Outsiders are simply too overpowering

[Freed]

Arrived at "too nosy?" and pretty much ready to give up at this point in the game. I have ~500 million credits, but due to the limits on what can come into battle I feel like I can't realistically beat Outsiders anymore in any way that is even remotely fun. I have Sanctuary + all Pirate bases. Bringing the absolute biggest best most upgraded ships at the maximum number I can actually bring into a battle gets utterly steamrolled despite active upgrade use and overworld combat is even worse.

PS: It's just kinda funny how transitioning to ship mode from overworld combat and all the Outsider ships are together in a close-knit formation, but my guys are 2000+ away. That entire formation focus fires my Brig to dust in no time flat before the rest of my fleet even gets there. Please fix it so player fleets are actually spawned in formation, next to the player when entering ship mode from overworld combat- not that it would matter against Outsiders anyway in my experience.

I really love how promising your game is, I just hope you'll fix it.

[Sentient]

The pirate ships have rather low health compared to some of the other factions, which is why they are the easiest to conquer first. The TSF have some of the stronger ships. A full fleet of upgraded TSF can easily wipe out outsiders. Even the kind (stubs) have stronger flag ships. The further through the story missions you get there are also rewards that make fighting outsiders easier.

[Fenris]

You can also go into the difficulty screen of an active game to remove the fleet cap on battles that you are personally participating in. Just be aware that it can be a bit of a performance hit, and it uncaps the enemy too.

[chaosavy]

Thanks for the feedback - the Outsiders are meant to be overpowering and force the player to get better ships and better at ship building. It's a tough challenge for me to keep this reasonable (reasonably overpowering) while still maintaining fun.

[Rhunin]

I currently don't have any qualms with this part of it, if you ONLY use the "Wall" formation then your ships will be clustered fairly close to you and if you drop out of Overworld in a random space, you can cluster stuff like fighters into their own "Wall" formation so that they fly in a big snowflake pattern

My issue is with my patrol fleets getting decimated in auto-resolve combat faster than I can realize what's going on with them

[0mn1]

with outsiders I had to change my patrol fleet strategy from generally allowing AI patrol to splitting my fleets into 2-3 groups and directing them all manually. Outsiders smash a typical destroyer fleet of 1 destroyer+50 ships, so you need to at all times have 3-5 destroyer fleets piling on each Outsider fleet. A carrier fleet of 1 carrier + 2 destroyers + 50 ships is at risk of losing the carrier to an Outsider without at least 2 destroyer fleets helping out.

Unless you're at war and allowing outsiders to blockade TSF, you also want to support TSF bases. However their unupgraded fleets move slow as glaciers and your fleets will speed to all Outsiders and take them on alone. To prevent this you may station your fleets as close to the very center of the TSF base area as possible. This maximizes the "slow" distance around bases they must cover to reach targets and allow TSF AI fleets to reach targets first.

In general in endgame I found the AI combat fleet behavior super annoying and insubordinate as fleets kept belaying my orders to guard a location or travel through a gate so that they could go chase an enemy fleet I specifically directed them away from. I'd prefer to just turn it off at that point and have no combat fleet AI, and by that point there's nothing they need to patrol really, I just want them to go where I tell them and do what I tell them to do. Not continuously ignore my directions and chase whatever the ♥♥♥♥ they want to.

[Rygoat]

Steam is saying I have 470 hours, I'm yet to complete the main storyline.
I've come to realise that playing has started to remind me of the greek mythology of Sisyphus who was given the punishment of pushing a boulder uphill for eternity.

I could be one mission away from the end for all I know, but it's really a grind just to not feel like I'm about to lose the game (what happens if everything is blockaded and I just flat out lose to the outsiders? TSF cant even defend themselves and they have better firepower)

[chaosavy]

What can sometimes happen in games - and it's a terrible thing - is that the player can play so long that they start to dislike the game. The goal was that the outsider are truly challenging - because in many games the end game enemies were usually jokes, they were played up in story but in reality they were weak, I didn't want that here, but I might have swung things to far to the other side.

