Starfarer 0.5a Preview Release
It’s been far too long since the last release, but I’m happy to announce the wait is over! We’ve got a slew of new features for you, including the first iteration of the campaign mode. Here’s a list of the new high-level features in this release:
- Campaign mode – fight your way up in the war-torn Corvus system
- Start out with a single frigate, buy (or capture) more ships to grow your fleet
- Customize your ship’s loadout before battle
- Level up your crew
- Ship weapons and engines can be disabled by damage, adding a new layer of tactics
- Tons of balance changes, UI improvements, AI improvements, and several new ships and weapons
For a full list of the additions and changes in this release, take a look at this thread.
You can download the new version using the buttons below. You’ll have to reinstall the game, but shouldn’t need to enter the activation code again. Thank you all for your support!
Awesome, will download it as soon as I get home from work!!!
Oh my god, this is it !! Downloading now, I now what I’ll play tonight, thanks !
Awesome, downloading now! 😀
Cant wait, leaving work early to grab a copy.
Man, wish I could leave work early, ha ha, sounds crazy awesome! 🙂
Sweet! Downloading now. Thanks Alex!
Wohooo you made my day! 🙂 Already downloading…
Awesome, but how do I select how much cargo I want to sell? or how many people? It seems like I can only sell and buy the maximum amount of a resource…
Shift-click to select 1 (again to add 1 more), or shift-click and drag the slider to select any other quantity.
Thanks!
DF 2012 and Starfarer both on 2/14. Coincidence? Don’t know where to start :D~~~~~
[…] way back when, but sadly I got caught up in reviews and such. With a new version coming out — which is out today, by the way — I contacted the game’s author a week ago for a preview. After diving into the game […]
Is it possible to rebind keys in this build? I’m on the fence about buying, that’d tip me one way or the other.
OMG! This is awesome! Great work!
You know a game is awesome, when you have tons of fun, even if you are really bad at it.
Constantly dieing and really having fun in the campaign.
@Marcus: Yep.
@Sven: Thank you! Glad you’re having fun 🙂
That’ll do me. Thanks Alex, sending you some cash.
What’s the best place for game feedback? The forums?
Love what you’re doing with this, and tell David his art is amazing.
Dwarf Fortress AND Starfarer updates on the same day … I … this is the best day.
It’s so much hilarious fun. Was in a Hound, took a large missile to an engine (it has two) … started spinning in circles faster and faster. So awesome. Will be cleaning up crew vomit for weeks.
Holy shit! Sorry for the expletive but crapping wow! You have improved this already stellar game to amazing heights o.o in such a short time. I showed my brother 2 minutes of gameplay and he’s buying as we speak. This is…just. I don’t care how long the time is between updates, take it slow. I can’t believe this game is only 10$, when it’s done I am paying for the difference of whatever full price ends up being, you deserve it.
Just bought the game, for 8.20 Euros, it’s quite a steal 🙂 Keep up the good work Alex!!!
Its hard, but its fun.
Keep it up, you have a good game on your hands there!
Thank you guys 🙂
@SeaBee: that’s my favorite part of the whole “disabled engines” business, by far.
D/Led as soon as I saw it, will do my best to enjoy it as possible.
It’s events like that that make a good day (that and sleeping well too :))
Alex, you are an absolute genius… I t was worth the wait! Also what language is this programmed in?
@Vakuza: It’s in Java.
AWESOME!
Awesome. Least favorite current thing: Repairing a newly captured ship (Even a small bomber wing) takes forever. 41 days? That’s like 15 minutes of real time sitting there doing nothing! A fast forward feature would be greatly appreciated.
Fighters are actually a bad example – their repair rate depends on how much hangar space you have, and whether you have carriers.
If you’re short on both, it can take forever. With a fighter-friendly fleet, it will only take a few days.
But yeah, nonetheless, some way to speed up repairs may be in order.
The only thing that I didn’t like is that now that I’m have three frigates, a lot of pirates run away from me and I can’t catch them. And if I try to take on the big guys with more than one destroyer/frigate, I always get my butt handed to me. But it’s my fault for being bad.
