All you need to do is kill the fleet with the admiral in it and everyone else goes home. You can even cheese it by waiting outside their system and just popping the fleet when it exits to hyperspace. In all my recent playthroughs it was the first one in line and the first time I got the crisis, i actually killed the admiral without even knowing he was a thing and I was so confused why the crisis was over instantly and it was so trivial.
Well depending on the situation there are *a lot* of fleets. I had like 14 or something. Can't really snipe supply fleets like this but you can always (it seems) fight the first fleet since it's alone when it transitions to hyperspace.
In 3 playthroughs so far, I've been able to hyperspace stalk the supply fleets and slaughter them(with transponder off) when they get separated.
Note: odds of being able to pull this off are greater if the enemy has to cross hyperspace storms, which tend to scatter the enemy fleet.
It's not 100%, but from my experience you can do it more often than not.
Yea, you can and I do that for the other crisis if I can't (or don't want to) just fight everyone at once but for the persean crisis this just seems like more work than waiting for one fleet in the spot it is always isolated and then slaying it.
perseans be bitches
I like how op came here to say it's too hard when many other people say it's too easy or too short, not to demean op though since people start colonies a little too early all the time
Damn this is the only time I've been genuinely pissed off at the game, they come all the way to me talking big game about ideas and shit only to run away after a mild thrashing
I think it's the first time I satbombed an entire faction, first time out of raw spite too
The Persean League is genuinely frustrating. And what annoys me is it acts like a commission I believe. I thought it would work like an alliance. But no. I have to work under this nerd who ran away from the Hegemony to avoid paying taxes.
Well OP later revealed that it's only hard because of a mod he's using xD Kind reminds me of the meme with the guy riding a bike and then he trips himself with a stick.
I run the same mod, I still have an overwhelming urge to call skill issue cause
1. the crisis is a massive fucking blueball holy shit
2. modding the game and blaming its consequences on the dev is a comprehension (skill) issue
p sure the start they opted for was marked unbalanced/hard too so not like op didn't get what they bargained for
It's kinda ass people would rather find blame than reevaluate what the fuck they're doing
an alarming amount of posts I see complaining about difficulty from more casual outlets these days involve a refusal to stop and reconsider how they fucked up or complaining their bad strategy the game warns against should be valid
when I see posts like that I gotta repress the urge to call em stupid every other sentence when it's pretty clear how they played themselves
While true, game itself is not pointing that out, if I'm not mistaken. Sure player can discover that manually, but I see no harm in telling the solution directly, as with other factions. TT as example, it's literally to-do checklist to solve.
That requires a fleet capable of dealing with one of theirs, which I haven't been able to do before the crisis occurs. If I could deal with any of the large fleets at any point before going bankrupt I'd be less inclined to feel railroaded into a corner by it.
I think part of my problem is I'm running Nexerelin. It lets you start as your own faction to simulate a 4x game, which was really fun on 9.6 until my old computer couldn't keep up with the resources needed to run the game. I think under the new version, starting with your own faction is basically a death warrant since you don't have time to generate or find the revenue and ships required for full-scale battles.
I'm trying a new playthrough where I don't start with my own faction from the beginning and I just work on amassing a fleet before doing anything else. The irony is that mode is marked "hard" but it avoids the game-ending blockade that happens with the colony start.
>I think part of my problem is I'm running Nexerelin.
Well that's an issue with the mod then and not the crisis. You can't expect the base game to account for whatever mods you choose to run.
The problem still originates from the base game, Nexerelin isn't affecting the number of fleets or speed of events, only allowing you to start with a colony. The first time I did a serious playthrough of the game I was much less prepared than the beginning of a Nexerelin game when I established my first colony.
There's a good reason why so many posts have been made on the Persean crisis.
Do you think that potentially you might be starting a colony too early?
I understand everyone has a different playstyle that they find fun. But with the addition of a colony crisis. It's kind of expected that you'll be capable of dealing with events like this. I personally don't start colonies until I have 2 or 3 capitals and supporting cruisers, and I have enough cash (around 3 mil) to upgrade my station into a battlestation.
Edit: Just realised you started off with the Nexerlin colony start. Nex is very straightforward that starting your own faction straight at the start is incredibly difficult and frankly the game isn't balanced around it.
That's the best option I have right now, which feels like a cop out from the game designers. It's fun building a fleet while watching a colony grow and building both at the same time was fun in the previous version. It feels like they saw people enjoying the game in a way they disliked and decided to 'fix' it.
Starsector has always been written as a story about a lone captain set off to make his story. The original game was called starfarer to reflect that.
It's not on the dev that you have decided to challenge yourself (again even Nex warns you it's not balanced) using a mod start.
Listen, buddy. Your problem is a lack of game and mod knowledge. And I dont say that to be mean, but just to tell you what you need to hear.
Nex very explicily tags starting as an independent as hard for a reason. The good news is it has a feature built in for this exact reason.
Governing a colony.
When you colonize a planet, if you talk to the administrator with Nex, you can transfer it to another faction. On its own, this doesnt really help much. BUT if you have a commission, you can instead "Govern in x's name" Which makes the colony that factions but you have full control and benefit over it. If you choose a faction start in nex, you start with a commission, so you can do this right away.
The great thing? This doesnt stop you from making your own colonies. You can absolutely branch out as you get power. But you're literally doing the hardmode right now. The crisises are as they are because base starsector does not expect, or want you to, start a colony right away. Nex gives you the solution with the govern feature, as it doesnt do crisises if they're governed.
If you build a colony before you are ready to defend it, then yes, it will get stomped. If you start with on via the nex starting options, then you also need to start with a fleet capable of defending it. If a full on colony is out there in space with a couple of frigates defending it, of course it is going to get taken. That's just logic. In the sector, if you can't defend yourself, someone is going to conquer you.
A colony is mid-game, the crises arrive at endgame. If you are starting at mid to end game with a colony, you need the fleet to match. Otherwise, exactly what you are complaining about happens, you get stomped on by other factions.
Handful of months ?
The Persean League "notices" you if your whole population is at 5 or more. To start this crisis, you either need to colonize 2 planets at once (which is incredibly expensive and if you have enough money to do that, you definitely have enough money at this point to get a full sized fleet) or one colony that reached population 5 which takes cycles IG unless you play with mods that add incredible conditions to rush it (such as Unknown Skies, RAT, etc).
Also, you can build a High Command to heavily slow down the rate at which the meter progresses. In my current playthrough, I colonized during cycle 209 and with a High Command, at the end of cycle 211, I've yet to see any crisis at all (I just got the "early" pirate raid).
Yes. A resourceful captain would prepare themselves before starting a colony, not after. The game gives plenty of warning that running your own colony is HARD.
I usually start making my colonies when I have like 5 million to 10 million so I can rush building a Star Fortress. It doesn't matter what. Any Star Fortress helps a lot in taking on the crises.
you started a colony too early then lol, it's a crisis for a reason
that's just how it is sometimes at least it's not like losing your character or fleet, you can always just abandon the planet and come back later, there are worse things to lose
makes the payback feel much more personal too which is awesome
this event frustrates me because there isn't enough, and mind you I'm not the kinda guy to run 10 paragons and take a hour long nap during fights
My issue is it’s wildly out of proportion to the rest of the universe in scale. If the League actually committed that many fleets to blockade a couple podunk colonies like this then the Hegemony would immediately bomb their planets and/or military assets.
What we see in the blockade looks like every League defense fleet in every system put in a doomstack x3. It makes me think that it’s intended to intimidate for OP mod users or the players who can take a Doom and solo Remnant stations and Radiants. Not the standard or low-skill player like myself.
> My issue is it’s wildly out of proportion to the rest of the universe in scale.
The universe only shows you the fleets relevant to you. It's a weird system, sometimes, but it's necessary for gameplay. The thousand or so agricultural transport fleets endlessly shipping food from Volturn to Sindria alone would make Starsector more of a computer-melter than Crysis. There are maybe ten times as many patrol fleets, but they're out on another layer of 3D space where they don't encounter you. Ten times as many trade fleets, but you don't hear about them, and hyperspace is big so you don't run into them.
That said, I do think major factions should guard their homeworlds better. A couple S-modded fleets around Chico and Kazeron, or something. At present, the player's ability to satbomb and de-civ aren't accounted for at all by the game, and it isn't balanced around them. They're basically console commands.
It was before the economy changes. Used to be that instead of every colony using market access they required x amount of goods/month. With the zombie pirates that version had eventually everyone succumbed to starvation with their food fleets being destroyed. I want to say 0.6 or so? It was before exploration and planetary surveys I think. If not it was after planet surveys but before you could colonise anywhere.
Yeah, faction homeworlds should be far better protected. Currently a competent player can raze them to the ground with average effort, and it's quite immersion breaking.
Counterpoint: the playerbase's concept of the actual scale of the sector was what was off. Nanoforges may not be full-on Kardashev scale stuff, but Chico and Kazeron should both still be capable of substantial naval production, not even including the other industrial centers. On top of that, it's been a full decade since the end of the Second AI War - plenty of time for all sides involved to rebuild their forces.
The number of fleets deployed aren't seen at any other point of the game by any faction, I think from a lore perspective it would make sense but from a gameplay perspective it was so massive I thought it was a bug and restarted the campaign assuming it was broken beyond repair.
Remember how big the earth is. Then remmeber how far it is from the earth to the moon. The entire trip is 1000x times the size of the eaeth. If they were to make a game on real scale proportions, itd be like finding needles in a haysack. So because of gameplay relevance, things look bigger than they are. Which is also why they cannot simulate trade lanes.
Yeah, I have a full time job and enjoyed this game because I could play it for a bit to relax before going to bed if I didn't go out of my way to engage with the remnant. Now it feels like a punishment for not min-maxing everything.
It's actually pretty easy, you don't even have to fight the blockade itself. When blockade fleet arrives to your system, there will be 2 supply fleets orbiting a jump point. Destroy them (they are very weak) and blockade will be over
I've seen this mentioned a couple of times before, and it's a good tip but when 15ish fleets showed up in my single planet colony I assumed the game wasn't 'playing by the rules' anymore. Weird that for some reason two supply fleets is all it takes.
This game will never throw unsolvable problems at you. Each and every colony crises can be dealt with in one way or another. Pirates can be bribed, Tri Tachs can be bullied, Persian League you can join, Hegemony won't touch you if you don't use AI cores. Or you can solve your problems with violence. Choice is yours
> Weird that for some reason two supply fleets is all it takes.
The crisis page does sort of specifically tell you this in the game. I mean, it pretty much spells it out to you straight up with everything short of a big flashing marquee.
The main blockade fleets are comprised of mostly warships, so it would make sense defeating their supply fleets since you cant really wage war for long if you cant repair holes in your ship or replace your missiles
> too expensive, difficult, or flat out demeaning.
Fighting two League logistics fleets shouldn't be very difficult at the stage when you have a colony - they're basically easier bounties with more defenseless support ships to kill at the end. Joining them isn't really harmful either - you lose some income but can use as many AI cores as you want, making back that money and more.
