That’s just the minimap, you would only glance at it briefly to make sure you are moving in the right direction (kind of like bringing up the map in Diablo).
It’s not where you spend most of your time, the actual playing area is much prettier.
@KevinC unless you are playing a Pirate run, I’d suggest getting yourself into the mindset that Pirate worlds are fuel and supply depots waiting for you to raid. With 100-200 marines you can swing by, load up on fuel and supplies. And you can raid them every day or two. Just don’t assign enough pips of marines to cause the commodity to reduce. The UI shows you when this will happen.
Anyways, you ought to be able to load thousands of fuel and supplies this way from very early on in the game. It actually does kind of trivialize the economy if you abuse it but sometimes you just need more fuel than the shops are selling.
Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind! I do have a small contingent of marines so that’s a possibility. Does seem a little strange that a single fleet can use up more fuel than the local economy can produce/sell, hah!
Anyone have tips for finding/founding my first colony? That’s really what I’m interested in doing. Been doing a lot of surveying but not entirely sure what I should be avoiding or looking for. I can’t seem to find much farmland, the best I’ve found in a desert planet with poor farmland. Is it a requirement to have farms or can stuff be imported? Any hazard rating I should be looking at for my first colony(s)? Any tips of finding good candidates, like particular regions or star types to look out for or avoid?
Thanks!
Stuff can be imported, and most of what you need will be at first.
The lower the hazard rating the better: low hazard rating means fast growth, which means you get to establish more industries (and make more money) sooner.
I don’t recall if regions on the map are generated with similar star types, but yellow and orange stars will give you the best chance for terrestrial worlds.
Also, pick a low hazard world as close to the core worlds as you can to colonize. Your colony gets an accessibility penalty the further away from the core it is. So, something close to the core and it should preferably have 2 stable locations to build a comm buoy and nav buoy. Class 5 worlds are best. I wouldn’t colonize less than a class III.
There are 3 uncolonized systems in the core worlds where you might get lucky and find a low hazard planet to colonize (hazard less than 150). Penelope’s Star is one of them. One is a binary system upper right of the core (Yma) and the other is an orange star (Duzahk) in the middle of the Hegemony worlds.
You can also check to see if there are actually any colonizable worlds within the colonized core systems themselves. Once in a while you get lucky and can find one of those.
I wasn’t complaining about the graphics being ugly, I was complaining that there appears to be nebula everywhere, with very little actual nebula-free space - that’d be annoying as hell to travel anywhere without dodging multiple nebula. Is it mario cart or a strategy game?
Ah, I see. FWIW, I usually just YOLO right through the nebula.
Nexerelin for 0.95a has dropped. This allows many more diplomatic options and upgrades the political system to include invasion, alliance voting and so forth.
Seems to work with my existing save and my mods, worth a look.
I still just don’t understand the point of it. You could remove all nebula from hyperspace without losing a single thing, in my experience. It doesn’t serve a purpose, especially when it’s splashed all over the sector map. It just either A) makes you painfully slowboat at speed 4 (7 with the Sensor skill) or B) makes you ignore it and just pay a healthy tax via supplies used to repair the damage.
That’s it. I’m still new, but I probably have 20+ hours into the game at this point. Not a single interesting thing has resulted from all the hazards. No interesting decisions, no interesting encounters, nothing. It’s just pointlessly annoying, IMO. I wish there were a mod that would just remove it until there’s an actual gameplay reason for it to exist. Give me a tradeoff or interesting things to do in there, like have it be far more dangerous than it is but have some really valuable loot to find in there, that sort of thing.
I mean, the thing with space is it’s big an empty. And here, it’s hard for me to go anywhere that’s not covered in nebula storms.
Thanks for that, it answers some of my questions as to what the intent was.
I think that’s the crux of it, in my experience there isn’t a gameplay system or player skill involved. Sounds like most people just plow through it (either full speed and ignore the storms or just slowboat through it). I don’t feel the tradeoff of flying a long winding path to avoid storms from A to B is worth it or any faster, really. I think they’re just too ubiquitous and it makes traveling take longer. This wouldn’t be a problem per se if interesting things happened while traveling, but in my experience thus far almost all the action has taken place in-system, not on the hyperspace map.
