Dogs Of War Vu

Sim/Strategy/War => Games Discussion => Topic started by: Asid on May 14, 2018, 04:33:33 PM

Title: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 14, 2018, 04:33:33 PM
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/header.jpg?t=1519270596)

Enter a stunning Sci-Fi universe filled with meaningful choices and intrigue. A space exploration RPG that features classless character progression, squad-based tactical ground combat and a living universe where your actions have consequences. Gather your team, equip your ship and explore.


Homepage: Here (https://www.stellartactics.com/#)
Steam: Here (https://store.steampowered.com/app/465490/Stellar_Tactics/)
Official forum: Here (https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/)
YouTube: Here (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjmitwO-dYp0coyXJbSoPag/videos?shelf_id=0&view=0&sort=dd)


Single-player


Story  Trailer

https://youtu.be/AHvW_kHuQBI



About

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/extras/GROUND_gif.JPG?t=1519270596)

•   Build a team of space mercenaries and explore a vast open-world universe
•   Classless character progression and perks allow for unrestricted customization. Specialize team members or master all weapons skills
•   Tactical, turn based team combat - use your action points wisely to ensure victory
•   Tons of gear which can be upgraded with Nano-Tech and component parts to customize your team. All weapons and armor have five tiers of quality and millions of variants.
•   40 ships to choose from. Each can be customized with various quality grades of equipment and specialized as cargo, mining, exploration or combat vessels
•   Space combat utilizes energy management and a dedicated skill progression system
•   Mine for minerals in space and sell the ore for profit to earn enough for a new ship
•   Scan planets to reveal new exploration opportunities or sell the data to faction merchants
•   Discover ancient civilizations, abandoned stations, cave systems, anomalies and the ruins of hundreds of years of unrelenting warfare in a living dynamic universe
•   Accept missions, follow the main story or explore - the choice is yours

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/extras/SPACE_gif.JPG?t=1519270596)

Bringing back the nostalgia, excitement and wonder of classic RPG's, Stellar Tactics will thrill you with a compelling narrative, deep strategic squad-based ground combat and rewarding open world space exploration. To survive, you will need to build your team's skills and equip your party and ships with the best weapons, armor and equipment you can find. With 10,000 sectors, tens of thousands of solar systems and millions of planets to discover, you can spend countless hours exploring, fighting, trading and building a party of seasoned veterans that can dominate the challenges of deep space.

NOTE: This game is in Early Access - there may be bugs and the game does not yet contain all features planned for release.


Additional features in development:

You can see the development road-map posted on forums here: Development Road-Map: https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/0/350532795334521117/

•   FTL travel
•   Commodities trading and dynamic economy
•   Extended narrative based on thousands of years of lore, intrigue and faction warfare
•   Devices that will allow the player to fit a total of 12 unique effects both beneficial and combat specific across their team members
•   "Azimuth", a synergistic combat system, presents new challenges for strategic players
•   Crafting system - Refine ore and dismantle equipment for component parts to build useful equipment for your team
•   Ground mining drone system
•   Stealth and trap system
•   Repair system for your ships and ground based equipment
•   Additional perks


(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_7fbd2e908a0f89fe1ff010d1770b500f1388bcff.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_be145b6143e2247d48b6a1b81b16168c617b1602.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_26b35ee164f7c1ae8d91871ab7d2aef89dc9b78b.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_a7f05735eed9bf066e765aa82c942e8ec114d7bd.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_175414f2d8546f3e7167130c555a27a0e0a111e6.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_e4e96e09c6705bf6665310c4a3f21a51165736d1.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_8f2d733d82c41bb0b4c2d67d0c464e205522f041.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_4ed6bff2681d8d33a9dbb3ecfebb452bb5e69b35.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_d5e6767572046162c314d0c854611dc4f1813008.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_118e689e9eec4d86953467cd032a15fca883211e.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_9ccdba11e087d38b12ea5fb86e78157e86e5b3e2.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/465490/ss_27179ef7eb0ca23328233bf13887293718adbe42.1920x1080.jpg?t=1519270596)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on December 26, 2018, 11:23:59 PM
Patch 0.170 - Better mission rewards, new device, enhancements and fixes
21 December - Stellar Tactics

First, I'd like to wish all of you a very Happy Holiday Season and thank you for a great year! This is the second patch as promised that provides additional bonuses to end mission loot, a new device that lets you scan for lifeforms in mission areas, a cleanup pass on the movement/interaction system and more. This is the last patch this year, and it has been a very busy year indeed. I have big plans for 2019 and I hope you enjoy the content and updates to come.

Here are the patch notes:

UPDATED: At the end of missions and when you clear hostile facilities and explore locations, you are now awarded better bonus equipment. Originally this was going to be a crate. I'm going to reserve that for major bosses that will reward epic items, and now grant these reward items as described below.
All granted items are now useful - no more health kits or junk items.
All granted items are of exceptional quality or higher.
You now get three guaranteed items at the end of missions.
Other rewards remain the same - Faction, cash rewards, and ammo are still granted depending on whether the location is a faction mission or a explore location.
--Short missions and explore locations - A chance for a legendary - a total of three granted equipment items (weapon, armor, shield or mod)
--Medium missions and explore locations - A high chance for a legendary - a total of three granted equipment items (weapon, armor, shield or mod)
--Long missions and explore locations - A guaranteed legendary - a total of three granted equipment items (weapon, armor, shield or mod)

UPDATED: A cleanup pass to the movement and interaction system. Overall this brings a few things in line with where they should be as far as object interaction and movement is concerned. Still more work to do on this.
--When moving to a location, if you click a chest, object or NPC, the closest team member will branch off and interact with that item instead of ignoring the object and continuing to move to the destination.
--If a PC is moving towards an object to interact, other team members will stop and wait.
--If a PC is moving towards an object to interact, another click to move will interrupt the interaction and clear the interaction queue.

UPDATED: The help screen while in space has been updated.
UPDATED: When rolling over grenades and health kits popups, descriptions are now displayed on the screen so you can see what kind of grenade or health kit you are selecting.
UPDATED: The high-resolution space option now also displays higher resolution materials for planets.
UPDATED: In higher level encounters, enemy groups are less likely to be generated with multiple missile launchers. Sure, that was fun, but it can also be overwhelming.
UPDATED: New color coding icons for equipment tiers in all menus.
UPDATED: You can now translocate directly to your ship from anywhere on a trade station if you have the Halamis Translocator equipped.

ADDED: A new device exclusive to the Shikaru faction. Shikaru faction vendors now sell the Lifesign Tracker. This device exposes all lifeforms in the current mission area on the radar for 10 seconds. Enemies out of range of the scanner are displayed at the edge of the radar display. You can use this in any mission area to help you track down those elusive enemies hiding in small rooms or in the larger mission areas like caverns and stations. The device has a 2-minute cooldown. The device cannot be used to reveal ethereal creatures. The device uses a global cooldown so other team members that also have the device equipped will need to wait until the cooldown expires. The cooldown persists between saves. There will be many more useful devices coming to the game - cloaking devices, resource node scanners for salvaging, drones for scouting areas and destroying upcoming turret placements in missions etc.

ADDED: Bloom filter setting in the video options screen.

