Star Traders: Frontiers

INTRO:

The Trese Brothers have been making games for a while. The inspirations for them are obvious: they have made a game with a fantasy dungeon, a space 4X game, and a Space Hulk look-a-like. Their latest me-too is inspired by Space Rangers, which created a genre about travelling, trading and adventuring across 2D representations of space.

Yet, the Trese Brothers have made much more than just derivatives. They have designed calculation systems for their games that made surprisingly good use of RNGs. They appear to have done something similar for this one, as will be described later. However, there are some luck-dependent designs that could have been done so much better, or not at all.

PREMISE:

The game takes place in the Star Traders universe, which has been the setting for some of the Trese Brothers’ previous game, such as Templar Battleforce (a very well-done knock-off of Space Hulk). Specifically, it takes place decades after the Exodus, which is an event that forced people (presumably humans of the sci-fi future) away from their previous homes. The tail-ends of this event were the setting of Templar Battleforce.

For a while, having the scattered remnants of the People keep in touch with each other was a struggle. Faster-than-light (FTL) communications was a no-no, mainly because this alien-compromised technology was the cause of the disasters that led to the Exodus in the first-place. FTL travel is similarly difficult, because controlling the exit points of FTL travels was still an unreliable science.

This changed with the discovery of the hyperwarp gates. These gates are stable spatial phenomena that linked sectors of space together, allowing for travel that is far faster than FTL. With these, the remnants of the Exodus flourished, allowing the re-establishment of civilization.

This civilization is mainly composed of the Houses (noble families) and Syndicates (corporations that have since reformed into something akin to clans). Together, they are called the Factions. They have fierce rivalries, but their existence was mandated by the proclamations of Shalun, the Hero of the Exodus. Shalun realized that factionalism will always be around, for despite its weakness due to a lack of unity, its diversity is a source of strength.

Thus, the Factions vie with each other according to rules of conflict set by Shalun and his advisors. Some of these conflicts can even escalate into wars of assassination and limited space battles, but never open warfare.

The significance of the abovementioned plot element is actually reflected in the gameplay, as will be described later.

Amidst these happenings, the lesser heroes of the Exodus plied their trade: the Star Traders. Like the Star Traders of yore, they frequent the trade routes of space according to their whims, while going on errands that the factions’ own agents could not perform so easily.

The player character is one such Star Trader, newly anointed after the death of an uncle that once held a charter of Trade.

To anyone who is well-versed in the lore of Warhammer 40K, they will recognize almost immediately that this is a knock-off of the tradition of Rogue Traders in that grim-dark space sci-fi setting. However, there are a few notable differences, here and there, mainly for the purposes of gameplay. These will be described later.

Anyway, the player character begins in what the developers have called the “First Era”. This is the era prior to the reforms that a certain main NPC will introduce. The First Era is used to present the gameplay elements that are associated with the inter-Faction rivalry.

The next eras are used to introduce further twists to these elements, and also other elements; further gameplay content is also introduced in these later eras. They also become the backdrop for story arcs that happen during these eras. As of this time of writing, new eras are still being designed, following a long-term plan that the Trese Brothers had been coy about explaining.

It should suffice to say here that the story-writing for the game is worked quite well into the gameplay, even though most of the developments in the story are reflected in the gameplay as changes in factors and work-arounds for certain gameplay rules.

THE SHIP – FOREWORD:

The ship is the main instrument of the Star Trader’s will. In fact, the ship is ever only the Star Trader’s home, and that of his/her crew, if they choose to remain loyal. There are benefits and consequences to such an arrangement.

Although a Star Trader can have more than one ship, only one can be operational. The others are held in the drydocks of the various inhabited worlds with starports that can support the presence of the ships. The player can swap between ships, if he/she can spare the time to visit starports that have his/her reserve ships.

All space ships in the setting of these game have two things in common despite their myriad differences: the Void Engine, which is the energy source of the ship, and the Hyperwarp Drive. This is the means by which they traverse the stars at FTL speeds. The Hyperwarp Drive, in particular, is needed for transition through the hyperwarp gates (as should be obvious).

However, the radiation from these two devices, especially from the Void Engine, poses considerable problems. The radiation is not of the horrific cell-melting kind, but it is a kind that warps the minds of the ship’s occupants. This is reflected in-game through the accumulation of Traits, which will be described later.

The radiation also happens to extend the life-span of people aboard ships (in return for the aforementioned price of going gradually insane). Since Star Traders and their crews are almost always on board their ship, they are particularly long-lived – and are quite bonkers.

Like Space Ranger, the player needs to consider the fuel and repair needs of the ship. However, active maintenance and ammunition concerns are not worked into the gameplay, perhaps for the better.

The ship is also the means by which the Star Trader transports goods; Star Traders cannot charter other ships to haul goods for them.

THE CREW – FOREWORD:

Obviously, a ship cannot operate without its crew. Some Space Ranger-like titles utilize convenient narrative and very sci-fi reasons that let ships be crewed by a very small number of people who happen to be the main characters. This is not the case for the ships in Star Traders Frontiers: even the smallest ship needs more than a dozen crewmembers, and the biggest needs half a hundred.

In real ships, each crewmember would have a role and may be assigned to one of multiple teams. To simplify the gameplay, the Trese Brothers lumps all of the statistics of the crewmembers together, and measure it against the needs of the ship. The needs of the ship are represented in meters, and the lumped statistics of the crew fill these meters. It is a simple solution that removes the minutiae of having to manage the tasks of each and every crewmember.

The lumped statistics also happen to be used as factors of performance. They are used for the dice-based rolls that represent challenges to the skill of the crew. These will be described later.

The crew are people, and thus have needs for creature comforts. Perhaps for the better, nutritional needs are not represented in the gameplay; the crewmembers are assumed to always have the food and water that they need. This leaves Morale as their primary need, and one that the player should monitor closely. Morale does not directly affect the performance of a crewmember, but it is the main deciding factor for his/her loyalty.

There is also the health of a crewmember. A crewmember will always contribute to the performance of the ship as long as he/she is alive. However, poor health leads to poor morale readily. Indeed, a crewmember in poor health will have a hard time restoring his/her morale. Obviously, if a crewmember runs out of health, he/she is dead. Nonetheless, there are ways to save the life of a crewmember that is driven to death’s door, which will be described later.

PERMADEATH:

Generally, if a character runs of hitpoints/health, he/she is quite dead and gone. However, at the “normal” difficulty setting and lower, the Officers and Captain of the ship (more on these people later) are always brought back from the brink of death, but at a cost. They are guaranteed to suffer heavy morale loss, and more often than not gain bad traits.

At higher difficulty settings, Officers can die permanently. At higher settings still, the Captain can die; this is generally a game-over.

The lesser crewmembers can die at just about any difficulty setting, though the player can choose to customize difficulty settings such that they could not. Generally, it is often a bad decision or unwise risk-taking that leads to such occurrences, and only infrequently so due to bad luck.

CREW TRAITS:

Traits are the quirks of people who have sworn to live lives among the stars; they are aptly called “spacers” in the game’s lore.

Gameplay-wise, some of these traits alter their abilities or skills, for better or worse. Some traits grant benefits or disadvantages that only trigger when certain conditions are met. For example, the Peace-maker trait grants a person Morale points if the player manages to end an otherwise hostile encounter in a peaceful manner.

There is no limit to the traits that a person can have, apparently. Once in a while, often after hyperwarp jumps, a crewmember may gain a Trait, be it good or bad.

Bad traits can be removed with the services of medical experts. However, their services only offer a specific mix of bad traits that can be removed. Therefore, the player will want to look for more than one of such Contacts.

Unfortunately, this endeavour reveals a gap in the documentation of the details of such Contacts: what traits that they remove is not included in their listed details.

UNKNOWN CREW TRAITS:

Some of the traits that a crewmember has may be hidden from the player; they do not appear to come into effect until they are discovered, or perhaps are so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable. Sometimes, a crewmember may gain a new hidden trait. Eventually, they will be revealed, if the (unknown) circumstances are right. Alternatively, the player can have some crewmembers invest in Talents that reveal these Traits.

SHIP HULL:

The hull of the ship is a major element of the gameplay. It acts as the hitpoint meter of the ship; if it goes down to zero, the ship is wrecked and the player has lost. None of the difficulty settings will allow the player to survive such an event, so it is in the player’s interest to keep the hull of the ship at tip-top shape. This is easier said than done, of course, because the ship’s hull is the part that is the most expensive and takes the longest to repair, if the player goes for repairs at starports.

Fortunately, there is another way to repair the ship’s hull. Any salvaging operation that the player successfully undertakes is guaranteed to yield materials for the repairs of the hull.

Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that during combat, the hull of any ship is on a one-way trip to zero. Furthermore, as the hull of a ship comes closer to zero, there is a growing possibility that the ship suffers a sudden rupture from the next attack that lands. This event kills the ship outright.

SHIP COMPONENTS – IN GENERAL:

There are several types of components that must be in the ship. Among these must-have components, three are critical: the Bridge, the Void Engine and the Hyperwarp Drive. There can only be one of each of these. The player can have these completely damaged, but the ship still retains some function, albeit severely diminished.

There are other critical components, though the player can have more than one of each type of these. One type is the crew barracks; there must be at least one so that the player can have crewmembers to bulk up the statistics of the ship. Then there are the officers’ cabins: other than the captain (who is the player character), officers are the most versatile crewmembers and will be needed to widen the range of operations that the ship can undertake.

Then there are weapons. Technically, a ship can go without any weapons thanks to a boarding mechanic, but being able to shoot at the enemy can go a long way because weapons can do more than just inflict damage; this will be described further later.

Next, there is cargo storage. The player could forgo trading altogether, but there is quite a lot of gameplay content that involves cargo hauling. Besides, trading is in the name of the game, and trading does impart more benefits than just monetary profits.

There are other ship components, which will be described later where relevant.

NO ON-BOARD MANUFACTURING:

There is only one thing that ships in the game can not do: manufacture things. There has yet to be any piece of lore that describes ships that are practically mobile factories, much less any gameplay element that has the player’s ship converting materials into products.

CAPTAIN:

The ship’s captain is the player character, and the eponymous Star Trader. The player is given the choice of crafting the captain before the start of a playthrough.

Interestingly, the crafting feature makes use of a system that would be familiar to followers of present-day Western RPGs, especially the European ones like Shadowrun. The player character has several aspects, each of which the player assigns a “priority” level. Higher priority levels give the player more points to spend in those aspects.

Presumably, such a feature allows the player to create a diverse range of characters. Yet, there are some aspects whose importance would eventually become noticeable to any player, and whose priority setting is almost a no-brainer. This is to the detriment of the impression that the player can make do with any kind of build.

Chief of these aspects is the “abilities” of the captain, which will be described later. It should suffice to say for now that this aspect is the only one that can never be improved in any playthrough, so the player should set it as the highest priority in order to guarantee the creation of a powerful character.

The Captain is a crewmember that can have up to three kinds of jobs, meaning that there is always at least one crewmember that has a versatile set of skills.