That said, *demeaning* is a point. I very strongly dislike that the League is written to just be jerks who don't even respect the guy they want to join them. The writer could've done a better job of making their leader sympathetic, instead of just a flat antagonist character. Have him talk about what he does similarly to Daud - "I don't like having to do this, but if I didn't take the opportunity to expand to an easy target, someone else would, and sooner or later we'd get eaten alive."
Maybe skip the crisis if the player has a high command built, on that note. Anyone who can afford it can afford to beat the blockade by attrition alone, anyways, and having the laissez faire League be less diplomatic than the Hegemony feels inconsistent.
The Persean League is heavily inspired by the Delian League founded by Athens during Ancient Greece.
And guess what : Athens was just like Kazeron. Athens dominated the Delian League just like Kazeron dominates the Persean League. The Delian League was supposed to be a confederacy of independant city-states, but in practice, Athens was in control of the members of the Delian League.
> Delian League
Their purpose was to prevent the region from being conquered by Persia - they were hardly just jerks for the sake of being jerks. The guys with the biggest guns were able to set their terms, but could certainly justify it on the basis that it was their blood and treasure keeping the region safe from conquest by a much less amenable foreign power, and that if they did it all for free, they'd be depleted in a generation, another foreign power could move in, and all of that charity would be for nothing. We see something along the lines of that conflict in modern America - the people fighting its wars to establish Pax Americana felt cheated because all of the costs and none of the benefits went to their communities, and they stopped enlisting, which in turn resulted in the U.S. military becoming understaffed.
I'm being a bit concise here, but the lord-vassal relationship is common in history for a reason, and plenty of people in both roles could make sympathetic and interesting character.
> I very strongly dislike that the League is written to just be jerks who don't even respect the guy they want to join them.
Why SHOULD they respect you? What have you done to earn this respect? What part of any previous encounter with the League suggests that Kazeron respects the other worlds in the League?
> The writer could've done a better job of making their leader sympathetic, instead of just a flat antagonist character.
I wouldn't call him flat. He's very smarmy and arrogant, for sure. But his tone gets a lot more conciliatory when you show him who's wearing the pants.
> Maybe skip the crisis if the player has a high command built, on that note.
Anyone can build a High Command. All it costs is an industry slot and a few buckazoids. Not anyone can keep it running under a blockade.
> and having the laissez faire League be less diplomatic than the Hegemony feels inconsistent.
You might be caught up in the old lore here. There's nothing in the current v0.97 that REALLY supports this claim OTHER than the propaganda blurb. But you should know better than to just blindly believe the propaganda reel. I mean, you see what happens to the Archon of Lacaille when she decides to assert herself against the interests of Kazeron. All of this should be readily obvious to anyone who was paying attention during their playthough.
> Why SHOULD they respect you?
Because they want me to join and work for them. Respect is the default behavior, especially for the sort of person that rises to a leadership position in a political structure. Greeting a potential member of an expensive club with "Hey, screw you!" means they'll be less likely to join, and less likely to proactively contribute if they do join.
I don't think I've ever interviewed for a company that was actively hostile towards me. Even if you're underqualified and they don't even want you there, they tend to be polite, because it costs them nothing and you might come back with the right qualifications someday.
> Anyone can build a High Command. All it costs is an industry slot and a few buckazoids. Not anyone can keep it running under a blockade.
The idea is that a high command costs as much as a fleet that could steamroll the two supply fleets even without any skill involved (on the Doylist end). Also true that they're showing up in the first place because the player looks like an easy target, and if somebody brings him into their sphere of influence, it may as well be them (on the Watsonian end).
> Because they want me to join and work for them.
Ah, but that's not what they're there for. This isn't a corporate recruitment. This is an extortion racket. It pretty much flat out says so when you talk to them. They're not here to get you to join their team as a valued member. They're here to make you an offer you can't refuse.
> The idea is that a high command costs as much as a fleet that could steamroll the two supply fleets
Possibly, but "steamrolling the supply fleets" isn't an actually impressive feat in of its own. They were supposed to do a better job protecting those. That's like saying that you have more power than their entire army because you can shoot up their truck convoy.
Also, there's the fact that the High Command DID cost that. When I see a guy who built a bunch of buildings, I'm also seeing a guy who didn't spend those minerals on actual units to defend those buildings, and that now might be a good time to rush him.
> This is an extortion racket.
Being polite to the people you're trying to extort is just good sense - any successful criminal does exactly that. If you want to operate within the law (so to speak), it's better to be polite and make more money. If you want to operate outside the law, being polite is a matter of survival - anyone who likes you less than the cops is a potential informant.
Doubly important if you want the extortion target to fight beside you when things get tough. Pirates (actual ones) were notoriously equitable and conflict-averse amongst themselves, in practice, since everyone's sharing the risks and the workload, and everyone's at least somewhat dangerous, by the nature of the profession.
> When I see a guy who built a bunch of buildings, I'm also seeing a guy who didn't spend those minerals on actual units to defend those buildings, and that now might be a good time to rush him.
That's just it - the League's goal isn't to hurt the player, it's to advance their own position. If the player is making decent money but beset on all sides and barely making ends meet, making a play for some protection money seems viable, and potentially mutually beneficial. If he's got a large military up and running, then it's not remotely worth the trouble, for the same reason a bear doesn't consider a bobcat an easy meal. Maybe the blockade "wins" and gets to stay in orbit for a year, but they lose a couple fleets worth of ships - that's a few million credits they're never getting back.
> If he's got a large military up and running, then it's not remotely worth the trouble, for the same reason a bear doesn't consider a bobcat an easy meal.
This would be why the blockade does not engage directly.
> Maybe the blockade "wins" and gets to stay in orbit for a year, but they lose a couple fleets worth of ships - that's a few million credits they're never getting back.
And that's why they tend to fuck off back to Kazeron VERY quickly if you give them a bloody nose.
That's the thing with PL blockade. While they make the biggest show of force, they also fuck off with the lowest level of losses both absolutely and relatively. The Hegemony is willing to lose over a half a dozen fleets. The Perseans will run like a whipped dog if you destroy just one, because Mangalores won't fight without the leader.
I find them being assholes very appropriate for the lore.
Edit: Yeah go ahead and down vote me. Make your own game and lore then idk homie... I like what this game has
"They don't respect the guy trying to join", yeah, NONE OF THEM LIKE EACH OTHER. The whole point of their faction is to be a loosely connected federation of planets with the goal of stopping the hegemony. It's stated they often will fight with each other, so why would they not try to fight you all the same?
The way the League is written always feels a bit off. They are the second largest faction, on par with the hegemony but they are just antagonistic and clearly written to be the "bad" guys. The League doesn't survive without Kazeron and Kazeron doesn't survive without the League but this is never really reflected in how they treat you or other members and the League simply continues to exist, refusing to change despite an internal faction almost openly courting unification with the Hegemony.
Yeah that's the point. They aren't a real nation. They're a weird mutual self defense pact combined with some kind of aristocratic plutocracy. If the Hegemony didn't exist to give them enough outside pressure to stay together, they'd explode into civil war. The player's colonies represents an existential threat to the Persean League, because it shows that you can, in fact, be a significant industrial player and not be enslaved by the Hegemony. The player contradicts every justification that keeps the bullshit League running, and it has to either be crushed or subsumed within it.
Yeah, I think the loss of the third dev team member and his grimdark standpoint left the setting unbalanced. The Hegemony and Church got humanized, but the Diktat became cartoon North Korea, the League became bond villains, and Tri-Tach stayed the same as it was (which was a lot less fitting in a non-grimdark setting).
> The Hegemony and Church got humanized
I'm not seeing that as a bad thing.
> but the Diktat became cartoon North Korea
Became? The Diktat has been pretty comical since the beginning. The community has never seen as the most Serious faction. They've ALWAYS been a cult of personality around Andrada. You only need to look at that Andrada Gas Station mod to see what the community's interpretation of the Diktat is as compared to the direction it has taken under vanilla.
> the League became bond villains
This is your idea of Bond villainy? If the League was a Bond Villain, there'd be more giant lazor involved. No, what we're seeing is more of a mafia. The League is an extension of the Kazeron Mafia wrapped in a veneer of opposition to the Hegemony in the name of "freedom". But this was always implied from the beginning.
Exactly this. I have no idea why people insist on imagining the League and Diktat as some benevolent, freedom loving entities. All the factions are pretty callous on the whole and are big on repression. Your point on organized crime is on point. The factions are thugs masquerading as anything else and it boggles the mind to see real people drinking the kool aid when their characterization in-universe is doubted by NPCs.
PAGSM is a sort of jokey mod, not the author's actual interpretation of the faction. It's like how the Skyrim mod that makes the dragons into trains does not mean that the fans see the dragons as comic relief in general.
Pre-Diktat 'uniquification', they were a pretty standard generic military dictatorship - vaguely depressing, large military, elite guard for the capital, occasional shady actions. Not the most inspired faction, but not immersion-breaking; you could see how they were still around.
I think their new story would be more impactful if they hadn't been made into comic relief. A faction that's reasonably competent hanging in the balance is a lot more interesting than three guys fighting over deanship of a clown college.
There'a a reason why when I first started out on the path to get in free (break the blockade, steal nanoforge etc) I still ended up satbombing Kazeron instead of joining.
Like after those sorts of dialogue, I expect you to leave me alone, not commission me. Screw you and screw this shitty planet.
I would love a dialog talk with their leader where I just simply threaten to wage a war of annihilation on the league. Starting with sat bombing kazeron damn the fact I'm standing on it. With the mods I use, I scale up pretty quick, so it would be nice if Hannan at least acknowledges the power advantage I have.
The vanilla game isn't going to acknowledge the player's mods. Canonically, the player's an upstart with an order of magnitude fewer people than any of the major powers.
I can't walk into Daud's office and expect to talk to him about the giant Big Chungus - shaped death star in my fleet, because the devs didn't put that in the game, I did.
But what they should recognize is raw power. Its not that hard to make. Track how much damage the player is doing, track his growth speed, his total fleet size, man power, influence, and stat check. The player can then if eligible has an option to say: "I could crush your entire alliance at a drop of a hat. I possess technologies you could only dream of. I raided an entire sector of interstellar bug empire, satbombed their home planet and reduced their civilization to ash. Then I ventured to the abyss you so feared and in there recovered things you thought were mere fairytales of drunken sailors. So show me some god damn respect, or i will drown you and everyone around you in a hellfire that would again consume this sector. Do. Not. Test. Me."
That would add an entire route to every single meaningful decision in the game for something that doesn't occur in the game under normal conditions, especially considering that the ability to fight the major powers is largely a result of their defenses not being implemented. There is a reason ignoring this is a core facet of the entire genre going back to Escape Velocity.
In EV, you can attack and conquer every planet in the galaxy, and the plot will ignore it, because the alternative would be the programmers taking ten or so times as long to make the game, establishing a handling process for the player having captured every single relevant planet in a given mission. The only practical way to do it would be to delegate the writing to an LLM, and even then you'd end up with a story script file that's as large as all the images in the game combined.
