Star Traders: Frontiers Update #82: Crowning Achievement

[fallen]

Update #82 brings two major new sets of features online as well as improving, fixing and polishing for the game's upcoming release. It's a big one with some important changes, so be sure to check this out!

First up -- to keep a good thing going, we've now added another matching outfit to the roster. Now you can dress more and more characters with that military precision everyone has been talking about.

Achievements and Unlocks

As we near on the end of the EA Dev Roadmap, we're rolling out the Frontier's achievements and unlocks systems. Hunting these new achievements to obtain their unlockable rewards will push Captains to try new parts of the game (Exploring, Missions), higher difficulties (this unlock requires Hard), find new goals within the game (story achievements or meta). Even more importantly, you can now work toward gaining rewards that are cross-captain. Unlocking a reward with one Captain opens it up for future captains as well.

With Update #82, we've released the first 4 unlocks -- all of them starting ships. We've added two new small ships, the Palace Interceptor and Aeternum Vindex to the starting lists, but both require an achievement. Finally, in order to obtain the right balance with this type of content, we have chosen to put the Galtak Freighter and Stellar Falcon behind locks as well. Until you obtain those achievements any template that relied on those ships will be invalid and these ships cannot be purchased in a starport.

We're just getting started with these and expect new unlockable rewards to be coming in quickly now. More types of locked content will be appearing quickly -- Starting Professions, Starting Contacts, Ship Components, Crew Weapons and Armor and more.

Check out the Unlocks option from the main menu to see the full list, and what you may have already achieved!

Faction Specific Contacts

Some types of Contacts will now only be created on specific faction worlds. We have added 6 new Faction-specific Contacts to round out the set, as the Steel Song Blade Dancer, Alta Mesa Flight Academy Provost and Zenrin Sage of Records already exists (but were not playing by the rules). Each are unique and powerful already, but we are working on some more Contact service changes that will make them even more appealing. With the system now in place, we are set to add even more Faction-specific Contacts to further differentiate the Great Houses and Syndicates.

And More

We've also fixed of bugs with Talents, fixed issues with Contact generation where Smugglers were appearing where there couldn't be a Black Market, and rebalanced missions in the very early game.

To honor our KickStarter backers, we've loaded another set of "Join the Lore" content into your storytellers -- they've got a lot to say now in the spice hall!

v2.3.11 - 7/14/2018

- View Steam Achievements and Unlockable content from Main Menu
- Improved Awards / Unlocks displays for individual Captains (Ship > Captain's Log > Awards)
- New Locked Starting Ship: Palace Interceptor
- New Locked Starting Ship: Aeternum Vindex
- Locked existing Starting Ship: Stellar Falcon
- Locked existing Starting Ship: Galtak Freighter
- More achievements and unlockable content coming!
- Added new matching male outfit -- more uniformed crews possible
- Added Faction-specific Contacts to simulator, now fully supported
- Added 6 new contact types: Moklumnue Trade Czar, Rychart Spymaster, Javat Mining Samrak, Thulun Red Lion, Cadar Naval Commander, De Valtos Ranking Executive
- Existing Faction-specific Contacts now locked to faction: Steel Song Blade Dancer, Alta Mesa Flight Academy Provost, Zenrin Sage of Records
- Improved Contact type variety and balance
- Fixed issues where Black Market providing contacts could appear on zones without black markets
- Second wave of KickStarter "Join the Lore" rewards loaded into storytellers' tales
- Improved mission generation to avoid overly difficult missions appearing too early
- Rebalanced Calm and Skeptic Traits
- Fixed "Bladesman Rally" Talent from Swordsman to use Evasion Skill to determine Morale recovered
- Fixed keyboard shortcuts from gate jump screen, fixed crashes in gate jump
- Fixed bug with Reroll all 5 card Talents for Patrol/Spy/Blockade

[daveal]

Thanks! There has been quite a bit of discussion over on steam and it may be worthwhile to point out that in the next release, the achievement to unlock the Galtak Freighter will be easier.

[Captain Dave]

Unlocking the Galtak was ez common bruh

[ntsheep]

Another update. Further proof that the TB's need to take a break. Why just the other day on a Twitch stream I saw poor Cory having back problems. They work too hard folks. Can't we just give up a few updates so they can relax a bit. Are awesome games worth the suffering the TB's have to put themselves through. Don't any of you remember the line from the Grateful Dead's Touch of Grey, the dog has not been fed in years. Come on people, do it for Tut. Search the forum, you'll see the photos of the poor dog longing for the days of happiness he once shared with the TB's. Free the TB's, even just for awhile. Let them go play with poor Tut in a field of flowers and butterflies. We need not any fancy updates. We already liked the games since we've been playing them. What could make them better? Do we really need them better? Please my friends, free the TB's. Free them.

[fallen]

Jul 16, 2018 22:44:11 GMT -5 ntsheep said:

Another update. Further proof that the TB's need to take a break. Why just the other day on a Twitch stream I saw poor Cory having back problems. They work too hard folks. Can't we just give up a few updates so they can relax a bit. Are awesome games worth the suffering the TB's have to put themselves through. Don't any of you remember the line from the Grateful Dead's Touch of Grey, the dog has not been fed in years. Come on people, do it for Tut. Search the forum, you'll see the photos of the poor dog longing for the days of happiness he once shared with the TB's. Free the TB's, even just for awhile. Let them go play with poor Tut in a field of flowers and butterflies. We need not any fancy updates. We already liked the games since we've been playing them. What could make them better? Do we really need them better? Please my friends, free the TB's. Free them.

