Am I missing something?

[bigboote66]

I've been playing this game about a week - maybe logged about 6 hours, and I'm trying to figure out why it seems to be so hugely popular and well regarded.

From the descriptions I've read, it seems like the kind of game that would appeal to me - old school, non-twitch based space exploration & spaceship-building game. But it feels like I'm missing what is making the game fun for everyone else.

I'm only playing the free version, and the game feels very tedious busywork to me. Trading seems to simply be a matter of waiting for a shortage or a surplus, then buying or selling the appropriate good at whatever port is closest - the huge difference in prices that the crisis creates make regular trading pointless. I don't really understand the point of creating a cache - as soon as you sell a cargo-bay's worth of stuff, the crisis ends and the price returns to normal, so you can't get more from the cache to sell, even if its on the same planet. Keeping track of commodity prices is a pain - the feature inside the game that will show you the price of goods at other locations seems broken - the prices are not right, or at least they're not updated correctly (crisis prices remain in place long after I've ended the crisis and the price has returned to normal).

Other factions will eventually get pissed off at you (I'm guessing that managing faction hatred is maybe one of the challenging things in the game, but that doesn't really appeal to me), but as long as you're in good with one faction, you can trade with them and the independents. I'm not really sure why getting blacklisted from a faction is such a big deal, as there isn't a lot to differentiate the planets from one another.

Combat seems really opaque; I'm not even sure what the "Engines" and "Decks" buttons do - combat in general is pretty much undocumented, from what I've found on this site and in the in-game manual.

In general, the game seems to depend on your ability to number crunch, but all the numbers are hidden from me; I see mentioned on this site that crews from fringe worlds are more "hardy" - but how are you supposed to determine this? I have even less visibility into the suitability of my crew than a real captain would - all I have is a headcount and a morale number.

Most of all, though, I'm having trouble seeing where the game is going - I've played for six hours or so, and it seems like I'm just spinning my wheels - it's just the same thing over & over - fly around to complete contracts, occasionally sell stuff at ridiculous prices, repeat.

Finally, I noticed somewhere else that the devs here are encouraging fans of the game to downvote low ratings that are being given in the Android Market. Not cool at all, guys. The game already has a crazy number of gushing 5-star reviews - you don't need to squashing 1-stars.

[Fenikso]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

I kind of understand your point. The lack of proper documentation is the biggest drawback I have encountered when started to play the game. Everything seemed so random and I was unable to understand the game's mechanics. There is however a lot of places you can find "the documentation". Some time ago I started to put the information together, you can find it here. There are also links to the other sources such as Wiki.

The thing which makes the game fun for me is: challenge and permanent death. I am playing Impossible difficulty and it demands from the player a lot of skills, judgment and ability to understand the game as whole to survive. A lot of things start to make sense on higher difficulty. For example Caches can be difference between life and death. Also handling the faction politics so you do not end up pissing anyone off eventually. The free version also makes the universe very small, so things are very close together - which makes it easier.

About the reviews:
I am not 100% sure but I think that devs encouraged people on the forum to mark as spam or unhelpful the reviews where people confuse others. For example when they mistake corrupt SD card with game bugs, or people giving 1-star "because the dev does not want to destroy his game by their great idea they tried to mash against his head and the head of everyone on the forum". I have no problem with truthful (even subjective) low reviews. for example 1-star review saying that "I hate Permadeath" or "Need a better instruction manual" is cool with me. 1-star review as "Try again suckers" or "It's about as fun as a case of genital warts" is not. Especially when you can play the free version to see if you are going to like it or not.

[slayernz]

Hey bigboote66,

Getting to grips with the game ... even understanding its purpose is more complex than the typical android/iphone game. When you start you definitely mash your head against a brick wall thinking "what's the point?". It's only when you start figuring things out does the game move from complex mud to a crystalline beauty. I'm not blindly going to babble about the wonderfulness of this game. When I first got it and played it, I gave it a couple of hours then ignored it for 2 months. It was only because I kept hunting for a mindless space trading game that I came back. Ironically, as you discovered, trading is one of the things that quickly becomes secondary to the game itself.

