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This is surprisingly robust and a great turn-based alternative for fans of Escape Velocity and Transcendence. The in-game UI is extremely busy as a newcomer, but taking time to sit and read it all, it flows well. It very much rewards taking the time to look at the in-game system atlas to review available trading options and efficient mission routes. What's really interesting is embracing job/ talent synergy and specializing - making an Officer really really good at crew combat or really good at missions is a massive difference compared to trying to pick evenly. At first it seems frustrating to lose faction reputation willy nilly, but planning ahead and using bribes / talents to mitigate loss really opens up options with dealing with conflicts. It's refreshing this game offers the option. The Official Wiki and the official Discord are definitely worth bookmarking if you're interested in exploring the systems further - the patches are rolling in every couple of days since launch and the devs are responsive in communications. For example, I found out in the Discord if you close to range 1 in ship combat, you can board an unlimited amount of times, so you can take on ships way bigger than you by weaving through fire and shooting and looting your way through their crew. This also keeps the ship intact so you can steal fuel / activate repair / healing talents and come out of ship combat relatively intact instead of having to burn 6-11 weeks repairing and healing crew. 40 Proof Listerine fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Aug 9, 2018 |
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Aug 9, 2018 07:59
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KirbyKhan posted:People will never discrace their gaming pride by playing on "normal" or "basic". I started my first game on Normal and had a great time floundering around specifically because of the big margin of error. Getting my first captain killed and living to tell the tale let me learn the combat UI and dice rules, along with basic principles of "fuel is important" and "faction rep is super important." Starting a second game on Demanding with a custom captain has been more seat of the pants, but more satisfying since I'm customizing crew for a specific role (punching ships and their crew). The devs encourage this philosophy because most new players will load the default template and call it a day, while devoted fans will go ahead and start over again, so they want as many people to have a good time with their captain. Higher difficulty levels introduce experience and loot bonuses for the trouble, and also introduce permadeath. The hardest keeps the difficulty and removes the loot bonuses. You can customize the rewards and permadeath levels to whatever amounts you like if the pregen difficulties aren't what you're looking for.
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Aug 12, 2018 07:51
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Guildencrantz posted:I actually quite like the combat system, at least when I can really engage with it, but I'm really at a loss on how to set up my playthrough around it. Spying and trading are pretty secure sources of cash, but when I try the combat-focused classes like pirate and military officer I can't get the playthrough off the ground. Any fights I really commit to generally mean heavy costs for repairs and crew damage, and maintaining those big ships and crews with early game income isn't cheap either. Swapping out a few small weapons for stat-boosting modules (+Pilot is a gamechanger for ranges 3-1, +Navigation if you're at 5-4) and you improve dodging, then if you have room for +Boarding module, that improves which modules and how many get sabotaged during a successful boarding. If you just want to vaporize ships, then getting a Interlocking Sensor Matrix or two really adds some zip - the bonus +crit% is additive, so that 10% to crit can get to 28% with a pair, or you can get to 48% with a 30% crit base. Same goes for crew combat - bringing a Commander and Combat Medic really extend the life of the squad, and the ship talents for healing crew/morale top off your boarding crews. By investing in the talents, you'll come out about as good as you came in, and can maintain for about four fights before repairing instead of one fight. You'll still run into shotgun guys / snipers occasionally one-shotting your frontliners, but 
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Aug 14, 2018 02:15
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Koobze posted:My main complaints with the game have to do with the poor presentation of information to the user. It's hard to just see what your rep with a faction is without clicking through stuff - I think they could've used a lot more mouse-over tooltips and things like that to streamline the experience. I find it really offensive that in order to figure out what I want to buy at a planet, I have to actually take off from the planet to access the map. It's great that you can look in the Atlas to see a listing of places in a system and what they want, but that doesn't tell me which one's closest to where I am, or is along my planned route of travel. Then you have to land again, buy the poo poo, and take off and go to the next planet. I guess if you are forward-thinking and decide on your next location before even landing at the current you can already pick what you buy, but that doesn't help if you just got a mission on the planet and now want to see what's worth carrying with you on the way, to maybe sell at some in-between location. And I still have no idea what the point of rumors is, I mean clearly they affect prices and things, but some more information about what they do and how they impact me, and what I can do about them, would be nice. You can sort the system atlas by distance or faction, which helps tremendously in figuring out what's closest. You can also mouse over the banner of a faction to immediately see the reputation, or click the dedicated contacts button on the left to see what's happening with then. Both of these are clickable when on the planet, just not when talking to a contact or in the actual market screen. The devs have posted in the discord that adding the buttons when in the black market/missions/contact screen is something on the to-do list.
