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I believe the actual game is made entirely or almost entirely by Alex, with David doing the art and maybe some small parts done by outside help here and there (I think some of the sound was outsourced, for some reason)? Recent blog posts have suggested that Alex and David have some dialogue on the design process. Alex is against taking on extra help because he wants to be in direct control over the creative process for his game. So far the outcome has been excellent, even if the game is going to take a decade to finish. I also agree completely that he his behavior-centric approach to game design is fantastic.
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Jun 30, 2016 07:45
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It is, the blogposts are a great asset to gain insight into his process as well.
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Jun 30, 2016 09:44
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So i just picked this game up and I have no idea what to do in the campaign. I've got the controls with weapon groups, shields, venting, and basic fleet tactics fine but i just can't find any low level pirates to grind out with. Anybody have tips for a hapless new player?
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Jun 30, 2016 18:53
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I've been keeping an eye on this game for a few years and everything I hear sounds like it is extremely my poo poo, how close is it to release?
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Jun 30, 2016 20:29
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ZearothK posted:I've been keeping an eye on this game for a few years and everything I hear sounds like it is extremely my poo poo, how close is it to release? Just buy it. It's a pretty complete sandbox now but the actual 1.0 release is scheduled for somewhere around the time the sun burns out.
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Jun 30, 2016 20:33
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No part of the game feels unfinished. It's like buying a cheap full game that comes with a life time of free expansions
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Jun 30, 2016 20:34
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I agree with the dudes above, SS is rock-solid and super fun as is now. It feels more complete and bug-free than many finished games. fleshy echidna posted:So i just picked this game up and I have no idea what to do in the campaign. I've got the controls with weapon groups, shields, venting, and basic fleet tactics fine but i just can't find any low level pirates to grind out with. Anybody have tips for a hapless new player? The starting system (Corvus if I remember) should have a decent population of pirates especially around the pirate bases there. I think the game's scripted to have a decent general bounty in that system at the start of a new game so if you go blasting pirates there until the bounty ends you should be set up with a decent chunk of cash and experience to allow you to tackle some bigger fish.
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Jun 30, 2016 21:27
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fleshy echidna posted:So i just picked this game up and I have no idea what to do in the campaign. I've got the controls with weapon groups, shields, venting, and basic fleet tactics fine but i just can't find any low level pirates to grind out with. Anybody have tips for a hapless new player? Let's be fair, this is kind of a significant weakness of the early game. Basically, the way the game is supposed to start is with Jangala and Barad's orbits at closest intercept and a bounty on the Barad pirates to give you a little starting-game boost along. But, that means things can be a little tricky on you if you miss it. If you can't find any pirate packs your own size to pick on, remember that you can join other people's battles. There's no shame in shadowing a wing of Hegemony pirate hunters, waiting for them to either get into a scrap or for them to break a pirate fleet down into something you can handle. If nothing else, you can go float around Barad waiting for prey, and if something too big for you spawns and aggros on you, lure it into hegemony patrols.
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Jun 30, 2016 21:56
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Also sometimes the starting system just isn't working. It can be a bit expensive, but checking out other systems and the battles going on in hyperspace can be good, don't think of the first system as a newbie zone you have to stay in. But early on the "hobo phase" can be a bit brutal. Being an opportunist and vulture and just jumping in to other people's fights can be a really good early strategy.
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Jun 30, 2016 22:02
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Ill have to admit the game is amazing but the early game grind and difficulty has caused me to stop playing most of the games I start. I have a good handle on ship piloting and fleet composition once I get going but lack of easy targets/inability to find them in the starting phase of the game often dooms me to a slow death of supply loss and unreadiness. Also independents really need to be split up into a broader number of factions because its dumb as all hell that me shooting smugglers angers mercenary fleets. But again the game is great and has a good,weighty space combat system. Its just that the start can be brutally hard.
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Jul 1, 2016 11:33
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Telsa Cola posted:Ill have to admit the game is amazing but the early game grind and difficulty has caused me to stop playing most of the games I start. I have a good handle on ship piloting and fleet composition once I get going but lack of easy targets/inability to find them in the starting phase of the game often dooms me to a slow death of supply loss and unreadiness. Also independents really need to be split up into a broader number of factions because its dumb as all hell that me shooting smugglers angers mercenary fleets. If you play with Starsector+ I think there's an option to start with a small fleet, so you might want to give that a shot.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:05
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Or just use the console mod to give yourself a starting credit pile/starting ships of your choice, too.
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Jul 1, 2016 16:04
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That's what I do 
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Jul 1, 2016 18:13
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One early game trick I have success with is to jump to hyperspace and hang out above a planet with a gravity well with your transponder on. When you are a single ship, all pirates will attack no matter how bad they are. If high level pirates come at you then jump in the planet gravity well and there is a very good chance they will pop in on the opposite side of the planet and might get engaged by a faction patrol to boot. Since you aren't moving this is also very fuel efficient.
