Starsector 0.95 Nexerelin #14 - Chicomoztoc

hi there and welcome back to our star sector pirate campaign so in the last episode we engaged a number of remnant fleets as well as one of their space stations and we gained a number of new weapon systems which i should be able to put to good use against the hegemony so what we're going to do now is head to carus in order to refit our ships and pick up some more troops before we head to chickamau's dock and try to take the hegemony capital alright and we've made it to cars without incident after a little housekeeping the first thing i want to do is take a look at my officers at the very end of the last episode we encountered a ship graveyard and in one of the derelicts we were able to find a cryopond with an officer who is already level 5. while her selection of skills isn't ideal was still well below our officer cap so we can keep her for now and one of the skills that she came with was shield modulation so i think we're gonna switch her into the apogee and put henry morgan into the doom and morgan has also gained enough experience to get to level five so i've given him a number of skills that work well in phase ships as for the ships themselves we're just going to work our way down the list starting with our flagship the odyssey the biggest change here is that i replaced all of the medium missile mounts with sabotes and also built in the expanded missile racks almond so we should have a huge amount of sustained shield breaking potential i gave the conquest expanded missile racks as well and placed mirv launchers into both of the forward-facing large missile mounts on the offensive port side i replaced all of the large and medium ballistic weapons with gauss cannons and hypervelocity drivers respectively but to make room for all of these additions a few of the ng weapons were removed on the astral the only significant change was the replacement of the salamanders with a second squall missile system and as with the conquest several energy weapons were removed in order to make room the doom underwent the most extensive rebuild getting even more reaper torpedoes in place of all of its annihilators and two iron pulsers to replace all of its forward-facing energy weapons i also built in expanded missile racks so we can get more use out of all of those torpedoes finally i cut down on vents and put safety overrides back in as having tried to pilot it without i've decided that if the doom is going to get blown up i prefer that it ride through the gates of valhalla shiny and chrome on the apogee i removed the anti-matter blaster as well as one of the point defense lasers and added two small pulse lasers into the forward facing hardpoints the eagle was also extensively rebuilt having all of its forward-facing ballistics replaced with two assault chain guns taken from the hammerhead which is now effectively retired from being our flagship the graviton beams were also replaced with iron pulsers the intention being to have them rapidly break through shields so that the chain guns can start doing hull damage finally as i'm planning on piloting the eagle in the future i removed the insulated engine assembly hull mod in order to make room for safety overrides with his chain guns gone i decided to give the hammerhead hypervelocity drivers and needlers so that it can be more of a harasser rather than a front-line brawler on the atlas i built in efficiency overhauls which in our case probably just means putting better locks in all the cargo containers i really have no idea what the boys think they're going to be able to do with a bunch of spare motors and electrical conduits actually on second thought i don't want to know i also finally decided to do something with the heron which consisted of adding some fighters and interceptors adding some long-range missiles to the medium weapon slot slapping on some point defense lasers and rounding out the build with some vents and capacitors we still don't have any carrier-focused hull mods so this is just something to make sure it doesn't go into battle naked if we ever do need it last but certainly not least we have the sunder which got an auto pulse laser two medium pulse lasers and a dual light machine gun to cover its butt since safety overrides are very conveniently already built in i decided to use all the space that was saved to add in hardened subsystems and insulated engine assembly and finally i built in hardened shields and used any remaining points on capacitors and vents all right now that all the ships are sorted let's get as many marines as we can and then head over to the aslan system so we have about 1 500 marines now and if we're careful that should be enough for our purposes since we were docked i also sold off any extra blueprints that we had i would normally be more careful about selling these off to the pirates but since they're on our side this time that's not really a concern also so far i've been using the first copy of any blueprint that we find i'm not sure if we're actually going to end up using any of them as i'm currently content with taking over the persian sector on behalf of the pirate faction but we're not exactly strapped for cash and it's not as if we have a colony to maintain or any ships and weapons to buy so i've just been opening them up on the off chance that i changed my mind and we do start our own faction [Music] okay so the hegemony certainly didn't wait very long in welcoming us to the aslan system i don't foresee any individual fleet posing too much of a challenge so i'm actually gonna try and get them bunched up so we can engage them all at once let's see who decided to show up to the party that seems