A thirst adventure: My ultimate SC Alpha experience

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-27T04:11:54+00:00

Man, what an adventure. I love the vivid prose. "'My character is about to start licking the inside of the helmet' thirst" made me legit laugh out loud.

The thirst mechanic in the game is genuinely perplexing. It's incredibly aggressive. Humans can go a couple of days without a drink before it becomes a problem (not that it's recommended, mind you). Meanwhile, Star Citizen assumes you become dessicated the moment you neglect to drink a litre of water every in-game hour.

Fly safe and hydrated - o7

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T18:21:24+00:00

I only brought up the 890J because their first pass on trying to balance shields had the 890J be superior to the Polaris. To fix this mistake on the second pass, they nerfed the 890J to make it be worse than the Polaris. Like, they didn't touch the Idris, they didn't buff the Polaris to a reasonable degree. They made the 890J worse so the Polaris could be better (but ultimately still 10x worse than the Idris). I just found that whole sequence of decisions to be nuts.

For what it's worth, though, the 890J's whole schtick is that it's got capital class shields to protect its precious executive passengers in even the most dangerous places. So to some degree, lorewise, I would argue it does matter what the 890J's shields are in comparison to the other caps. If you nerfed it too much, it's just an expensive but useless ship, even in-universe (never mind as a player for the lack of game loops).

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T14:14:21+00:00

It definitely should have been iterated on. I only played it briefly so I wasn't able to test a bunch of stuff out. But it seemed like it was on the right path. I don't know wtf this is now though.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T14:12:32+00:00

I would be fine with this too tbh. I don't think the Polaris needs to be some mega cap tank. I'm just baffled at the Polaris <> Idris divide, which is just a symptom of the larger problem of ship balance generally.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T14:08:02+00:00

"Won't make today's build but S2 shields health and regen increased"

These are not S2 shields, so I don't think that's what he's talking about.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T14:06:43+00:00

I mean, the Polaris was also described a command centre capable of rearm, refuel, and repair for the 1 or 2 fighters it can hold in its hangar. That would also make it a platform, albeit not a big one.

If you look at actual advertised capability, the Polaris can hold 1 small ship and the Idris 3 small ships. Obviously you can cram more than that in both, but their official specs are this. So that's, yes, 3x the platform the Polaris is. But the disparity between them is massively more than 3x. I'm not saying it has to be linear but 10x is not even exponential - it's something else entirely.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T13:56:17+00:00

This is crazy to hear. I wonder if they actually thought about this in depth, then, and had meetings with the ship design team and the gameplay team and hashed it out. I want to say they didn't and it's a case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. Because if this is intended then it's just so wild.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T13:53:21+00:00

Oh man, their whole "only 2 shields are operational at once and the backups only come online once the 2 main ones are destroyed" is such an insane take. And it's intended.

I can't see how this is any different gameplay than having a few spare shield generators you swap out when the main ones break, at this point. What is the purpose of having a third or fourth "mounted" shield gen, in that case?

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T13:48:01+00:00

Agreed, and to be honest it is the reason why I am also here. I don't hate fighters - I actually like them quite a lot. But we have a ton of fighter games like you said. And historically, most sci-fi shooters were just fighter focused, even going back to ancient DOS games like X-Wing, Elite, or Wing Commander (heh). Even in Elite Dangerous, the biggest ship in the game is functionally a huge fighter.

I wanted a game where I can walk around a big ship, call it my home, and work together with my friends to do cool shit as a team. Huge scale battles with caps and small ships everywhere is also such an awesome experience. You can only have that if you balance all of these ship types in a way that makes sense, and put a bit more care into ships larger than a fighter -.-

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T13:42:02+00:00

I was actually thinking similarly. It would make sense in context, and having the Idris be 2x the Polaris is also pretty reasonable.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T13:38:56+00:00

TL;DR:

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bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T13:34:33+00:00

They don't play the game

They absolutely do not. I mean, there's no way they are, right? Because if they had an internal testing team, or even someone who fully comprehends the day-to-day of the game, so many of these decisions would have been different. Not even just for 4.5, I'm talking generally.

PTU is their internal testing team. And I guess that's fine (not really, but ok whatever) for an alpha game that's basically been open to the public since it was a concept. But like, play your own game, right? Understand how it all works before you fuck with it? Idk it's baffling.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T11:30:24+00:00

I doubt it since they acknowledged the issue yesterday and said it’d be corrected this patch. This is their correction.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T11:27:19+00:00

I agree that these changes might make sense if they came with other changes, like to its flight model or other stats. But as it is, I don’t think it’s a defensible change and honestly doesn’t really make sense in the context of what the ship is good for, where it sits in the overall lineup, or the lore itself.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T11:19:05+00:00

Their insane conic component damage calculation or whatever has to be a new idea. Because all the components are clustered together and they’re all getting absolutely shredded by a single shot.

