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dylguy90 posted:So has anyone managed to keep Valencia alive in a ship smaller than the beginner one? Every time I let her onboard I manage to escape a couple bounty hunters but end up not being able to escape the last one despite spamming escape talents. Gotta say, hard mode lives up to its promise, especially if you try to stay ahead of the main story. Small ships are bad at The dice pools for Escaping: Navigation minimum requirements are "strong dice" (twice as good). Engine speed are strong dice. +Range Change bonuses are strong dice. +Escape bonuses are strong dice. Navigation extra are standard dice (up to 200% staffing), shipwide tactics are standard dice, and shipwide command are standard dice. Ships gain navigation requirements as fast as they lose speed. So bigger slower ships are better at escaping because they 1) have higher skill minimum requirements to counteract speed losses, 2) can gain more benefit from experienced crew, 3) can fit more crew members to gain benefit 2 more easily, 4) can fit more officers to get more command and tactics, 5) have more and better talents because of 3 and 4, and 6) have the mass and component slots to spend on booster components. Things are a little less awful for attack and defense rolls, because having more speed or agility than your opponent gives you a dice count multiplier on attack and defense. But a combat oriented big ship (Xenos) will outshoot and out-evade a small ship, as well as be more capable of controlling engagement range. metasynthetic posted:How are you guys building your officers? After having done a couple of captains just to get a feel for the game, I think I'm going to go with the following: I generally build a Doctor/Combat Medic, a Quartermaster/Commander, and the Engineer just goes straight engineer until I can retire them for some crewman engineers or high level mechanics. This is by no means optimal, and the only one of those who I would keep super long term is the heal bot. When you promote an officer they get a free respec, the only thing you can't change is their first job. Since officers "only" cost $2,500, mid to late game officers are meaningfully stronger in crew combat and affordable to replace. And officers get 33% more job ranks than an equal level crewman, plus a gear slot. So once you're well established (honestly past the point where the game is interesting, though) you can milk your contacts for specialist crew to
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May 19, 2018 06:23
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:33 |
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metasynthetic posted:The main cost of an officer is the opportunity cost of losing their xp though, no? And the fact that they can get much better synergies from skill / ability stacking. That said, I already lost a game since my last post now that I'm playing on hard, and found that some of those 2nd / 3rd jobs are distantly behind the 1st ones in terms of job leveling priority. I can now see that the Doctor / Combat Medic would easily be the best 'obvious' option for a combat officer. Not, really. Let's say you have a level 16 swordsman officer (single jobbed) and two level 16 swordsman crew-members (and 3 other fighters who survive the fight). You get into crew combat and you send in a basic crewman. They die, and now you have a level 16 swordsman officer and one level 16 swordsman crew-member. Or you could send in your officer. They die, and you promote one of your crew-members for $2.5k. Now you have a level 16 swordsman officer and one level 16 swordsman crew-member. If you lose someone in crew combat, you lose a lot of experience either way, but it doesn't really matter if they were an officer. Galaga Galaxian posted:I still barely understand what I'm doing in this game. Anyone got a good guide or something to check out? Each paragraph covers a different topic in an extremely condensed manner. For basic operations, do the following. Pay wages every time you have the opportunity. Also, your crew do not heal naturally so you have to use the planetside doctors. These are like paying your transportation guy in SimCity. You can technically choose not to, but you can't actually choose not to. Pay for time off in high rating spices halls (8+) whenever you're worried about morale. I'm usually worried if morale is less than 70, because that's where a few bad rolls in space can push someone to the desertion cutoff. It really sucks to lose someone with a mid to high level talent to desertion. You need the following skill pools (totaled across all crew and officers) to not die when flying around in space: Pilot, Ship Ops, Electronics, Navigation, Repair, Doctor, Command, and Intimidate. Pilot, Ship Ops, Electronics, and Navigation are capped by your ship (larger ships are better when staffed, but if you're understaffed you basically implode). Repair, Doctor, Command, and Intimidate are uncapped. The better these dice pools are the less often you'll have to pay money for doctors, spice halls, or repairs. DO get skill saves for all of these skill pools. Your first skill save talents for a pool should be read as "stops the game from dicking your crew with 600 HP damage just because." You need to cover your operating expenses: fuel, crew wages, spice, doctoring, and repairs. Trading without a license will barely cover these. Missions without military rank or edicts will barely cover these. Do both at once, and save up for a way out of the treadmill. Also, even the legal missions are doing bad things for political schemers who need the plausible deniability of a Star Trader to cover their rear end. Missions are a bad way to make friends (aka faction reputation) but a good way of earning favors (personal reputation). The card-game minigames are bad ways of making money (unless you have a monster of a ship you can rob and pillage with). They are essential ways of making friends. Make new contact rewards are unpredictable, but can potentially open an entire faction to profit from. Reputation rewards from patrolling are valuable for cutting down on how many ship encounters are actually dangerous to you (you don't have to fight the smugglers/pirates you encounter to gain rep). Intel from spying can be sold to certain contacts to boost your faction reputation and personal reputation more quickly and safely than running missions. Dealing with ships in space is tricky. As a Star Trader you belong to no faction, not even the faction you pick during creation. Reputation is not actually about what's legal (even though negative reputation makes you a criminal). It's about being helpful. Exercising your legal right as a Star Trader to leave a military ship (or pirate) without being searched isn't helpful. On the other hand, making a civilian ship stop to search you and fill out an official report also isn't helpful. To be helpful, surrender to ships who have a vested interest in stopping and searching you (including criminals), and retreat from ships who don't. Sometimes you'll still be hit with a rep loss for the equivalent of "loitering with intent" because factions are paranoid and society is breaking down. If you're actually friends with a faction, they'll usually accept a friendly hail and report on what you're doing instead of a search. That's the "Acknowledge" option. The (literally) nuclear option of ship combat can go terribly wrong. Even one or two hits can cost more in repairs (both upfront, and the wages paid during repair time and doctor time) than surrendering a load of non-permitted trade goods. And driving another ship to open fire at you is extremely unhelpful. Talents can give you a few more options here, but they belong to jobs that you can't hire from the Spice Hall.