OFFICERS:

Like the Captain, the Officers are crewmembers that can have up to three jobs. However, the player has no control over their creation. Fortunately, Officers tend to start with relatively high abilities.

At least four officers will be around in any playthrough: a Doctor, an Engineer, a Quartermaster and a Hyperwarp Navigator. The Engineer and Quartermaster are particularly rare professions, such that the player would find it hard to get any crewmembers with such jobs.

Officers are the most loyal of the Captain’s underlings. However, if the morale of any Officer dips too low and stays that way for too long, that Officer will eventually lead a mutiny against the Captain.

In addition to the Officers that the player gets at the start of any playthrough, the player can gain other Officers by promoting regular crewmembers. This promotion immediately bumps them a level, allowing the player to select a different job for them, if the player wants them to have multiple jobs. Indeed, the only way to get crewmembers with rare jobs that is in the player’s control is to promote a regular crewmember into an Officer, before giving him/her levels in these jobs.

There are also some stories that have characters joining the player’s crew as an Officer. As compensation for this imposition, these characters often join at a level equivalent to the other Officers, but with all of their job and talent points unassigned. This allows the player to customize them from scratch.

REGULAR CREWMEMBERS:

Regular crewmembers join the player’s ship with their default job and cannot change to another job. Generally, regular crewmembers have merely decent abilities, but the player might get lucky and gain crewmembers that have high abilities; these are great candidates for promotion to Officers.

Any regular crewmembers that the player deigns to remain merely regular will only ever advance in their default job, i.e. they cannot take on other kinds of jobs. This eventually stifles their versatility, but ultimately, the player can only ever have up to a maximum of seven Officers, regardless of how many Officer Cabins that the ship has.

CHARACTER ABILITIES:

“Abilities” are the core statistics of any character. In actuality, their skills matter more in the long-run, but their abilities will determine their robustness in “crew battles”, which are fights that involve characters instead of ships.

These abilities would be familiar to any player that has played action RPG games. For example, there is Strength, which determines the base amount of melee damage that a character can inflict. Another example is Resilience, which determines how tough they are. Perhaps the most important ability is Quickness, which determines the character’s Initiative rating; this will be described later.

Generally, abilities cannot be changed for a character. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to select the abilities of the Captain as the highest priority during character creation, if only to have a character with considerable base stats.

Abilities can be raised by equipping certain pieces of gear. However, the ability increases from these sources are small, so the player should not expect gear to compensate for low ability ratings in the first place.

However, abilities do not matter much in ship battles and luck-dependent occasions where crew members would take damage. For example, if the ship has been struck and the RNG rolls determine that crewmembers would be hurt as a form of secondary damage, their Resilience and other abilities will not help in reducing the damage that is inflicted on them.

CHARACTER SKILLS:

The skills of any character is imparted by their jobs. Skills cannot be raised through any means other than advancing in jobs.

Skills are the main factors that determine the performance of the ship and its crew at carrying out tasks. For example, Pilot is the skill that determines how well the ship can avoid hazards; it is also used during ship battles to avoid attacks from enemies and to get closer or further away from them.

Since skills are only ever provided by jobs, regular crewmembers that have only one job have a limited skillset to contribute to the ship. The officers can have multiple jobs, but spreading the points for jobs around mean that they cannot achieve considerably high level of skills. That is, unless the player has chosen jobs with similar skillsets. Even so, the player would have to hire a multitude of crewmembers so that the ship and its crew has well-rounded capabilities.

In particular, the player will want to hire a few Doctors and Spies, because the Doctor skill is needed almost all the time and the Stealth skill allows for subtle solutions with little negative impact.

STRONG DICE AND STANDARD DICE:

Skills and abilities are the main factors that decide the ship and crew’s capabilities. In turn, their capabilities are challenged with frequent tests. These tests involve RNG rolls, the mention of which might immediately irk people with an aversion to luck-dependent gameplay. Fortunately, the system that the Trese Brothers have developed works, as is evident from its use in their previous games like Templar Battleforce.

These tests have the player’s side and the opposing side rolling digital six-sided dice. There are two types of dice: “strong dice” and “standard dice”. The main difference between them is their probability of producing a successful outcome: strong dice has a 50% chance, whereas standard dice has a 33% chance.

The opposition usually already has a number of strong and standard dice to toss, depending on its level of challenge. As for the player’s side, the combined rating of the relevant skill that the ship’s crew has determines the number of strong dice that they can toss. This is usually on a one-to-one ratio.

As for standard dice, the Captain’s abilities are often used as the main factor; hence, there is a need to ensure that the Captain’s abilities get the highest priority during character creation. The number of standard dice that can be obtained is often a portion of the relevant ability of the captain, so the player should not expect to have a lot of standard dice to throw. Consequently, the crew’s skills are generally the main decider in the tests.

The outcome of the test is decided by the number of successes from the strong and standard dice thrown by both sides. Generally, the side with more successes wins. Most tests have binary outcomes, but there are some tests where the number of exceeding successes matter, such as the test that determines how much damage is inflicted on a ship.

MORALE & SPICE HALLS:

The Star Trader’s crew are sworn to follow him/her wherever his/her ship goes, but the radiation from the Void Engine and Hyperwarp Drive would eventually become too much. Furthermore, the travails of journeying through space can be stressful and dangerous. Suffice to say that there are many things that can cause morale to tumble, and there are not a lot of ways to raise it.

Fortunately, one of the few ways to maintain morale also happens to be quite commonly found wherever there is civilization. People have found substances that can be brewed to produce comestibles and beverages that somehow stave off the problems from the aforementioned radiation. These substances are given the catch-all term “spice”, because most of them happen to have zings of various degrees in how they taste.

(It would not take long for a follower of sci-fi to have the impression that this is a reference to the late Frank Herbert’s works.)

These spices are served in spice halls, which are establishments that most planets with decent economies have. The player can have crewmembers go on shore leave at the spice halls, which according to the lore are the only places that Star Trader crews can freely go to.

Each spice hall has a rating, which determines how high morale can be restored before they can go no higher from further trips to the hall. Only crewmembers with morale below the maximum rating can be sent on shore leave; the rest stays on board the ship and apparently twiddle their thumbs.

Of course, the player foots the costs for sending crew on shore leave. Each shore leave trip takes about two days; multiple trips may be needed to restore the morale of particularly depressed crewmembers. On the other hand, no matter the cause for their low morale, crewmembers will always regain morale from trips to the spice halls; spices are that great. Multiple crewmembers can also go on the same trip simultaneously, thus saving some time.

However, having extant injuries would severely diminish the morale gains. Having even the best spice beverages would not do much if one is in agony from wounds that have yet to heal.

Furthermore, refreshments at the spice halls are not inexhaustible. The spice halls restock their spices over time, with higher grade ones stocking more. However, if the player has a crew of considerable size – and many of them are sorely in need of pick-me-ups – the player could possibly wipe out the reserves of the spice hall. Therefore, the player might want to prioritize individuals with critically low morale for shore leave, if there is a limited supply.

There are also events – called “Rumors” in-game – that can cause spice halls to be closed. Therefore, the player will want to consider his/her next stop carefully, lest the ship lands on a planet that could not satisfy the crew’s wants.

PAYING THE CREW:

For whatever reason, the crew can only ever be paid when the player has landed on a civilized planet. The reason for this is not clear, but it is presumed that the crew and their captain can only ever access their wealth on a civilized planet. Therefore, the player cannot delay visits to worlds, lest the crew becomes restless from having their pay delayed.

MEDICAL TREATMENT:

When crewmembers come out of situations with injuries, those injuries stay with them. The player can ensure that they enter the next battle at full health by vising a planet with viable medical facilities. The rating of the medical facilities determines how long it would take for wounds to heal; more advanced facilities take shorter times.

The costs of healing appear to be determined by the severity of the injuries. Light injuries cost little to heal, whereas heavier wounds cost exponentially more. However, even the lightest of injuries will still take a day to heal.

Medical facilities also have limited supplies. If the player has a lot of crewmembers with considerable injuries, the medical supplies can dry up fast.

There can be Rumors that can cause medical facilities to shut down, especially when the “Fourth Era” of any playthrough commences. These are hard times, so the player may want to be careful about putting crewmembers in danger.

HEALING CREW DURING SHIP COMBAT:

Doctors have talents that allow them to heal crewmembers during ship combat. Of course, this is meant for the player to heal crewmembers before the next attack that lands kills them. Ostensibly, the player could use these talents to heal crewmembers that were already injured before the battle. However, of course, starting a ship battle just to do this can be a foolhardy thing to do. On the other hand, if the player could execute a plan that minimizes the number of attacks that land on the player’s ship, healing crewmembers through this exploit can be gratifying.

HEALING DURING CREW COMBAT:

Doctors and combat medics can join on-foot battles in order to provide healing support for their teams; this is not unlike the healers in team-based RPGs. Any healing that is provided is permanent, i.e. persisting after the end of the fight. Therefore, the player could ostensibly get already-injured crewmembers into a fight just so that the team doctor can heal them. Of course, this is a particularly foolhardy thing to do, because most enemies will focus their murderous intentions on the already-wounded members of the player’s team.

CANNOT USE CARGO OF MEDICAL GOODS OR SPICES:

Although the player could buy spices and medicines, these are implemented in-game as trading goods and are only ever treated as such. In other words, the player cannot have the crew consume the spices while they are on the ship or use the medicines for medical treatment. The goods cannot be used to refill the spice and medical supplies of planets either.

The most understandable explanation for this is that the trade goods are not in a form that is readily usable. Yet, this seems like a lost opportunity to improve the diversity of the gameplay.

STARPORTS:

Any ship can land on any planet and any planet has landing spaces for ships. However, the technical capacity of planets to service the incoming ships varies considerably; this is represented by their Starport ratings.

Higher starport ratings mean that repairs and other changes to the ship happens faster. Higher starport ratings are also needed to install more advanced parts in the player’s ship.

If the player is upgrading his/her currently-used ship, there is nothing that the player can do while that is being done; the game simply fast-forwards. Considering that some upgrades can take a dozen weeks even in the best starports, this can result in a lot of opportunity costs, i.e. all that in-game time spent on waiting could have been spent doing something else.

A starport with a rating of at least 6 also has a drydock, which allows the player to store extra ships. The drydock is there to allow the player to commission modifications to the ship in the drydock while the player goes about doing other things – this was a feature that the developers took a long time to write the code for during the Early Access stage of the game, complicated as it is.

NO SIMULTANEOUS USAGE OF ON-PLANET SERVICES:

It has been mentioned earlier that time will pass when the player sends crewmembers on shore leave, sending them for medical treatment, enact repairs on the current ship or swapping out its components for others. There does not appear to be any convenience of being able to do these simultaneously, despite the Trese Brothers having written code for the drydock feature.

This has been a complaint since the Early Access stages of the game, but it would appear that this limitation is here to stay until the Brothers figure out the code for this.

WATER-FUEL:

The Void Engine is a technological wonder. It does need any known fuel, and much has been made possible thanks to it. However, it has serious drawbacks. The mind-bending radiation that it emits has been mentioned already. The other is its heat output. If the Void Engine of a ship does not have something to cool it down, its heat and radiation emissions increase to unbearable levels. Hence, there is “water-fuel”, specially-treated water that can absorb much of the heat and radiation from the Void Engine.

