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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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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?
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May 10, 2018 04:17
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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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How does this compare to Starsector? There is always room for a great space game in my heart. Templar Battleforce is pretty fun so I will have my eye on this.
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May 10, 2018 04:38
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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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This is a good game.
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May 10, 2018 11:59
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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.
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May 10, 2018 18:17
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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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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. The Trese Brothers never stop updating games ever, even after release. They are cool as hell and I got mad respect for them.
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May 10, 2018 18:56
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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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My problem is I wanna remake my FFG Rogue Trader RPG Rogue Trader, but he was too good at too many things for that.
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May 11, 2018 01:55
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Oh poo poo, I like this game. I was checking for a thread a few days ago. I like it overall, it's definitely lacking in "Story" content that isn't the main story, It would be cool to see your randomly generated contacts have stories and the like too as you raise or lower peoples influence with a faction. But the game play loops are fun, I've done a lot of pirating and smuggling/trading. Not tried Zealot/Spying/Exploring much so I'm curious, with being a Zealot, is there a way to help your faction actually win those wars and such that pop up and like, expand their influence among a system/multiple systems? I think that's the one thing stopping me from getting super involved with the game, is the lack of impact you seem to be able to have on the inter-faction politics that are definitely present, but very bare-bones. Hopefully this is something the devs add more to.
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May 11, 2018 21:20
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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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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.
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May 11, 2018 22:10
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Will this run reasonable on my crappy old laptop (i5-3230M, 8GB) with Intel HD graphics? Because a lot of it sounds really up my alley.
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May 11, 2018 23:13
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Should do the art is decent but it's essentially turn based.
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May 11, 2018 23:16
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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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Ciaphas posted: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?? It did highlight but I couldn't find anything to do with that character. I've played a good bit of Darkest Dungeon too.
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May 13, 2018 14:48
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Did your screen look like this? The highlighted area is where your actions are listed: If you didn't see it then your game might be bugged.
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May 13, 2018 15:17
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I'll reinstall, thanks.
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May 13, 2018 15:25
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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. Anybody got any tips or feelings about crew combat in general?
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May 13, 2018 18:55
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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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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. Does anyone have tips for escaping combat and dodging torpedos? I can't tell if RNGesus hates me but it seems like even with the smallest fastest ship spamming evasive maneuvers or escape it still takes me several rounds to get out of there. Which is really annoying when you get a hostile bounty hunter or god forbid a xeno ship.
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May 19, 2018 00:18
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I got this game a few days ago based on goon recommends in the Steam thread and it really is way better than the weird, mobile style graphics would suggest. 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: Captain - Spy / Explorer / Exo Scout Obviously this is for an exploration focused captain. Explorer / Exo Scout are a pretty self contained combo, so I picked my first job as Spy since it gets what seems to be a really good starting bonus (+25% XP and also +3 CHA) and it combos with the Electronics that Explorer provides. XO - Quartermaster / Commander / Zealot - Stacking Command and Intimidate, I found on my other starts that Intimidate was one skill I was consistently failing rolls on since it's hard to get it on your crew if you don't specifically try to. Negotiator - Diplomat / Merchant / Smuggler - obvious synergies Doctor - Doctor / Combat Medic / Military Officer - Doctor and Medic are obvious, Military Officer is because it has a great skill that lets you automatically score draws with enemy Military and Zealot ships without rep loss, and Doctor has both Tactics and Command to combo with. Engineer - Engineer / Mechanic / Spy - obvious synergies Also as far as crewmen go - I don't like using my officers for crew combat as they're less disposable, are officer combatants powerful enough to justify risking them / making them worse at other jobs? So far I feel like I'm going to build my team as: Slot 1 - Swordsman - the counter attack is insanely good and they have other good buffs / attacks besides Slot 4 - Soldier - They have a good team buff and a bunch of good ranged attacks too Slots 2 and 3 I'm less sure on. I'm thinking Combat Medic and Exo Scout, partly because I want those guys in my crew anyway for non combat purposes.
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May 19, 2018 00:55
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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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TheBlandName posted: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 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. On another note, just had a super frustrating moment. I'm an hour or two into a new run, just got my starting crew how I wanted it (cut loose some of the excess basic crew, hired 3 exo scouts + 1 merchant officer after buttering up the appropriate contacts) then a random pirate encounter wrecked my poo poo, since I still have gently caress all for combat skills. Turns out I didn't die though... because he decided to stop short because I held a good trading permit. Because he was my own faction.  As of the next stop, I have 8 open crew slots from all the dead + deserters. gently caress.
metasynthetic fucked around with this message at 06:59 on May 19, 2018 |
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May 19, 2018 06:51
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I still barely understand what I'm doing in this game. Anyone got a good guide or something to check out?
