How much of the game has changed?

[CordialVillain]

I played a good deal of Endless Sky back in late 2022, just wondering how much more content we have to play with.

Oh and I seem to recall the combat being quite fast paced; has it slowed down at all?

[Gore]

At least to me it feels very fast paced. I'm new to the game though, but if it has been even faster it must have been truly insane :D

[noctilucus]

I don't really recall how much was implemented at the end of 2022 - I don't even remember since when I've played it, 2021 or earlier. There are definitely entirely new parts of the galaxy, new races, new ships & equipment. The main storyline is probably still the same.

Combat is still fast paced, even at normal speed.

[Psycho 78]

Yeah I love the game but I find myself avoiding combat because it's just a whirlwind of ships and shooting. No idea who is who. Slower speed options or automatic slowing when in combat would be very appreciated.

[Rocket Witch]

Since late 2022 there's been some progress on Coalition and Gegno storylines (for the former, there is now a Lunarium faction route in adition to the Heliarchy) and two new alien species (Incipias; Successors). If you opt into the version 0.10.11 Unstable there's a third one (Avgi) currently in the process of release.

FAQ:
- No, there is still no Navy path for the main human campaign, and realistically no one appears to be working on it.
- Ditto for Wanderers Pt. 3.
- Hai Revealed is still 90% disabled.

To slow combat in an otherwise vanilla game, you might want this plugin: https://github.com/Arachi-Lover/LowerDamage
Click green "<> code ▾" button and then "download ZIP".

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

Combat has gotten slightly faster due to various balance changes to engines and ship mass/drag. It's definitely gotten to the point where it's too fast for my liking. An overall increase to shields/hull and reduction in damage would help. A lot of weapons with secondary effects feel quite pointless at this breakneck pace.

[Saugia]

Could you be specific with what in combat has made it faster/what areas? Compared to several updates ago, we have a big change in mass, so smaller ships are faster yet large ships slower; so fights with larger ships are arguably longer, not faster; fights with small ships aren't faster in duration, but speed-wise smaller ships are faster. Nothing in the way of notable weapon changes has happened in quite some time, except *maybe* with missiles, but not a change that would make fights be noticeably faster than they were a year or two ago.

It could be just not playing after a while and being used to other games, so if there's anything specific you feel, feel free to mention. (Also, combat might be faster in the newer alien area but that's just how their thematic is. Ultimately I don't think we did any big changes to combat overall that would make it seem much faster than the past.)

If it's a matter of making it slower as a suggestion in general that's one thing, sure. But I don't think it's faster, if at all, than it has been before.

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

I mean "faster" in a more broad sense, in that from jumping into a system, you have less reaction time to target a particular ship. So whenever you take on more than one bounty job at a time, odds are that the smaller bounty targets will be on top of your fleet before you have time to even assess the situation. You are correct in that combat itself did not strictly get "faster", it would be more accurate to say that there is much less time before combat begins in the first place. Heavy warships are indeed somewhat slower, but jobs like Marauder bounties are often accompanied by light and medium ships which give you no time to react now. I think the movement speed is fine across the board, but a side effect of the "time until engagement" being so short now is that the overall time pressure from combat already being fast ends up being more noticeable.

To put another way: The engine and ship speed rebalance were overall a welcome change, but it's made the already fast combat a more noticeable issue.

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

Having put some more thought into it: I think there might be some aspect of an X/Y problem to this. The reason why I feel such pressure to focus fire on certain ships in particular is because the fleet AI has a tendency to switch targets too frequently, making my ships lose precious time turning to face new targets as various small ships fly towards and promptly zip past them. If the target selection were more "sticky", that is, if a ship going out of range would not force selection of a new target so quickly, that might also alleviate the need to manually select a target to focus fire. Also would be nice if some degree of "ship already targeted by others in your fleet" would increase the weight for other ships targeting it, to make the fleet AI prefer to gang up on smaller numbers of enemy ships.