Water-fuel is spent to cool down the reactor of the Void Engine. It is spent as the ship moves across what passes as space in the game, and also when the ship conducts operations at the orbit of a planet. It is also spent when making hyperjumps, which will be described later.

The player can run out of water-fuel and still function, but morale tanks so quickly such that the player is at risk of the entire crew going up in a crazy mutiny. Furthermore, the ship is at greater risk of damaging its components.

Water-fuel can be replenished at any planet that has a decent enough economy. Most planets offer this service, but there are quite a number of very poor ones that will not. Fortunately, planets do have labels that indicate whether they have this service, as well as other services.

There are several variables to the price of water-fuel. Firstly, the planets that are closest to the home of the Captain have the lowest prices; this is likely a gameplay balancing design. Secondly, there is the type of economy of a planet. Refineries and high-tech industrial planets tend to have the lowest prices, because they specialize in producing water-fuel. Thirdly, House Javat is a faction that is particularly skilled in the production of water-fuel, so their prices are among the most affordable. Finally, the player’s connections on the planet or the quadrant that the planet is in may determine the price of water-fuel too.

QUADRANTS & HYPERGATE JUMPS:

As mentioned earlier, the regions of space that the People have inhabited are linked together with hyperwarp gates. Each region is called a “quadrant” in the parlance of the game.

Each quadrant has a handful of planets. There is no astronomical or spatial reason for the presence of the planets in the quadrant; the Trese Brothers are not that bothered about having accurate representations of spatial theories. Anyway, some quadrants have considerable densities of planets, while some others are sparse. However, there is always at least one inhabited planet in each system, and at least one planet with refuelling services.

Hypergate jumps are significant affairs. Jumps from one quadrant to another does not happen instantaneously; more often than not, around one week is needed for each jump. Therefore, the player will want to include these time-skips in his/her calculations if he/she does not want to be overdue for a mission (more on this later).

Heavier and more sophisticated ships cost more water-fuel when jumping, though these ships tend to have considerable reserves of it. However, refuelling is, of course, more expensive for the bigger ships in the long term.

PLANETS – OVERVIEW:

A Space Ranger title would not be one if there are no planets to visit. For the player’s convenience, planets in the main view mode are labelled with icons to indicate the services that they provide, the presence of any contacts and their involvement in the player’s missions, if any. Further details can be had from their tooltips, and even more details can be had from looking at their entries in the quadrant’s list of planets.

In fact, there are so many details that there is no way of showing all of them in a single screen. This has been a problem in the game since its Early Access days. Still, the Trese Brothers have gone a long way to have a display show as much as possible at a glance without causing visual clutter.

Anyway, planets are the main source of the resources that the player needs, and also the main source of wealth. Missions are primarily conducted on planets or in their orbits too; there is not a single mission that can be performed in the middle of nowhere in the vastness of space.

TYPES OF PLANET ECONOMIES – IN GENERAL:

The planets are typified according to their economic specializations, instead of other things like climes and gravitational strength. This may seem unconventional to the Space Ranger genre, but in hindsight, it is quite appropriate and convenient because they contribute to the trading part of the gameplay.

There are farming and mining planets, which produce the most baseline of goods. These goods have the lowest prices, but they are often produced in bulk. Players with ships that have massive cargo holds are best suited for making wealth with these planets. Their goods are desired by almost any other types of planetary economies.

Industrial and refinery planets are the next tier. They produce goods that have a wide range of prices. The ones that are made in bulk are on the lower end of the range, and are often desired by planets of the previous tier. The ones that are made in fewer quantities fetch higher prices, and are often wanted for the next tier of planets.

Speaking of which, these are orbital stations and high-tech industrial planets. The latter produce goods that have the highest of prices among commodities. Orbital stations have goods that sit somewhere in between those of industrial planets and high-tech ones.

Tradeways exist somewhere in between these tiers. The goods that they offer and demand are varied, as befitting tradeways.

Most planets exist on their own in their locations. However, there are also binary planets. These conveniently allow the presence of two types of economies, or two of the same type, in the same location. The player’s ship can travel back and forth quite readily between the two.

A few specific types of planets will be described in their own sections, because of their significant differences from the other types.

ORBITAL STATIONS:

Some planets have their civilization marked by the presence of orbital stations. Gas giants, in particular, have these, but there are solid planets that have orbitals but no civilization on their surfaces, i.e. they are Wildernesses, which will be described later. Some civilized planets have orbital stations too.

Gameplay-wise, orbital stations are implemented like civilized planets. The main difference is that the player’s ship does not need to spend water-fuel to land on them, since docking with them in orbit is a matter that does not require water-fuel.

POPULATION & LUXURY POPULATION PLANETS:

Population and luxury population planets are, as their names suggest, where the bulk of people live. They are the target markets for end-consumer goods, such as clothing, medicines and food.

These planets often offer little in the way of commercial goods. There are only ever two types: biomass (i.e. the bodily wastes of the populations) and scrap. Planets with greater economies often produce a lot of them, but they fetch such a small price that unless the player is travelling to a planet that wants them, there is no reason to have them as cargo at all.

WILDERNESSES:

Wildernesses are planets that do not have the touch of civilization, for reasons that make them near uninhabitable. There are worlds with aggressive jungles, harsh rocky deserts and biting-cold tundras.

There are rare few reasons to go to them. One of these is that they offer opportunities to gain raw resources (i.e. goods that mining worlds tend to produce) for relatively free. However, the player has to have a ship that is tricked out for that, and there is considerable opportunity cost for having such specialization for the ship. Furthermore, resource extractions take time. Most importantly, the player has to play the awful associated card mini-game to do that; this mini-game will be described later.

Yet, go to them the player will. There are some missions that can only completed by exploring the wildernesses of these planets, such as missions that have the player looking for traces of illicit/covert camps.

PLANET STATISTICS:

The Trese Brothers certainly love their numbers. That said, each planet has a set of statistics that determines how much that it can offer the player. These statistics are virtually set in stone when the playthrough is generated, i.e. they cannot be permanently changed afterwards. However, some Rumors can enact temporary changes, for better or worse.

Anyway, these statistics include the economic rating of the planet. This determines the amount of goods that it can produce, and how many goods that it desires in return.

Then, there are its starport, medical and spice hall ratings, which have been described earlier. Usually, these are proportional to the planet’s economy rating.

A planet’s military rating determines how risky the card mini-games can be. Higher ratings mean that the player is more likely to come across system defence ships in those mini-games, for better or worse. The military rating also determines what kinds of combat hardware that the player can get for his/her ship; higher ratings generally offer stuff with greater firepower.

Trade law is perhaps the rating that the player would be looking at the most. Trade law determines what kinds of goods can be traded at the market exchange of the planet. Goods are assigned legality ratings; generally, goods that are intended for public consumption have high ratings, whereas the esoteric ones have low ratings. Any goods below the trade law rating of a planet are considered illegal and cannot be sold at the exchange. If the player’s ship is inspected by the system’s defence ships at these planets, such goods are outright seized and lost to the player.

The government rating of a planet determines how much Intel can be gleaned from the plant. However, higher government ratings also make spying riskier, and make it much less likely that there would be contacts with black market access.

TRADE GOODS – OVERVIEW:

Trading is in the name of the game, and it is something that the player would likely do from the start of the playthrough to the end.

Anyway, the trade goods that a planet produces and those that it wants are often decided by its economic type. This is what the player would be checking most of the time; conveniently, the goods have labels in the user interface that mentions which planets want them.

However, this is only part of the information. These planets want the goods to varying degrees. In order to know which planets want which goods the most, the player needs to already have the goods in his/her ship, because this information is only available in the info screen for the cargo that is on the player’s ship.

Furthermore, depending on the statistics of the individual planet, they may or may not want a type of trade goods, even if that type has a label that mentions that it is desirable on that planet.

Fortunately, the current quadrant’s list of planets shows the demands of these planets. However, the demands that are shown are those that are generated before the start of the playthrough, rather than its current conditions. This is a problem, because the planets’ offers and demands only refresh after an unknown number of in-game weeks, with no clear countdown timers.

Thus, at this time of writing, trading is as best something to be done on the side, while the player’s ship moves from planet to planet with the intended destination being someplace that concerns a non-trading mission. The player could still engage in full-time trading anyway, but the game just does not have the amenities to support this yet.

FACTIONS – OVERVIEW:

As mentioned earlier, most of the People have defined themselves as belonging to one Faction or another. This comes with benefits, such as the protection and favour by their peers, and drawbacks, namely the enmity of the other factions, especially the one that has a particularly long rivalry with them.

The Factions often associate themselves with at least one aspect of civilization. Incidentally, Factions that are associated with the same aspect are often rivals. This association is not just for narrative purposes either; the Factions offer gameplay-affecting benefits that are associated with their chosen aspects.

The player begins with a parent Faction, and his/her relationship with this Faction begins at a better state than those with other Factions. The player is not obligated to maintain this relationship, as is the privilege of those who are Star Traders. However, bettering it can give the player a considerable advantage early on.

Speaking of making relationships with the Factions better, this often comes with the setback of upsetting another faction. This is especially so for one of the main story questlines; if the player follows this one, he/she is bound to greatly anger the rival of his/her parent Faction.

At this time of writing, the Factions still function similarly to each other in terms of gameplay. Other than the bonuses that they offer to the player, they have the same mechanisms of granting military ranks, trade permits and edicts to Star Traders that have gained their favour. Any noticeably significant differences between them are mainly seen in the narrative, in which the personalities that typical representations of the Factions make themselves known.

INDEPENDENTS:

Despite the comfort and conveniences that the Factions offer, there are people who insist on being free from Factionalism, decrying it as a source of corruption and treachery. Thusly, the Independents live rough and hard lives, at least when compared to the Factionalists who live in opulence.

What the Independents consider their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Without a patron faction, they have no protection or deterrence against those who would just rob them blind. The rebellious Hunna Collective do ostensibly avenge them, but only when bad things have already happened, like crippled Independent ships being destroyed with their crew.

(Incidentally, this is implemented in-game as a disincentive against going around killing Independents willy-nilly and destroying their ships for salvage. If the Hunna Collective becomes particularly upset at the player, the player can expect ambushes on the crew when they alight from their ship onto civilized worlds.)

Interestingly, Independents mostly only have planets with rough-living upstream economies, like mining. They may have orbitals and some other planets too, but these tend to have lousy statistics and offer poor prices for the player’s goods. The player is not likely to be able to get much wealth from doing business with them.

However, there is a good reason to do so anyway: they do not require trade permits for any goods, unlike the factions. On the other hand, after the player has managed to get trade permits from all the factions, that good reason evaporates.

CURRYING FAVOUR WITH FACTIONS - OVERVIEW:

Considering the power and resources that the factions wield, it is in the player’s interest to pursue good relationships with them. Even if the player is not interested in what they can offer, keeping good relationships would help the player to avoid being harassed by Faction forces.

