KickStarter Star Traders: Frontiers - space sandbox game by Trese Brothers

[ERYFKRAD]

Game needs barbarian profession and more than a few axes.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Nutria]

I've been playing again after a few years and I can say that there aren't any really huge new features but everything works better and is more balanced.

I guess it really is a labor of love for them.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Totally agree. I got it on early access I believe and it was playable but rough at that stage. Over the years, I've been on and off again with it, and I've gotta say it's much more cohesive than previously. Now, if they had some sort of end goal you could go, some way to end it, show your impact on certain groups, if any, etc. that would be good.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

the problem is always the same: the ships. not expensive enough, they all feel the same (even the new carrier) and bigger is always better, much better, by a gigantic shot. to the point that the biggest ship available is always faster and nimbler than anything else. the amount of different rooms *needed* to survive also is an issue because it drastically decreases the available builds, thus playstyles, thus fun. i can't larp if every game is the same.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I agree with you on that.

 

[Nutria]

the problem is always the same: the ships

Yeah, and I'd add to that there's no obvious progression of the ships. So I waste way too much of my time trying to figure out which one I want to buy.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Well, I'd like it if there was a genuine advantage to smaller ships over larger ones in some way, or there were elite versions of them or something. Like smaller ones were better at certain things, or had other advantages.

 

[Sarissofoi]

I just want to Star sector combat with political and contact global system from Star traders.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I mean more than just void though. Like, additional maneuverability or easy with advancing. The ability to outrun your opponents or just remain undetected altogether.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Blaine]

the problem is always the same: the ships. not expensive enough, they all feel the same (even the new carrier) and bigger is always better, much better, by a gigantic shot. to the point that the biggest ship available is always faster and nimbler than anything else. the amount of different rooms *needed* to survive also is an issue because it drastically decreases the available builds, thus playstyles, thus fun. i can't larp if every game is the same.

This is what has prevented me from playing this game.

Everything I read about the ships is a red flag—from their "progression" to how they're unlocked (meta-gaming ahoy!) to how they're equipped (from what I gather: they start with rubbish modules that you immediately delete, then cram with min-maxed shit) to the fact that bigger is apparently always better. And there is no doubt about that last one. Even random Steam users all agree that big old samey ships are the only way to go endgame, and much of midgame as well.

To be honest, the starship portion of a "dudes in a starship who fly around visiting places and doing shit" game is pretty fucking important to me, especially when ship-to-ship combat is a fundamental game mechanic and cock-blocking mechanism.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

To be honest, the starship portion of a "dudes in a starship who fly around visiting places and doing shit" game is pretty fucking important to me, especially when ship-to-ship combat is a fundamental game mechanic and cock-blocking mechanism

Have you tried Stellar Tactics by the way?

 

[Blaine]

To be honest, the starship portion of a "dudes in a starship who fly around visiting places and doing shit" game is pretty fucking important to me, especially when ship-to-ship combat is a fundamental game mechanic and cock-blocking mechanism

Have you tried Stellar Tactics by the way?

Yes, but for some bizarre reason it runs horribly on my rig. It judders, stutters, and hitches constantly, to the point that it's obnoxious and unplayable, and no combination of tweaks, alternation between G-Sync/v-sync, altering the refresh rate of my monitor, and uncapping the framerate (a new experimental option the developer added to Stellar Tactics) offers any relief.

It's probably a Unity game, all of which run like garbage on anyone's computer, but I can even get most Unity games to work far better than that.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/335620/view/3044975900137088065

Update #266: New Profession + This One is for the Modders
New Shock Trooper starting profession, modding improvements for beta creators

Spoiler

Last week, we opened the beta for mod creators, inviting them to come and check out the tools, get their feet wet and start creating. It has been a wild and wonderful week to see them in action and to learn about places where we can improve our support to really let their creativity run free in in the void.

While Update #266 is very much for our mod creators it also includes a very exciting -- and to be honest, a very risk -- starting profession! The Shock Trooper Captain has arrived and it is a rush. Living on the front line of every fight a snubber in hand. Hold on to your butts, here goes!
Shock Trooper
A Shock Trooper has been toughened and trained by some faction military, prepared for deadly battle in the closest of quarters. Whatever profession or career these warriors seek, they are likely to do it from the front ranks.

Picking this profession as a new captain may be especially challenging, if you plan to fight in the traditional way of a Shock Trooper. Access to the Shock Trooper profession has been locked behind the "Heir Apparent" unlock, which you can gain by helping Valencia on Normal or higher Difficulty.

