Star Traders: Frontiers Update #95: Honor in the Void

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Update #95 comes close on the heels of our development roadmap which went live on Friday. Be sure to check out the roadmap for our ambitious plans for future version milestones and content expansions. If you've been playing Star Traders: Frontiers even for a week, you probably have already had a taste of our relentless update style. If you are enjoying it -- tell a friend and consider leaving a review!

steamcommunity.com/games/335620/announcements/detail/1696055855739611821
Update #95 adds 2 new ship encounter Talents, deepens the complexity of ship encounter hostility rules when it comes to military Rank and delivers on a highly requested feature for the starport: queuing upgrades for dry docked ships. Queue 'em up, and then just keep flying!

Dry Dock Upgrade Queuing

On a mission to deliver the most hotly requested feature from the player base, we have now tackled dry dock upgrade queuing. If you have a second ship in dry dock and want to replace one or more of its components, you have the option to load them into a queue or finish the work while waiting. If you queue the upgrades, the ship is moved into the starport's bays for its upgrade work and you are free to go on your merry way. When upgrades are queued, the dry dock listing for the ship reports how much longer you have to wait for them to complete and prevents you from launching the ship. However, queue up a big engine overhaul, a hyperwarp drive replacement, three new weapons and a medium officer suite drop in and plan to come back in 2 years -- you've now got all new freedom in running ship upgrades without interrupting your play or story.

The option to wait at the starport until all the work is finished is also present, if you want to continue to upgrade your ships that way, or are planning to immediately finish the work and hop in the new ship.

Ship Encounter Talents and New Rank Rules

Update #95 adds two new Talents to deepen your options during ship encounters. First is Raider's Scrutiny a rank 1 Pirate Talent that allows you to get a reading on what cargo the enemy ship is carrying during the encounter phase -- in the form of "0 raw resources, 20 manufactured goods and 5 rare trade goods." A well trained pirate is a master of the arc scanner and can spot the slightest anomalies created by different type of cargo containers.

Second is Dubious Nod a rank 1 Smuggler Talent that allows one Smuggler captain to give the other a subtle hello-and-goodbye without stirring up any trouble. Dubious Nod allows you to end a Smuggler encounter in a draw, regardless of hostility. You may end up with Reputation loss, but there doesn't need to be any trouble between two criminals in the void.

Finally, a new rule has been added for Military Officer encounters and captains carrying military rank. If you have at least Rank 3 in a faction military, when you encounter Military Officers, they will no longer be more hostile due to the local quadrant reputation. You may be known as a criminally in the local space, but your standing in their faction military overrides it.

Other Talent Fixes

With this update, we've hammered through a series of bugs, incorrect descriptions and balance improvements for a big pile of Talents.

Rushed Patches and other ship component repair Talents no longer have an unlisted restriction that they won't repair Talents with less than 10% Damage. Now, they will repair any damaged component!

The weapon repairing Talent Ordnance Overhaul now focuses its efforts first on weapons that are disabled (60% or more) and then spends any remaining points on simply damaged weapons.

A number of the ship encounter and victory Talents have been rebalanced from a 3 week to 6 week cooldown. While this is a pretty minor tweak to the timeline, it does mean more of these Talents will not be available in immediately back to back combats.

Traits and Talents affecting rewards in Patrol and Spying have all been fixed. Our apologies that a bug crept in here at all.

v2.3.43 - 8/19/2018

- Added choice to put upgrades to dry docked ships into a queue so that you can keep flying your other ship while they finish
- Improved encounter hostility rules -- if you carry Rank 3 with a faction, their military officer's ignore your Reputation with the local quadrant faction
- Added new rank 1 Pirate Talent "Raider's Scrutiny" allows you to detect count of raw, manufactured and rare trade goods in enemy cargo hold during encounter
- Added new rank 1 Smuggler Talent "Dubious Nod" turns an encounter with a fellow Smuggler Captain into an immediate draw
- Improved Mechanic "Ordnance Overhaul" to focus on returning disabled weapons (60% or more damage) to being ready to fire
- Added details to Ship encounter with Pirates about rules that rank 2 Permit avoiding looting
- Improved "Rushed Patches" Talent and other mid-battle repair Talents repar even components that have less than 10% damage
- Corrected Morale restoring ship combat Talents to match description -- "Solace in Battle" heals Doctor Skill in Morale to 20 crew members
- Rebalanced cooldowns on some ship encounter and victory Talents (going from 3 weeks to 6 weeks)
- Reclassified some Gear between Offensive and Defense type
- Fixed bug with passive Patrol Talents and Traits not granting correct bonuses
- Fixed bug with "High Stakes" Talent indicating that it increased intel rewards by 0%
- Fixed bug with selling generic Intel and Conflict scores
- Fixed bug with indie pirates in Patrol not being associated with a valid conflict
- Fixed bug with story characters being affected by auto assign outfits