The most readily available way of currying favour with a Faction is to eliminate threats to the Faction’s holdings. For example, a little gratitude comes the player’s way if he/she accosts and removes a pirate vessel that is not of that Faction from its quadrant. Of course, the player needs to have the (good or bad) luck of having a random encounter with these NPCs.

Next, the player can carry out missions for any Faction official (called “contacts” in-game, as will be described further later). These missions generally benefit the Faction, and certainly will benefit the persons who gave the missions. However, most of these missions will have the player upsetting the other factions. Some missions also happen to hurt specific officials of other Factions.

Thirdly, the player can sell intel to any official that can buy them. (Intel is any strategic information that the player may have obtained about any Faction.) Any piece of intel is saleable, though certain pieces of intel are more valuable to an official than the others. For example, any piece of intel that is associated with the Faction of the buyer is considered more valuable than those that are not.

Some major story-based endeavours (called “story vignettes” by the Trese Brothers) happen to apply massive changes to the player’s relationship with certain Factions, depending on the player’s decisions. Some of these can tank relationship’s outright, if the player is not careful.

BAD RELATIONS & PARDONS:

A relationship with a Faction that has gone far into the negatives can cause a lot of trouble for the player. Firstly, that Faction begins to progressively deny more and more services to the player; the only thing that they cannot deny to the player is the right of any Star Trader to land on any world. (This has the gameplay benefit of letting the player pay the crew at any civilized world.)

(This can be contrasted with the rights of Rogue Traders in Warhammer 40K – which is next to none, if they had not befriended the governments of planets or hold enough influence to strong-arm them.)

Secondly, any ship of that Faction becomes increasingly more hostile to the player. The only ship that would not attack the player outright are merchant ships, and even so these can be fierce if the player accosts them. The other ships are hostile to various degrees. For example, ships that are commanded by Zealots are likely to attack the player outright, but military officers might just want to board and inspect for contraband if relations are not too bad.

Fortunately, the player can climb out of even the deepest pits, simply by filling it with money. If the player can find a Contact that is personally ambivalent or partial to the player and who has the ability to grant pardons, the player can pay a huge amount of money to simply reset the relations counter. The amount is exponentially proportional to the depth of the relations nadir, but the reparations are instantaneous.

However, the pardons only apply to the player’s reputation with the Faction as a whole. It does not apply to personal relationships with individual NPCs. If the player has greatly angered an individual, no amount of official pardons can assuage that. Fortunately, getting back into someone’s good graces is still a possibility, but it is (deservingly) a lot of work.

INTER-FACTION CONFLICTS:

There are some events that can happen out of the control of the player. The most numerous of these are inter-Faction conflicts.

Due the rule of the hero Shalun’s laws, conflicts may never escalate to open war. The most violent form of inter-Faction conflict that is allowed is the Solar War, in which the official militaries of the Factions can engage each other, but only in one-on-one duels. Most other conflicts are not as severe as Solar Wars, but each has their own intricacies.

The less violent ones, but no less troublesome, are trade conflicts. These conflicts inhibit the player’s ability to trade as a Star Trader, lest he/she angers one Faction or another for selling goods at the wrong place and the wrong time.

The frequency of any type of Conflict depends on the time progression of the playthrough. At first, violent conflicts such as Duel of Assassins and Solar Wars are all too frequent, but will soon give way to less violent conflicts. As the playthrough wears on, a balance of violent and non-violent conflicts would eventually be achieved.

These conflicts change the behaviours of the ships that belong to the Factions involved. For example, Solar Wars make Military ships a lot more aggressive, especially if the player character’s parent Faction is on the opposing side.

CONTACTS:

“Contacts” are the NPCs that the player character knows. After the player character has discovered their existence – and their willingness to deal with Star Traders – they automatically become people that the player character knows.

Contacts are almost always affiliated with one of the Factions. There are a few NPCs that are staunchly independent, such as a certain main character that would be pivotal to the narrative backdrop of any playthrough, but most are partisan. Thus, the player could pave the way for the start of a good relationship by currying favour with the Faction that they belong to.

However, doing good things for the Factions that they belong to does not mean that they will do good things for the player immediately. Contacts that the player has learned about from hearsay would start off as complete strangers to the player character, and being complete strangers, they will not do the player any favours until the player has scratched their own backs. This is a significant disincentive to learn about Contacts from hearsay.

The more costly and more tedious, but perhaps more rewarding, approach is to learn about them through introductions from a Contact that the player already knows. Almost all Contacts provide this service for a fee (which is presumably spent on gifts and greasing of hands). Any new Contact learned about through this manner starts with a better personal relationship level than those that are known through hearsay. How cosy the player character is with the Contact that made the introduction also determines how well the relationship with the new Contact begins.

Afterwards, the player can begin to work to obtain services from the Contact. There is emphasis on the word “work”, because not only does the Contact demands money in return for any services, the Contact’s favour is also a consumable resource.

PERSONAL REPUTATION:

That consumable resource is “Personal Reputation”, which is the measurement for the aforementioned personal relationship with the Contact. Almost every service that the Contact provides will consume some points of Personal Reputation, meaning that the player can only make use of the Contact’s services so much before he/she could not anymore.

Interestingly, there is no option to regain favour through bribery or any other overt palm-greasing for that matter. This limitation is not believable, but using money to grease things would have made dealings with Contacts a tad too easy.

Thus, the player has to do work to increase the Personal Reputation rating of a Contact in order to continue having access to that Contact’s services. This is done by performing missions for the Contact, selling Intel to the Contact if he/she buys it, or some other means that are often unique to specific types of Contacts.

EFFECTIVE REPUTATION:

To make the dealings with a Contact even more complex, there is the matter of “Effective Reputation”. This is the result of an algorithmic calculation that involves the Personal Reputation rating of a Contact and the Reputation rating with the Contact’s Faction.

The calculations are not clear and the equations for the algorithm have purportedly been changed many times in the interest of gameplay balance. Nevertheless, there are some general cases that can be reliably expected: if the Personal Reputation rating of a Contact is zero or in the negatives, the Contact will not offer any services at all, and if the Reputation rating with the Faction is in the pits, they will not offer any services other than pardons.

CONTACT INFLUENCE:

If the Reputation ratings are not complicated enough already, there is the Contact’s Influence rating. This rating determines the number of services that the Contact can provide.

Almost any mission that the player would perform for a Contact would increase his/her Influence. Selling Intel to the Contact also increases his/her Influence. The highest level of Influence that a contact can get is 100.

However, a Contact can have his/her Influence rating go into the negatives. This can happen due to losses in inter-Faction conflicts, or events outside their control that cause their Influence to tank.

In the case of Contacts whose careers are relatively small-time or not entirely legal, they are at risk of disappearing due to some mishap if their Influence is too low. This can especially happen if the Contact has other NPCs as enemies.

Contacts usually stay with the same careers that they have, but there is at least one story vignette where a contact is upgraded to a more powerful form after it is pursued and completed. There is no pervasive mechanism to upgrade Contacts, however.

Due to the interlacing factors of Reputation and Influence ratings, a considerable amount of the player’s experience with the game would be about currying favour with NPCs, for better or worse.

LOSS AND GAIN OF INFLUENCE DUE TO INTER-FACTION CONFLICTS:

Contacts can lose or gain influence from the outcome of events, especially those that concern inter-Faction conflicts.

In the case of inter-faction conflicts, having their Faction lose them causes them to lose Influence almost across the board. Conversely, if their Faction wins, they gain Influence.

The Contacts that have positions with high profiles in the Faction stand to lose or gain significantly. For example, the High Prince or Princess of a Faction loses or gains the most, as befitting the nominal leader of the Faction. The Contacts with less-than-legal careers have the least changes, as careful as they are to limit their profiles.

CONTACT FRIENDS AND ENEMIES:

A contact may have other Contacts as friends and enemies, in addition to other Contacts that they know either through professional communication or ties with their Faction. These relations give rise to a greater variety of missions that the player can have from them.

Doing these missions is guaranteed to raise the Influence of the Contact, of course. In the case of missions that help a friend, completion of these increases the Influence of that Friend too, and also increase the player’s Personal Reputation with them (presumably because the Contact reported the player’s contribution to his/her friend). In the case of missions that harm an enemy, they decrease the Influence of that enemy. Conveniently, the Contact would obfuscate the player’s contribution, so the reputation loss with that other Contact is reduced or even negated.

Such missions allow the player to curry Favour with multiple contacts. They can even be contacts across different Factions, because people of any Faction are ultimately free to be friends with anyone from any other Faction – even a traditionally opposing one.

CONTACT TRAITS:

Contact traits are not to be confused with crew traits. Unlike crew traits, Contact traits remain almost the same throughout a playthrough. However, many of them also start hidden, and are difficult to reveal even if the player has built considerable Personal Reputation with the Contact.

One of these traits is always in play when the player is asking the Contact for mission offers. If the trait is a hidden one, the player would not have much of an idea about what to expect from that mission. However, if it is known, the player has a better chance of expecting trouble or better rewards.

For example, if a Contact is known for being treacherous, the player can expect ambushes to happen at critical moments of the mission. Of course, the Contact would deny having a hand in them, even if the player could confront them about those.

Some traits are a lot more mundane. For example, some traits increase the pay-out from the completion of specific types of missions.

GRUDGES:

In the most recent build of the game at this time of writing, having a bad Personal Reputation with a Contact that happens to be a very influential person will lead to undesirable incidents. The player may be accosted by a party of assassins as soon as his/her ship lands on a world. The player may encounter peculiarly hostile bounty hunters while travelling through the space of a quadrant, even though the player’s relationship with that faction is okay.

If the player persists in having such a bad relationship with an influential Contact, the player would soon trigger the conditions for a certain story vignette involving the attention of particularly infamous bounty hunters. Defeating these bounty hunters earns the player considerable renown, as well as special pieces of equipment (which tend to be trophies taken from the defeated bounty hunters).

MISSIONS - OVERVIEW:

Missions are the main driving factors of any playthrough. Missions are procedurally generated tasks given by Contacts, if the player is not pursuing any story vignettes, or specially crafted ones if the player is pursuing them. Sometimes, Missions are immediately added to the player’s to-do list, but some others have to be selected from the Contact’s list of offered missions.

The Star Trader never does things for free, as per the requirements of their charter. Therefore, all Missions have payment for the Star Trader when pursued and completed. However, payment will be greatly reduced if the player cannot complete the missions in time. Indeed, all missions are timed, though some may be a given a deadline that is many in-game years away.

Some Missions are composed of only one task; hiding caches of goods for a Smuggler Contact is an example of these. Some others are long-winded, such as the survey tours that Princes or Princesses often dole out. The long-winded are, however, very lucrative and often with a big payday at the end.

Some others are more elaborate, requiring different tasks. These require crew with diverse skills, and so happen to pay better than Missions of similar length.

Missions with phases may have the player being paid for each completed phase, or have payment deferred to later. The player may also gain or lose Reputation upon completion of a phase, depending on the solution that the player has used.

