Trese Brothers Games (Star Traders: Frontiers and more)

Yeah, they said they’re already working on fixing that. It may even be in the next patch. I use the filter like @Rod_Humble does to deal with that.

They said to make sure you save for all the new ship components too. They recommend upgrading your old ship before getting a new one.

I’ve been whining to the devs about the faction information available so they said they’ll be tweaking things there some to add more info on what causes your negative rep hits (maybe in the captain’s log) and make it all easier to read. They’ll also be tweaking the event log to be a full log so you can call it up and see all the stuff that’s scrolled off your screen. Once they do that and add all the missing tool tips, it should be a lot easier to tell what’s what.

If they can show us the jumps necessary for all the waypoints in the mission screen, that will be great. Like a mini-map or something.

I took a mission, after it ended I am like 11 jumps away from the starting point!

Edit: It is crucial that we take “reveal contacts” traits when we can. I opened up a lot of contacts just by visiting places. If not for those skills, it’ll be very difficult to recover when we are very far away from our contacts.

I’d like to say that this is a bit further away from being a functioning product than some have implied here, it’s very dense atm and hard to know what’s what other than having to click through walls of dull quest text

I’ve just saved up 630K! And is getting a hang of avoiding pissing people off.

Another couple of well paying missions and I’ll purchase a heavier ship that can contain a medical bay! As I had a leveled up doctor that have a trait that can allow me to provide medical services to low tech worlds. This may help me gain free reps! Yay!

Stick with it. It’s much deeper than it appears on the surface!

Edit: Once you and your officers have leveled up a fair bit, losing crews is not such a bad deal. Taking conservative choices and staying alive makes your key officers and captain really powerful. Even conservative choices like avoiding combat lets your crew gain XP.

Playing conservatively allowed me to create a very healthy team of high level officers that cover the key skills I wanted.

You can see from the screen. The crew with the officers are all operating beyond 200% of the starter ship’s operating requirements for the various subsystems.

So even if we get very unlucky rolls and the crew loses morale or dies to an unlucky hit in ship combat, we’ll survive.

I’m aiming to have each officer gain land combat skills so that I can do without any combat troops.

Officers are much higher powered in Land combat as they can carry extra items compared to normal soldiers. You’ll need to find planets that supply the specialist items for your officers and buy them from the contacts. I’ve refrained from getting any as I was saving up cash for the big ship upgrade. But it’s one of the items on my checklist!

I think I’ll go for broke and aim for the most expensive ship that is currently implemented and see what it can do! Wish me luck… and patience. =)

Me too, especially Heroes of Steel. It released in 2014 and still getting free updates, 104 and counting. I’m really enjoying Templars.

Agreed. It’s been a common complaint. They still are working on adding a lot of hand holding stuff during EA such as the tutorial and tooltips for everything. They’re actively taking suggestions so be sure to put yours in. I asked for system names to be displayed on the map (like every 4X in existence) so you don’t have to mouse over every single system. They’re going to add that and other stuff I’ve asked for. They constantly improve their games and they never stop doing it even long after release so I have no concerns there.

I haven’t played Star Traders: 4X Empires but have played Heroes of Steel. I haven’t finished it but I like what I’ve played of it. It’s kind of similar to Templars but without the huge requisition point tree. The tactical combat and use of skills is very similar. I don’t think the story and game universe has been as good as the Templar game in it but I’m not even halfway though Heroes yet so that could change. It’s certainly more than well worth the price, especially when it’s on sale (which it should be next week). Templars is my favorite game by them so far although it looks like STF could eclipse that. It does have a lot more depth than anything else they’ve done so far.

All three are on sale now for just under $24.

http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/462/Complete_Trese_Brothers_Pack/

A 3rd patch in under a week!

http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=335620

v2.0.9 - 11/19/2017

  • New Rank 5 Soldier Talent Blowback added for shotgun specialists
  • Looting Cargo from Pirates no longer causes Rep loss
  • Any looting of Biowaste/Scrap does not cause Rep loss
  • Looting un-permitted goods from Smuggler does not cause Rep loss
  • Enemy Pirates never pay tribute for fear of looking weak before their crew
  • Enemy AI are now flying the Longbow Cruiser and Lightbow Raptor
  • Crew Payment now has an alert on it and causes the spice hall alert to be present as well
  • Improved crew list, refresh of filters, officer badging, and visual for level-ready crew
  • Destination waypoint circle always visible, fixed issues with distance to destination not updating
  • Minor improvements to display of ship component and engine stats during upgrade (more coming)
  • Fixed all crashes when opening Missions List
  • Fixed bug in “Call for the Strong” story introduction
  • Fixed bug in “Pirates Behind Every Star” story resolution
  • Fixed bugs with Valencia storyline, looping, reappearing, etc
  • Fixed Contacts sometimes dying during the middle of active story arcs
  • Starport refreshes Upgrade / Refuel screens properly when switching ships or upgrading
  • Improved keyboard arrows panning maps (Quad & Galaxy)
  • Rebalanced mutiny threshold to avoid looping mutinies
  • Improved keyboard support for opening/closing subviews (QARCX)
  • Improved keyboard arrows panning map
  • Fixed screens missing mousewheel support (Combat Views)
  • Fixed issues with 1280x1024 resolution support

