Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh, you link the lance and lasers, or at least have neither on autofire. I just link the lot of them, since tap fire on the HILs takes very little flux and they don't have a cooldown more or less period. Hypervelocity drivers are what you have on auto, stuck in those two universals. They'll build up hard flux on basically anything (up to and including stuff like other paragons, iirc... though maybe not something with that hard flux dissipation skill), and at range, at which point you swing around and lance it. Also seem to screw with the AI a bit, cause them to drop shields at odd times... and with the lasers or lances, it doesn't exactly take a lot of travel time to get some hits in. One of the other nice things about the lance is that you both don't really need a sustained hit, and can hit the shield instead of the actual ship, to get good use from it. Means it's actually decent for one of the front slots, since raking fire does well enough.

Use so far has been just the one, on one of those front mounts. Don't auto it, but do fire pretty much whenever something's in front of the ship. Low chance isn't no chance, and all that, and when the rest of your layout besides the drivers (which aren't really all that flux heavy in practice, themselves) is entirely PD lasers with some ion cannons thrown in for flavor, you've by and large the flux to spare for spam. On a max vent paragon, anyway, heh.

E: Huh. Neat. Apparently if you roll up on a dormant fleet that's been sitting inside a corona, they'll have lowered CR. If you jump one that's been idling inside a solar flare, they'll start the fight with a CR of zero. Ganking a drone fleet in the middle of a solar flare may be the most metal thing I've done in this game, so far. The things are surprisingly feisty for flatlined ships, too.

I'unno, I think I'm actually kinda' fond of the autopulse lasers. Get shield busting stuff on other slots (I'm pretty fond of graviton beams, personally, if only because the range on them when equipped on a paragon is hilarious), tank up (hardened/stabilized shields, lots of vents/capacitors/etc.) to soak up damage until their shields go down, at which point you promptly unload that 1500 burst DPS into their face. It's also cheaper flux wise than most other large mount energy weapons, which means your shields et al get to do more work.

E: Ehehe, the predator or prey mission can be pretty amusing. Turns out hammering burn drive into the astral's face metaphorically shouting, "I bet you blow up first!" works pretty well. I'm sure there's some kind of fancy strategy possible, but barreling through the wall of missiles and fighter detritus and unloading a passel of torpedoes and shield-stripping ballistics into the carrier's face does just fine.

Welp. Doing a quick probe drop off at some random cache, flap over to an inactive gate in the system to do the usual drive through, pop out of the gate choice screen thing to notice it's inside a debris field, one of the ones with a junkload of derelict ships. First one I check has structural damage (meh) and a damaged flight deck (somewhat more annoying), but...

... it's a bloody legion. My current combat ships consist of a mora, condor, enforcer, and wolf. Actually going to leave it there for a bit (the skeleton crew requirement is larger than the combined crew max for my entire fleet), but damn. Biggest bit of random salvage I've yet seen, a position previously held by a pristine... whatever the largest or second largest crew carrying civ ship is called.

Try a full delete/uninstall and reinstall? Quick pokearound suggests the problem is caused by something in the program's code, rather than something on your end (such as it were), which would imply something screwy happened to your instance of the program -- corruption, unintentional file overwrite or lack of intended one, stuff like that. Other than checking to see what the specific code of the error points is and giving a go at fixing it from that end, a clean install with the latest version is probably your best bet.

E: Could also try running from the .bat inside the starsector-core folder instead of the launcher/.exe, maybe.

E2: There's also a .log file inside that folder you might look at for more information. Pretty sure it would tell you (more or less) what the program was trying to do before erroring out, which can help narrow down exactly what's going wrong and what potential fixes are.

... lastly, asking on the main starsector forum is probably a good idea, heh. Can't remember if the dev comes by here occasionally or not, but they're almost certainly your best bet for figuring out what to do.

... y'know, I just now noticed that d-mods apparently allocate, at least in part, based off what damage is dealt to the ship in combat.

Suddenly the near ubiquitousness of damaged engines makes a lot more sense. All my combat ships are using salamanders.

Fleet -> suspend repairs & recovery. Default hotkey is d, checking.

That said, efficiency is only desirable up to a point, when it comes to deployment, imo. If you have officers burning supply for experience starts looking like a very fair trade, heh.

E: Also, be careful about carrying around too much fuel. If you're over your limit your supply costs spike pretty hard.

Eh, that'd matter basically not at all if steam decided for some ungodly reason to go that route. They'd just drop the same sort of hammer on said publishers/devs (no more keys! Send us their steam ID with our cut of the money and we'll activate your product for their account). I'm not sure how far off we are from steam being able to do something like that, and devs not really having terribly much choice (save to be massively uncompetitive, sales wise) beyond grin and bear it. Relatively more sure we're not anywhere close to them actually being willing to do something that enormously stupid, but they're probably not all that distant from being able to and continue as a company and distribution platform.

Though @ arista, yeah, I doubt it'll happen. Point wasn't if it will, but how it could Fixing up a new API or somethin' to do it (or, "better" yet, not and leaving other folks to figure things out on their own) would be a fairly obvious method.

Well... if you really want it, ASAP, I'll just throw out there that the cash value is stored as a float. Just to make things a little quicker, should that make sense to you