Some Missions have phases that are hidden from the player. This is especially so for those Missions that have the player searching for or hunting a person that has information that the player needs in order to proceed. However, the number of hidden phases is always shown to the player, so an experienced and observant player might be able to guess what tasks lay ahead.

Incidentally, many Missions will end with the last task being the player character reporting to the mission-giver. It is a rare mission where the player does not need to do so. Moreover, the Influence that the mission-giver would gain is only ever granted at the full completion of the Mission.

OVERDUE MISSIONS:

The player is almost always given a due date for a mission. Otherwise, the timer for a mission reads as “Expiration Unknown”.

Despite the statement of a deadline, the player could still complete a mission that has become overdue. Only the payment is reduced, but the other rewards are still given.

However, if the player dallies with a mission for too long, like having it go overdue for an in-game year, the mission is cancelled and the Contact that gave the mission becomes quite cross with the player.

TYPES OF MISSIONS:

Most missions will involve one or more gameplay elements. For example, bounty hunting missions have the player going after enemy NPCs, and will more often than involve a ship battle or crew battle (more on these later).

Before going on missions, the player is usually briefed about what steps that there would be, so the player will know what skills are needed. Some missions will also require the player to have some specialized ship components, such as passenger cabins for chauffeuring important people about. Indeed, the player cannot proceed with, or even begin, certain missions without these components. The game usually does a good job of telling the player about these requirements.

TRADE PERMITS, EDICTS & MILITARY RANKS – OVERVIEW:

In addition to Faction Reputation, there are three distinctions that determine a Star Trader’s standing with a Faction. These distinctions have ranks. Generally higher ranks are better, but the Faction that gave them expects greater loyalty, or at least neutrality, from the player character.

These three distinctions are granted by Contacts that have been vested with the authority to do so. However, most Contacts can only grant one or two types, and only up to certain ranks. Princes/Princesses can grant all three types and most of their ranks, but only the High Princess/Princess of a Faction can grant all of the ranks of all three types. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to find these NPCs and get cozy with them.

TRADE PERMITS:

Of these three, Trade Permits are likely the most coveted, because these allow the player to trade high-end goods. Trade Permits only apply to the Factions that gave them. To elaborate, a Trade Permit with one Faction lets the player sell any high-end goods at that Faction’s trade exchanges, but it will not let the player sell these goods at the exchanges of other Factions.

Since there are so few ranks of trade permits, losing them can be distressing. The player can lose them by violating the tenets of Trade Wars and Trade Bans, e.g. by participating in the trade economies of the opposing Factions.

Thusly, the player might have to withhold any trade with Factions that are having trade conflicts with each other. This can be dissatisfying, though there are other ways to sell goods regardless of these conflicts, as will be described later.

EDICTS:

Edicts are the sanctions that the Factions give to hunt down targets; in the lore, these are the licenses given to bounty hunters. Theoretically, the issuer of the Edicts take the brunt of the blame, but in actuality, the targeted party will remember the hunter who took away their own people. Gameplay-wise, they enable missions that have the player going after people from other Factions. These missions will certainly anger the other Faction upon completion. However, there are some Talents that can reduce reputation loss with the aggrieved Faction, and their potency depends on the player’s Edict rank.

Certain Factions value Edicts more than the others. For example, Steel Song is a Faction that strongly believes in the concept of retribution, so those who hold Edicts that it has issued benefits from discounts for the purchase of certain things, like boarding implements.

MILITARY RANKS:

Military rank is the distinction that happens to have an outrageous number of levels – more than twenty, in fact. Apparently, this is part of the Trese Brothers’ long-term plans: higher-end stuff like advanced ship components would only be available to the higher ranks.

Despite its name, military ranks do not allow the player to command armadas or armies in the name of that Faction. Military ranks are merely recognition of the player’s service to the Faction, and they happen to be granted by people who tend to give missions that benefit their Faction as a whole. Besides, the player still has to scratch some backs and grease some palms to get those ranks in the first place.

LOSING RANKS:

The player can lose ranks in any of three distinctions for a Faction if the player completes missions against its interests, or other commit aggression against its assets. Worse transgressions result in more ranks being lost. In particular, partaking in inter-Faction conflicts can lead to considerable loss of ranks. However, there are a few Talents that can mitigate the losses, but these Talents take a lot of time to be replenished.

CARD MINI-GAME:

The system of Strong and Standard Dice is a reliable implementation of luck-based gameplay, as unlikely as that sounds. Its use has already been proven in the Trese Brothers’ earlier games.

They have a new luck-based system for this game. This system comes up whenever the player’s ship operates in the orbits of planets, when the player is exploring Wildernesses, or when the player is accessing the Black Market of a planet (this will be described later), among other activities.

The player is shown five cards, which represent the possible outcomes of an attempt at this mini-game. The variety of cards depends on the statistics of the planet, and the combined sum of certain skills. For example, Spying operations depend on the Government rating of the planet, and the player’s combined Stealth rating.

If the player’s ratings outweigh those of the planet, there would be more cards with positive outcomes than the negative ones. However, the ratings of the planet also determine the magnitude of the rewards. For example, backwater planets are not going to yield much of any Intel for spying operations.

The variety of cards is considerable, though there are some noticeable patterns about them. These patterns depend on the type of operation that the player is performing.

For example, there is the response of any ship that the player encounters, if the player got such an outcome. If the player is patrolling the orbit of a planet, the player is helping out that planet. If the player encounters any Faction-own ship that is from the same Faction as the planet, it is usually favourable towards the player. However, if the player is blockading the planet or spying on its communications, that Faction ship would likely be hostile.

INFURIATING LUCK-BASED OUTCOMES FOR MINI-GAME:

Unfortunately, this card mini-game is not enjoyable. This is because it is almost entirely about luck. There are not many things within the player’s control, despite its presentation of cards.

Without any Talent that is relevant to this mini-game, the player can only just press a button. The mini-game picks one of the cards for the player. There is little that the player can do to make the RNG roll slant towards a specific card.

The most that the player could do is use Talents that remove or convert the cards, or reshuffle the entire hand. Yet, these come with limitations and caveats of their own.

Indie titles like Hand of Fate have implemented such a card picking mini-game better than this game does. In particular, Hand of Fate lets the player follow cards as they are overturned and shuffled about.

CAN ONLY USE ONE TALENT AT A TIME IN CARD MINI-GAME:

Even with Talents that give the player some measure of control in the card mini-game, it is still infuriatingly luck-dependent. This is because the player can only use one Talent at a time; using it immediately leads to an attempt at a mini-game. The mini-game could have been much more enjoyable if the player could use more than one Talent on each attempt.

LUCK-DEPENDENT CARD RE-ROLLS AND CONVERSIONS:

Some Talents re-roll cards, but even so the cards that they turn into are randomized. The player might re-roll a risk card, only to have it turn into an even worse risk card.

Some Talents that convert cards might convert them to cards with specific outcomes. Chief among these are the Talents that convert cards to Mission Success outcomes. However, the other conversion Talents may produce results with considerable variation. For example, a Spying-related Talent that converts a card to an Intel Skim card randomly determines the potency of the resulting card.

BLACK MARKET:

The Black Market of a planet is the player’s means of selling illegal goods on that planet. Black Markets also allow the player to work around trade conflicts.

However, there must be a Contact that can provide access to the Black Market, and there are not a lot of these. Furthermore, the player still needs to consider the planet’s demands for goods; one big disappointment is finding out that a planet does not have demand for the exotic but illegal stuff that the player is carrying.

Accessing the Black Market of a planet requires the player to play a variant of the card mini-game, which has particularly nasty risk cards. The risk cards almost always result in the player’s illegal goods being seized, sometimes with fines levied. Reputation loss is also certain. Furthermore, the player’s Contact that provided the access also loses Influence and gets upset at the player too. An even worse one is the player losing the Contact outright.

Fortunately, for this particular card mini-game, the rewards can outweigh the risks. Illegal goods that are in demand often fetch favourable prices, and selling them can sometimes result in additional rewards if the player has crewmembers with special Talents, like the Smuggler.

TALENTS – IN GENERAL:

Talents are special capabilities that crewmembers can learn in order to give them an advantage, or at least more options in a situation. They gain Talent points at certain levels, which the player can then spend on having them learn Talents that are made available by their jobs.

Furthermore, when the player’s ship has landed on a planet, the player can spend some money to have them relearn their talents. (The reason for why they can only do these on planets is neither clear nor convincing, though this is a deliberate gameplay restriction.)

There are many types of Talents, but the game does help the player understand them by typifying them. This helps the player select Talents so that the ship’s crew has a balanced selection of Talents.

TALENT COOLDOWNS:

Any talent that is not related to crew combat has a cooldown timer, often in spans of weeks. This means that the player will want to be frugal with their usage, if the player is given the choice of using them or not. However, some Talents will be automatically used regardless of the player’s wishes, specifically the Talents that affect the outcome of RNG rolls.

AUTOMATIC-PASS TALENTS:

Perhaps the most welcome of these talents are automatic passes in the case of failure in the Strong and Standard dice rolls. The player’s ship will be making a lot of such rolls as it travels in space, and these Talents happen to negate bad luck whenever they happen. It is strongly recommended that the player has some of these.

SHIP BATTLES – OVERVIEW:

A sci-fi game with space-ships would not be complete without some ship-to-ship battles that the player participates in. Star Traders: Frontiers has them, of course.

Ship battles are one-to-one affairs. The player will not be seeing armadas, possibly not ever, because the Trese Brothers does not intend to implement total war conflicts in the game, at least not yet. The most that the player would have are back-to-back ship battles.

Anyway, the two ships appear on-screen during battle, but their actual distance to each other is determined by the range meter. The meter has five divisions that express the relative distance between the ships.

The ships start at range 5, which is the furthest range. If either ship moves beyond this distance, that ship is considered to have retreated from battle. This is one of the possible outcomes of a battle: neither side loses, nor does it win. The player’s ship retains any harm that has been inflicted on it, of course. The other ship is removed from the game world; there does not appear to be any means of hunting down a weakened opponent that has escaped.

The other outcome is obviously victory for one of the ships, and defeat for the other. This can be brought about in several ways, each of which concerns the fate that the defeated ship has suffered.

The defeated ship can blow up from taking too much damage. The defeated ship can have lost a lot of its crew incapacitated/slain such that it could not function anymore. Its captain may have been incapacitated. Its void engine might be crippled. Indeed, it is rare to find any other space sci-fi game where there is more than one way for a ship to be defeated, other than being blown up. This variety of outcomes gives the player plenty of options on how to deal with an opposing ship, which is much welcome.

When a ship takes damage, the damage is inflicted on its hull meter. Some of the damage is also duplicated and applied on the components of the ship too. Heavily damaged components eventually stop their contributions to the ship’s performance. In the cases of critical components like the Void Engine, it might even lead to defeat.

Some of the damage is again duplicated and applied on the crew. Which crewmembers are hurt and the portion of the damage that they would take is wildly randomized, however. Their Resilience ratings and other statistics that determine their toughness will not matter much in this case.