FIXED: A bug that would display the wrong number of available faction tokens when purchasing an item from a faction vendor.
FIXED: When purchasing an item from a faction vendor, the text sent to the log now correctly indicates that you used tokens to purchase the item.
FIXED: The beacon icon now disappears if active when you FTL out of a star system.
FIXED: Blending issues with nebula effects. Overall, nebula effects now better match the star system sky and are more subtle.
FIXED: Removed duplicate log entry when turning in faction missions.
FIXED: A floating container in one of the mission areas and a number of other visual glitches in various mission areas.
FIXED: A mission enemy that was linked to a group on the other side of the mission map in one of the mission areas.


A little of what you can expect for the NEXT content patch:

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/db4be80d710ad85019a0647d43b23f325a839e86.gif)

The first set of final models for some of the ships (10 total)
Victory FT-2 - Light Fighter
Arrow FT-1 - Light Fighter
Triumph ITC-4 - Interceptor
Rovah MK-1 - Explorer
Talon ATKR-2 - Medium Fighter
Khaal ATKR-4 - Heavy Fighter
Tarsus MRCH-2 - Light Merchant
Severin MRCH-2 - Light Merchant
Heron MRCH-3 - Light Merchant
Exetor ATKR-7 - Heavy Fighter

Cargo transfer on stations
Ground mining drone system
Commodities and trading tied to the beacon system currently in the game
Updated animations
Improvements to the pace of combat (tied to the new animations)
Faction Agents will buy scan data

That's not all of course and I'll be working my way through the "What's Next" and "Roadmap" posts on the forums as I move towards Alpha.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on January 18, 2019, 01:53:46 PM
Cargo storage

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/959731270405365039/9674A9456FFE610F8FEE1249549D5C43CE678767/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on January 27, 2019, 12:03:03 AM
More progress on the new ships

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/958606303348221910/6B61EE35F5CFA87BC0F30E676DC096CD4C8C9DCA/)

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/958606303348224252/D5D45CD6D416FBB1CBD4DD43873523518C4C7CCE/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on February 23, 2019, 11:54:54 PM
Defense and Mining Drones

Renders of the defense and mining drones [WIP]

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/969867816651630146/B408FF6F7B3212F10A511E9C836BF3594FBBE569/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on February 24, 2019, 12:01:56 AM
Patch 0.177 Stability and player suggested QoL updates
16 FEB - STELLAR TACTICS


Hi all! I decided to set this week aside for a major update to the loading code, QoL improvements suggested by the community and a number of urgent fixes. No screenshots this week, just a bunch of things you've asked for that I needed to "get done". Here are the updates and fixes. Hope you all have a great weekend and thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

UPDATED: Improved loading speed when moving between areas.
UPDATED: Autosaves now take place before transitioning between areas.
UPDATED: Autosaves are now displayed at the top of the load/save menu under the quick-save slot. You can no longer overwrite or delete autosaves.
UPDATED: When saving over an existing save game, that save games current name is displayed by default with a new time stamp in the save confirm dialog.
UPDATED: Increased the animation speed when swapping weapons.
UPDATED: Ship equipment merchants will always carry at least one mining laser.
UPDATED: NPC ships can now be intercepted when micro-warping.

UPDATED: Added new logic for approaching NPC ships so you follow at a distance once in range. This should make intercepting ships in star systems much easier.
--Reduced the speed of NPC ships that are micro-warping to destinations so you can intercept.
--When you are micro-warping and you target a ship and press the "Approach" icon, you will now approach that ship and match that ships speed once you are in attack range.
--If you target another ship or stellar object, you will accelerate back to full micro-warp speed.
--If the targeted ship arrives at it's destination while you are following the ship, you will drop out of micro-warp in range of that ship.

UPDATED: Increased the frequence of drops for several rare mods (Frequency Modulators and Projectile Weapon Barrels).

UPDATED: End turn options now have dedicated key binds:
[1] - Delay Turn - If you have a full bar of AP, this option will let you delay your turn in the turn order.
[2] - Defend - A chance to reduce or completely mitigate the next attack on this character.
[3] - End combat turn

UPDATED - When you are ready to end your turn, you can now press [SPACE] a second time to end your turn so you do not need to manually select a end turn option. This is the same as selecting the new keybind [3].

UPDATED: Another tweak to the number of ships traveling to/from systems.

FIXED: Fixed a rare random lockup when transitioning between areas. This includes a major overhaul of the loading code when transitioning between areas. If you have any issues moving between areas, please post on the bug forums. I've tested this heavily and everything seems to be working as intended. I'll keep an eye on the bug forums over the next few days to make sure the new system is working as expected for everyone.
FIXED: A rare bug related to high faction levels not populating the system object list (upper left menu when in space) correctly.
FIXED: A rare bug related to high faction levels not displaying correct faction information in faction UI on the star map.
FIXED: The names of equipped devices are now correctly displayed when rolling over the icons on the tool bar.
FIXED: Particle systems were not triggered when launching to space when you first recieve your ship.
FIXED: If a rollover tooltip is visible and you leave a menu using the ESC key, that tooltip is hidden correctly.
FIXED: A visual glitch in the new game cinematic when exiting the crio-chambers.
FIXED: When starting a new game, after the intial cinematic, you will not be able to edge scroll until your implants are activated. You can also recenter the camera on your crew with the "Q" key and access the help menu "H".
FIXED: You can no longer select the end turn option "Delay Turn" if you do not have a full bar of AP.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on February 24, 2019, 12:02:12 AM
Patch 0.179
A few fixes in this one.

--Planetary gravity well indicators should display now for all planets
--A rare edge case related to the keypad to the room where Phestus is located
--Reduced the experience requirements for space skills (Piloting, Weaponry, Electronics, Targeting)
--Moved a few icons around on space hud. Added a few icons for the upcoming drone mining system.

See the image below - a few icons have been moved around. The shield and weapons toggle icons are now placed in the center panel.

There are two new icons that are not active yet on the UI. They are for a future patch.
--The drone manager in the lower left.
--The launch drone icon shows up when you select a mining node on a scanned planet.

(Urg - typo in the image - not going to fix it - moving on...)

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/969867816651111601/F479093DAEF185D8053BFBC33CDE599CE8D27A44/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: SystemInShock on February 25, 2019, 09:32:16 PM
I try very hard to stay away from early access games, but this one I had to pick up. I probably won't play it at all until it's complete, but hopefully my small contribution will help push this past the finish line.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on February 25, 2019, 11:32:44 PM
I try very hard to stay away from early access games, but this one I had to pick up. I probably won't play it at all until it's complete, but hopefully my small contribution will help push this past the finish line.

I do the same quite often. Most games I do not play in EA because they are constantly changing in a big way so you have to restart.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on March 03, 2019, 05:31:41 PM
Drone Manager (WIP)

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1007023210962784430/E32F3D904B4BD780E4584A4A476CDBD50CF1846D/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on March 05, 2019, 01:31:09 PM
The new Kraken model


(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1007023210970200961/D7B0A93C20E73936A825A37CFAA1DDC65E0F7992/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: SystemInShock on March 05, 2019, 08:27:09 PM
I try very hard to stay away from early access games, but this one I had to pick up. I probably won't play it at all until it's complete, but hopefully my small contribution will help push this past the finish line.

I do the same quite often. Most games I do not play in EA because they are constantly changing in a big way so you have to restart.