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Aug 17, 2018 04:07
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Woebin posted:With a lot of the ship info not being clearly presented when shopping for ships, I find it hard to determine which one's the best for my purposes. I've currently got the Sword Battlecruiser and it's working out pretty well, but I'm wondering if there's something else I could consider upgrading to from there. Doing a lot of fighting with this one so probably not the Cautela Titan since it seems to be more of a freighter, but maybe the Broadsword Class? Or the Warhammer Class? I don't know. Which ships would you lot go for, given enough money? There's actually merit to running smaller ships, since faster engine speed takes less time to cross distances in space and you burn less fuel doing so. A 9000 hull is for kitting out to be a king of ship combat, but for practical purposes of narrative, a 6000 or 7000 hull is actually a good balance on running missions efficiently and having enough firepower/modules to be creative. The three biggest considerations on the ship hulls is how many compartments they have, what sizes (the smaller ships have scout bridges in a small module, which allows them more room for cargo / big modules), and what the balance on hull/shield/armor is. The smaller ships have more base shield/armor to compensate for less hull, while the bigger ships have to spend modules on reinforced hulls / battle prows and such. Swapping out a couple weapons for sensor modules is a huge boost to ship combat dice, too.
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Aug 18, 2018 20:07
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frogge posted:Just picked this up over the weekend and finally got a chance to play. Quite a lot going on in the UI, but otherwise I'm having fun. The only thing as a new player to be aware of is keep in mind is that missions (including the narrative) have deadlines - it's okay to focus on 2-3 missions at a time instead of accepting every mission offered to you. If you do have missions active, be careful about doing patrol/spy/blockade or exploring planets, because those can eat up dozens of weeks very quickly between the actual patrol and repairing ship damage. Even if you do miss the deadline, you can still finish the mission most of the time, just with reduced pay. If you do wander off the narratives, keep enjoying yourself - side quests and branches will open up and you can still do your own thing.
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Aug 21, 2018 01:15
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The devs are continuing to push out a tangible update every week, and the past two weeks have been doozies: This week's Update 98 completely revamps the Rare Trade Goods system - they scale on an eight-tier system like other contact services, and scale in profitability the more jumps away from your source you are. Also huge, not only did Update 97 introduce a double speed option for sailing around space, but Update 98 also includes a double speed option for the card games for your exploring binges. It's a huge improvement to zipping around on new saves, but since the skill checks are calculated in double speed also, it's important to keep a close eye or you can have a dead and mutinous crew by the time you reach your waypoint if you didn't notice the radiation storms. Update 97 also has new end-game enemies who seek you out to test your endurance in your tricked out ships. Update 98 posted:- Added new option for faster results / animation speed during minigames Update 97 posted:- Added option for faster movement/animation speed during map travel
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Aug 31, 2018 06:48
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ZearothK posted:Yeah, I've had two successful spy captains (successful as in, they didn't die and eventually had more money than I knew what to do with) and did both with the Scout Cutter (requires D priority for ship). It is a small ship with low maintenance costs and also a smallish crew. One advantage for a smaller crew is that your guys level up faster, so you get quicker access to the high level talents. As a generalist strategy, having a Pirate or Commander in the Officers is really useful in early ship combat, as Steady Hands (Commander) and Furious Prodding (Pirate) let you mitigate crew effects from torpedo aftershocks and Furious Prodding has a bonus to morale recovery, too.
