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CiaphasNote: Game is now released and out of Early Access! I'm not playing it as of this edit but reports are good. I imagine Fighters and everything else on the dev roadmap were added as schedule. OP remains up to date as of May 9 2018. --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyneeQ4jZpQ Star Traders: Frontiers is a single-player, sci-fi character RPG by Trese Brothers, who have a few games on PC that I know nothing about, including the seemingly well reviewed Templar Battleforce. In it, you create a template for new Captains (or select a pre-generated template), select a map (or generate one), select a difficulty (or customize one, optionally with bonus Captain Permadeath), and go forth and seek riches and fame (or die ignobly to enemy bounty hunters who disabled your engine, boarded your ship, and executed you and your surrendering crew). The game is designed as a Story Generator, similar to Dwarf Fortress (remember Boatmurdered?). While there is a crafted story you can follow, the world is more or less what you make of it without restriction besides what your skill points can handle. Be a Privateer, attacking every enemy ship you come across, seizing its cargo, and selling some of it to your Faction leaders instead of the market. Be an Explorer, finding artifacts, salvage sites, and information, as long as a Xeno doesn't eat you. Be a Tradesman, with trade permits for every market, a ship bristling with defensive weapons and cargo space, and a handy smuggler Contact for the real heavy poo poo. Be a rumor-chaser, traveling the entire dozens-of-sectors-wide map chasing information as and when you hear of it, like Shortages and Surpluses, Merchant Fleets (with attendant increased piracy!), and more. Be a Bounty Hunter or Spy, doing missions for the Factions. Along the way, you'll cross other ships, rumors and events that will, with some imagination as you work with your crew and Officers, create a story of your own. Sounds like an advertising pitch except I've done it three times since I blind-bought this five days and 56 hours ago, and I swear to god Clan Juvat pirates have somehow been the death of all three   In this screenshot of a Captain I'm about to abandon, I'm making a last ditch effort to explore and find stuff I can legally sell to make some money to pay my crew and fuell bills (note: out of fuel). But there're Xeno Spores around the planet so I'm already at a disadvantage, but at least none of my ship operations rolls are failing! Oh yeah, this game has Lore and a main story. Apparently.  Star Traders: Frontiers is in EA, and it does show: the UI is not quite a disaster but it takes far too many clicks to do anything, and the overall design feels like a mobile game graphically. In addition there's quite a few typos and things like talents listed in game as NOT YET IMPLEMENTED. That said, the game is what I would consider Complete: they're adding mission and story arcs and content as time goes on, but most of the core gameplay elements are there, with only Fighters (small craft combat) remaining on the list. The developers have a Early Access Dev Roadmap which they've so far held to, and an aggressive update schedule. Basic Gameplay The gameplay has you traveling across a 30-something sector (called "Quadrants" here) map, looking around at the different planets and stations ("Zones"), and trading, working with mission Contacts to achieve various goals, or perform Operations, in addition to refuel, repair, upgrades, and crew & morale management. While doing all of these, the Skills of your captain, officers and crew are constantly checked. In flight you can pass or fail checks like Ship Ops for daily shifts, Intimidation to prevent a gambling fight from escalating, Repair to fix that electrical short, and many others--some two dozen plus skills total. Operations also use these Skills to first determine, then resolve draws from, an Operation card deck with Rewards and Risks. Finally, there's Ship and Crew Combat which are Complicated. Skills are accrued by leveling Jobs. Your captain and officers can take up to three Jobs; standard crew only have one. In addition to raising sets of Skills, Jobs also award Talent points which can be used to unlock Talents for that job, with more becoming available as you level. These Talents are used automatically or manually then go on a cooldown for some amount of game time, providing Skill Saves, less penalty for violating Conflicts between Factions, abilities to use in Ship or Crew Combat, Boarding actions, Mutiny responses, and so on. Speaking of Factions, there are Factions! Nine of them, each with names that I can't remember . Beyond some lore blurbs and minor static bonuses if your Captain is a member at the start of the game (and traits unique to crew from those Factions), they don't have personal identity: they exist to Conflict with each other and to give you groups to interact with. You can build Reputation with them by completing Patrol operations, pleasing Contacts or participating in Conflicts; Reputation, in turn, makes Contacts more useful as it rises, and gets you in trouble with the law/services closed as it sinks. Screenshots  The crew combat is simplified Darkest Dungeon, basically  Ships are extremely customizable. You won't own as many as you tend to accrue in the X series, Rebirth excepted, but you'll get a few by the end Links Steam Page RPS: "Star Traders: Frontiers is the best space game I’ve played in ages"  The quite up to date WikiTrese Brothers Games Ciaphas fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Aug 1, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 03:31
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Basic Terminology Quadrant - A region of space reached by HyperWarp gates, containing Zones. Analogous to Sectors in other games Zone - A place to land your ship and do stuff. You can orbit around Zones to do other stuff Spice - there's probably some lore to this but it seems like a mix of drugs and alcohol. Going off duty for morale is called "Spicing" Operation - Several activities present you with five cards of positive and negative effect, and picks one to apply after you optionally use a Talent to modify the hand. These are collectively called Operations. Includes Patrolling, Spying, Blockades, Exploring, and some Missions Attribute - Strength, Wisdom, etc. Primarily mostly matters for Crew Combat, except for your captain where they always matter Skill - used to pass (or fail) dice rolls against every activity in the game. Accrued from leveling various Jobs over time Job - Captain and Officers can train up to three, Crew only get one. Trains skills, reveals Talents and grants talent points when leveled. Examples include Crew Dog, Military Officer, Pirate, E-Tech, Exo-Scout, etc etc Getting Started Tips
More guides and stuff as I think of them/have them linked. Ciaphas fucked around with this message at 03:38 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 03:32
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sebmojo posted:Great op! I love this game, it's basically a rogue trader sim. I remember being puzzled by how to find your ship on the star map though, do you know? Tapping space seems to work, but I don't scroll around on the star map much. I go straight to the Atlas list and pick my destinations from there, much more readable to me than the map iconography. Ciaphas fucked around with this message at 04:28 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 04:25
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Blisster posted:How does this compare to Starsector? There is always room for a great space game in my heart. I believe Starsector is played in real-time, combat included, correct? Star Traders: Frontiers has a similar premise but is turn-based and extremely heavy on the :rollsdice:, don't know enough about Starsector to comment otherwise.
