Most Anticipated ST2 Feature?

[resistor]

Hmmm... the most anticipated feature... hard question...


I'll say it is small craft/shuttle combat. Adding a whole new "fighting style" to the ST formula is a very interesting thing. Can't wait to blow stuff up with small craft and a huge armored carrier.

[fallen]

Jul 8, 2016 14:30:15 GMT -5 resistor said:

Hmmm... the most anticipated feature... hard question...

I'll say it is small craft/shuttle combat. Adding a whole new "fighting style" to the ST formula is a very interesting thing.

Good pick!

Launching fighters from your carrier is going to be too cool.

[Cory Trese]

Jul 8, 2016 14:30:15 GMT -5 resistor said:

Hmmm... the most anticipated feature... hard question...

I'll say it is small craft/shuttle combat. Adding a whole new "fighting style" to the ST formula is a very interesting thing. Can't wait to blow stuff up with small craft and a huge armored carrier.

You are on the same page as the Executive Producer team who have almost all expressed a high level of excitement about being able to buy, upgrade and launch wings of small escort craft in combat.

It certainly is a game changer and I think fallen and I are both very excited that we reached that particular stretch goal. I cannot imagine, at this point, the ship combat system without it!

[redartrats]

You mentioned that after exploring different alternatives you settled on a side-view for ship/boarding combat. But what about the mechanics of boarding? Will it be similar to ST1, or will there be more of a sense of advancement?

By which I mean, for example, there may be "stages" to your boarding: your crew initially lands in say the cargo bay. Depending on the ship, there may be a direct route to the bridge and a less direct route to the engine room, but this being an Alien ship, say, you know that the bridge is heavily defended by powerful Alien defenders, so you might want to opt to fight your way to the engine room instead. So perhaps there'd be an Engines button and a Bridge button at the initial boarding (or maybe at various points in the boarding battle, say when you reach a corridor), and Advance and Retreat buttons. As you Advance, you'll fight through the enemy crew, and after a few Advances, the status bar (and perhaps the background?) might indicate that you've now passed the cargo bay and are in the main hallway. Perhaps at this point the Bridge/Engines button might appear again (or perhaps they only appear at this point), and you can decide whether to move on to the Bridge to try to take out the enemy captain, or divert course to the engine room to disable the ship instead.  And once you reach the Bridge you may have to Advance several times before you can reach the enemy captain.

Sometimes Retreating might be a strategic advantage, e.g., midway fighting through the enemy crew on the way to the bridge you realize that you probably will not win, so you retreat to the previous junction and try to reach the engine room instead.

I think this is still workable in a side-view combat system if the UI is sufficiently streamlined.

[redartrats]

Anyway, as far as "most anticipated feature" is concerned, I confess I'm an Explorer at heart and procedural world generation would probably be the biggest thing for me. Flying around discovering new planets, whether wild, urban, both, or dead, and thinking about how to take advantage of the resources / economy / politics there in relation to the growing subset of the map that I've discovered so far, would be something really cool.

Also, though perhaps this is a little too ambitious, can there be planets with multiple, landable, urban zones? Or is that already in the works? It seems strange that most planets only have a single urban zone, whereas in the real world Earth has a myriad of urban zones (though, arguably, most are inaccessible to a spacer 'cos there'd only be relatively few space ports) and wild zones. It would be fun, for example, to have a disputed planet where one urban zone is controlled by DV, the other urban zone is controlled by Cadar, and you have an option to which zone you land in depending on your standing with each faction. Such a planet, of course, would be in a very turbulent political state, with the aerial/spatial forces in a stalemate over who controls the space around the planet, and there may be frequent raids, assassination attempts, political unrest, civil unrest, etc., as the factions duke it out for rights to take over the entire planet. There may be missions to blockade the opposing faction, etc., or there may be actual war raging across the planet, making it a very unsafe place to land. The planet may have a chance of being taken over completely by one faction, or may switch between the two factions, depending on who gains the upper hand at the time. If you arrive at the wrong time, you may suddenly discover that it's now controlled by a faction that hates you, and you're up the creek without a paddle because you need fuel but are banned from the exchanges of this faction.

