Starsector - RT 2D indie space goodness

[tindrli]

At this point I just find this game depressing. Every time I check back on it the dev managed to kill off a few more great mods. The mod forum is like a monument to the fallen.

i wonder, which ones?
the only Mod that i really miss is the one, i cant remember its name, battle simulation is allowed only with ships that you encountered.

 

[kinzadza]

this game hits like heroin.

inclined for sure

 

[Black]

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Every time I check back on it the dev managed to kill off a few more great mods.

it's not like this game gets so many patches modders can't keep up.

 

[Black]

At this point I just find this game depressing. Every time I check back on it the dev managed to kill off a few more great mods. The mod forum is like a monument to the fallen.

I mean, that's expected if you're making mods to an incomplete game that's still getting updates.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://fractalsoftworks.com/2024/12/20/anubis-class-cruiser/

Anubis-class Cruiser​

Posted December 20, 2024 by Alex in Art, Development
Today I’d like to talk about a new ship we’re adding to the game, the Anubis-class Experimental Cruiser. What makes this ship special enough to merit its own blog post? After all, as has been proven by science, at least 10 new ships are being added in the next update. However, this is one of a few ships that will be possible to have in the player’s fleet (as opposed to being [REDACTED]), so, finally, it’s something I can talk about without any real spoilers. Plus – as hopefully you’ll agree – it’s going to be a fun ship!

I try to be careful when adding new ships and want to make sure each one brings something different to the game. This is, for example, why a lot of new ships have built-in hullmods – now that the majority of “normal” ship roles have ships filling them, it takes a little more to make a ship stand out in some way.
This is where built-in hullmods come in, breaking or bending the rules a little for a particular ship. I don’t usually *start out* wanting to add built-ins, though – the process is almost always that I have an idea for how the ship should work, try to make it do that, and then add a built-in hullmod or two if that seems to be the only way to achieve the desired result.
Motivations
For this ship, the motivation is actually a weapon – one that does not see much use despite being very good at what it does. I’m talking, of course, about the Paladin PD System. It’s fitted into a large energy slot, and it’s extremely effective at taking down missiles and fighters, for a reasonable cost in both flux and ordnance points. The problem is the large energy slot – there aren’t many of those to go around, and ships that have them *really* want to use them for their primary armaments, not a point-defense system.

So, what I wanted to do is create a ship where using the Paladin would be a more compelling option than usual, though hopefully not the only one. I’d also like it to be a ship that would be fun for the player to pilot themselves, that is, not just something that’s very firmly relegated to a passive support role.
To have multiple large energy slots, the ship pretty much had to be a cruiser or a capital, but if it was a capital, it’d face a different problem – you’re pretty unlikely to bring an expensive capital ship for point-defense purposes. So, it was pretty clear that this was going to be a cruiser. Three large energy slots felt about right, too – more than that is way too much for a cruiser, and less than that might not leave enough room for the Paladin. (Or for any kind of similar future weapon! Having a ship like this opens up the weapon design space a little bit more.)
Playstyle
The next thing to think about was how the ship should play, what would you do with it if you were controlling it yourself? One of the things that I find fun is using a ship in a kind of fire-fighting role, moving around the battlefield quickly, dealing with incoming fighter wings, missiles, or flanking enemy ships, supporting an allied ship that gets in trouble, that sort of thing. The Paladin is a good match for that type of role, but what should the ship system be?
Temporal Shell – a system that briefly speeds up time for the ship – feels like a good match for this. It’s nice for charge-using weapons like the Paladin (because they can reload more quickly while in fast-time) and it also improves the ship’s mobility. The ship’s name – the Anubis – came from that, since the other ship that uses the Temporal Shell is a frigate named the “Scarab”.
So, we’ve got the broad strokes here – cruiser, 3 large energy slots, Temporal Shell. A bunch of important questions remain. What kind of support slots/options does the ship have? And what’s to stop you from putting 3 high-damage primary weapons in those large weapon slots?
The problem
And this is where I stopped writing this blog post, realizing there was a problem. Sure, *some* assault-type energy weapons can be made a poor choice to put in all of these large slots by just tweaking the ship’s flux stats (briefly: flux is generated by firing weapons/taking shield damage, and limits how much you can do of either); that was the original intent. However – the Tachyon Lance, a powerful “sniper” type weapon, has very similar flux generation to the Paladin. Sure, it generates a bit more flux, but it’s really hard to draw a line between the two, to come up with flux values that favor using one en masse but not the other.
Some quick testing confirmed my fears – yep, a triple-Lance build was effective and in fact way, way too strong. The Anubis is meant to be a cheaper ship to deploy, due to being inherently more support-oriented, and being able to spam 10 of them or so with triple lances… well, it was a sight to see. Though not for very long, because the enemy ships evaporated rather quickly. So, yeah, problem.