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Jul 2, 2016 01:30
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Modded Easy mode to not give you any in-combat benefits and just the extra money + wingman is also a really good way to skip some of the early grind.
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Jul 13, 2016 20:44
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Definitely just use the console mod to give yourself whatever leg up you want, even if it's just adjusting a faction relationship so you can purchase a ship without reputation grinding then reverting it when you're done.
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Jul 14, 2016 04:29
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Heeeeeeerrrre's a blogpost! http://fractalsoftworks.com/2016/07/17/exploration-salvage/#more-2946 Tying into the idea of procedural generation and finding neat stuff, it'd be cool if we could have maybe random modifiers on ships and weapons occasionally, it'd be fun to find a ship with a tricked out engine or something that you want to keep just because you can't get that modifier otherwise. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jul 18, 2016 |
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Jul 18, 2016 03:21
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I can't help but read the first half of that blog post as a giant "gently caress you" to Elite Dangerous, home of utterly samey exploration, barely any reward and near zero ties between game systems. Alex is doing everything right that they did wrong from a conceptual level up.
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Jul 19, 2016 12:14
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Starsector is a good-rear end game that is about to get even better.
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Jul 19, 2016 15:22
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How the hell am I meant to accurately trade in this game? The trading system seems really confusing. I wanna buy low and sell high but the intel panel on that stuff is really confusing, and most of the time when I get to the station that is supposedly buying high, it isn't.
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Jul 19, 2016 16:05
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Loopoo posted:How the hell am I meant to accurately trade in this game? The trading system seems really confusing. I wanna buy low and sell high but the intel panel on that stuff is really confusing, and most of the time when I get to the station that is supposedly buying high, it isn't. With extreme difficulty. Trading in the sense of a normal space game is supposed to be unprofitable, because it is reasoned that running a profitable trade route over and over is not entertaining. Hence, tariffs and the heavy saturation of NPC traders using very large ships are designed to basically tell you to get hosed when it comes to buying organics at the organics factory and selling them at the organics consuming factory. Instead, you want to look at a few other things: 1. Market stability Market stability is the overall price multiplier of everything in the market, the more stable the market, the more everything costs and the more it sells for. Buying at high stability markets is generally a bad idea because you will be paying a lot even if everything else is in your favor, on the other hand, selling at high stability markets is the way to get maximum profit, as a rule, but this is heavily reliant on: 2. Events Events are things that happen to greatly affect the cost of various products in a market, they usually take the form of trade disruptions and food shortages. Both of these tend to be caused by trade fleets being blown up en-route to the market, the market doesn't get its supplies, and goes into panic, either dropping or elevating the price of various goods, often fuel, supplies, and food. The longer these events go on for, the greater the price variations, so if there's an impending food shortage, you'll get a boost to food prices, when the shortage actually hits, the price goes up even further, if the relief fleet somehow doesn't make it to the planet, things get even worse and the price goes up even further. These sorts of events are how you make money trading. You're an opportunist, you likely have a small fleet which doesn't even equal to a single dedicated superfreighter but you're travelling all over the place and you might just show up at the right time to sell a truckload of food or supplies to a planet undergoing a mass panic. Now a truck is still just a truck, but when everyone is starving people will pay a lot for a truck of food rather than wait for the supertanker to get here next week. It is also worth noting that you, as the player, can, erm, influence these events a little. Suppose you see a fleet of traders heading to a planet full of food, maybe you drop your transponder and knock them over. Suddenly the planet has no food, and wouldn't you know it, you've just found all this food floating around in space near these recently destroyed ships. Maybe you let the planet sweat a bit, maybe a relief fleet gets sent out, but maybe that fleet gets blown up too by that pesky pirate that seems to be operating around here, but fortunately for the planet you just got yourself even more food and you can swoop in at the last minute and save the day. As a small trader you can also visit all sorts of low stability worlds like Maxios and buy up all the stuff on their black market, another key part of opportunistic trading is knowing what to stockpile on so you can sell it when you land in a port which is having a run on that commodity. Again, supplies, fuel, and food are all good bets. Especially supplies and fuel because you need both of those anyway and fuel doesn't take up your main cargo hold, there's literally no reason not to run with a full tank all the time and sell it when the price spikes. As you visit low stability worlds, buy up anything going cheap like supplies and fuel, and high value stuff like guns and drugs and organs that you can sit on for a while, then when you find a high stability world with high prices for those things, flog them all off on the black market to avoid the tariff, you'll take a rep hit but eh, money's money.
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Jul 19, 2016 16:21
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OwlFancier posted:Heeeeeeerrrre's a blogpost! Wow, this stuff all sounds amazing.
