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This is a good game.
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May 10, 2018 11:59
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:55 |
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I've bought this game and it's absolutely my poo poo. Peace.
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Jun 30, 2018 10:55
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Help a fellow spy out, I've been thinking about upgrading my ship from the Scout Cutter since I am finally lucking into lucrative contracts. What should I be getting in the 300k-400k range to maintain a high maneuver ship that either avoids fights or bumrushes for boarding actions? Or maybe I shouldn't bother because a more expensive ship just means my money is going to be spent repairing it?
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Jul 2, 2018 19:09
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:Has anyone done well with one of the more "peaceful" occupations? Things tend to be a slog when half the factions hate you and every time you leave a planet you're almost guaranteed to run into one of their ships. The only upside to this is when you're in a completely hostile system and you need more fuel to get out of it. I've been a spy, but I end up stabbing a lot of people while completing missions, even the spy ones. My ship is pretty good at running from fights I don't want, at least, which is most of them. I think focusing on being a merchant properly would involve doing a lot of neutral missions and preventive patrols to keep relations with most everyone at 20+, which still incurs the very real possibility of space combat. I also think in theory a peaceful character should start with contacts at A or B priority and use your wide network to keep relations up by doing their missions or to buy pardons.
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Jul 4, 2018 18:59
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And new patch!Update #79: New Heights posted:
I haven't gotten to the Plague Era yet or even close to the level cap, but I appreciate the UI work on ship components.
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Jul 5, 2018 12:01
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For my next character I fully intend to pick her up and then keep her on my ship or lose her and see if the game reacts to that.
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Jul 11, 2018 01:43
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BBJoey posted:When I tried this, the faen conspiracy sister showed up on the third planet I visited to tell me that the arbiter had hitched another ride to the faen court but I was welcome to go there to get missions. Additionally, when I tried taking the arbiter mission then waiting until the last moment to complete it, she actually got pissed off a few weeks in and left, making her own way to the faens (that annoyed me a bit because for that particular mission the deadline is a straight up lie) Okay, then I guess I have to figure out a way to lose her to pirates or something.
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Jul 11, 2018 13:20
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bonds0097 posted:How many years of story does the game have? Ive never even made it past the duel of assassins stage or whatever. When I saw patch notes about a 'plague era' I was pretty boggled. I am in 227 and after the duel-of-assassins phase there was a Second Founding Era about a decade in and I am currently in the Early Coalition Era. They change some of the background elements, the kind of encounters you have, the missions you are likely to receive, the relationships factions are likely to develop with each other and the events you get on planets. I don't know how many more there are between where I am and the Plague Era, which is supposed to start around 300, I think?
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Jul 11, 2018 14:18
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I kept with my Scout Cutter, upgrading it, until I naturally had about 600k in the bank, when I upgraded to the Raptor. Note that if you're used to an upgraded ship you will want to spend about 200k after buying it to upgrade its stuff, but it's definitely worth it. Do note that I am still on my third character (and my only long-term one, since the others died or went bankrupt in the first five years), so I am in no shape or form a master in this game. Also, I travelled all the way to the main quest contact of the third era and I can't talk to her because of civil unrest on the planet, so I guess no plot missions for this season!
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Jul 12, 2018 12:30
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Latest update is a big one for people who weren't down with the Ironman saves, as you can now have multiple save slots if you don't have permadeath enabled. Also looks like the game is coming out of Early Access this week.quote:Update #86 has brought us to the the final moments of this game’s Early Access phase. It has been a busy 8 months and we owe a huge thanks to the thousands of Captains who have helped us improve the game. But -- we're not done yet! ZearothK fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Jul 29, 2018 |
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Jul 29, 2018 13:29
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BBJoey posted:If only there were a solution to this problem, but I guess not In his defense, non-permadeath mode is barely even two weeks old by now, and the reactor defense skill is even younger. I do agree it is pretty bullshit to have your captain die from a bad roll in a game where campaigns are as long as this. A playthrough that goes through all the eras can take you ten+ hours of gameplay and having it end because of what amounts to bad dicerolls is extremely frustrating. ZearothK fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Aug 10, 2018 |
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Aug 10, 2018 00:40
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Yeah, I've gone for putting the difficulty on the first Permadeath level and removing Permadeath with the custom options. My only regret is that most achievements require the vanilla difficulties.