That's my problem.  Restart, restart, restart.  Or I finish the game and then 6 months later it's updated and I don't want to play it again.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on March 19, 2019, 11:34:40 AM
Click to open/close info HUDs

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1008150427568940772/748E84AC870198C7724CD8A2AFA0F67BD56D5A15/)


Space Info Huds opened

(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1008150427568987274/392429389DD7711E171D41E31692760830078533/)
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 08, 2019, 12:25:03 PM
Patch 0.180 - The new drone mining system and 10 more ships updated
9 Mar @ 4:10pm - Stellar Tactics   

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/a000ad1f71859a69d0d329db3fa38b046e69cb0e.gif)

Ten more ships updated!
Aries LATK-2
Vagabond EX-4
Wanderer EX-2
Arden LM-2
Revenant ATK-5
Corsair HATK-2
Ashaton MATK-3
Kraken HATK-7
Traveler EXP-2
Trident MATK-7

https://youtu.be/3cq99khcXo0


The new drone mining system is in the game. Here is how it works.
You can now purchase mining drones at any ship equipment vendor. The total maximum number of drones you can have active and on your ship is 20. Drones on your ship are transferred to any ship you are actively flying so, if you transfer to another ship, any drones aboard your current ship get transferred along with your cargo. Drones are fairly expensive, however, they pay for themselves in a few runs and are a great way to make money while exploring the universe.

Drones have a maximum capacity of 1000 units. When they are deployed, the drones fly to the targeted planetary resource node and mine until full. You can use the drone manager to manage your drones, check their status and set their AI (more on the drone manager below).

Drones have two AI states:
Automatic – Drones will mine a node until full and then fly to the nearest station and unload and sell their cargo. You will get a notification when cargo is sold and credits will be added to your account when the transaction is complete. Drones sell cargo at the base universal average for any resource type. This option is ideal for players who want to earn extra income in a semi-automated fashion to pay for ship and equipment upgrades. If a drone sells a full cargo hold of ore, you will receive mining experience on the crew member assigned to the weaponry station.

Manual – Drones will mine a node until full and then set their status to “IDLE”. The drone will wait on the planets surface until you enter the star system the drone is located at and retrieve the drone. The drone will fly to your ship (assuming you have enough cargo space) and unload the drone to your cargo hold and return itself to storage. This option is designed for players who want to engage in the future trading and crafting features. They can then refine the ore and/or trade crafted items, raw and refined ore. This option will require a ship with a fairly high cargo capacity. If the drone fills its cargo bay, you will receive mining experience on the crew member assigned to the weaponry station.

Deploying a drone:
To deploy a drone you will first need to scan a planet. If that planet has any resources they will be displayed on the planet map in the upper right corner of the screen. Higher skill in scanning will display more nodes if there are any and provide higher quality scan results. The higher the quality of the resource node, the more resources it has available to mine. Higher quality resource nodes also provide higher returns as they are usually rich in valuable resources.

Select the node on the planets surface and the “deploy drone” icon will be displayed below the planet info panel along with the number of available drones you have to deploy. Select the icon and a drone will be launched. The drone will fly to the surface of the planet, the node icon on the planet map will change to let you know a drone is assigned and the drone will be added to the drone manager list.

Retrieving a drone:
Eventually, drones will deplete the resource. A drone with a depleted resource (or a drone that was set to manual that has a full cargo bay) will be displayed in the Drone Manager as “IDLE”.

To retrieve the drone, fly your ship to the system where the drone was deployed, select the drone in the list and click the “Retrieve” button at the bottom of the drone manager. The drone will return to your ship, unload if it has any cargo and set itself to storage. The drone will be removed from the drone manager.

Drone Manage:r
The drone manager can be accessed while in space via a new icon in the lower left of the screen. You can see how many drones you have and how many are deployed. Every deployed drone is listed and selecting any drone will show you it’s current status ( mining, traveling, idle etc.).

You can also access the drone manager from the Log->Map in space or when at stations or mission locations. Selecting a drone will center the map on the system where the drone is deployed.

If you select a drone while in FTL space, the system the drone is located at will be selected in the upper left system panel making it easy for you to target and approach that system for drone retrieval.

NOTE: Currently “Gas” nodes retrieve ore. I’ll make the changes needed to harvest various gas nodes when I get the trading system in the game.

There is a new in-game guide entry for the drone mining system.

Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics and have a great weekend!
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 08, 2019, 12:27:48 PM
Progress update - The Trade-Net
13 Apr @ 9:19pm - Stellar Tactics

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/474fa60374ea7595b90ab03b0c7efe45665d904c.png)


A progress update on the Trade-Net today. Things are moving along nicely and the universe-side code is completed. I'm wrapping up the UI and will start working on handling accepted contracts and deliver/retrieving contract trade goods this week. Here is a short video showing some of the work that has been done:

Video: Progress update - The Trade Net

https://youtu.be/H3nHqWRliVc


The trade net uses a network of placed beacons. Beacons have been in the game for a while now and many of you may have fairly large networks of these devices. The larger the network, the more options you have to find the best deals.

Initially, these could only be used for fast travel between systems. You likely use them to travel back and forth between mission locations or to your favorite home system where you store goods and ships. With the trade-net update, these beacons will start sending data to the trade-net so you find the best places to buy and sell trade goods, ore, and refined ore. A ship with a good-sized cargo hold can make excellent money traveling between systems trading all kinds of goods.

For those of you interested in smuggling, there will be an option to have your Trade-Net "hacked" so it will show contraband items (like the Kchor Brandy shown above). Traveling with these items in your cargo hold is risky. Raiders may spawn and scan your cargo, trade stations may force you to pay a fine if you have these goods in your cargo hold and will seize the items. A high electronics skill can help avoid detection. There may also be a few ship upgrades just for smugglers.

I'll keep you posted as I make progress. I'm hoping to get this out for everyone sometime in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, here is a list of the latest patch notes since the last announcement. Thank you for supporting Stellar Tactics!

4/5/19
Stability fixes:
--Capped framerate at 60fps - I'll look into uncapping FPS during late alpha. In general, capping the framerate at 60 keeps the physics engine (and overall framerate) stable on higher-end systems with fast CPU's/GPU's and high refresh monitors. The game actually plays much smoother for me running at a 144hz.
--Clearing some dynamic data before level loads.
--Integrated the latest Steam API for stability, upcoming achievements and other plans I have for the game.
--Removed a few files that that game does not need (may have been causing conflicts on some systems).

FIXED: A bug related to autosaves on the Dauntless.
FIXED: A bug related to volumetric effect coloration in certain star systems.
FIXED: Rollover info labels are now displayed correctly when hovering over docking and landing icons.
UPDATED: Added additional info to the star system object list in the upper left HUD that displays the [NEAREST] jump point.

3/25/19
FIXED: When exiting Dauntless the game was generating two autosaves.
FIXED: When leaving the Dauntless, items equipped on characters other than the main character are correctly moved to the stash
FIXED: The number of items in ship cargo holds could be displayed incorrectly in rare cases. Cargo volume is now correctly displayed in the vendor UI, when viewed in the ship cargo UI and in purchased cargo storage. If you have a current save that displays incorrect cargo volume, this patch should resolve the problem.

3/24/19
FIXED: A display error for perk bonuses to the weaponry skill. Specifically bonuses applied to reload speed and efficiency displayed on the ship screen under "Skill Bonus"
FIXED: Targeting a planet and traveling to FTL space then clicking the upper right info panel even if it displayed "No Target" would display the info panel with bad info.
FIXED: Placing a beacon and then deleting another beacon would cause the beacons list to not display the most recently placed beacon.
FIXED: Display of number of drones deployed and in inventory in the log->drone UI
FIXED: The game would lock up while hacking if you had perks selected from the auto-hack line at higher levels (Mystic Keycard, Master Key etc.) when those perks were triggered.