(And if you're an explorer, trying to Explore a wild zone might accidentally lead you to an area of conflict and get your crew killed by the clashing faction forces.)

[Cory Trese]

Jul 8, 2016 15:43:14 GMT -5 redartrats said:

You mentioned that after exploring different alternatives you settled on a side-view for ship/boarding combat. But what about the mechanics of boarding? Will it be similar to ST1, or will there be more of a sense of advancement?

We covered this a bit in the update I liked above ... here is the quote:

In the original Star Traders RPG boarding combat is simply a unique combat range that loads different rules. The game’s pace is preserved, but the individual actions of Crew and Captain are lost in a blaze of damage points and turns. Star Traders 2 intends to allow the player-Captain to participate in the individual heroics of the battle, and fight compartment to compartment on the enemy’s decks.

Jul 8, 2016 15:43:14 GMT -5 redartrats said:

By which I mean, for example, there may be "stages" to your boarding: your crew initially lands in say the cargo bay. Depending on the ship, there may be a direct route to the bridge and a less direct route to the engine room, but this being an Alien ship, say, you know that the bridge is heavily defended by powerful Alien defenders, so you might want to opt to fight your way to the engine room instead. So perhaps there'd be an Engines button and a Bridge button at the initial boarding (or maybe at various points in the boarding battle, say when you reach a corridor), and Advance and Retreat buttons. As you Advance, you'll fight through the enemy crew, and after a few Advances, the status bar (and perhaps the background?) might indicate that you've now passed the cargo bay and are in the main hallway. Perhaps at this point the Bridge/Engines button might appear again (or perhaps they only appear at this point), and you can decide whether to move on to the Bridge to try to take out the enemy captain, or divert course to the engine room to disable the ship instead.  And once you reach the Bridge you may have to Advance several times before you can reach the enemy captain.

Sometimes Retreating might be a strategic advantage, e.g., midway fighting through the enemy crew on the way to the bridge you realize that you probably will not win, so you retreat to the previous junction and try to reach the engine room instead.

I think this is still workable in a side-view combat system if the UI is sufficiently streamlined.

As you advance through boarding combats, you will have the choice to continue to press on into the ship and attack additional compartments, or to return to the boarding shuttle/pods and escape. If you retreat from a combat, you'll effectively end the boarding battle (and suffer a morale loss for the boarding crew.)

I don't foresee the game using a progress bar mechanic, or in specific terms, using a retreat as tactical advantage. Strategic advantage in boarding combat will be achieved by Retreating at the correct time, soaking the morale loss and re-starting the boarding combat with a better set of Crew, with a more advantageous position, or by taking advantage of the boarding result in the Ship combat view.

I know that the design we have is workable, either in side scrolling, isometric or even top down -- the perspective isn't really the deciding factor on the design. The boarding combat system will give you an exciting way to approach combat, either for advantage in ship battles or as a way to take on the enemy's Captain and Officers in hand to hand combat.

[Cory Trese]

Jul 8, 2016 15:58:42 GMT -5 redartrats said:

Also, though perhaps this is a little too ambitious, can there be planets with multiple, landable, urban zones? Or is that already in the works?

Already done. We will use it in a way that is consistent with the setting, which will mean you very rarely, if ever, see planets with competing Faction Zones. If you play ST RPG, you'll get some background on the setting and see how that will work.

You will see Planets with multiple different zones, wild, urban, orbital and so on in a procedurally generated mix.

Thanks for the post!

