Sinatar
Arbiter
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2014
- Messages
- 569
I managed to craft the soldier one, pretty underwhelming. Gives +5% to all resists, +10% xp and +10% loot find.
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KickStarter StarCrawlers - indie sci-fi dungeon crawling RPG
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
gestalt11
Arbiter
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2015
- Messages
- 629
Apparently they are all these same stats for all classes.
Zetor
Arcane
You'll want to take advantage of at least one
lol i picked none of those. well i guess i'll re-spec. i wouldn't normally but as things are right now my current party's skills make each battle so long it's nigh-not-worth-playing. Beginning to see the "procedurally generated" aspects as well by now, but ah well. it's good for what it is. the decision to force the player to keep LMB depressed for taking an action during combat is beyond retarded though.
Sad to see there's a roflstomp right way to build your party and other skills are worthless. 
if the game made it easier to mass-edit enemy hp values (grr Unity) one could simply halve all enemy (perhaps except bosses) HP values and raise by 25% the effectiveness of the 2-skill-tress that are worthless in every class, and leave the 1-good-tree each class has as is.
but, alas... Unity.
the simply change I just typed out would immediately "fix" the biggest flaw in the game as-it-is-right-now, obviously not taking into account low-level system mechanics but simply superficial changes.
but, alas... Unity.
the simply change I just typed out would immediately "fix" the biggest flaw in the game as-it-is-right-now, obviously not taking into account low-level system mechanics but simply superficial changes.
Sykar
Arcane
That is also a major gripe of mine and primarily due to the baffeling 5 skills per character limitation. I just do not get why he put in a 5 skills limitation when you can reach around level 25-30 by the end of the game and can max two trees basically which gives you around 8-10 skills easily but around half those skill points are wasted in actives you never use and quite often the passives you get are of little value to your main tree as well. More synergy between the trees is needed.
The other gripe I have is the lack of attributes. It could be as simplisitic as D2 and still add significant value and build variety.
Something like:
STR: Basic Melee damage and skills, inceased aggro?, extra inventory slots? (Ninja primarily, Soldier maybe?)
AGI or DEX: Basic Ranged damage and skills, dodge/evasion (Smuggler, Soldier primarily)
WIL: Ability damage and some resists (Void Psyker, Force Psyker primarily)
INT: Ability damage and improved dungeon exploration skills (Hacker, Engi primarily)
VIT: Health and physical damage reduction
SPD: Faster turns, maybe even slightly increased dungeon speed depending on the slowest member (up to 15% maybe?)
Should not have been too hard to implement and would add quite a bit of depth.
Lastly at least a rudamentary tactics system with front row and back row at least.
Yeah.
It confuses me to no end why such a basic, yet tactically important system is not implemented in many games like this.
It would immediately solve Starcrawlers' problem that enemies target primarily the same character (and tend to aim at the weakest).
After my respec (focusing on one tree instead of two), the game became playable again, now even Hard missions are manageable. But it is also obvious that some trees require at least some minor cross-tree skills.
For example, the void psyker's summoning tree (which I'm focusing on) has one ability that generates void power. One simply isn't enough, so you need to tap into another tree for another generator.
In total, I find the the game absolutely recommendable, but it doesn't have the depth of a Wiz 8, obviously.
Then again, I'm just happy that it's not another Dance Dance Revolution that pretends to be an RPG.
Emmanuel2
Savant
I just played and finished the game on Hardcore Ironman (NG), clocked 25 hours. I refused to play the game due to how the Hacker trivialized all content back then, but having read of the butthurt induced by the nerf I decided to come back in. Now she's in a good spot for an NG playthrough, can't say yet for NG+/NG++ though.
Party was:
Party was:
- Soldier - Heavy - 18 Tactics / 15 Specialist
- Smuggler - Pistol - 18 Traps / 15 Gunslinger
- Hacker - Paired Melee - 6 Rootkit / 18 Malware / 9 Optimization
- Void Psyker - Paired Melee/Heavy Melee - 21 Evoker / 12 Summoner
Grampy_Bone
Arcane
On-topic with Starcrawlers--
I had the game crash near the end of a map and haven't gone back to it. I'm not sure why it makes saving so obtuse considering it isn't a true roguelike/ironman/permadeath game, but whatever. I was definitely feeling the HP bloat and random battles just being a slog.
With the Force Psyker I was immune to all damage, but only if his turn came up early. If he went last I was out 10-30% of my HP in the first round. With healing so limited in this game I felt I needed to address this but couldn't see how. I could start investing or respec in his barrier tree maybe. I wasn't finding any items that boosted his initiative enough to guarantee a first turn.