3/18/19
FIXED: Rare random lockup when entering or leaving combat.
FIXED: A bug related to populating the star map search data based on your location in the universe. This could have made it hard to find purchased ships located at remote stations.
FIXED: A bug that would add an empty character between the save name and time played values in the save UI when overwriting an existing save.
FIXED: Deleting saves while in the save game UI could cause a bad entry in the save list.

3/13/19
Resolved issues with several instances where opening a menu and not closing it would cause the game to lock up. Specifically:
--Opening the Drone Manager from the log screen and then pressing the ESC key or any other key that would navigate you to inventory, character information etc. would lock up the game. Thanks again for the reports.
--Opening the "Reputation" menu from the log screen and then pressing the ESC key or any other key that would navigate you to inventory, character information etc. would lock up the game.
--A change to the core AI architecture
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 09, 2019, 12:07:34 AM
Trade-Net, refining and mining perks
8 May @ 11:43pm - Stellar Tactics

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/0867a72d3d4607fd53f9370e2727de194b3525fb.gif)


Here are the notes for the latest content patch. This patch introduces the Trade-Net, refining and mining perks. Hope you enjoy the changes. If you do find any bugs or issues, please post on the bug sub-forum and I’ll look into it.

Trade-Net, refining and mining perks

https://youtu.be/NBTXbRg3iu8


Added the Trade Net:
The Trade-Net is a marketplace where goods are sold by various orbiting stations across the universe. Trade Stations issue buy and sell contracts for goods required by the population of that system. These goods are transferred between orbiting stations and planetary colonies.

The Trade-Net is not available until you leave Achmedius and place at least one beacon near a Jump Point in another system. Once you place a beacon in another star system, Achmedius will be added along with any other star systems where beacons are placed. If you have already placed beacons in an existing save, the entire available Trade-Net will be visible when you load that save.

Trade contracts are delivered through the cargo storage terminal on stations. Cargo storage has been revised so it opens immediately without the need to purchase storage. If you want to buy cargo storage at a station, just open the cargo storage terminal and select the option to purchase storage. Delivering or retrieving purchased Trade-Net items is as simple as traveling to the station where the trade contract was placed and retrieving or placing the cargo in storage. The contract(s) are completed when closing the cargo storage menu. Cargo storage has a new area at the bottom of the UI that displays delivery contract information.

A few notes related to the addition of the trade-net.
•   Over time, the number of trade goods in any available contract on the trade-net are reduced as AI merchants accept orders.
•   Trade goods and refined ore cannot be bought from or sold to vendors, only traded via the trade net. These items will not be displayed in the vendor interface.
•   Mining and mining drones now have a slightly lower chance of collecting rare earth minerals and rare ore to offset market pricing.
•   The amount of ore retrieved while mining, especially at higher levels has been adjusted.
•   Mining drones sell ore at a reduced price now that the Trade-Net is in the game to balance the economy. Retrieving ore, refining it and then selling it is the most profitable path - however, automated drones still generate significant income.
•   Commodity merchants and ore vendors have been removed from trade stations now that the Trade-Net is implemented. They may come back as something new when crafting goes in the game. Ore can still be sold to vendors, though using the trade net to find the best price is likely more profitable.
•   The ore vendor on Hurzog Mining is now a general merchant. Scarby's dialog has been revised to reflect that.
•   If a beacon is placed in a hostile system, trade data is not streamed to the Trade-Net for that system. You cannot trade with hostile factions.
•   You gain a small amount of mining experience for refining.
•   Gas nodes on planets have been removed and replaced with mineral nodes. I may look at gas mining again at some point in the future.

Added Refining:
You can purchase and equip a refinery on your ship. Refineries let you convert raw ore to refined ore – a more valuable commodity. Refined ore is used for crafting items and across the universe for building stations, colonies, and goods. You can purchase and equip a refinery at any ship equipment vendor. Like all ship equipment, refineries are ship specific so you cannot swap them between ships. Refineries equip to your ships “hardware mount point”.

You can refine anywhere - in mission areas, in space, it doesn't matter - as long as you have ore in your cargo hold. So, you could have a ship with a large cargo hold full of ore and go complete a ground mission while all that ore is being refined.

Mining perks:
Mining perks have been added to the game. There are three lines - Drones, Refining and Mining. Each gives you bonuses to various functions of each of these utilities. For example, selecting drone perks will give you bonuses to drone mining speed and the quality of ore mined by drones. If you already have high enough skill levels in mining, you can assign perks to the skill line as usual in the character information screen. Just select mining from the list on the right and the perk choices will be available.

An important note, mining queues off the crew member assigned to the weaponry station. So, bonuses are derived from this crew member and the perks assigned to them.

Also, bonuses to the speed of your mining turrets are derived from both the level of mining skill and the perks assigned to the crew member in the weaponry station. Those bonuses are applied to your turrets reload speed. A high mining skill and selections from the mining perk line will produce ore at very high rates at high skill levels.

Smuggling deserves more than just a simple on/off switch. I'll be adding a bit of storyline very soon that will allow you to unlock smuggling. Contraband items are in the game now for the trade-net, however, they are hidden until I do a bit more work on this system.

There is now a very small chance that you will be attacked by hostile ships when entering a star system. You will be warned if this is the case and have a few seconds to put your shields up or micro-warp away from that area. The chance of this happening is slightly higher if you have active delivery contracts.

Guide entries have been added to the in-game guide for the Trade-Net and Refining. You can find the guide by pressing “H” and selecting the “Guide” button at the top of that screen.

General fixes:
FIXED: In large open areas, a very long path was generated in some cases for the selected PC that would cause the framerate to drop.
FIXED: In some cases, loot dropped by enemies could not be selected if the loot dropped on a stairway near a door.
FIXED: A dupe exploit related to cargo storage.
FIXED: Incorrect info displayed in a few rollover labels.
FIXED: A bug related to recruiting a heavy weapons NPC that would overwrite the primary PC's ranged weapon ammo type. This fix is not retroactive.
FIXED: You can now eject cargo while in FTL space.
FIXED: The cargo volume label at the bottom of the center ship panel now updates correctly as ore/cargo are added.
FIXED: The beacon icon in the lower left of the screen while in space now disappears correctly when moving away from a jump point.
FIXED: Drone menu in space and in the log->map window now responds to the ESC key to close the menu.
FIXED: Opening and then closing the Steam overlay would break movement at ground locations until ESC or a menu was opened or closed.
UPDATED: The cargo list on the ship info screen now updates every second. The number of cargo items is also updated.
UPDATED: When rolling over systems on the star map, system names in the info popup with a "*" next to their name have a beacon placed.
UPDATED: Cargo storage terminals now have a unique icon on the radar.
UPDATED: Adjusted rollover info for ship equipment so it's clear that the equipment fits ship type, not ship class.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 25, 2019, 12:39:33 AM
Progress update 5/24/19
24 May @ 11:56pm - Stellar Tactics

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/23a2cc85b23a977d45c951c775026b64da7b1cdc.png)

Hi all - lots of work being done. Some of my time has been spent adding a new mission that unlocks Smuggling. This mission gives you an option to unlock buying and selling contraband on the Trade-Net. Once you unlock contraband, these items will appear for trade as buy and sell contracts. Smuggling is a bit more dangerous than hauling trade goods between star systems and pays better overall in smaller ships as low volume – high-value transactions.

