Drox Operative 2

Yeah this is where we want to go with the skill tree suggestion – basically reduce the max number of slots you can buy, and give interesting choices that diversify the starting races.

And I agree with you on the mines. For some reason, my early games didn’t have that problem, but now I’m starting to get a lot of them. At least if they triggered for the monsters as well I wouldn’t feel so bad.

Nice to see your ‘terrain’ suggestion of different nebulas having unique properties – that’s one I had in mind as well. Being able to sneak up to a planet following a ‘stealth’ nebula would be neat, as would an added travel speed nebula.

I should be clear that I’m loving the game, I had the day off work today and got sucked into a wormhole and suddenly it’s 5:00 in the afternoon. Would have been a total Quarter to Three moment had I started in the evening instead. :)

@Bluddy, that’s interesting you’re seeing the mine spam now too. It’s not every system but it sure is a lot of them and when it goes nuts with the mine generation it’s just really tedious to try to maneuver. I want to explore or fight or get to my quest objective, but I feel like I’m spending the majority of my time just trying to carefully move around mines. I wish AOE weapons like Bombs could blow them up at least, or give me a Minesweeper component to equip or something.

Also, is there any way to reliably get crew? I found quite a few crew early on as drops or level up rewards but I haven’t seen one in 30 levels (I’m L39 or so now).

Drakk planets can get you crew via a generated quest you pay for.

To me, best idea is to find crew with 2 stats, then keep them as they keep levelling up, unless you’re playing hardcore, in which case you don’t want crew.

Ah, neat! I’ve never seen the Drakk in a sector before!

Wooohoo!

Yaayyyyyyyyy!

I think chained mines was the main culprit of what was causing too many mines to show up. They have a good chance of spawning several and they had the same chance to spawn as a normal mine.

@Bluddy @Steven_Peeler or anyone else, can you please educate me on this because I’m likely mistaken on something.

As far as I can tell, the Defense stat doesn’t work. I’m assuming that’s because I’m not understanding something, hence my plea for help.

I am currently L21 with a Defense stat of 538. The game tells me this provides a 20% chance for a L21 ship to hit me. I am in a sector that says the monsters are L20, so I’m assuming the chance to hit would be a little lower than that.

I have watched probably 70-80 shots and have been hit 100% of the time. Most of them have been projectiles or missiles, so are those exempt from to-hit rolls or something? However, I did fight a couple monsters that used beam weapons and they also seemed to have a 100% hit rate, albeit I have a smaller sample size there just due to monster distribution so perhaps it was really bad RNG. I’m a bit skeptical that’s the case, though.

It seems I’m really misreading or misunderstanding what Defense does, because it doesn’t seem to help my survivability at all despite putting a lot towards it. I was much tankier when I ignored it and went with Engineering for better shields.

EDIT: okay, right after posting this I ran into a pack of Blue Disruptors that used beam weapons. I watched 18 shots before I popped (I sacrificed my life for SCIENCE!) and 100% hit me as well.

Definitely seems like a bug. Projectiles are indeed exempt from attack/defense calculations, but missiles and beams aren’t. I would try starting another character in a new world on the off chance that an update caused this problem in an older save.

There’s a balance issue regarding attack/defense in general: with mines + all the new ballistic missiles in Drox2 that ignore attack/defense, it’s not clear why it’s even worth investing in them or having components that boost them. I think attack and defense should probably be applied to everything, except perhaps AOE weapons (purely for lore reasons).

Version 0.806 is out: changes.

This patch adds Guild quests back in, adds a new Guild win type, fixes mines being too frequent, balances many things better, and fixes several other more minor issues.

Perfect timing! Given my post above, can you explain this?

  • now only players get radar bonuses (should make defense stat better for players)

I didn’t know Radar affected combat. What does it do?

Hmmm. Small sample size, but I have actually seen an attack miss me now on 0.806, but it’s only been 1 out of 20+ shots. Game is telling me I have a 30% chance for a L24 ship to hit me but I’m fighting in an area that is L21. 19/20 shots connected on me (beams mostly with a couple missiles) before I engaged myself and blew them up. I did see a shot clearly miss though, but as it is Defense feels pretty pointless at the moment.

I also fought some NPC faction ships where I had similar results but it was harder to tell as it was a bit more chaotic. I did clearly see a shot miss but it’s definitely hunting for a needle among all the landed hits.

If a ship is within radar range, it gives you a bonus to attack.

Could you email me your ship and world saves so I can take a look at it?

Ahh, interesting, I didn’t know that! Sure thing, I’m going to play through this evening to get a larger sample size and will zip up the files after I’m done playing for the day. I ran into a different type of monster ship (Pulse, I think?) that had beams and noticed more misses there, so maybe I just had a string of really bad rolls or I was fighting a type of monster with higher than usual attack or something?