So first things first, what the hell is with this trading thing?
I'm really glad you figured out the rumors thing. Finding rumors of shortages/surpluses is one of the biggest "balancers" of the game, especially at more difficult levels. When you start out, the gaps between buy and sell rates are so huge that there is no real point in trading at normal prices. Even when you have high negotiation skills, the margins are so thin that you are better off doing other activities.

Also, the prices that are stored in your ship records are not automatically updated over time. The prices of your goods are as at the last time you were at the planet. So if there was a shortage, even if you cleared it or the shortage finished of its own accord, the price won't be updated until you next go to the planet. Sub-space bandwidth is not cheap and is reserved for critical communication. Price updates aren't deemed critical.

Caches ...
They do have several key uses. First, if you have stocks of different goods stored at a cache (say 80 units of each type of commodity), then if you see a shortage rumor for, say, Metal, you don't have to spend precious time flying around various planets buying up 10 units of metal here, 5 units of metal there. Instead, you can go straight to your cache and load up on all the metal stored there. You'll get to the rumor planet quicker and can cash in on the shortage in one hit. Why is this important? Because rumors expire, especially fast on higher difficulty levels. It could take you 50+ turns flying around from planet to planet trying to pick up small amounts of metal. 52 turns = 1 year, so by the time you get to your destination you find the shortage has changed to some other rumor ... or no rumor at all.

Secondly, when you discover a surplus rumor (say 200 units of crystals on a friendly planet). You can either take your ship that holds max 80 cargo, buy at $80, then sell at another planet for $300. OR you could buy at $80, go to a wilderness and dump the entire cargo in a cache. You soon have a cache of 200 crystals stored away for a shortage rumor. Think of the margin when you get a planet willing to pay $2200 for one unit of crystals!

Thirdly, Water-Fuel. The fuel that you have access to can make the difference between a happy, effective crew, and a mutiny where you lose money or the game. Not all planets have a lot of water, and as you've found, you'll make enemies with some factions and won't be able to use their exchanges. Having caches of water around the galaxy means you are able to survive, especially if a battle has gone wrong and you've got significant sail damage.

Fourthly, when you are harvesting or exploring. If you do this on a wilderness, the first thing you do is go to the planet with a surplus of water-fuel. You dump that in a cache (holding say 5 - 10 units in reserve). Then you do an Explore or Harvest. If you're skilled in exploration (or lucky), you can fill your cargo hold up with the discovered booty. But wait a minute, if you found that much so easily, what are the odds you can get lucky again? They are, of course, pretty high, but you have no room for anything even if you wanted to try again. So what you do is dump your new-found items into the cache, and you're ready to go again. If you find nothing, you can always grab what you cached, but if you find a ton of new stuff, you can carry that away without having to leave much behind.

Combat
There are a ton of threads on the topic of combat, but in a nutshell, when you are at close range, you have the ability to target sub-systems. Shooting at the Engines means that you have a greater chance of disabling the ship. No engines = ship surrender. It doesn't mean that the only damage you do is in the engines, but that is where you are aiming.

Shooting at the Decks is basically trying to kill the crew without destroying the ship. The Decks are short for the Crew Decks. Knocking out the crew makes it easier for you to board, and it gives you a greater chance of taking the ship with minimal damage.

What are the skills most useful to combat?
Pilot allows you to change ranges in combat, and more effectively retreat if need be. It also helps stop your enemy from advancing/retreating from you too.
Stealth allows you to dodge enemy weapons fire, especially torpedoes and at longer ranges.
Tactics help when it comes to targeting the enemy ship. Better tactics means higher hit-rates. Most noticeable at higher difficulty levels later in the game)
Warrior is beneficial if you like to board enemy ships. It means you'll get more effective at killing enemy crew and enemy captains without being hurt quite so much yourself

What officers are useful?
Pilot officer Boosts your pilot skill value and allows you to be more effective in all range maneuvers. Found with a "Spice halls overflowing" rumor

Military officer Boosts your warrior and intimidation skills value, which is beneficial for boarding combat.

