[The E]

And here's a few things I've noticed.

One, Weapon variety, or lack thereof.
When looking at capital ship torpedoes, we find that there are two, the "Nike" and "Athena" missiles.

Which are exactly the same. Apart from the Nike being allegedly smaller. Range, damage, all gameplay-relevant stats are exactly the same. This, to me, seems a bit wrong.

Two, Point Defense(-lessness).
When captaining a Devastator or Courageous, it seems that I get killed a lot by enemy missile swarms, while at the same time having to see all my missiles get splashed by enemy PD. Am I doing something wrong here?

Three, Shields.
What, if anything, are they doing? Except suck energy, that is. Missile weapons can bypass them, beam weapons can't reduce them.... So what is their purpose?

Four, persistant ship damage
So apparently, missile loads and subsystems can be fully reloaded and repaired between missions, but hull damage can not?

[Lucan]

A bit a strategy is needed when taking down larger cap ships.  One of the tactics I commonly use is to make every effort to avoid taking on ANY cap ship head on.  Instead, I maneuver for an attack on the enemy ships' broadside where I'm not exposing myself to the line-of-site of their torpedo bays or grazer ports.

Once I maneuver within  firing range of my grazer beams, I target the enemy's PDBs for the purpose of stripping away their defenses.  After those have been eliminated, I am free to unleash a fusillade of torps onto their defenseless side.  For finishers, I target their thrusters and quantum drive so they are unable to accelerate or hyper out of the combat area.

As for the hull damage, one way of working around that issue (except for the campaign) is to assign a negative damage value using the mission event editor.  Here is an example of what I am talking about:

event: {
id: 1,
time: 10.0,
delay: 0.0,
event: Damage
event_ship: "Carrier"
event_param: -150000
event_chance: 100
trigger: "Time"
}

Notice in the "event_param" that a negative value was assigned.  There is no exact formula for figuring the damage value in relation to hull integrity. But with some trial and error, it is possible to create a workable hull repair scenario.  (One thing I have to mention is that entering negative damage values cannot be done within the GUI mission editor.  Instead, it will have to be done using a text editing application -- like notepad.

I hope the information is helpful.

 

[Thaeris]

I did not really find the weapon variety lacking. Starshatter is not FreeSpace: with the exception of a few different types of aeroplanes throughout history, hardly any could easily rotate in a new type of gun armament on short notice. Warplanes are oft built around their weapons - changing internal armament means that much of the internals must be re-arranged, the center of mass shifts, etc. Starshatter, though the style is a bit more fantastic than realistic, still aims to be more of a realistic sim than an arcade sim like FS.

...I realize your comment is about capship weapons, but even still, ship weapons are relatively limited as well. Once a system is installed, it is not terribly easy to rotate it out. FS tends to field a large variety of systems on short notice, but in reality, that's not terribly feasible and possibly presents a logistical challenge. SS is the opposite, and forces you to deal with the fixed weapons of the vessel. Any weapons refit would involve getting the ship back into "mooring" of sorts, where the vessel could then be serviced.

I have read that shields are there principally to deflect beams. Perhaps particle beams are easier to fend off than bombs in the far future, and that's what you must keep the PDBs around for? For better or worse, starfigher ASMs cannot be shot down, though there is a mod out there that does that, too.

I'm also not sure all of your subsystems can be fully repaired or replaced between mission, though I never enjoyed capship missions. Hence, I'm drifting into territory I do not understand. But, I recall that your engineering window lists only so many spares, etc.

As far as net damage, tell me you will fix this for next mission:



...Which is 8 hours from the last one.   If a gun turret is down, it is possible a new one can be dropped into its mounting. But, if there is extensive hull damage, yeah, you're not going to fix it in a day.

[braddw25]

In response to the E's post..

Point 1 about weapons variety. I never really gave it much though probably because I mod the game more than I play it. But now that you mention it, there is not a huge variety of weapons in the stock game. I think Thaeris made some valid points in regard to why that might not be all that unreasonable, but the nice thing about SS:TGS is that if you personally feel that a greater variety of weapons is needed, then it's easy to mod them in. I agree with you that it is stranged that there are so few differences in the torps that both sides use. Ask any WW2 sailor about how similar our torps especially at the beginning of the war were to the Japanese torps.

