Starsector - RT 2D indie space goodness

[GreyViper]

Hahaha just got my colonies glassed by Hegemony for illegal AI usage. I did not see that coming. But so far when you do get the colony going, it seems everybody is out to get you. It was getting absurd playing pop a mole with pirate raiders at one point.
Overall fantastic game and with mods it almost gives you a feeling of a full game.
FYI about ships that are good at start special mentions go to Tempest, Drover & Doom.

 

[PapaPetro]

If you use AI cores... that's a paddling.
If your colony grows above 3 pop... that's a paddling.
If your exports start competing with theirs... that's a paddling.
If you set your colony to a free port... that's a paddling.
If you try to stop the paddling... that's a paddling.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If you want a REAL paddling try taking out the giant loan from Tri-Tach and not repay it.

 

[Norfleet]

Clearly, the answer is to get very good at paddlin'. Do unto others before they do unto you. If you're going to start your own Space Empire, you'd better have many times more than the "bare minimum" need to establish a colony, because if you sink all your meager assets into that colony, you'll have nothing left to cover it.

As a rule, as in real life, your expense budget should not exceed 10% of your income. If you're making $100 a day, then your budget is $10 a day, no more. Anything costing you more than that is out of your budget range.

 

[Damned Registrations]

To be fair, income in Starsector varies wildly. One month you can fly around and find nothing to do except some shitty exploration mission that takes a month to finish and rewards only 50k, the next you get 3 procurements for the same planet that let you rake in a million credits in a single week.

 

[Norfleet]

To be fair, income in Starsector varies wildly. One month you can fly around and find nothing to do except some shitty exploration mission that takes a month to finish and rewards only 50k, the next you get 3 procurements for the same planet that let you rake in a million credits in a single week.

In situations where outputs are variable, always assume minimum.

 

[Fedora Master]

So, regarding colonies, anyone got any pointers? I established one on a rather decent 75% world but of course I'd like to expand to one of those tasty ultra rich volcanic worlds for the minerals, is there a specific build order to make those turbo-inhospitable worlds viable?

 

[Commissar Draco]

They are vial-able to mine there Comrade if ore is ultrarich even the 300% hazard make them profitable just put there mine only buildings there, really good governor helps a lot too also look for places with mild weather and Crashed terra-forming drones they lower hazard and thus operating costs too.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The other problem with hazard rating is the garbage growth rate. Not much to be done to fix that, unfortunately. You can keep costs down by using AI cores to reduce demand and cover the demand with in faction production. Defenses will be expensive as fuck so it's ideal to have your mining hell hole in the same system (or better yet on a moon of) a habitable planet with a patrol HQ. And since it's an uninhabitable shithole anyways, may as well try to find one with low gravity for the access bonus. Although at the end of the day, most of the profit will come from having good resources. Check ice planets too for volatiles, they're also rare and needed for fuel production.

 

[Catacombs]

Got a 12 page long thread in GRPG of all places for this in case you want to discuss the game https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/starsector-rt-2d-indie-space-goodness.58852

Thanks, friend.

 

[Catacombs]

I'm interested in teaching myself Java to write my own mods.

Master Trade Lord Sseth led me here,at last got something to play at work!

His video made me want to buy the game. I'm enjoying it so far.

If you want to expand the game a litle, get SWP, it neatly inetegrates into vanilla. If you want 4x, get Nexerelin. Aside from version checker and speedup, id also get lightshow and trailer moments. Starship Legends is highly recommended as well to add some personality to your ships.

Do both mods work well together?

Solar shields help with that a bit. Also, the clouds in hyperspace don't slow you as much if your fleet is smaller, they're a good incentive not to just build a massive fleet.

I often use the hyperspace storms to help speed my fleet's trip if I'm running out of fuel. I've done return trips with 200 fuel, needing over 300 and bringing that down to 200/150, thanks to the speed boosts from the storms. However, I needed to have a shit ton of supplies to account for the damage.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's an interesting prototype.
while the number and variety of ships is satisfaying (despite the usual bias toward "bigger is always better". a 40 points worth battleship will wipe the floor and flush its nose with 40 points worth of anything else smaller), those of weapons' are not, they're few, uninteresting and unfun.
a game with a huge focus on fleet action gives half its skill tree to your own ship stats, the same stats any ai officer can have, but no ai officer can have the truly powerful skills which buff the whole fleet. it's a no brainer.
but the real huge issue, the one which completely kills the game and its scope, is its size: everything is based on exploration, that's what you're supposed to do, but there are... 50? 60 systems top? they might even be fewer, i didn't stop to count. 10-15 are the central, populated systems, many of the rest are just empty. you're allowed to control 4 colonies and 3 ai officers which are hugely inferior to your own character because they don't develop. a game about expansion can't be based on 7 frigging planets.
the map should have been at least 10 times bigger and the factions should have been much more active in colonizing (if they even do it, i don't know, i met a planet which supposedly reverted to stone age, something which should happen to unsuccesful colonies), but i guess the game would die crushed under its own weight.
shame.