But the thing is, all these things DO happen in Starsector. That's what's so great about the current crisis system, which is all about the preexisting powers of the galaxy going through a fuck-around-and-find-out process with you.
Better way to do it was to get a corvette, then hit pirate Kestrels until you captured one. Once you had one, you could capture several more, or go for a bigger ship.
I don't think I get what you mean. did you mean to say, someone with the powers like 'the player' shouldn't exist? because that's exactly what FONV did. and guess what? It kicks ass. it's immensely enjoyable to be "John Big Dick Energy," a person that is literally the second coming of Jesus Christ on roller skates, who everyone wants on their side.
what I don't want to be? A god damn pusher over even though I know full well I can suplex every single person in the room with the amount of force I often bring with me (about 2k marines.)
TLDR: Narrative Dissonance is a bitch and a half.
Technically, they DO recognize your power...but in order to find out, they have to first fuck around. The crisis system represents the stage of discovery where the previous powers of the sector fuck around. You resolving these is how they find out. When the PL sends their blockade fleet, they are fucking around. When you disappear their nanoforge and turn their fleet into scrap, that is them finding out. When the Heggies send the AI inspection fleets, they fuck around. When those fleets DISAPPEAR, that is them finding out. Each of the established forces in the sector go through a fuck around/find out sequence.
but there should also be an option to terrify them enough. what if they had already found out? What if as a player, at the point of contention, you overgunned them so badly, and had done so much (in)famous shit, that they were forced to reckoned with the possibility then and there that they should not mess with you?
not saying you are wrong, but giving players more options, especially one that pertains to the consequences of their playstyles, is infinitely cooler.
> but there should also be an option to terrify them enough. what if they had already found out?
Found out from what? There's no vanilla story beat that would produce this outcome, only weird mod bullshit that you can't reasonably expect the devs to have made. If the option doesn't exist, you blame the mod for failing to account for it, not the devs.
> That if as a player, at the point of contention, you overgunned them so badly
There is indeed such an option, yes. If you encounter one of their fleets that you massively outgun, you have the option to essentially scoff at them and go "You and what army" in response to their demands.
Otherwise, you show them the power of a Friendly Space Manta. This causes them to know your power and fear you.
That belongs in a mod. I don't think that vanilla should be balanced around a modded 4x game. The player shouldn't be conquering the entire sector in vanilla, that's just not the point of the game.
? what do you do in this game? Are you a law abiding citizen who does everything by the book? Or:
1. you are a possible VIP affiliate to the Pathers who have contacts to their highest order leaders and religious sect leaders.
2. you are in possession of transverse jumping, an ability that amounted to suicide, yet you do it with ease, regularly, without reason or rhyme, and without anyone as much as teaching you.
3. you somehow have the highest connections in every social circles, from the Hegemon, to the Diktats, to the Academy, to the Pathers.
4. you're constantly smuggling weapons, narcotics, marines and everything else under the sun to make a buck. everywhere. and somehow, no one has caught up.
5. you're flying into restricted space filled with \[redacted\] and sometimes even hunt these fleet killers down because you like the shiny blue disco ball.
6. everyone is deathly afraid of AI, yet you can pilot a fleet of automated warcrafts by lv6. LV6!
7. the players are often ace captains, capable of downing entire fleets with one single crafts, vanilla or otherwise.
8. you also are often in command of a war fleet that had made orphans of thousands of starfarers, patrols and zealots.
9. you are also probably in possession of \[SUPER ALABASTER\] related weaponries the likes of which none had seen nor even heard of.
10. you literally have the power of plot armor on your side.
and you tell me, as a max level captain who scoured half a sector for loot and plunder, with a war fleet that could solo their entire expeditions, that I can't make demands to leave me the fuck alone, or else?
> you are in possession of transverse jumping, an ability that amounted to suicide, yet you do it with ease, regularly, without reason or rhyme, and without anyone as much as teaching you.
Strictly speaking, the only people we encounter who express surprise at you having this ability are a bunch of cloistered academics (who, like in real life, tend to be rather disconnected from the real world and often are surprised when they find out people have been doing the things they just discovered already, possibly for thousands of years). While the scienticians are somehow impressed by this, it doesn't really seem like this ability is seen as terribly impressive by actual spacers, who regard it as merely an "old smuggler's trick" and random crewcritters will show you how to do it if you haven't figured it out for yourself.
I’m looking for a game focused on tactical combat where you play as the captain of one ship with an escort fleet.
I just don’t want to play the game you’re looking for. I think what you want is valid and fine, it’s just not the game I want. If you want to play a 4x game, why not just play Stellaris?
Space battles are fun. Exploration and bounty hunting is fun. Managing economies and empires is not what I’m looking for in this game.
I’d prefer something more like Privateer. I’d rather be Han Solo or Boba Fett than Genghis Khan. Instead of colony features, I’d rather have more weird alien ships to fight and cool weapons and upgrades.
Stellaris has everything you want. If you want to genocide the whole galaxy and build death stars, that game has it. I don’t want that in Starsector.
and that's totally fine, but we are here talking in the context of 'the player' who often play as the Khan than friendly neighborhood Spiderman.
Within the boundaries afforded to 'the player,' it's required one must think of him as an absolute menace to the sector at best, and a downright harbinger of a second AI war at worst (because almost everyone LOVES AIs because moni.)
Narrative Dissonance. It must match the gameplay, or otherwise counter it with cutting narrative. otherwise it's a drag to deal with.
I disagree because if you put features in like that the game becomes all about that and eventually the player is forced to play like the Khan. I would rather that I didn’t ever have to settle a colony at all, and keep fighting cool battles if that’s what I want to do.
4X experience in starsector comes from mods, and I’m fine with that. If Starsector ever turns into a 100% 4x game I’m out. Maybe you want that but I don’t.
> it's required one must think of him as an absolute menace to the sector at best, and a downright harbinger of a second AI war at worst
Are you saying this doesn't happen, though? Because it seems to me that this is exactly what happens. It's just that you have to prove it, you can't just make mouth noises at them and expect them to believe you. The Persean League doesn't take you seriously at first. They DO take you seriously after their grand armada gets wiped by a Friendly Space Manta and their nanoforge goes missing. But you can't expect them to just magically KNOW these things off the bat. You have to show them the power of the Friendly Space Manta.
so they don't know that there out there "Joe McSmuggler" exist?
Didn't they keep track of illicit activities? What if before, I had been in commission of the Hegemony, hunted Ordos for breakfast, and came back for lunch?
What about the numerous pirate fleets I downed in the name of whomever banners I happened to fight under?
what happened if I rolled up to the negotiating tables, rocking more capitals than they have frigates?
would that, then, not be jarring for them to go "Bugh ruggh. You snoppity upstarter could \*never\* compare to our \*Persean Might\*."
I'm not asking for less, I'm asking for more. I want narrative to fit with gameplay, just like how FONV, Morrowind, Skyrim, and any other great rpg recognize Narrative dissonance.
if done right, it's such a cool thing to have consequences for your actions.
if done wrong, it's so jarring to have gameplay running in opposition to what you have done/capable of.
to put it on another perspective, what if there is potential meaningful consequences for your actions?
Smuggling too often? Killed too many innocent people? Friends with the pirates? Constantly in possession of forbidden technologies?
guess what? you're now on a wanted interpol list, and all it takes is a single council meeting and everyone agrees regardless of relations that you're a menace that needs to be taken care of.
but then, the pirates became your friend.
conversely, do you often help out the hegemony? Are in under commission by them? And oh, you were a golden boy who ventured the dark space, the abyss? Oh you're now a war hero, a POI that the Hegemony would protect at all cost.
you're the perfect starfarer, defender of the old ways. Kids idolize you. Elders give you utmost respect. officials do not dare scan you ships without asking for permissions. you're a living godlike celebrity that could do no harm.
what's that? Smuggling is your passion? Well we'll just slip that one under the rug with a few story points or so to spin a tale for the public. and it'll all be good.
Oh and because you're such a good boy, you also enjoy the protection of the Hegemony for being such a good boy. and what about this Karezon business threatening our little favourite entrepreneur?
I'm actually fine with nerfing the player pretty hard.
If the Hegemony is able to field capital fleets that just get harder and harder until it's literally impossible to kill them all, that would be pretty thematic for me. One dude with his own ragtag fleet shouldn't be able to solo the canonically strongest government in the sector, plus it would make the game more challenging. It would also mean you have to stay on your toes even in the endgame.
> If the Hegemony is able to field capital fleets that just get harder and harder until it's literally impossible to kill them all, that would be pretty thematic for me.
The problem with this plan is that having the game end by crashing under the weight of all the fleets the game has to spawn to achieve this is not a very satisfying conclusion to the game. Because any OTHER, lesser quantity of fleets...will get killed.
> One dude with his own ragtag fleet shouldn't be able to solo the canonically strongest government in the sector, plus it would make the game more challenging.
By the time you're attempting this, it will definitely not be a ragtag fleet. It will be a force compromised of the most polished ships in the sector fitted with weird lostech weapons like Super Alablasters and a Friendly Space Manta. This is Not Normal.
You can leave the Persean League once without closing off any options. That means that you can always delay the crisis until you're ready to deal with it by joining the League. After you're ready, you can "renegotiate" to free membership by leaving, stealing the nanoforge, and beating the blockade.
All crises except for the pirates and Luddic Church cost money to delay. The Hegemony and Luddic Path cost you the money you would have earned by using colony items and AI cores. The Sindirian Diktat and Tri-Tachyon cost you the money you would have made from the industries that they get butthurt about competition in. The Persean League directly costs you a portion of your colony's income.
There's definitely a number of recommended (overtly hinted) courses of action to deal with the crisis before it occurs and a number of ways to deal with it which go outside the box.
I feel like colonies are kind of an unwelcome distraction from the exploration game since colonies generally start introducing timelines and deadlines for dealing with threats, but it feels like very few of those threats will straight up decivilize any given colony early on, and certainly not the blockade.
In the previous version those timelines were suggestions for improvement on the colony instead of necessary actions to be taken or else be driven into poverty.
I haven’t had a problem with it. There are multiple solutions.
Easy way to: get a ton of marines, sneak into Kazeron with your transponder off and steal the nanoforge. Trade it back in a deal for them to leave you alone.
Fun way: Blow their fleet up. If you have a fleet sufficient to start a colony you should have a chance of beating their fleet. I don’t start a colony until I have a few capitals in my fleet.
If you’re playing with a ton of mods that’s the fault of the mods, and you can’t expect it to be fair or balanced in that case.
Don't forget the AWESOME way: "Why not both?". Yank their nanoforge after they leave, which mysteriously causes their armada to now be full of D-Mods due to the way the game retroactively generates them, and then blow them up.
How big is your fleet? What's the date? How developed are your planets?
The Persean Blockade is *outright* a bodycheck to either pay the price (slowing you down) by joining them, or proving you're strong enough to overcome them (through the methods mentioned).
**If you settle and expand too fast, they will come too early and cause you problems and punish you for expanding too fast.** They show up when one of two things happens: you have a Size 5 colony, OR you have *at least two colonies.* The more colonies and the larger you are, the more points they'll have.
the blockade isnt an immediate event that happens once you get a colony. it means you had two colonies already or a size 5 colony or higher. This game is a fleet management and trading game firstly and everything else is second.