People get pissed off at me
It is definitely possible to play the game with everyone liking you (except independents and aliens). The trick is to look at the factional conflicts. Be as aware of factional conflicts as you are of shortage rumors and it'll be a great start. Don't trade on trade-embargoes, and don't engage in combat with anything other than pirates, independents and aliens.

Do you get much XP from this approach? Not as much as more aggressive approaches, but you still get XP, enough to grow your skills. If you want to have more XP, sure, attack or trade when it negatively impacts with one or more faction. The skill here is to pick the factions you want to hate you rather than have it happen randomly.

So what's the point?
Like all RPG's, building up your character, making money, and getting levels, ships, ranks, awards.

You have the money thing sussed. I'm guessing you're playing at either basic or normal levels, where focusing on rumors and buying/selling gets you great success without too much pain. Playing at harder levels means you have to focus on survival as much, if not more than trading.

When you're just going from planet to planet, trading with who you can with no regard to factions, conflicts, and planet types, you'll either die a lot or get pretty bored. It's understanding the other aspects of the game that allow you to start growing characters and finding success in more than a financial sense. Do contract missions. Go for awards (and unlocks). Buy/seize new ships and upgrade them in the dock. Build up your captain skills so that you become almost invincible in combat, then try it all again at a harder difficulty level.

As for the review thing, I agree with Fenikso. I don't blindly squash every negative review. It's only when there is a review that is blatantly stupid/wrong. eg "This game doesn't have ponies!" might not be useful to anyone when it comes to assessing the games merit.

[antixeele]

Welcome to the forum! Id like to try to ameliorate some of your confusion on some of the technical aspects of the game you mentioned. First, however the idea that you are 'missing something' has got me thinking. Sometimes im not sure exactly what I am 'Getting'! When I first found startraders, it was one of many free games I downloaded from the market. Most of those others got deleted, save for chess, go, dopewars, the game of life, and startraders. First impression for me was "dopewars im space". After warming to it I became really hooked for a time. Excited about this "awesome game" I had been playing, I showed it to a good friend, who happens to be be an avid gamer and understands programing FAR better than me. He was utterly nonplussed. He summed it up as a "text based roguelike with programmer graphics" and "a two dimensional android attempt at cloning Freelancer". I was completely unable to express to him what made it so special, or even WHY it was fun! Same problem showing the game to other people, most say theres to much stuff to read, and its boring. In trying to explain it, I realised that the game almost entirely consists of navigating menus! And its almost completely text-based! Yet ill stare at my phone and navigate menus, sometimes for hours, more recently in shorter, more directed sessions. And ive come to a better understanding of what makes it fun for me.

A large part of the gameplay is mental. For a while, the coordinate system made no sense, you know, the 'plot course' button, and 'travel to this location in deep space (5,-1)' then I realised that the map is an x,y axis, centering around the default starting planet. Actually up one and left one, at (0,0). The first number is left and right of the axis, left negative units, right positive, the secomd number is above or below the axis above being negative units, below being positive.

But you don't need to graph anything to get a general idea where a coordinate is, just hold up two fingers in a cross. This way you can map out your course through seperate points mentally. Ah.. The game actually does this for you in the zoom map I guess.

Ah crap, hope im not rambling to much! So the game involves levels of planing. First a general plan for the first several years. Like, do contracts, get some cash, avoid conflict, pick up some good officers etc. then you have plans for your current activity, such as, do these contracts in this order, buy water fuel, head to this planet for a pilot etc. Mixed in with this is resource management, resources being money, crew, water fuel, rations, and the other trade goods which give bonuses in different situations. Now the Challenge comes in completing your plans, and goals, within a dynamic, randomly shifting environment.