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Sep 15, 2018 20:47
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Frog Act posted:So I'm getting started in this game, I made an Explorer and started out with a Frontier Liner that seems to have decent weapons. I made 10k doing the first story mission (plus a cool 1.6k on some cargo) and I'm thinking I'll just do some story missions quick since I've heard they expire. Time is paused any time the ship isn't physically moving or playing a card game. You can land on a planet or stop navigation and level up crew / swap crew weapons at will. Engine safety rating affects how many of the skill checks you get while in space. A 60% rating engine has (1/60%)= 167% of the skill checks than a 100% safety engine, while a 120% safety rating has 83% the checks. Engine speed (not agility, that's for ship battles range 1-3) also gets you across systems faster so you can complete more missions in less time (Great for explore/spy chains). Big UI tip - you can click on the small box in the top right of a big box when landed (like spice hall big box) to select individual components/ crew to heal/replace/refuel, handy when low on money.
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Oct 13, 2018 21:34
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Phlegmish posted:I must have crossed some sort of scaling threshold because now I'm getting wrecked by everyone I see. I just lost to some random Alta Mesa ship and they apparently imprisoned me for several years (!!!). I like this game but the ship combat is just too brutal for me, I have no idea how to make my ship not suck. I'm thinking of starting over while trying to maintain positive rep with everyone from the beginning. Bumping up armor and shields also helps with crew attrition; a cheap upgrade (both in $$ and time) is upgrading officer bunks to reinforced bunks for the extra armor and shielding. Soft skills like Tactics and Command also throw a bunch of extra small dice into a bunch of crew and ship combat checks, so having a few Military Officers and Commanders makes a bigger difference than you'd think.
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Nov 16, 2018 04:55
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Digital Osmosis posted:There's a ton more to it if you care - dodge versus stealth dodge versus armor, grenade attacks being their own weird thing, off-handing a sword to parry with - but the gist is just get four fast face smashers, equip them as best you can, decide on a positioning for them and grab skills that work in that position, and you'll be fine.
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Feb 25, 2019 11:06
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ZearothK posted:https://steamcommunity.com/games/335620/announcements/detail/1730979046047360465
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Apr 7, 2019 14:09
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Star Traders: Frontiers is still going strong, it's been getting a lot of update releases after Cyber Knights came out, the latest just hit the other day: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/335620/view/3887233545929039392?l=english quote:v3.3.75 - 12/15/2023 iOS and Android are just a couple updates behind Steam now, there was a bit of a block with Apple for a while and that's been figured out for the most part - lots of cool relic gear from salvage in the last few updates.
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Dec 18, 2023 02:35
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Sometimes I wish they would slow down or finish up the updates. All the frequent additions make it so that guides are typically out of date. This game feels really hard to get into because of how complex it is. The core of the game's still stable since they added in small craft a while back, most of the updates these days focus on higher end captain things like endgame ship components, fixing bugs, and rank 15 talents for jobs. There's also a bunch of Steam guides that are published recently that have a solid core - you don't need to follow them step by step and they still have a lot of good information on certain specific builds, like this recent one for legitimate merchanting without using rare trade goods: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3110793982 Pretty much the big things to suss out are how the dice work and what skills contribute to checks and ways to save time on missions and you can sandbox pretty effectively any specialization you want.
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Dec 18, 2023 19:02
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Subjunctive posted:is the desktop interface better now? it felt really clumsy the last time I tried it, with no tooltips on icons and things not being clickable the way I expected I play on both and I like the desktop interface a little better than mobile because you can hover over stuff for tooltips instead of long pressing. It is a lot of information to take in at once even though everything is labeled and does what it says on the tin. Left click to select, right to confirm waypoints, middle mouse to back out is pretty intuitive. sebmojo posted:Also that if you follow the breadcrumb quest exclusively you will eventually die, penniless and a long way from home This part's absolutely true because the breadcrumb quest makes a huge enemy out of the other faction and if you don't mitigate that rep loss or prepare for angry bounty hunters there will be huge combats.
