Most fun way to get started as a total noob?

[Heron]

Hi! I'm completely new to the game. It looks like it could be loads of fun once I know what I'm doing, but I find it hard to get started. There's too much very important stuff I know absolutely nothing about and reading / watching guide after guide has proven rather not so fun.

So, my question is: is there a lifestyle that is fun to play as a total noob?

I imagine it would be most fun for me if I could just ignore most of what the game has to offer and still have success with a hyperfocus on a select few game systems. A viable playstyle that allows me to focus on one game system at a time (like, only crew combat or only ship to ship combat or only one essential non combat system) would be great to feel less steamrolled with tons of things to learn at once.

[Gilmoy]

Start as a merchant trader. It's a trading game :)

+ You can buy and sell at any landing zone. Buy Trading Permits from Calagan Faen, stay in your home system, run laps and trade goods. Your #1 minor learning quest is to earn your way up to Trade Permit 3 or so.

+ Run missions. Visit every Contact in your starting system. Talk to them all, and ask them for their missions. Generate as many as they'll allow (based on your p.rep with them). Early missions are milk runs in the same system; do them all for quick cash. Later missions vary in distance and difficulty. Be picky.

+ Run narrative missions. Accept Estelle Brokstrom's delivery quest to Prince Calagan Faen's world (in your starting system). He'll give you some milk run missions. Do them all. Then he'll ask you to take Estelle on the start of her grand quest.

Keep in mind: Whenever ST:F animates a cutscene, that's always part of a narrative (or Era vignette), which is not your typical mission. Narratives are scripted (by the devs), and comprise part of ST:F's official storylines and lore. Some are not too hard, some are very hard, some will ask you to make weird choices.

- Beware of your start-of-game Trade Ban, which is a type of galactic conflict between 2 factions. You always start the game with 1 Trade Ban in effect, between you and a random other faction. Trading on your own systems will displease them, giving you -faction rep with them (to a floor of -28). That's irksome, and potentially mildly dangerous if you randomly meet their ships later.

Play as trader until you figure out your own solution to this vexing problem :) Some obvious tips are:

- Don't violate the Trade Ban. All Conflicts are temporary, so you can run missions for ~2 years and wait for it to meekly expire. Trade at any other faction's world that isn't one of the 2 factions involved. Or smuggle, which always bypasses all trade bans.
- Violate it at will, ignore the f.rep hits, never leave your home system, thumb your nose at them.
- Run Estelle's narrative missions, which will lead you to jump into the Char faction's system. Usually, the Char faction isn't your Trade Ban foe. So -- you can trade with the Char while you're there :) Warning: Estelle's missions will inevitably displease Aetaan Char, and you'll eventually lose your trading privileges. But it might take 2 years for this to occur, and then the Ban expires.

Every other kind of start demands a fair bit (~ a few hours) of homework to grasp ST:F's dice mechanics. Basically, throughout all of ST:F, you want Moar Dice:

+ on your ship, just to fly around, and to ship-fight
+ on your crew, just to fly around, and to play card games
+ on your combat crew, to crew-fight

You also want the right mix of talents. Jump in, fly around, play, get dinged, you'll soon learn what talents would make the dings hurt less

But at first, just run laps around your starting system, visit all of your Contacts, do those easy first few missions (with no jumps), and trade.

Finally, you will often(*) get interrupted by a random ship encounter in space. Don't fight. You can usually surrender, bribe, or use a talent. Shrug off the cost of a couple dozen bribes (and earn it all back by trading well). Shrug off the annoyance of surrendering. Avoid ship combat until you've done some ship upgrades.

Crew fights you should always anticipate. You can get ambushed during any mission step, which by definition happens when you're not expecting it. So always expect it, and set up your combat team beforehand.

[Gilmoy]

And anyways, ST:F is fun. Jump in and play! The best start is to start

[Trese Brothers]

The non-negotiable thing that you must achieve is to make money, so you can pay your crew, fill up your fuel tank, and upgrade your ship. There are so many ways that you can do this, but the most straightforward are either as a merchant or by running missions for contacts. If you're finding the start a bit overwhelming, then I would recommend considering skipping the faen storyline until you have the basic money making loop feeling comfortable. There's an amazing community here on steam, so post any questions you have if you aren't interested in looking at the answers the community usually will directly answer. Awesome post @Gilmoy.