I was going to send an email about this, but I figured other people might have the same question and can benefit from your answer.
You’ve probably heard this one before; I’d like to pre-order, but I find it very handy to have most of my games on Steam.
Will you put Starfarer on Steam once it’s at version 1.0, and if so, will I be able to use the pre-ordered key to activate it on steam when the time comes?
I wish the starfarer menu screen was a screensaver. Its kind of nice relaxing and watching ships shoot each other
@Ryuu
That is one problem I encounter when I reach a certainarmy size. I have now 2 Cruisers 2 Destroyers 4 frigs and a healthy amount of fighter and I crawl on the mpa.
What we need is the possibility to “stock” our ships while we go hunting to be able to target light fast groups.
@Konstantin Vernikovskiy
With a simple carrier Destroyer it usually doesn’t take more than 4/5 days for my fighters. At first I used my capped fighters like any ships but as soon as I got a carrier, their efficiency almost tripled.
I could totally live with a 4-5 day repair time; However even my captured frigates sometimes need 17-27 days to repair at 107 percent efficiency. I understand that it makes sense to have a long repair time sometimes – such as if you have no fighter bays or whatever – but the waiting around for 6-10 minutes, parked in the safety of an unassailable location, is just not fun. If there could perhaps be a feature that sped up time, or let you park around a planet for X days or something, it’d allow you to be appropriately penalized for inefficient repair ability (Since the world keeps moving while you’re not paying attention, and a big pirate fleet may just sneak up on you) but not have the 10 minute long period of no fun. That’s what my thoughts were at any rate.
Reguardles, this is great and I’m so happy to see this moving forward it’s not funny. Well a little funny. But great.
@Naros: It’s not entirely up to me whether Starfarer can get on Steam (they have to accept you), so I can’t promise anything there. It’s definitely not going to be in the near future – the game needs to be finished first.
@Konstantin: Ahh, those frigates taking so long to repair are probably under-crewed. Shouldn’t take more than a week even if they’re pounded into scrap. Although, you’re saying a 107% repair rate, which means you’ve got more than the skeleton crew for everything, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Which frigate are you talking about, specifically?
@Konstantin: My suggestion is to load up green crew if you’re on a limited budget. Maxing out crew will cause repair rate to shoot up to 200%. This means those 12-27 days will end up being 5-9 days.
I’ll admit I wasn’t paying super close attention, so maybe my repair rate was lowered? What I did was, I had close to maximum crew – the rest marines – then I captured a larger ship. I then didn’t have enough crew for some of my ships. I wanted to repair the ship and sell it, as repair percentage factors into selling price – but I didn’t want to buy more crew because once I’ve sold the ship, I’d no longer have room for them. I’ll go poke around and see what repair rates look like vs. what I’m repairing, if that’s an issue, and under what circumstances I have long repair times. But the situation of sitting around waiting to repair a ship so that I can sell it – especially since I can’t just fly around fighting in the meantime, since it slows me down a lot – is unfortunate.
@Konstantin: Ah, I see, good point.
Yup it’s a crew problem, and don’t worry about having not enough room for them, as it is for now (I think) you don’t have a maximum limit to either crew and cargo and they’ll always be useful for when you capture other ships.
And the answer to being too big to go hunt is to wait on the planet of your ennemies and cath them as they take off :p
@Troll
I did it and now I’m so damn strong that everyone flees from me. I have almost all great ships. Once I get a Paragon battleship, I think I’ll have “completed” this alpha. And then I’ll restart and do everything again because I think I’m in love with this game.
Already have the Paragon (grin).
All that is needed now is to take on the Hegemony forces.
So far no bug and all good, well balanced and some fun tactics with particular weapons (like the tachyon Lance x2 for the Cruiser).
All in all the 0.5 alpha is great and could actually be a game on its own with a few more ships / weapons. The base is very much like a Mount & Blade with a much deeper tactical feel (not much strategical since we are restrained to a single army for now) with a quite smart AI and great explosions when you forget to light up the room due to screen fixation.
Move damaged ships to the top of your fleet list between fights to assure they get the best quality crew/crew priority so they repair quicker.
This is awesome, major props to you and your crew Alex.