I tried a bunch of things. The first was changing the arcs of the large slots so that they couldn’t all focus on the same target. However 1) this feels kind of bad and makes the ship awkward to use, and 2) doesn’t solve the problem because – unless the arcs are truly weird and restricted – you could still turn the ship and focus two lances on the same target, which is already too many. The sweet spot in terms of power is when the ship can maybe use one Tachyon Lance, and not too comfortably.
Then I tried messing more with the flux stats, trying to draw that line between the Tachyon Lance and the Paladin, but there’s just not enough room there – because the lance is a burst weapon with a substantial delay between shots, the two weapons are surprisingly close in terms of flux use!
In retrospect, the solution is obvious – to *make* the room, by reducing the flux cost of the Paladin drastically. This led to a second realization, that while the Paladin is indeed already a strong weapon, it’s strong against threats that either don’t exist or exist so rarely that it’s not as appealing. If every battle had you facing off against massive swarms of missiles and fighters, sure, you’d want to trade some Tachyon Lances for Paladins, even on ships that have few large energy slots – but that’d be a different game.
So in the context of what we’ve actually got, a buff to the Paladin seems justified – and, in fact, required to make the Anubis work. It’s not sufficient by itself, though – it’s just a crack we can wedge the chisel into and make something happen.
The other part of the problem is the player can do a few things to improve a ship’s flux stats – adding vents/capacitors, certain hullmods, certain skills. Normally this is good, but we’re trying to walk a fine line here. If the flux stats the player can *add* to a ship are enough to support a Tachyon Lance or two on their own, then the ship’s base flux stats could be zero and we’d still have problems. This is where built-in hullmods come in!
Putting on our in-fiction hat, what might be holding back an experimental ship like the Anubis? Let’s call the hullmod “Design Compromises”. The first thing it does is reduce the ship’s flux dissipation and capacity by 40%, including the base stats and any bonuses those stats might get from any source; this was the original idea – to rein in the amount of flux stat improvement possible.
By itself this wasn’t enough, even with the Paladin change, so: it also increases the flux generation of energy weapons by 100%, widening the gap between the Paladin (and anything with similarly low flux costs) and the assault weapon lineup (most notably the Tachyon Lance, which has some of the lowest flux costs for a primary weapon). This, finally, is enough; a triple-lance loadout struggles to fire. It’s *possible* to stack every flux bonus and fire off a triple-lance volley, but this makes the ship extremely vulnerable, and even two lances firing can’t be sustained. Maybe it’s possible to make this work and maybe someone will post a video destroying 3 [REDACTED] Ordos with it, but hopefully it’ll be at least a challenge.
(You might be wondering: why double the flux generation of energy weapons instead of cutting down the flux stats some more? Flux is also used for shields, and the ship needs to have at least half-decent shields, so the primary reason is just to keep the “shield flux per damage” number looking reasonably normal.)
Support slots
With that finally figured out, let’s get back to the support slots! That is to say, what other weapon slots is the Anubis going to have, to support the 3 large energies? (Chronologically speaking, I’d thought this through before the lance testing, but the support slots didn’t matter for that – they were left empty, and the extra ordnance points spent on flux stats to power the lances.)
The main thing to keep in mind here is the ship is going to be very flux-limited, so we want the slots to allow for some low-flux-cost options. Given that, I settled on a pair of medium universal hardpoints, and a single fighter bay. The fighter bay doesn’t need much explanation – fighters function independently and you can put in whatever fighters you want without increasing the ship’s flux generation.