I don't think that the Outsiders can take over everything, they have a range of sorts. You'll likely need TSF firepower to compete - you could take over a mobile TSF base then fly it down - and build up a fleet or fleets and have a go at it.

[JamesonMdrago]

Originally posted by chaosavy:

What can sometimes happen in games - and it's a terrible thing - is that the player can play so long that they start to dislike the game. The goal was that the outsider are truly challenging - because in many games the end game enemies were usually jokes, they were played up in story but in reality they were weak, I didn't want that here, but I might have swung things to far to the other side.

I don't think that the Outsiders can take over everything, they have a range of sorts. You'll likely need TSF firepower to compete - you could take over a mobile TSF base then fly it down - and build up a fleet or fleets and have a go at it.

I know the post is more than a year old but I ran into this issue a while ago which just made me drop the game entirely, and IMO the key to achieving this "Played up in story, actually powerful in-game" method is to either have it not affect the player (I.E: You can see the other factions getting utterly demolished, but they're at least somewhat holding the lines), or TO have it affect the player, but have to handle only a few ships at a time.

For the former, you could make it so they target TSF bases primarily, and hint at it in the story, so the player can set a "no trade" option with TSF to avoid their trade ships being destroyed, while still witnessing their bases full of cruisers being blockaded by destroyers, without seeming like the player is put on a time limit. Even if the outsiders aren't coded to take over everything, the player is never notified of this in-game, so they'll just assume that if they don't rush, the Outsiders will take over everything, probably why there's alot of people rushing these parts.
Whereas for the latter, a fighter punching with the weight of a gunship, gunship with the weight of a corvette, etc, would be something terrifying indeed, but easily balanceable for story missions where the player is expected to bring a set amount of ships (If the player is expected to bring a corvette to a mission, it'll be just about even if they face an enemy gunship), or simply the player's fault for trying to take out a cruiser with a fighter, and if quantity is the big fear, there could be a few setpiece missions where the enemy fields a truly terrifying amount to really suggest "Yes, there's alot of them, you just don't see them."

The Outsider rush is what truly killed it for me in my review by the way, and I can not stress that enough, since it felt like either I had to invade the TSF all at once in order to get their ships to fight back, BEFORE doing the auction mission, or I had to simply rush the story missions to plug the deluge of Outsiders before they perma-blockaded the entire game.
And when I learned that I'm supposed to fight the TSF afterwards, that, really rubbed me the wrong way, doubly so since I was trying to be "good" up until that point.

[chaosavy]

Thanks for the feedback, I don't think anyone has ever left positive feedback towards the end game/outsiders. My goal was to make an actually hard end game and that the player feels pressure. I tried to improve or change how many games do things, and that often creates issues of their own and being in uncharted territory.

Thinking back I don't know if this was a good idea in a game where players tend tow ant to watch their empires grow. But I thought - that's what sandbox mode is for.

[JamesonMdrago]

Originally posted by chaosavy:

Thanks for the feedback, I don't think anyone has ever left positive feedback towards the end game/outsiders. My goal was to make an actually hard end game and that the player feels pressure. I tried to improve or change how many games do things, and that often creates issues of their own and being in uncharted territory.

Thinking back I don't know if this was a good idea in a game where players tend tow ant to watch their empires grow. But I thought - that's what sandbox mode is for.

I'm ... actually surprised about the positive, at least relatively positive reception towards such feedback, so you have my respect for that.