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May 19, 2018 07:13
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The wiki for the game seems to be decent, there's a bunch of guides for stuff in the top right section of the main page: https://startraders.gamepedia.com/Star_Traders_Wiki
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May 20, 2018 00:01
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TheBlandName posted:Small ships are bad at I loving knew it, I kept wondering why it was easier for me to run from stuff in a big ship than the speedy little bastard. That thing is a trap. I finally got enough for a cruiser and compared to the little ship that thing goes wherever the hell it wants. Gotta say, that is counterintuitive as hell and needs to be signposted in game waaay better. Captainchat: Spy for dodging, hidden shot, combat medic for lifeline and grabbing all the aggro to then Dodge, pistoleer for synergy. Absolute murder machine.
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May 20, 2018 00:34
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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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Thanks for the tips, it's helping clear up some half-baked notions I have so far about the game's flow, especially the last part. On that note, if you allow an independent military vessel to board and search for contraband, despite the fact that everything is legal in indie markets, stuff that normally counts as permit only still counts as contraband... especially since there's no such thing as an indie trading license. And that's how I lost a cargo hold full of cambrinite I got through one explorer encounter event.
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May 20, 2018 04:59
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This game reminds me a lot of space rangers 2, I think it's the amount of game systems hidden behind the ugly UI and what the gently caress is going on game start. Hopefully once past these it will be as good.
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May 20, 2018 15:20
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So i've been playing this game a lot and have learned a ton of things- I'm finding that officers are best off as combatants, once you get a good pool of crew recruits beyond the basic crew jobs. If you're gonna do card games, you need to spam the crewman type that offers the ability to add a success result to the cards, typically 4 will do, alongside the talents and ship modules that increase rewards.
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May 20, 2018 16:16
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Panzeh posted:So i've been playing this game a lot and have learned a ton of things- I'm finding that officers are best off as combatants, once you get a good pool of crew recruits beyond the basic crew jobs. Now that I'm about 10ish hours into a hard playthrough, I'm starting to think maybe I should be doing this instead. Crew combat has gotten stupidly difficult now - I've been in 2 storyline related fights: one involving taking on a young noble as an apprentice for a couple years (who got assassinated no thanks to me) and another to put down a revolutionary protesting the union of the factions and both times I got my poo poo rolled hard. Just now, one of my guys got killed before I even got a chance to move, and it didn't seem like simple bad luck. I went out of my way to get a Goliath A5 weapons locker and to put new armor / guns on my guys as appropriate first. My team was a pistoleer and bounty hunter around level 10, and a soldier and swordsman recently hired. (I split my A team of all 10s into 2 because the game warned me I'd have 2 fights.) I'm at the point that it's got me afraid to engage in crew combat ever since it feels like I'm guaranteed to lose at least one crewman and my only chance is to just passively keep them out of fights and leveling up in the background until the day they are ready to emerge from their delicate cocoon. It sucks. So, basically, are officer combatants 2 - 3x more powerful than a crewman or what? Because I feel like they'd have to be to be capable of routine use for crew combat. What am I doing wrong? metasynthetic fucked around with this message at 02:35 on May 21, 2018 |
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May 21, 2018 02:28
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metasynthetic posted:Now that I'm about 10ish hours into a hard playthrough, I'm starting to think maybe I should be doing this instead. Crew combat has gotten stupidly difficult now - I've been in 2 storyline related fights: one involving taking on a young noble as an apprentice for a couple years (who got assassinated no thanks to me) and another to put down a revolutionary protesting the union of the factions and both times I got my poo poo rolled hard. Just now, one of my guys got killed before I even got a chance to move, and it didn't seem like simple bad luck. I went out of my way to get a Goliath A5 weapons locker and to put new armor / guns on my guys as appropriate first. My team was a pistoleer and bounty hunter around level 10, and a soldier and swordsman recently hired. (I split my A team of all 10s into 2 because the game warned me I'd have 2 fights.) I'm at the point that it's got me afraid to engage in crew combat ever since it feels like I'm guaranteed to lose at least one crewman and my only chance is to just passively keep them out of fights and leveling up in the background until the day they are ready to emerge from their delicate cocoon. It sucks. The key to crew combat is to ensure your combatants have high wisdom and quickness, those are the two most important stats. A skill bonus in a weapon is helpful, too, but you need to have good attributes to get consistently good init in combat, and initiative is king. The advantage officers bring is that you can splash them into classes with good heals or with better on-init passives. IMO (mostly) pure soldiers are still the best backline combatants, but other classes have some help for pistol-wielders and swordsfolk. If an officer has weak attributes, i will have them spec into difficult-to-get jobs like doctor and military officer to get those talents/skills, until I can ditch them entirely and promote a crewman with a good passive skill and attributes and make them a combatant. Also, officers can use devices, while crew fighters cannot. That being said, tactically, the idea is to try to pull/push people out of their good zones and use init-debuffing abilities to sap turns from the most damaging enemies. Combat classes are the most dangerous enemies(soldiers, swordsmen,pistoleers) while you can leave others alive.
