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[SCC]

I see now. Well, I guess Alex didn't actually expect people to ignore the tutorial completely. At the moment, I have no better advice than "do everything the game tells you to as soon as possible" until you finish the tutorial (it ends when you go to Jangala in Corvus system and talk to the base commander).

[RandomName]

I'm almost 100% certain that the supplies you are given to restore your fleet are based on the active ships in your fleet, regardless of crewing level.

I tested this today on a new run and confirmed the player receives 50 supplies after returning from Tetra, regardless of how many ships are active or mothballed. The reward is not affected by the number of supplies currently available on the market either.

Tbh, there should never be any need for the player to mothball ships at any point in the tutorial.

If the player starts with the combat freighter and drone tender they will have a 180 crew cap after starting this mission and being given the transport. With 180 crew the player will receive a dialog while recovering the ships at Tetra, that tells the player they have insufficient crew and should mothball some until more crew can be hired.

You are given enough supplies to do the things you're asked to, and there's several debris fields to salvage for a bit extra.

The debris fields are all located near destinations of previous tutorial missions, so in my case (and likely for most players) they were already scavenged. Repeated scavenging is a net loss.

Following the tutorial without delay does yield enough supplies to fully repair the fleet, with plenty more available in the market. But if the player delays to play around for any reason (or leaves the game unpaused while sidetracked by real life) they can run low on supplies and find that suddenly none are available within the system and progress is impossible. This outcome requires starting over if the player only has one save file (the game is intended to be played this way) but as the player may never know why they are in an unwinnable situation it can make the game seem broken and unfair.

I think it's a shortfall of the tutorial that a new player is never alerted to the fact they are under time pressure to get the jump point back online and will have to start the tutorial again if they delay too long. Either that or it is an oversight that this scenario may occur and a way to avoid or resolve it should be implemented.

[RandomName]

I hope that you at least give it another shot...

My love of this genre meant I was always going try to crack the problem, but I felt providing feedback on the first impression was a priority while the experience was was still fresh. If someone with many hundreds of hours in similar games was getting frustrated before finishing the tutorial, something had to have gone wrong.

I was later able to defeat the larger pirate fleet by reloading an earlier save (I was reluctant to do this as the game is intended to be played with one save file) and repairing the hammerhead instead of the carrier, then hiring two officers (this had not been introduced by the tutorial at this stage) and putting the aggressive one in the hammerhead. The result was that my fleet tended to hold together while the pirate fleet split up, allowing individual ships to be focused down. Previously the opposite kept happening, with my carrier refusing to engage or commit its fighters and my remaining 3 ships splitting up all the time, unable to even break the enemy's shields.

If you want to win the tutorial, it might be best to start with a new campaign and follow all the missions without getting distracted.

After breaking the pirate blockade, supplies returned to Ancyra's market on a daily basis. It seemed clear at this point the tutorial takes place under time pressure but I did not recall any sense of urgency. So I restarted to confirm what the player is informed about. The story text does a good job of making clear the importance of supplies but it's never apparent that the player will soon be unable to obtain supplies if the blockade is not broken.

If the tutorial is followed without distraction, the player never needs to buy any supplies and can fully repair all 5 ships recovered from Tetra providing a fleet of 8 for the blockade fight. It's a significant reduction in difficulty.

Thanks for sharing your impressions, even if they weren't good ones! Hopefully you can see the game in full and comment on that!

Thanks for understanding the motivation for my post is to provide feedback. Developers and experienced users tend to lose sight of how accessible software may or may not be to inexperienced users and first impressions last.

My hope is that when Starsector is completed, it delivers an experience which improves upon Freelancer, Escape Velocity and Endless Sky (the current kings of the genre so far as I'm concerned). Recent similar games have been disappointing but Starsector looks very promising. Although there are a few systems that feel like they exist to intentionally sabotage certain play styles and reduce player freedom, but that's another topic.

[Serenitis]

<lots of words>

I was dead certain it worked how I described it, so I tested it just now and proved....
Myself wrong.
You are 100% correct here.
Although I think I might have figured out where the supplies went.