Another quick way to get your feet under you is to run the achievement unlock for completing 25 missions as fast as possible. It's a great way to make some early game money get a feel for traveling and see the game.

[Bmorekareful]

Good stuff here!

[Shad1902]

really some good tips here.

Addition to gilmoy, I want to add that I've started the game by doing all the small / fast unlocks, as it teaches different game mechanics and unlocks some good starter ships / contacts / captains. Look for unlocks such as "big network", "Faction defender" etc...

Seconldy, Gilmoy suggest the trader as starting captain, and while I agree, I think for a total noob the Military officier might be a close second, as he has some very useful skills. Especially in the beginning, when the trade ban is in place, you'll do a lot of mission running and the +10% to draw mission cards when patrolling can be a game changer. He has also a far easier time to manage reputation as he gains +2 to +4 rep when patrolling.

But both are solid starting captains to learn the game.

[JimmysTheBestCop]

I started at game launch week I never even heard of STF or knew anything about it. I played it very much like a rogue like game originally. A bunch of small runs ending in mostly failure to learn specific elements and mechanics of the game then finally put together in a slightly longer play through.

Now I have like 500+ hours in the game and I might have some long runs of 30+ hours but most of mine are still less 20/25 hours.

Once you learn the game a little bit you are more easily able to role play a certain captain that you in mind. I then play the captain I created to whatever end story I have envisioned for him as well.

I am completely content not seeing every Era, every story, every enemy on 100% of all my play throughs.

I also really enjoyed learning the game in the beginning and getting my team/ship killed a couple dozen times. Some players might not take fun in that but it was most enjoyable.


These guides should help
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2155436223
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1632020515

But I would just jump right in and try to learn the mechanics in pieces. First crew combat, then a different run for ship combat, maybe a run for each kind of job etc. Even if your runs are 5 or 10 hours you will learn quickly that way.

Don't play above normal until you are comfortable!!!!

[Heron]

Thanks a lot for all the good advice! I take that as a very good sign for ST:F's quality, in my experience only exceptional games attract these kind of super helpful, dedicated communities. Reminds me of the Battle Brothers forums. And even a dev reply within hours! Now that's truly exceptional. :)

In my 2 hours of playtime prior to posting this I've initially wanted to start out as an explorer as that sounds super cool imo, but then it looked a little too advanced for me.

I restarted as a pirate with default settings. I did some contracts and tried to give trading on the side a shot but ran straight into the trade ban between my main faction (Steel Song) and the faction that apparently holds most of the other planets in my starting system.

Am I unlucky or is that normal? =D

I also took a contract to hunt down smugglers on a xeno planet in a neighboring system and totally lucked out on a 20% roll to find them. Now I have about 100 k starting capital in that campaign. But it felt like totally random and just ultra lucky on my part.

I guess I'll go on trading and questing with my lucky, embargo plagued pirate for now and see how that goes, but will refuse any contracts that involve hyper jumping or landing on xeno planets.^^

[JimmysTheBestCop]

Originally posted by Heron:

Thanks a lot for all the good advice! I take that as a very good sign for ST:F's quality, in my experience only exceptional games attract these kind of super helpful, dedicated communities. Reminds me of the Battle Brothers forums. And even a dev reply within hours! Now that's truly exceptional. :)

In my 2 hours of playtime prior to posting this I've initially wanted to start out as an explorer as that sounds super cool imo, but then it looked a little too advanced for me.

I restarted as a pirate with default settings. I did some contracts and tried to give trading on the side a shot but ran straight into the trade ban between my main faction (Steel Song) and the faction that apparently holds most of the other planets in my starting system.

Am I unlucky or is that normal? =D

I also took a contract to hunt down smugglers on a xeno planet in a neighboring system and totally lucked out on a 20% roll to find them. Now I have about 100 k starting capital in that campaign. But it felt like totally random and just ultra lucky on my part.