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May 10, 2018 04:45
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grrarg posted:How does the pace of updates affect a playthrough? I have been following this game for a while, and they sometimes have three or four seemingly substantial patches a week. Pretty crazy for a team that is just two brothers. I've been holding off until they slow down some, if they ever do. They still occasionally update Templar Brotherhood, and it has been out a couple years. They probably won't ever slow down, doesn't seem to be in their MO. Or the EA Roadmap, for that matter. But they have pinky sworn (somewhere, I can't find it ATM) that they will never break saves with patches, so there's that. Presumably with new features (like small ship combat/fighters coming soon) you just get set to some default state or zeroed out in new stats or whatever. On a separate note entirely, this morning I realized that Talent rolls that mention a skill (like market skills that use Negotiate for increased profit) only use that crew member's Skills (unbonused if they are not officers). So now the fake-OCD perfectionist munchkin in me is wondering how long it would take to make The Perfect Crew of bonused captains and officers for a given role 
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May 10, 2018 18:46
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Now that I'm actually home I'm debating whether to try out Starsector, the combat looks fun but I kinda prefer the chill turn-based pace of everything here in STF, real-time pausing aside In this game at least I keep wanting to make really generalist captains and ships. Something about trying to minmax this game, even as heavily numbered as it is, just feels kinda wrong
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May 11, 2018 01:33
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Green Tea Erotica posted:Oh poo poo, I like this game. I was checking for a thread a few days ago. I get the impression from the dev's Discord server and the roadmap that there's no plans to do that. You can increase the Influence of individual Contacts within their Faction, but they plan for faction ownership of zones to remain static on any given map. Not the kind of game they want to make, I guess.
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May 11, 2018 21:53
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Lorini posted:I got stuck in the boarding combat screen, what the hell am I supposed to do there? I get it's like Darkest Dungeon but I couldn't select anyone to do anything. It should have highlighted one of your characters with a blue corner box and showed their abilities in the bottom a la Darkest Dungeon, if it didn't then it might have crashed I guess??
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May 12, 2018 00:59
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KirbyKhan posted:Ive tried to use a greater variety of skills durring my few crew combats, but I keep going to my comfort favorites. Burst fire fir soldiers, pinning shot for pistoleer, balanced blade for blades(wo)man. My feeling is that skills that move the enemy are just as good here as they are in Darkest Dungeon. My favorite lineup has been a Swordsman/Zealot/? in slot 1 for access to at least two pushes, a Doctor/Combat Medic/Spy in slot 2 with a Pistol who spends 99% of their time doing single target heals, a shotgun Soldier in slot 3 with that attack that does a push from slot 3 or 4, and something Snipery for slot 4--in my current game an Explorer/Exo-Scout/Sniper. The swordsman and shotgunner can push a position 1 or 2 swordsman back to 3 on their first go, where they'll be forced to move up instead of attacking (usually). Saved my bacon any number of times.
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May 13, 2018 18:59
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Glenn Quebec posted:Lmao. I've argued with the Devs about engine loss ending combat. They stopped responding to me. Dunno which brother that is, but I remember asking in the Discord about that and someone saying that lorewise the engines are Really Important because the void (space) is significantly more dangerous just to be in than our own interstellar vacuum, and running engines are a significant part of the protection from it. The assumption about the crew sort of makes sense in that context. Probably doesn't mollify you, I too think that's silly, but there ya go
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Aug 1, 2018 19:00
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You hardcorers knew what you were getting into 
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Aug 9, 2018 15:23
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Ravendas posted:Okay, thanks all. It was overwhelming, when the first thing you do before anything else is go through and set a few dozen talents for things that you have no idea what they're referring to. I'll spend a bit more time with it and puzzle them out, then quickly die and try again. Eventually you just start to remember names and what they are for solely because "oh right that's what hosed over my last guy " so this is the correct approach
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Oct 13, 2018 00:29
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Synthbuttrange posted:Oh god the ios version is going to be out today or tomorrow im going to be playing a lot more of this. I do remember thinking when I played this that this should absolutely have been a touchscreen game. If you do get it I'm looking forward to impressions
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Jan 30, 2019 02:09
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