A13 Playthrough notes

[Greeba]

Some Alphas came where I had a 'mature' savegame and wanted to test transitioning it (so I've done A11-A12 playthroughs, then played A12 from scratch, for instance). A13 introduces such a big change to Logistics, and allows you to play the Stargate without the Deep Space Industrialist story missions, so I played A13 from scratch.

Storage Crates are an obvious game changer and something that players asked for a while ago. I was sceptical about 'shelves' as were suggested, but now the crates are such a beneficial addition it's hard to imagine they weren't always planned. Ships now have such a density to them that they didn't have before, it's hard to adjust to the change in scale. You need more crew and better logistics simply to be able to handle the amount of goods flying around, or your ships will forever be stuck loading and unloading, and there's not always time for that (more on that later...) The time it takes to offload sold goods is the biggest, because one shuttle is the slowest way to offload the materials compared to a really efficient drone system. That's a change, as drones used to be slower, but now with all the upgrades and the right design it's possible to grab things on to a ship much quicker than it is to send them off through the Docking Port. There seems to be an opportunity for upgrading and/or automation here - I suggested goods in/out squares which would work with tracks in the correct direction, in a GitHub ticket[github.com] a while ago, as I think this could help with efficiency if offloading common goods was automated (especially for certain ships like Fuel tankers which mostly want to offload one thing).


I got into a discussion on this suggestion thread[github.com] on the GitHub, about the timing between waves of Hostiles in the combat zones, and whether it's enough. I still think that's a yes, though this is playing with my very developed attack Cruisers, two of them. I'm up to attack wave 31 so far, fighting a few waves at a time before returning to the Shipyard to repair and offload the spoils. I played up to about 20 waves with one cruiser, then added a second when the attack waves got too hard, but they seem to be mostly keeping up now. Occasionally I don't have time to salvage big wrecks, but I can usually fit it in by going back over the next wave or two. It's possible to eke a wave out by leaving the weakest ship alive (or occasionally indefinitely, if one of the Hostiles that spawns is a static platform, unless it gets killed by meteors).

The key to quick salvaging is to have a ship that is very good at killing Hostiles and picking their bones and not much else. My Cruisers have a big forward battery of Railguns, then a mix of Cannons and Deflectors to kill ships, and PDCs to pick off weaker ships and meteors, down the sides. The nacelle design allows for the outer edge of the ship to be mostly guns while also packing in six drone bays, Thrusters on every spare bit of edge, and a couple of Hyperspace Scoops to claw back some Fusion efficiency. (Credit for the starting design of this ship goes to Nandomo; I modified it from their Fully Furnished AIO ship design, but it's had many revisions since so I'm content to call it my Cruiser and co-credit them on the edit screen). The Drone Bays are unloaded to a carousel of Track, which in turn unloads Drones to a central Small Storage Crate to get them out of the way and allow space to keep more goods moving. As there are two rows of bays and two track carousels, they both unload to additional Storage Crates in the middle, to pick out more of the most common spoils (Scrap Metal, Cannon Shells and Bullets), again to keep the tracks free to move more goods. The tracks then zigzag to allow two rows of Robot Arms to unload them once the sorting arms have had the first pick. Once all the Track/ Arm/ Drone upgrades have been researched, these 12 bays across 2 ships are enough to mop up most attack waves, if not in each cycle then spread across each two or three. Previous versions of these ships offloaded to Smelters which then used Metallic ingots to make more ammo, but this was a waste of space and energy - the space is now taken by those three Storage Crates instead which can be offloaded to a dedicated production ship after the fight, and ammo just doesn't need to be fabricated once you start salvaging hundreds of stacks from dead ships.

This is not a beginner set up and it's not immediately available to players who haven't spent time honing the design and earning the money to buy such ships. But I'm not sure that's a reason to nerf the game; players should have something to work up to. Then again, it's also foolish to suggest the Hostile Zones introduced in A12 are perfect, they may still need revising and maybe the wave timer can be part of that.

Running two Cruisers takes a LOT of Deuterium (I like to have 150k-200k on each Cruiser). They are powered by three Fusion Reactors each. When they're not going into Battle Stations I unplug two of them and power down the weapons to save power load and conserve fuel. I raised a ticket a while ago to add a simple stop/ start context menu (like the goods selection for crates or Smart Robot Arms, etc) to allow for more elegant control of such Reactors - for now this is done by un-plumbing and plumbing them in the Pipes view. To provide the Deuterium I use my 2H Tanker ship - I've also modified this for Alpha 13 to make use of Small Storage Crates, so it's a bit wider but much more space efficient and the crew shouldn't need to walk the wings very often as most of what they want to fetch and carry is in the central hull. Otherwise she's the same in principle - top her up with food and Tilium (and/or lots of salvaged FTL charges from killed Hostiles) and she'll do lots of long jumps until her tanks are full.

What I find now is, since such space efficiency is afforded by the Crates, large attack ships arguably carry more ammo and fuel than they'll ever need. I might want to slim my Cruisers down to compensate for this, and there's an argument for introducing a smaller crate for ammo loading or to allow crates to fill 50/50 (see suggestion ticket here[github.com], or just to ditch the crates and go back to using tracks, because the ship is not going to stay and fight enough attack waves for the ammo to come close to running out before returning to the Shipyard for repairs and offloading salvage - which per the above, then takes ages. I'm loathe to ramp up from 26 crew to 40 or 50 as the expanded Habitation Deck will give the fuselage of the ship a glass jaw, and in the heat of battle there are already enough crew to keep the ship up and running even if a lucky hit takes out a Weapons Officer. The crew is right sized, the logistics of the docking port are the new bottleneck. Of course, another way to help with that would be if the Weppos got off their arses and carried a few boxes when they're not at Battle Stations, as I requested long ago in this ticket[github.com]. Their union must be amazing.

Of course the other question is how well combat is working. Chris' A13 video prediction is true, that our ships feel OP until more opposition comes in using Deflectors. And are there more weapons and countermeasures coming? Time will tell.

One strange thing I have found is that if you blanket-target all of your weapons as you are fairly likely to do in the heat of battle, the targeted Deflectors cause a massive power drain (this is about the only thing that can kill the batteries on my Cruisers when all three of their Fusion Reactors are spun up). If there is a reason for this, i.e. some useful effect for a targeted Deflector, I'm yet to see it and have not managed to get any response when asking about this on the Discord. I've raised this as a bug here[github.com] pending any explanation. If Deflectors are only ever going to target incoming Cannon Shells, arguably they should be on the Point Defence column of the Tactical View rather than amongst the targetable weapons, to prevent this coming up.

Another change is mining yields. In previous Alphas I complained that the asteroids could be mined out. This is still true, but the idea of running out of resources is farcical - in my current playthrough I've mined out the metals in all but one system, because that one has meteors, and my production ship has nearly 4000 stacks of metal stored.

Crew pathfinding is still eccentric. I leave clear pathways but still see crew take the long way round a lot. This is particularly apparent when I set the Suits On order and the crew go all over the shop rather than neatly collecting the suits from the small crate they are stored in.

There is so much good new play from Alphas 12 and 13 it's hard to get across. This is all meant as constructive criticism/ useful feedback, as there is so much fun to be had in the game, I can't wait to see what comes next.

I have over 100 savegames from this playthrough, I can share examples if anyone finds them useful.