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Aug 12, 2018 11:55
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:This game is obnoxiously addictive, even though I suck at it. If you get involved in the Faen family drama you can get some extra contracts and gain a lot of rep with your starting faction (while burning down your relations with the Char's faction). Doing the Arbiter storyline at the start will also set you up with a bunch of extra contacts in diverse factions and decent rep with them, which I feel is one of the best options for your time in the early game. You can also get some unique encounters. It is certainly worth doing for a change of pace, though with the caveat that the devs keep touching up the storyline quests.
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Sep 11, 2018 22:03
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:What's the best ship for spying? 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. Hire extra E-Tech personnel to help with Intel gathering and focus your pilots into evasion. You want to avoid space combat until you can graduate to a bigger ship, but if you must, aim at going for boarding actions because that's the only way you will beat anyone, so get Bombardment (to reduce enemy hit-rate, which combines very well with evasive maneuvers in the opening turns) and Boarding Assault so you can do boarding from greater distances. A Bounty Hunter officer or crew mate will also help you getting those boarding actions going on. You can even sell most of your guns and replace them with boosters to Intel gathering or piloting/navigation. Get one of your officers to pick up Military Officer (I usually put it on the Quartermaster) and get Stiff Salute at level 1, which will give you a quick way to avoid combat encounters with military and zealot ships. This talent will save your life, and you should always take it in the early game, no matter your captain template. It also helps to have Diplomats and Merchants as officers or crew, as their early talents will aid you in cultivating contacts. Having a wide range of them is good to keep you in the good graces of several different factions, as well as always having someone to sell valuable Intel to, amongst the many perks of a contact network.
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Sep 15, 2018 00:48
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Also don't start at any difficulty above normal. It is common to have a bunch of failed captains before hitting stride. I am going to quote myself here. quote:Get one of your officers to pick up Military Officer (I usually put it on the Quartermaster) and get Stiff Salute at level 1, which will give you a quick way to avoid combat encounters with military and zealot ships. This talent will save your life, and you should always take it in the early game, no matter your captain template. This will help you avoid a lot of fights in neutral/hostile sectors. There are other talents to avoid fights with different captains, but I think - and someone correct me if I am wrong - that's the only one you can easily grab at the start of the game. One thing that helps with money is always trading, when you stop at a world to refuel pick up whatever is cheap there and sell it at a decent price somewhere along your route (the market screen tells you in the upper right corner what types of world have something in demand, and you can double check that info in the cargo screen). You don't need to sell it where it is most valuable, just at any level of profit to cover your maintenance costs.
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Sep 18, 2018 09:48
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Ravendas posted:I just bought this, started it up and clicked the 'pick all talents' option for advanced users or somesuch. Figured I'm an advanced guy, why not. Honestly, if you're just starting out I'd call it a bit overwhelming. It is better for future playthroughs when you know what you actually need. A spy character is going to have different needs from his Gunners, Pilots and E-Techs than a straight-up pirate, for example.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:02
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Frog Act posted:Thanks dudes. I'm a little confused about character creation - so you start out making a template, and there doesn't seem to be any way to have starting skills (it always says over budget if you try to put any points in anything) but two of the premade templates have like 5-8 points in command and tactics starting out, and what look, at a glance, like maybe more attribute points? Are the premade templates just...better? Should I try explorer again? You can change the priority for certain traits in character creation, you probably go overbudged when altering skills because it's set as E priority. Personally I recommend giving attributes the A treatment because it is very rare to increase them in-game, but the rest depends on what kind of play you have in mind.
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Oct 14, 2018 15:24
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Or comment about it on their official Discord (link is in every single news update, can't grab it now), they are really quite responsive. I really think you have a very good idea with that.
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Oct 19, 2018 07:56
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Getting involved in the Caen family missions will always at least tank your reputation with their rival faction. Keeping a positive/neutral reputation while doing quests is easier if you go with the Arbiter, as she'll help you develop contacts in a multitude of factions while not offending any too much.
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Nov 14, 2018 19:15
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My two long term captains were spies and yeah, Intel is fantastic for building up rep without also pissing people off and builds up contact influence pretty quickly so you can access their service, plus it tends to have a good weight on conflict scores. Definitely worth it. By the way, what does conflict score even do? I know the faction with greatest score "wins" the conflict, but what does that mean in game? Bonus influence for characters involved in the winning side and loss for the losers?