 

[Elephantman]

I am stuck at the first level up screen xD
I want to be a fighta but everything screams to be a leader.

 

[Norfleet]

You can only control 4 colonies? What about the rest? I mean, we CAN conquer them, right?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

with maxed skills, you can directly manage 4 colonies and demand 3 more to ai officers. 7 total. you can have more but they suffer harsh mali.

meanwhile i checked the map, i might have been unlucky with my first game because this second one delivered maybe a hundred stars in total. still absolutely not enough.

 

[rashiakas]

Mods in Starsector work well together, the modding community works closely together to avoid issues.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Fair warning, adding a shitton of mods will up the amount of RAM required to save the game. I had to turn several off after adding a bunch on my latest run.

The most important ones I'd say are Nexerilin (adds random sector generation and options to capture bases along with interfaction wars), SWP (adds cool bounty missions with unique ships to capture) Starship Legends (lets ships get unique traits and rewards tough/well fought battles) Speedup (for those parts of battles where you're not doing anything but watching) and most importantly, the degenerate portrait pack.

I'd really recommend adding at least a couple faction packs too. Diablo is my favourite, but Borken are probably a close second and there's like a dozen more that are all really high quality with cool features and a dozen more less polished ones on top of that. Most factions have some sort of iconic mod that goes on all their ships, like the ORA has one that makes point defense weapons cheaper to install, but beam weapons more expensive, and if their ships have more weapons installed on one side than the other they slow way down, but all their ships are designed with broadsides and not much forward firepower.

 

[Catacombs]

degenerate portrait pack

bro lol

 

[Average Manatee]

Interesting game, but:

- Having combat be on a separate map makes it tedious and annoying. Faction doesn't like you and you want to go through their space? Fight 10 meaningless battles. Massive letdown here. No grand chaos of space where you try to dodge pirate's missiles to get to port, instead if they touch you you are locked into a fight with them. Also falls into the same problem I have with Total War where you quickly max your fleet to the limit and never really get to appreciate small-scale maneuvers or tactics, it's all just about having a lot of ships and dogpiling in.
- The economy is basically irrelevant. Tariffs mean you can't make money off anything (at least not in a time-efficient manner). Combat isn't really much of a payoff (for some reason captured hulls are worth jack shit in this game despite them supposedly being super hard to replicate without blueprints and ancient technology). Instead all you do early on is fly around waiting to see missions that pay 75k-225k for 2 minutes of work.
- Almost as soon as you colonize a planet the economy becomes more irrelevant. Like, planets just print money. Build everything for infinite money. At least that's pretty much what happened to me. Factions all sent fleets to attack my planets (even though I had near-max relations with lots of them), but those fleets were then destroyed by my planetary defenses without me lifting a finger.

Don't know if there's actually a story or goal I'm supposed to pursue but I'm sitting on 1.5M credits and it feels like there's nothing to do. I've explored and fought a bunch of the remnants but there doesn't seem to be anything worthwhile to get out of it other than hoping a blueprint or AI module drops (still haven't found an Alpha AI).

So, regarding colonies, anyone got any pointers? I established one on a rather decent 75% world but of course I'd like to expand to one of those tasty ultra rich volcanic worlds for the minerals, is there a specific build order to make those turbo-inhospitable worlds viable?

What matters most for mining is whether the world has ores (or rare ores, or organics, or farmland) at all. The production equation takes the colony size and other things like administer modifiers into account so really being rich vs. poor doesn't matter terribly much. An ultra-rich world (+3 to mining) will be offset by 2 more population and +1 production from an administer with the relevant perk. So you can see how getting a high-pop colony w/ all 4 resources (well 5 if you count the ruins) is more important than getting a colony because it is ultra-rich in one resource, the former is going to be producing a sum total of 30+ resources very quickly while the latter is left in the dust. Since hazard affects both growth rate and maintenance cost you want a good 100%ish planet IMO.

What I did was put a manufacturing center for everything on a 100% hazard gas giant (later a barren planet in the same system as well) in an unclaimed sector in the core worlds for the accessibility. They just bought their inputs from the local market, processed them and resold for massive profits. From there my next colony was a 75% hazard w/ all 4 mining sources. Though honestly I'm not sure accessibility matters that much, colonies rather far from the core still have high values there just from being a free port and having a megaport, I'm just telling you what I did. Point is that you should be rolling in dough with some time and investment. Those two colonies established on literally worthless land right next to all the other factions' colonies control around 25% of the market each on most high-tier goods.

I'm not sure if there exists a way to prevent constant raids on you. The first one raided me because I had free port on. I turned it off, the next one raided me because I had too high of a market share, at which point I said fuck it and just build all the defenses to max.

 

[rashiakas]

Fair warning, adding a shitton of mods will up the amount of RAM required to save the game. I had to turn several off after adding a bunch on my latest run.