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Dec 18, 2023 19:44
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the last two updates posted:v3.3.77 - 12/21/2023 Steam and mobile are in sync again, which is nice for gaming on the go. The ship components they're adding in on the high end are pretty interesting for midgame play because they can really take the edge of the rough parts about a specialized ship - My current Hard mode run needed a better ship before Xeno showed up and I went with a Strikecarrier which is a real fuel guzzler with a Warhammer engine - it only had about 35 AU range base and some quadrants spawn 70 AU wide. The medium fuel tank was a great investment, bringing up the range to 60 AU and letting me cruise around the galaxy in a solid midgame tanky hull and run back and forth completing plot missions to get to the next era. Only problem was doing the plot missions got me away from the other missions I had going on so I had to daisy chain a bunch of overdue missions before they expired and I'd take a rep hit, so I mitigated the rep losses by replacing the small craft launch bay with a giant medical bay and giving out free medical care to factions whose systems I was marauding and spying in. sebmojo posted:It's a very dark souls learn by doing aspect and is kind of cool, but yeah. The big thing for me was not being able to buy fuel. You can top off fuel tanks by exploring or getting lucky on the patrol/blockade card games, or there was one case where there was a salvage rumor up and I was out of cash and fuel and went through a bunch of xeno crew combats with an all star wing commando captain to scrape up resources to sell to top back off. If you're bold you can also win a ship combat and steal their fuel and that's key to a pirate playthrough because there'll be big chunks of space you can't refuel due to reputation hits. You can also fly around with no fuel in a pinch for a little bit - it guzzles morale and will quickly lead to a mutiny and it comes up from time to time when using the talent to flee a ship combat at the cost of hyperwarp drive damage and a jump of fuel
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Jan 1, 2024 17:41
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Lum_ posted:Also someone has been posting a ton of new detailed how-to-get-started guides in the Steam Guides section which are pretty useful. Just sort by Most Recent and you'll see them all. This trick is funnier if you're aggressive with making new Contacts you can meet Aetaan Char and work for her like a normal Contact so Indie Aetaan Char is a really funny prospect. Steam version's up to 3.3.85 and mobile's on 3.3.83, lots of new components and tweaks - new Medium slot Torpedos were crucial in winning versus the Jyeeta Xeno incursion era in my latest run and in .85 new small Lances and Medium Gravcannons round out aggressive ship options at ranges 3 to 1. If folks hadn't tried a run yet with the small craft, it's easier to make them work than it sounds especially since a bunch of midgame ships come equipped with good Hangars and Launch Bays - the revamped Leo Battlecruiser for Thulun faction is a great light carrier to supplement a gun strategy and the Javat Mortifor Carrier comes pre-upgraded with a nice Large Gravcannon to support a Interdictor+Shuttle combo. 40 Proof Listerine fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Jan 20, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 03:54
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 06:22 |
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Mobile's on 3.3.85 and Steam's on 3.3.87, looking forward to the mobile parity since 3.3.87 shakes up the ship combat a little bit by letting the AI get access to all the new kit the players got in the past couple patches.Latest update posted:v3.3.87 - 1/21/2024 Part of my last several runs has been seeing how small a ship I can get away with for the general midgame eras pre-Jyeeta since smaller faster engines mean getting more missions done and the new Traveler hyperwarp drives are a real interesting upgrade especially for B priority ship starts like the Aeternum Vindex and the Palace Interceptor. The faction specific M3400 and M5000 ships are all really great values that can be upgraded to hold their own against Terrox Xeno on a budget so they're good for midgame passenger ferrying and the occasional pirate blasting. willing to settle posted:Working against Indies isn't entirely without negatives. Killing indies in combat is more likely to give your combat crew drinking problems, PTSD, etc than regular fighting. Yeah the time based trait mutations are pretty notable, since I keep punching Xeno ships in the face and thus probably a quarter of my crew wind up with "Other Fascination" trait (gain morale on seeing Xeno ships instead of losing morale). There's a soft timer on Xeno encounters where they're less likely to appear in rumors and cards before year 215.01 unless you go Exploring or Scavenging for them deliberately and I got a good laugh because I started a new run with an Explorer captain and saw Xeno explore cards in week 2 on 210.04 and decided that planet can stay unexplored.
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Jan 25, 2024 16:39
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