It’s been a while since I have played. I really do need to start a new game. I think they have added another era since I last played and certainly a bunch of jobs, hats and beards. :)
The boarding lets you really rip up the crew and internals if I recall correctly. There were some special talents that you could use that let you target engines, weapons etc. You have to use other talents to maintain the range and keep the boarding actions going. Using radiation weapons from your ship at close range can also clear the enemy decks. Hope this helps. It’s a bit general but it can be done even against Xenos. I had a fully pimped out boarding team that was an unstoppable terminator crew.
The thing about this game and many of the games that I like is that you have to be really good about risk management and pushing your luck. If you can’t handle that bad card but you “hope” you won’t get it, then don’t draw from the hand. Bad things will happen. Throw that out the window if you are desperate and need the cash, rep, etc. Then the reward is worth the risk. But still expect snake eyes.
You killed four of their crew- this will reduce their dice pool, and if you keep doing it, you’ll eventually either kill the captain or do enough damage/morale damage that the enemy ship surrenders.
I’ll keep that in mind. My Captain is just level 8 and not a lot of talents to choose from.
This makes sense. Looks like I have to have some good hull and speed so I can get close and board them a few times. My troops are pretty good when it comes to the Troop Combat but my ship sucks!
I am a fan of the Trese Brothers and their games and while I’ve played Star Traders a lot, I always run out of gas not long into a run. My experience is that a) this is a hard game for me to return to if I have taken an extended break so I start over, and b) I tend to lose direction/purpose and so I take a break.
Now I learned early that the campaign was not for me, so I approach it as a sandbox. But like most sandbox games I run into the ‘to what purpose’ conundrum. So maybe it is sandboxes that are the issue for me.
That being said, are there guides or even, gulp, a YouTube brief series that might help me follow some kind of North Star in this game so that I don’t feel so adrift?
This one is only about 30 minutes long so not a huge time investment:
In addition, as the video dude says in the comments, “Play on easy and just follow the story missions. That should give you enough cash to keep going and let you learn the game :)”
I have died twice so far and this is my third game on Normal difficulty. It’s really hard to make money if you don’t do the missions. Trading does not yield a lot of profits - whatever profit I made is offset by the high expense on ship repairs, crew wages and sending the crew to splice bar (come on! They should be using their own money for this!).
Fighting pirates or, being a pirate and threatening merchant, end up in that ship battle, which I’m still too weak at. If I win, then resulting repair cost made the effort not worth it.
And so, doing mission from important contacts seems to be the only way to survive at this moment, but even then, I have to wrestle with crew morale and mutiny. God! I long for the days of Space Rangers when I’m just the solo pilot exploring the galaxy. No people management “shit” to take care of like in real life :)
These are not complains about the game though. I’m enjoying these challenges and it’s the type of “one more turn to go before I call it a day” game which ended me up at quarter to three in the morning! Looking forward to the day I can finally buy a new ship. I hate how ugly the starting ship look!
A single mission isn’t generally all that profitable either if that’s all you’re doing. You make money by doing more than one thing at once. In other words getting several missions going in the same direction and then trading along the way. But that’s true of most trading games.
Trading in Star Traders does become more profitable once you can get high level trade permits (and afford expensive cargo), but doing so requires improving your relationship with people who can sell you the permits, which generally requires doing missions for them.
And I cannot press one button to send the lot to the bar. It seems to be sending by batches or group. Makes sense. The boss want to reward those who worked hard and let the disgruntled ones leave by themselves. That’s how I’m saving money and dismissing the lazy bums!
The general strategy for basicallt all ship combat is to build a ship with ridiculous evasion so you are hard to hit. Stack it with evasive maneovers skills and the like.
You can then win the fight multiple ways, but boarding is probably the most reliable (although it’s slower).
Once you get to range 1 your entire crews sabotage actions are available after a successful boarding, I think you can use 2 each time. (mostly level 5 / 8 skills on some combat characters, spies, mechanics etc.). After a couple of successful boarding and sabotages your will have crippled the other ships dice pools and can repeatedly board to take them apart at your leisure.
Trading is very profitable if you can find a good route where you have the required permits and the law at both ends allows it and you have profit boosting skills. But without a plan just picking up stuff and moving it around is still worth doing, but only tends to make small change.
I think the intention is that you use easy contact missions to build the xp and cash you need to do anything else. It also boosts contact rep / faction rep which can give access to things you can’t get any other way.
You shouldn’t have morale problems on normal difficulty as long as you take a couple of failsafe skills for each roll type (the skills that let you ignore a failed roll). I like to have three of each except at the very beginning where you have to get away with fewer.
You can easily run into morale problems if you spend a long time in space without docking. Note this is in-game time, and it’s quite easy to use up a lot of that in long jumps without really noticing.
I believe the problem is that your crew lose morale fast when their pay is overdue, and you can’t pay them when you’re in space. Then if morale is low they abandon the ship the moment you land, before you can either pay them or fix their morale with the spice hall. (This makes sense mechanically, as otherwise no-one would ever leave unless you ran out of money.)
So yeah, I recommend landing at least once per sector if at all possible just to be able to pay people promptly.
I believe what’s happening there is the game will only let you send people with lowish morale (below 80?) to the spice bar. But it also doesn’t increase individual morale all that much. So when you have to click that spice bar button multiple times, you’re sending the same crew members day after day until they finally reach high enough morale.
I suspect in many cases it’s cheaper to just do one or two spice bar trips and let the others cope with low morale. Your next payday is always getting closer and it really hurts the bottom line to have your crew sat around doing nothing.
The game doesn’t make it easy to work out what to do with morale though. I really wish they’d gone with much smaller crews (at least in terms of distinct individuals) to make the management aspects easier to engage with and more impactful.
Speaking of in-game time, I only scratched the surface of the game when I began to play it a couple of years back and I couldn’t really make out how much of it was passing. Do they not use days/hours/minutes etc.? It wasn’t really made clear.
I think you are right. I land in one system to fuel up before I made a jump but it’s usually just one stop. I am trying to have 2 stops before a jump, so let’s see if this helps. Thankfully, the game allows us to adjust the speed of the game. Setting it to run at double the speed made these two fuel stops easier.
Currently, I’m doing this story arc where I have to look for this secret lab. In this lab, I encounter a mad scientist doing some horrifying experiment to himself (?), resulting in a big “Vat Monster”, akin to a mini boss.
Unfortunately for me, one of my heroic pistollers had deserted me. That’s my problem for being cheap and not sending them to the spice bar often enough. I can’t seem to win this mini boss - there are 2 rounds of back to back combat and while I can get through the first round, I’m always defeated in the second one. Once my team is defeated, the mission disappeared from the quest list. I really want that 100K reward!
And so I restarted my game and found a few interesting things - one, I should seriously look into Retraining my fighters to have more buff and rebuff actions. Secondly, it turns out I can change their choice of armor and guns! (Facepalm!!!). Now, I know what that Weapon Locker 3 upgrade is for! But, there does not seem to have any pistol upgrade, just a shotgun and sniper rifle. Or, maybe, my choices are already updated with the latest and greatest.
These two discovery helped somewhat, but my team is still too weak against the mini boss. I’ll do a few more pirates run to level up some more before tackling him further.
My main issue is with Initiative. The enemy was able to shoot me a few times before the turn end and my team only gets one chance at it. What determines Initatives? There does not seem to be any such Stats in the character screen - only Quickness. Is that the one?