SHIP ARMOR AND SHIELDS:

The armor and shields of a ship reduce incoming damage. Armor reduces kinetic and certain other types of physical damage. Shields reduce damage from esoteric sources, like laser beams and radiation weaponry.

A ship begins with base armor and shield ratings; these are determined by the model of the ship. The ratings can be bolstered with certain ship components, namely plating and shield generators. Some ship components that are not dedicated armouring and shielding can provide increases too, albeit to a lesser degree.

It should be mentioned here that the increases are percentage-based. Therefore, ships with low ratings, such as the smaller ones, will not benefit much from the increases.

The armor and shield ratings are then converted into percentages. These percentages are the portions of incoming damage that would be shrugged off. The conversions depend on the model of the ship, but the equations for the conversions are not shown to the player. This would have been helpful, because the reduction percentages are limited to 60%.

Any further increases for the ratings will not have the percentages go beyond 60%. Furthermore, the increases have diminishing returns, especially after the percentages have edged past 50%. Considering that the increases often come with the setback of increasing the water-fuel costs of jumping, the player might want to put off trying to max out the percentages.

On the other hand, having an excess of increases will provide some redundancy in the case of having components damaged during battle. Still, such redundancy tends to be not worth the increase in jump costs.

REPAIRING COMPONENTS & HEALING CREW DURING BATTLE:

The ship’s hull is on a one-way trip to zero, but components can be repaired during and after battle. This is important, especially in the case of the weapons on the ship. Having enough components knocked out can doom the player’s ship, even if the player manages to win the battle.

Fortunately, components that are completely damaged can be completely repaired later. They are not permanently destroyed.

Crew will die if their hitpoints are reduced to zero during ship battle, unless the ship’s doctors or medics (and recently the Quartermaster) have Talents that can save their lives. As long as they are alive, regardless of how low their hitpoints get, they will still contribute to the performance of the ship and their Talents will still be available. There are not a lot of means of healing crew members during battle, however, and these few are provided by Doctors.

EVASION:

Of course, a ship can attempt to evade incoming attacks instead of taking them on. Its capability to do so is determined by its Evasion rating, which in turn is determined by the model of the ship. Generally, smaller and nimbler ships have better Evasion ratings, which is just as well because they lack the durability to take solid hits.

These ratings, together with the combined Pilot skill rating of the ship’s crew, determine how many dice that the ship gets to oppose the dice rolls of the other ship. The outcome of the opposing roll-offs is binary: the attack either lands, or it does not.

There does not appear to be any mechanism for critical hits in ship battles, by the way.

REACTOR POINTS:

The Talents of its crew and the variety of its components determine what a ship can do during battle, but its Reactor Points determine how much it can do.

For better or worse, all ships, including those of the enemy, has eight RPs, regardless of the diversity of its components. There are some Talents that can temporarily increase the pool of RPs, but these often come with setbacks such as damage to components because the crew are abusing the Void Engine of the ship.

The most common consumption of RPs is having the ship change its range relative to the other ship. This is important if the player intends to disengage from the battle, use weapons that have specific ranges, or board the opposing ship. The other ship will be doing the same. The cost to change range is generally 4 RPs, though one of the Void Engine models reduces this to 3 RPs. (This makes that Void Engine model a rather good long-term investment option.)

If both ships attempt to change range in their turn, the range change is usually just one step, unless they are using Talents that increase the magnitude of the change. In the case of the ships having opposite directions for their range changes, the ship that rolled better on its pilot test gets to have the range change happen its way. However, a draw can still happen, in which case there is no range change.

Any remaining RPs are then spent on using weapons or launching strike-craft. These have varying costs, though most of them cost at least 2 RPs to use.

SHIP WEAPONS:

If the player intends to destroy the other ship, the player will need ship-mounted weapons to do so. Ship weapons occupy the same slots as the other ship components, so there are many possible permutations of ship weaponry.

There is a considerable variety of ship weapons, and even similar ones may have differences in what they can inflict on the other ship.

The main reason for this variety is that ship weapons have primary and secondary means of inflicting damage. Primary damage is usually determined by the physical nature of the munitions for the weapon. For example, autocannons and missile inflict kinetic damage. Primary damage is in turn resisted by either armor or shielding.

Secondary damage is determined by the de-buffs that they apply. For example, gamma beams inflict radiation de-buffs, which poison the crew and damage components over time. Different ships have different resistances or options to deal with these de-buffs and the damage that they inflict, so it is the player’s interest to have a myriad of weapons.

However, having a variety of weapons means that the component slots that they occupy cannot be used for other things. Besides, the player’s ship can only have so many RPs to spend on firing weapons.

In addition to the damage types that ship weapons have and the RPs that they require for their use, there are their ranges to consider. Some weapons cannot fire at certain ranges and they are at their most effective at specific ranges. For example, missile batteries cannot fire when the range between the two ships is very close, and they are most effective at maximum range.

Therefore, the player might want to have weapons with varying ranges so that it can fire something at any range. Besides, there is no weapon that can fire at any range.

SHIP & CREW BUFFS & DE-BUFFS:

As to be expected of de-buffs, they diminish the combat performance of their targets and/or inflict damage over time. They will go away after several rounds, but they can stack indefinitely, including de-buffs of the exact same type. A ship that is piled with a lot of de-buffs is quite doomed.

There are two major categories of de-buffs: one category is inflicted by weapons, the other by Talents.

The de-buffs that weapons inflict are called “Crippling Statuses” in-game. These de-buffs are further categorized into those that affect ships and those that affect crews. This is important to keep in mind because the Talents that remove these de-buffs generally either remove de-buffs of one category but not the other. (Doctors do have a high-level Talent that remove all Crippling de-buffs.)

De-buffs that are inflicted through the use of Talents cannot be removed with other Talents. However, there is a caveat to their application; they are only applied if the ship’s attacks land. There does not appear to be any Talent-based de-buff that can be applied without having to hit the other ship. Therefore, the player runs the risk of having a Talent wasted because of a missed shot.

Buffing one’s ship is a given necessity during battles, even against the easiest of opponents. These buffs include the usual damage bonuses, accuracy bonuses and such other statistical increases.

However, the most powerful ones, such as RP increases and massive firepower bonuses, often come with setbacks. Significant component damage is the most common one.

CRAFTS - OVERVIEW:

Crafts are a recent addition to the game. They are small vessels that the player can use to support the efforts of the ship against the opposing one. Crafts convincingly reinforce the notion that the player’s ship is a capital-class ship. Not all ships can have craft, however. This is because they must have launch bays, which are large components that do little else but enable the use of crafts.

There are three types of craft: interdictors, bombers and boarding shuttles. Any of them can only be used if it has a pilot. At this time of writing, the user interface for assigning pilots to crafts is a bit of a hassle to use, mainly because of the need to scroll up and down the list of craft. Assigning pilots also requires more than one click/tap.

A ship can only ever have four crafts, regardless of its size. Furthermore, the Launch Bay only supports the presence of one craft. Hangars are needed in order to have more crafts, but each Hangar can only provide for one craft. The ship must also have a Launch Bay before it can have Hangars. Hangars also serve little other purpose.

Having a squadron of craft comes with a lot of opportunity costs, obviously.

CRAFT PILOTS:

To get a craft pilot, one of the crewmembers must have at least one level of the job that is associated with the crafts.

There is one job for each type of craft, so if the player wants to have all three types of craft available for use, there has to be three crewmembers with these jobs. Furthermore, any skills that these jobs provide do not contribute to the skill pool of the ship. Fortunately, these jobs have some versatility in the form of the Talents that are unique to them, but they are only usable if the crewmembers have been assigned as the pilots of the crafts.

To use crafts in ship battle, their pilots must have spent Talent points in at least one of the “flight plans” that are associated with their type of crafts. Without flight plans, the crafts cannot even be deployed in battle.

FLIGHT PLANS:

Flight plans are the actions that crafts would execute after they are launched. A flight plan is separated into several phases.

In a previous build of the game, the phases are the approach, the execution, the return and the docking. The approach has the craft flying over to the enemy ship, after which it executes its offensive maneuver on the enemy ship. It then returns to the player’s ship, and docks afterwards. Each phase takes a round of combat. In the current build of the game, the return and docking phases have been merged, thus reducing the number of rounds for a flight plan to be performed.

In the current state of the game, crafts cannot be affected by any de-buffs. However, there are some Talents that can suppress their flight plans. For example, there is a Talent that high-level Gunners can have that force opposing crafts to immediately skip to the return phase of their flight plans, while also inflicting damage on the crafts.

On the other hand, there is currently no reason to have these Talents. The developers have yet to implement CPU-controlled enemy ships that have crafts.

CRAFT DAMAGE:

Crafts can be destroyed. Yet, currently, there is no system to have a ship specifically target either crafts or the opposing ship. Instead, the game depends on a system of probabilities. When a ship makes an attack, it is likely to target the other ship instead of its crafts, if any. Any attack that is directed at the crafts are opposed by the Pilot skill and Evasion of the crafts, rather than that of the ship.

At this time of writing, a craft can continue to function even if it has taken tremendous damage. However, it is not counted as a component of its parent ship, so it cannot be repaired during battle. It cannot be repaired during salvage operations either. The only way to repair it in the current version of the game is to have it repaired at starports. Fortunately, the repairs do not take long.

INTERDICTORS:

Interdictors, at this time of writing, are of limited use. They are meant to shoot down incoming enemy torpedoes and missiles, but there is an RNG roll that determines how well they do so. They are also meant to intercept incoming enemy craft, but in the build of the game at this time, enemy craft has yet to be implemented.

Furthermore, there is a problem with one of their flight plans, specifically the one that has them looking out for torpedos and missiles. After they are deployed with this flight plan, they cannot be recalled. This is because the flight plan lacks a return phase.

Interdictors can attack the enemy ship, but their damage output leaves much to be desired. Indeed, the only reason that the player might want an Interdictor to attack is the de-buff that it can inflict on the opposing ship.

BOMBERS:

Bombers are the reason to have crafts. Bombers have flight plans that can inflict considerable damage against opposing ships, though considering the number of rounds that their flight plans take, the damage that can be inflicted is diffused across the duration of the bombing run. However, the de-buffs that they inflict are a worthwhile benefit. Bombers have no other use during battle other than to go on the attack, however.

Bombers do have use outside of ship battles, provided that their pilots have taken the appropriate Talents. For example, Bombers can destroy defeated enemy ships to greater effect.

BOARDING SHUTTLES:

Prior to the implementation of crafts, boarding can only be performed at range 1, or with boarding-related Talents, which eventually run out before they have to be replenished over in-game weeks. Boarding shuttles provide the player with reusable means to board the opposing ship.

Where the other craft types inflict damage on their attack phases, the boarding shuttle initiates a boarding attack. This is equivalent to the other methods of boarding, but will not result in additional boarding battles if the player has been using more than one method. This limitation likely has been put in place for the sake of gameplay balance.

In addition to making a boarding attack, the boarding shuttles also inflict de-buffs. This can stack on top of whatever nasty things that the player can inflict on a successful boarding attempt.

