Star Conflict

I can only afford one cash-hoovering tactical addiction at a time. These guys are the Zynga of wargaming. But without the evil. Once you get the tank, you have the tank; you don't need to keep purchasing cash-only periscopes, or diesel fuel or something.

LtWarhound wrote:

Same setup as World of Tanks. Its irritating, and silly, since you want people to want to play, and being unable to group with your friends means fewer people will be willing to spend the time to learn to enjoy the game enough to want to pay RL cash for a license.

The funny thing is, Gaijin's other game War Thunder doesn't work like this. They say if you want more than two in a squad you need Premium but, I know for a fact you can have three without any of them being premium.

Thanks for the games Tamren it was fun. ON a different note what are peoples thoughts on the different factions. So far i've just been focusing on Jericho since my friend Csteel logged into my account before me (i had a beta account) and selected Jericho as my race... only have the 260 freebie gold for now i may consider changing it to something else,

Cayne, there is no point in changing factions by buying the False ID with gold. If you want to try a different faction's ship, take a contract with them to earn the rep you need. You do pay a fee each time you swap factions, but its fairly trivial. I'm at level 6 rep with both the Empire and Jericho, and I'm able to hit level 6 with the Feds.

TigerBill wrote:
LtWarhound wrote:

Same setup as World of Tanks. Its irritating, and silly, since you want people to want to play, and being unable to group with your friends means fewer people will be willing to spend the time to learn to enjoy the game enough to want to pay RL cash for a license.

The funny thing is, Gaijin's other game War Thunder doesn't work like this. They say if you want more than two in a squad you need Premium but, I know for a fact you can have three without any of them being premium.

Yeah, we had three in a party the other night.

LtWarhound wrote:

Cayne, there is no point in changing factions by buying the False ID with gold. If you want to try a different faction's ship, take a contract with them to earn the rep you need. You do pay a fee each time you swap factions, but its fairly trivial. I'm at level 6 rep with both the Empire and Jericho, and I'm able to hit level 6 with the Feds.

That gold switcheroo thing is just for your permanent faction bonus. 5% Reputation boost with Empire, 5% gold with Federation, and 5% experience with Jericho.

The Jericho thing is pretty worthless. You max out your synergy bonus with the ships pretty quickly, but gold is always useful, and it would take an awfully, awfully long time to max your Reputation everywhere.

I don't know if it would be worth spending the gold to switch it though.

I did get the fake ID actually. I mostly wanted the extra 1% main weapon damage though 5% gold is nice though!

Any chance I can get an invite the corp? Brianoh is the username

I would also like an invite to the Corp if I could.

In game name is Hantaxp

Sent and sent. Well, friend requests anyways, until one of the officers is on at the same time you can't get a corp invite :(.

I may do the flip flop anyway don't anticipate spending my gold on anything else, where other sources of gold is there besides the 5 day 100 gold pump.

Also just played my first couple o games with a Harpy last night, empire sniper frigate... holy balls that is easy mode EMP Match had my buddy TKH in an interceptor flying past rocks to hide from their snipers but the other team didn't get the memo i was covering him from 8k away just wailing on their guys, ended the game with 11 kills or something silly like that. He had higher eff since he blew up all the beacons but i was second from kills and assists.

A new patch dropped today. Lots of changes, mostly bugfixing. They changed the font used for almost everything in game, and now it looks weird to me!

Full Notes

The biggest change by far is that you can only earn loyalty through doing contracts. Reputation affects your overall faction rank and what ships you can fly. Loyalty ranks you up with subfactions and controls the gear you have access to. Not a big fan of this myself, it's going to make loyalty a real grind and I'm not sure you can buy a boost to make it go faster. On the bright side they almost doubled the loyalty you get per-contract, so faction-hopping remains the best way of ranking up. Just do all the contracts and pay the fee to switch.

There has been a big surge of T1 people. This might be in part because contracts can be completed at any tier and Tier 1 has quicker and easier gameplay. I'm starting to play on maps I have never seen before with really big team sizes.

IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867214686407409578/94B4F79737DA755989200478939B15394A7E2E99/)

I got SO MANY medals from this match.
- over 5 "destroy two enemies within 15 seconds"
- one "destroy three enemies within 15 seconds"
- one "win the match with double digit kills AND assists
- the highest killing spree award which only goes up to 15
- plasma killing spree
- Interceptor killing spree

Tamren wrote:

The biggest change by far is that you can only earn loyalty through doing contracts.

Not a fan of this. I've had times where the contracts required beacons (capping, defending, etc), and I kept getting non-beacon game types. Game is getting a bit too grindy for my taste.

LtWarhound wrote:
Tamren wrote:

The biggest change by far is that you can only earn loyalty through doing contracts.

Not a fan of this. I've had times where the contracts required beacons (capping, defending, etc), and I kept getting non-beacon game types. Game is getting a bit too grindy for my taste.

What they did to compensate was greatly decrease the amount of reputation you need per-rank (almost half I think). But I have the same gripe with the system, I keep getting games that do not allow me to work on my contracts. If I could select specific game modes through matchmaking the system would work much better. And I'm wondering how boosts work now because it says the give a bonus 50% loyalty and I'm almost certain that didn't apply to contracts pre patch.

One nice change they added is that each ship visible on your radar has a little bulletpoint above it that shows what ship type it is. Diamond-triangle-square for fighter-interceptor-frigate.

I also tried the federation frigate for the first time and have come to the conclusion that it is useless. At least in Tier 1. It has neither high health or high shields and none of the defensive toys that frigates get in Tier 2. Maybe I just haven't learned how to use it yet but I lose 90% of 1-1 confrontations.

Especially when you have team mates firing guided torpedoes into the fray right at you

I'm still pissed about the requiring a licence for groups of 3 or more that's going to put a serious damper on my lifespan with this game. But i'm definately enjoying flying around in my Warden tier 1 Hercules, Harpy, Dvergar Knight. That microwarp engine is just silly fun.

Small patch today. It switched back to the old font and made it so that the Steam Pack reputation bonuses also apply to loyalty as well.

Edit: I am really starting to love my interceptors. Stack a bunch of speed boosts onto them and you basically go to plaid, nothing can catch you! The trick to piloting one is to never slow down, buzz by and strafe a target then loop back again. In fact they actually put a limit on an interceptors top speed so that none of them could travel faster than 600. Apparently they were going so fast it was messing with the netcode. I can already get to 500 in my Jericho interceptor and it's not hard to zoom past people so quickly that in order for them to lead the target properly with their guns their cursor would have to be offscreen.

If you enjoy the game at all I highly recommend sticking it out until you get to Tier 2 ships. Tier 1 is really just a tutorial by comparison. You have 9 weapons to choose from instead of 3. You can switch your guns between two damage types. Interceptors can go invisible, drain energy, stun enemies, steal shield strength... lots of fun stuff.

A new patch dropped a couple days ago. They boosted the loyalty gained from contracts again. I think the bonus is +50% if you complete the contract in a winning game. They also added this "ping" mechanic where you can ping a target or location and draw people's attention to it. Helps a ton for coordinating pub teams.

Especially in Captain matches, since the captain can see all baddies I tend to sit in map mode, and watch who's coming for me then ping them with double tapping R. Defenders swarm and I'm safe. I should really make a push to tier2 i've been sitting in tier 1 just optimizing my gear to blue faction or random purp drops.

New patch today, it allows players to form squads of any size free of charge!

Unfortunately the game is now totally FUBAR. Even worse than PS2 Updates if you can believe that. The patch notes sound great on paper but a lot of the changes are horrible in practice. I compared notes with some other players and we figured that everyone is getting 3-10% of what we used to get from finishing a match. Not 3-10% less, 3-10% TOTAL. I used to get 2000 reputation for winning a match, now I get 150. It will take me approximately 3000 games to get to the next faction rank. (assuming I win)

Still very much a beta.

General
* Alpha, Closed Beta or Super testing participants automatically receive unique stickers!
* Added stickers created by players in the competition. All authors automatically receive their own stickers.

Game balance: Matchmaking
* Improved matchmaking algorithm, ship strength and pilot success calculation algorithms.
* Ships of adjacent technical levels can mee in battle if they have comparable power.
This is utter bullsh*t, ships of different tiers do not belong together. The power level disparity is HUGE. Higher tiers have bigger guns and more/better modules.