Are you planning on having, for lack of a better term, rare weapons etc?
Ie, I really enjoy flying the the Eagle, but I feel that aside from changing a few weapons on it there’s not a lot of progression options for it.
So, for instance, could it be possible to find (by various means) things like a Tri tachyon tactical laser, or a Hegemony Pilum Missile launcher, or a Tachyon Lance mk IV etc etc?
Perhaps the same with modifications, have one use modifications that you could find or purchase?
So far very good though, I’m loving the M&B in space feel.
@Inter: We’re planning to add more weapons here and there. There are already a fair number of choices for the Eagle, though – just the front battery alone could be set up in various ways (Heavy Maulers, Heavy Needlers, Hypervelocity Drivers, and a few other ones). It’s just that some of these may be a little tough to get in the current campaign.
@Levik: I’m sorry – we’re not set up to accept webmoney at the moment.
@Daza: Saved games will probably not carry over. I’d like to add a way to export your fleet (and/or character) in the future, and will pay more attention to save-game compatibility when the game is further along. Right now, though, trying to keep the save format working isn’t realistic – too many things will change.
I have only webmoney what to do?
It’s looking good indeed. I enjoy the combat in this game than other similar games. In the starting ship
i took on a slightly bigger ship and was losing at one point. Then the tide turned and i managed to defeat it and capture it.
Will saved games in these and future updates carry over up til the final release?
Keep up the good work.
I’ve always been really fond of the the “humble beginnings” part of games and I feel that its waaay to easy to grow a massive fleet quickly.
I do hope that the current campaign is not balanced in any way when it comes to fleet growth speed and power.
When you first start a new game I feel you should be stuck with frigates and maybe a few destroyers for a good while until you complete some major story events which allow you to support larger ships – like perhaps found your first colony and built a large orbital dock/supply station.
@Dri: Yeah, likewise. The current campaign’s progression is rather accelerated, because combat is *all* there is to it right now, and if that was slow, it’d just be grindy. When there are more things to do, the progression can slow down.
have you got any idea how difficult this is! it’s bloody impossible!
Oh, also! Please tell me there will be music added to the game. Music that plays while cruising around the sector map, several battle music tracks, a catchy tune while in the inventory/refitting screens etc.
@Alsmonty: It gets easier with practice. But yeah, it’s hard, and it’s supposed to be 🙂
@Dri: Absolutely!
Been playing for a few hours and really enjoying it. My only complaint is how hard it is to run down ships. How about a “turbo” boost that makes your fleet fly some % faster for a day, but then you move very slowly for multiple days. Would make it easier to run down those ships you can almost catch, but would be risky as it would greatly open your fleet up to being run down right after combat. I bring this up as I just chased a fleet that was fractionally slower than me more well outside the bounds of the system before I caught them…
This is seriously f**king amazing. I want to talk more but I’m too busy playing!
@Alex: If Starfarer gets into steam/desura in the ‘far’ future will you guys provide activation keys for customer that preorder now?
It’s hard to believe how many new features you have added in. This is shaping up to me an awesome little game. I have already played 6 hours worth just in this one sector.
I’m really liking the direction this game is going in. However, the fleet control system seems to be rather unwieldy at the moment (judging form TotalBiscuit’s video). Are there any plans to improve on this (to hopefully be more intuitive, like a traditional RTS). Additionally, I understand it is difficult to quantify, but how much more will this game expand? Mount and Blade was awesome but I felt it missed more polish and features that would have made it truly great. Mods did elevate this problem somewhat, so do you guys support mods as well? Sorry for the plethora of questions.
@kof chua: I’ll certainly try.
@Xenner: Thank you!
@Daniel: Re: control system – take a look here, and in the next post. The gist of it is that we tried the RTS control scheme earlier and it’s a bad fit. Re: how much it will expand – a hard-to-quantify answer for you – “a lot” 🙂 Re: mods – there’s already quite a few, check out the Modding section on the forum!
@ Daniel
Total Buscuit’s video was already a bit not that great because he made many mistakes like not automating turrets as well as not properly using the engine boost among others.
