I've read that the late game and colony stuff is still undercooked but most of the game systems are so fucking good.
It's true; they are pretty sparse, still. Alex has been reluctant / opposed to adding 4X / Grand Strategy style elements to the game (don't ask me for a source, my source is "I remember reading it somewhere") because he wants it to be focused on the space battles, but I think he's realizing the game kind of needs them even if it's not a thing he personally likes. The new colony threat system, for example - colonies were originally meant to just be money printers to fund fleets so you could have space battles, so the mechanics around colony threats were absurdly simple. Now we have something more engaging, which signals to me that Alex is acknowledging the game does need more in the way of colony interaction and deeper systems there. I'm hoping this is a trajectory we'll continue on, in terms of faction diplomacy and stuff (i.e. replacing the minor expeditions with actual periods of war you can enter, major enemy fleets that add real endgame challenges and can also fuck up your colonies really badly if you don't defeat them, that sort of thing), but time will tell.
Yeah, the Hostile Activity event system is a step forward - but I think Alex's reluctance to add to the grand strategy / multi-fleet management stuff or a dynamic political simulation is more of a matter of priorities and reluctance to make promises. Development speed is glacial and, again, until this update the factions weren't even fleshed out mechanically, there was barely any story content before version... 0.9?
Now that most of the mechanics are in a good place, hopefully he can focus on more of the late game / questing / politicking aspects. But I think he always intended to implement
some sort of greater strategy element at some point - that grayed out "command" tab is there for a reason, after all.
I actually don't really like the random "political simulations" of Mount & Blade or Nexerlin, and I don't think Starsector will go into that direction necessarily, being more of an RPG where its important that, for instance, certain factions own certain quest locations. The event system is promising for simulating, for example, the take-over of a certain star system, or an inter-faction war effort, with player participation - instead of random planets changing hands due to the random decisions of AI fleets, maybe you gain points on the event track when you hunt enemy faction fleets, or when allied faction fleets successfully blockade the opposing planets and so on, until you reach a breakthrough and the war ends to your faction's benefit. But I am just brainstorming here, who knows which direction Alex is going to take things next.
But a model I'd like to see is something like the story campaign in Mount & Blade: Viking Conquest. There are emergent and dynamic elements but a lot of it is reigned in by story parameters, and its not a broken ant farm simulations with retarded political AI making horrendous decisions as is the case in pretty much every game of this type.
THe only thing that i really hate in this game is the FACT that i really suck in manual combat. abismal performance i show. just cant keep flux levels optimal as AI do. not even close..
Its a bit like riding a bike, I bounced off the game for years and once I figured out the flux game, combat stopped being frustrating. The rule of thumb that works for most ships is simply to make sure your flux dissipation is equal to or slightly exceeding the [sum of your non-PD weapon flux/s] + [shield flux/s]. There is a bit more to it than that - making sure you have a mix of damage types available to your ship (prioritize kinetics for sustained damage,) making sure your firing groups are set up correctly and weapons don't have horrendous range mismatches, and so on. But flux management is probably the most important part of the whole equation.