Contracts: General
* Reduced requirements for excessively complex contracts.

Game Mode: Beacon Hunt
* A new PvP mode is avaliable: "Hunting Lighthouse".
- This is an arcade game mode.
- Only one lighthouse is activated simultaneously.
- The team that controls it, receives points.
- After a while, a different beacon becomes active.
- The team that controls the beacon can't re-use ships.

Game balance: General
* Participating in battles with ships of a rank far below yours, gives you less reputation.
* Mk1 modifications price increased.
* When buying a new ship, you also get a complete set of pre-selected modules corresponding to the class of the ship (ship cost has been increased accordingly).
* Reduced cost of repairing T2, T3, T4 ships.
* Changed the reward formula: effectiveness now plays a bigger role.
* You can now create squads of any size free of charge.
I despise the ship cost. I already own a full set of modules, I don't need these garbage ones inflating the ship purchase prices. Scaling rewards sound great, but right now EVERYONE is getting almost nothing!

Interface: General
* Added an option to compare characteristics of selected ships and weapons with your current one. You need to press the Shift key to compare.
* Revamped battle selection window:
- Now you get a clear explanation of each type of combat.
- New game modes coming soon!

Interface: HUD
* Object markers moved closer to the central element from the edge of the screen.
This at least is a great change, all of the HUD markers that used to be at the screen edges are condensed into a ring in the middle of the UI.

Bug fixes:
* Beacon capture is no longer interrupted when the ship collides with the beacon.
* Fast chat message posting in corporation chat no longer automatically blocks messages.

Well as much as I would like to sell you guys on this game, I think I'm about done with it. To put it politely, this game is garbage. The last couple patches seem to be specifically designed towards running this burning ship into the ground.

- Rewards for finishing a match are now linked to score. The kind of playstyles that go with high scores have little to nothing to do with actual teamwork. So the people who play "properly" get less of a reward.
- Matchmaking is utterly FUBAR. The game now mixes ship tiers together in the same match with does horrible things to game balance.
- Reputation rewards were cut in half. I used to make 2000 rep per match and half of that on a loss. Now I'm lucky to get 1000 if I WIN. Even when I win I sometimes get 500 or less thanks to low scores. The amount of reputation I would need to get from rank 8 to 9 is 160k! I rarely get more than 5 rounds in a day, you do the math.
- Loyalty rewards were cut altogether, I used to get 2000 per match. Now I can only get it from contracts which offer low amounts and have timers which can go up to a week.
- Winning a battle lets you roll for loot and get random items. Sometimes usable ship components. The value of the "vendor trash" items were cut by 80%.
- I used to spend 5000 credits to re-do my implants, or "talents". The cost of re-speccing was increased 190x!!!!!! It costs almost as much to reconfigure as buying a new ship.
- Ship prices were increased across the board because they now come pre-fitted with junk modules. I already have a full set, so these are useless to me.
- Some players now can't buy ships because they don't have enough warehouse space to store all of these junk modules. Storage space can only be increased by... you guessed it, grinding out currency.

I'll check back in later, it's a beta game after all. But unless they come to their senses and just flat out reverse these changes this game isn't worth playing.

War Thunder also recently made a bunch of people mad with economy changes.

If it was just a matter of economy changes I could deal with it. But they massively cut player income. Massively increased rep grinding. And the actual game itself is no fun to play anymore. It's a mess right now.

Tamren wrote:

If it was just a matter of economy changes I could deal with it. But they massively cut player income. Massively increased rep grinding. And the actual game itself is no fun to play anymore. It's a mess right now.

That's basically what I meant by economy. How much time or money it takes to play and unlock things and earn rank.

If you go back into it let me know i'll dl and run a few missions.

Is the Horde mode still implemented and worth doing?

So it's been a very long time since I last touched the game and things have changed quite a bit. When I last left the game I think I said something to the effect of "the grind between levels has increased by 30000%". And while that was true at the time, the systems that statement refers to no longer exist. Here is a breakdown of the major game systems:

Ship Tier Unlocking:
- In the old system you had to pick one of the three factions to support. As you played matches you would earn faction XP which increased your level and unlocked new ships of a particular tier.
- In the new system the old faction ranks don't exist anymore. You earn access to new ships by leveling up or "synergyzing" the previous ship in the tree. Synergizing increases your ship's stats and can unlock small bonuses that make it perform better.

