Frontiers or 4x?

[Lord von Games]

I actually own the 4X, and I like it... loved it... but eventually burned out on it. Is it worth buying Frontiers or just give 4X a rest, then go back and play 4X some more?

Your thoughts, opinions?

[davea]

Buy them all! Awesome dev team.

[Trese Brothers]

Originally posted by Lord von Fleck:

I actually own the 4X, and I like it... loved it... but eventually burned out on it. Is it worth buying Frontiers or just give 4X a rest, then go back and play 4X some more?

Your thoughts, opinions?

Oh yes, try STF. You'll see the difference a few years have made I think!

[JimmysTheBestCop]

STF has been my favorite game of the year. The Turn Based Tactics group on steam always speak wonderfully of STF as well.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tbtactics

Really comes down to what you like. Example I dislike 4x games. The last one I tried was Stellaris. They just aren't for me. I always was way more into SimCity then Civilization. Thats personal preference.

[peterebbesen]

Short answer: Probably worth your time.

My longer answer is from a recommendation I started writing for the Paradox forum but never got around to finishing (or editing for brevity :p); It comes in two parts: The first part is probably the sort of answer you are looking for when asking for opinions, the second part goes into what is - to my mind - the poorest designed aspect of the game. Don't let that part put you off trying the game, please. For all its limitations, it really is a very good game.

.....

Trese Brothers' Star Traders Frontiers is best appreciated for its large scale "Do what you want as an independent trader in the galaxy" approach and emergent storytelling.

It reminds me of the feeling I first had back in the day when I played Elite on my Commodore 64. It is a game that gets the open world freedom right. Want to play as an explorer? Go ahead. Trader? No problems. Pirate? Arrgh. Hunter of aliens? Right on, Commander. A jack of all trades? More of a challenge, but can-do.

You aren't locked into a path, but your officers, your crew, your ship - all off these can be changed during gameplay and determine what you are good at.

Your crew, more than anything else in the game, determines what you can do, and fortunately the crew management aspect of the game is implemented well enough that you may end up caring for the fate of individual members - your officers, if nobody else - and you've got a lot of possibilities depending on what you want to do.

Most of the various non-combat combat activities are resolved by miniature random card selection, with your crew selection and customization determining your ability to influence the random results both passively based on stats, and actively based on activatable abilities.

The game has tactical ship and crew combat, both of which are enjoyable if repetitive. But if you don't want to engage in ship or crew combat to focus on other aspects of the game, well, design your ship to avoid or escape combat.

The UI is functional and the inclusion of copious hotkeys makes navigating it easy; Rapid transition between states allows the player to focus on issuing orders rather than having to waste time on smooth animated transitions, which is much appreciated. Tooltips are omnipresent and as a rule highly informative.

That being said, the UI does lacks polish and some important information is either inaccessible or omitted.

The initial menu screen contains links to the game's wiki and to a lorebook; the first contains much valuable information, the second can help deepen the immersion.

It is a game of many parts, and overall it works well. I can highly recommend any lover of tactics or strategy games try it out.

----


BUT, I do not consider it a game with longevity for a hardcore strategy/tactics gamer like myself. And that's fine - I am not the core audience for the game and so long as I have fun exploring the game for some time and examining its mechanics, and I do, I've got more than my money's worth. :)

And the reason I consider it poor from a hardcore strategy/tactics approach is primarily, but not solely, because the tactical ship combat and crew combat are the weakest aspects of the game from a design perspective, and at the same time those on which most attention has been lavished in design and those that are most impacted by player agency.

That's because the game's dice pool mechanics lends itself to specialization with simplistic and nonsensical stacking of single values for optimization purposes, which leads to an extreme repetitiveness in how you approach encounters. It is the ultimate in quantity>quality absurdity. At least if you are a compulsive optimizer.

Don't get me wrong: I don't have anything against dice pool mechanics in general, but give the player enough freedom of stacking with few limitations and the result is bonkers.

I don't expect this to change fundamentally, since it would require a radical rethink, a heck of a lot of work, and quite likely alienate many of the players for whom the current implementation is great fun.

(As an example of dice pools gone right, Trese Brothers' game Templar Battleforce, which managed to entertain me for three weeks this winter playing through the campaign, and I could well see myself picking up again in a year or two for another campaign with a different squad focus. If you don't have it yet and like classical tactical games, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?)

That doesn't mean that I consider the tactical combat bad, mind you - it can be quite enjoyable - but it is possible on any difficulty level to render it non-challenging simply by focusing enough on stacking the proper values and suspending any and all ideas that what is going on makes sense.

A well designed and well crewed combat ship in ST:F is one that in science fiction stories would only exist as a joke on crippling overspecialization, probably in a "planet of hats" scenario.

A good example of that is that the various ship design threads in this forum where various posters show off their near-impossible-to-hit ships made by stacking either electronics or piloting.

Ship design in principle includes important values such as total hull, armour (first line damage reduction), shields (crew protection), radiation and void resistance, and lots of possible modules to include in your ship builds to make increase those values (except for total hull), but the objectively "best" builds for ship combat are all builds that ignore armour, shield, and resistances entirely (except where you can get it on required components) in favour of stacking electronics or piloting stats via whatever modules provide the highest value.

And I do mean whatever modules: When first researching conventional wisdom for the game after drawing my own initial conclusions, I discovered a thread that included an in-depth analysis of whether stacking Defense Pattern Matrixes (that provide defensive bonuses) or Sensor Arrays (that provide offensive bonuses) were best for avoidance. Sounds bonkers? It all makes perfect sense in this game, where the skill required to use a component in the first place is, at the same time, the skill that can be contributed to dice pools, and the sensor arrays require a lot of electronics (more than the defensive alternative), and electronics is ship combat is a defensive stat. See? Perfect sense.

In the end the Defense Pattern Matrixes are better at defense, but that this is even a question in the first place is rather amusing. If the devs added a small or medium component "Super Freezer: +50% value of food trade goods. Requires 16 electronics", these freezers would make their way into electronic based combat builds faster than you can say "what?" (They wouldn't, needless to say, make people start trading the game's food products, as they have a low base price. But more electronics dice? Yes please!)

That doesn't mean you can't use the other modules buffing armour and shields or increasing resistances to make effective ships - you can - but once you've realized that there's no soft cap on the ability to avoid damage entirely, it is all dice pool vs dice pool whether you are hit or not, while the damage reduction you can achieve from armour is capped at 75% (with skill use) and some damage ignores armour entirely and there's only so much resistance and shielding can do, and that you can drive avoidance arbitrarily high by focusing on stacking stats, well, it is hard to unsee or to justify being less effective by including armour, shields, etc. where it would come at the cost of avoidance.

Oh, and as a general rule, the larger the ship, the harder it is to hit (if you build for combat), because it gets more component slots and hence requires higher skills, and hence provide more dice. Making humongous battlecruisers nimble enough to dodge light speed attacks is fairly easy, but a real challenge for small agile fighters.

It is a game where having a third or more of your crew consisting of military officers who are ordinary crew members barking orders to a smaller number of pilots, and quite possibly no gunners at all, makes for arguably the best gunship. To be fair, you might include some gunners. Not because they'd be needed to man the guns, mind you, but because it would allow you to engage in boarding actions from medium range rather than short.

...said boarding to be carried out by the ship's officers, who would in this scenario all be crew combat specialists, most or all utterly incapable of command, because that's the way to optimize for crew combat. :D

You didn't know that having many people good at commanding and tactics shouting at a few doers who have to carry out the orders, all overseen by officers looking like a who's who of the Galaxy's Most Dangerous Murderhobos was the way of the future? Now you do.