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Nov 15, 2018 12:06
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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. I'd say that unless you take A or B for ship priority you will want to focus on avoiding the hell out of any space fights until you've had upgrades. Get Stiff Salute on a Commander character at level 1 (your main or officer if none of your starting contacts offers the hires) so you can avoid even starting combat against Zealots and Military ships, which are the worst encounters short of Xenos. Going for Boarding is also very effective, like Woebin posted, but then make a priority upgrading your weapon's locker to improve the odds there. Plasma guns also do a lot of damage to crew, so they have a decent synergy with that strategy. Even then, I'd still describe ship-combat as the highest risk activity in the game, as even if you win it will often be pricy to pay for any repairs. It is, frankly, my least favorite part, so I tend to pick careers that avoid it.
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Nov 16, 2018 00:37
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Phlegmish posted:Thanks for the help, guys. I've decided to start yet another playthrough with the following in mind: If you're trying to keep reputation up, a Diplomat crewmember is a good one to have. At level 5 they get a talent that reduces reputation loss from missions (and at 8 they reduce rep loss from ship battles). Since you're picking E-Techs, their Signature Jammer skill also reduces reputation loss from ship encounters - which definitely adds up over time. Smugglers get a similar talent to avoid combat with fellow smugglers, but that's not as important as they're not a captain class that tends to be too aggressive, there might be other classes and talents that just shut down combat that I don't know of. There are a bunch of rep damage reduction talents in Spy too, and probably other careers, with spy having the bonus of a lot of talents to manipulate the cards in the spying action, so you can improve the odds of getting that "Contact Introduction" effect. To accumulate contacts, Merchant has two level 1 talents that help you find ones. One that procs every time you make a trade worth 5k or more (relatively big in the early game, but trivial once you're on your feet) and another with a chance to trigger when going to spice-halls, if you get both you will have more contacts than you know what to do with by the mid-game. E-Techs are not the best at this since their required talent is level 8, which takes a while to get to unless you have experience at A - which I honestly don't recommend, but E-Techs are pretty useful anyway, so might as well pick a few. Naturally, always check out who your contact can introduce you to after you have some influence with them. The Arbiter Questline in the early game will introduce you to a bunch of contacts in varied factions, so that's a good one too, but be ready for some ship combat in that case.
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Nov 16, 2018 12:06
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Phlegmish posted:Alright, I'm going to pick secondary careers in Diplomat, Merchant, and Spy. Wish me luck. It depends on what you want to do, really. If you're thinking of avoiding combat, I'd suggest taking up either Spy or Merchant as your primary careers. Spy missions often end up having crew combat, note, but you can avoid choosing the ones that would involve ship battles. (and yeah, if you take spy it is good to also put some skill points into blades at character creation so you can wield Sword + Pistol, or take up Assassin as well and go all in into combat). Explorer also doesn't involve ship combat directly in its core activity, but at least when I last played it was a pretty difficult career to make good money at, and the really valuable stuff (Xeno Artefacts) will require Black Market Access, so there are caveats to it. Oh yeah, if you leave a crew slot open you will eventually get a stowaway event when leaving an urban planet that can award you a Smuggler character, which is pretty handy. It reliably triggers in the first two years if you can afford to not have a full crew for a bit. Another rep maintenance action is patrolling, now that I think of it, many of its available cards improve reputation with the local faction, so you can check out the options you have when stopping at a planet. The risk is that patrols will put you in encounters with dangerous ships, but again, it doesn't cost anything to check what the cards are.
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Nov 16, 2018 15:45
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Yeah, I don't like permadeath in this game for that exact reason. Permadeath in a session-based game? Cool. But in one where you will be playing for dozens of hours and can get a random encounter that obliterates your engine with an unfortunate diceroll? Not cool, man. I think the main hurdle when changing ships is that your starting one likely has some upgrades of its own, so you will want to have enough cash for the new ship AND to upgrade it - which can take a while. They added a few month's ago the ability to leave a ship undergoing changes while going around with another, thankfully, since large components often take months to be replaced. There is also the fact that bigger ships do require bigger crews to operate at full capacity, and if you're coming from a small ship you probably have a high level crew (one of the perks of small ships is that the crew levels up faster), but the new guys won't be up to the same standards for a while. It doesn't help that the shopping list doesn't really detail the components of each ship's basic modules, so you kind of have to guess, hope, ask or look at the Wiki to figure out if you really want this ship. I've never played a dedicated smuggler/merchant so I don't know what would be a straight upgrade for the Frontier Liner, but organize by cargo space in the wiki to see what would improve on your build. It seems that only the Horizon Highliner fits the bill (with 100 cargo space out of the box), but the other ones near it can probably have their cargo spaces upgraded beyond what the Frontier Liner has (I see it starts with 50 cargo space, so one of the 75 ships can probably upgrade beyond). Bigger ships do consume more fuel, though, so they often will have less autonomy than smaller ones. Eddy-Baby posted:Ship combat is an arcane system and I have prepared this Effort Post to try to explain how it works, and how you can improve your odds. Man, this was a great post, much appreciated it. If the OP was around I'd ask her to put it there.