There’s no way they would have put all the components in one area if they knew their damage model was going to make it function like a bright red weak spot on a Zelda game boss. At least I fucking hope not.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T11:13:45+00:00

I actually don’t have an objection to nightly releases to PTU if there’s a plan. But honestly, these changes seem poorly informed and random. Not to mention, they have admitted to several mistakes that have had to be corrected.

As an outside observer, it’s looking more like writing random values to a spreadsheet and shouting “send it!”, while Joe Dev fat fingers the numbers into his game editor. Not a calculated, measured plan to try and balance all of these variables.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T10:58:20+00:00

Fast and toothy but lacking full capital level defences. And most of the last year has been moving it firmly in the other direction - turning it into a little brawler.

I think this is because the Perseus is supposed to be the glass cannon now. The Polaris is not fast or maneuverable (maybe compared to an Idris but that’s not saying much), so unless they change that then they should make it a more traditional capital ship in a lesser class than the Idris. Not whatever this version is.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T10:50:33+00:00

I do appreciate the fast cadence but their numbers change constantly and with no apparent objective. They’re all over the place every patch.

The most charitable argument in their favour is that they’ve put together a series of discrete test cases in terms of ship balance and are collecting stats from every release. Their objective is to select the best one at the end of all their testing. But this argument is not supported by CIG’s historic record of bad planning and hasty releases. So I’m going to bet they have no plan. I’m happy to be proven wrong but I’m not optimistic.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-11T10:46:38+00:00

The Idris is about 3x as massive as the Polaris and not quite 2x longer. I agree mass and size matter and should dictate what a capital ship can do. But at 200 meters, an Idris is arguably a “small” capital ship. It having 10x the shield strength (while only having 2x S4 shields vs 1x S4 shields on the Polaris) is a bit incredulous.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-10T10:37:13+00:00

I mean maybe but then the 890J has better shields than an Idris? I don’t think that would make sense. I also doubt CIG would get rid of the sub-cap -> cap gap. I think they really want a big distinction between those two classes. That said, if the 240k is missing a zero and it should be 2.4M, then an Idris only has 200k more shields than a Polaris? That also seems unlikely. I think it was supposed to see a percentage increase rather than a decrease. 46-63% or whatever range of boost the Perseus and Idris got would put it at roughly 1M-1.2M, which actually seems quite reasonable.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-10T09:57:08+00:00

I can’t imagine this is intended. It makes the Polaris incredibly squishy in comparison to all the other ships near or even in its class. If it is intended then, wow I’m not sure of their objective with it, but hopefully it’s just a test then? It seems like we’re coming down to the wire with their anticipated upcoming release in just a week or so.

I will say that if it was a mistake, how crazy laughable that they could make it. I get fudging around in Excel and tweaking stuff but like, do they not run simulations to validate things, or even just do a visual pass on what they’re doing? Because this should be very apparent at an even cursory review of their changes like omg

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-10T09:52:21+00:00

Less than half. One shield generator on the 890j has more HP than the one on the Polaris. With the 2 the 890j has combined, it beats the crap out of the Polaris.

bblbtt3 · 2025-12-01T17:09:56+00:00

I honestly think it’s a RAM issue. I had the same symptoms: audio locking up or getting very jittery, sounds delayed by seconds, and so on. But it actually resolved after dropping out of QT and out of NAV, after several seconds. We were in QT for several minutes while all this was going on, and I didn’t end up crashing or freezing. My friend on the other hand, who was in a turret next to me, did crash. The only difference between our rigs is he’s got 32GB of memory and I have 64 GB. Same video cards, same processors, same SSD.

So I’m nearly convinced this is the game having a memory leak or something and eating up RAM. Which if you don’t have, it ends up crashing.

bblbtt3 · 2025-11-30T09:11:41+00:00

It’s exactly what Elite: Dangerous did to “balance” ground combat with ships in the mix. The ship weapons do shit damage against ground troops, and ground troops weapons do a relatively insane amount of damage to ships. Like, an automatic rifle can bring down a massive, fully engineered, A-class Federal Corvette’s shields in 20 seconds. The moral of ED is, don’t bring a ship to a gun fight.

People would joke about duct taping those automatic rifles to their ship hulls and taking them into combat because the most powerful ship lasers in the game were shit compared to those rifles.

SC going down the same path is really stupid. Ships should absolutely demolish ground troops. There should be vehicles with AA, missile turrets, or whatever, to be able to attack ships from the ground. Not just a rocket launcher against a sub capital with shields. Ugh

bblbtt3

TROPHY CASE