Thinking about it, I really like that as a player you could focus more on projectile weapons like Ram Accelerators and skimp on your Attack stat, instead relying on manual aiming. On the defensive side, there’s an awful lot of projectile weapons, mines, ship ramming, etc that Defense doesn’t seem to affect which has me questioning the value of the stat compared to say, throwing on another shield or some armor plating or something like that instead.

Maybe for the player ship, a successful defense roll vs. a projectile attack could result in a “Deflection” and reduced damage or something? Kinda the opposite of a critical hit. I’m just spitballing and don’t have all the game mechanics mastered yet obviously, just my impression playing through it right now is that Defense feels a little lacking due to the multitude of attacks it doesn’t help the player with and of course with the NPC radar thing prior to 0.806. Attack on the other hand feels very impactful with my beam weapons: crit crit crit BOOM!

It does present options, but it becomes really hard to justify investing any points in Computers or any relevant components, when you can just pile on more Tactical (aka Strength) and also get access to stronger weapons.

Yeah it’s a real issue. Defense is derived from Dexterity (Helm), and there’s just no real reason to invest in it right now.

Not a bad idea. Alternatively, defense/attack could have a reduced (rather than no) effect on projectiles, so if you have a 50% chance of attacking a ship your level with the current Attack, it goes up to 75% with projectiles.

Just to follow up, didn’t upload a save because it seems to be working as advertised. I don’t know if I was fighting some monsters that had really high attack or the change hadn’t fully kicked in or something at first, but afterwards I was seeing consistent misses. Not the ~70% I would expect from my Defense stat, but I would say >30% or so (and I need to factor in psychological biases when looking at that stuff, so it was likely higher than that).

Anyway, so my takeaway right now is that in 0.805, I was convinced Defense wasn’t working at all because I literally never saw a single miss. In 0.806 it seems to be functioning, but my opinion is that it’s very undertuned compared to putting more into Structure or Engineering and putting another shield or armor plate on. I was playing a Drakk ship and ignored computers but have gone back to a Shadow to play around with Computers, and the survivability differences are pretty stark. There’s too many things that Defense won’t protect you against, whereas shields or armor just work and work in consistent ways.

Personally, I’d prefer if Defense could “deflect” like I mentioned or function as some sort of universal damage mitigation mechanism like armor traditionally and would supplement resists or something. If I’ve got an incredibly agile ship flown by an ace pilot, they should be able to minimize damage from mines or projectiles by steering out of the way, IMO.

@KevinC what kind of build do you go with? I find that the requirements for items get really high really fast, and I’m wondering how you get past that at the high levels.

I’ve been restarting multiple times so I really haven’t done much of anything at high level (I think the highest I’ve reached is 49, the rest of my guys are in the teens or low 20s).

I feel the same way about stat requirements on items, they largely dictate how I spend my stats so I don’t really feel like I have a lot of control. For my Drakk ship I ignored Structure completely and just went shields for defense. Drakk ships get Helm when upgrading the ship and between that and having multiple crew with that stat,I didn’t have to invest a ton there. So it was mostly Tactical and Engineering.

That’s what prompted me to reroll a Shadow. I was going to focus on Computers, Helm, Atk/Def kind of thing, wondering if the crit would make it so I could do okay with lower level weapons (since I wouldn’t have the Tactical to run them). It didn’t really work out, Defense just doesn’t provide enough survivability since so many things ignore it, which made me go heavily into Engineering for both energy and shields. That character is mothballed because it’s not really working out, and is what prompted my posts about Defense earlier.

I feel like right now I have a hard time doing a “build” due to stat reqs on components, especially since the past two characters have had terrible luck finding crew. Helm you have no choice dumping points into because your ship gets slower as it gets bigger. Need Tactical to have weapons and engineering/structure for HP, so I mostly just end up having to spend my crew points on whatever stat I’m short on for the items on finding.

The Bonus you get for every 50 base points in a stat also feel off for this reason. Take my Drakk ship, which gains Helm when it upgrades to the next class. These free Helm points do not contribute to the base and I think they should, because getting those free points means I don’t have to invest as many there to equip thrusters, I need them in Tactical or Engineering or something. I also likely have a racial crewman that is giving me that stat. So because I spend fewer points in the stats my race ship gets a bonus in, ironically those end up being the Bonus categories I’m furthest away from.

I’m kind of wishing that stats just gave bonuses to components and weren’t required to equip them because it feels pretty restrictive. Either that or make it so it requires a stat OR a ship level. So maybe if your Tactical was really high you could equip a particular laser early at L27, otherwise you could equip it no matter what your stats are by the time you hit L33 or whatever.

By the way, I have to say the tweak to “chain mines” has made a substantial improvement. Mines are an occasional thing now, I don’t find entire systems carpeted in them. Much more enjoyable to move around the map now.