Star Traders: Frontiers Update #14: Unchain the Ships of War
Dec 16, 2017 0:47:09 GMT -5
tenbsmith likes this
Post by fallen on Dec 16, 2017 0:47:09 GMT -5
In the first month of Early Access, our understanding of the balance of combat, the ships of war and the captains who command them has come forward by leaps and bounds. Seeing saved games, analytics, watching streamers, chatting with players and discussing on the Steam forums has -- as we knew it would -- helped us hone in on a series of major combat balance updates!
Before hitting the specifics below, let me ask that if you like our relentless pace of updates (14 meaty updates in a month!), please leave a review and tell a friend about how the Star Traders: Frontiers early access!
Without further adieu --
Enemy Captain, Officer and Crew
With the Unchained update, we have released all new enemy strategies into the game and updated all of the existing routines. This includes the enemy ship building engines as well as the AI to build captains, their officer corp and their crew. Captains will build more focused officer sets around their profession, as well as driving better crew allocations for their type of ship. Overall, we've rebuilt the foundation of what makes up an enemy crew. From here, we will be continue to work on improving the AI's ability to perform better at a variety of ranges, make more challenging tactical decisions, use a better variety of Talents and stop repeat stacking certain Talents.
On top of adding new smarts, variety and tricks to the enemy AI builder, we've added some rebalance, improvements and increased variety to the cargo holds of other ships traveling the Quadrants. Rumors relating to Merchant Fleets have been majorly increased as well.
+5 New Ships!
With new ships launching across many of the major Mass thresholds, this update almost increases the ship catalog by 30%. Including 3 new ship visual designs, these new models expand both the player and enemy captain's ability to build unique, different vessels for war, trading, spying or more.
We are continuing to work on our plan to add further differentiation to the ship hulls. More on that will be coming a bit down the line, but for now we're getting this new bevy of ships out to both your Captain and the AI's Captains!
Rumor Boosts
An equal number of risk and reward rumors have been buffed up for this release. Watch out for storms of all sorts, but revel in the riches of Artifact Find and Merchant Fleet.
In other news, we've added new wiki pages, fixed a bug that was causing Suppressing Fire and other knock-back Talents to steal turns, fixed the update routine for the service icons on the map and resolved all the reported crashes in the last release! The two man team here is working around the clock for big updates -- so enjoy and thanks for your feedback, reviews and shares.
v2.0.35 - 12/16/2017
- Reworked enemy Officer generator and Captain builder
- New Ship Artwork: Predator - Gold
- New Ship Artwork: Dreadnought
- New Ship Artwork: Warcruiser
- New 3400 Mass Ship: "Strikecruiser"
- New 5000 Mass Ship: "Solar Predator"
- New 5000 Mass Ship: "Paladin Defender"
- New 6000 Mass Ship: "Vengence Class"
- New 8000 Mass Ship: "Warhammer Class"
- New Ship Components: Hull Shielding, Battle Prow, Reinforced Officer Cabin
- Repriced Ship Components: Bridge, Cargo, Defensive
- Rebalanced Ship Components: Medical Chamber, Medical Bay, Hospital
- More Cargo Variety for Bounty Hunters, Smugglers, Pirates, Explorers, Xeno
- Adds support for more variable types and quantities of looted cargo
- Map markers (contact, mission, refuel, etc) now refresh
- Fixed issue with knock-back crew combat Talents (Supressing Fire, etc) stealing enemy's turn
- Rumors: 100% Increase in impact of 'Merchant Fleet' on cargo generator
- Rumors: Artifact Find Boost Increased by 50%
- Rumors: Better modifies power of Radiation Storms by difficulty (+30% on Impossible)
- Rumors: Boosted power of Ion and Meteor Storms on all difficulties
- Talents: Fixed issues with Ion and Radiation Storm Talents
- Fixes some bugs with score keeping on 'Crew Killed' scores
- Adds Wiki page for 'Contact Traits'
- Fixed issue with Retrain pricing
- Fixed issues with System counts in Galactic Map
- Fixed Crashes with Rumors, Contacts, Atlas Filters