END OF SHIP BATTLES:

Generally, defeating an enemy ship with it intact yields a more lucrative reward than having it blown up. With it intact, the player can conscript its crew, steal its cargo or syphon off its water-fuel. This can be done in any order, and if the player is feeling bloodthirsty, destroy the defeated ship outright anyway. Destroyed ships can then be salvaged for money and hull repairs.

Some Talents enhance the rewards from defeating enemy ships. For example, Smugglers and Military Officers have Talents that can yield more loot from defeated but intact Smuggler ships. Furthermore, during some inter-Faction conflicts, the player is given more options to dispose of the defeated enemy ship, such as seizing them as prizes, assuming that the player has the appropriate Talents.

Of course, each option comes with caveats, such as angering the Factions. Alternatively, the player could just leave, but that would mean going away empty-handed.

Losing is generally a bad thing. If the player’s ship gets blown up, then that is the end. If the player’s ship is taken intact after a heated battle, the player can expect his/her player character to be executed outright, or imprisoned – either case is a game over anyway.

CREW BATTLES - OVERVIEW:

Crew battles occur whenever either ship commits to a boarding action against the other ship, or when the player’s away team (to borrow a Star Trek term) goes exploring. It may also happen in some story vignettes, especially when the player’s ship had landed on some planet.

Regardless of how they are initiated, crew battles always involve the player’s main team of fighters. The player picks these from amongst the combat-capable crew of the ship, specifically those with jobs that grant them Talents for use during combat.

Crewmembers with jobs that do not grant them such Talents cannot be selected, and generally will never participate in combat. However, the crewmembers of opposing ships with such jobs can be pulled into combat, mainly so that the player can eliminate them and weaken the pooled skill ratings of the other ship.

Unlike the hull of the ship, the health of characters is not on a one-way trip to zero. As mentioned earlier, they can be healed during combat if one of their team-mates have Talents that can provide healing. Indeed, in a fight between two groups that have healers, it would be a battle of attrition if either side could not land telling blows, or at least eliminate the other team’s healer first.

There is only ever a maximum of four characters in either team. If the player’s crewmembers have their health reduced to zero, they are removed from the fight; there is no chance for any reinforcement or replacement. The characters may survive, however, if there are characters that have life-saving Talents available.

POSITIONAL RANKS:

Either team has four ranks of position, one for each member. These ranks determine what kinds of attacks that the characters can use. If an attack requires that a character be in specific ranks, and the character is not, he/she/it cannot use that attack. Players who have played the Spirit Engine titles by Mark Pay or Darkest Dungeon by Red Hook Studios would be quite familiar with this mechanism. Indeed, the presence of some Talents that force enemy characters to change their ranks is a strong indicator that they matter in combat.

However, unlike Darkest Dungeon, any character is at least able to do something when he/she/it is in any rank that he/she/it does not prefer. These actions are not cost-efficient though, and often less potent than the actions that are rank-dependent.

INITIATIVE:

The initiative of each character is perhaps the second-most important statistic, after health. Like the Initiative scores used in other games, they decide who gets to move before the others. However, in this game, Initiative also determines how many actions that they can take during combat. At the start of each round, characters roll for Initiative, and then add the bonus from their Quickness ratings. Thus, they have a pool of Initiative points.

Different actions require expenditure of different amounts of Initiative. Once the points are spent, the characters’ new Initiative scores decide when they get to move again next, if at all. Initiative is only ever reduced to zero, but if an action would take a character below -8 points before the Initiative is set to zero, that character gets a penalty. The penalty comes in the form of that character’s Initiative being set to a mere 8 points in the next round, ensuring that there is nothing much that he/she/it can do.

It should be mentioned here that there is no option to wait. Each character must do something when his/her/its turn comes up and must spend Initiative instead of conserving it. The only thing that comes closest to a “wait” option is an option to restore a bit of health and morale; the benefits of this option are just not worth the Initiative cost.

CREW WEAPONS:

Each human character is armed with a weapon of sorts. Also, since this game is partially influenced by Warhammer 40K, there are close-combat weapons too.

Each type of weapon grants its wielder a default attack to use in crew combat, if only to give them an option to attack the enemy. There is no option for unarmed fighting.

There are two categories of guns: pistols and two-handed guns. The use of the former is governed by the Pistol skill, whereas the latter is governed by the Rifle skill, even if the guns are not rifles per se.

Pistols are handguns of any kind. It does not matter whether the pistol resembles a revolver or a semi-auto. All of them function similarly.

The two-handed guns are assault rifles, heavy rifles, shotguns and sniper rifles. Assault rifles are the standard of the lot, having all-rounded statistics and the ability to hit all four ranks in the enemy team. Heavy rifles are bigger assault rifles, doing more damage but costing more initiative to use. Shotguns are shorter-ranged, can only hit up to three ranks deep and cannot be used if its wielder is in the fourth rank. In return, it does considerable damage for less Initiative than heavy rifles. Sniper rifles are powerful, but they are ungainly things that are best being fired deep into enemy ranks from far away rather than an enemy that is up close.

Speaking of up close, close-combat weapons can only, understandably, be used by anyone that happens to be in the front two ranks of his/her team.

The selection of close-combat weapons is less diverse than the choices of guns. There are swords, of which a character can only wield one. There are no shields, and characters with swords only ever wield them in a single hand instead of using a double-grip.

Characters with pistols can hold weapons that resemble machetes or kukris in their other hand, if they have any levels in the Blades skill. These give them the option of either shooting or cutting the enemy. Generally, cutting does more damage, but the difference is quite small – too small to justify the choice of having the character take on jobs that grant him/her the Blade skill.

Furthermore, any Talent which uses the Blade skill would inflict less damage when used with a kukri or machete than when used with swords.

CREW BATTLE TALENTS:

Unlike the Talents for other gameplay situations, the ones that are used in crew combat are reusable. They are often more effective than the default attack that is granted by a character’s weapon. However, Talents use more Initiative than the default attack.

There are Talents that require the use of specific weapons, such as those that are associated with the Pistoleer, Swordsman and Soldier (which are jobs that are dedicated to crew battles). Their cost is represented by a multiplier that is applied on the Initiative cost for the default attack.

There are Talents that do not require specific weapons, such as those that have characters tossing grenades. Talents that affect more than one target tend to have considerable Initiative cost, or inflict some form of setback on their users.

EVASION, DEFLECTION & ARMOUR PIERCING:

Every character has an evasion rating, which is obviously how skilled they are at avoiding incoming attacks. Interestingly, bonuses to evasion ratings are provided by armor too, provided that they are not heavy armor (which inflict penalties instead).

Deflection and armour piercing are two related statistics. These do not use the Strong and Standard dice system. Instead, they use percentages. When attacks land on characters, their Deflection ratings determine the percentage of damage that they can shrug off. However, this percentage is reduced by the Piercing ratings of the attackers.

Understandably, Deflection ratings are mainly provided by armour. There are some Talents that can increase Deflection further. Piercing ratings are provided by quality weapons, but there are a number of Talents that bolster them too.

CREW GEAR:

A human character can equip at least two pieces of gear: his/her weapon and armor. Officers can have an extra accessory, which either bolsters their performance in crew combat or at tasks that are not related to combat. This extra accessory is often a good incentive to use Officers in crew combat, albeit at the risk of putting them in danger.

If characters are not equipped with special pieces of gear, they draw their gear from the ship’s Weapon Locker, if there is any. The tech level of the Weapon Locker determines the default tech level of the weapons and armor that characters use. If the Weapon Locker is rendered unusable from damage and could not be repaired before the next ship battle or crew battle, any new crewmember would not have their gear updated to the tech level of the Weapon Locker and the player cannot replace any gear with gear from the Weapon Locker. Any pieces of gear that are already equipped, including those drawn from the Weapon Locker earlier, are unaffected.

There is no way to seize the gear of defeated human enemies. Indeed, finding gear for crew is a considerable task.

One of the endeavours that the player would undertake is the acquisition of special pieces of gear, especially those of tech levels that are higher than those provided by the highest-ranking Weapon Locker. These special pieces of gear can be bought from Contacts that are dealers in weapons and armor. Understandably, better relations with them translate to a better selection of offers.

There are also rare opportunities to obtain particularly high-level gear that are not offered by Contacts, often through one-time only story vignettes. It is not always clear which story vignettes provide these as rewards. After all, these rewards come from benefactors who just give them on a whim.

ENEMY SHIPS - OVERVIEW:

Every real second that the player’s ship moves about in space, the game makes a roll on whether the player would encounter another ship or not. If there is an encounter, and that ship happens to be irrevocably hostile for whatever reason, the player has few other choices than to begin a ship battle. There are Talents that can be used to get away from the hostile ship, but these options inflict damage on the ship’s Void Engine or Jump Drive. Without these Talents, the player’s ship can only escape by retreating during the ensuing battle.

Of course, the player could decide to fight anyway, depending on the capabilities of the opposing ship. To help the player determine the strength of the enemy ship, the developers have (recently) implemented a feature that shows brief comparisons of the capabilities of the two ships. Exact numbers are not shown, however.

If the player has been successful at repeatedly boarding and killing the crew of the enemy ship, its capabilities would plummet. That said, there has yet to be an automated ship in the game – even though the lore of the setting does have such ships. Further statements about this are withheld because they are story spoilers.

INDEPENDENT SHIPS:

Prior to a certain update, the main prey of any player is the Independent ship. It has no friends among the Factions, or any powerful benefactor who would miss them. This has since been rectified; deliberately destroying a crippled Independent ship would anger the Hunna Collective, who can pull off some unpleasant stunts on the player.

Nevertheless, the Independent ship remains the most preferred prey. The player may be in trouble for killing them in cold blood, but robbing them of their fuel and cargo has few consequences (unless there are crewmembers who are staunch indie supporters).

FACTION SHIPS:

As mentioned earlier, committing aggression against Faction ships will land the player in trouble. Yet, these ships are likely to be the most hostile human ships that the player would come across. Even if the player is on good terms with the Factions, there are events that turn certain ships hostile, especially Pirates and Zealots.

CANNOT SKIP PAST EASY BATTLES:

Human ships will eventually become some of the easiest ships to fight, especially the Independent ones, if the player can persevere in building up the strength and capability of the ship and its crew. They will become so easy that they become tedious to fight, if there is no choice but to do so.

Of course, by this time, the player’s ship and crew could be skilled enough to simply escape at the end of the first round. However, the opposing ship might still land some hits. They are not likely to inflict severe damage, but it is still damage that the player gets nothing in return for.

XENO SHIPS:

Alien ships are the most formidable enemies that the player would encounter. They are inherently hostile, so without Talents that let the player escape before the battle begins, the player has to fight them. They are also well-kitted out. Even the least of them is very tough and fast, and difficult to flee from. Moreover, their weapons are incredibly powerful – cheatingly so, in fact, because most of them only cost 1 RP to fire, meaning that they can fire up to eight weapons if they do not move in their turn. Indeed, an encounter with one too early in a playthrough is likely to doom the player outright.

Furthermore, due to their incredible toughness, fighting them head-on is a battle of attrition that even the most well-equipped ship cannot win. Xeno ships can use a lot of Talents that restore their weapons and remove de-buffs, making them far more durable than any human ship.