If you do the tutorial without doing anything special, all the repairs you do while travelling means when you get back to Ancyra will all the ships it looks like this:

Spoiler

[close]

And when you fill up your crew, the repair bill looks like this:

Spoiler

[close]

21 supplies.

But when you mothball a ship it gets it's CR set to zero, so when you pitch up at Ancyra it looks like this:

Spoiler

[close]

And when you re-activate the ships and fill up on crew the repair bill looks like this:

Spoiler

[close]

83 supplies.
So by mothballing your ships, you essentially throw away all the repair recovery, and whatever CR recovery the reduced crew can manage during the journey over.

The supply situation after returning from Tetra
With mothballing:

Spoiler

[close]

And without mothballing:

Spoiler

[close]

(Also 50 supplies confirmed.)

The difference is only 11 supplies between them.
And yet the complete repair and recovery of those ships from mothballed costs 62 supplies more than if you'd just leave the ships undercrewed on the way back.
That's where the supplies have gone.

This doesn't address the whole 'invisible time limit' thing though.

[Thaago]

Huh. Now THAT is interesting. I find it very strange and counterintuitive that mothballing costs MORE supplies. TIL.

[Serenitis]

I didn't expect it either.
It might also be worth noting that just talking to the commander and unlocking the storage seems to get you some free repairs and CR recovery, which is why the repair costs are lower than they really should be.
And why mothballed ships disrupt things, because a mothballed ship can't be repaired or recover CR. So when you re-activate it you end up paying the full cost.

Fleet at Ancyra before talking to commander:

Spoiler

[close]

Fleet after talking and unlocking storage:

Spoiler

[close]

That free CR is a decent amount of supplies saved.

[intrinsic_parity]

Mothballing sets CR to zero, so if the ship is not already at zero CR when you mothball it, you have to pay additional supplies to get it back to the CR it was at. You're not throwing away the supplies you spend repairing them during the journey, you're throwing away the supply value of their initial CR when you mothball them, which is more than zero, even for recovered ships (I'm pretty sure). If you flew around for a bit with a ship while it was repairing and then mothballed it, you would also lose the supply value of the repair/recovery you did while flying around, but really you're losing the supply value of the CR when you mothball.

[angdyshuz]

Edit: During the tutorial Ancyra's economy suffers while the jump point is blockaded. If the player takes too much time to recover the ships from Tetra, an unwinnable situation may occur whereby there are not enough supplies available within the system to repair the ships required to clear the blockade and progress. The player can then do nothing but watch their fleet decay. The tutorial does not make this possibility apparent and offers no way to resolve it if encountered.

As a new player myself (started to play 06 jan 2020) I have completly opposite experience
This tutorial situation can be exploited to create lucrative trade route that is basicaly monopolized by player. Getting Sensors lvl 2 skill makes trade runs between research station and rogue miners very easy. After several runs with food and supplies I had enough credits to buy storage and fill it with all supplies left on research station markets. Profitable trade runs gave me enough experience to get Navigation lvl 2. After that I recovered and repaired all derelict ships and won 1 battle with pirates on jump point, leaving second fleet alone. That gave me enough skill points to get Navigation lvl 3 with Transverse Jump.

So, now I have system that can receive any kind of goods from me only. And local Hegemony fleet doesn't mind that I fly around without transponder making things even more comfortable.

I don't know if it's intended by game design or not, but from role playing point of view it's seems legit to exploit hard situation for ze profits

[Cyber Von Cyberus]

Be careful with that exploit, you need to complete the tutorial in order for missions, bounties and all that other stuff to work and if Ancrya dies you basically softlocked the game and will have to start a new character

[dandylions]

Be careful with that exploit, you need to complete the tutorial in order for missions, bounties and all that other stuff to work and if Ancrya dies you basically softlocked the game and will have to start a new character

Isn't that a possible strategy? There was the comment earlier about "Somebody actually plays tutorial apart from the using the Transverse Jump exploit. What a wonderfull thing." and while I've never tried it, it seems like the rest of the game goes on as normal and you can still do colonies and (your own) exploration.