to be everyone speaking of parties my wife recently informed me that she and i have been invited to a housewarming party being thrown by one of her friends who recently purchased her first home just a few hours ago she informed me that she had received a group chat from the host asking if anyone had a bunch of extra chairs and this is after telling me all week that the host had only just started ordering furniture online i recall that when my wife and i purchased our current home we started ordering furniture weeks before we even signed the paperwork so you might say i have some reservations about attending this so-called party as i would at least appreciate a place to sit down and enjoy beer with all of the other husbands who got invited as a plus one i mean i'm rarely in the mood to be kind to their gemini but i was at least considerate enough to bring enough chairs as i expect this fight to largely consist of us telling them to sit down anyway i started this fight off by deploying the conquest odyssey and doom and i've sent each of them to take one of the capture points closest to the bottom edge of the map with the conquest being assigned to the nearest one as it is the slowest now that we've captured all three we have 60 extra points to work with so i'm going to bring in the astral and the omen and have everyone regroup in the center this fleet composition is pretty light on escorts so we're just gonna have to be particularly vigilant about groups of smaller ships and be mindful of our positioning so as not to get surrounded you know one thing that just occurred to me is that we could have put those broadswords that went into the heron onto this odyssey instead i've never been particularly fond of gladius fighters and i suspect the broadswords would have served us better also i should probably have turned off comms before i said that disregard gladius pilots you're doing a great job now go fly into some missiles for me i need more blade of armor as you can see our deployment points are now negative as the enemy fleet has taken some of the points that we previously captured but this will only become relevant if some of our ships are destroyed and we need additional deployment points to bring in reinforcements but i have no intention of allowing anything like that to happen did you hear that dude that includes you no blowing yourself up all right it looks like the hegemony have gotten themselves into some sort of shape over there and now that they're nicely balled up i'm gonna start heading over to the right flank and see if i can start picking some of them off this mora carrier looks like it's not backing down in the past i actually quite liked the mora for its resilience but i've since discovered that the mora seems to have a self-confidence that is really only warranted when its damper field is active as soon as this ability runs out it tends to find itself in a lot of trouble because it's still taking shots to the face but those shots are suddenly hurting a whole lot more okay we've built up a bit of flux here so i'm gonna plasma burn out of range of the onslaught and then vent before we go back in for the legion all right calm down legion i got a chair for you right over here so while the lesion is venting i'm gonna fire off all the sabos so that we can get his flux back up as quickly as possible and then from there the plasma cannon and squall should be able to do the rest and that's largely the strategy we're going to be following for most of these bigger ships there's a cluster of smaller ships closing in at the moment so i'm gonna fire off another round of sambo's to finish off this lesion as quickly as possible all right time to make our exit though surprisingly these smaller ships don't seem all that eager to pursue oh boy are you okay that conquest when i said use your offensive side i didn't mean verbally now you just pissed him off i do apologize for my colleague i'm sure he didn't mean anything that he said now if you'll kindly take a seat over there i'll have someone attend to you shortly well that should be all the capital ships taken care of let's see what's left on the board well there's a constellation of smaller ships around us but nothing too threatening and the doom is starting to lose combat readiness so let's have him back out in case we need him for the next fight and everyone else can regroup a little closer to the front line i'm still hearing a lot of angry doom noises clearly he's not the kind of fellow who quietly slips out of the party through the back door he's much more of a let me throw a bunch of live explosives into a crowd of strangers before i go type i'm not really sure how many of these smaller ships we're actually going to be able to finish off as without the doom and with the omens combat readiness also slowly winding down we don't really have anything left that's fast enough to catch them of course i don't really have a personal vendetta against any of them so i wouldn't mind if they all just decided to bug out now as long as they don't bother us in our next fight against the space station also i seem to have inadvertently started a game of beach volleyball or space legion bowl in any case the concourse wasn't having any of the poor guy clearly he's still feeling a bit out of sorts after getting half his face blown off it's all right buddy just breathe walk it off nothing a little duct tank can't fix and we've got plenty of that on the atlas or at least we did last time i checked the little thieves over there must be having an absolute riot of the new box we installed by the way if you're enjoying the star sector content but would like more than what i'm able to put