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It sounds like your ship and crew build are not coming together to give you the dice you need. A good start would be to post a ship status screen and the community can toss some suggestions about where to start.
The lower difficulties basically function as "just let me continue my game at any cost" option. Turning off captain permadeath, similar. You will lose combat and released back into the void.
Do you always bribe and allow inspections?
Do you have more than 2-3 factions where you have high negative reputation?
Fortunately, in-game solutions exist. Prepare to be patient.
As a new player, you will never accidentally meander, stumble, or luck your way into a win.
You must pro-actively build for it, with a plan.
The standard plan runs 5-15 game years, and is essentially 100% repeatable.
0. First, learn (the hard way) all the ways to die and end a run.
Then learn to avoid them
This sounds trite, but it's subtle. Many small actions in the game have small costs.
These can build up over game years.
The end result can be:
This specific newbie-trap is probably caused by your Faction Reputation (f.rep).
You kept dinging 1 faction so much that you drove your own f.rep with them to -30 or lower.
That's a danger zone. All of their random ship encounters get -1 or -2 hostility.
That can drop them from -2 final hostility (you can still bribe) to -4 (you cannot).
-4 hostility is a forced ship-fight, and you're not ready to ship-fight yet.
Tactically, this is the small problem that their ship outguns your ship.
Strategically, it's a larger problem that you allowed your f.rep to get that low.
In other words, you actually do have direct control over this outcome.
And that suggests the solution: Actively manage your f.rep.
Don't ding 1 faction to -30.
Actively repair your +f.rep.
Standard tools include patrols, hire 1 Merchant crew for T5 Garner Favor, etc.
1. Xeno ships are another gotcha, but they're meant to be a gotcha. That's their job.
By ironclad game rule, you have Plot Armor vs. random xeno ship encounters for 5.0 years.
You can't meet them before that. Think of it like your eggshell.
In your Captain's Year 5 Week 0, the kid gloves come off, and you're Fair Game.
Then any random ship encounter could be a xeno, purely by RNG.
You've alertly learned that this is A Thing in the game.
One way to approach this is to know it's coming.
In any new run, from Year 0 Week 0, start a 5-year clock in your head.
Your goal is to prepare for it somehow. You have 5 years.
Common strategies include:
(a) in year 4.98, promote an L12 Navigator to Officer to take T11 Skip Off the Void
This is drastic, a sledgehammer, and kind of sucks. But it works, 100% of the time.
(b) upgrade your ship + crew for very high Escape dice, hope you get lucky
This fails to Twitch Surge. The AI could even play 2-3 Twitch Surge in a row.
(c) play on high difficulty levels, ship-fight early, conscript some L14 Navigators
(d) do nothing, hope for even more luck
Much later, you can build a 3rd ship to consistently beat xeno ships.
AI ships do scale, roughly with your Captain's level.
Your ship does not scale. You must pro-actively upgrade components yourself.
AI Captain's levels scale roughly with your own Captain's level.
You can see this in the encounter preview screen.
AI crews also scale with their Captain's level.
An L20 Captain will have L22 - L09 crew, but mostly L20 - L18.
More importantly, every AI Captain gets a budget, and a brand-new ship.
The ship starts identical to what you get if you bought that ship new.
The budget scales with the Captain's level.
Then the AI Captain instantly spends its "budget" on upgrades to ship components.
The final result is that the AI ship itself is "better than" a new ship, by that budget amount.
Early on, this is the AI's big stick that beats your ship dead.
Later on, you'll see that this is the grave flaw that lets you lolstomp AI ships dead.
AI budgets are finite, and scale with their Captain level.
Your budget isn't. You can spend with no cap to fully upgrade every slot on a ship.
In a nutshell, that's the "trick" to win at ship-fighting.
When we say prepare for ship-fighting, we mean fully upgrade every slot.
+ curate your crew: trim away redundant crew members, hire crew with +Command skill
+ buy a 2nd ship (and later, a 3rd ship)
+ queue up 31 of 32 component slots with upgrades to max tier 4 or tier 7 stuff
For a 9000 mass ship costing $2.0M, the full upgrade can take 150 weeks = 3.0 years,
and cost another $5.0 - $6.0M. That's normal. We all do that.