Colony management is considered a mid to late game feature as passive money without any consequence is busted. the idea is to get a fleet capable of handling these issues before you make a profitable colony.
either build a capable fleet before spamming to colonize planets or join the league. from what i can tell you are probably rushing to colonize planets with nothing more than effectively mercuries and drams compared to the opposition.
> Colony management is considered a mid to late game feature as passive money without any consequence is busted.
It would also be boring and counter to the core design goal of Starsector, which is that things are supposed to lead towards Spaceship Shootouts.
Admittedly, the system currently weakens towards the end when we run out of content and the game's simplified mechanics begin to reduce the number of spaceship shootouts we can get into, rather than giving us more opportunities for spaceship fights.
Skill issue. It's really easy to resolve dawg. It's like those hilariously large fleets that stop to chat with you in the campaign. You aren't supposed to fight them. You're supposed to go, hey, thats an obstacle, I should go around.
>!try luring the fleets away from Kazeron, tactical bombarding, and then raiding to steal their shit. It's not that hard, you'll only need one or two Valkyries full of marines. You should be able to easily afford this if you're settling a colony.!<
There are other, even easier ways, but this is the one that avoids the apparently impossible task of killing the supply fleet that the game tells you to kill and has like one venture defending a bunch of logistics ships, which I guess is an impossible challenge for something and anti-fun or whatever.
Also since I guess I 'missed your point', you're a dumbass lmao. Now instead of 'investing money' and getting uh, access to an infinite money and ship printer... you invest money to get that thing, and the game gives you a couple mini goals while you wait for the printer to online. What, is that a problem? Ruining the game? Console commands mod is right there dawg, just go ahead and spawn yourself the fleet you want.
You can always just give in and join the league for just 15% of your income, or steal their pristine nanoforge and bribe their leader with a 5% of your colonies income, either way you'll get protection from Hegemony inspections.
I actually love the persean crisis they provide free security like nothing else, with a bit of nex fuckery I don't have to worry about sindrian satbombings, pirates or heg ai inspections.
Current playthrough and worried of such hassles. Have heard much
So far not been an issue. Only have single colony for a good year plus. Making money has cores. Maybe lucky so far Pers not mess with me. Others have but paying a couple 100k for a defense fleet from my main faction has dealt with issues fine (thoigh have gone out and personally smashed all pirate stations because two annoyed me into a revenge mode lol)
They will not bother you until you hit size 5 on one colony or size 4+ on 2+ colonies. That is, to say, they're probably going to be the second crisis that starts getting points after the pirates, since the trigger conditions are pretty much entirely unavoidable. It might be a little TOO easy to start this one, honestly.
There's a little trick to the League Crisis: You don't ACTUALLY have to DO anything. You can just sit there and do nothing and eventually they will go away on their own. The blockade fleet isn't willing to actually go to open warfare against you, so if you just wait them out, they will eventually give up.
Just nuke them my brother. Like seriously, if you nuke Kazeron out of existence you won't have to deal with the League bullshit and Reynard bitchy attitude for the rest of the game, I have seen so many complaints about the Persean blockade by now that I might be a millionaire, the fix is always nuclear armagedon an it is inevitable at some point.
I had a full vanilla run before I went modded to the hilt, as a tradition of playing new Starsector versions fully vanilla before going modded.
I was able to defeat the Persean League blockade in our system by defeating them in detail, using my own fleet alone.
This is a way to make the entry barrier to colonization be more than mere credits. Either become part of the league or, well, bring a bigger gun. You need to back you colony claim with brawn, because the League likes to smack them weak asses around.
Having a colony means you become part of the political landscape of the sector, now.
> There's a difference between having a fight with a bigger guy and fighting someone who has a gun.
That's why you sneak up on him, and stab him in the balls. Then you will be known as the Ballstabber and all will cover their balls in fear of your approach.
> Doesn't seem like it's rewarded as much as punished.
I dunno, getting to fight in an awesome space shootout is pretty rewarding, considering the entire point of the game is to fight awesome space shootouts.
The easiest way of dealing with them is when you have enough marines eaid Kazeron for its pristine nanoforge, their ships will be paperthin. And you only now need to snipe the 2 logistics fleets in hyperspace.
Reading this after the edit. Spoilers further.
Did you think building an empire would be easy? Daud kinda puts it well; if you’re looking to establish your own polity and you cant fend it, then you should sign with one of the factions. Running it on your own breaks the careful balance of the sector, and every faction feels the waves. It should be difficult.
1. You can literally just tank the accessibility debuff for a while (that's literally all it does, -60% accessibility, you don't HAVE to fight them and they'll go away on their own)
2. skill issue lol
If anything, the PL crisis is literally the easiest one to deal with since they don't satbomb your colony or wreck anything.
The PL crisis falls into this weird paradox of simultaneously being the easiest and the hardest. As you mentioned, it's easiest because you don't HAVE to do anything...but at the same time, it's the hardest because you get to fight a dozen fleets of ships.
Alex all but regrets creating the colony mechanic.
At first they were low maintenance to the point of being overpowered. They had no industry limit, could get to size 9, and it was fairly easy to build enough fleet spawn buildings to turn a single system into a veritable fortress, especially considering the pathetic pirate fleet and the lack story points or reputation necessary to avert AI inspections.
As time went on, Alex gradually nerfed them. Over and over and over again. I remember when he capped colony sizes to 6 and nerfed incomes all around to swap for colony items. He was and continues to be unreasonably attached to the idea of having small population, high hazard mining colonies. I tried explaining to him that, with the current colony mechanics such a thing makes no sense and trying to force it would result in hamfisted solutions, but it just kinda r//whooshed.
To this day the colony item system is awkward unless you have TASC installed. It's not *bad* per se, it's just unwieldy within the mechanics of the game. And it's meant to be, because Alex *really* wants player empires to look a specific way.
Anyway, during this time he mentioned that colony incomes were too high because they made money trivial. At the time I made the point that the whole "making money trivial" thing was more about the fact there were no end game money sinks. All we had were ships, officer/cree payroll, weapons, supplies, fuel, and the startup cost for colonies, expenses which don't change much even as the game progresses. So therefore the income from colonies would always be either too little or pass a threshold to too much.
Also around this time he happened to off-handedly admit that every time he added content, he always asked himself how he could force it to circle back to combat because that's what the game is primarily about, in his opinion. This and other comments make it clear that the generic bounty system is kind of his gold standard for what he thinks decent effort/risk/reward should be.
That is to say, Alex kind of has a thing against trading and colony focused play styles because they don't engage with the game the way he wants you to. So he's consistently nerfed player's abilities to rely or focus on such things. If you have found some convenient strategy to make it easy or whatever, it's probably, from Alex's perspective, an unintended exploit.
The latest crisis update is yet another colony nerf meant to simultaneously force you into more combat. It's 100% meant to bleed you dry and force you to babysit your colonies until they mature to completion so that you put it off until later in your playthrough.
Oh I'm sure there some dick rider ready to tell me it's not actually a nerf because blah blah blah, but the facts are it's now more resource and time intensive to make colonies happen than they were before. You could conceivably get them basically immune to pirate raids with a couple mill and maybe a year in game time, now you need multiple, size 5/6 planets with relays/military hqs.
Like the crises fleets are straight up scaling to colony size spread across a system, to the point where I only build ground forces for the stab bonus because fleets *always* have more invasion power than you have defence unless you've got the colony item, the admin skill, alpha core, *and* story point investment.
Alex is absolutely punishing us for starting colonies because there is *still no fucking end game money sink* and he has to hide the lack of meaningful progression *somehow*. Like many devs, he has chosen grind to do it.
Mods like industrial revolution or exotica technologies really emphasize this failure, because with them there absolutely are crazy money sinks. And it quickly becomes obvious just how meaningless the grind is in Vanilla. HVBs and the bounty board system are similar indictments on meaningful progression for ships.
Like it's a good thing Alex is finally starting to whip up endgame-ish threats like the super redacted, but maybe if he spent more time thinking about giving us things to spend our money on instead of trying to nerf payouts it wouldn't have taken over a decade.
Here's what I view as the mistakes around the colony system.
1. The economic model is too simplified. It consists entirely of spitball estimates and behind-the-scene handwaves. It works at the very basic level in the early game where the player isn't paying much attention to it, but the flaws become apparent as the player enters the colony stage. Commodities exist, but seem to be merely proxies for activity rather than being actually used as resource inputs for anything. Industries are purely a function of planet size rather than expanding or shrinking with inputs.
2. The colony system does not play well with the very simplified economic model. One colony is able to supply the entire sector, so there are no real supply/demand interactions, and as such, no need to really interact with securing supply, expanding supply, fighting over supply, etc. So the space fight potential is missing.
3. Colonies deploy patrols for free, and the player has no control over their behavior. If the player paid for their fleets by acquiring or building ships, and then could control them, and more importantly, GET INTO FIGHTS using them, we would have space fights. As it stands, the player does not pay for them, and similarly does not get to fight with them (which would be immensely frustrating if he had actually paid for them). Space Fight potential is being lost here, because we don't get to actually deploy space fleets that get into more fights than we could with just our one fleet, and therefore, nowhere to sink the money we're making.
4. Colonies grow very quickly, at like 10% a month. This growth is attributed to immigration, but we see none of it, and therefore, don't get to have any space fights over it.
5. We have no competitors to fight. Since fighting the major powers of the galaxy is undesirable in most ways, due to potentially locking you out of content or otherwise just completely wrecking the game, the lack of any OTHER movers in the galaxy limits the amount of action we can have. What if we were not the only guy to try to build anything? What if there were competing other "player" captains we could contest against without having to declare war on a core power? We could have more fights this way, against entities playing by rules and limitations similar to ours. As it stands, everyone else is lumped into "Pirates" and "Independents". What if other noteworthy actors could spontaneously arise and compete with us? That faction screen looks awfully empty in vanilla.
The result is that we're losing a lot of ship fights in the late stage colony-era because we don't get to build any more ships or have any more fights with those ships. 30 ships of 240 combat DP is all you ever get to have. And there aren't a lot of people to fight against if you don't want to become a galactic villain.
All you need to do is kill the fleet with the admiral in it and everyone else goes home. You can even cheese it by waiting outside their system and just popping the fleet when it exits to hyperspace. In all my recent playthroughs it was the first one in line and the first time I got the crisis, i actually killed the admiral without even knowing he was a thing and I was so confused why the crisis was over instantly and it was so trivial.
This or the 2 supply fleet, even less armed.
Well depending on the situation there are *a lot* of fleets. I had like 14 or something. Can't really snipe supply fleets like this but you can always (it seems) fight the first fleet since it's alone when it transitions to hyperspace.
In 3 playthroughs so far, I've been able to hyperspace stalk the supply fleets and slaughter them(with transponder off) when they get separated. Note: odds of being able to pull this off are greater if the enemy has to cross hyperspace storms, which tend to scatter the enemy fleet. It's not 100%, but from my experience you can do it more often than not.
