Thoughts from an Old STE Player

[MTKnife]

I played the original Star Traders years agos. I bought STF on PC right after it came out, but never got around to playing it, but I recently got the Android version, to play on my Chromebook.

Some kudos:

• This is a much richer game, with detailed crew management, storylines, crew combat, and the card games.
• I LOVE how the interface scales with screen size. I've opened it on my 11" Chromebook, my 10" tablet, and my phone, and the GUI is different on each one, hiding more buttons as the screen gets smaller. Well done.

I have a couple of concerns that have carried over from the original:

• I don't really see smuggling (in the sense of carrying illegal goods, as opposed to mission datacubes) as a viable career choice. The key problem, as it was in the original game, is that, to make smuggling work, you have to build up rep with black market contacts. That can be done, but unless you need to dump goods that are illegal almost everywhere (i.e., Xeno artifacts), it's just not worth the effort, compared with getting trade permits. A trade permit is just about as hard to get as black market access, but works on every planet for the faction in question. By contrast, to use the black market for actual trade (rather than just dumping artifacts--the black market works great for explorers, not smugglers), you have to cultivate contacts at both ends of your trade route, and you'd better hope they're on the right sorts of planets for the goods you want to trade. It's a little jarring in the first place that your access to the black market depends heavily on faction rep, since, after all, the whole point of a black market is you're selling stuff against the faction law; in fact, in the real world, one of the most common cases for the growth of large smuggling networks had been trade across the lines of warring countries--and that's nearly impossible in STF. In any case, aside from the realism question, it just isn't balanced. Why not have black market access apply more broadly, like trade permits? However, instead of buying a faction permit, you could obtain access to networks for particular types of goods; in fact, the game has certain types of goods, like spice and weapons, where there are already different gradations with different levels of legality. Another option is to make access regional, say, for a particular quadrant.
• When I encounter a ship in deep space, how do I know the captain is a spy? Or anything else for that matter? But the spy is the silliest one:
  I mean, is that something you're going to announce every time you meet someone?

And some thoughts specific to the new game:

• I know it's been said before, but in ship combat, I'd love to see some indication of whether or not my crew needs healing, without having to dig through the log.
• After the middle game, I don't have anything to do with my money. It's relatively easy, just running lots of concurrent missions, to rack up 4 or 5 million credits over a period of under 5 years, and after I buy an endgame ship, what am I going to do with that money? (Yeah, I could buy an even bigger ship, but above a certain point, they're too slow, and you can't switch back and forth, because moving to a smaller one means releasing crew.) In STF, this is a particularly critical question, because, if you're playing for the sandbox aspect, or if you've finished all the storylines, earning and spending money is almost all the game is about.
• I think crew combat has a bad interaction with the power curve: enemy crews get better and better as the game progresses, but eventually, the player's crew is going to roll badly in a battle with Xeno, and someone is going to fail a death save, and you won't be able to replace them with anyone close to the present power-curve level. And then you have an ugly snowball, and either the rest get killed, or you give up crew combats altogether. Yes, the storylines allow you to recruit a couple of effective combatants (Vytatas, obviously, and Elsa if you build her for combat), but that's not much.
• I'd love to see a drydock interface that lets me play around with ship designs, so that nothing is finalized until I hit the "Retrofit" button, and I'm not charged for changing out the same slot twice.

[MTKnife]

A couple of solutions to the crew combat problem occur to me. One possibility is that enemy crews feature fighters of uneven levels, with the unevenness increasing at higher levels. Another solution, which would be a lot more work, is to provide more ways to recruit high-level crew members. (That might even be something to spend money on--as it is, it's absurd how little the crew gets paid; I'm surprised they don't mutiny constantly due to the fact that the captain keeps millions while paying them peanuts. )

[daveal]

Lots of good feedback points here.