Equipped with a snubber and the Battle Proven Trait ("Often set to a single, resolute purpose, +2 Fortitude, +2 Resilience, +2 Initiative, +20% Debuff Resist, Morale never breaks in Crew Combat") and the Undisputed Boarder Trait ("Charging to battle even from the bridge of their ship, gains +20 Boarding, +1 Initiative and +5 Range Change in Ship Combat") the Shock Trooper captain is a force to be reckoned with.

Be sure to set your Attributes high Priority!

An exciting early selection of mods is already coalescing!


Mod Creators Welcome
Last week we were excited to open the mod creators beta Steam group and have welcomed over 60 creators now to check out the tools, see what can be done and get their hands dirty. This flurry of activity has resulted in a list of places where we want to improve our support. But, as we are with updates for the mainline, we're jumping on updates for the modders during this beta process.

Rapid improvements are already arriving! :D

This 3.1.61 update for modding version of the game will arrive soon.
When it does --

A new data.JobConfig table now enables full add / replace / remove for both jobs and starting professions. This data.JobConfig table also allows easy marking of which Jobs have faction affinity, so you can add more, remove or change these as well. The Jobs that are recruited by Contact Traits can now be modified through the data.ContactTrait table. And we've retooled the SFX priority system to ensure all the database fields are used -- Talent > Weapon > default.

We'll be posting more on this update in the mod creators beta Steam group if you are interested!

Star Traders: Frontiers AnnouncementThu, May 20, 2021
Beta for Mod Creators is Open!
Blowing open the doors for mod creators to get in and get their hands dirty


v3.1.61 - 5/29/2021
- Added new Shock Trooper profession, the hardened military operative
- New unique Traits for Shock Trooper profession
- Shock Trooper profession requires "Heir Apparent" unlock (protect Valencia, Normal difficulty)
- Minor improvements to sorting of ship combat Talents within range groups
- Fixed misprints with Hota-Cored Shells boarding talent

Modding Kit v3.1.61
- Jobs and starting Professions now ready to be modded
- Faction affinity for Jobs now ready to be modded
- Jobs recruited by Contact Trait now ready to be modded
- Override SFX for ship weapon and crew weapons now ready to be modded

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Fucking awesome.

 

[lukaszek]

comparing this to their next game is so bizarre

 

[Saduj]

Does anyone know how many eras are in the game and whether there is a definitive end game era? I stopped playing shortly after the Crimson Pox era ended and the next event is a brood awakening.

Also re: bigger being better I don’t have any problem at all with the bigger ships being better in every way because that is closer to how it would work out in reality. Minus an atmosphere and gravity, there is no reason for smaller ships to be better at anything except stealth. I do agree that variety could be better. IMO it would help if different ships in the same weight class got different inherent bonuses that make them play differently. Stuff that you can’t compensate for by just having more room for components. As things are now the only major choice is carrier vs non carrier.

 

[Infinitron]

Over 3 Twitch streams, we built the story of the Spicetender Stratego and his traitorous cousin using the Star Traders: Frontiers modding toolkit. This 6 hour video contains basically everything you need to know to understand how to approach modding stories in Star Traders: Frontiers and shows the process -- and the thought process! -- from start all the way to finish.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/335620/view/3003324016167573939

We’re celebrating 3 years & nearly 300 updates for Star Traders: Frontiers!
Join us this Sunday, August 8th, at 8pm Eastern.
It’s a crazy summer, but we didn’t want to let this milestone pass unnoticed. It’s been 3 years since Star Traders: Frontiers launched on Steam!

This Sunday, at 8pm EDT, join us on Twitch for a community party! Join us (Andrew, Cory, and a whole bunch of you awesome players) to...

• Look back at some of the biggest changes to ST:F in the nearly 300 free updates we’ve made to the game.
  
• Showcase some of our favorite player creations & achievements. (If you have fan art or screenshots of your favorite captains / crews / achievements you’d like to share, post it in our Discord!)
  
• Get a preview of the upcoming Steam Workshop mod support.
  
• Talk about what’s still to come for Star Traders, both in Frontiers and (potentially, some day,
  purely hypothetically
  ), the next Star Traders game.
  
• Hang out, meet some cool people from the community, celebrate being a part of making Star Traders and Trese Brothers Games better and better (10+ years )!

We’ll see you on https://www.twitch.tv/TreseBrothers at 8pm Eastern, August 8th!

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/335620/view/3003324016169459583

Update #274: Long Shifts Night
New Talent Manifest section, improved Starport Boosted Rumor and community fixes

Update #274 arrives with a bevy of community requested improvements, new features, content balance and minor tweaks. A huge thanks, as always, to the big community surrounding the game, posting feedback, suggestions and reviews. As Update #274 goes live and modding is just around the corner, we're hitting our 3 year launch anniversary for the game and looking back to marvel at all that has happened. We've been busy, hitting an average update every 4.8 days if you include the 8 months of Early Access before launch.

