Star Traders: Frontiers Update #99: Lost Wilderlands

[fallen]

Update #99 welcomes the weekend with a big burst of new improvements, balances and tightening up in some of the major storylines.

Recruiter's Eye

With this update, we've added another benefit to high level military Ranks within the faction. At Rank 13+, you now get a bonus +1 level to any recruit from a Contact, pushing the maximum recruit level to 9 or even up to 13 with the right Rumors and Contact Traits.

We've also made some changes to the Attribute matrix for zone ratings, roughly adding a +10% boost for those zones with higher ratings.

Mac UI Scaling

If you were having any issues with Mac UI scaling, we've now enabled the UI Scaling in the options menu. You should able to use this to resolve any issues you were having. We're looking forward to hearing feedback from the Mac crew on this new option!

Legality at a Glance

We're always excited to add awesome features suggested by the community here on Steam. We've added cargo legality directly to the buy / sell / cargo and stash screens to make it really clear where all the goods stand. Thanks
@phasmaphobic for the great suggestion.

Stories Running Smoother

We've made 4 big improvements across heavily played areas of storylines to help smooth out issues, improve communication of the world and lore and to help reduce things that just were confusing. First up -- the Early Coalition Era is about 25% longer, giving you more time to work with the Arbiter or take care of other storylines appearing there. During the Plague Era, you'll now find Arbiter Brokstrom more responsive. The Crowned Smuggler story got a sizeable overhaul with new deadlines shown for every story objective, improved entries in the captain's log and also improved fail alerts -- if you fail to deliver on the crowning planning, the Smuggler/Fixer will talk to you about it instead of oddly cold-shouldering. Finally, we added a number of additional lines of dialog to the end of the Faen case to ensure that its resolution and timing are clearer to all players.

v2.3.51 - 8/31/2018

- Military Rank 13+ now grants additional +1 bonus level to any recruit from a Contact
- Increased Recruit attribute rolls by around 10% depending on Zone Ratings
- Added Legality value directly to 4th column in Exchange
- Increased the duration of the Early Coalition Era by 25%
- Improved Arbiter Brokstrom's reaction to Plague Era, she now provides Introduction to Chaesin effort
- Improved Crowned Smuggler story vignette to have clear story deadlines as well as being clear when it has failed
- Improved and clarified story explanation of Faen case ending in Erik and Valencia storylines
- Corrected description for 4 crew combat Talents that always removed all enemy buffs, but did not list it (Plas-Charge Slugs, Damning Aim, Terrifying Accuracy, Bullet Trace)
- Fixed issues with Contact Influence overflowing above 100
- Plague Rumors now have greater impacts on effected Contacts
- Fixed issues with Coalition Contact titles ("Coalition Coalition")
- Fixed captains log > score not perfectly counting every crew fight
- Improved consistency of clickable regions in zone services tray
- Fixed Screen Scaling support and improved fullscreen performance for Mac OS X

[spooky]

Aug 31, 2018 20:58:11 GMT -5 fallen said:

Recruiter's Eye

With this update, we've added another benefit to high level military Ranks within the faction. At Rank 13+, you now get a bonus +1 level to any recruit from a Contact, pushing the maximum recruit level to 9 or even up to 13 with the right Rumors and Contact Traits.

We've also made some changes to the Attribute matrix for zone ratings, roughly adding a +10% boost for those zones with higher ratings. 

I like that the higher Military Rank has a crew level benefit to pursue. 

Could you elaborate or provide some concrete details on what "Attribute matrix for zone ratings" does in game?

[fallen]

spooky - it isn't something we are sharing the specifics of at this time. In general, if you are hiring characters at zones with high ratings, like high Econ, high Danger, high Military, you can see up to a 10% boost in their Attributes. That is -- zones that are good at recruiting got 10% better.