The new build has for example more info on what orders will do, strike will show you which ships will attack your target, your rally points will show which ships are included in the order…Also I wanted to add that it is not a typical RTS so I doubt it would be that useful to make controls the same and controls become quickly logical to you after a few fights (ine 0.50 not 0.35).
@Alex
Is the Conquest in the 0.50 build to be found ? Its the only big ship I haven’t yet found I believe.
And once again continue the great work, already put a good 15h and still want to come by everyday for a few fights. Wonder how long I uwill use when the full game is out 🙂
Have to say, it has been a long time since I have played a game, to look at the clock and notice its almost 13 hours later.
This is everything I wish SPAZ had been and then some. Cant wait for the end result.
My Fleet value just passed 1000 points, but I have a couple of uncrewed ships at the bottom of my list. The sector has completely run out of crew to sell me, and they don’t appear fast enough to keep up with my demand. My flagship is 50% elite crew, it’s an Onslaught class with a custom load out; I’ve given it what I call a Brawler setup, where you focus on close-range hurt, and max out the engine speed and manueverability with add-ons. It is absolutely killer versus other, slower-moving battleships. Combined with a couple fighter wings to serve as distractions, I can take on other fleets near single-handedly.
I just figured out how to get any ship, with 1 marine. Here’s how it works: Attack the ship. Don’t kill it, but pummel it until it wants to retreat (and then let it retreat). Repeat until it’s not shown in the enemy fleet strength. After this, you should have the ship without any resistance.
My thought on what happens is that the crew is getting killed. When there isn’t enough crew on board to run the ship, the captain surrenders the ship to you.
@Troll: It’s a bit hard to get the Conquest right now – only a random chance for it to be available at the Orbital Station.
I love the game and cant wait until next patch. What I would like to see is also that if you atomate you turrents you are using they will autofire when they cant reach the target you want to attack. if you 1/3 turrents for example can one attack the ship you want the other 2 will autofire on any other ship that is in range for them insted of them to be idle.
can you make it so that you can start off with a few more ships, i find it impossible to find anything that i can actually take on really early on in the campaign
Keep restarting the game till you get a Lasher. Hunt solo hounds or even other lashers – they are generally labeled as Pirate Scouts, buy a few better crew if you can and you’ll get a speed boost to make it even easier to catch them.
The PRIME target when first starting the game though is Buffalo s. Buffalo are slow, only really attack with missiles and best of all they have no shields and give decent cash/drops per kill.
Hounds, Lashers, Buffalos and even a few figher wings can be found flying solo – with a Lasher as your main ship you should have no issue killing them.
Bought the game after seeing the video of it on TotalBiscuit’s page. The game is great already, but I sense there’s potential there for the Indie game of the year!
Suggestions:
– You should make it so that when you enter combat, the combat area will be different depending on where you are in the star-system so that initiating a fight while you’re in an asteroid field will mean there’s way more asteroids on the combat map for example.
– When you add a story and missions, make some of the quest-based fights of the campaign happen in unique locations that are visible in the combat map. For example, since there’s a lot of references of days of grandeur long gone in many of the ship descriptions, a mission could include entering an immense derelict space station that you’d have to navigate into on the combat map. Other possibilities to add would be clouds that you can’t pass through without taking damage, such as some kind of electrically charged storm clouds or clouds with radiation. Those would provide some variability to the ever-alike combat map.
– You should make it possible to make a come-back in the combat fight. What I mean is that the advantages you get by capturing objectives in combat maps snowball into an unstoppable advantage in the combat, making it difficult to make a come-back in a fight. There should be some mechanic that favours the current underdog because that would make the fights more interesting because the current leading side couldn’t just rest assured of his victory. I have no idea what that mechanic could be, but I think the underdog should have the possibility to get some kind of bonus after some time has elapsed on the combat screen.
– The independent faction currently all sticks together which shouldn’t happen. If you attack one independent mercenary, independent traders and miners shouldn’t be hostile to you but currently they are.
