Star Traders: Frontiers Update #130: Enemy Swoops In!

[fallen]

Update #130 comes with an exciting set of new Void Engines, big changes to how the enemy ship builder designs its ships, some critical balance changes to Orbital Salvage and a ton of other community suggested improvements and bug fixes.

We're hard at work laying the foundations for carriers/fighters and the next story Era. If you read between the Bexian tea leaves, you can see the enemy ship design rebuild being a direct product of needing to improve the AI's ability to accommodate fighter variations.

Thanks to everyone suggesting improvements, posting suggestions, telling a friend and leaving a review!

Here's Update #130, captains!

Enemy Ship Designs

Over the last few months of play, testing and component upgrades the AI has been preparing for a major upgrade. Update #130 begins this series of improvements to its upgrade routines, helping expand the total number of upgrading paths that the enemy ship builder can pick as well as improving the allocation of upgrades and especially of defensive upgrades.

With this update, you will start to see some improved AI behavior, more weapon variation and better defensive stats on military captain types. From here, we've restructured the internal rule set of how the enemy upgrades its ships and we'll be making further changes in the coming series of updates.

Dual-Field Engines

Dual-Field engines provide another option for captain's with a stockpile of capital who are looking to use balanced engines. The Dual-Field technology allows similar Void Engine statline while reducing the Mass of the engine component by upwards of 30%. However, such technology doesn't run cheap and the costs can be as much as 200% higher than the standard engine. Still - the trade off can help free component slots.

In balancing out these new engines, we also took a moment to review and correct issues with some Mass 3400 and Mass 5000 ships. Some of the ships had unnecessary mass reducing components installed in their default builds and those have now been swapped out for more exciting and functional components.

Salvaging Risks and Rare Trade Goods

That ^^ is not where you Orbital Salvage, but it sure looks like a nice vacation spot.

... in serious news, Orbital Salvage has always been billed as high risk and high reward. With this update, we've fixed a bug in the card deck calculation that was causing too many hands to be tipped to have 3 positive cards and only 2 negative cards. This has caused some of the run-away successes that we've seen in Orbital Salvage where Captains can amass a vast pile of wealth on single orbital rumors. This change will help tip the balance back to where it should be -- high *risk* and high *reward*.

In balancing this, we've also tweaked the Pirate's Talent "Nose for Loot". While it still swaps in a Rare Trade Good card, the number of RTGs uncovered is half of what the standard +5 card will draw.

Finally, we fixed issues where remove Rare Trade Good rewards for winning crew combats during Orbital Salvage were not being not counting towards Awards and Unlocks. Yes, you've got to kill some pirates or xeno, but its another way to pile up those rewards!

Talent Cool Downs

A few more cool down changes to improve balance for the crews have gone into effect this release. Mechanic's System Flush has joined all other ship combat purge Talents at 6 weeks. The Quartermaster still reigns supreme at stopping mutinies, but the Calming Speech Talent's cool down has now been pushed out to 13 weeks.

To help make Scouring Search stick out in the Spy card game, we've given it a new Talent icon.

A huge thanks to all of our players making suggestions on how we can improve the game! Please tell a friend or leave a review

v2.4.67 - 1/23/2019

- Improved enemy ship builder AI -- increased upgrade paths, better allocation of upgrades, smarter at defensive module management
- Fixed issues with several Mass 3400 and Mass 5000 mass ships that had unnecessary Mass Reducer components by default
- Added 7 new Void Engine designs -- the Dual-Field engines
- New 'Dual-Field' Void Engines provide minimal mass options at higher cost
- Adjusted balance of Orbital Salvage so that card hands are more correctly balanced to have high risk -- more hands will draw with 3 negative cards
- Adjusted orbital salvage Pirate Talent "Nose for Loot" to replace a risk card with Rare Trade Loot card, a smaller find of Rare Trade Goods (4-8)
- Fixed issues where remote RTG stashes created after crew combats during Salvage were not counting towards Awards/Unlocks
- Fixed issues where positive Reputation was being incorrectly reported with xeno during missions
- Fixed issue with some story fights incorrectly giving you the option to bribe or retreat
- Added new Talent icon for Spy's "Scouring Search" Talent
- Adjusted Quartermaster's "Calming Speech" Talent cool down to 13 weeks
- Adjusted Mechanic's "System Flush" Talent cool down to 6 weeks