities and free agents unified more by a lack of association with a major faction than any shared qualities. Independent worlds and the spacers who call them home often share data, trade generously among themselves, and will readily cooperate to perform short-term security and military actions to better protect what freedom they have maintained by working together. Equally likely, trust can break down, and Independents will suspiciously deny each other favors, compete viciously, and turn a blind eye to the misfortune of neighbours."
So while they do hold those "loose" bonds, that doesn't mean that they should function as a hive mind that keeps track of every single thing that happens to every single random individual claiming to be "independent". They even outright work against each other, as per the lore, on many occasions.
But this feels more like a limitation of how reputation functions in game, more than anything. How it realistically should function, is that if you're doing a lot of black market trades on a certain indie station, picking off their salvagers in the system, etc, that base should develop a negative opinion of you. But if you're on the other side of the sector, fighting scavengers over a debris field that you created, defending that claim absolutely should not have any correlation to what indies elsewhere think of you, at all.
But again, that would require the rep system to function on a much more specific basis, sort of like how you have rep with officers you might run into. If something like that could be applied to individual stations/planets, and then the station/planet's rep then applied to their affiliated officers and fleets, Independents would feel much more immersive, and not like just any other faction in the game (which is exactly how they function, outside of immediately hostilities from identified combat).
The way I work with it is just using the console to relations to try to emulate that behavior, and then placing limitations upon myself at times in not being chummy with indie stations that realistically wouldn't like me. It isn't really a fix, but it's something.
I feel the same way about Independents, but I'd say that's a base Starsector issue and not anything special with Nexerelin.
I put a suggestion (which probably won't be implemented), because Independents don't really make sense as being a group, and also not really interacting with the other big factions either.
It would be great to have truly Independent planets and groups so the Scavengers group could be *** off with your rightly, but the Smugglers, or Miners don't really care.
On a separate note I have a Nexerelin question. If I play as a pirate does my actions on killing merchant fleets have any effect on the big powers in their battle over the sector? Like if I lower the accessibility of Kazeron will that stop Persean League sending big invasion fleets to other factions? I know I can intervene more directly by stopping invasion fleets, or killing defending fleets but just wondering if killing traders or mining fleets has any actual benefit to me other than improving colony export rates (if I had a colony)?
Quote from: Sharp on July 28, 2021, 02:58:35 PM
In regards to invasion fleets it does to some extent. I asked for some information on what impacts factions in what ways some time ago so let me quote the mod author here:
Quote from: Histidine on January 05, 2021, 04:46:16 PM
Invasion spawning depends on the supply of ship parts, fuel, supplies, marines and heavy armaments [...] It checks all colonies the faction has daily
[...] A bunch of things are affected by stability, including invasion spawning
Outside of that, destroying merchant fleets can have the usual effects like weakening colony defenses through shortages of commodities consummed by defensive structures and loss of stability from shortages of basic commodities.
Sweet, thanks that is great to know! Appreciate the quick response and direct quote as well!
Another amusing thing about Indies in game as they are that made me laugh... When you run across decivilized planets that hail you, there's a chance that they'll ask for the supplies they need to re-colonize their planet. What you do then, to this group of random individuals who have been eking out a living on a decivilized world for God knows how long, will affect Indies' opinion of you across the entire sector, or vice versa, even if they don't possess as much as a comm link.
Again, obviously just a limitation of their current implementation, but another detail that's a little funny, and a good example of why the current implementation is so flawed.
dEVoRaTriX_LuX
Any chance that Nex could add 3-way of 4-way battles in the future?
Quote from: dEVoRaTriX_LuX on July 28, 2021, 07:39:12 PM
Not a chance in hell. That's what I was talking about earlier; there are scenarios where the real ideal would be a three-way fight, but the base engine itself does not support that and making Starsector support a feature of that scale is way more work than is reasonable to ask of Histidine. If Histidine wants to go for it, then super, but implementing battles beyond the two-side-with-allies version we have now would require huge rewrites to nearly every element of the combat code, including the AI.
Quote from: idiotekque on July 28, 2021, 07:36:20 PM
I mean, I can at least follow this one. They don't have hyperwave comms immediately, maybe, and it'll be a while before their ships get places, but sooner or later word will get around that you helped a new polity get off the ground, and you did it without conquering them or selling them out to one of the big factions. That'll mean a lot to indeps everywhere, and it makes sense that you get karma for that. It's just a bit cleaner to implement it immediately rather than on a delay.