out in my admittedly rather glacial release schedule i do know that both rademont and asher recently started new star sector let's play series and both of them have been pretty consistent in putting out videos that are both longer and come out more while i haven't had the time to follow along either let's play series all that much i do know that asher's game is pretty heavily modded and includes a number of factions that don't appear in vanilla whereas ronaldo series is much closer to the base gameplay as he also covers a number of other games in case you're interested i've left a link to the first video in each series down in the description below okay well i feel like a bit of a cow at the moment with this gremlin just buzzing around our rear end and i'm gonna keep my shield turned in this direction as the vigilance is not particularly threatening whereas the gremlin is clearly waiting for an opportunity to offload all of its missiles ah there it goes right on cue now it's just a matter of turning around and look at our conquest trying to be helpful with that mirv which will do absolutely nothing in this battle but is likely to cause an ecological disaster when a crash lands on the jungle world several centuries from now i mean just think of all those lush green forests that would have turned to coal 100 million years from now just waiting for some top hat wearing mustache twirling industrialist to burn it for fuel you're cutting the supply off right at the source that's playing the long game conquest i see what you're doing and i like it since we're basically on cleanup duty here i wanted to address something that's been on my mind so i recently started a new campaign in bannerlord the much-anticipated sequel to mountain blade a game that is often compared to star sector usually phrased in a manner akin to star sector is mountain blade and space i had played a fair bit of van lord when it first released in early access but haven't touched it much since then because the non-combat parts of the game like the overworld kingdom building diplomacy and things like that still have a long way to go and even though the combat is fun i usually need some kind of long-term strategic goal to keep me invested and that got me thinking a bit because i have a friend who i've been trying to convince to play star sector for a long time but i think i gave him a poor initial impression because when i described the game to him i started with the combat and he was all about it but when i started yammering about founding colonies and managing resources his eyes glazed over and i could see this sort of sour expression work its way across his face in looking at the games that he's raved about in the past i suppose it shouldn't come as a shock that he wasn't as enthusiastic about grand strategy as me his favorites including ftl slave aspire and more recently disco elysium are all fairly light on spreadsheets and calculators now the fellow that i'm talking about is someone i met at work which is a bit of an exception because apart from a few chaps from college who i still keep in touch with most of the gamers i've interacted with i've never actually met in person and it's much easier and more reliable to make the assumption that someone who is already playing the same game as you will share your preferences after all you both chose to invest your possibly very limited free time in that particular pursuit and having that common interest is a great first step in establishing relationships and creating communities of like-minded people but the example of my work buddy served as a good reminder to me that even individuals with common interests can diverge on the particulars for example we both quite liked divinity original sin which perhaps strikes the right balance in accessibility and complexity for both of us but he struggled to get into cataclysm which for all its merits is positively labyrinthine when examined in detail i think it was vormathrax a longtime cdda content creator who recently sent something to the effective nobody knows how all of the systems work there's just too much there for any one person to hold in their head so to get back to star sector is there a version of the game that i think my friend would enjoy perhaps it is possible to enjoy star sector for many hours without ever founding your own faction or getting deeply involved with the existing factions because one thing that star sector appears to do very well is serve as a great basis for creating a vast variety of different mods new factions ships weapons colony buildings even gameplay mechanics all can be added or adjusted so for my friend perhaps a load of new toys to play with that don't require a lot of fiddling around would be enough to keep him invested but if simply taking the base game and adding more is the answer why not make that part of the vanilla experience well it comes back to the problem of complexity each person can handle a certain number of interconnected systems and mechanics before they get overwhelmed and each mechanic could either be a draw or a turn off depending on the player there's a danger of adding too much and putting people over their complexity threshold so developers are always forced to balance the considerations for veterans yearning for more intricacy with those of new players still ascending the first foothills of the learning curve at the time that i'm recording this rimworld is just about to release a new update that adds ideologies as a new gameplay mechanic while i haven't had the chance to try it yet and i'm eagerly awaiting the opportunity to do so i always have a degree of apprehension when games layer even more systems on