I'll be expanding on this system quite a bit during Alpha with timed trade missions, branching delivery missions that include ground and space combat and special equipment for your ships. Initially, when this patch is released, you will be attacked more often if you have contraband items in your cargo hold, so make sure you are well equipped for space combat if you take these contracts.

I’ve also been doing a bit of work on the faction system and when this next patch goes live, you should start to see small skirmishes in space between various factions. You can choose to join these skirmishes or fly in to pick up the loot when the shooting is over.

The next patch will also see an increase in the trade-in value of your current ship. CHA has always reduced the purchase price of ships and increased the trade in value of your ship. The next patch will boost this a bit more. I’ll also be including a number of bug fixes and stability improvements.

Once the next patch is live, I'll start working on the crafting system, implementing the updated animations, adding the ground combat special attacks and moving on to some other work as I quickly approach full Alpha.

As I start implementing these new features I'll begin posting builds to the public test branch for a week or two before setting them live for everyone. Some of the changes that are coming are fairly complex so I think it will be a good idea to start separating the stable builds from some of these more experimental updates. I'll post on the forums when I start publishing test builds with instructions on how you can access these updates.

That’s it for now. I hope to have this patch live in a week or so. Meanwhile, here are all the latest patch notes. Have a great weekend and thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

5/20/19
FIXED: Another edge case with older saves that could display trade contracts from stations that are no longer in certain systems.
FIXED: Cargo volume displayed incorrectly when using sorting options. Could allow you to add more cargo than your cargo hold could carry.
FIXED: Cargo volume was displayed incorrectly in the vendor UI when sorting cargo.
UPDATED: You can now sell refined ore to vendors at or below average market value. This should help starting players who want to mine and sell refined ore.
UPDATED: Adjustments to vendor ore sale values - ore values are always below the market average and best market purchase price. Mostly applies to low-value ore.

5/17/19
FIXED: Planets were displaying completed mission landing locations after completing a mission. You could land at these sites but no enemies were present and the location was bugged. These locations are no longer shown on planet surfaces. If you are in one of these locations, just exit to space. The landing location should disappear.
FIXED: Panning and rotation using the keyboard no longer cancel each other out.
FIXED: When overriding a key bind, the override pop up now correctly displays the key you are overriding in the text field.
UPDATED: A few adjustments to enemy movement related to the physics engine. Will see if that fixes a rare bug with enemies losing their way when traversing the navigation mesh.

5/15/19
FIXED: A bug that was transferring cargo expansions between ships. If you have this bug, you can either keep the current cargo expansion or buy new cargo expansion and drag that to the cargo expansion slot in your ship.
FIXED: An error that was not properly applying drone perk bonuses. Perk bonuses for speed now correctly apply to mining and travel speed.
FIXED: If self stunned in combat (stun grenade etc.), you can now use the end turn hotkeys. Previously required that you manually click end turn options.
FIXED: Cargo values displayed below the center ship UI. Let me know if you see numbers that do not match your current cargo hold. This display updates every few seconds.
UPDATED: You can now cancel trade contracts from the Trade-Net menu. Select the contract you want to cancel in the list and then select the "CANCEL CONTRACT" button.
UPDATED: Refinery button moved to the bottom of the refinery menu.
UPDATED: The storage transfer menu now allows you to specify the number of items to be transferred with an updated VALUE entry field (bottom center of the transfer popup).
UPDATED: The drone manager now displays the quality level of the node being mined for each drone in the list as QL-1 through QL-10.

5/10/19
FIXED: Over time, Trade-Net contracts were being removed and not regenerating.
FIXED: In some cases, the color coding and arrow display in the contracts area of the trade net was being displayed incorrectly.
FIXED: The stacked item slider is now fixed in cargo storage.
FIXED: Phosphate can no longer be purchased for zero credits.
FIXED: Skills that are capped at 100 skill level now correctly display a full bar of skill experience in the character info hud.
FIXED: If you had a max skill of 100 in mining, you can now select mining perks
FIXED: If you have the current maximum friendly status with a faction, the faction bars in the upper left character hud and the log->map now correctly display as full. I expect that I will be adding additional tiers of faction in the future. Faction continues to be accrued even when at maximum with any faction and that is intended.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on June 02, 2019, 12:07:18 AM
Patch day - Smuggling, objective tracker and faction warfare
1 Jun @ 2:21pm - Stellar Tactics   

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/2e8456564319d274e13dc461710d9d4bd48a1921.png)

Patch day - a few updates and fixes this week.

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/23a2cc85b23a977d45c951c775026b64da7b1cdc.png)

You can now unlock Smuggling. Speak with Forley Coresh on the Achmedius Trade Station to start your career. Smuggling is a fairly dangerous career and you will be harassed by Raiders and Scavvers if you have active contraband contracts. I recommend a starship with decent weapons, shields and balanced power systems. This is a great career for those of you who want to make money from trading smuggled goods and of course from all that loot you are going to find by eliminating the enemy ships that attack you. For now, you do not need to worry about The Authority (not in the game yet). I have a few interesting plans for the smuggling system including a few ship enhancements, timed smuggling missions and extended story content related to The Syndicate. If you read the dialog carefully, you might notice an intro to future story content and a long-standing mystery surrounding the loss of your crew, depending on the options you choose.

Smuggling requires a large Trade-Net to be effective - so place beacons in every system you find with orbiting stations. Contraband goods are traded all over the universe, but not as often as normal commodities.

Ships may attack each other now. You can join in and help or ignore these skirmishes. In some cases, if you do decide to help, you have a good chance of finding loot from dropped cargo containers. Rarely, regardless of whether you engage or not, cargo containers are dropped from these ships and you may find them floating in space. This is the start of the faction warfare system (just the start) and these engagements are generally between the various factions and Scavvers and Raiders entering and leaving systems.

I've added a mission and contract tracker to the HUD when traveling in space. You can now see active missions or trade contracts on this list. While in FTL space, you can select any destination and the Star System the mission or contract is located in will automatically be selected in the info panel so you can click the approach icon and fly to that system. If you are in Star System that has a mission or contract, selecting an item in the tracker will select the planet or station where the mission or contract is located so you can easily approach that location without needing to open the log to reference mission information. The tracker is also useful for translocating as it displays contract destinations and commodities in the list.

And one last thing - a surprise for those of you playing the game...no spoilers. I'm sure you will notice immediately.

If you find any problems with this build, please post on the bug forums and I'll address the issues promptly.

Patch notes:
ADDED: A short mission that unlocks Smuggling. Speak with Forley Coresh on the Achmedius Trade Station. He will help you start your new career.
ADDED: The Objective Tracker. All missions and Trade-Net contracts (buy/sell) are now displayed in the objective tracker while in space. The tracker can be opened/closed using an icon on the right center of the space exploration UI. Selecting a tracker mission or contract entry will display the targeted star system, planet or station in the info panels so you can easily navigate to the destination. Selecting an item in the tracker will:
1) Target the destination planet or station if you are in the same Star System where the mission/contract is located
2) Target the destination Star System if you are in FTL space

UPDATED: Increased the min/max base margin values for the Trade-Net across the board. This means there will be lower sale prices and higher buy prices available depending on the size of your network. These adjustments will become available over time as trade contracts are refreshed.
UPDATED: When translocating using Jump Points, ship fusion cells are now used instead of ground weapon fusion cells. The cost is still the same - 5 fusion cells per jump.
UPDATED: Incursions now only provide a positive faction bonus for the faction that initiated the incursion.
UPDATED: Faction rewards in space combat adjusted:
--Incursions generate higher individual faction bonuses for the faction that assigned the incursion. Additional factions (factions other than the assigning faction ) no longer generate faction bonuses. It was too easy to gain alignment with other main powers in the Universe while doing work for a specific faction.
--Destroyed ships from non-incursion attacks in hostile systems will only generate negative faction based on that system.
--Destroying ships that are not part of an incursion and not direct attacks in hostile systems will generate single digit faction bonuses for all non-aligned factions and normal negative faction based on the ship destroyed
UPDATED: Trade in values when buying a new ship increased. Note that CHA applies to all ship purchases decreasing the price of buying a ship and increasing the value of your trade-in. This has always been the case.
UPDATED: You now have a much lower chance of being attacked when you have an active delivery contract if that contract is not contraband. A higher chance of being attacked by Raiders and Scavvers if you have an active contraband delivery contract.