The biggest issue I can see with the outsider missions are that you're about on-par with them in pure ship quantity and class in the straight up fights, so if you're allowed a destroyer, they're allowed a destroyer, and their destroyers are far taller than any stock ship you can bring, which means you need to push your ships to the limit, which includes active abilities, which really sucks to use on a sufficiently large fleet.
The solo missions are fine due to the fact that you can really stretch your ship and maximize your flying style, and the objective usually isn't to 1V1 the Outsiders on those anyways, I remember during the first gate mission I actually wound up killing all of the Outsiders except the dragonfish, because I had tuned up my Swordfish to be incredibly powerful, and I could reliably use each ability to the max.
This is less so the case when dealing with fleets, since you can't fly 30+ ships in a way which maximizes evasion and positioning all at once.
However, again to reiterate, in a 5V5 of destroyers, the Outsider destroyers will win unless you do some serious shenanigans with your destroyers (Boost in as close as possible, spam Atzu's gambit on another ship when they aim at something to turn their aim away), and as far as I could see, during the straight up fights that's what I was expected to deal with.
And of course with a set ship limit, you can't just grind it down, the most you can do is field a squad of upgraded TSF/Kind ships and micro them to hell (Sidenote: I never noticed the pufferfish's ECM effects, even though I brought mostly Kind ships where I could due to ease of acquisition), whereas without a ship limit, or at least allowing reserve ships to deploy, would allow you to overwhelm them through sheer numbers and industrial might, the ability to go wide if you want instead of being forced to go tall.
Sidenote: It seems that going sufficiently wide results in a CTD, as I tried to amass a fleet of 40 Swordfish and 40 Ronin to stomp everything with the reserve system off, and what wound up happening was every single fight I wound up crashing until I turned the reserve system back on.

The issue with Void Destroyer 2's particular implementation of pressure is that it feels like a time limit, one which you need to keep ahead of, and the common response to time limits, doubly so for the first time around, is to rush, as in really, REALLY rush to keep ahead of it.
This rush can compound with the previously aforementioned "Pushing ships to limits" issue, as the player won't likely grind up their fleet between fights, they'll just continue trying to stem the flow of Outsiders without recovering, so unless they prepare a truly mind-boggling amount of reserve ships, or ships in production, they may get simply attritioned down to the point of being unable to deal with the threat.
Not to mention when the TSF turn to fight (At least they did with me, though that may have to do more with the fact that a couple of their ships must've gotten grazed in the fight before, turned hostile and then I had to destroy them, which is it's own discussion.), the player also has to fight both the Pride (Due to the bounty), AND the TSF (Due to the fact that they're suddenly mad at you), ONTOP of the Outsiders, and suddenly any trade backbone supplying to the TSF and Pride has to be panic rerouted away and given a much stronger escort, else you'll find alot of Hercules and Plutos missing.

Also on the sandbox note, the game suggests completing the story first, so it's easy to assume that the sandbox would be harder than the story if no further context is given.

And finally, minor irritation, but when I did the auction mission, I was actually expecting to buy at least some Outsider grade tech with my sky-high stack of money to make my fleets taller, it made me mildly annoyed that I didn't get to upgrade my ships further, but it's more of a personal thing than anything else.


As for personal suggestions: Scale the ship limit so that the player CAN field an overwhelming force against the enemy, but if they feel up for the challenge, they can field a smaller quantity of ships, that's the whole point of grind after all.
Allow legal ways of acquiring bases, we already do so with civilian platforms, so I don't see why we couldn't roll up with a billion credits or something absurd and purchase ownership of a base, plus it'd avoid stepping on the factions' toes and forcing an all out war between a faction and the player, mostly for the "good" players, but probably helpful for the less experienced who don't want to fight, say the TSF, for their ships.
Disallow side swapping, or rep loss due to friendly fire during missions, more often than not my missile packs clipped a friendly ship and turned them against me, but I needed said missile packs to either destroy the smallcraft swarming me, or to apply major damage to the cap ships in a DPS race (By DPS race I mean they are targeting a ship I need to protect).
And finally give the player more options to build taller, if we're hitting the wide limit with the ships already, and we can't build any taller, then we're limited on the power we can field relative to the outsiders.