With Ninja-Soldier-Hacker all enemies would die in an explosion of lovely particle effects during round 2 or 3 at the latest. Success was guaranteed, but there was a random "HP tax" depending on when Force Psyker got his turn. I.... guess this isn't too far off from any other RPG, but it felt somehow unsatisfying. I probably won't be going back to this.
I had the game crash near the end of a map and haven't gone back to it. I'm not sure why it makes saving so obtuse considering it isn't a true roguelike/ironman/permadeath game, but whatever. I was definitely feeling the HP bloat and random battles just being a slog.
With the Force Psyker I was immune to all damage, but only if his turn came up early. If he went last I was out 10-30% of my HP in the first round. With healing so limited in this game I felt I needed to address this but couldn't see how. I could start investing or respec in his barrier tree maybe. I wasn't finding any items that boosted his initiative enough to guarantee a first turn.
With Ninja-Soldier-Hacker all enemies would die in an explosion of lovely particle effects during round 2 or 3 at the latest. Success was guaranteed, but there was a random "HP tax" depending on when Force Psyker got his turn. I.... guess this isn't too far off from any other RPG, but it felt somehow unsatisfying. I probably won't be going back to this.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,424
Huh: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/06/12/starcrawlers-review/
Wot I Think: StarCrawlers
StarCrawlers [official site] is a game about punks and rebels – people eking out a living on the edge of space by stealing, smuggling and doing odd jobs for the shady corporate entities that run the galaxy. It’s cyberpunk, but with the soul of Firefly and the mechanics of Eye of the Beholder. These different inspirations fit together neatly, rather than competing, resulting in a cohesive and ambitious party-based dungeon-crawler.
Whenever I’m perusing the job board inside the local saloon in STIX, the game’s hub, I think about Clerks. Specifically, I think about debate around the contractors working on the Death Star when it’s destroyed by the Rebels. “Speaking as a roofer, a roofer’s personal politics comes into play heavily when choosing jobs,” a customer interjects. So does a smuggler’s. At least this one’s.
See, quests in StarCrawlers are not glory-filled adventures where villagers are helped and big bads are slain. They are generally illegal, morally questionable, and tend to favour nasty corporations while screwing over their competitors. This means that almost every job you do is going to piss someone off, at least a little bit. And a Crawlers rep is their most important resource. It translates into new weapons and armour, information, help with avoiding the wrath of enemy corps – all purchased with favours earned from jobs or hostile acts against the competition.
The games of one-upmanship being played by the corps and the groups seeking to loosen their grip on humanity paint a vivid picture of the galaxy, with minimal exposition getting in the way. Though the story is fat with conspiracies, politics and revolution, it’s all told simply, and the game never loses itself in its attempt to construct an interesting galaxy. There’s only ever a few lines of dialogue between you and your next morally questionable adventure.
Mid-mission, there are even more ways to make new friends and foes. The grid-based dungeons are labs, offices and spaceships full of terminals to hack and lockers to break into, and along with loot, you might find secret documents or fancy prototypes. Special finds can be sold at auction back at STIX for money, rep and items, but some can also be sent directly to a specific corp for a big payday. All of these things affect a Crawler team’s standing, and also necessitates a team that can get into those hard to reach places.
StarCrawlers classes are an eclectic bunch, featuring sci-fi mainstays like Hackers and Engineers, along with more unusual ones, like the Force and Void Psykers – essentially the game’s magic users. Each has their own personality, as well as exploration and dialogue skills that unlock extra options, like hacking terminals or fiddling with people’s minds. They’re all helpful, though the Hacker’s abilities see far more use than the others. Unless a room is completely empty, the hacker probably has some work to do. Thankfully, there’s no hacking mini-game, just a dialogue box and, sometimes, a few different options on how to proceed. The rest is left up to RNG.
Expect to spend more time fighting than exploring and looting, however. Rare is the door that doesn’t hide an enemy on the other side. Robotic waiters, medical bots, horrible alien beasties and scimitar-waving pirates are just a few of the angry things waiting to murder your team of four rogues. They’re an odd bunch too, their designs skewing towards cartoony. Security bots lob orange cones, insane medical drops chuck toxic syringes – StarCrawlers is a bit wackier than your average gloomy cyberpunk setting.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of these peculiar threats are very bad at the whole murdering thing. Aside from the visual diversity, there aren’t many differences between them. A challenging enemy is usually just a damage sponge, not an opponent with surprising or tricky abilities. Yet I enjoy the scraps in StarCrawlers a great deal. It’s all down to the Crawlers themselves, as each is blessed with three very distinct ability trees and, even more importantly, wrinkles that make using these abilities risky.
Take the Void Psyker, for instance. They’re big fans of Cthulhu, for some reason, and use dark magic to harm enemies over time. Their big attacks require void energy, which can be generated by lesser abilities. However, void energy is exceptionally dangerous to just about everyone, including the Void Psyker. Once their meter fills up, there’s a chance that the energy will erupt out of them, making them faint while harming everyone in the room.