The two universal slots open up many options. First off, missiles – always a strong choice, and usually with no flux cost. Second, ballistic weapons; usually unavailable on high-tech ships like the Anubis; generally flux-efficient in their role, and long-ranged. (Briefly, ships tend to either have speed or range; if they have both, then kiting becomes too strong of an option, and high-tech ships tend to have speed, while ballistic weapons tend to have range. As with any rule, there are exceptions.) And, finally, there are some flux-cheap medium beam options.
Usually when a weapon slot allows mounting different classes of weapons – ballistic, energy, and missile – missiles and ballistics win out, due to the former not costing flux and the latter having better range and efficiency. And that’s before the doubling or the flux cost for energy weapons on this ship specifically! To even out the options a little bit, the “Design Compromises” hullmod from earlier has another pair of effects:

• The range of ballistic weapons is reduced by 15%
• The rate of fire of missile weapons is halved

This should make the range of viable choices for these slots more varied, while keeping the ship’s power down, which appropriate for its low-ish deployment point cost. There’s also a nice symmetry with every weapon type being affected by some kind of penalty (with the energy one being a flux cost increase, from earlier).
Loadout feel
So all in all, the ship has 3 large energy turrets, 2 medium universal hardpoints, and 1 fighter bay. This is a small total number of slots for a cruiser, and makes it feel very different! It almost feels like a scaled-up frigate in terms of loadouts, and I like it – the choices are more pronounced, and there are fewer of them.
The “Design Compromises” hullmod also drastically reduces the value of vents and capacitors (normally, you’d put a fair amount of points into these before doing much else); this means that hullmods become comparatively more attractive on the Anubis.
Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out; the choices here feel fresh, and the ship feels like something new. I hope you enjoy flying it!

---

Hi! David here to give some ~*~* artistic perspective *~*~.
The Anubis was brought back from the underworld of one of Alex’s many design documents by a discussion a couple weeks ago about what I needed to do next. See, I’ve been knee-deep in rules scripting for quite some time and I said “tbh I am kinda dying to draw something.” So he said, great! We can do this ship I was thinking about a while ago- and you’ve already read about the mechanics design from there.
Me, I’m interested in the aesthetics. It’s all about the vibes, man.
The Scarab offers an obvious visual starting point due to the common key element of the temporal shell. Alex discussed working on the Anubis briefly in The Socials and I believe the phrase “Fat Scarab” came up in comments and I was like noooooooooooo it can’t be a fat scarab! It can’t! So I also knew what I didn’t want to do.
Ahem. So we did play around with some other names for a bit, taking “scarab” as a starting place – I wondered if there were any other particularly holy beetles to be found, and failing that, considered what Egyptian gods might be fun to pull from. This is a cruiser, after all, a step up from a destroyer. After some discussion “Anubis” felt the best in terms of matching vibes and being easily memorable (and easy to spell, which is an important consideration… says the man who put “Chicomoztoc” into the game.)