FIXED: A lockup when docking at stations, planets and translocating if under enemy ship fire.
FIXED: A rare crash related to enemy ship beam weapons.
FIXED: Incursions will now reward faction for the system where the incursion is taking place, regardless of whether the system is a main or sub-faction.
FIXED: A very rare persistent yellow particle effect left in the scene after space combat.
FIXED: Old auto-saves - that is auto-saves created before the new auto-save system (rotating between 4 dedicated save files) are no longer displayed in the load/save menu. This will clean up save lists for players with games that were created all the way back to the start of Early Access.

Thank you all for supporting the development of Stellar Tactics. Have a great weekend!
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on June 15, 2019, 08:56:11 PM
The map, experience adjustments and bug fixes
14 Jun @ 11:10pm - Stellar Tactics   

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/862dbc7c846e5ddc49673d92e5509be0eb394cba.jpg)

I'm adding the ground exploration map today. This is likely the most requested feature from players since I first started gathering feedback. It includes fog of war, zoom, and scrolling. I hope you all enjoy the update.

I'm also including increased experience for space combat, first-aid and hacking skills. If you do find any issues with this patch, please post in the bug forums. Here are the patch notes:

ADDED: Added the map.
--The map includes fog of war so you can view where you have been.
--Zoom, scroll, center.
--You can see various icons like mission markers, vendors, faction agents, exits, mercenaries, etc. A "legend" for the various icons which match the radar is available on the map.
--Persistent data. Wherever you go in the universe, your tracked progress is saved.
--Your saved key binds have been replaced so I could remap "M" as the default key for the map. The crew manager has been moved to "J".
--The in-game help screen and guide have been updated to match the new default keys.

FIXED: When exploring ground locations with a single crew member, the game will no longer crash when manually entering or leaving combat.
FIXED: A bug that could generate ship equipment when turning in agent missions. This would place ship equipment in general inventory instead of the cargo bay - breaking rollover info and a few other things. NPC's now have a brief cooldown period before you can interact with them when an area loads. IMPORTANT - If you do find any ship equipment in your general inventory (not in your cargo bay), you should drag that item to the trash and delete it. These items cannot be sold or used.
FIXED: "Gadolinium" added to the commodities market. Trade contracts for this item will start to appear over time.
UPDATED: Reduced space skill experience requirements per level.
UPDATED: Mercenaries now display a bright yellow dot on the radar and map so they can be distinguished from other regular NPC's on stations around the universe.
UPDATED: Hacking and First aid skill progression will now continue even if you are at the level cap.
UPDATED: Reduced hacking and first-aid experience requirements per level.
UPDATED: Improved dynamic shadow resolution.

Other notes - 6/6/19
FIXED: The objective tracker now correctly targets the mission return location if an agent mission is completed.
FIXED: Agent mission return destinations in the objective tracker now correctly targets a planets surface or station depending on where the mission was originally accepted. This is not retroactive, so previous missions, if taken on a planet surface, will target stations.
FIXED: A error with default FTL drives that was calculating base FTL speed incorrectly. This fix is not retroactive so if you do have a "Stock" FTL drive that seems faster than other quality level FTL drives available for sale, you get to keep it. You will likely want to swap out that FTL drive eventually when sub-system damage goes in the game for a FTL drive with higher HP.
FIXED - Old autosaves are no longer displayed in the save game menu.
FIXED - When swapping crew members in and out of your active crew, it was possible that perks from the previous crew member would be assigned/enabled on a crew member that had not selected those perks.
FIXED - A bug that was not correctly displaying shield bonuses from the electronics station (perks etc.) unless the crew member was in the active ground crew.
FIXED - A bug related to recruiting NPC crew members gaining incorrect Hand2Hand skill for secondary weapon if that was their specialty.
FIXED - Closed out a number of bugs related to the Trade-Net displaying incorrect contract target system information. This rarely resulted in arriving in a system that was not the correct destination target.
ADDED - Added the old music into the music track list for space and ground exploration.
ADDED - you can now preview mercs before recruiting them. Mercs now cost an initial fee based on their level. High-level mercs can be very expensive, so fill out your crew early in the game.
UPDATED - An increase in the base number of trade goods vendors buy/sell.
UPDATED - The last audio track played in an area is saved and loaded the next time you load an area.
UPDATED - You can now place beacons on the FTL map. When you get close enough to a star system, the beacon icon will be displayed in the lower left of the screen. Target the system, open the beacon menu and you can place a beacon in the targeted system. You cannot destroy beacons or translocate using the beacon menu on the FTL map. This should help players quickly build a larger Trade-Net.
UPDATED - When in FTL space, star system labels now display a "*" next to their name if a beacon has already been placed in this system. It should make it easy to identify systems where you could place a beacon to expand your Trade-Net.
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on July 13, 2019, 12:26:44 PM
Progress update and Patch
12 Jul @ 6:27pm - Stellar Tactics

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/98113abb36b703dd2737fafc4aec0a7bc8995e28.jpg)

A few fixes and QoL requests addressed today. The patch should be posted shortly. As always, if you find any bugs/issues, please post on the bug forums. I'll address any critical issues promptly.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/7/

Just a note about the crafting and salvaging system. The paper design is nearly complete. I should start implementing these systems next week starting with the base salvaging system related to inventory items (junk, weapons, armor, turrets, etc.). From there I'll start implementing the crafting system using those salvaged items. I'll provide more details in a post at some point as I get closer to finalizing the system. I don't want to make any promises until I have it fully working and have time to test and tweak things.

Crafting will not be just a matter of adding x + y + z to create a new finished item. There will be multiple stages of crafting similar to:

•   Setup - Setup the crafting table with salvaged components, and resources of varying qualities
•   Process - Process the components using various resources
•   Finish - Finish the crafting session enhancing the item and adding stats, bonuses, slots etc with remaining CP (crafting points)

I'll keep everyone posted as I make progress.