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Jul 19, 2016 17:37
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OwlFancier posted:With extreme difficulty. Trading in the sense of a normal space game is supposed to be unprofitable, because it is reasoned that running a profitable trade route over and over is not entertaining. Hence, tariffs and the heavy saturation of NPC traders using very large ships are designed to basically tell you to get hosed when it comes to buying organics at the organics factory and selling them at the organics consuming factory. Whenever I go the Black Market route, my luck always runs out sooner rather than later. I get pulled over for a cargo scan and then I get owned with fines. Any tips for avoiding that happening? I can't outrun the border control guys.
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Jul 19, 2016 18:15
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Don't trade, it's not there to make money or really do much with. You can make some money by jumping on market instability but it's not reliable or fun. You make money in this game by killing the poo poo out of pirates for bounties.
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Jul 19, 2016 18:36
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Loopoo posted:Whenever I go the Black Market route, my luck always runs out sooner rather than later. I get pulled over for a cargo scan and then I get owned with fines. Any tips for avoiding that happening? I can't outrun the border control guys. Black marketeering work better with faster ships for this reason, you can also consider doing it in systems which don't actually consider things like guns and drugs and organs to be illegal, the tri-tachyon systems are good for this as they also don't tend to charge much in the way of tariffs. Otherwise, clever piloting can shake patrols if you get the hang of it.
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Jul 19, 2016 18:42
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Baronjutter posted:Don't trade, it's not there to make money or really do much with. You can make some money by jumping on market instability but it's not reliable or fun. You make money in this game by killing the poo poo out of pirates for bounties. This would sort of by my suggestion too in as much as you probably can't make a living just by trading legally. Your ships can do a lot of things in this game and it behooves you to make use of that. If you see a pirate that looks easy, kill them. If you see some goods going cheap, buy them, if you see an event driving prices up, fill the demand if you can. You do well in starsector by being primed to take advantage of any opportunity, and for that I find the best rules to go by are 1) Always have a full tank of fuel. 2) Always have a good cash float. 3) Stockpile supplies whenever you can get them cheap. 4) Pick a varied fleet loadout so you can field small ships for small threats while staying quick and being able to carry some cargo. Cerberus class frigates are an excellent thing to have in your fleet for all of these reasons and I find them to be a good idea of the sort of stats to look out for in most of your early fleet picks. You can adjust for supply costs of course but they're quick, solid enough, pack a nice gun, and have good cargo space. Another option would be, if you can get them, a few Hegemony Auxiliary Kites, the normal kite is a little underwhelming but the Auxiliary version is all around better while losing the civvy hull modifier, making it perfectly acceptable to keep in a fleet, get a pair of those with salamander missiles on them and officers in them and you can just field them for some extremely helpful support when fending off lone pirates, they're very cheap to deploy and run so they basically allow you to pick off most any lone ship that comes your way, and screen retreats too if you have to do them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Jul 19, 2016 |
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Jul 19, 2016 18:46
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Being a smuggler is profitable and fun. Valuable illicit goods are mostly sold in lowish volumes and missions for them don't require huge quantities so you can make some really good money running them around demanding markets. The Hound is an excellent and super cheap ship to do this in, with the shielded cargo bays helping with any scans. As you make money, buy more hounds and avoid the trap of larger, slower cargo ships without shielding. The caveat is lots of regular black market trading can/will tank your reputation eventually.
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Jul 19, 2016 18:54
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:Starsector is a good-rear end game that is about to get even better. Hell yeah, if exploration is half as thought-out and well-done as the what's already in the game then this will probably be the most fun I'll have had exploring in a game in many years.
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Jul 19, 2016 21:19
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Loopoo posted:How the hell am I meant to accurately trade in this game? The trading system seems really confusing. I wanna buy low and sell high but the intel panel on that stuff is really confusing, and most of the time when I get to the station that is supposedly buying high, it isn't. You can make money "straight" trading (not smuggling or pirating in order to influence the market), but it's not as simple as going from port A to B and repeating. First you need to get market information by visiting a lot of ports and hacking system relays. Without this you won't know where the high and low prices are. Second, you need to wait for a big difference in prices to present itself. I use the trade intel screen to get a graphical overlay of prices for various stuff. When I find a cheap source and expensive destination for something, I make sure the prices are recent, and that there's enough supply and demand to make it worthwhile, then I jump on it. Most of the time there won't be anything. The more relays I have hacked, and the more frequently I visit new planets, the more often I can find profitable trades. Just keep in mind both the supply and demand are limited and prices will increase on the supply side and decrease on the demand side for every unit you buy/sell (even if it's in a single transaction). So make sure you check the average prices when buying and selling and compare that with the low prices you expected. If you make a transaction bigger than the market supports then kiss your profit margins goodbye. The reason the system is so complicated is because this is a game about killing the poo poo out of spaceships and watching the cool explosions that whiteout your monitor for a second or two. The economics system only exists to give strategic context for rad space battles.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:00
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Loopoo posted:Whenever I go the Black Market route, my luck always runs out sooner rather than later. I get pulled over for a cargo scan and then I get owned with fines. Any tips for avoiding that happening? I can't outrun the border control guys. Act like a totally legit trader. Keep your transponder on, act cool. If you want some insurance, use those busted-rear end buffalo variants with the extra cargo shielding and no shields. They will reduce the tax/fine if you do get scanned. It's easier the better your reputation with the government is, since they will pay a lot less attention to you if you have sufficient reputation.