Just you wait. You write this kind of post, we're bound to post an update within the hour

[resistor]

why are all your captains cadar?

[ntsheep]

Bring it on art boy. Even Argus will be saying "Holy sheep! Did you just sheep'n see that sheep'n sheep!" by the time I get done derailing things

[fallen]

Jul 16, 2018 23:05:29 GMT -5 resistor said:

why are all your captains cadar?

Click too fast

[fallen]

Jul 16, 2018 23:08:43 GMT -5 ntsheep said:

Bring it on art boy. Even Argus will be saying "Holy sheep! Did you just sheep'n see that sheep'n sheep!" by the time I get done derailing things

bring it indeed!
startradersrpg.proboards.com/thread/17893/traders-frontiers-update-espionage-waves

[divini]

Some feedback of my own on the unlocks - I've been working on a lot of the ones in the "coming soon" category, and I think most of them are difficult but fair. (I do have an issue on you have to make a completely specialized captain often going ship/level a/b and totally gimps you long term and only makes you good at that one thing and horrible on anything else... but I guess that's how you meant it to be like)

My main issue are with the achievements "Adventurer", "Master Adventurer", and "Big Network" which are heavily RNG based. The other achievements you can fail but play better and eventually get it. These 3, you can play your best and still fail which is really frustrating.

Tbh the first xeno achievement is not too bad (15 in 5 years), but when it jumped to 60 in 10 years, the first time I tried it a string of bad luck prevented me from finishing it. This is with me having a powerful combat crew that could easily repel Xeno even. If only the artifact card reroll wasn't a lv11 exo-scout talent. You may think 10 years is a lot of time but considering you have to keep moving to new planets once the richness wears off, and landing on the dreaded "extra time" card, it's really not, especially when you need 60 artifact reward cards.

In comparison I got the 100 explore achievement far, far before getting close to even the first one. Seems like a big disparity.

I feel the same with "Big Network" in respects to RNG. It's like you better hope Faen, your 2nd Prince, Mechanic, Politician, and Military Commander and their introduction's introductions can provide you with most or all of the introductions you need. Since it's the only viable method (not to mention the time needed to farm the 6 P.Rep needed per introduction), because the only available early game options for obtaining contacts are the having a Merchant Captain or a lv5 Explorer captain, with all of their talents having super long cooldowns (and there's not really an opportunity to get more merchants and explorers this early, unless you get lucky with the above contacts).

The above might seem like a rant, but still, I really, suggest making this easier as rerolling and rerolling and rerolling just to beat the RNG is just tedious and not fun at all.

On a final note, do all the unlocks have to be ships? I think it would be more fitting to have some of the unlocks be related to the task you have to do. For example: Spying 100 times in 2 years grants you some powerful stealth components in the starport, or the Crew Battle achievement unlocking a new tier of weaponry from weapon-selling contacts. Just a suggestion, since it looks like you already have the ships pre-planned.

[Cory Trese]

That is very interesting feedback. Hopefully some dedicated forum members will drop in and help you with other paths to those Awards, because they certainly exist.

Keeping in mind that we of course based all achievements on player data, well tested goals and mechanics we had more than a year of test data for.

I'm sad you are one of the unhappy few. We will continue to gather player data, analyze play patterns and do our best to come up with rewards for players who are exploring and having success with the game.

Not all the unlocks are ships, no. The Coming Soon icon is just a ship right now so it looks nice.

[fallen]

Jul 17, 2018 0:51:09 GMT -5 divini said:

On a final note, do all the unlocks have to be ships? I think it would be more fitting to have some of the unlocks be related to the task you have to do. For example: Spying 100 times in 2 years grants you some powerful stealth components in the starport, or the Crew Battle achievement unlocking a new tier of weaponry from weapon-selling contacts. Just a suggestion, since it looks like you already have the ships pre-planned.

Unlocks will cover ships, contacts, ship components, crew weapons and gear and potentially more. We're shooting for a wide range of unlockable content and think it would be unfortunate to only do ships.

[ntsheep]

The derail attacks are now beginning,,,

[daveal]

Jul 17, 2018 0:51:09 GMT -5 divini said:

My main issue are with the achievements "Adventurer", "Master Adventurer", and "Big Network" which are heavily RNG based. The other achievements you can fail but play better and eventually get it. These 3, you can play your best and still fail which is really frustrating.

I didn't find big network too hard. You can get half way there just by starting. See details here: steamcommunity.com/app/335620/discussions/4/2534848209927685855/#c1709564118766031020

[divini]

Jul 20, 2018 18:50:12 GMT -5 daveal said:

Jul 17, 2018 0:51:09 GMT -5 divini said:

My main issue are with the achievements "Adventurer", "Master Adventurer", and "Big Network" which are heavily RNG based. The other achievements you can fail but play better and eventually get it. These 3, you can play your best and still fail which is really frustrating.

I didn't find big network too hard. You can get half way there just by starting. See details here: steamcommunity.com/app/335620/discussions/4/2534848209927685855/#c1709564118766031020

Yeah, I managed to get it a couple days ago.  Thanks though!