– You should be able to split your fleet into two, or at least leave some ships behind to a station without having to sell them. This for two reasons: 1) You may want to hoard ships without necessarily selling them and 2) Smaller fleets are faster so maybe for a while you’d want a faster fleet to hunt faster opponents but have the option of later returning to pick up your parked ships if you want to engage a fleet consisting of capital ships or other very dangerous things. Maybe you could even park them on planets or moons and assign marines to guard them.
– In the campaign, there should be challenges that are consistent with the story you want to tell. For example, if it involves an ancient race of aliens returning (please don’t do that it’s way too common a motif, think Mass Effect 3) then you’d have a mission of fighting one of their insanely big ships. What I’m trying to say is that there should be unique boss fights.
– Do you know the game Sword of the Stars? In it there are these things called grand menaces which have a chance of triggering each day after an initial amount of time has passed. These grand menaces include for example the locusts, which devour planets and multiply by it, the von Neumann vessels (which are self-replicating machines that scour the galaxy collecting materials to eventually build a massive attack ship capable of destroying planets) and similar thingys. Think about it, such things could have a place in this game. You’d for example spend a lot of time enlisting the aid of many factions in different places in the star map to fight the grand menace and the engagement could have your fleet, the planet-killer and allied fleets that are not under your direct command.
More suggestions:
– Planetside missions, so that setting a course for a planet or other object would have some purpose other than just following them around
– Later, the possibility to build your own space stations for set purposes (mining, fleet construction, civilian, trade, research, etc..)
– Different factions prevalent in different places in the star-map, not just intra-system factions but factions that have domains in the star-map that consist of many systems
– Possibility to enlist pirates against a faction by setting bounty on that faction, possibly by visiting the pirate headquarters of that system. The pirate headquarters should be hidden somehow that you’d have to search for it, it would make no sense if it was visible from the start.
And for inspiration, think about this by George Steiner: “It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text (Antigone) to express all the principal constants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are fivefold: the confrontation of men and women; of age and of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and god(s). The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, define themselves in the conflictual process of defining each other. Self definition and agonistic recognition of ‘otherness’ (of l’autre) across the threatened boundaries of self, are indissociable. The polarities of masculinity and of femininity, of ageing and of youth, of private autonomy and of social collectivity, of existence and morality, of the human and the divine, can be crystallized only in adversative terms (whatever the many shades of accommodation between them). To arrive at oneself–the primordial journey–is to come up, polemically, against ‘the other’. The boundary-conditions of the human person are those set by gender, by age, by community, by the cut between life and death, and by the potentials of accepted or denied encounter between the existential and the transcendent…. ”
Antigones, George Steiner
Again these are ideas for you, something to help you realize the immense potential of this game.
@Alex
Thx for the info, will have to work a bit on the ship then.
@Sebastian
Either put those wepons in different groups if you can, and if you can’t simply don’t link them, as long as they cycle you should have no problem using multiple ranged weapons on auto.
@Alsmonty
Almost everything Dri says is about the easiest way I also found. The Lasher is the most solid starter ship and easy to take in hand.
What I usually do in a fresh game is at most take up to 2 frigs at the same time, often Lasher and Hound and take the hound out first.
Otherwise the talon Interceptor + Pirnha Bomber is not hard to take on and you often get a chance to board either. Never take on more than 2 ennemies at a time to ensure a fruitfull battle.
One thing I found quite effective is to use the starter funds to get a full crew of Elites to get the edge at the start.
Hope it helps
@Troll Thank you will try it out.
Anyone know when next patch will come out? Have I missed it or havent they anounced it yet?
@Troll, thanks man, the advice about getting elite crew really helped, as well as the fact that i started with a wolf class!
I have not stopped playing this game since I purchased it (spurred by the TotalBiscuit preview). Fantastic job so far.
Since I now consider myself to be something of a “play tester,” I’ll say one thing about the current release. I would like to see the AI fleets stick together in battle. What I’ve been doing to exploit this is just quickly nabbing a few victory locations (enough to bring in all of my reinforcements), then hunkering down with my entire fleet at one spot. The enemy fleet will filter down, usually one ship at a time, and I (with my concentrated fleet) will pick them off as they arrive.
This is a problem with a lot of strategy games’ AI, and here it allows smaller fleets to pick off larger fleets, so long as their forces stay concentrated and allow the enemy to attack in small groups (Clauswitz FTW).