Keep flying your previous ship to do missions and earn more cash.
Then your "prep" is far superior to any AI Captain's fixed budget.
Your ship is $imply $uperior, with better components giving Moar Dice.
Then you win the die rolls, and win every ship fight.
Ship combat is brutal but fair. The ship with Moar Dice usually wins.
Hence, be the ship with Moar Dice. The law of ship-fighting is: Get Moar Dice.
Conversely, if you know your prep is inferior, Avoid Ship-Fighting At All Costs.
2. Your #1 task in the early game is to extend your game.
Don't die from an avoidable death.
Learn how your own actions lead to certain deadly situations, and modify your behavior.
Bribing + surrendering is very good. We all do that, in the 1st ship.
Avoid antagonizing factions, so that their ships don't hate you on sight.
Xeno you cannot appease in any way, hence they require separate prep, or pure luck.
Much later, your fully prepared ship is $imply $uperior to xeno, too, and then they're fun.
But it can take 15+ years to build your way to it.
Hence a typical anti-xeno strategy is:
1st ship: prepare for Year 5
Year 5 - 7: Escape, Skip, or never meet one, buy 2nd ship, fully upgrade it
2nd ship: Skip from all xeno, buy 3rd ship, begin upgrading it
2nd ship: you can maybe fight your 1st xeno
3rd ship: fight everything (including xeno), go win the game
~~~~
Not every situation in ST:F has a solution.
There is no Plot Armor that guarantees that you will Always Survive Every Bad Thing.
Some situations will End Your Run.
If I ever got into that situation, it would End My Run, too.
Skill in ST:F is to anticipate all of those situations, preempt them before you're in them,
live 60+ years, and build with a plan. It works for us, hence we teach it.
In my current game I've discovered that military officers can get the 'stiff salute' skill. Which should let me get away from a zealot if I need to. I guess they're just mandatory crew members. Players should probably start with one of those either as an officer or crew otherwise it might take a long time for players to realise there's an option to avoid combat like that.
Personally, I think the "skip off the void" that navigators get should be a rank 1 or 5 talent. They have other good competing talents and the drive damage/fuel cost are more than enough of a disincentive to use it without careful consideration. It also has a pretty long cool-down, so it might not even save you if you get caught by 2 unavoidable enemies in a row.
Either way, avoiding cheap feeling deaths should be a goal in development of a game like this. Sure, you can argue that players can get to know the mechanics of the game and therefore account for situations like this coming up with enough experience, like by making sure you always have a military officer. However, that definitely falls under 'metagaming' rather than just playing the game. If you have to have intricate knowledge of the game to play the game effectively then you're potentially putting off a lot of new players who's first experience will likely just be an unfair and confusing seeming death. Why keep playing a game that doesn't respect your time and just kills you arbitrarily?
It's easy to say "just play on easier difficulties" but the main draw of the game is the rogue-like elements. Unlocking new ships, contacts, starting professions, etc requires playing on hard more for many of them. So that's just not a reasonable option for players that have 'beaten' the game on normal difficulty.
1. yes always allow inspections and bribe when possible. My point is that it's not possible with zealots and xeno.
2. no, just one... The target of the starting missions. Even then, if I can get a contact with 'pardon' I will pay to keep it at 0. Sometimes you just don't get that contact though.
One of the fun parts of roguelike games is that you may die a lot, but you learn from it and get better. That type of experience may not be fun for everybody, but please do keep posting your questions here and we will be happy to help.
A screenshot of ship status could help us make some suggestions.
As I said before, there's in-game learning and then there's learning how to metagame. For most roguelike the in game learning is skill based. Learning enemy attack patterns, how to dodge them, etc. In other roguelikes it's strategy learning. In this game, you learn that taking multiple missions that go to the same quadrant means you get a lot more money for less moving about than doing each mission one at a time, for example. Or learning how ship stats work and which parts actually give you what stats.