If you've enjoyed the massive expansions and constant improvements to the game, we hope you'll take minute to leave a review and tell a friend -- there is no better way to thank us!

Live Streaming STF's Birthday
Also, we're celebrating a major milestone -- 3 years since launch and nearly 300 updates! -- this Sunday, August 8th, on Twitch if you want to join us for a live stream party.
But speaking of new -- if word hasn't trickled down from the tippity top of the New Boston spires, leaked below the streets and drip-drip-dripped into your safehouse, we're here to tell you about our upcoming turn-based cyberpunk heist RPG. Cyber Knights: Flashpoint will be coming to Steam in 2022 and mixes stealth, hacking and tactical combat with deep RPG elements and a unique heist system for missions. The wishlist button is calling your name, Knight.

New Mission Manifest
With this update, we've added a new section to the Talent Manifest to cover the wealth of options within Mission Talents. There are over 13 different variations listed here, each with their own angle or bonus. It is an immediately useful section in our playtesting and helps to highlight all the ways you can build out your crew to focus on mission success.

This also gave us a chance to look closely at all the rules for the different mission Talents and we did uncover one bug. The Military Officer Talent "Power Play" Talent has long been using the wrong Attribute, relying on Resilience instead of Charisma for its Reputation bonus %. Now fixed!

Starport Boosted Discount
The discount offered for Starport Boosted Rumor is now clearly codified into the game's Rumor list as well as displayed prominently in the starport when you're shopping. It's a solid 10% off, so you want to know in cases where that is saving you thousands of credits!

Tactician's Annex
This one came off the presses just too good! We've removed the Armor bonus for the Tactician's Annex.

v3.1.81 - 8/5/2021
- Added Mission Talents to Talent Manifest (13 variations)
- Corrected bug with Military Officer Talent "Power Play" which was using Resilience instead of Charisma
- Improved Starport Boosted Rumor listing to clarify 10% discount on component upgrades and make visible in starport
- Improved ship encounter bribe text for Merchants, Explorers Zealots and Bounty Hunters to be more specific
- Removed Armor Bonus from new Tactician's Annex component
- Fixed issue when enemy crew uses On Init debuff Talents such as Sniper's "Target Acquired" text printing in wrong side of screen
- Fixed issue when enemy Wing Command users "Ripcord" Talent messing up the combat order

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/335620/view/5694225455763993136

Update #275: Home Among the Stars​

Update #275 brings a major improvement to your quadrant map to make starred zones ever-visible as well as improving ship encounter messages, fixing an Explorer card, tweaking a ship price and making final preparation for the modding upgrade. Thanks, as always, to the community for making great suggestions on how to improve the game, reporting bugs and pointing out little places where we could put on a little more polish. We wouldn't have made it to Update #275 without such an amazing community gathered around the game, so many thanks!

The launch of Steam Workshop and full mod support is very close now. We're lucky to have had such an amazing crew of creators working on different improvements, adjustments and adds to the game. It's going to be awesome to see so many new things available to everyone on the first modding day!

Speaking of new, new new -- if word hasn't trickled down from the tippity top of the New Boston spires, leaked below the streets and drip-drip-dripped into your safehouse, we're here to tell you about our upcoming turn-based cyberpunk heist RPG. Cyber Knights: Flashpoint will be coming to Steam in 2022 and mixes stealth, hacking and tactical combat with deep RPG elements and a unique heist system for missions. The wishlist button is calling your name, Knight.

Stars on Quadrant Map
If you use Stars on your zones, they now appear right on the quadrant map as you pan or sail around. This really helps brings stars into constant consideration, avoids the need to use the Atlas and can help you spot and remember zones you might have otherwise forgotten. My captains are already grumbling about needing more colors!

Other Fixes
Update #275 is more specific about the Depart messages in ship encounters for Merchants, Smugglers and Explorers, removing vague warnings about losing Reputation in the cases when that is not a possible result. We've also improved the text on the explorer card "Wild Revelations" and increase the number of crew who can possibly gain XP. The price on the Neutiquam Cruiser had to be increase a few hundred grand and finally we clarified some text in new game Templates around who can use gear (some crew!)

While we've got a really nice update here, there is a lot more work going on behind the scenes to finalize the mod support in each of these updates. If you're enjoying the pace of updates, be sure to tell a friend and leave a review!

v3.1.83 - 8/15/2021
- Zone stars now appear on the quadrant map when sailing the void
- Improved depart messages from ship encounters for Merchants, Smugglers and Explorers
- Fixed "Wild Revelations" XP card in Explorer to reward 12 or more crew
- Fixed price issues with Neutiquam Cruiser
- Improved note about Contacts offering weapon/armor/gear in New Game Template

 

[Infinitron]

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/335620/view/2990941584237358128

The Road Ahead for Modding​

Checking in with modding v1 and looking at future roadmap

Now that mod support is released, let’s talk about where it will (and could) go from here. The last week since modding launched has been exciting with a lot of interest, thousands of subscribers to mods and a great update to the core game to boot. Now -- let's look at the road ahead for modding.