Point 2 on point defenses. I have heard this complaint many times about the pdbs, but I honestly have not seen it as a problem myself. As Lucan said, the great thing about this game is that although it has flaws, the way different ships have strengths and weaknesses is very well modelled. If you haven't yet learned the best way to attack a given enemy ship and blunder right into its kill zone while at the same time you don't have your ship optimally oriented in relation to the enemy, you do get smoked pretty quickly. I don't know which ship you were attacking, but the most commonly complained about ship is the Broadside destroyer. I can't tell you how many times I've read complaints about how that ship must have an invicibility bug. The broadside is one hell of a tough ship, but I can tell you in all truth that I have taken them down with frigates before. YOu just have to know how to attack them. My favorite method is to use the z axis. Many folks forget that space is 3d. If you take on a Broadsword head on, you are going to get smoked in most cases. Try diving diagonally down and get underneath so you are looking up at teh underbelly of the ship and you might see vastly different results. As I said though all ships are different. YOu just have to learn the strengths and weaknesses. It takes time.

POint 3 shields. There are 3 different types of shields in teh game. I do not remember at the moment the names for all 3, but they all operated differently. Some of them are better against bolt type weapons while others are better against beams. Some completely stop all damage from getting through to the hull until they are overpowerd and reach zero while others don't appear to be doing anything, but are stopping a percentage of the damage from reaching the hull. I apologize for not being able to be more specific, but I'm going from memory here. The shield dynamics are somewhat complex, but they do actually work.


Point 4 persistent ship damage. This is one area that I hope we can eventually change with the source code project. I feel that repairing hull damage should not be as easy as repairing or replacing components, but I think it would be nice especially in campaigns to be able to take a ship offline and send it to a repair facility to have at least some if not all of it's hull damage repaired. As it stands right now if you have a ship with it's hull 99 percent destroyed your only option is to keep sending into the phray knowing full well that it will probably be destroyed. Realistically not to many commanders would do such a thing when a ship could be reparied instead.

[The E]

...Which is 8 hours from the last one.   If a gun turret is down, it is possible a new one can be dropped into its mounting. But, if there is extensive hull damage, yeah, you're not going to fix it in a day.

I'm not saying that all the damage should be gone between missions. However, being able to say "I'll take this ship off the line for repairs for x hours/days to repair hull damage" should be an option available to you.

In addition, I noticed a bug where if you do a jump out of the currently active sector, end the mission, and then try to get into another mission, the game won't let you. That's bad.

A few other annoyances:
-"Defend the Defend" mission directives
-Empty patrol missions (even though those are part of the realistic feel of this game, they're utterly boring, thus nullifying the game part of the game).
-Cargo escort missions where the cargo ship flies utterly strange and ridiculous paths.

[Alan Bolte]

I used to like to fly single destroyers vs destroyer squadrons, and my experience from that is that if you don't have your shields at 100% their laser fire is going to kill you pretty quickly. As to getting hit by capship missiles, I haven't generally noticed it to be a problem, just make sure your PDBs aren't under repair or something, and that they have a good field of fire toward the enemy. It can also be problematic if you're using them to attack a ship in close combat, and another ship starts shooting you with missiles - your capacitors are depleted and if there's a way to prioritize PD targets I don't recall ever figuring it out.

Fighter missiles and AA missiles, on the other hand, cannot be shot down at all, which is really annoying when a strike group attacks out of nowhere and there's nothing you can do but turn toward them, take some hits, and try to get close enough to kill them with your PD before they launch every missile. Generally I just jump out when I see fighters incoming, though as you saw The E the campaign engine doesn't like ending missions that way.

[The E]

So the campaign engine just handed me a string of eventless patrols.
Clicking through the nav map, I found an enemy CVBG in another sector. So I jumped there and killed it LIKE A BAWS.

A few things I am starting to miss:
1. A "match speed to target" command. Yes, you can probably do this by handing command over to the AI and telling it to escort your target, but that (obviously) only works on friendlies.
2. More fine-grained control over the ammo expenditure of the other ships in your squadron.

Oh, and another question: What do you have to do to finish Campaign 4 (Firestorm)?