You've got random encounters, some of which are hostile some of which arent. Which ships are hostile to you depends on your relations with the governing faction, I.e. reputation, trade permits and military rank. Very negative rep gets bounties placed on your ship and bountyhunters after you. You've got tile changs, like alien attacks or storms, that you may want to navigate around.

All the faction conflicts create situations which you can either use to your advantage or take as advice to avoid certain worlds and areas. Same with rumors.

I only use caching to stock a full hold worth of goods near a surplus so I can make the most of it, or to store what I find while exploring planets.

Combat has three ranges, far medium and close. Well four if you count boarding. Torpedos are only effective at long range. At medium range guns are more effective, and at close range you can target the engines and decks of the enemy ship with guns, targeting decks doesnt always do obvious damage, but it damages the morale of the enemy crew. You can also.attempt to board at close range.

You dont really.need to number crunch. The game does that for you. Concidering how many variables youd have to keep in mind, its better to go by "feel". Getting a feel for the various stats, ship stats, and cargo bonuses is like letting your subconcious crunch the numbers for you also.

And finally there is the point. The ultimate goal of the game is generally being successful without dying, and surviving as long as you can. Doing this can be a real challenge! And theres tons of cool stuff which keeps the ride interesting, also, many very different ways to play and be successful. There're rare ships, unique encounters, eventually you can plunder from ships or find on planets literally hunreds of artifacts and whatnot. There's no level cap, and I umderstand that the higher difficulties become more and more challenging as time goes by. There are challenges to unlock rewards, each one a strategic puzzle in and of itself. There's also content added something like every four days or so, VERY dedicated developers, and a burgeoning online community.

Phew! Fingers about to get a breaj, typed all thar on a phone

[fallen]

antixeele - just to agree -- a factor in each individual game's difficulty scale is the # of turns that your Captain has already survived. In the higher difficulties, in some respects, as I see it, you are racing against time to keep up with levels vs. this difficulty factor. It can be fatal to fall behind this curve, or at least very hard to catch up.

[correct me if I'm wrong =]

[antixeele]

Interesting! Ive gotten past the dark century on demanding, but i dont know that ive gotten far enough into the end-game to see what I will now be calling the Probability Death Spike. Been wondering for awhile whether the rise in difficulty was due to time or captain level. Figured with a close to 200% increase in captain level on impossible, at lvl 50 you face up to lvl 100 enemies, but at lvl 100 you'd face up to lvl200 enemies!

[blackgauntlet]

From what I've gathered from this game, I've found the true No. 1 rule. Which is both absolute and applicable to real life...

Never take anything for granted.

[alienfodder]

I uninstalled the free version after playing it a few times. I shared some of your sentiments. I still have some, but the more I play the less they concern me (menu design excepted - is this the reason the game feels tedious?). I don't, indeed can't, play STRPG exclusively because it forces me to invest time & mental energy which can be infuriatingly nullified by the slightest miscalculation or push of luck. However, I believe you take out what you put in, and my sense of accomplishment is immense when I get it right.
I agree about the opacity of information - the really helpful hints are not to be found in the game but online, and what pointers there are in the game seem unclear due to the language employed.
The biggest boon by far is this forum with its resident dev & other knowledgeable users.

[blackgauntlet]

We're always badgering Cory to add in new rumors that explains how the game works in the game itself. Like how Spice makes Pilot fly better, Weapons make fighting easier and some such. So, the Spice Halls and Palaces are like your in-game manuals.

However, the thing is that the rumors run out faster than you would like. And that would suck for newbies. Good thing that they have infinite number of retries after their ship blows up.

If there were Spacer Guilds that would provide in-game tutorials/manuals for n00bs and advanced guides/strategies for l33ts, that would be better, I think.

[Cory Trese]

this is really a great thread and full of well thought out responses.

Thanks a ton. Gives me some ideas on how to improve as well.

[blackgauntlet]

Like Spacer Guilds? ;D

Y'know, it'd be really cool to have rumors (like missions) separated into categories.