Spoiler

First: Mod Support v1
Thanks to our dedicated modders in the private beta, some of the mod support capabilities you’re seeing today are even better than we expected.

• A mod manager that merges SQL allows multiple mods to be installed and work seamlessly with each other with many fewer potential conflicts and much less configuration than we might have released originally.
  
• Story modding became a v1 priority. Modders now have everything they need to add their own story vignettes to the game. While creating quality stories is no small task (welcome to our world ), we think the potential for player-created story mods filling the Star Traders universe is one of the most exciting aspects of adding modding to the game.

In addition to those big wins, we’re proud to have v1 offer a broad foundation for modding to begin with:

• Everything in the game database is replaceable, or can be added to. Ships, weapons, gear, talents... pretty much anything with stats. Modders can rebalance, simplify, power up, or add to any of these things.
  
• All binary files in the game directory are replaceable. Graphics, sound effects,
  
• An extensive set of documentation. Upfront: this may not mean
  complete,
  but we’ve gone through a huge amount of data fields to make it more clear what each does and what your options are as a modder for using them.

Second: some necessary limitations
We want to be upfront about a few things that will not be possible with modding.

1) Hacking in crowd-sourced translation through modding.
While modders are welcome to create mods in any language, or even to attempt to rewrite the portions of in-game text that are contained within the game database, we want to be that there is still too much inaccessible text through the mod kit to complete a successful translation of the game.

We know translation is a popular request, but we want to be very clear up front that modding does not answer that request. As we’ve noted elsewhere, we’ve learned a lot from this entire process, and our next game will be translated from the start.

2) We won’t be adding a scripting language for mods (though we may add some additional scripted triggers / effects for modders to use, ourselves).
Star Traders: Frontiers is built on a custom engine, with a workflow heavily driven by data in the game database. While we’ve opened up the database, we can’t open up the engine, or provide a way for modders to hook in scripts without a far more extensive rebuild than we could handle with the mod kit at this date in the game's lifecycle.

However, we are listening daily to the modding community (and asking to!) to understand where there is interest for additional extensibility and hooks that can be used by the mod kit.

3) Modding Roadmap
As we have stated elsewhere -- we are continuing our work to update the base game, especially with some big upcoming story arcs and eras. At the same time, we have reserved some bandwidth to work closely with involved and interesting modding creators to expand the capabilities of the mod kit.

In-progress

• Save editor:
  while the modded game databases be modified at will with simple tooling, we are still looking forward to creating a saved game editor that will allow you to execute certain sets of commands against your saved games.
  
• Improving documentation:
  the doc team never sleeps because there is always more to write down! Star Traders: Frontiers is a surprisingly huge and deep game (did you notice?) and so documenting every in and out of its data-driven structure is going to be a process that continues for a long time.
  
• Crowd-sourcing talent effects:
  some of the ready-to-play mods already make exciting tweaks to Jobs but we're looking forward to the first completely New Job mod to appear. To this end, we'll be holding a brainstorming within the mod community looking for new types of Talent effects and triggers that could help define new Jobs and allow modders to create truly unique new combinations for your crew and officers.

Future possibilities

• Game Rule Control:
  while few rules are within reach of the mod kit today (maximum ship armor 75%) we will be working to move some of these -- those most interesting to the mod community -- into scope and play for mods over the next months.
  
• More Story Examples and Features
  : with the first story mod already published, we cannot wait to see more modder created storylines filling up the galaxy. As we continue to add story to the base game, we will be authoring these new storylines in the same that the modders can use, which will expand the base of examples to pull from. We're excited to work closely with any modder working on a stories as one of our top priorities to see this type of content expanding in the game and to work on building out features that specifically cater to their needs.
  
• Further authoring tool development:
  the modding community has already developed a pretty set of powerful authoring tools, some of which are publicly shared. Depending on the need and interest, we may further invest in helping the community make these tools easy to use and share for new modders coming on to the team.
  
• Card Control
  the mod kit does not include the contents and rules for card games today but if there is significant interest, this is a direction we could work to expand the kit.

Captains, I think you know by now that given unlimited time and resources we’d just keep adding to Star Traders: Frontiers until your scientist crew members were writing essays in their downtime pondering if they were merely living in a simulation and there were a real universe somewhere outside their perception...

Sadly, as we do not have the cheat codes to get unlimited time and resources, we do have to pick our battles.