[redartrats]

I'm not too clear about the details of the setting, actually. About the only thing I can recall off the top of my head is that there's a rumor that says it's the Templars who decide who should own which planet, but that the Templars aren't around anymore / aren't as influential anymore so nothing is changing. Which, in my mind at least, means it's possible for some remote planets to have multiple factions squabbling over who owns it.

But I'm happy to hear about the procedurally generated mix. I think it will be lots of fun to discover the galaxy on-the-fly(!).

[fallen]

Jul 8, 2016 17:47:47 GMT -5 redartrats said:

I'm not too clear about the details of the setting, actually. About the only thing I can recall off the top of my head is that there's a rumor that says it's the Templars who decide who should own which planet, but that the Templars aren't around anymore / aren't as influential anymore so nothing is changing. Which, in my mind at least, means it's possible for some remote planets to have multiple factions squabbling over who owns it.

In the founding of any new Quadrant, if the Templars were on hand in force, they helped the settlement to go without too much argument and conflict. If you play Battleforce, you can see the rivalry between Rychart and Moklumnue spark over ownership of a prime world, and not enough Templars there to quell it easily.

[redartrats]

Oh, another thing I've noticed about ST1, is that Aliens seem to be all lumped into a single category, and the different Alien species are apparently just flavor text as opposed to making a real difference. E.g., when there's an Alien rumor, you can encounter just about any of the diverse Alien species just in that one sector alone. Which always bugs me, since realistically speaking, rumors of Alien attacks ought to be caused by one Alien fleet (or at the most a small number of allied Alien fleets) passing through the area causing havoc. So one would expect that the rumored sector will have very high chances of encountering one particular Alien race, but all other Alien races should have no higher than background frequency.

Also, according to the flavor text rumors, certain Aliens like to hang out in certain environments, like dead planets, so it seems that the chances of finding these particular species of Aliens should be higher there, but other Alien species should only have background encounter frequency.

And certain Aliens are rumored to originate from a particular planet or star system; so they ought to have a higher chance to occur near that system? Is this already in ST1, or will it be in ST2? Will there be Alien homeworlds where those Alien hunters among us may try their luck at attacking the Aliens head-to-head? Perhaps such worlds can have unusually high rate of Alien ships, and perhaps unlandable Alien urban zones (if you land you'll be instantly killed by endless waves of Alien hordes), and landable but extremely dangerous wild zones (very high chance of Alien encounters, perhaps higher-level Aliens too).

[Cory Trese]

Thanks for the feedback. Sorry the way that Xeno work in ST RPG bothers you!

[redartrats]

Oh, also, will planetary exploration be more controllable in ST2? As opposed to ST1 where it's essentially just a slot machine and the game basically rolls the dice automatically for the entire exploration? My dream is to be able to direct the crew on where to search and how to search when exploring a wild zone... but perhaps ST is the wrong game for this.

[redartrats]

Cory Trese I didn't mean it that way... I mean, I understand why Aliens in ST1 work the way they do, and while it's not very realistic it's still fun to play as a game. I was just saying that ST2 could do better in terms of realism.

[Cory Trese]

Jul 8, 2016 18:20:14 GMT -5 redartrats said:

Cory Trese I didn't mean it that way... I mean, I understand why Aliens in ST1 work the way they do, and while it's not very realistic it's still fun to play as a game. I was just saying that ST2 could do better in terms of realism.

Not really aiming for "realism" in our sci-fi ship simulation game ... we're working really hard on fun, canon consistency, honoring the setting, telling a great story, and tying the previous four ST games together in a way that is convincing to people who've loved the setting over the past six years of work.

[Cory Trese]

Jul 8, 2016 18:18:25 GMT -5 redartrats said:

Oh, also, will planetary exploration be more controllable in ST2? As opposed to ST1 where it's essentially just a slot machine and the game basically rolls the dice automatically for the entire exploration? My dream is to be able to direct the crew on where to search and how to search when exploring a wild zone... but perhaps ST is the wrong game for this.

Yeah, there might be better exploration games out there for you than ST!