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Nov 17, 2018 13:41
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Synthbuttrange posted:
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Feb 4, 2019 02:47
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40 Proof Listerine posted:The other thing about boarding is that when you advance to position 1 in the ship combat, your whole crew gets to use their boarding talents, not just the boarding party, so you don't have to worry much about burning talents on your combat crew on the boarding talents, since the rest of the ship crew can handle the intel looting and the crew shooting. You've just changed my life.
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Feb 25, 2019 11:31
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https://steamcommunity.com/games/335620/announcements/detail/1730979046047360465 Do not go gentle into the archives thread, hype, hype against the dying of the light.
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Apr 7, 2019 14:03
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THE BROOD COMESTreese Brothers posted:The BROOD has been awoken in this major new expansion pack which includes a extremely challenging Story Era, the new Gundeck Boss Job and invites enemy captains to command carriers and launch squadrons of attack craft.  I haven't really played since just a bit before the carrier update, but now that they wrapped up the 2.6 updates, I guess it's a good time to jump back in and have my gaming be consumed by this for November?
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Nov 5, 2019 11:47
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When the subject of RPGs came up in the official Discord the brothers did confirm they played a lot of Traveller back in the day, it is a very strong and direct influence on Star Traders.
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Nov 26, 2019 18:01
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The Kickstarter for Cyber Knights, the next game from Treese Brothers, has begun! It is essentially Shadowrun.
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Feb 3, 2020 19:11
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Yeah, they hit the goal in like 11 hours and right now they are at U$ 28k more than they had at the end of the Star Traders: Frontiers KS, with 27 days to go. It's a clear sign that they have managed to build a loyal audience these last few years and I hope they grow even more, they've certainly earned it.
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Feb 8, 2020 00:06
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Honestly, my relationship with Star Traders is spending an entire month playing it compulsively once a season. I've got a lot of backlog to go through, but it is inevitable I'll be coming back to give this game another month of my gaming time. And yeah, I've come to the conclusion that I don't like Permadeath in games with longer than session-long playthroughs, so other than achievement hunting I pretty much stopped playing PD modes in everything that has the option.
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Sep 27, 2020 23:49
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The big crises in the later ages are exactly that.
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Sep 28, 2020 18:26
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Yeah, the Arbiter's follow up storyline is probably the best way to go for a starter, as it will give you a bunch of new contacts all over.
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Oct 1, 2020 20:59
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Anyone tried the scientific intel economy and science careers introduced last week? I am this close to dipping my toes into this game again.
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Oct 15, 2020 14:27
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Yeah, ship combat is the hardest thing you can do at the start, so it requires some knowledge of the game to not be frustrating. Boarding and planetside combat is less so, but it's still risky. A diplomatic/spy focus is good to learn the ropes and you might as well start with a small fast ship (that evades and runs away from naval encounters), as that's way more cost efficient for the kind of work you will be doing and the smaller initial crew will ease you in on how to develop them, also they will earn XP faster, so when you eventually move to a bigger ship you will have a core crew of badasses to build your roster around of. Note that spycraft will often involve planetside combat encounters, so you will want to have a handful of combat specialists and even if your captain is not specced for combat it is a good idea to at least give them a sniper rifle and let them hang in the back, because combat is good XP. I'd also recommend not using the normal difficulty for your learning game. Permadeath is a bit harsh for this game, as campaigns can be veeeeery long and it is frustrating to lose a long game over ignorant choices (which you will make a lot of as you're learning) and poor dicerolls. Bankrupcy and losing core crew is enough risk to provide tension.
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Jan 26, 2021 00:16
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Always promote one of your officers to Military Officer at game start and pick the Stiff Salute talent. It lets you skip encounters with Zealot and Military ships every nine weeks and is a real game saver through the entire campaign.
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Dec 27, 2021 21:25
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Unless it's been changed in the last few years, SAM worked for the unlocks.
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Jun 8, 2022 15:02
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:55 |
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Hey, Nextfest has a demo for Cyber Knights, Treese Brother's next full release. Just leaving that out here since I imagine fellow veteran poop haulers would be interested.
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Jun 20, 2023 12:15
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