It would not take long for the wise player to realize that boarding is a much needed component of his/her strategy against xeno ships. Their resilience and ferocity are still dependent on their inhuman crew, so killing them in boarding actions is a vital tactic. Yet, aliens are among the nastiest enemies that the player would face in crew battles. They will be described further later.

There are good incentives to fight Xeno ships, however. The first and foremost of these is the gratitude of the Factions; no one in the Factions would fight the Alien if they do not have to. The second is the possibility of harvesting Xeno Artifacts from them, especially if the player could capture them intact (a tall but not impossible task). Xeno Artifacts are proscribed things that are illegal just about anywhere, but they fetch a high price wherever there is demand for them. However, there is a chance that there is nothing but grisly Biomass and near-worthless Scrap on the ships.

ENEMY SQUADS – OVERVIEW:

As mentioned earlier, the player’s team only faces up to four enemies in crew battles. However, there may be back-to-back battles that the player has to fight. However, since health can be restored during a fight and there are no ammunition concerns, these consecutive battles would not be much of a problem to a tricked-out and skilled team.

The majority of the crew battles that the player would fight are boarding actions. In these cases, the first boarding action would almost always pit the player against a team of dedicated fighters, namely Pistoleers, Swordsmen and/or Soldiers. However, if the player could defeat them, the next boarding action would have the player fighting crewmembers that do not even specialize in fighting at all. Eventually, consecutive boarding actions would whittle down the other ship’s capability, possibly to the point that it does not even have enough crew to continue functioning. Of course, if the player could encounter the enemy captain and defeat him/her/it, the player wins upon the end of the crew battle.

Human enemies are by far the most numerous that the player would fight. The ones that are encountered through risk cards or story vignettes tend to be far more skilled and better kitted than the ones that the player fights in boarding actions.

Although human enemies are visibly equipped with weapons, the player cannot steal anything from them, as mentioned earlier. That is, unless the game has been scripted to reward the player with something taken from their cold dead hands.

BUFFS:

Characters on a team can grant each other buffs. Some of these buffs are applied the usual way, e.g. a character spends his/her turn to grant a buff but does nothing else. Some other buffs are applied when the character lands a hit, of all means to get a buff. Some other more amusing ones are applied when characters take a hit.

Some buffs are applied at the start of a round. This occurrence depends on an RNG roll, and their triggering will cost the character some Initiative. However, the Initiative costs tend to be small, and being able to have these buffs before the enemy makes a move is a good thing.

However, the player should beware of stacking too many buffs. There are some nasty Talents that can immediately remove all buffs, while also inflicting bonus damage depending on the number of buffs removed.

Furthermore, unlike ships, characters in crew combat cannot have more than one buff of the same type. Attempting to do so merely resets the timer for the buff.

DE-BUFFS:

Characters on opposing sides can pile de-buffs on each other, usually through the application of Talents. Many of these de-buffs require characters to land hits, so missing can be a big waste of the characters’ turns.

There are not many Talents that can remove de-buffs, but those that can happen to be the specialty of characters who are useful to have in battle, such as Doctors and Combat Medics.

Interestingly, the Stun de-buff is applied as a separate state. It can be removed by removing the source, which is usually another de-buff. As long as it is active, the Stun de-buff has a percentage-based chance of triggering its effects when the Stunned character’s turn comes up; the percentage is clearly shown. Characters who suffer its effects skip their turn.

BREAKING:

The morale of human characters matters in crew combat. If their morale is very low, there is a chance that they “break”, which causes them to lose their turn outright while also causing their Initiative to plummet. Obviously, broken enemies are easy to defeat.

ALIENS:

At this time of writing, the only aliens that have been included in the game are the Terrox. The Terrox are facsimiles of the Tyranids from Warhammer 40K, being creatures of unnatural origin and which had been bred for the purpose of unreasoning violence against any sentient being. Understandably, any ship that they crew would pursue any human ship relentlessly.

When they are encountered in crew battles, the inexperienced player would be subjected to some unpleasant surprises about them. Although all of them are primarily melee fighters, any Terrox can attack any enemy at any rank, from any rank. Indeed, they do not appear to have any rank-based limitations to what they can do. Any Terrox also hits hard – which is perhaps befitting creatures that have been described as being able to kill unarmoured humans outright.

Granted, eventually the player would be able to nurture and develop fighters that can crump them quite handily. That would take a while though, and the fighters would likely need to have high ability ratings in the first place in order to be able to take hits from them without immediately going down.

Morale affects the Terrox differently. Terrox will never break when they are at low morale, but they do not seem to be able to use their Talents (which is perhaps just as well, because most of them are nasty).

One complaint about the Terrox is that the Trese Brothers have forgotten to highlight the “captain” of Terrox ships when the player fights in boarding actions against them. The captain looks exactly like the rest, and has no icon to indicate which one it is. This is unlike the display for the captains of human ships, who have icons that clearly indicate who they are.

(That said, the Terrox captain has a peculiar title that suggests an alien language, even though the lore of the game does not exactly mention that the Terrox has any form of civilization.)

RUMORS:

Rumors are the equivalent of “events” in games that have things happening elsewhere, out of the player’s control. There are a variety of Rumors, but most of them alter the statistics of planets or the safety of the quadrants. Some others activate certain gameplay content, something which has been recently implemented at this time of writing.

The most dreaded of these Rumors are those that render entire quadrants unsafe. Pirate Fleets or Xeno Incursions greatly increase the likelihood of encountering hostile ships. The latter, in particular, can have the player facing the nastiest hostile ship in the current build of the game: Tier 3 Xeno Ships, which have crazy statistics and many dozens of crew.

Nevertheless, all of these Rumors provide the player with opportunities, if circumstances allow them. For example, if the player is powerful enough to wreck Xeno ships, killing a lot of aliens is a reliable way to curry favour with the Factions.

On the other hand, some of the circumstances of these Rumors are just not compatible with the other circumstances. For example, there is the Rumor about the Market Exchange of a planet being closed indefinitely until further notice. This Rumor greatly increases the prices of goods that can be sold in the Black Market of that planet, but the player cannot take advantage of this if there is no Contact that can provide Black Market access on that planet.

SCAVENGING:

One category of Rumors is Scavenging opportunities. These also happen to be the only Rumors that can be triggered by paying certain Contacts. When these Rumors crop up, the planet gains a fourth card mini-game, called “Scavenge” (of course).

The variety of reward cards depends on the type of object that is being scavenged. For example, abandoned medical stations may yield Kloxian Medical Bays, which are rare trade goods (and likely a reference to Star Wars’ Bacta tanks).

The most coveted reward cards are those that yield special crew gear. These pieces of crew gear can only ever be obtained from this mini-game – unfortunately. As mentioned earlier, the card mini-games are infuriatingly fickle. The player may make many attempts at the card mini-game but may not even come across the card. Even so, the player has to be lucky enough to score that card, or has to save-scum a lot.

The risk cards are unpleasant. More often than not, these have the player fighting crew battles. Getting defeated tends to have the cargo hold of the player’s ship raided. Even if the player’s team is powerful enough to defeat any comers, these risk cards are tedious.

There is also a risk card that causes the death of multiple crewmembers. These cannot be prevented with life-saving talents, because apparently the cause of death is disastrously body-obliterating.

Scavenging is a recent addition to the game. It is unfortunate that the Trese Brothers just have to implement it with a card mini-game.

VISUAL DESIGNS:

Being a typical indie game that has been designed for a diverse range of machines, Star Traders: Frontiers makes use of spliced-sprites and near-static artwork. It does not look particularly distinct, especially if the player is a long-time follower of space science fiction.

There are vistas of alien worlds, replete with unrecognizable flora. There is artwork with starry skies. There are the ubiquitous pictures of nebulae, which remain ever a fixture in space sci-fi. The only noticeable omission is the picture of black silhouettes against the glare of stars, but the Trese Brothers would get to this sooner or later. Space sci-fi artists eventually do.

Ships in space sci-fi games are almost always barely animated. There is often no need to because the typical depiction of them in sci-fi are hunks of metal and ceramics gliding through space. On the other hand, there is a noticeable absence of turrets on the ships, and munitions seem to fly out of them from unseen orifices. Even the moving things are really nothing more than sprites sliding around.

Of course, players who have had plenty of experience with space sci-fi should not be expecting much.

The sprites for the characters have more animations, but to a seasoned follower of games with spliced-sprite animations, they can seem rather amateurish. Some of the postures are a bit awkward, especially the humans’ animations for the recoil from the firing of their guns. Sword strikes look rather flimsy too, especially considering that most sword strikes are waist-high forward-stabs with a single hand.

Perhaps the most noticeable gap in the visual designs for characters is the lack of any facial animation for the humans. They do not even blink.

SOUND DESIGNS:

The music is the first thing that the player hears from the game. Players who have played the Trese Brothers’ earlier games would know that they like to use digitally-made music. In the case of this game, there is a lot of electronic to listen to. This is nothing new, but it is noticeably different from the usual orchestral tracks that tend to permeate space science fiction. There are not a lot of tracks, however, so they will eventually become repetitive.

There are no legible voice-overs, but there are some utterances that human characters make when they are injured. This merely serves an aesthetic purpose, so they can be disabled without affecting the gameplay experience.

Sound effects accompany the use of Talents in crew combat, which is of course nothing impressive. There are some notably goofy oversights though. For example, the shriek of Terrox is generally meant to accompany their actions, but certain skills that human characters use, such as the Soldier’s Ferocity, also trigger the sound effect for this.

The use of any weaponry comes with sound effects that are specific to the type of weapon. However, there is nothing that a follower of combat-oriented games would have not heard before.

During space battles, the use of Talents is not accompanied by sound effects, though this is not necessary as there are obvious visual indicators for this. The only sound effects to be heard are the firing of ship weapons and their impact on the other ship. At this time of writing, the crafts do not have any sound effects, not even for the Bombers’ bombing runs.

CONCLUSION:

Star Traders: Frontiers is a continuation of the Trese Brothers’ design philosophy: not really great-looking, but complex to play and rewarding to those who persevere in learning the ropes.

However, the complex depths of the gameplay also makes it slow. Players who prefer quicker gratification are not likely to be entertained.

The pace of the content updates also still leaves something to be desired. For one, the gameplay element of crafts is still incomplete because enemy ships with crafts of their own had yet to be implemented, at this time of writing.

The Trese Brother continues to use the system of Strong and Standard Dice that has been in their previous games. This has been a surprisingly reliable luck-based system, so its continued use is a wise decision on their part.

Unfortunately, a design decision that is not as wise is the five-card mini-game. It is an awful expression of fickle luck, despite the presence of Talents that can manipulate the cards. A better design would have been to allow the player to use multiple Talents for each go at the mini-game, but this is not the case.

If not for the considerable pervasiveness of the awful five-card mini-game, this game would have been easy to recommend. As of now, this is a game that would be good for players who want more Space Ranger titles with greater complexity, but only if they can stomach the more fickle elements of the game.