I guess I'll go on trading and questing with my lucky, embargo plagued pirate for now and see how that goes, but will refuse any contracts that involve hyper jumping or landing on xeno planets.^^

Devs are everywhere and basically reply to every thread in thier universe. Discord, steam, their forum, reddit, partreon, etc. They are basically unlimited clones trapped in closets at this point.

Exploring isn't bad. It requires you to learn the job and its all about crew combat. So its pretty focused.

Yes you always start in a trade ban with the opposing faction. It depends who you startt as but there is always a ban.

Trading is both simple and complex. Simple because there aren't many goods and the supply/demand is pretty easy. But then their are permits and each planet has individual trade laws. So that is the complicated part. Plus permits only give you access to that particular faction goods so other factions still think its illegal.

I will give you a warning everything you do has consequences on your rep. So if you start doing of random missions you will gain negative rep with the opposing factions in those missions. Soon you could be negative with several so it will make the game 100x times harder.

So when taking missions it's probably a good idea to focus on 1 enemy faction and only take missions against them not the other factions.

If not you will soon be wanted by every ship, those are fights you won't know how to win and you will be able to land on the planets but you wont even be able to refuel.

Carefully select missions is the key to noob success

[Heron]

Is there an easy way to tell who I'm going to annoy when I accept a given mission?

Oh and while we're at it, is there a quick way to look at the map during mission negotiation to see where the mission would require me to go in case I accept? I always quit the window atm to go see the map and I think that I then have to land on the planet again costing me fuel (?) in order to speak to the mission giver again.

[jendoxx]

As long as the button land still shows you are landed but if you click on the planet while outside, it kicks you out. So you can go to map and back landing (just click land) without leaving or spending turns.

The UI is overwhelming however in the begging I suggest you to scan it from top to bottom. There are a lot of information including who you are going to piss off or make happy.

Don't overthink anything. Initially I was trying to measure time vs experience and how efficient I spend it. Overthinking....

But I suggest you to follow some of the great advises given already and most importantly have fun. Initially when I saw a merchant captain , I really thought it's the most boring, "safe" gameplay ever. But actually not true. I suggest the following:

Just play a game (bounty hunter is a fun start too for a beginner with a set template) and level up, run missions and play cards where safe, die, repeat, die, repeat till you start getting the dynamics of the gameplay. There are lots of articles on tips and tricks. Eventually you get a hand of it

Later on I suggest to

Read loads if you find this game interesting. This is a game where you need to invest, full of formulas/math, planning ahead and most importantly staying focused. (Sounded like hard work but it's not)

Focus on your build. You can't be a little bit of everything at least in the beginning. For example, you may start by building a strong crew, but you may have the weakest ship. Later on, would you want a fast ship to board ships or strong slower one fighting or torpedo them from far. All this will require some planning, crew/skills/talent builds and sometimes a specific gameplay. (This is extremely simplified and just some thoughts).

I spent God knows how many hours on this game and I can still consider myself a noob as this game has the steepest learning curve which is also the best part of the game.

[Shad1902]

Originally posted by Heron:

Is there an easy way to tell who I'm going to annoy when I accept a given mission?

Oh and while we're at it, is there a quick way to look at the map during mission negotiation to see where the mission would require me to go in case I accept? I always quit the window atm to go see the map and I think that I then have to land on the planet again costing me fuel (?) in order to speak to the mission giver again.

you can look at the flag on the upper right. If it's against another faction you see a "quest-giver-faction FLAG vs against-faction FLAG"

You can then hover your mouse over those flags and see your relationship and current conflicts. Note: alliances (military or trade) doesn't piss of the other faction if the mission text doesn't specifiy a hostile action.

pic:

https://i.imgur.com/Y5xLZzB.png


as jendoxx said, don't overthink it.

It's different and defininetly more complex than Battle Brothers, so take it slow.

[Heron]

Thanks! I'll have to make a more conscious effort to pay attention to the UI.^^