So there we’ve got the imperatives for stations in Starsector. From an art creation standpoint, this means that I don’t have to draw ungodly huge sprites 4-5 times larger than the largest capital ship and make every little piece unique. This means they’re like one big Starsector ship with a bunch of smaller ships attached at various points. There are still degrees to which range comes into play, but you’re (almost) never going to be able to kite/snipe a station battle. So: the player must close with the station.
#Starsector redacted plus#
Stations also need extreme weapon range so that they don’t get stuck in a place that rewards long-range player ship builds plus tedious combat grinding.What to do? Make the station rotate! (Like in Master of Orion 2! Which also had separate directional shields, which we also stole because it’s a great idea.) But movement is supremely important to defense in Starsector and an immobile target is an easy target. We knew from the start that stations had to rotate.This is actually largely covered by Alex’s post, Orbital Stations In Combat, but I’ll repeat a few points in my own words because they inform the artistic direction for battlestations: There were a few core mechanics for stations that followed logically from the concept of stations in general and considerations of combat mechanics in Starsector in particular. It’s obviously an awesome idea. But how would they work?
I mean, this is a space game, of course we’re going to think about putting big stations into combat. The conclusion to that exchange was to put off further discussion until “the time was right”. Upon reviewing correspondence with Our Benefactor, it appears that we first discussed stations … quite a long time ago. (At least someone around here respects important Hegemony COMSEC directives!) Which seriously is all you’re going to get out of me on that front. It was quite rewarding to see people freak out when they ran into a fully armed and operational Remnant Battlestation.Īnd there’s more planned to do with stations in battle, of course. And we’d been planning to implement them one way or another for quite a long time.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, how about those battlestations? Pretty big, right? They took some doing. Many of you have clearly not been following important Hegemony COMSEC directives, leading directly to speculative rumour-mongering among the civilian population about the art and design of certain deep space objects which are the subject of today’s blog post. Here be spoilers to Hidden Fun Content in Starsector. If this document has come into your possession outside of protocol 20 then you must destroy this document and report immediately to your unit intelligence officer for enhanced debriefing. If you can start the fight with an advantage in this regard, it actually goes super easily.The following briefing is cleared for officers at Hegemony COMSEC level ALABASTER. Personally I don't like this strat too much.
How well it's going to work depends on how skilled you are at using that ship however. If you are good at piloting Dooms - go behind a Radiant, deploy some fun mines and shove reaper torpedoes in it's ass. Quad Tachyon is great at killing smaller Redacted ships but barely scratches a Radiant - plasma or autopulse imho works better there (plus it's more flux effective which is important if you are using Paragon to protect your other ships). If you do want to use a Paragon then use hard flux dealing weaponry. Harbinger turns off the shields, Onslaught turns on anti hull and anti armor weaponry. Personally I actually had fairly good successes with a combination of low-tech Onslaughts/Dominators AND high-tech Harbingers. If you have your own from the Galatian Academy storyline - with typical loadout it can easily defeat a Radiant and with it's intended loadout (but that's ultra lategame) it mops the floor with Radiants and eats it alive in sub 30 seconds. Makes fights much faster as you won't have to care so much about capturing comm relays first. And if you can then go for 10 (needs a skill) OR get a mercenary officer or two. Otherwise you will be at HUGE DP disadvantage. Make sure you have at least 8 officers assigned to ships. You might need level 3 skill in leadership if you want to keep it at above 50% CR while also having Alpha core as a pilot. 40 DP only, can obviously fight other Redacted ships very effectively. if you have Automated Ships skill then you can have a Radiant of your own. Drop rate for Alpha cores seemingly dropped quite a lot in 0.95a so do expect it will take a while to get any Alpha cores from them.