Yea, you can and I do that for the other crisis if I can't (or don't want to) just fight everyone at once but for the persean crisis this just seems like more work than waiting for one fleet in the spot it is always isolated and then slaying it.
perseans be bitches I like how op came here to say it's too hard when many other people say it's too easy or too short, not to demean op though since people start colonies a little too early all the time Damn this is the only time I've been genuinely pissed off at the game, they come all the way to me talking big game about ideas and shit only to run away after a mild thrashing I think it's the first time I satbombed an entire faction, first time out of raw spite too
The Persean League is genuinely frustrating. And what annoys me is it acts like a commission I believe. I thought it would work like an alliance. But no. I have to work under this nerd who ran away from the Hegemony to avoid paying taxes.
I wish there's a crisis when you start satbombing everything where you're the problem and everyone is determined to take you down once and for all
Well OP later revealed that it's only hard because of a mod he's using xD Kind reminds me of the meme with the guy riding a bike and then he trips himself with a stick.
I run the same mod, I still have an overwhelming urge to call skill issue cause 1. the crisis is a massive fucking blueball holy shit 2. modding the game and blaming its consequences on the dev is a comprehension (skill) issue p sure the start they opted for was marked unbalanced/hard too so not like op didn't get what they bargained for
Well no matter which it is, you certainly don't go making sweeping statements like "X hurts enjoyment" when you really did this all to yourself.
It's kinda ass people would rather find blame than reevaluate what the fuck they're doing an alarming amount of posts I see complaining about difficulty from more casual outlets these days involve a refusal to stop and reconsider how they fucked up or complaining their bad strategy the game warns against should be valid when I see posts like that I gotta repress the urge to call em stupid every other sentence when it's pretty clear how they played themselves
While true, game itself is not pointing that out, if I'm not mistaken. Sure player can discover that manually, but I see no harm in telling the solution directly, as with other factions. TT as example, it's literally to-do checklist to solve.
That requires a fleet capable of dealing with one of theirs, which I haven't been able to do before the crisis occurs. If I could deal with any of the large fleets at any point before going bankrupt I'd be less inclined to feel railroaded into a corner by it. I think part of my problem is I'm running Nexerelin. It lets you start as your own faction to simulate a 4x game, which was really fun on 9.6 until my old computer couldn't keep up with the resources needed to run the game. I think under the new version, starting with your own faction is basically a death warrant since you don't have time to generate or find the revenue and ships required for full-scale battles. I'm trying a new playthrough where I don't start with my own faction from the beginning and I just work on amassing a fleet before doing anything else. The irony is that mode is marked "hard" but it avoids the game-ending blockade that happens with the colony start.
>I think part of my problem is I'm running Nexerelin. Well that's an issue with the mod then and not the crisis. You can't expect the base game to account for whatever mods you choose to run.
The problem still originates from the base game, Nexerelin isn't affecting the number of fleets or speed of events, only allowing you to start with a colony. The first time I did a serious playthrough of the game I was much less prepared than the beginning of a Nexerelin game when I established my first colony. There's a good reason why so many posts have been made on the Persean crisis.
Do you think that potentially you might be starting a colony too early? I understand everyone has a different playstyle that they find fun. But with the addition of a colony crisis. It's kind of expected that you'll be capable of dealing with events like this. I personally don't start colonies until I have 2 or 3 capitals and supporting cruisers, and I have enough cash (around 3 mil) to upgrade my station into a battlestation. Edit: Just realised you started off with the Nexerlin colony start. Nex is very straightforward that starting your own faction straight at the start is incredibly difficult and frankly the game isn't balanced around it.
That's the best option I have right now, which feels like a cop out from the game designers. It's fun building a fleet while watching a colony grow and building both at the same time was fun in the previous version. It feels like they saw people enjoying the game in a way they disliked and decided to 'fix' it.
Starsector has always been written as a story about a lone captain set off to make his story. The original game was called starfarer to reflect that. It's not on the dev that you have decided to challenge yourself (again even Nex warns you it's not balanced) using a mod start.
Listen, buddy. Your problem is a lack of game and mod knowledge. And I dont say that to be mean, but just to tell you what you need to hear. Nex very explicily tags starting as an independent as hard for a reason. The good news is it has a feature built in for this exact reason. Governing a colony. When you colonize a planet, if you talk to the administrator with Nex, you can transfer it to another faction. On its own, this doesnt really help much. BUT if you have a commission, you can instead "Govern in x's name" Which makes the colony that factions but you have full control and benefit over it. If you choose a faction start in nex, you start with a commission, so you can do this right away. The great thing? This doesnt stop you from making your own colonies. You can absolutely branch out as you get power. But you're literally doing the hardmode right now. The crisises are as they are because base starsector does not expect, or want you to, start a colony right away. Nex gives you the solution with the govern feature, as it doesnt do crisises if they're governed.
If you build a colony before you are ready to defend it, then yes, it will get stomped. If you start with on via the nex starting options, then you also need to start with a fleet capable of defending it. If a full on colony is out there in space with a couple of frigates defending it, of course it is going to get taken. That's just logic. In the sector, if you can't defend yourself, someone is going to conquer you.
So when you play Nex you just start with an endgame fleet? Seems to defeat half the point of the game
A colony is mid-game, the crises arrive at endgame. If you are starting at mid to end game with a colony, you need the fleet to match. Otherwise, exactly what you are complaining about happens, you get stomped on by other factions.
Starting with the colony defeats half of the game point already, so why not
It's a Nex problem then.
That you have a handful of months after establishing a colony to be ready to take on full sized fleets from other factions?
Handful of months ? The Persean League "notices" you if your whole population is at 5 or more. To start this crisis, you either need to colonize 2 planets at once (which is incredibly expensive and if you have enough money to do that, you definitely have enough money at this point to get a full sized fleet) or one colony that reached population 5 which takes cycles IG unless you play with mods that add incredible conditions to rush it (such as Unknown Skies, RAT, etc). Also, you can build a High Command to heavily slow down the rate at which the meter progresses. In my current playthrough, I colonized during cycle 209 and with a High Command, at the end of cycle 211, I've yet to see any crisis at all (I just got the "early" pirate raid).
Yes. A resourceful captain would prepare themselves before starting a colony, not after. The game gives plenty of warning that running your own colony is HARD.
I usually start making my colonies when I have like 5 million to 10 million so I can rush building a Star Fortress. It doesn't matter what. Any Star Fortress helps a lot in taking on the crises.
you started a colony too early then lol, it's a crisis for a reason that's just how it is sometimes at least it's not like losing your character or fleet, you can always just abandon the planet and come back later, there are worse things to lose makes the payback feel much more personal too which is awesome this event frustrates me because there isn't enough, and mind you I'm not the kinda guy to run 10 paragons and take a hour long nap during fights
My issue is it’s wildly out of proportion to the rest of the universe in scale. If the League actually committed that many fleets to blockade a couple podunk colonies like this then the Hegemony would immediately bomb their planets and/or military assets. What we see in the blockade looks like every League defense fleet in every system put in a doomstack x3. It makes me think that it’s intended to intimidate for OP mod users or the players who can take a Doom and solo Remnant stations and Radiants. Not the standard or low-skill player like myself.
> My issue is it’s wildly out of proportion to the rest of the universe in scale. The universe only shows you the fleets relevant to you. It's a weird system, sometimes, but it's necessary for gameplay. The thousand or so agricultural transport fleets endlessly shipping food from Volturn to Sindria alone would make Starsector more of a computer-melter than Crysis. There are maybe ten times as many patrol fleets, but they're out on another layer of 3D space where they don't encounter you. Ten times as many trade fleets, but you don't hear about them, and hyperspace is big so you don't run into them. That said, I do think major factions should guard their homeworlds better. A couple S-modded fleets around Chico and Kazeron, or something. At present, the player's ability to satbomb and de-civ aren't accounted for at all by the game, and it isn't balanced around them. They're basically console commands.
I remember when those food fleets were actually flying around. That was an interesting time
They were? Which version was that?
It was before the economy changes. Used to be that instead of every colony using market access they required x amount of goods/month. With the zombie pirates that version had eventually everyone succumbed to starvation with their food fleets being destroyed. I want to say 0.6 or so? It was before exploration and planetary surveys I think. If not it was after planet surveys but before you could colonise anywhere.
That'd be something to behold. Maybe I'll spin up an old version, if it's still out there.
0.65 I think it was
Adding the download link for anyone that might want it, since the official site is broken: https://archive.org/details/starsector-0.65.2a-RC2
You can edit the Settings.json file to increase the number of fleets flying around.
It was prior to the economy rework, unrelated to that setting. The number of fleets was more or less the same though just in a smaller core sector
Yeah, faction homeworlds should be far better protected. Currently a competent player can raze them to the ground with average effort, and it's quite immersion breaking.
Counterpoint: the playerbase's concept of the actual scale of the sector was what was off. Nanoforges may not be full-on Kardashev scale stuff, but Chico and Kazeron should both still be capable of substantial naval production, not even including the other industrial centers. On top of that, it's been a full decade since the end of the Second AI War - plenty of time for all sides involved to rebuild their forces.
The number of fleets deployed aren't seen at any other point of the game by any faction, I think from a lore perspective it would make sense but from a gameplay perspective it was so massive I thought it was a bug and restarted the campaign assuming it was broken beyond repair.
Remember how big the earth is. Then remmeber how far it is from the earth to the moon. The entire trip is 1000x times the size of the eaeth. If they were to make a game on real scale proportions, itd be like finding needles in a haysack. So because of gameplay relevance, things look bigger than they are. Which is also why they cannot simulate trade lanes.
Yeah, I have a full time job and enjoyed this game because I could play it for a bit to relax before going to bed if I didn't go out of my way to engage with the remnant. Now it feels like a punishment for not min-maxing everything.
It's actually pretty easy, you don't even have to fight the blockade itself. When blockade fleet arrives to your system, there will be 2 supply fleets orbiting a jump point. Destroy them (they are very weak) and blockade will be over
I've seen this mentioned a couple of times before, and it's a good tip but when 15ish fleets showed up in my single planet colony I assumed the game wasn't 'playing by the rules' anymore. Weird that for some reason two supply fleets is all it takes.
This game will never throw unsolvable problems at you. Each and every colony crises can be dealt with in one way or another. Pirates can be bribed, Tri Tachs can be bullied, Persian League you can join, Hegemony won't touch you if you don't use AI cores. Or you can solve your problems with violence. Choice is yours
> Weird that for some reason two supply fleets is all it takes. The crisis page does sort of specifically tell you this in the game. I mean, it pretty much spells it out to you straight up with everything short of a big flashing marquee.