[Antrocon]

for me, i'd say reason the game feels too fast is the enemy spawn frequency. it's just too frequent & fast. any mid/high threat system has pirate fleets jumping in every 5-10 secs, so even if you decide to engage in what you think reasonable battle, you get overwhelmed really quick. all those enemies jumping in forces player to either avoid battle completely, or use deathball fleet - simply bring so much firepower that any enemy will die in couple of seconds, so that you actually have a chance to deal with present enemies before new ones jump in. frankly, that isn't fun
it was most prominent during FW campaign, once you in active war with republic. you can jump into rep system, get attacked by single carrier and think you can deal with it, but then in 5 secs another carrier fleet jumps in, then another & another & so on. soon there are more carriers than systems in republic and you need like 20+ shield beetles to clear them all out. similar situation in wah ki, with unfettered jumping in every 5 seconds it's total chaos in there.

[noctilucus]

Very recognizable comments. It's a bit better if you can manage to move away from the epicenter of the battle, kiting a few enemy ships, picking them off, then slowly approaching the epicenter again, etc.
But that's just a very unelegant solution to the balancing problem and definitely doesn't always work.

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

I've seen an open issue on the github, proposing a pause feature. Not a pause menu, but a way to pause the gameplay, and still issue commands. Probably not going to happen given how much refactoring it would take, but this type of feature would ultimately address the core frustration. If I can just jump in, pause, issue commands at my own pace, and then unpause, it takes the time pressure off having to track small, fast-moving ships and individually issue commands to target them.

[Saugia]

I suppose at that point, you're thinking more like RTS games with fleet strategies. While I can't say whether or not such a mechanic would be added, we do balance our game around single-ship play or small fleet play (something like 10 ships or lower). Those who have fleets of tens or hundreds of ships aren't really within the game's intended gameplay path; it's something we wouldn't limit, but the game is designed around the former.

[Antrocon]

tbh, i don't see it as balanced for single/small fleet play.
FW story battles against republic have several carriers & escorts and if you won't immediately disengage and pull out to the edge of system you get focused and melted very quickly; bounty hunter fleets i've complained the other day in different thread made a short work of me whenever i tried to use "small fleet" (centipide, 5 falcons & 4 aeries), i had to unpark all the ships i've captured to deal with them without major losses; non-story FW battles (like when you need to go through republic space) can be absolutely unwinnable if rngjesus decided to spawn several carrier fleets jumping right on top of you in each system
i _would_ prefer small fleet, but reality is forcing me to amass gigantic deathball just so i can stop losing ships left & right.

[Dolly ✨🌈🔧]

Putting intended fleet size aside for a moment, my main point of concern is an accessibility issue more than anything. Any feature, whether it be pausing to issue orders, slowing down the game much like the current double speed feature, reducing overall weapon damage, or improving player fleet AI, ultimately has the potential to significantly reduce time pressure on the player in combat. I like to play this game to relax and it would be nice if combat didn't require such fast reaction times on my part.

(Though I do agree that small fleets don't meaningfully address the issue of having to be so quick to issue commands in combat.)

[Saugia]

>tbh, i don't see it as balanced for single/small fleet play.

Fairly recently, we've had several devs live-stream their playthroughs of the game and no, we are not amazing at the game; the main plot is entirely doable in a single ship (being one you upgrade through the story, such as Argosy-Falcon-Dreadnaught-Hai-Wanderer and so on). For most of FW, it is indeed balanced around this. And with a fleet of small ships, it is made easier, but of course don't expect to do the entire story without losing ships or in one life. There are also many players who can do it solo as well. At this point, it's hard to balance the game for *everyone* to be able to do it in one specific way, or for it to not be easy and bland for others, but generally, if you stick with your fleet and focus down weaker ships, it's doable.

Whether or not *specific* battles are balanced is another story (especially Wanderer and Pug ones later on, which are on the list to look into), which sounds like your problem point which is valid.

Pirate raids I'm not sure of as much, perhaps they can be toned down. The "underground" spawn-rates could get a second look at (pirates, hunters, marauders, etc.)

On the topic of "non FW battles" something we do think is massive Republic fleets spawn a bit too often outside of FW, so we will probably look at reducing those.

As for accessibility issues - it really comes down to what the game's designed around. As the game is not an RTS or fleet-based game, adding mechanics to such elements isn't really a priority, we might add a few, who knows, but fleet gameplay isn't our focus.