I’d much rather have particular regions be thick with dangerous storms but given reasons to go there: certain resources that are available in that terrain, better chances of finding valuable derelicts with some skill and some luck, etc.
In any case, it’s just a quirky design decision that fell flat for me and it’s interested me from a design POV. Sorry to anyone if it seems like I’ve been harping on it. Your link at least answered the question of what the intent was, even if I don’t think it panned out. :)
I think it’s a shame the wavefront design he mentioned didn’t pan out—I admit it sounds more interesting, and I also haven’t ever gotten the hang of seeing where hyperspace storms are going to be. Balancing it so that travel isn’t painful even if you don’t have a wavefront, and extra-fast if you do might have worked out, maybe?
In the middle of my last game, when I had a middling-to-large fleet and my colonies weren’t fully mature, I would find myself navigating through clear spots on long exploring trips, saving fuel on the way back. I was also almost permanently using sustained burn, though, to make travel time a bit less obnoxious. Eventually, once my colonies were pumping out hundreds of thousands of credits per month, I just bought some superfreighters and supertankers, loaded up on fuel and supply, and plowed on through whatever terrain was in the way.
I don’t know if any of the game devs will see this here but I think I just encountered a bug in the main questline.
I was working on the ‘Project Ziggurat’ quest chain and it sent me to a distant system to look for a particular ship and scientist. When I arrived I was attacked by a headhunter with an exclamation mark (so part of the quest). On the comm call with them they basically say they’re working for Tri-Tachyon and are there to kill me. My only option was to fight, so I did. Note that I had a commission with Tri-Tachyon and was at 100 (max) reputation with them at this point.
It was a brutal fight (he had two Doom cruisers that were murder) and I finally won but lost half my fleet. Okay, this is the part I think is bugged. Afterwards, I got a notice that my reputation with Tri-Tachyon was docked -153 and they dropped my commission. I went from having max rep to being at war with them just like that. I think this is a bug. I don’t have a Starsector forum account so hopefully one of the devs (like @dbaum) visits this thread and sees this.
Okay, I’m dumb. I didn’t realize that the various skill… sections were not mutually exclusive? I’m having a hard time describing it, but like this: I thought the choice was binary, you picked one and the other was locked out:
The skill I didn’t pick in the first tier gets grayed out while the two skills in the next tier flashed and then were left with a brighter outline.
But I only just noticed now that once you get to the end of the skill line you can go back and pick up ones you missed. There’s a line of text on the tooltip that indicates the requirements but I didn’t notice. I guess to be fair I haven’t had a skill line maxed until just recently but still.
Ah, you’re not the only person who had a bad experience at that point.
I believe for the next patch the rep hit for that fleet will be flagged as minimal. (This is, after all, a mercenary and a black project, so definitely not above-board stuff you’d go waving the bloody shirt to the whole Sector about.)
Thanks dbaum! I’m glad it will be adjusted in the next patch. It was a total shock to lose my commission like that and the 100K per month from it. Plus, I have a bunch of AI cores stored at a Tri-Tachyon planet and now getting them out will be difficult.
No, my transponder was off and they knew who I was anyway. They address you by name on the comm call and take the rep no matter what you say. Currently, I think running away is the only way to avoid the hit.
Sorry I missed this - the prices and ships in game change on a monthly basis, so if you did a query, nothing should change until the end of the month. Hypernet will pop up a reminder box before the end of the month so that you will not rely on queries just before the price changes.
It could be that relief fleets / freighters may change prices on a dynamic basis, but I’ve only had that happen to me maybe once over years of in-game play.
I find the battle AI in this to be really impressive, especially for a one-person gig. It’s really interesting to watch how well it can know when to commit, when pull back, when to hang back until sufficient forces arrive, etc. And it can micro things like the shield really well, I’ll see it flick off a nearly depleted shield to let the sabots land and then immediately flicker back in to deflect the torpedo or whatever.
It pretty much puts every RTS I can think of to shame. Seriously, well done in that front.
Yeah, me too. It’s great. Half the fun is finding loadouts for your ships that the AI uses really well. It’s quite satisfying to watch.
Another hotfix (warmfix?) out - RC14.
https://fractalsoftworks.com/2021/03/26/starsector-0-95a-release/