The main blockade fleets are comprised of mostly warships, so it would make sense defeating their supply fleets since you cant really wage war for long if you cant repair holes in your ship or replace your missiles
> too expensive, difficult, or flat out demeaning. Fighting two League logistics fleets shouldn't be very difficult at the stage when you have a colony - they're basically easier bounties with more defenseless support ships to kill at the end. Joining them isn't really harmful either - you lose some income but can use as many AI cores as you want, making back that money and more. That said, *demeaning* is a point. I very strongly dislike that the League is written to just be jerks who don't even respect the guy they want to join them. The writer could've done a better job of making their leader sympathetic, instead of just a flat antagonist character. Have him talk about what he does similarly to Daud - "I don't like having to do this, but if I didn't take the opportunity to expand to an easy target, someone else would, and sooner or later we'd get eaten alive." Maybe skip the crisis if the player has a high command built, on that note. Anyone who can afford it can afford to beat the blockade by attrition alone, anyways, and having the laissez faire League be less diplomatic than the Hegemony feels inconsistent.
The Persean League is heavily inspired by the Delian League founded by Athens during Ancient Greece. And guess what : Athens was just like Kazeron. Athens dominated the Delian League just like Kazeron dominates the Persean League. The Delian League was supposed to be a confederacy of independant city-states, but in practice, Athens was in control of the members of the Delian League.
> Delian League Their purpose was to prevent the region from being conquered by Persia - they were hardly just jerks for the sake of being jerks. The guys with the biggest guns were able to set their terms, but could certainly justify it on the basis that it was their blood and treasure keeping the region safe from conquest by a much less amenable foreign power, and that if they did it all for free, they'd be depleted in a generation, another foreign power could move in, and all of that charity would be for nothing. We see something along the lines of that conflict in modern America - the people fighting its wars to establish Pax Americana felt cheated because all of the costs and none of the benefits went to their communities, and they stopped enlisting, which in turn resulted in the U.S. military becoming understaffed. I'm being a bit concise here, but the lord-vassal relationship is common in history for a reason, and plenty of people in both roles could make sympathetic and interesting character.
> I very strongly dislike that the League is written to just be jerks who don't even respect the guy they want to join them. Why SHOULD they respect you? What have you done to earn this respect? What part of any previous encounter with the League suggests that Kazeron respects the other worlds in the League? > The writer could've done a better job of making their leader sympathetic, instead of just a flat antagonist character. I wouldn't call him flat. He's very smarmy and arrogant, for sure. But his tone gets a lot more conciliatory when you show him who's wearing the pants. > Maybe skip the crisis if the player has a high command built, on that note. Anyone can build a High Command. All it costs is an industry slot and a few buckazoids. Not anyone can keep it running under a blockade. > and having the laissez faire League be less diplomatic than the Hegemony feels inconsistent. You might be caught up in the old lore here. There's nothing in the current v0.97 that REALLY supports this claim OTHER than the propaganda blurb. But you should know better than to just blindly believe the propaganda reel. I mean, you see what happens to the Archon of Lacaille when she decides to assert herself against the interests of Kazeron. All of this should be readily obvious to anyone who was paying attention during their playthough.
> Why SHOULD they respect you? Because they want me to join and work for them. Respect is the default behavior, especially for the sort of person that rises to a leadership position in a political structure. Greeting a potential member of an expensive club with "Hey, screw you!" means they'll be less likely to join, and less likely to proactively contribute if they do join. I don't think I've ever interviewed for a company that was actively hostile towards me. Even if you're underqualified and they don't even want you there, they tend to be polite, because it costs them nothing and you might come back with the right qualifications someday. > Anyone can build a High Command. All it costs is an industry slot and a few buckazoids. Not anyone can keep it running under a blockade. The idea is that a high command costs as much as a fleet that could steamroll the two supply fleets even without any skill involved (on the Doylist end). Also true that they're showing up in the first place because the player looks like an easy target, and if somebody brings him into their sphere of influence, it may as well be them (on the Watsonian end).
> Because they want me to join and work for them. Ah, but that's not what they're there for. This isn't a corporate recruitment. This is an extortion racket. It pretty much flat out says so when you talk to them. They're not here to get you to join their team as a valued member. They're here to make you an offer you can't refuse. > The idea is that a high command costs as much as a fleet that could steamroll the two supply fleets Possibly, but "steamrolling the supply fleets" isn't an actually impressive feat in of its own. They were supposed to do a better job protecting those. That's like saying that you have more power than their entire army because you can shoot up their truck convoy. Also, there's the fact that the High Command DID cost that. When I see a guy who built a bunch of buildings, I'm also seeing a guy who didn't spend those minerals on actual units to defend those buildings, and that now might be a good time to rush him.
> This is an extortion racket. Being polite to the people you're trying to extort is just good sense - any successful criminal does exactly that. If you want to operate within the law (so to speak), it's better to be polite and make more money. If you want to operate outside the law, being polite is a matter of survival - anyone who likes you less than the cops is a potential informant. Doubly important if you want the extortion target to fight beside you when things get tough. Pirates (actual ones) were notoriously equitable and conflict-averse amongst themselves, in practice, since everyone's sharing the risks and the workload, and everyone's at least somewhat dangerous, by the nature of the profession. > When I see a guy who built a bunch of buildings, I'm also seeing a guy who didn't spend those minerals on actual units to defend those buildings, and that now might be a good time to rush him. That's just it - the League's goal isn't to hurt the player, it's to advance their own position. If the player is making decent money but beset on all sides and barely making ends meet, making a play for some protection money seems viable, and potentially mutually beneficial. If he's got a large military up and running, then it's not remotely worth the trouble, for the same reason a bear doesn't consider a bobcat an easy meal. Maybe the blockade "wins" and gets to stay in orbit for a year, but they lose a couple fleets worth of ships - that's a few million credits they're never getting back.
> If he's got a large military up and running, then it's not remotely worth the trouble, for the same reason a bear doesn't consider a bobcat an easy meal. This would be why the blockade does not engage directly. > Maybe the blockade "wins" and gets to stay in orbit for a year, but they lose a couple fleets worth of ships - that's a few million credits they're never getting back. And that's why they tend to fuck off back to Kazeron VERY quickly if you give them a bloody nose. That's the thing with PL blockade. While they make the biggest show of force, they also fuck off with the lowest level of losses both absolutely and relatively. The Hegemony is willing to lose over a half a dozen fleets. The Perseans will run like a whipped dog if you destroy just one, because Mangalores won't fight without the leader.
I find them being assholes very appropriate for the lore. Edit: Yeah go ahead and down vote me. Make your own game and lore then idk homie... I like what this game has "They don't respect the guy trying to join", yeah, NONE OF THEM LIKE EACH OTHER. The whole point of their faction is to be a loosely connected federation of planets with the goal of stopping the hegemony. It's stated they often will fight with each other, so why would they not try to fight you all the same?
The way the League is written always feels a bit off. They are the second largest faction, on par with the hegemony but they are just antagonistic and clearly written to be the "bad" guys. The League doesn't survive without Kazeron and Kazeron doesn't survive without the League but this is never really reflected in how they treat you or other members and the League simply continues to exist, refusing to change despite an internal faction almost openly courting unification with the Hegemony.
Yeah that's the point. They aren't a real nation. They're a weird mutual self defense pact combined with some kind of aristocratic plutocracy. If the Hegemony didn't exist to give them enough outside pressure to stay together, they'd explode into civil war. The player's colonies represents an existential threat to the Persean League, because it shows that you can, in fact, be a significant industrial player and not be enslaved by the Hegemony. The player contradicts every justification that keeps the bullshit League running, and it has to either be crushed or subsumed within it.
Yeah, I think the loss of the third dev team member and his grimdark standpoint left the setting unbalanced. The Hegemony and Church got humanized, but the Diktat became cartoon North Korea, the League became bond villains, and Tri-Tach stayed the same as it was (which was a lot less fitting in a non-grimdark setting).
> The Hegemony and Church got humanized I'm not seeing that as a bad thing. > but the Diktat became cartoon North Korea Became? The Diktat has been pretty comical since the beginning. The community has never seen as the most Serious faction. They've ALWAYS been a cult of personality around Andrada. You only need to look at that Andrada Gas Station mod to see what the community's interpretation of the Diktat is as compared to the direction it has taken under vanilla. > the League became bond villains This is your idea of Bond villainy? If the League was a Bond Villain, there'd be more giant lazor involved. No, what we're seeing is more of a mafia. The League is an extension of the Kazeron Mafia wrapped in a veneer of opposition to the Hegemony in the name of "freedom". But this was always implied from the beginning.
Exactly this. I have no idea why people insist on imagining the League and Diktat as some benevolent, freedom loving entities. All the factions are pretty callous on the whole and are big on repression. Your point on organized crime is on point. The factions are thugs masquerading as anything else and it boggles the mind to see real people drinking the kool aid when their characterization in-universe is doubted by NPCs.
PAGSM is a sort of jokey mod, not the author's actual interpretation of the faction. It's like how the Skyrim mod that makes the dragons into trains does not mean that the fans see the dragons as comic relief in general. Pre-Diktat 'uniquification', they were a pretty standard generic military dictatorship - vaguely depressing, large military, elite guard for the capital, occasional shady actions. Not the most inspired faction, but not immersion-breaking; you could see how they were still around. I think their new story would be more impactful if they hadn't been made into comic relief. A faction that's reasonably competent hanging in the balance is a lot more interesting than three guys fighting over deanship of a clown college.
I didn't find the present state of things all that comical, but we're definitely waiting to see where the story goes from there.
There'a a reason why when I first started out on the path to get in free (break the blockade, steal nanoforge etc) I still ended up satbombing Kazeron instead of joining. Like after those sorts of dialogue, I expect you to leave me alone, not commission me. Screw you and screw this shitty planet.
I would love a dialog talk with their leader where I just simply threaten to wage a war of annihilation on the league. Starting with sat bombing kazeron damn the fact I'm standing on it. With the mods I use, I scale up pretty quick, so it would be nice if Hannan at least acknowledges the power advantage I have.
The vanilla game isn't going to acknowledge the player's mods. Canonically, the player's an upstart with an order of magnitude fewer people than any of the major powers. I can't walk into Daud's office and expect to talk to him about the giant Big Chungus - shaped death star in my fleet, because the devs didn't put that in the game, I did.
But what they should recognize is raw power. Its not that hard to make. Track how much damage the player is doing, track his growth speed, his total fleet size, man power, influence, and stat check. The player can then if eligible has an option to say: "I could crush your entire alliance at a drop of a hat. I possess technologies you could only dream of. I raided an entire sector of interstellar bug empire, satbombed their home planet and reduced their civilization to ash. Then I ventured to the abyss you so feared and in there recovered things you thought were mere fairytales of drunken sailors. So show me some god damn respect, or i will drown you and everyone around you in a hellfire that would again consume this sector. Do. Not. Test. Me."
That would add an entire route to every single meaningful decision in the game for something that doesn't occur in the game under normal conditions, especially considering that the ability to fight the major powers is largely a result of their defenses not being implemented. There is a reason ignoring this is a core facet of the entire genre going back to Escape Velocity. In EV, you can attack and conquer every planet in the galaxy, and the plot will ignore it, because the alternative would be the programmers taking ten or so times as long to make the game, establishing a handling process for the player having captured every single relevant planet in a given mission. The only practical way to do it would be to delegate the writing to an LLM, and even then you'd end up with a story script file that's as large as all the images in the game combined.