top of what is already a complex game i worry that those few extra building blocks will transform the wall of information that new players are faced with from an intimidating challenge into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle at least rimroll benefits from being a game that is already in full release so the developers are able to release new content in bite-sized chunks and players have the choice of adding these onto their base game as and when they are ready but by and large in these open-ended games the mechanics are not gated you get everything at once and it's always there affecting your gameplay whether you know about it or not which to new players can make it seem as if the learning curve is more of a sheer cliff its staggering heights failed in cloud and fog when you're climbing it you often don't know how much further there is to go and that can be disheartening i think that bringing this mindset to star sector has helped me to see the game in a more forgiving light in its current state i'm usually left wanting more more ships more weapons more colony management more diplomacy options more everything but i also want more people more gamers to be able to find the same joy in it that i have and if the price for that is the base game never getting more complex than it is right now i think i'd be alright with that star sector is a great community and is bound to get a whole influx of interesting and talented people when it finally hits steam and i'm content to let their hard work add those extra layers of complexity when i'm looking for it but what about you guys do you feel like vanilla star sector strikes the right balance between accessibility and complexity is there a feature from your favorite mod that you think should make its way into the base game or do you want something for which no mod currently exists whatever your preference feel free to let me know down in the comments okay so we eliminated the majority of the defensive fleet in that first encounter and we got a chance to test drive the newly configured eagle in the pursuit that followed under different circumstances i may have decided to simply let those logistic ships go but i wasn't entirely certain that we had enough fuel for the upcoming tactical bombardment so it was very considerate of that gemini to throw a couple of fuel tankers at us just to make absolutely sure but as soon as that was over a couple of latecomers decided to show up explaining their tardiness on the fact that one of them forgot to lick their boots clean the night before of course i tried to explain to them that i had a permit for all of the space trash that we just left behind but as we've already learned this particular breed of fascist is not particularly well versed in negotiations so here we are again i've decided to fly the doom this time as the odyssey and the eagle already featured in the last fight and i'm not planning to feel the doom against the space station so it's okay if we expend all of its cr here you may have noticed that this thing looks like it's had a bite taken out of its front armor and that's due to damage sustained in the previous engagement so we're just gonna have to be extra mindful about not taking too many phallic shaped projectiles to the face this time around i've also intentionally left the conquest and omen out of this fight as the former took a bit of a beating in the previous engagement and the ladder is running fairly low on combat readiness and i would definitely like both of them to still be functional when we engage with the star fortress as for this fight my general strategy is just to deploy mines until the enemy shields get close to overloaded and then unfazed to fire the iron pulsers and as many torpedoes as is needed to get the job done for the most part i'm trying to put the minds behind the intended target as this is where ships with front-facing shields are most vulnerable and it also serves to limit their avenues of escape now we can just take a little less inspiration from jackson pollock when choosing where those mines go we'd probably be able to get this done a whole lot faster you're up for a game of soccer eagle i brought a ball he doesn't want to play either always the bridesmaid and never the bride i wonder why these guys never want to play with us i mean we have petting zoos and disco maybe they don't have those things in their germany how to explain well you see a petting zoo is kind of like the brig except contact with the prisoners is encouraged and all of the prisoners are llamas and goats and disco uh well this goes a bit like marching except everyone's marching in a different direction and you don't have to keep in time oh and some people may be on compact stims yeah combat stims now doesn't that sound like fun what do you mean you don't know what fun is actually you know what i think i do have exactly what you guys need just a hail of torpedoes and then darkness forever griffin europe first well despite missing with half our torpedoes i think we still delivered on our promise there don't mind me monitor i'm just gonna pass right through you and then use you as a shield if you hear the distance screaming of eldritch horrors don't worry that's a side effect of minor exposure to face space most people get used to it or they take a pencil to their eardrums or a spoon to their eyeballs or they throw themselves out in airlock anyway you get the idea i wonder what the ludic path would think about all the creepy crawlies hanging out in face space maybe that's why they don't use phase ships frustratingly this dominator is doing an absolutely terrible job of reversing directly into a minefield let's give