Happily “Anubis” also provides a great place for visual inspiration aside from the general high tech ship style and the Scarab itself. Of course the three large turrets are the entire point of the ship so they came first, then everything else. So: Anubis, Egypt. I’ve always wanted to put some stripes on a ship, so why not evoke the pharaonic headdress, the nemes? (It is important, pedantically, to note here that Anubis was not portrayed in Egyptian art wearing a nemes – the nemes is for kings, not gods. Unless the god is also a king. But Anubis was not. So get it right, people! Obviously this doesn’t apply to my use of imagery here, being that this isn’t intended to be an actual representation of Anubis. The walls of my glass house are just fine, thank you.)
– There’s also something compelling in the sleek, elegant shapes in the jackal-head of Anubis that I wanted to evoke, so you get those from the sweeping wing-like pieces to the fore and aft, as well as the skewed/curved shape of the flight deck. The hull can also take on slightly darker shades, more blacks and dark grays, to match the black-headed jackal. This hull is allowed to bend the rules a bit anyway due to being an experimental development and implicitly a more recent design than other high tech hulls.
The engines were quite directly ripped off from another high tech ship. No need to reinvent the AM-catalyzed fusion drive! The docking bay was taken from the Astral, the archetype of high-tech carrier. A few other pieces from other hulls; there’s a design language here, and it’s important to echo what’s been set elsewhere in the game to give a sense of continuity.
So, I was feeling pretty good at about step 8 there.
And then Alex comes back – he’d been doing some testing and balance – and tells me no, it’s too big. (“Fat Scarab” flashes before my eyes! A red fog descends and… )

Some time later I awoke to discover that I’d managed to trim the sprite down. The voluptuous version of the sprite did, in fact, feel even beefier than a full-on Dominator, which was terribly inappropriate. This is supposed to be a sleek opportunistic hunter-escort, not a line-of-battle brawler! It needs to feel a little spooky, a little weird – and so it is. I’m quite pleased with how distinct the Anubis looks while still feeling like a natural extension of the existing style.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I like the idea of a large PD boat, but I'm skeptical this will be practical. I suppose it will come down to it's deployment cost; this thing will need to be costed much cheaper than any existing cruiser to justify the fact that it's basically a sitting duck against anything even slightly faster than it that is bigger than a frigate. It'll need to be in a large fleet, which is already going to inherently have some PD anyways, so you'd basically be carrying this ship around for battles against unusually large proportions of carrier ships in a major battle, which tend to be easier to handle anyways because the AI can't be prepared for the player flying past all their other ships to focus fire their carriers.

 

[Black]

 

[MerchantKing]

Whatever you do, stay away from the anime mods.

But then got the best ships/complementary plot. Now please pay your taxes.

No. Taxation is theft.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

so, i'm trying this again, and... what's up with the invincible pirates by the gates? have they always been there? if so, have they always been this invincible? even if i rebuild the bigger ships, they make mince meat of me. and if i manage to sneak past them and follow the quest, the system i'm sent to provides little to no earning potential. i'm not sure i have enough money to buy troops from the pirates and drop them on the planet right below to get some pennies, i spend everything on supplies just to stay afloat.

 

[Damned Registrations]

so, i'm trying this again, and... what's up with the invincible pirates by the gates? have they always been there? if so, have they always been this invincible? even if i rebuild the bigger ships, they make mince meat of me. and if i manage to sneak past them and follow the quest, the system i'm sent to provides little to no earning potential. i'm not sure i have enough money to buy troops from the pirates and drop them on the planet right below to get some pennies, i spend everything on supplies just to stay afloat.

Are you talking about the tutorial or something? I'm not familiar with that, but I suspect it creates a situation that forces you to learn how to stealth past ships and do smuggling or something. If you've already lost a bunch of money rebuilding ships you might need to start over, I'm not sure if it's set up to allow you to recover otherwise. I could give more specific advice with more context. Is it the tutorial? Are you getting ambushed in system or outside it? What kind of fleet do you have?


If you're talking about pirates in general camping by gates to murder you, they've always done that, but they rarely get powerful enough to bully out the various faction patrols unless something has thrown balance out of whack, like the pirates being heavily supported or the factions being heavily harassed by the player, so it's really only a risk if you forget to turn your transponder off while leaving (which lets the pirates know exactly how weak you are and what goods you have) or have a big juicy transport fleet with no defenders.

There's also a difference between inner and out gates in systems- outer gates tend not to get patrolled and therefore are more useful for smuggling but also more likely to be ambush points for pirates. Patrols might also be distracted if there are pirates in the system already, either because they have an outpost there or are doing a raid. If they steal a communications satellite a patrol will be sent to take it back, possibly leaving a gate unguarded.