For replacing high level combat crew, many people say the most effective way is to conscript, one at a time, using the QM/Dip talents to prevent poor morale. In fact on high difficulty levels you can recruit crew considerably higher level than your own. I often make sure to rely on combat crew with one base class like soldier, and then I keep some crew around with that single class. They just level up in the background. In case of an unexpected combat crew death, I can promote that high level crew to an officer. That requires me to keep one level of their original skill, and then I can choose whatever other levels I want. (In case for RP reasons you were playing with permadeath but you can't stand to lose that officer, you can also rename the new officer to the same name and same appearance. But I never do that myself :-))

For deciding about healing in ship combat, sometimes I just click a healing talent, and it will tell me nobody needs to be healed. If you don't get hit much, that is enough information.

I agree that lack of a speculative drydock is a problem. Even on permadeath, I often externally save the game then buy whatever ship I wanted and play around with retrofitting it. In case that wasn't even the ship I wanted, I reload the game and try again.

I agree about spy and black market. Even for selling xeno artifacts, I find it easier to remember that occasional law 1 indie world.

Have you collected all the storylines and the variants of each one? (3+ Faen outcomes, 2+ arbiter outcomes)? The list is here:
startraders.gamepedia.com/Story_Vignettes

[MTKnife]

This last game, I started with an Aeternum Vindex, so not a lot of slack for backup crew--but anyway, you run out of those eventually.

I had thought about conscription, then forgotten about it, so thanks for reminding me. It seems like a very tortuous way of finding new crew, though, and I think I'd count it a flaw that it's the only viable path in this situation. Of course, crew can die in ship combat as well, but those deaths are spread out among a larger pool, and anyway, you have death save talents for those situations. I have to admit I don't understand why those talents don't apply to crew combat--maybe because having 3 or 4 available would make crew combat completely non-deadly?

As for saving before buying a ship, I wanted to do that, but I play on a Chromebook--and rooting the Chromebook Android container is no longer an option, because the project that allowed it seems to have been abandoned, and recent updates to the OS broke what was working before.

With the Faens, I can't stomach working for Erik or Zette. I'm not sure what you mean by two arbiter outcomes--do you mean the two different eras? As for the various vignettes, I've probably seen half of them so far--well, most of the major ones, at least.

[daveal]

I agree that conscription seems like taking advantage of an uncommon mechanic; I would much prefer if contacts weren't limited to such low level recruits. Once you get past level 10, it's painful to use contacts for this.

After falling in crew combat, the crew still gets a normal death save. I hadn't thought of applying the death save talents of other crew to that. I guess, if the doctor with the death save was right there on the combat crew, it might make sense. But normally I suppose the combat takes place away from the ship where a death save could not be applied in time.

There's a later era quest called Buried Demons for the arbiter, which can lead into two different subsequent eras.

[MTKnife]

Ah, I think I vaguely remember doing that one the first time I played through, a few weeks ago.

[fallen]

Sorry you haven't found Black Market to be viable. Keep in mind all of its benefits --

Besides ignoring the legality of goods and trading without the proper permit there are other advantages to trading in a Black Market. These include:

All sale prices are (25%) higher -- better profits for smugglers
Black Markets have less impact on supply / demand, allowing a captain to complete longer trading cycles in a single zone
All "big trade" talents in the Black Market are more powerful than their legal Exchange counterparts
Black Markets ignore conflicts such as Trade Bans

Thanks for all the feedback, we'll sort through and catalog the rest of this.

[Cory Trese]

Smuggler is definitely one of my favorite play styles in STF. One of the things I consistently hear from players, and see in saved games, is how much more popular smuggling is in STF.

I'm sorry to hear that it isn't working for you! I'm also sad to hear that you're not finding the crew combat interaction with the game's progression to be pleasing.

Some of the big money sinks we had planned for the late game were not funded in the Kickstarter and couldn't be built.

We will continue to work to improve STF where we can and look forward to a bright future of Star Traders: Frontiers 2.

[Cory Trese]

Nov 29, 2019 18:33:18 GMT -5 daveal said:

I agree that conscription seems like taking advantage of an uncommon mechanic; I would much prefer if contacts weren't limited to such low level recruits. Once you get past level 10, it's painful to use contacts for this.

Sorry to hear you're not finding the recruit boosting system to be fun. I've seen examples of players recruiting crew at almost level 20.