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May 20, 2018 01:35
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I have nothing to add to this, other than officer swordsman have a pretty good chance (>50%) of parrying non-officer swordsman just because officers get more job ranks. Actually, I almost forgot. Swordsman have a very initiative efficient self-heal/morale-restore to patch up when the enemy is down to one survivor.
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May 21, 2018 03:53
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Exploration is a case of needing too many specialized crew to make it pay out half as well as an equally leveled generalist crew can earn from trading. The one upside is that it's a reliable source of rare trade goods that doesn't require you to know the right contact to get more. Just to, uh, sell them. So it's not even a real upside. On the other hand, exploration is thematically cool and new contact cards seem to be about as common when exploring as when spying. Like spying and patrol, I'll take a look at the hand I'm dealt whenever I stop by a planet and decide if there's enough reward to risk some crew/component damage.
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May 26, 2018 16:02
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On ships and by the standards you've set forth: the 6,000 mass ships are all terrible. 5,000 mass ships have large sized engines, medium sized bridges, and medium sized jump drives. The 6,000 mass ships have large sized bridges, engines, and jump drives. But on average 6,000 mass ships only have 1 more large component slot than the closest 5,000 mass comparison. So you're doubling your fuel costs with the most efficient engine, AND you're losing one cargo hold because your mandatory equipment is bigger. The Horizon Highliner is the only 6k mass ship that might feel like an upgrade, you'll still double your fuel cost and your cargo space won't increase, but you'll have ~600 more mass in combat or exploration gear. Buuut for an 800k buy-in (before the customization that you need to budget for!) you're nearly full capital and can pick up a Broadsword for just 50k more. At 8,000 mass, you'll have the space capacity to devote one of your medium components to a shield module of some kind. At that point you can build a better ship in every metric but fuel efficiency. TLDR: 5,000 mass ships are a sweet spot in terms of effectiveness. To get good results from upgrading you have to go REALLY BIG.
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Nov 17, 2018 15:39
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Strong early game boarding doesn't exist*. Strong boarding without dedicating your officers to it doesn't exist. Pick your combat officers based on their attributes (especially initiative attributes). Your officer's starting job doesn't really matter, because the hyper-optimal 3-job builds aren't much better than functional 2-job builds. After job level 2, you rarely (if ever? I'm not actually going line by line here) get more than 2 skill points per job level. That's only "worth" about 4 attribute points in crew combat. Having an extra 8 initiative every round matters a LOT more than avoiding your officers being crewdog 1/soldier X/sniper Y (or whatever your build ends up being). *An attributes/skills or skills/attributes focused captain can start really strong. But that still leaves 3 slots in your away team that are filled with randomly generated clowns. ADDING: Most crew ranked swordsmen/pistoleers/soldiers are for feeding to xenos and pirates when you're exploring before you can tackle those fights safely. You just can't do poo poo with a crew combat character who rolls a total of 30 Quickness + Wisdom, so most of your hires are only good for being warm meat. TheBlandName fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 21:44
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Subjunctive posted:Man, you guys are so helpful. Thank you! What I meant by "worth" is here, and this ONLY applies to crew combat: Each skill point adds a "strong die" to your dice pool. A strong die has a 40% chance of working. Every two attribute points add a "standard die" to your dice pool. A standard die has a 20% chance of working. For gut feel checks, it's close enough to true to just say "1 strong die = 2 standard dice". So 1 skill point is just as good (and no better than) four attribute points in the related attribute. Honestly, for crew combat characters you'll get like 90% of optimization done by looking at the initiative range of your candidates and nothing else. That's because one of the attributes used for initiative is also used for both defense pools. So if one character has better initiative than another they will usually have better defenses, by enough to make up for any skill bonuses they do or do not have. You can occasionally get tripped up by someone who has very similar quickness and wisdom, because they'll have worse defenses than their initiative would suggest. Crew attributes only matter for crew combat. The end. Okay, technically there are a few talents that will be based on a crewman's charisma or wisdom. Obvious talky careers care about these, and crew-dogs who are not obviously talky also care about charisma. Your combat team is ready to start boarding as soon as they can fairly reliably dodge the non-combat defenders*. Fastest way to that isn't leveling, it's buying better weapons lockers and hiring recruits with 24+ in quickness or wisdom, and 15+ in the other stat. The problems in the early game are that you don't often start with good combat crew, and you need your officers to do jobs like "quartermaster" and "doctor" to keep the crew from rioting your ship into a million pieces. So if you want to get boarding started early you can churn through recruits, hiring/firing people at every world you stop at. And that works. But the next big leap in boarding strength comes when you have crew-ranked quartermasters and doctors from your contacts, so you can promote 25+/25+ super candidates to officer from any starting job. *Usually this means rifles and handguns. But it's worth noting that (in practice) the only thing that can dodge a sword user is another sword user, so I would recommend 2 swordsmen on the front line. TheBlandName fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 23:40
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:33 |
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I want to correct some stat numbers I gave earlier. I was thinking the max attribute roll was 30 (like on captains) but the max roll for crew and officers is about 25. So your targets for "good for a crewman" are about 20 in one and 12ish in another, and "good for an officer" are 20 in both. The goal was less "these are specific numbers to hit" and more "aim for above average or nearly max".
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Feb 24, 2019 06:06
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