Time is another resource that demands attention. Every ability has a specific number of units of time attached to it. The higher the number, the further back in the order of attack the character will be placed once it uses the ability. So a powerful or charged ability might force a character to wait for everyone else to get two turns, while a basic attack could be used twice in a row, potentially. It’s the system rather than the foes that require tactical thinking to overcome.
Engaging though battles may be, there’s still just a little too much combat. With the countless side missions and the optional but recommended grinding for loot and experience, there’s no end to the fighting, and by the halfway mark, it starts to lose steam. There are too many of the same fights that are a foregone conclusion. Objectives suffer similarly, but they start repeating right from the get-go.
Main missions fair better, though. They’re hand-crafted, so the dungeons tend to be more elaborate, and usually contain extra objectives and optional paths. And there’s the story driving them forward, a space yarn with its share of intrigue and rebellion. Like the side missions, however, it’s still very much tied to reputation and the squabbles of corporations.
I’ve found myself treating StarCrawlers like a game with a morality system, despite the absence of one. That’s not what the rep system is, but for me it serves the same purpose. Sure, sometimes I do jobs just to make ends meet, but whenever there’s an opportunity to help the vulnerable, especially when it cost the corps something, I take it. But unlike a lot of proper morality systems, the game doesn’t assume anything. Maybe I’m still just in it for the money. Maybe I just want to watch the galaxy burn. I determine why I’m doing something, not the game.
Making the most out of reputation means going on countless runs, procedural mission after procedural mission. Quantity is a necessity, and for a small developer like Juggernaut Games, the best way to create lots of missions and ways to influence the corps is procedural generation. It’s just a shame that procedural generation is also a really good way of making everything feel far too familiar. After a dozen hours, it’s all just variants of the same dungeons over and over again.
By the time I grew a bit bored of the dungeons, however, I was already invested. So that I didn’t need to keep checking the corp information menu, I even scribbled down my grudges or the names of groups I needed to butter up in my Little Book of Debts. Even more than Syndicate or Shadowrun Returns, StarCrawlers manages to capture the essence of cyberpunk and turn it into compelling systems. Despite the concessions made in the name of ambition, it’s an impressive dungeon romp.
StarCrawlers is out now on Windows, Mac and Linux via Steam and GOG for £15/$20/€20.
Last edited by a moderator:
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
Sykar
Arcane
But what happens if the reader happens to be a virgin?
i began a whole new playthrough of SC with the new patch today. WIll make a small blog-post about it regarding how the first three "story missions" (don't plan on wasting time doing anything else) "feel" with the new patch.
at the very very very least it should make the ninja feel more of a damage contributer as the skill(s) (of the ninja) that got buffed are their indisputably "best" skill tree.
the game's major underlying problem still remains the insane enemy HP bloat and the lack of in-depth mechanics for the player to get into once the honeymoon phase is over (which for me is around right after finishing the 3rd story-mission, not counting the tutorial-mission).
plus i still can't fucking believe i have to force my mangled, disabled-ass fingers to keep the LMB held down just to access in-combat menu actions. the more I play StarCrawlers the more I am moving to the camp that opines that this "feature" alone renders the game unplayable.
...yes, i said unplayable.
at the very very very least it should make the ninja feel more of a damage contributer as the skill(s) (of the ninja) that got buffed are their indisputably "best" skill tree.
the game's major underlying problem still remains the insane enemy HP bloat and the lack of in-depth mechanics for the player to get into once the honeymoon phase is over (which for me is around right after finishing the 3rd story-mission, not counting the tutorial-mission).
plus i still can't fucking believe i have to force my mangled, disabled-ass fingers to keep the LMB held down just to access in-combat menu actions. the more I play StarCrawlers the more I am moving to the camp that opines that this "feature" alone renders the game unplayable.
...yes, i said unplayable.
Emmanuel2
Savant
I finished NG++ HC/Ironman before this patch at level 69 (last mission was at default level 90) last week.
The game has plenty of depth and mechanics to consider at the higher NGs but not everybody has the time (and especially patience) to go through all of those and at a higher difficulty. Essentially, there are no "best" trees to consider over the other now since you literally get everything at around ~level 60. The game leaves you to experiment with the synergy between the classes, how you build/plan your party overall and how the equipment you find complement/make the builds themselves. I appreciated the game much more once I realized that the game revolves around items, planning, factions, and your party synergy (especially the limited 5 active skills).
You can build your soldier as a damage dealer, a tanker or an AoE king if you built the items and the party right. Smuggler as a support, a CCer, or a damage dealer. The void psyker as a heavy CCer, damage dealer, support. Etc.
The only class IMHO that is essentially stuck to a single role is cyber ninja.