I’m looking forward to the introduction of role-playing elements — you tease me with the greyed-out “Character” and “Officers” tabs. Can’t wait to see what you guys have in store.
VN game.
Played for few hours, didn’t try to get a massive fleet, but to find the best ship (I like to fight solo). I would really like to see new version as soon as possible 🙂
sorry but so far it is straight-out horrible, I have no idea what to do whatsoever…
@shandrolis Can you plz tell us (or at least me) why you dont like it? I know it is your opinion and it is okey by me.
Anyone know when next patch is out?
On the patch notes from al it says
Latest changes (as of 2/13/2012, final update): What dose Final uptade means? it is the only on the forum were it is visible.
Love the game looking foward to more mods and the character and officers.
Greetings Alex.
Will it be possible down the line, or do any ways to change the stats of *Specific* ships within a save file currently exist? Or may I offer a suggestion for a feature to increase ordinance points on a ship, once character levels up?
I would very much like to solo the galaxy as a super frigate, or any single ship, to bring about a heavy feeling of immersion in an overpowered and unlimited fashion. This derives from being a Star Wars fan mostly. The hero in space feeling seems quite limited, because of the limited ordinance points available on ships by default.
Big ships while having alot of firepower, and being the backbone of a fleet of complimentary craft, feel somewhat underpowered in their ability to solo many craft due to the immense payoff of durability / mobility / firepower.
It seems one or the other, I’m really just asking if you plan to put in a way to have superships, but I’m extremely long winded.
Sorry and thanks for reading if you do, I love this game!
Also Alex,
Just to affirm, I have put in about 50 hours of gameplay already into Starfarer.
My most successful techniques include farming pirates at their homeworld, and capturing tri-tachyon fleets for amassing a huge fleet, and picking off trade caravans for the faster high tech frigates in attempts to solo.
The ability to increase a single ship overtime as a character progresses would be soooo good for a player like me, having played StarFlight back in the day.
But this is just regarding the combat, so I understand you have things to think of other than it, so I’ll be off now, thanks again!
Also Alex, lol
I thought of a cool little feature for the world map, where perhaps you could sort of ‘drift’ behind gravitational tides in space, allowing smart players to use a planets momentum to slingshot themselves at smaller fleets or ships to catch them.
Thanks again! lol
Hi Sam – the ability to develop your character is definitely planned. That’d let you choose to build up your combat and engineering skills, and have a very elite, but small force (perhaps a single ship), or to build up your command and industrial attributes and use a larger fleet.
I absolutely cannot wait, the game has already deterred me from WoW, even in its current state.
Thanks for replying so fast!
May I ask for a potential release date of the final game, or the next build? Me and my Plasma Gun Apogee are awaiting greater spoils!
hey, there is one thing that i really want to see changed, i think that capital ships are WAY too small, they look like they have been scaled down too much, i got a paragon and expected it too take up loads of the screen, but when i saw it in action i was really disappointed.
oh and an update date would be cool, me and my 14 capital ships are waiting XD
While the capships do seem just a tas smaller, I sure would’t want them laods bigger,1.25x current size maybe and that’s quite big.
Bigger capitals would mean more guns, slower, loads of screen taken and overall balance harder to factor in.
Otherwise you need another class of ships, like supercapital ships and mobile fortresses. And in the current build they wouldn’t fit.
Since you’ve completed your army and have no one else to fight, press the restart button :p I found it quite enjoyable as every new game is somewhat different in challenge.
3 most weirdly powerful things I’ve seen-
1) I beat a Tachyon fleet with just an Apogee and Conquest-class, and stole a Plasma Cannon. It fit on the Apogee… and now it’s invincible.
2) I can solo any ship in the game with a modded Medusa. Take off all the weapons, put two heavy blasters on the middle turrets, give it hardened shields, 20 vents, aug engines and thrusters or armour. Immortal.
3) Getting hold of 3-4 Apogees and putting Tachyon lances on all of them. – LOL.
good game
increase zoom out distance, and for another class of ships, DREADNOUGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!