FIXED: Completed eliminate missions now display the green "cleared" state on the mission objective map if an area is cleared after the primary "eliminate" mission objective is completed.
FIXED: Hacking tool no longer displays stats. All hacking bonuses were moved to perks a while ago.
FIXED: If you were queuing up attacks and ran out of ammo when using the combat queue - the game would lock up and you would need to reload a save to continue. Bad bug - thanks for reporting it!
FIXED: A very rare case where some system configurations could not load required DLL's at the start of the game causing a forced exit when clicking past the EA display screen.
FIXED: A bug that would display "NONE" in the dialog field instead of Dr. Emily Jensen while in the Ruins.
FIXED: A number of typos.
UPDATED: Key binds would not allow binding of the up and down arrow keys. All key binds have been reset and you will need to re-map your keys. I am looking into key binds for grenades and med-kits for a future patch.
UPDATED: When a weapon is equipped, mod slots are now clearly labeled in the weapon mod slots menu as "Mod slot not available". This should make it less confusing when players try to identify equipped weapons that actually have mod slots.
UPDATED: Added arrows to the portraits on the character information and inventory screens so you can scroll through active crew members with the mouse rather than using the F1-F4 keys. The F1-F4 keys still work if you prefer to use them.
UPDATED: Adjusted ship materials so they load faster resulting in less hitching when NPC ships are loaded in star systems and the FTL map.
ADDED: "Steering" mode for ships. Holding the left and right mouse buttons will now place the camera behind and slighting above the ship. You can move your mouse in any direction to steer the ship in this mode. Additionally, the left and right turn keys used while in steering mode will accelerate turns. Releasing the mouse buttons will return control to the normal state.

Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics and I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on August 17, 2019, 12:21:43 PM
Progress update - Crafting and ship interiors
16 Aug @ 9:29pm - Stellar Tactics

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/f4436f8b5484811db71f873865f57d9aa95d3170.jpg)

I’m posting a work in progress video today that shows the salvaging portion of the crafting system which is nearly complete. I still have a bit of work to do on the UI and balancing. The video also shows the first completed ship interior for the boarding system. More details below.

Progress Update 8/16/19

https://youtu.be/Dy3GbDkl2Vg


Crafting requires components and the salvaging system lets you mark items in your inventory, stash and cargo hold for disassembly. As you disassemble items, you will gather crafting components and the finishing items you will need to craft equipment for your ships and crew.

You can salvage items anywhere. That is, you do not need to travel to a salvaging station to break items into component parts. Initially, I was going to tie salvaging to a static salvaging station that would be on your ship and space stations. I felt it would be a lot more useful if you could do this at any time, clearing inventory of excess equipment and vendor junk items. Crafting material storage is infinite so you won’t need to worry about max inventory for these items.

Equipment – When disassembling equipment, you will gain salvaging experience, component parts, finishing items and progress towards learning a locked crafting schematic for that item type (based on the quality of the item).

Junk items – Junk items generate finishing materials. These will be used in the finishing stage of crafting to assign stats, weapon min/max damage values, and other bonuses to equipment. In general, crafting an item can result in a finished item with bonuses and stats that are better than any item you can buy or find in the game.

I’ll be starting on the crafting portion of the system next now that I can generate crafting components. This will take a while and I hope you all enjoy the system when it’s finished.


Ship interiors are being worked on. These interiors will be used for a number of purposes:

•   Boarding: Disable a ship and enter through the airlock. Various doors to be hacked, hostile enemies defending their ships and objects that need to be repaired – not to mention loot and the ability to sell these ships for profit.
•   Missions: There will be a number of missions that may pop up as a communication from a disabled ship, rescues and a few other scenarios that will require entering other ships.
•   Your home: Ships will serve as a place to store goods, interact with the crew and craft items.
That’s all I have for now. Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on October 12, 2019, 03:38:46 PM
Crafting preview
Fri, 11 October 2019

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/531d45aa43fa3e1a9c31d19007f33d9eb723fc2d.jpg)

I’m posting a video first look at the crafting system today. There is still a good bit of cleanup, bugs to fix and balancing work to do. I’m hoping to have this patched into the game in a week or so.

Stellar Tactics - Crafting system preview

https://youtu.be/f7ZLqCSHYLM


Crafting requires various components:

•   Crafting components are broken down from items you find in the world using the salvaging skill
•   Refined ore and rare earth minerals from mining or purchased from the Trade-Net
•   Finishing items salvaged from junk you find in your travels

Crafting requires schematics that are unlocked as you salvage items and learn more about them. Schematics can also be very rare drops from various enemies and in ship crates. Over time you will gather a large number of schematics that can be used to craft gear for your crew and parts for your ships.

Assuming you have a schematic and the required resources (components and refined ore) you can begin crafting by selecting a crafting station found on trade stations across the universe. I’ll also be adding crafting stations to ship interiors when I patch the boarding system into the game at a later time.

Once you find a crafting station, you can select a schematic and the table is automatically filled with the resources you need to craft the item. Refined ore and rare earth minerals are pulled from your cargo hold and from the station's storage when crafting, so, you can stockpile these items on stations if you want to. Components and refined ore are required. However, it is very important to also have a good stock of rare earth minerals and finishing items.

Some crafted items have additional options you can select. For example, beam pistols and rifles have options to select various damage types. Ship equipment requires you to select a ship type. Your current ship is always selected by default.

You can re-roll the base stats for most items. Ground weapons are the exception as they scale on the weapon skill of the crew member. When crafting a weapon, you can select crew portraits to preview the weapons stats on that particular character.

Rare earth minerals – At various stages in crafting negative and positive “conditions” may develop. If you do not have the appropriate rare earth mineral, it could cost you finishing points, increase your chance for a crafting process failure and decrease the number of actions you have resulting in a lower quality item. Having the correct rare earth minerals will also let you trigger bonus effects for additional finishing points and extra action points.

Finishing items – The last stage of crafting is finishing. At that point, you should have the correct finishing items from salvaging to take advantage of allocating finishing touches to the item. These additional points increase the effectiveness of the item you are crafting.

In general, high quality crafted items will always be better than item drops or equipment found on vendors. The exception to this will be some of the new bosses that will be coming to the game and perhaps faction gear which will see a re-balance in the near future. When crafting weapons, especially higher quality weapons with mod slots, those slots are unlocked based on the quality of the crafted item. In addition, higher quality items unlock more finishing options so you will need to keep an eye on conditions when they pop up.

That’s all I have to show for now. I hope you enjoy the first look at the crafting system!

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on October 25, 2019, 11:47:57 PM
Crafting and Salvaging patch
Fri, 25 October 2019


Salvage items and craft new high quality gear for your crew and ships

Today’s patch adds the first pass at the crafting and salvaging system. The crafting system lets you craft almost every item that can be equipped in the game other than faction armor, ammo, grenades, and devices.

Crafting requires the disassembly of items you find in your travels. When salvaging, you learn about the items you are disassembling and eventually, you earn a schematic so you can craft that item.

Salvaging – process items found in your travels into component parts for crafting.

•   You must mark items in your inventories (CTRL-Click - General/Stash/Cargo Hold).
•   Once items are marked, you can access the salvage toolbox from the inventory menu via a new icon above the general inventory.
•   Junk items generate finishing materials used in the crafting finish process.
•   Weapons, armor and other items that can be equipped generate primary crafting components.
•   Salvaged items are placed in a separate infinite inventory. This inventory feeds the crafting bench and parts are automatically placed on the crafting table.
•   As you salvage items, you will earn experience towards unlocking a schematic for that item. At times you may even gain experience towards the next tier schematic.


Crafting - Once you unlock a schematic, you can craft the item. All schematics come in various quality tiers that need to be unlocked. Schematics are also a very rare drop from loot crates, cargo containers, enemy packs, and lockers.

Crafting requires a number of items:

•   (Required) Base item components of the same quality tier salvaged from a similar item
•   (Required – In cargo hold or station storage) Refined ore. You can mine ore and refine the ore, or purchase from the Trade-Net
•   (Optional – In cargo hold or station storage) Rare earth minerals to clear conditions. You can mine ore or purchase from the Trade-Net
•   (Optional – In cargo hold or station storage) Finishing items salvaged from junk and rewarded during salvaging of equipment


Rare earth minerals and finishing items are optional, however, they are very important and you could end up with a sub-par item if you do not have any on hand when crafting.