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May 21, 2018 03:27
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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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TheBlandName posted: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. You can also splash into doctor and get a pretty powerful heal that way. Another potential thing is getting a class with blades with your pistol-user so you can dual wield and get the parry bonus from the offhand blade.
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May 21, 2018 04:01
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Albinator posted:Will this run reasonable on my crappy old laptop (i5-3230M, 8GB) with Intel HD graphics? Because a lot of it sounds really up my alley. It should, I run it on linux (crouton) on my chromebook perfectly. The game needs virtually no graphics horsepower. Has anyone figured out a system for recruiting crew with good stats? I'm still looking for a reliable way to recruit replacement crew mid-game with stats as good as the starter crew. All of my replacements seem to be 5+ points in each stat lower than the guys you get at the beginning of the game. The best option I've found so far is to stack people with the commander talent (discerning gaze?) for the stat bonus and only recruit when I have someone not on cooldown. Also, the developers mentioned that stat, ability and trait pools vary by recruitment location -- locations will produce crew with similar abilities/stat skews etc. There was some mention of pulling better crew from shittier worlds (hard vacuum atmosphere, crushing gravity, etc.) Has anyone noticed this in action? Edit, from Discord: quote:MintDragon - Today at 4:19 PM No answer on where to look for high quickness/will recruits. Other recommendations included waiting for the mercenary rumor and making sure the Commander talent that boosts new crew is off cooldown. o muerte fucked around with this message at 00:35 on May 22, 2018 |
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May 21, 2018 08:24
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Still playing, current conclusions: - Probably the most crucial single skill to get as soon as you can is Skip Off the Void from Navigators. It damages your hyperdrive which will take anywhere from 2 - 4 weeks to get fixed, but the cost in repairs + downtime is going to be roughly $2-5k, which is much better than the average repairs from a fight, surrendering your cargo or, you know, actually dying. Definitely get the other automatic-escape type talents when you can since their downsides aren't so harsh, but this works on everything, including xenos. I know this first tip is long but drat does it make a huge difference to survivability. - Exploring sucks as a method to make money. - Patrolling is good for faction rep building. - Spying seems like it would be a decent way to make money early on with low capital but also low risk. Trading is definitely the best moneymaker, but higher level missions can pay quite well too. The simplest good way to get started is to: 1) Get at least a level 1 trade permit with a faction. (Level 2 is also cheap and good to have ASAP, 3+ is good in the long run but it's better to build some trading capital first.) 2) Find a farm or mine supplier with a high economy rating (16+) and <= 6 trade law, and a refinery also with <= 6 TL. Just run raw spice to the refinery for good profits / run. 3) Alternately (or after doing the previous one if you get lucky) is to find a refinery supplier with <= 7 TL and Lux Pop (or many others but I think Lux Pop has the highest demand) running refined spice. The margins (usually) aren't as good, but it's still good money. All you should need to pull this off is to do the opening quest with the Prince to make a little cash and get enough rep with him to get him to approve the permits. Spice of any kind has pretty good value vs. cargo space so even non hauler ships can pull in some cash like this. Building rep & buying trade permits from more factions will make this easier to pull off with more routes. On that note - the map seed I'm playing on seems really cool, one half of the map is a densely populated zone with lots of trade opportunities, and the other half is this long pipe with few branches but high ranking faction contacts that tend to come up in missions.  Anyone interested in the map parameters / seed? metasynthetic fucked around with this message at 06:10 on May 23, 2018 |
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May 23, 2018 05:26
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