[chaosavy]

So the way that Outsider invasion works in the story mode is -

When the Outsider mission starts, Outsider spawns are created, these are on a timer, these attempt to blockade bases, patrol (attack ships) or attack a platform. The blockade bases is on a counter - so only blockade 2 bases at the start, then as the player does Outsider missions more blockaded bases are added to the count and the Outsider fleets become bigger and larger ships get added to the fleets. Because the spawn starts at the "north" side of the map, likely it's away from the player bases because - the first base you get is Sanctuary and then likely the player will go after the pirate bases, plus if the player wanted to they could capture the Pride base and move it down, same with Civ Outpost and the mobile military base. So basically the player could be more or less immune to Outsider base blockades for a long time. The big effect is still player trade ships trading and getting wacked by Outsider patrols or not being able to trade with all the bases due to them being blockaded. So it's designed with some thought to it and rushing actually makes it worse - then terrible at the end with the max number of bases that the Outsiders will blockade (still not all).

Thanks for the continued feedback, the way you describe engaging the Outsiders is what I intended, for the player to use active abilities and tactics.

My bigger-ish mistake is how much HP the outsiders have, the fights turn into slogs and aren't really fun. They have both bigger HPs, the Outsider shields and better weapons. I wish I designed them more like the "Ashes" DLC ships - where they don't necessarily have more HP but more creative weapons and shields that while powerful fail at some point.

[JamesonMdrago]

Originally posted by chaosavy:

So the way that Outsider invasion works in the story mode is -

When the Outsider mission starts, Outsider spawns are created, these are on a timer, these attempt to blockade bases, patrol (attack ships) or attack a platform. The blockade bases is on a counter - so only blockade 2 bases at the start, then as the player does Outsider missions more blockaded bases are added to the count and the Outsider fleets become bigger and larger ships get added to the fleets. Because the spawn starts at the "north" side of the map, likely it's away from the player bases because - the first base you get is Sanctuary and then likely the player will go after the pirate bases, plus if the player wanted to they could capture the Pride base and move it down, same with Civ Outpost and the mobile military base. So basically the player could be more or less immune to Outsider base blockades for a long time. The big effect is still player trade ships trading and getting wacked by Outsider patrols or not being able to trade with all the bases due to them being blockaded. So it's designed with some thought to it and rushing actually makes it worse - then terrible at the end with the max number of bases that the Outsiders will blockade (still not all).

Thanks for the continued feedback, the way you describe engaging the Outsiders is what I intended, for the player to use active abilities and tactics.

My bigger-ish mistake is how much HP the outsiders have, the fights turn into slogs and aren't really fun. They have both bigger HPs, the Outsider shields and better weapons. I wish I designed them more like the "Ashes" DLC ships - where they don't necessarily have more HP but more creative weapons and shields that while powerful fail at some point.

Like I have mentioned, the player is never made aware of the outsiders blockading only a limited amount of areas, all they see is outsider ships invading and likely utterly slaughtering whatever they come across short of either a player dedicated death fleet, or several war fleets converging all at once, so the only knowledge they'll have is "Outsiders are invading, they are killing everything they come across, there doesn't seem to be an end to them."
You could handwave and explain it as "scouting parties" in a mission dialogue, and let the player know about the limited fleets, so they know that they have time to breathe and recover, because otherwise, like I've mentioned, they'll think they're on a very strict time limit until the whole system's taken over.