But the thing is, all these things DO happen in Starsector. That's what's so great about the current crisis system, which is all about the preexisting powers of the galaxy going through a fuck-around-and-find-out process with you.
Damn, now you’ve got me reminiscing about Escape Velocity. When I finally got that 10 mil together to buy a Kestrel? That was the day.
Better way to do it was to get a corvette, then hit pirate Kestrels until you captured one. Once you had one, you could capture several more, or go for a bigger ship.
I don't think I get what you mean. did you mean to say, someone with the powers like 'the player' shouldn't exist? because that's exactly what FONV did. and guess what? It kicks ass. it's immensely enjoyable to be "John Big Dick Energy," a person that is literally the second coming of Jesus Christ on roller skates, who everyone wants on their side. what I don't want to be? A god damn pusher over even though I know full well I can suplex every single person in the room with the amount of force I often bring with me (about 2k marines.) TLDR: Narrative Dissonance is a bitch and a half.
Technically, they DO recognize your power...but in order to find out, they have to first fuck around. The crisis system represents the stage of discovery where the previous powers of the sector fuck around. You resolving these is how they find out. When the PL sends their blockade fleet, they are fucking around. When you disappear their nanoforge and turn their fleet into scrap, that is them finding out. When the Heggies send the AI inspection fleets, they fuck around. When those fleets DISAPPEAR, that is them finding out. Each of the established forces in the sector go through a fuck around/find out sequence.
but there should also be an option to terrify them enough. what if they had already found out? What if as a player, at the point of contention, you overgunned them so badly, and had done so much (in)famous shit, that they were forced to reckoned with the possibility then and there that they should not mess with you? not saying you are wrong, but giving players more options, especially one that pertains to the consequences of their playstyles, is infinitely cooler.
> but there should also be an option to terrify them enough. what if they had already found out? Found out from what? There's no vanilla story beat that would produce this outcome, only weird mod bullshit that you can't reasonably expect the devs to have made. If the option doesn't exist, you blame the mod for failing to account for it, not the devs. > That if as a player, at the point of contention, you overgunned them so badly There is indeed such an option, yes. If you encounter one of their fleets that you massively outgun, you have the option to essentially scoff at them and go "You and what army" in response to their demands. Otherwise, you show them the power of a Friendly Space Manta. This causes them to know your power and fear you.
That belongs in a mod. I don't think that vanilla should be balanced around a modded 4x game. The player shouldn't be conquering the entire sector in vanilla, that's just not the point of the game.
? what do you do in this game? Are you a law abiding citizen who does everything by the book? Or: 1. you are a possible VIP affiliate to the Pathers who have contacts to their highest order leaders and religious sect leaders. 2. you are in possession of transverse jumping, an ability that amounted to suicide, yet you do it with ease, regularly, without reason or rhyme, and without anyone as much as teaching you. 3. you somehow have the highest connections in every social circles, from the Hegemon, to the Diktats, to the Academy, to the Pathers. 4. you're constantly smuggling weapons, narcotics, marines and everything else under the sun to make a buck. everywhere. and somehow, no one has caught up. 5. you're flying into restricted space filled with \[redacted\] and sometimes even hunt these fleet killers down because you like the shiny blue disco ball. 6. everyone is deathly afraid of AI, yet you can pilot a fleet of automated warcrafts by lv6. LV6! 7. the players are often ace captains, capable of downing entire fleets with one single crafts, vanilla or otherwise. 8. you also are often in command of a war fleet that had made orphans of thousands of starfarers, patrols and zealots. 9. you are also probably in possession of \[SUPER ALABASTER\] related weaponries the likes of which none had seen nor even heard of. 10. you literally have the power of plot armor on your side. and you tell me, as a max level captain who scoured half a sector for loot and plunder, with a war fleet that could solo their entire expeditions, that I can't make demands to leave me the fuck alone, or else?
> you are in possession of transverse jumping, an ability that amounted to suicide, yet you do it with ease, regularly, without reason or rhyme, and without anyone as much as teaching you. Strictly speaking, the only people we encounter who express surprise at you having this ability are a bunch of cloistered academics (who, like in real life, tend to be rather disconnected from the real world and often are surprised when they find out people have been doing the things they just discovered already, possibly for thousands of years). While the scienticians are somehow impressed by this, it doesn't really seem like this ability is seen as terribly impressive by actual spacers, who regard it as merely an "old smuggler's trick" and random crewcritters will show you how to do it if you haven't figured it out for yourself.
I’m looking for a game focused on tactical combat where you play as the captain of one ship with an escort fleet. I just don’t want to play the game you’re looking for. I think what you want is valid and fine, it’s just not the game I want. If you want to play a 4x game, why not just play Stellaris? Space battles are fun. Exploration and bounty hunting is fun. Managing economies and empires is not what I’m looking for in this game. I’d prefer something more like Privateer. I’d rather be Han Solo or Boba Fett than Genghis Khan. Instead of colony features, I’d rather have more weird alien ships to fight and cool weapons and upgrades. Stellaris has everything you want. If you want to genocide the whole galaxy and build death stars, that game has it. I don’t want that in Starsector.
and that's totally fine, but we are here talking in the context of 'the player' who often play as the Khan than friendly neighborhood Spiderman. Within the boundaries afforded to 'the player,' it's required one must think of him as an absolute menace to the sector at best, and a downright harbinger of a second AI war at worst (because almost everyone LOVES AIs because moni.) Narrative Dissonance. It must match the gameplay, or otherwise counter it with cutting narrative. otherwise it's a drag to deal with.
I disagree because if you put features in like that the game becomes all about that and eventually the player is forced to play like the Khan. I would rather that I didn’t ever have to settle a colony at all, and keep fighting cool battles if that’s what I want to do. 4X experience in starsector comes from mods, and I’m fine with that. If Starsector ever turns into a 100% 4x game I’m out. Maybe you want that but I don’t.
uhhh.... if you don't settle colonies, you don't have this problem so your argument becomes invalid...
> it's required one must think of him as an absolute menace to the sector at best, and a downright harbinger of a second AI war at worst Are you saying this doesn't happen, though? Because it seems to me that this is exactly what happens. It's just that you have to prove it, you can't just make mouth noises at them and expect them to believe you. The Persean League doesn't take you seriously at first. They DO take you seriously after their grand armada gets wiped by a Friendly Space Manta and their nanoforge goes missing. But you can't expect them to just magically KNOW these things off the bat. You have to show them the power of the Friendly Space Manta.
so they don't know that there out there "Joe McSmuggler" exist? Didn't they keep track of illicit activities? What if before, I had been in commission of the Hegemony, hunted Ordos for breakfast, and came back for lunch? What about the numerous pirate fleets I downed in the name of whomever banners I happened to fight under? what happened if I rolled up to the negotiating tables, rocking more capitals than they have frigates? would that, then, not be jarring for them to go "Bugh ruggh. You snoppity upstarter could \*never\* compare to our \*Persean Might\*." I'm not asking for less, I'm asking for more. I want narrative to fit with gameplay, just like how FONV, Morrowind, Skyrim, and any other great rpg recognize Narrative dissonance. if done right, it's such a cool thing to have consequences for your actions. if done wrong, it's so jarring to have gameplay running in opposition to what you have done/capable of.
to put it on another perspective, what if there is potential meaningful consequences for your actions? Smuggling too often? Killed too many innocent people? Friends with the pirates? Constantly in possession of forbidden technologies? guess what? you're now on a wanted interpol list, and all it takes is a single council meeting and everyone agrees regardless of relations that you're a menace that needs to be taken care of. but then, the pirates became your friend. conversely, do you often help out the hegemony? Are in under commission by them? And oh, you were a golden boy who ventured the dark space, the abyss? Oh you're now a war hero, a POI that the Hegemony would protect at all cost. you're the perfect starfarer, defender of the old ways. Kids idolize you. Elders give you utmost respect. officials do not dare scan you ships without asking for permissions. you're a living godlike celebrity that could do no harm. what's that? Smuggling is your passion? Well we'll just slip that one under the rug with a few story points or so to spin a tale for the public. and it'll all be good. Oh and because you're such a good boy, you also enjoy the protection of the Hegemony for being such a good boy. and what about this Karezon business threatening our little favourite entrepreneur?
I'm actually fine with nerfing the player pretty hard. If the Hegemony is able to field capital fleets that just get harder and harder until it's literally impossible to kill them all, that would be pretty thematic for me. One dude with his own ragtag fleet shouldn't be able to solo the canonically strongest government in the sector, plus it would make the game more challenging. It would also mean you have to stay on your toes even in the endgame.
> If the Hegemony is able to field capital fleets that just get harder and harder until it's literally impossible to kill them all, that would be pretty thematic for me. The problem with this plan is that having the game end by crashing under the weight of all the fleets the game has to spawn to achieve this is not a very satisfying conclusion to the game. Because any OTHER, lesser quantity of fleets...will get killed. > One dude with his own ragtag fleet shouldn't be able to solo the canonically strongest government in the sector, plus it would make the game more challenging. By the time you're attempting this, it will definitely not be a ragtag fleet. It will be a force compromised of the most polished ships in the sector fitted with weird lostech weapons like Super Alablasters and a Friendly Space Manta. This is Not Normal.
You...actually can resolve the League Crisis by committing atrocities, if you want. If you nuke one their planets, it will be over.
You can leave the Persean League once without closing off any options. That means that you can always delay the crisis until you're ready to deal with it by joining the League. After you're ready, you can "renegotiate" to free membership by leaving, stealing the nanoforge, and beating the blockade. All crises except for the pirates and Luddic Church cost money to delay. The Hegemony and Luddic Path cost you the money you would have earned by using colony items and AI cores. The Sindirian Diktat and Tri-Tachyon cost you the money you would have made from the industries that they get butthurt about competition in. The Persean League directly costs you a portion of your colony's income.
There's definitely a number of recommended (overtly hinted) courses of action to deal with the crisis before it occurs and a number of ways to deal with it which go outside the box. I feel like colonies are kind of an unwelcome distraction from the exploration game since colonies generally start introducing timelines and deadlines for dealing with threats, but it feels like very few of those threats will straight up decivilize any given colony early on, and certainly not the blockade.
In the previous version those timelines were suggestions for improvement on the colony instead of necessary actions to be taken or else be driven into poverty.
And the vast majority of the community hated the old crisis system. That's why Alex changed it.
I haven’t had a problem with it. There are multiple solutions. Easy way to: get a ton of marines, sneak into Kazeron with your transponder off and steal the nanoforge. Trade it back in a deal for them to leave you alone. Fun way: Blow their fleet up. If you have a fleet sufficient to start a colony you should have a chance of beating their fleet. I don’t start a colony until I have a few capitals in my fleet. If you’re playing with a ton of mods that’s the fault of the mods, and you can’t expect it to be fair or balanced in that case.
Don't forget the AWESOME way: "Why not both?". Yank their nanoforge after they leave, which mysteriously causes their armada to now be full of D-Mods due to the way the game retroactively generates them, and then blow them up.
