Here’s a tip I think about a lot but never see mentioned. Don’t plot a course for and then exit into a star - use one of the jump points near the star. If you take the star point you’ll end up in the corona of the star and lose a ton of supplies while your fleet struggles to stay alive in such harsh conditions. Navigating to a sector seems to (always?) dump you into the star, so I took to manually taking over as I approached my destination and diving into one of the nearby jump points instead.
That is a very clever mechanic.
Listen to this man.
Thanks for that tip, I made use of it repeatedly tonight.
I gave up on continuing the tutorial campaign, I got what I needed out of it up to the point it cuts you loose.
I’ve started a new one as basically an explorer/scavenger, least at the outset, I’ve run a couple shipment missions, killed some pirates who got in the way, salvaged a derelict I ran across and bought a couple of cheap ships for extra storage capacity.
I can feel the hooks slowly sinking in, I really didn’t want to stop tonight.
I had to force myself to stop playing lest nothing else get done for Space Game Junkie. I feel ya, mate.
Can someone breakdown for me how this compares to Star Traders: Frontiers, in terms of game scale, progression, overall vibe, and so forth? I’d be curious to hear a little about how they’re similar and how they’re different.
-Tom
Star Traders: Frontiers seems to have ground missions, which Starsector doesn’t (yet) have. Should Starsectors add ground missions prior to release?
Starsector have the raid mechanism that you can do against bases. It’ll need you to have a contingent of marines. I think that count as “ground missions”?
No, I mean combat with individual ground units or soldiers.
Or “tactical” combat or whatever.
I played a bit of Star Traders but it didnt really grab me so my impressions are biased.
-
The world seems much more alive and dynamic in Starsector. The effect of approaching stars systems and having the factions generate and withdrawing contracts adds a LOT to the impression that the world is alive.
-
The combat in Starsector is amazingly visceral compared to the highly abstract pew-pew in Star Trader. I read in the forum that if one master the piloting, it gets even better and just by looking at my ships auto-fight I think they are right in saying that!
-
I checked out the modding structure. They are written in Java and allows for complex coding compared to just simplistic json tweaks. I have a feeling that this game is gonna stay in my drive for a long long time purely due to the fact that the customization is extremely flexible.
-
On the other hand, Star Traders seem to be more “flavourful” in the campaign.
-
YakAttack mentioned ground combat, which Starsector lacks. But I think it’s a plus in this case. Sometimes, the profusion of game systems detract from the gameplay. I’ll rather the game do 1 combat well than 2 half as well.
Starsector grabbed me really hard. I dont remember anything in the past 20 years grabbing me so much. Maybe Space Rangers, but even that excellent game is not as great as this game will be imo.
Edit: I’ve basically stopped playing anything else apart from this. Rebel Galaxy languishes and I abandoned my latest run at XCOM. This is really something!
I forgot about that! When I played it, that portion seemed to be a chore. It’s not as polished as Darkest Dungeon and feels tacked on.
Also, I the character classes is a huge gigantic list that is hard to figure out but turns out to be more like statistics and numbers. I could not get attached to the crew members and just relied on the auto assignment to allocate points I think.
@easytarget The others have posted some great starting tips to get you going, but I will add only one: try black market trading of drugs and organs. You can make a great profit pretty easily, and it is exciting trying to make sure you don’t run afoul of authorities.
@tomchick I was a KS backer of Star Traders: Frontiers, backing enough to get both Steam and iOS versions, so I was all in. @cicobuff’s assessment of the two is precisely mine.
I eventually tired of crew management in ST:F, and the space combat left me wanting. On the other hand, I cannot stop playing Starsector - I feel true tension as a I carry out my missions, there’s a ton of things to do, I love the tactical combat, the universe feels alive and foreboding. As I said upthread, it is everything I want in a space game.
Well, raiding, which uses marines, is (very abstracted) ground combat. But, it’s abstracted to the point that you can’t really call it combat. It’s just some numbers and percentages.
In my current endgame game, the only high-end big-ship blueprints I’ve reliably been able to find are carriers (plus an Onslaught blueprint and a Dominator blueprint, granted). By necessity, I’ve done more carrier experimentation than in past saves. Two fun loadouts:
-
Legion-class with four Khopesh wings. The Legion has enough point defense to get by without a fighter screen and can hit hard enough to fight off most frigates and destroyers, and the rocket bombers have plenty of firepower.
-
Astral-class with four Trident wings and two Broadsword wings. The Broadswords go in first and launch flares to confuse enemy PD, which makes the torpedoes from the Tridents much more effective. With the paired torpedoes, the Tridents do a ton of damage, and eight bombers’ worth is enough to overwhelm point defense even in the absence of the screening fighters. Bring two Astrals to fight a battlestation, and you don’t really need much else beyond screening ships if they’re coordinating their strikes.
Yes! Astrals are my favorite carriers by far. I have a similar setup with 1 Broadsword, 2 Longbows and 3 Daggers. The Longbows help break the shields first and then the torpedoes from the Daggers finish the job. The coordinated strikes are devastating. Anything less than a cap ship can go down in one bombing run. For some real fun I like to deploy 2 Astrals and a Paragon.
I need to take a few more exploration trips. I really want some better direct combat cruisers/capitals—I don’t have the right mindset to fly Onslaughts (“Get in his face and armor tank! He can’t hurt you if you’ve blown all the weapons off the front of his ship!”), and the next smallest pure combat ship I have is a Falcon (a bit too small) or a Doom (phase minelaying is fun, but it doesn’t last very long at peak performance).
After looking at the media on the developer’s site, this looks like a spiritual successor to the old Escape Velocity games. Can anyone confirm that?
In tactical gameplay terms, it puts me vaguely in mind of EV Nova, my only real point of familiarity with the latter series. Both the combat and the sandbox are much more complicated. On the flip side, I don’t think Starsector is ever likely to have as much story content out of the box as EV Nova did.
I hit this point in the game a few times also. Shortly after ending the tutorial I’m broke and I can’t figure out a way to make money that doesn’t cost more money than I earn!
Then I started digging around on the intertoobs. A few things I’ve learned:
- Supplies are the killer. They usually about $100 a pop. Flying around burns supplies. You need to ditch ships with high supply requirements.
- Watch the “D-Mods” on ships you’ve captured. Damaged engines makes a ship slow (slowest ship = speed of entire FLEET). Slower fleet = longer to get where going = more maintenance cost.
- Another d-mod to avoid is the “higher maintenance”.
I’ve been selling the ships that are just too expensive to maintain, and that has made all the difference in the game post-tutorial.
I know I know, “But these captured ships are POWERFUL and COOL!”. Yes they are. But they are often simply un-maintainable. $$'s rule.
SamF7
Yeah, I do need to pay attention to speed and cost of ships. In starting over I’ve got a better balance on this I believe, fewer less expensive ships.
Playing the tutorial you get an option to salvage stuff and I just salvaged everything because I didn’t know any better (perhaps the tutorial could point out costs when this comes up, seems like it would have been good timing?). That pretty well doomed me on playing forward from the point the tutorial ended.
So, off into the wild blue yonder in a new campaign. Should prove interesting to see how long I last this go, I anticipate it might well take a few runs at this for me to get enough of a lay of the land to make it stick. Fine by me, having fun.