Political Rumors/Top Secret- Palaces
Market Rumors (shortage/booms/closures for Exchanges/Star Ports)- Spice Halls
Officer Rumors/Exploration Rumors/Alien Rumors- Spacer Guilds

Currently, they're all mish-mashed into a whole ball of info-overload. And sometimes, we wonder why princes talk as though their rough 'n tough spacers.

[taatuu25]

Jan 26, 2012 21:43:32 GMT -5 blackgauntlet said:

However, the thing is that the rumors run out faster than you would like. And that would suck for newbies. Good thing that they have infinite number of retries after their ship blows up.

brings into mind playing insanely hard games (QWOP, For example) where at first the completion of them seems impossible, but when you're played long enough (couple hundred tries)you start getting skills to complete it. You can actually, at some point easily do that what you didnt even think would be possible at first.

[bigboote66]

Thanks for all the thoughtful replies, everyone. From the sounds of it, it seems like I probably am not missing anything - not much that anyone has said has indicated that I've overlooked an aspect of the game, except for one thing:

You all seem to be talking about the Elite version, correct? One thing I found revealing was anitxeele saying, "There's also content added something like every four days." The free version seems pretty bland & content free - the rumors don't say much beyond the facts of "x is scarce" or "y has closed the starport", and the worlds are all pretty interchangeable.

If the free version is not representative of what playing the paid game is like, you're losing a lot of potential customers (like me?). I'm not asking for more fun free stuff - I'm really interested in liking a game like this, but the free version isn't selling it.

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts/elaborations on what I think could be improved:

1. Better feedback on what's happening: From what people talk about here, the model behind the interactions in the game seems pretty sophisticated, but from the perspective of the player, it may as well be a coin flip that determines why stuff is happening. I'm not even asking for hard numbers for a lot of this stuff - even a "excellent/good/fair/poor" rating would be sufficient. Some examples of stuff in the game that seems like it must be determined by my actions, but for the life of me just seems random:

1.A Ship combat: Why are my shots hitting or missing; why can't I close or escape. What is difference between "Acknowledge" and "Ignore". Why am I able to avoid 95% of all hostile encounters by just hitting "Ignore". Why am I able to see the name/class of a ship, but not see any stats on it until I enter combat, even though I've encountered that class before? Where are bonuses/penalties coming from (e.g., weapons in cargo, morale, # of crewmen, etc.).

1.B Politics: Why are factions angry/happy with me? If there's a price on my head, such that bounty hunters are after me, shouldn't I be aware of it like the rest of the universe appears to be? Why am I encountering so many ships while flying through the depths of space? Why am I encountering so many ships when I try to go into an urban zone on a planet? How do I distinguish ships representing a political authority from pirates or private citizens (this may be answered already in the game, but I think it's buried under the wall of text that appears whenever I encounter a ship - but after encountering so many ships, it becomes tiresome to read the boilerplate text - see more under my comments on presentation).

1.C Exploring/Harvesting: I haven't done much of this; I was excited about the idea of exploring, but I only ever found a handful of resources, and I'd often lose 12+ members of my crew with no real insight into how I could avoid this in the future, so I learned pretty early (perhaps wrongly) that exploring was not worth it. But mostly it's an issue of the process appearing unknowably random and one-dimensional. I'm not a fan of playing slot machines in real life, and that's what exploring felt like.

1.D Trading: In the real world, I would be able to know what the "going rate" is for a trade, vs. what I am able to get because of my charm/negotiating skill/whatever. It would be nice to know if the points I'm dumping into those skills are worth it, as reflected by the price I get for stuff. My issues with trading, though, are mostly with presentation, below.

2. Presentation:

2.A Visibility: I play on a Droid Bionic, and the text & many symbols are eye-burningly small. I'm a developer and I write UIs myself, so I know this can be tricky, but it would be good to be able to let the user either change things like font scaling, or have it be automatic, or something in between. As it stands, there's a lot of stuff that is important, but is pretty unreadable - like the fuel levels when on the Zoom map, or some of the weird symbols that appear next to planet names.

