How to predict missions you’re guaranteed to fail at?

[constantvitalrivet]

I’m new to this game, but starting to get the hang of it on Basic difficulty, and planning to start over to now that I have some clue what I’m doing.

Anyway I’ve been burned more than once taking on missions that involved a lot of time and hyper warp jumps, only to find that to complete the mission I needed to win some ship combat or crew combat where I was hopelessly outmatched. Is there a way to assess if I’m just asking for an ass-kicking? I’m thinking like if the credit value relative to the number of jumps looks high compared to other early missions, it might be too risky? I got burned this way on a couple of missions in a row where I was trying to build my reputation with a new faction, and besides not getting the cash payment, I also didn’t get the reputation bump I was hoping for.

[brentaur]

If you read the mission briefings carefully before you accept them you can tell if you will have to engage in ship or crew combat to complete them. After a while you'll know just by the mission titles which are which. On a lot of my playthroughs I never take ship combat missions. A lot of other missions (exploring and spying missions for instance) will require you to risk possibly ending up in combat situations (even stashing goods can lead to fights). I don't think there's a good way to tell from the payment for the missions how dangerous they are likely to be. In ship combat in particular there's a fine line between what you can safely handle and what will likely get you killed. I've been wiped out on missions that I thought my ship and crew could handle plenty of times. When playing with permadeath/on higher difficulties it is easy to get killed when deciding to risk almost anything. I lost a captain recently flying through a hostile faction's sector when i got stopped twice in a row and didn't have enough fuel left for a second skip off the void. No heavy patrol rumors or anything, just tough luck. In hindsight I wasn't under any time pressure and should have just gone the long way around...

My best advice would be to either learn to appreciate the experience of trying things out and having to restart on a pretty regular basis, or judge all choices carefully with the understanding that you could end up dying even when taking what seem like small risks. That can actually be a pretty fun way to roleplay it; it gives the game a much darker feel (more like the Walking Dead than Firefly).

[constantvitalrivet]

Yeah I found for example, on a set of missions that come out of trying to establish unionist commitments from faction leaders, one mission involved a set of combats with Hanna pirates that I handled just fine, but another mission ended with some ship combat against a pirate that way outclassed me. But yeah some of the missions that involved spying or transporting a passenger that end up resulting in a combat that kicked my butt. Anyway it’s not so much that that’s causing me to restart, because that could be a fun part of role playing, finding yourself in over your head (although I’m not interested in permadeath...) But I’m otherwise recognizing a series of poor decisions about ship and crew building that I’d like to start over with.

[brentaur]

If you're like me that will probably continue for a good long while. I'm still learning and adhusting my approach to things. There are a ton of guides and build threads here, and onthe Steam forums and Discord that are full of good information. I learned a TON from working on the unlocks, which pushed me to play outside my comfort zone of playstyles. In the end, STF is a Trese Brothers game, which means deep, complex, and challenging. It's intended to be played over and over and to offer a lot of room for different approaches and experimentation. There is no "best" way to play, just lots of opportunities to enjoy it. And to die and learn something and then start a new run.