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Jul 19, 2016 23:47
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Lowen posted:The reason the system is so complicated is because this is a game about killing the poo poo out of spaceships and watching the cool explosions that whiteout your monitor for a second or two. The economics system only exists to give strategic context for rad space battles. That's... actually a pretty bad justification for having an opaque and complex system that's something of a trap for new players as an 'obvious' means of making money or getting started. 'No really this was actually a giant pain in the rear end because we want you to do something that's more fun, haha, sorry about your wasted time'.
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Jul 19, 2016 23:53
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most of this game is very well designed but as it functions now the economic simulation would be well replaced by static prices based on location + a random event modifier oh well, trading's easy to ignore
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Jul 19, 2016 23:57
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Economic activity also works well as a form of warfare by other means. You want to shaft a faction? Blow up their trade fleets, run thousands of credits through their black markets, make ruinous profits by selling them back their own stuff at embargo prices. It's a lot easier to get profits when you are willing to make a couple enemies to do so.
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Jul 20, 2016 00:00
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I've only played the game for about a week but it seems pretty easy to make money running trade missions, in my last game I made about 5 million in a few hours using a couple Mules with a small escort, buying up rare metals and organs and then wandering around looking for missions taking those goods with time bonuses. The price of buying/selling the good is largely irrelevant, you just have to know where to buy (the econ screen will indicate each good's planet of origin) and the profit will come from bonus margins. So it's not hard, but it is very boring because you miss out on the interesting space combat part of the game, and if you do any serious bounty hunting you'll quickly tank your reputation with pirates which locks you out of smuggler missions.
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Jul 20, 2016 03:48
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Cool blog post. I can't wait to try it, though the allusion to outposts is probably what makes me the happiest. As for the economy, I've never found it to be too dense. Running missions almost guarantees profit but the issue is always investment capital: you have it or your don't. I view trading as a happy accident. Sometimes I check missions and find something too good to pass up so I load up and do a run. Other times, there's nothing reasonable and I go and hunt down bounties. Often I find myself finishing one and starting the other, and vice versa. Making money really isn't all that hard if you're not losing ships left and right. It's more about picking your battles than anything.
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Jul 20, 2016 05:38
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DatonKallandor posted:I can't help but read the first half of that blog post as a giant "gently caress you" to Elite Dangerous, home of utterly samey exploration, barely any reward and near zero ties between game systems. Alex is doing everything right that they did wrong from a conceptual level up. I don't know that it was deliberate but I was definitely thinking "Thank goodness it won't be another Elite" reading his thought process. If only we could get the Blueprints for Alex. victrix posted:That's... actually a pretty bad justification for having an opaque and complex system that's something of a trap for new players as an 'obvious' means of making money or getting started. It isn't an accurate summary. The trade mechanics are explained by the UI (though the UI is a work in progress) and the reason that conventional trade routes don't generally exist as a thing for players to do is because the designer doesn't think identifying an optimal trade route and then grinding it out in progressively larger space trucks until your hands fall off makes for compelling gameplay. Myself, I weep that Frontier doesn't think more like him.
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Jul 20, 2016 05:50
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victrix posted:That's... actually a pretty bad justification for having an opaque and complex system that's something of a trap for new players as an 'obvious' means of making money or getting started. It would be if the game wasn't in alpha and constantly being changed. Especially the campaign game, which wasn't even added when I bought the game that would later be named Starfarer. Once the game is complete I hope the dev, Alex will put in good tutorials that explain things better, but since everything is subject to change massively at this point it would involve some wasted effort. Any tutorials would get out of date very quickly. If you want to play Starfarer right now you kind of have to be willing to learn how to use the new systems yourself, read blog posts and patch notes and ask about stuff on message boards. That's the tutorial right now. I also agree with Voyager I, that it's a good idea and good game design to have an economic system that prevents the player from grinding trade routes.
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Jul 20, 2016 07:47
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https://twitter.com/amosolov/status/759412823948689408
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Jul 30, 2016 18:53
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Jul 30, 2016 19:19
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Very nice! Reminds me of Freespace 1/2; maybe he could add in some sort of shock wave effect?
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