I'm disappointed to hear you see the cap as 10. That is very low compared to a average players.

I will do some investigation to see if there are missing hint texts or perks we can highlight more.

Thanks for playing!

[daveal]

I would love to be wrong. At max p-rep, without any faction bonus, the highest level for a recruited contact is 6, right? And that doesn't scale by the captain's level. A captain with high faction military level can add up to 3 ranks at the highest level for a very few crew types. If you happen to also have a rumor, in a quadrant with that same contact, which adds onto the same crew type (which is vanishingly rare), that can add another 2 levels to certain crew types. How could you get a contact recruit of level 20?

[fallen]

Nov 30, 2019 10:44:26 GMT -5 daveal said:

I would love to be wrong. At max p-rep, without any faction bonus, the highest level for a recruited contact is 6, right? And that doesn't scale by the captain's level. A captain with high faction military level can add up to 3 ranks at the highest level for a very few crew types. If you happen to also have a rumor, in a quadrant with that same contact, which adds onto the same crew type (which is vanishingly rare), that can add another 2 levels to certain crew types. How could you get a contact recruit of level 20?

No. For the very basic start, with just P Rep without any faction bonuses, you can recruit at level 8.

If you add Rank, Edict or Permit bonuses, the highest is 12. That's just counting the basic bonuses you can get from your Contact.

If you have a Contact with the right Traits, you can get 15.

With Rumors 18.

Sorry you dislike the system.

[resistor]

Nov 30, 2019 10:44:26 GMT -5 daveal said:

I would love to be wrong. At max p-rep, without any faction bonus, the highest level for a recruited contact is 6, right?...

It is 8

[daveal]

It's not that I dislike the system, it's just that I feel the max recruitable level is too low. Thanks for explaining how you can get up to level 18, but that requires two big coincidences to happen at the same time. I would need a contact with the faction where I have high rank, and that contact has the right traits, and the right rumor comes in that quadrant. If I have level 30 crew, even recruiting a level 18 is too low. Is it possible to add, say, captain level / 4 to the recruit level? That would make conscription much less of an "obvious right answer". I always feel weird when I attack a faction I hate, for conscription, and wind up taking this hated enemy crewman to be my primary pilot or something.

[Cory Trese]

Thanks for the feedback. We will keep working to improve.

[MTKnife]

Nov 30, 2019 9:42:11 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Smuggler is definitely one of my favorite play styles in STF. One of the things I consistently hear from players, and see in saved games, is how much more popular smuggling is in STF.

I'm sorry to hear that it isn't working for you! I'm also sad to hear that you're not finding the crew combat interaction with the game's progression to be pleasing.

Some of the big money sinks we had planned for the late game were not funded in the Kickstarter and couldn't be built.

We will continue to work to improve STF where we can and look forward to a bright future of Star Traders: Frontiers 2.

I almost always pick Smuggler as my starting profession: the escape trait is invaluable. And running illegal data cubes and passengers, both of which benefit from the escape trait and Hideout, provide a very lucrative path.

However, the math of smuggling *goods* just doesn't work; I don't think it's even a debatable point. The black market may pay more, but an extra 25% doesn't nearly make up for being restricted to a handful of systems, for most of which you have to work your butt off for access. I can grind rep to open up the black market on one world, or I can do the same for a trade permit to open up 30 systems scattered across the galaxy. It's a no-brainer.

Yes, you can potentially make a profit, but it's still not as good as legal trade. Maybe you could come close if you limited 8 yourself to a handful of set routes, but that's not compatible with running missions...and it would be excruciatingly boring.

More than that though is the thematic aspect: the only way to be a successful criminal is to earn a good reputation with the faction authorities, and being a successful criminal in one faction's space has no impact elsewhere: in fact, if two factions are at odds, it's practically impossible to build up the high rep with both that would let you trade valuable goods between them. And anyway, there's hardly anything that's consistently illegal--it's easier to find a world with low trade law than to find a world with a black market contact and then cultivate him or her. In short, even when you do use the black market,it doesn't feel like smuggling: it feels like a more time-consuming and slightly dangerous version of regular trading.