Anyway, I can see how OP got into this state, as I've come close myself. Supplies (the general concept of consumables, but also Supplies proer) can be a bit of a trap themselves and after failing a couple games, I started trying to economize on them aggressively. I only stopped mothballing the salvaged fleet after reading some offhand comment on this forum about how there is a free repair for all active ships when you dock at Ancyra. Before that, I just sold or salvaged the least-useful ships in the salvage and restored the rest...

Anyway, I don't think mothballing in general is a bad habit, so perhaps the more elegant solution here is just to force-activate all ships and then repair them? I mothball most new acquisitions when playing since I keep my armory on one of my planets and I need to get back there first to properly outfit them. Plus modded games for any ridiculous mod-ships I pick up since they're generally too expensive to use but I like having them as trophies.

*And by supplies being a trap, I mean that running out can end a game, they're a non-trivial cost, and they're incurred after-the-fact, so it may be some days or even weeks before you realize you've screwed yourself royally. I understand that this also makes them a viable commodity in the grand scheme of the economy, so that shouldn't be changed, but some sort of more explicit warning or expectation-setting around ongoing costs may help brand-new players.

[Cyber Von Cyberus]

Well yes, you can do your own exploration and colony building but many people reported that the procurement, bounty and other random missions that appear on the Intel screen won't appear as long as the tutorial is incomplete.

[Plantissue]

The Transverse Jump isn't something that a new player going through the tutorial would do, since you need prior knowledge of the game to do so and those people can skip the tutorial anywas. I doubt you can get money faster than doing normal procurement missions anyways. I would consider it a bit of a non-issue really. Sure, it should be fixed, but I don't know why it keeps being brought up over and over again.

[RandomName]

As a new player myself (started to play 06 jan 2020) I have completly opposite experience...

Essentially what you did was find an exploit and take advantage of it using creative lateral thinking. This is a good thing and I think finding this path should be allowed because it enriches the range of possible experiences a player may have. However I think something should be done to allow the game to respond to players taking this path. Perhaps the station commander can realise the player has left the system, abandoning everyone trapped within to their fates.

Perhaps the station commander should realise that it's now up to them to break the blockade, and they should achieve this after a week in game time. If left to resolve the problem on their own, a reputation hit could be incurred by the player when next speaking to the station commander, and some special dialog should follow. Perhaps taking this path results in the player not receiving the stipend, as the station commander is after all the one who pulls strings to set it up.

[RandomName]

There really is no issue with mothballing during the tutorial so far as I'm concerned.

The user interface adequately explains the cost of doing it and the game actually prompts the player to do so during the tutorial due to crew limitations. In my opinion this is good, as it introduces the subject to the player. This is as it should be.

Whether or not the player mothballs ships there is no problem with availability of supplies or the funds to buy them with, provided the player did not get sidetracked. If the player does get sidetracked and finds themselves without supplies this is a valuable learning experience, so it should be a possible outcome for the tutorial.

But there should be a way to recover from this outcome during the tutorial. Once out into the game proper, the player should be on their own.

[empirecitizen]

The tutorial came from feedback from new players that wanted a more structured start when the campaign mechanics were getting complicated. It's very handholding and expects you to follow it closely. There is a choice to not start with tutorial. The bugs are basically coming from very unintended use case, i'm confident Alex will fix those but it probably is not a high priorty right now.


I like the trade mechanics in star sector.
The typical trade in space games/mount and blade are basically like this:

1. hire a boat in Brazil and fill it with sacks of coffee bean
2. Sail to the US and dump it into a random Starbucks
3. ??
4. Profit.

It's gamey, boring and done to death. The 'tariff' represent the barrier to entry for well established trades including, port fee, local license and exclusive deals, trade financing banking cost, and of course actual traiffs where warring military governments have warfleets parked next to the port for ahem 'protection'.

What is actually profitable are commissions for clients in good standing, smuggling and mass shipping to relief severe shortage due to crisis (e.g. hostile blockade).

In gameplay terms, it allows the game to inject interesting narrative and risk and reward gameplay loops that's more than being a truck simulator in space.

In fact, i can't explain it better than the man himself
https://fractalsoftworks.com/tag/trade/

You might be interested to read the blog posts, they are good game guides and interesting insight in the careful and deliberate design process.