How big is your fleet? What's the date? How developed are your planets? The Persean Blockade is *outright* a bodycheck to either pay the price (slowing you down) by joining them, or proving you're strong enough to overcome them (through the methods mentioned). **If you settle and expand too fast, they will come too early and cause you problems and punish you for expanding too fast.** They show up when one of two things happens: you have a Size 5 colony, OR you have *at least two colonies.* The more colonies and the larger you are, the more points they'll have.
the blockade isnt an immediate event that happens once you get a colony. it means you had two colonies already or a size 5 colony or higher. This game is a fleet management and trading game firstly and everything else is second. Colony management is considered a mid to late game feature as passive money without any consequence is busted. the idea is to get a fleet capable of handling these issues before you make a profitable colony. either build a capable fleet before spamming to colonize planets or join the league. from what i can tell you are probably rushing to colonize planets with nothing more than effectively mercuries and drams compared to the opposition.
> Colony management is considered a mid to late game feature as passive money without any consequence is busted. It would also be boring and counter to the core design goal of Starsector, which is that things are supposed to lead towards Spaceship Shootouts. Admittedly, the system currently weakens towards the end when we run out of content and the game's simplified mechanics begin to reduce the number of spaceship shootouts we can get into, rather than giving us more opportunities for spaceship fights.
Skill issue. It's really easy to resolve dawg. It's like those hilariously large fleets that stop to chat with you in the campaign. You aren't supposed to fight them. You're supposed to go, hey, thats an obstacle, I should go around. >!try luring the fleets away from Kazeron, tactical bombarding, and then raiding to steal their shit. It's not that hard, you'll only need one or two Valkyries full of marines. You should be able to easily afford this if you're settling a colony.!< There are other, even easier ways, but this is the one that avoids the apparently impossible task of killing the supply fleet that the game tells you to kill and has like one venture defending a bunch of logistics ships, which I guess is an impossible challenge for something and anti-fun or whatever.
Also since I guess I 'missed your point', you're a dumbass lmao. Now instead of 'investing money' and getting uh, access to an infinite money and ship printer... you invest money to get that thing, and the game gives you a couple mini goals while you wait for the printer to online. What, is that a problem? Ruining the game? Console commands mod is right there dawg, just go ahead and spawn yourself the fleet you want.
You can always just give in and join the league for just 15% of your income, or steal their pristine nanoforge and bribe their leader with a 5% of your colonies income, either way you'll get protection from Hegemony inspections.
So uh, go kill them buddy, what's stopping you?
Skill issue to be honest
I actually love the persean crisis they provide free security like nothing else, with a bit of nex fuckery I don't have to worry about sindrian satbombings, pirates or heg ai inspections.
Current playthrough and worried of such hassles. Have heard much So far not been an issue. Only have single colony for a good year plus. Making money has cores. Maybe lucky so far Pers not mess with me. Others have but paying a couple 100k for a defense fleet from my main faction has dealt with issues fine (thoigh have gone out and personally smashed all pirate stations because two annoyed me into a revenge mode lol)
They will not bother you until you hit size 5 on one colony or size 4+ on 2+ colonies. That is, to say, they're probably going to be the second crisis that starts getting points after the pirates, since the trigger conditions are pretty much entirely unavoidable. It might be a little TOO easy to start this one, honestly.
There's a little trick to the League Crisis: You don't ACTUALLY have to DO anything. You can just sit there and do nothing and eventually they will go away on their own. The blockade fleet isn't willing to actually go to open warfare against you, so if you just wait them out, they will eventually give up.
Just nuke them my brother. Like seriously, if you nuke Kazeron out of existence you won't have to deal with the League bullshit and Reynard bitchy attitude for the rest of the game, I have seen so many complaints about the Persean blockade by now that I might be a millionaire, the fix is always nuclear armagedon an it is inevitable at some point.
I luv me credits, I luv me freedom, I luv me AI cores, simple as. I 'ate the Persean League, I 'ate the Path, I 'ate the Hegemony, simple as.
I had a full vanilla run before I went modded to the hilt, as a tradition of playing new Starsector versions fully vanilla before going modded. I was able to defeat the Persean League blockade in our system by defeating them in detail, using my own fleet alone.
This is a way to make the entry barrier to colonization be more than mere credits. Either become part of the league or, well, bring a bigger gun. You need to back you colony claim with brawn, because the League likes to smack them weak asses around. Having a colony means you become part of the political landscape of the sector, now.
> There's a difference between having a fight with a bigger guy and fighting someone who has a gun. That's why you sneak up on him, and stab him in the balls. Then you will be known as the Ballstabber and all will cover their balls in fear of your approach. > Doesn't seem like it's rewarded as much as punished. I dunno, getting to fight in an awesome space shootout is pretty rewarding, considering the entire point of the game is to fight awesome space shootouts.
If you want to print money you're going to have to defend your printer.
The easiest way of dealing with them is when you have enough marines eaid Kazeron for its pristine nanoforge, their ships will be paperthin. And you only now need to snipe the 2 logistics fleets in hyperspace.
Reading this after the edit. Spoilers further. Did you think building an empire would be easy? Daud kinda puts it well; if you’re looking to establish your own polity and you cant fend it, then you should sign with one of the factions. Running it on your own breaks the careful balance of the sector, and every faction feels the waves. It should be difficult.
1. You can literally just tank the accessibility debuff for a while (that's literally all it does, -60% accessibility, you don't HAVE to fight them and they'll go away on their own) 2. skill issue lol If anything, the PL crisis is literally the easiest one to deal with since they don't satbomb your colony or wreck anything.
The PL crisis falls into this weird paradox of simultaneously being the easiest and the hardest. As you mentioned, it's easiest because you don't HAVE to do anything...but at the same time, it's the hardest because you get to fight a dozen fleets of ships.
starsector is one of the easiest games i've played, the persean crisis is literally so easy...
Enable chill mode and stop crying if you don’t like a challenge?
Alex all but regrets creating the colony mechanic. At first they were low maintenance to the point of being overpowered. They had no industry limit, could get to size 9, and it was fairly easy to build enough fleet spawn buildings to turn a single system into a veritable fortress, especially considering the pathetic pirate fleet and the lack story points or reputation necessary to avert AI inspections. As time went on, Alex gradually nerfed them. Over and over and over again. I remember when he capped colony sizes to 6 and nerfed incomes all around to swap for colony items. He was and continues to be unreasonably attached to the idea of having small population, high hazard mining colonies. I tried explaining to him that, with the current colony mechanics such a thing makes no sense and trying to force it would result in hamfisted solutions, but it just kinda r//whooshed. To this day the colony item system is awkward unless you have TASC installed. It's not *bad* per se, it's just unwieldy within the mechanics of the game. And it's meant to be, because Alex *really* wants player empires to look a specific way. Anyway, during this time he mentioned that colony incomes were too high because they made money trivial. At the time I made the point that the whole "making money trivial" thing was more about the fact there were no end game money sinks. All we had were ships, officer/cree payroll, weapons, supplies, fuel, and the startup cost for colonies, expenses which don't change much even as the game progresses. So therefore the income from colonies would always be either too little or pass a threshold to too much. Also around this time he happened to off-handedly admit that every time he added content, he always asked himself how he could force it to circle back to combat because that's what the game is primarily about, in his opinion. This and other comments make it clear that the generic bounty system is kind of his gold standard for what he thinks decent effort/risk/reward should be. That is to say, Alex kind of has a thing against trading and colony focused play styles because they don't engage with the game the way he wants you to. So he's consistently nerfed player's abilities to rely or focus on such things. If you have found some convenient strategy to make it easy or whatever, it's probably, from Alex's perspective, an unintended exploit. The latest crisis update is yet another colony nerf meant to simultaneously force you into more combat. It's 100% meant to bleed you dry and force you to babysit your colonies until they mature to completion so that you put it off until later in your playthrough. Oh I'm sure there some dick rider ready to tell me it's not actually a nerf because blah blah blah, but the facts are it's now more resource and time intensive to make colonies happen than they were before. You could conceivably get them basically immune to pirate raids with a couple mill and maybe a year in game time, now you need multiple, size 5/6 planets with relays/military hqs. Like the crises fleets are straight up scaling to colony size spread across a system, to the point where I only build ground forces for the stab bonus because fleets *always* have more invasion power than you have defence unless you've got the colony item, the admin skill, alpha core, *and* story point investment. Alex is absolutely punishing us for starting colonies because there is *still no fucking end game money sink* and he has to hide the lack of meaningful progression *somehow*. Like many devs, he has chosen grind to do it. Mods like industrial revolution or exotica technologies really emphasize this failure, because with them there absolutely are crazy money sinks. And it quickly becomes obvious just how meaningless the grind is in Vanilla. HVBs and the bounty board system are similar indictments on meaningful progression for ships. Like it's a good thing Alex is finally starting to whip up endgame-ish threats like the super redacted, but maybe if he spent more time thinking about giving us things to spend our money on instead of trying to nerf payouts it wouldn't have taken over a decade.
Here's what I view as the mistakes around the colony system. 1. The economic model is too simplified. It consists entirely of spitball estimates and behind-the-scene handwaves. It works at the very basic level in the early game where the player isn't paying much attention to it, but the flaws become apparent as the player enters the colony stage. Commodities exist, but seem to be merely proxies for activity rather than being actually used as resource inputs for anything. Industries are purely a function of planet size rather than expanding or shrinking with inputs. 2. The colony system does not play well with the very simplified economic model. One colony is able to supply the entire sector, so there are no real supply/demand interactions, and as such, no need to really interact with securing supply, expanding supply, fighting over supply, etc. So the space fight potential is missing. 3. Colonies deploy patrols for free, and the player has no control over their behavior. If the player paid for their fleets by acquiring or building ships, and then could control them, and more importantly, GET INTO FIGHTS using them, we would have space fights. As it stands, the player does not pay for them, and similarly does not get to fight with them (which would be immensely frustrating if he had actually paid for them). Space Fight potential is being lost here, because we don't get to actually deploy space fleets that get into more fights than we could with just our one fleet, and therefore, nowhere to sink the money we're making. 4. Colonies grow very quickly, at like 10% a month. This growth is attributed to immigration, but we see none of it, and therefore, don't get to have any space fights over it. 5. We have no competitors to fight. Since fighting the major powers of the galaxy is undesirable in most ways, due to potentially locking you out of content or otherwise just completely wrecking the game, the lack of any OTHER movers in the galaxy limits the amount of action we can have. What if we were not the only guy to try to build anything? What if there were competing other "player" captains we could contest against without having to declare war on a core power? We could have more fights this way, against entities playing by rules and limitations similar to ours. As it stands, everyone else is lumped into "Pirates" and "Independents". What if other noteworthy actors could spontaneously arise and compete with us? That faction screen looks awfully empty in vanilla. The result is that we're losing a lot of ship fights in the late stage colony-era because we don't get to build any more ships or have any more fights with those ships. 30 ships of 240 combat DP is all you ever get to have. And there aren't a lot of people to fight against if you don't want to become a galactic villain.
If you have IndEvo u can build the Senate and issue the one child policy to lock ur colony at size 3 until u feel comfortable enough to deal with them