The HP bloat never goes away but the "band-aid" solution of the game to that is by having weapon damage outscale their growth. In later NG/NG+, you will clearing entire groups in Random Missions but unfortunately are very, very far from testing your party's true capabilities since they're all piss-easy.
Class balance still has a long way to go since the 2 other people I know who finished HC/Ironman NG++ (level 64 and level 100 parties) including me has Hacker in the team but both of them has Force Psyker. Hardcore only however has alot of party options with someone beating the game with an engineer tank/dps IIRC + a prototype.
The game has plenty of depth and mechanics to consider at the higher NGs but not everybody has the time (and especially patience) to go through all of those and at a higher difficulty. Essentially, there are no "best" trees to consider over the other now since you literally get everything at around ~level 60. The game leaves you to experiment with the synergy between the classes, how you build/plan your party overall and how the equipment you find complement/make the builds themselves. I appreciated the game much more once I realized that the game revolves around items, planning, factions, and your party synergy (especially the limited 5 active skills).
You can build your soldier as a damage dealer, a tanker or an AoE king if you built the items and the party right. Smuggler as a support, a CCer, or a damage dealer. The void psyker as a heavy CCer, damage dealer, support. Etc.
The only class IMHO that is essentially stuck to a single role is cyber ninja.
The HP bloat never goes away but the "band-aid" solution of the game to that is by having weapon damage outscale their growth. In later NG/NG+, you will clearing entire groups in Random Missions but unfortunately are very, very far from testing your party's true capabilities since they're all piss-easy.
Class balance still has a long way to go since the 2 other people I know who finished HC/Ironman NG++ (level 64 and level 100 parties) including me has Hacker in the team but both of them has Force Psyker. Hardcore only however has alot of party options with someone beating the game with an engineer tank/dps IIRC + a prototype.
adding simple attribute system to each class (since there are no 'races') would make the game 100000000000000000x better/deeper/etc. Since adding completely new content (such as races) now is totally not practical for such a small Dev Studio; they could:
- they can simply release w/ a future patch "palette-swap" class variants, i.e. no new art assets whatsoever just Ninja class "A" (as a mere example) and ninja class "B", etc...
- ...and each class variant can then come with their own simple suite of Attributes (i.e. "Primary Stats").
- optionally they can then make/allow the player to "roll" those stats upon choosing/hiring a crawler, or simply (and maybe better) have the class variant's "Attributes" be randomly generated when going to the hiring Board.
There. I just fucking fixed the entire game in 1 post with a solution that requires zero new art assets whatsoever.
Lower the HP bloat by a flat 25-30%, and boom, game of the fucking year. GODDAMN why am i not making this shit, sigh.
EDIT: furthermore in order to deepen the itemization in the game these new class "variants" (again, just an example...) can sometimes be locked out of some specific gear while having access to other specific items for that class that another variant might not have access to;
...if that's too "hard core" then make it so a new crafting item eliminates that restriction. Ugh fixing games is so easy!!!
- they can simply release w/ a future patch "palette-swap" class variants, i.e. no new art assets whatsoever just Ninja class "A" (as a mere example) and ninja class "B", etc...
- ...and each class variant can then come with their own simple suite of Attributes (i.e. "Primary Stats").
- optionally they can then make/allow the player to "roll" those stats upon choosing/hiring a crawler, or simply (and maybe better) have the class variant's "Attributes" be randomly generated when going to the hiring Board.
There. I just fucking fixed the entire game in 1 post with a solution that requires zero new art assets whatsoever.
Lower the HP bloat by a flat 25-30%, and boom, game of the fucking year. GODDAMN why am i not making this shit, sigh.
EDIT: furthermore in order to deepen the itemization in the game these new class "variants" (again, just an example...) can sometimes be locked out of some specific gear while having access to other specific items for that class that another variant might not have access to;
...if that's too "hard core" then make it so a new crafting item eliminates that restriction. Ugh fixing games is so easy!!!
YES!
Hi, I'm Roqua
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2017
- Messages
- 2,088
I disagree attributes are not feasible for a small dev studio.
I like this game and enjoyed the time I played it, but it is too lite. The art is beautiful, the controls work well, the trees are okay, the itemization is barely acceptable, the game is very content lite, and it really needs to be more meaty in the character generation and building department to ever warrant multiple playthroughs. Even with the rpg-lite system, adding more rpg game content by way of quests, unlocking new shops or areas or something. There just isn't enough non-repetitive stuff to do.
The game is definitely worth buying and definitely worth playing, but barely meets the criteria for being an rpg. What it has is good, but needs more. I wished they aimed for a Wiz8 or MMX type game content instead of the main and generic mission system included.
Emmanuel2
Savant
You could try suggesting on the forums I guess, the dev does read them regularly and sometimes participate.
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