him one more try nope nope nope zero out of ten looks like we're gonna have to do all the work in this relationship please stand by i gotta lose some of this flux that i built up waiting for you to follow directions all right now just hold still i got a limited number of these suppositories left actually speaking of suppositories my wife recently took the dog to see the veterinarian the poor thing's been having some seizures recently and the vet was nice enough to prescribe some diazepam which should help of course i was curious as to how we were supposed to administer drugs to a dog in the middle of a seizure so i asked my wife when she came back from the pharmacist if she had received any direction she replied that she hadn't at which point i decided to read aloud the piece of paper that had come with the medicine suffice to say she was less than amused to discover she would have to shove drugs of her dog's butthole and speaking of buttholes we're almost done with this a japanese gum hopefully we won't have any more patrols to deal with after this you know i really have no idea why i'm trying to toss mines at this wolf we should really just shoot him in the face see that was much more effective now who do we have left oh yes just that soccer-hating eagle he may not have wanted balls to his face before but he's gonna take him now whether he likes them or not hey eagle remember us oh no i didn't want to talk about petting zoos this time actually i'm here about your starship's extended warranty yeah you really should have bought one okay well now that we've dealt with all of the chaff i think it's time we paid a visit to the high hegemon himself let's just take one more quick look to make sure we don't have an audience yeah okay still a few flies buzzing about but nothing too concerning let's do it so the biggest thing to watch out for in this fight is going to be the mines all of the tier 3 space stations are able to deploy mines and while i think the high-tech version is the most deadly because it can send out a whole lot of mines in very short order the low-tech versions are individually much more damaging so we'll just need to be extra careful not to hit any of them and that's also why i really wanted to bring the omen into this fight for as long as it's cr can hold out i'm really hoping it can take care of most of the mines on our unprotected flanks however it's definitely going to start waning before the battle is up so we are under some time pressure here to eliminate as much of the threat as possible before we need to send the omen away for its own safety on the defensive end my biggest concern is the conquest as it took some damage in the previous fights and its very narrow shield arc means that it's the most prone to being surprised by mines like all tier 3 orbital stations the low-tech star fortress has three layers of modules the outer layer is a constellation of orbiting defensive platforms on the high-tech star fortress all of these platforms have fortress shields like the paragon or monitor but the low-tech versions have no such thing so they should be an easy win for us i'm just gonna try and take each one out in turn as it circles around to face us you can see that after each platform is destroyed the remaining ones will redistribute themselves so that they're always evenly spaced around the center thankfully this station has been configured with a lot of hellboard cannons which are terrifying against armor but not too threatening against our shields okay just one more platform to go hopefully we have enough range to take it out so we don't have to wait for it to circle back around excellent all right let's back off a bit and lose some of this flux so the second layer of modules are sitting on the end of these spokes sticking out from the center of the station they're quite similar to what you'll find on the tier 2 station except they have additional armor plates which you'll have to destroy before you can start doing damage to the modules themselves one of these modules is considerably larger than the other two and is also the most heavily armed in armor so unless my allies are able to get it into a particularly vulnerable position i'm probably gonna save her for last and speaking of allies let's have them move in a little bit closer now that the first layer of defenses have been eliminated as you can see i was thinking about moving all the ships forward but i think what i'm actually gonna do is keep the carriers back and just put a fighter strike order on the station there's still way too many guns on that thing and the asteroid is far too slow to be able to back out safely if it gets into trouble as you can see we have the big module turned towards us at the moment and i'm not expecting to be able to do any serious damage to it right now so i'm just gonna bide my time until one of the small modules comes around actually quick change of plans i must have miscounted because there's one defensive platform left there let's just pretend that never happened now let's move on to the second layer for real this time i'm going to start by moving in a little bit closer and then firing off a volley of zappos to get rid of these shields even though the armor plates sit on top of the station module the module shields don't protect the armor plates it's like each module has this onion of protection and if you're not prepared trying to cut through can be the source of a lot of tears no please hold your applause and only took me all week to think of that one anyway we've already broken through the armor plating on this one let's see if we can eliminate the module itself before it turns out of range again i'm