If you use many mods, you want to edit your VMPARAMS file. Dont allocate more then 8 GB though, or the game becomes unstable.

https://bitbucket.org/MesoTroniK/6-gig/downloads/vmparams

This is the 6 GB version for download, should be enough for most cases.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The economy is basically irrelevant. Tariffs mean you can't make money off anything (at least not in a time-efficient manner).

Buying 600 units of something for 70 credits and selling it for 600 credits 'not time efficient'. Ok then. You also get massive xp for trading profitably, btw. Eventually your cargo capacity outstrips the demand on most markets but then you can start making crazy money off procurement quests for thousands of resources.

Colonies do scale beyond the costs of a fleet eventually. I like that though, rags to riches and a shift in gameplay. And you can always dump your money back into your colony if you need a sink. There's no 'win condition' but there's plenty of endgame shit to do that's fairly difficult, like taking on remnant bases or the other factions.

What version are you playing on? When colonies first got introduced they were way faster to build up and brought in stupid amounts of money, they've been nerfed a lot since then.

 

[Haba]

LUL! I thought that Starsector might've changed throughout the years, but to think that it has become an RPG too!

#ifithasnumbersitisanrpg

 

[Average Manatee]

The economy is basically irrelevant. Tariffs mean you can't make money off anything (at least not in a time-efficient manner).

Buying 600 units of something for 70 credits and selling it for 600 credits 'not time efficient'. Ok then. You also get massive xp for trading profitably, btw. Eventually your cargo capacity outstrips the demand on most markets but then you can start making crazy money off procurement quests for thousands of resources.

I've never seen such a spread. Looking at my save right now the best I can see is supplies at a buying price of 70 vs. a selling price of 225, but after tariffs thats 91 vs. 157 so only 66 profit each. Maybe this is something where you have to intentionally starve planets to create a deficit but combat takes too long to really be enjoyable and I try to keep all factions on my good side so I'm not facing constant attacks everywhere I go.

What version are you playing on? When colonies first got introduced they were way faster to build up and brought in stupid amounts of money, they've been nerfed a lot since then.

9.1a. There was definitely a significant investment period where the colony was mostly running even, but if you invest in growth 100% and do free port it grows really, really fast. Before then I did all of the scanning missions, easy to get 3 or 4 in one go worth 150k each. Maybe one or two procurements in the meantime while I was back.

 

[Damned Registrations]

To be fair, Nexerelin helps a lot with the trading, since it lets factions war and raid eachother. Just like for the player, a base's access will be shit if it's at war with people, especially people in the same system, and being raided will really fuck it over. Trading between two ports with low access where one supplies the other is the key to getting huge profit margins. And you can ignore the tariffs at the black market. Pirates tend to have low access due to everyone hating them so that's half the answer right there. If you don't want to tank your rep with anyone, taking out smugglers will lower access to their target port as well as conveniently giving you resources in demand at the place you just fucked up. In particular, if you can fuck over a planet that supplies a lot of harvested organs, there's generally not much demand for them so you can tank the price from 300 down to under 100, and then sell them at a starved mid sized base for a huge profit. Other big ticket items like volatiles and weapons can be good too. You can get the price of ore down to 1 credit but a ratio of 1:15 is pointless due to supply limit and cargo space.

I actually find scanning missions to be a pain generally. It takes a long time to reach one worth over 100k, they might be in a system guarded by huge armadas, and you can spend over a week just in the fucking system looking for the target if it's not a planet. "In the Blahblah system some distance from the centre" Gee thanks game, it's a fucking massive binary. That really narrows it down. "It's in an asteroid field" *Gets there, there's 3 different asteroid fields, including one at the extreme edge of the system.* Scanning missions definitely take the fewest resources to get started (you can do them with basically just a dram and nothing else) But they generally aren't fast and I've had them time out before if I cut it close because I thought 50 days was plenty of time to get 2 missions right next to me. These days I only bother with them if the target is something worth finding anyways, like a research station or a habitable planet, or maybe if there's a group of stars I want to survey along the way. It's also just not fun, it's 90% travel time. I'd rather blow up pirate bases, explore for ruins, or do smuggling runs.

 

[Average Manatee]

I generally only do scanning missions if I can hit 2 or more (several times I got 4) in a general quadrant of the galaxy. It's not "quick" in the sense of in-game time but as soon as you get a colony you are waiting around for growth anyway and can just alt-tab while your fleet flies to the destination. I do have 20 burn speed so its pretty quick to get around, and my civilian transports/tankers/freighters are loaded with scanning equipment so I can cheaply scan everything for easy XP and look for new worlds.

At least in my experience if you are going into the far reaches you'll always be finding plenty of ruins and plenty of remnants to fight. I had the syncnotron/corrupted nanoforge and plenty of AI cores before my first colony needed them. With some luck you can salvage enough supplies and fuel consistently to stay out indefinitely.