2.B Names: The Zoom map is not too useful - symbols next to the planets indicating affiliation, some abstraction of resource availability (based on my recent knowledge), what services are available, as well a marker indicating relevant rumors would be great.

2.C Walls of Text: You may be proud of the writing you've done in the game, but I can tell you that I really don't spend time to read it, particularly because I'm presented with so much of it at once. The first few times I landed on a planet I read the stuff on the right hand side; after that I just scanned it for relevant tidbits. Same goes with Rumors; at that point, you may as well be presenting the info in a table, with tic marks or prices for what I care about.

3. Overall UI philosophy: I'm getting the feeling that the development on this game is following the same arc as Dwarf Fortress - the dev is spending time rolling out new behind-the-scenes tweaks to the engine, when what it really needs is an overhaul to the user experience. I don't expect flashy graphics from a game like this, but if I spend most of my time navigating menus, I want that to be efficient. The #1 rule: Give the user information that is relevant to the context they're in. Some ways to do this:

1. Think of the UI from a task-oriented perspective, rather than a geography-oriented one. When I'm on a planet, I don't really want to snake in & out of menus to get to examine all the contracts - I'd like to deal with all the contracts at once. Same with rumors, or ship repairs. At least trading is all in one place, but once I'm there, I'd like to see, next to the price, a best sell/buy price based on my database of known prices.

Think about how the user ends up using your UI: specifically, gathering rumors. The first few times I got rumors, I would reach each carefully, but soon I found that they fell into a few broad categories (fluff, game info, info about the setting, commodity shortage/surplus, closings, danger, etc.), so I would just scan the text. Then I realized that sometimes a site would have dozens of rumors and even this was too tiresome, so now when I gather rumors, I just hammer on the "Next Rumor" button as fast as I can until it grays out, then just look at the rumors in my rumor database. I'm guessing that this is not the behavior you want your players to be experiencing.

As I'm sure you've heard - the rumor list screen needs some better organization. There's too much text - it should just be a table, preferably user-sortable. All I want to see are how old (not dates - I don't want to have to do math in my head), location, type, resource (for shortage), building (for closings), etc. It's great that I can plot a course to the rumor, but why do I have to then exit out through many levels of menus to get back to flying my ship? This is a problem all over the game, as I see it - lots of drilling down through multiple screens, then backing up.

The Status screen, with all its subscreens, seems really arbitrary in organization. Shouldn't the range of my current fuel supply be in the ship area? Shouldn't rumors and contracts be in proximity to each other, as they represent things I want to do? Again, the guiding principal should be task-based, not thing-based (captain/ship/cargo). And it doesn't matter if the same information is duplicated across multiple task areas.

I realize that some of my suggestions seem contradictory - larger text, more information - but I think its achievable if you get rid of a lot of the information that isn't relevant to the tasks at hand. I'm not an Android developer, but I'm guessing that the reason the UI is the way it is stems from the fact that you're trying to get as much work done as possible using built-in dialog box features & other basic widgets. You may want to consider rolling your own UI elements (or customizing; I don't know the Android way) that are tailored to the tasks in the game.

Anyway, I hope this comes across as helpful rather than preachy or whiny. Good luck!

[bigboote66]

Oh, another thing:

I have nothing against perma-death games, but I think its important that in games like this, you make it clear to the player why they died, and give them some insight into what went wrong. Otherwise, it's like trying to have Venus Williams teach you how to play tennis by having her play as hard as she can against you: the gulf between what you're supposed to do and what you did is basically unknowable, so it's hard to figure out how to move forward.

[taatuu25]

I hope this can be achieved, but the game engine may not support these.. And i think there is not enough space on my device. If the text were any bigger, aguff would not fit in one screen. I think of a aecondary layout for tablets?

I ESPECIALLY would like the inclining of important text.
(we have this blah blah blah blah blah AGAINST CADAR SYNDICATE blah blah IN SPICE HALL blah blah blah so as it is, it must be did in 20 WEEKS or shalun will do this and this and that and that and blah blah blah blah...)