Well, it does look interresting, however its too dense, and I can’t even figure out where to deliver or pickup stuff from quests I get.
Combat is very slow paced and full of things I don’t quite know what to do with…

To be honest, this just feels like a very inferior version of "Holy Potatoes we’re in space "
I just don’t see any points to playing this over that…the latter is a finished very well presented product that is just exactly the same game tbh.

Oh really? Sounds interesting! I ignored holy potatoes because of the theme and art style. Is the game deep enough to overcome that?

Its kinda silly, but uhm combat mechanics are almost the same…

Open the mission window and click on the “set waypoint” button. Then, on the map window, click the ‘navigate’ button at the bottom and you’ll travel to the mission system which should then be highlighted.

Ship combat is pretty simple. Each turn you can do 3 things: 1) move, 2) attack, 3) use a talent. So, for example If you want to fight you’ll probably use the evasion talent for defense, move forward to close range and attack with your weapons that are appropriate for the range you’re at. At range 1 you can board their ship and fight crew to crew which is simple and similar. If you don’t want to fight you’d move away and use an escape talent instead.

I managed to save up 1.2 million for the Broadsword and associated upgrades.

And strangely enough it opened up the trade mechanics and faction relationships for me.

  1. Certain Jobs that you take on deeply affect the resolution to encounters and missions.
    E.g. Some Jobs have skills that allow us to avoid combat and thus avoid pissing factions off.
    The “Automatically Save” type of skills allow the Captains to safely avoid die rolls to so that they can pass certain mission resolution options successfully.

  2. To avoid combat, I just use the evasive manoeuvres type of talents and press escape. Works really well.

  3. For trade, it is ESSENTIAL that we get the Trade Permits from as many Factions as possible. This basically makes trade runs super profitable. Just goto any planet (Industrial is good) and buy up the most expensive stuff (even if they are rated C) that is prized from 1000-4000 and visit the planets requiring them like Refineries or Farming worlds and turn a very healthy profit.

  4. Currently in my game, I have fully leveled trade permits from 3 factions and are sitting on >100 relations with them and I’m building up the faction reputation of the rest of the factions so that I can freely move around all over the place.

  5. It’s odd that the trade only opens up so late in the game. Mainly because of the requirement for the trading permits. So the traditional way to build up your character and ships with trading dont work in this game in it’s current form.

  6. About 15hrs+ in, my main character is level 27 and I’m sitting on a million plus credits with nothing to spend on (the ship is fully upgraded with level 4 components) and apart from the challenge of making all factions friendly, there seem to be no more challenges. So until they flesh out more content, players looking for more may be disappointed.

  7. I’m thinking of creating a character just based on stealth and see how that works. Someone in the forum says it it works very well on a small ship with the right skillsets.

All in all, there’s still a lot of areas they can flesh out imo. I dont regret getting the game, as I think it’ll get better. The devs are very responsive and active.

I jumped back into Templar Battleforce, and I find it awesome how intuitive it is, overall, even though the numbers aren’t always presented evidently. Jumping back into the game isn’t that much of an effort. The tech tree is as imposing as ever, though.
I love the lore of these brothers’ things, too.

Steam has the Trese Brothers’ collection at 60% off.

http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/462/Complete_Trese_Brothers_Pack/

It does not appear to include the new Star Traders (Frontiers) (and so should not be titled ‘complete’).

It probably won’t for a while: they don’t put their games on huge discount lightly (that 60% off collection might be the biggest discount they have ever done).

I really hate playing EA games; but I’ve noticed that my strategy of holding out until a game exits EA sometimes doesn’t work - the game gets released and I’m no longer paying attention to it, so I don’t bother picking it up. So maybe I should just bite the bullet and play EA games when the developers have a track record and/or the game is pretty fleshed out.

So:

  • Is this game complete enough to be worth playing, and
  • Does it have the @brianrubin seal of approval (yet)?