trying to keep an eye on our time here as i can already see the combat readiness of the omen dropping to zero the poor thing is shooting sparks all over the place just trying to hold itself together wait a minute doesn't it do that all the time all right time for another quick breather also astral i would really prefer if you sat a little farther back buddy you're really in the splash zone here and i know how much you hate getting wet all right well while the carrier is busy wondering whether i meant that as a double entendre let's try to back this odyssey up so that we can keep that station module in our firing arc i'm going to fire off another round of sebos because i really don't want to give this thing another opportunity to circle back around all right time to get rid of our flux again hey astral unless you want to get speared in that massive orifice you call a face you should really move and yes i meant it both ways this time that's our cue all right omen time for you to get out of here my diminutive friend and i feel like we sufficiently mitigated the threat so i'm okay with bringing in some of these destroyers to help soak up the fire and we're facing the big module again but i think i'm still gonna pass and instead try to focus down these fighter bays which are a much softer target and as usual we'll open the festivities with a round of zebos hey look at that another round of nerves merrily flying off to cause another ecological disaster i wonder who fired those okay well i think it was actually a saboo that did the job in the end in any case the astral is once again begging to have absolutely unspeakable atrocities committed against it i mean if you really are such a masochist i've got a wonderful little puzzle box that might interest you wow look at our hammerhead dodging and leaving between mines over there i mean that's working as intended because every mind heading his way is one less that i have to worry about anyway i've already talked about the first two layers of the star fortress and the third is really just a base orbital station with two sets of fighter bays and one large offensive module except as with the tier 2 defenses all the modules have additional armor plates on the outside and exactly like tier 2 the largest of the modules is significantly better armed and armored which is why i've gone after the two smaller ones first and with both of those out of the way i think it's time to bring in all of the firepower so we can grind down the two largest modules we're almost half the long flux here but we've got the station on the ropes so i'm going to choose to stay in the fight so we can keep up the pressure actually since the module is overloaded now might be a great time to lose our flux great now we can stay up close and personal and incredibly an almost stationary object has somehow managed to find its way into cover using other parts of itself and for once i'm actually not upset that the asteroid has come a little closer that is a terrifying amount of high explosives for a target that can't get out of the way and in about five seconds the astral's going to be able to do it all over again if only it knew how to aim hey conquest you want to give us a hand here wow that was actually quite helpful i take back every mean thing i ever said about you except for the rainforest they're still gonna burn and it's all your fault normally i'd be a little more apprehensive about just parking myself in front of the main offensive module like this but it seems like they're only boring about the fighter wings at the moment maybe they watch too much star wars listen guys unless you have an exhaust port that for some reason leads all the way to your reactor core maybe you should be more worried about the capital ship that's practically sitting on your face right now alright we've broken through the armor on this last module and i hate to get sentimental but it's almost like a family photo with a bunch of the serious mainstays all working together to get this done and as soon as i'm done complimenting you you all decide to start slacking off uh typical pirates i expected nothing less well i guess that means it's on us to bring it home want a satisfying explosion that's a once-in-a-career moment right there seriously i don't want to do that again and i have no interest in chasing off these stragglers we have more than enough fuel to do what needs to be done speaking of which it's time to prep the antimatter and make sure all of the marines have their wills filled out correctly so we know who to blame if they turn out to be a failure i suppose now would be the perfect time for some sort of speech but we all know my way here a revolution may have started on ankara but generations from now on free worlds across known space it won't be chickamau's dark they remember because here on this world is where we declare that the only power in the persian sector belongs to the pirates [Music] so i closed things a little bit differently this time don't worry it's not the end of the series i just want to try something new however i didn't want to leave you guys without saying as usual thank you so much for watching take care of yourselves and i'll see you out there in the sector

Channel: blazeroth

Views: 3,131

Keywords: lets play, gameplay, starsector, nexerelin, pirate

Id: 11JqBtqP9UQ

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/EpicMachine]

Hey Blaze, I enjoy your gameplay and it's a cool idea. So, kudos to you.

I have quite a lot of hours put into this game but I never did pilot the ships I had. I see that you pretty much load ships with as much Assault Chainguns as you can.

What are your main tips for combat?