Faction Contracts:
- In the old system faction contracts were repeatable achievements that you used to build up your faction loyalty. A higher ranking allowed you to buy the tier 3 blue or "rare" items from the merchant.
- In the new system faction loyalty is now measure in "vouchers". Instead of building these vouchers up to certain milestones you spend them like a currency to upgrade your equipment.

Loot System:
-When I first started playing SC the loot system was a bonus treasure hunt you got for winning a match. There were several nodes on a map and you click on them to reveal a reward kind of like a lottery ticket. The reward varied a lot and couple be anything from salvage items worth money, xp or loyalty bonuses, or whole pieces of equipment. Originally anything you found you simply kept.
- When I last played SC the system had changed somewhat. The credit reward for finding salvage was greatly reduced and you no longer got items automatically. When an item was found you had two choices. You could attempt to salvage it yourself which had a low success rate. Or you could "hire experts" for premium currency for a higher success rate. If either method failed you would simply get credits for the item instead.
- The new system has been revamped. Now when you find an item you can just straight up pay a fee of credits to get the item. The size of the fee is quite reasonable and works out to about 25-33% of what you would pay to buy the item instead. The other two options are to scrap the item for "artifacts" or pay premium currency to scrap the item for a much larger amount of artifacts.

Equipment:
- I won't bother describing the old system. The new equipment system has been greatly streamlined and no longer involves multiple confusing store menus.
- When you go to equip a ship you click on one of it's slots and a menu pops up displaying the equipment you own that will fit here. You can either select an item or choose to buy one. Buying an item costs money and grants you a "white" or common version. You can then pay more money to upgrade it to level 2 which makes it slightly more effective.
- To upgrade an item to blue or "rare" level 3 you don't spend money, instead you have to pay the loyalty vouchers you get for doing contracts with a specific faction. To upgrade an item to the final "epic" level 4 you have to spend artifacts, which you can only get from scrapping loot items you find.
- It's also possible to find level 2 "magic" or level 4 items as loot after a match, though I've never seen a rare item.

---

The game has changed quite a bit and while the grind is still there, you can more easily work directly towards what you want to get next. The basic dogfighting pew pew lasergun gameplay is still excellent and hasn't changed much.

So I'd say the game is worth another look at this point.

The horde mode PVE scenarios are still in there. And they implemented more of them too. They are the best way to get items and money because if you beat one you get more loot rolls and one of them is a guaranteed item. PVP combat is better for synergizing your ships.

Is anyone still playing this? I've logged almost 24 hours over the past week.

It's as close to Freelancer as I've been able to get.

I really want to like it but it's still crap. There is barely anyone around to play on most days so you get into a lot of matches full of AI bots which are really dumb. Plus the balance went to hell after they allowed everyone to craft 1-hit kill missiles. I had it installed since it first released on Steam and when it finally went gold at version 1.0 I didn't see much of a difference. Finally uninstalled it.

The whole situation is very frustrating because it's still the best and most easily accessed multiplayer space dogfight game we have at the moment, if only people played it.

Deadmonkeys wrote:

Is anyone still playing this? I've logged almost 24 hours over the past week.

It's as close to Freelancer as I've been able to get.

Can I perhaps point you this way??

IMAGE(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQU1AidXrPTgaHwpZFPpRjIa4tI6uvF7FPIWK0Bf00xsAbp_Zwi)

UMOarsman wrote:
Deadmonkeys wrote:

Is anyone still playing this? I've logged almost 24 hours over the past week.

It's as close to Freelancer as I've been able to get.

Can I perhaps point you this way??

IMAGE(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQU1AidXrPTgaHwpZFPpRjIa4tI6uvF7FPIWK0Bf00xsAbp_Zwi)

Intriguing. Have you played it yet?

I hope they release a demo down the road.

Some goodjers are starting to pay a new game with some similarities to Start Conflict: Fractured Space.