Then there's games that require metagaming knowledge to succeed in. For example, "at 2 years you have to have an escape skill or very strong ship because you'll have your first xeno encounter", or "If you have any enemies and don't want your game to abruptly end, you'll need a military officer to let you get away from a chance encounter with a zealot."
It's not the same because it's not learning how to play better, it's just learning when the game is going to screw you over and how you avoid it.
As i said, i already replaced a bunch of weapons with defence matrices. I was going to say the signal dampeners are too expensive but it's only the medium sized one that is. They might have helped me escape more reliably, to be fair, and give decent increases to stats.
Bridges are very expensive, agreed. Look into Pilot and Nav Assist Modules in small slots. If you're trying to flee, consider not upgrading weapons and focusing on other components that add to Skill pool.
A ship status screenshot would help make some suggestions.
But it works. We're all still here because it works.
Learning all of those intricate details, and planning to exploit them, is a skill here.
That does constitute "playing better".
Doing those things is directly correlated to playing longer and having more fun.
It's not metagame, it's all in-game.
ST:F does have a vast amount of data to memorize:
+ all classes' talents
+ all ship components
+ all crew weapons, armor, and gear
+ all game mechanics of combat, skill checks, morale, reputation, ...
+ trading
+ the set of all Era and story vignettes
+ the set of all regular mission types
+ all Contact types, and the services they offer
+ all Rumors
+ Conflicts
+ Contacts dying of old age, or killing each other in faction Conflicts
+ etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
All of that is in-game.
Memorizing, knowing, or looking up all of it on the wiki is, implicitly, in-game.
It might not all fit in your head at any one time (it doesn't fit in mine), but it's not secret.
Hence, it's a finite amount of total knowledge.
Any player could, in principle, learn all of it (eventually) simply by playing a lot.
Or you could read up on the wiki to learn much of it up-front, or just-in-time.
I did both, and still do. I always play with the wiki open (on a 2nd monitor).
Many powerful combos, tricks, and ideas are "in plain sight".
For example, simply taking 1 hour to read every class's full list of all talents
might make you exclaim "AHA!" 5-20 times, and jot down 20 notes of things
you simply must try out. That covers stuff like Garner Favor, Stiff Salute, etc.
ST:F is not a reflex-type game.
AI opponents don't have "attack patterns".
There is no square-dancing, or swing-timing, or sniping to learn.
It's not that kind of game.
If you're accustomed to beating a superior opponent by using mouse gimmicks,
that skill set does not apply here. Here, there is only (brutal) dice math.
Hence we teach that some encounters are too late to be won now,
and to Have Gotten More Dice Already, before you Choose to Fight.
ST:F surely won't change any core game mechanism now.
Learn it as-is, beat it, have fun. It's calibrated to be beatable by real players.
Yeah, I've already sacrificed all weapons but the torpedos, since they only take 2 AP each and gain accuracy bonus from max range. So I can fire them while trying to retreat with no consequence.
As I said, it's just the basic setup of the paladin cruiser. I don't think that ship is a very good starter tbh. I've tried the scout ship this time and it seems to be much better. I can at least retreat from some things with this, as opposed to literally nothing, haha.
I'm not too sure how you could improve it. Perhaps giving ships a component damaging order so that systems that your ability to defend, escape and change range are based on are protected for the first few rounds as other components take the damage. Armour plating kinda does this but 30% chance to absorb damage meant for another component is pretty low.
Maybe some time buying skills/parts? A shield generator/skill that gives you 2-3 turns of invulnerability at the cost of not being able to fire your own weapons out of it? As a skill it could be a shield overcharge ability that leaves you with -50% shielding for a few turns afterward, or something like that. That would be quite good I think as it would also provide an option for pure boarding ships to use while getting into range. It would probably fit as a rank 8 skill or a specialist medium sized part.
Anyway, mostly just wanted to say I love the game and I'm sorry for being a bit flippant in my negativity yesterday.
The comment about 30% not being that grand is very interesting. I've added it to our playtesting list for ideas to retry 50% and 75%.