The only real tactic I used was ordering ships to focus down one enemy ship at a time, and min/maxing my corvette+ ships' survivability, so if one started getting focused, I either popped overdrive on it and evaded at speeds nothing could hope to keep up with, shield recharge (And armor boost if it has it) to prolong the ship's death, or used Atzu's gambit to maximize how long each ship survived, with next to 0 care for gunships (Only firing missiles because there were so many to manage that anything else was overwhelming), and actually 0 care for fighters (Too many to micro manage, too low longevity to care).
This is because, again, the active ability list is extremely tedious to use due to the fact that it is per-ship only, at least let standardized ships, or ships with the exact same ability set use their abilities when selected as a group!
Not to mention there's not really many tactics to be had due to how many times it's a DPS check, so you need to simply aggressively engage head-first to maximize DPS on priority ships (Those targeting what you need to protect), or die trying.
Let alone the fact that almost all elements of the fleet seem to act all at once, and are incredibly difficult to outmaneuver for limited engagements, so it is more about strategic fleet composition than tactical maneuvers.
The only way to add tactics would be to have player ships which aren't soley damage dealers, or to add more specialized damage dealers, because at the core it seems like all player capable (Non-Lothan) ships are simply "everything" damage dealers, with the exception of Pride ships having far lower per-shot damage in exchange for far higher potential DPS.

And I personally thought the outsider ships were fine ... if they had been deployed in smaller numbers, as like I have mentioned, probably exhaustively at this point in time, from a player's point of view, an Outsider ship seems to punch one class above it's self so to speak.
So fighters punch like gunships, gunships corvettes, yada yada you've heard this before but I can't stress it enough.
As for their current arrangement, well their raw HP pool makes them damage sponges beyond belief, but their ability to turn and face means that a sufficiently large front shield would simply nullify at minimum one ship engaging them, potentially several ships at a time, which means that you'd need to focus one at a time and surround them, which just feels like a game of CQC whack-a-mole while their friends get to shoot you in the aft.
Not to mention that each ship seems to be "jack of all trades, master of all" due to their extreme damage, usually across multiple gun points on the ship, the Dragonfish being the most visually striking example of such a ship (Multiple front beams clearly on turret mounts, though as far as I can see they are linked together which is a relief), the Lothan being the antithesis of it (Singular central beam on an incredibly, incredibly slow turret, obviously very poor for tracking smallcraft), and this I would argue is the biggest issue with them, even above and beyond their extreme health pool.
It doesn't matter how you fight them, any guns you get off the board are simply more guns off the board, with the exception of the carrier and impairing ships, and even those are more or less gimmicks with giant "Hit me" signs posted on them.
I'd hilariously argue that the Lothan, as ungodly overpowered as it is (WHY does it treat destroyers like the Ronin does to gunships!?), is the most interesting to fight of the actual "attack" ships, since it has very limited smallcraft defense, and an incredibly slow beam ... which is sadly made up for by an incredibly fast turn, but at least you are able to do SOMETHING apart from having to facetank it to stop it.


Before I ramble on, what are the chances that changes are made to the Outsider mission chain in VD2? It feels like it's all for naught if there's 0 changes whatsoever.

[forsaken7]

Originally posted by chaosavy:

Thanks for the feedback, I don't think anyone has ever left positive feedback towards the end game/outsiders. My goal was to make an actually hard end game and that the player feels pressure. I tried to improve or change how many games do things, and that often creates issues of their own and being in uncharted territory.

Thinking back I don't know if this was a good idea in a game where players tend tow ant to watch their empires grow. But I thought - that's what sandbox mode is for.

I get that you want the game to be hard but it seems if you weren't already set up to do all the quest at once, when you start the "bid" quest then its almost impossible. Seemed like if this was your first play through then you were set up to fail. Each mission you complete only makes it harder for you to earn credits to buy even more expensive ships while being attacked by even stronger foes. I got to a point where I was barely making anything unless i was micro managing all my ships and it just became a huge headache with hours going by and I was barely making any progress/credits. On top of that once you finally scrap up enough to form a decent fleet to fight back, the outsiders just "respawns." It's like I might as well restart and capture the whole system before I do the "bid quest."

Making the game challenging is great but it needs to be enjoyable at the same time.

With all that being said, great game!

Just need to balance out that end game.

Not sure if you are open to suggestions but I think a decent way to balance the end game is simply just to set the respawn timer for the outsiders a lot longer or just out right don't respawn them so that players have a chance to rebuild and tackle the next quest.

[chaosavy]

Thanks for the feedback.