To craft an item:

1.   Travel to any trade station and look for a crafting station. Crafting stations have a unique icon on the radar and map.
2.   Select the crew member you want to craft and select the crafting station. The crafting table will be shown.
3.   On the top left is a list of unlocked schematics (if any are unlocked). Choose one.
4.   You may need to adjust a few initial values before you start crafting. For example, when crafting a weapon, make sure to set the correct weapon skill level before selecting the begin crafting button. When crafting an item for your ship, make sure the correct ship is selected.
5.   All items except for weapons can be “re-rolled” That is, you can re-roll a number of base equipment stats.
6.   When you are ready, select the processing button and start crafting.


Processing:

1.   Each process step will expend AP
2.   If successful, the quality of the item will improve.
3.   At various stages, negative and positive “conditions” may arise. You can select a condition to expend a single unit of rare earth for that step to clear negative conditions and activate positive conditions.


Finishing:

1.   Once all AP is expended, the item is ready for finishing.
2.   Select your finishing options if any. The higher the quality, the more options.
3.   Select the “Finish Crafting” button and the item will be placed in your inventory or cargo hold.


About progression:

•   Primary crafting components cannot be purchased. They can only be gained by salvaging equipment.
•   Occasionally you are rewarded crafting components for next tier items when salvaging as a bonus
•   The higher your skill in salvaging, the more components you get when salvaging an item. In some cases, you may be able to salvage enough components to build several items of a similar type.
•   The value of crafted items of high quality exceeds the value of any similar items you might loot.
•   Occasionally you are rewarded experience towards the next tier schematic when salvaging a lower tier item
•   Higher tier schematics require more disassembly than lower-tier schematics. Bonus experience offsets the number of items you need to disassemble to unlock that next tier.
•   You can find schematics when looting ship containers and gear in ground missions. These are extremely rare.
•   You are rewarded experience regardless of failures when salvaging.
•   Schematic experience is rewarded for every component that is disassembled. It is best to use the third salvaging option initially that rewards additional schematic unlock EXP.


Grenades and ammo will have a separate utility device that will let you break down these objects and craft other ammo types. That will come in a future patch.

The patch includes entries in the in-game guide for salvaging and crafting for reference.

Armor visual types are random for now until I can get more sets in the game. I’ll also likely add an “appearance” slot in the future that lets you equip a visual appearance of your choice. The faction armor set appearances are reserved for faction armor.

Perks are not available for Salvaging and Crafting at this time. As usual, I’ll add those after I gather more feedback on the system.

Note: Salvaging has been moved to the general skill area. It is no longer a space specific skill.

There are a few other things I’d like to do with salvaging – salvaging enemy ship wreckage and various items found in ground exploration locations.

I hope you enjoy the crafting system. I’ll be reading feedback on the forums and will make adjustments over time.

So, what’s next? I’ll be updating the ground combat animations and adding weapon-specific special attacks. I’ve gathered a lot of feedback from the community and there will be a few new options for targeting enemies and displaying target information. In general, I’ll be taking a deep dive into the combat system and adding a new pass at polishing the ground combat system.

After that, boarding. I have everything I need for this now including all the ship interiors. I know many of you have been waiting for this and I’m eager to get started.

General patch notes and fixes:
FIXED: A rare case where ship cargo could not be looted
FIXED: A rare case where incursions would not trigger
FIXED: Duplicate stats on high-quality armor
FIXED: Map, load/save and cargo storage screens close with the ESC key
FIXED: A few UI font scale issues
FIXED: A few typos
FIXED: A bug related to the correct rollover info displayed for equipped devices
UPDATED: FTL Drives and refineries are now dropped as loot in ship containers
UPDATED: Stun grenade effect reduced from three to two combat rounds
UPDATED: Frag grenade damage increased
UPDATED: Gas grenade damage increased per round of damage

As always, thanks for supporting Stellar Tactics.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on November 29, 2019, 11:27:35 PM
Stellar Tactics community wiki
Fri, 29 November 2019

The community wiki is live now
I've had a bunch of requests to start a wiki for Stellar Tactics and I'm happy to say that the wiki is live now!

https://stellartactics.gamepedia.com/Stellar_Tactics_Wiki

This is your wiki, so feel free to add content, edit, upload and otherwise make this a great resource for other players. I've seeded the site with a good amount of information. However, there is so much more that could be added and I would prefer to spend my time developing the game. I'll continue to add pages and information as I add the remaining features, content, and polish.

I'm excited to see where you all take this if you decide to get involved. Stellar Tactics has a great community of positive supporters and I'd like to thank you all for your contributions and support.

I've been very busy with the next content update that includes revised character animations, updated ground combat pacing, a number of new combat features and the weapon class special attacks system. But that's not all. I also have a few surprises that I think you are going to like. More on that in a few weeks when I'll be ready to show you some of the new things that are coming to the game.

Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on December 24, 2019, 11:49:44 PM
The Kchor, Fabricants and updated animations
Tue, 24 December 2019


Public Test: This patch adds the Kchor, Fabricants and updated animations.
It's been an amazing year for Stellar Tactics. I'd like to thank all of you for your support and patience. It's not often that you see such a positive and supportive community. I owe you all a huge "Thank you!" for all you have done for the game, your feedback, and for making this game what it is and will be.

This year, we've seen the addition of updated ships, the ability to sell scan data, the drone mining system, Trade-Net, smuggling, faction warfare (first pass), the area map, crafting and salvaging. A large number of bugs have been fixed and many suggested QoL features have been implemented.

This patch introduces two "mutations" to the universe - The Kchor ( pronounced "Core" ) and the Fabricants. You can find them all over the universe on stations, in missions and they are recruitable as Mercs to join your crew on your journey.

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/2baefa5baa04fb493fdc546caf8642bc8d0f17e9.png)

I'm also releasing a large number of updated animations that improve combat pacing and provide a second pass of polish to the overall look and feel of the game. I'm still doing a good bit of work on combat pace for the next content patch which will introduce new special attacks and a few other features. Following that, the boarding system.

THIS PATCH IS ONLY AVAILABLE ON THE PUBLIC TEST BRANCH. For information on how to get public test builds, please see this link. It is very important to backup your saves and review at least the first few paragraphs at the following link if you decide to join this branch.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/12/2653115517067165548/
Please post any feedback/issues/bugs in this forum:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/12/

I'll move this build to the public branch once I'm sure everything is stable and working as intended.

A bit of back story about the Kchor and Fabricants. More information will come when I expand the game story.

The Kchor – Class “A” Mutation (Rational : Humanoid : Sanctioned)

On Arrival, a large number of the pods on the HSS Pharris contained the Kchor mutation. Overall, the new species was considered robust other than several anomalies – parthenogenesis, extreme musculature, and a blue/green skin tone. The medical engineers released them with no special conditions and The Kchor have flourished. The Kchor can be found in most star systems and are generally peaceful.

The Kchor have a special relationship with the Sovereignty, having saved their fleet in the notorious Blockade of Karsus 7. Were it not for their arrival, Maezus Karsari would have destroyed or captured the entire fleet and undoubtedly overthrown the Sovereignty. Instead, The Kchor delivered Maezus to the Council earning their autonomy as a reward for their actions. The Kchor interdiction is one of many turning points in recent history that mold the current political environment of the inner systems.

The Kchor are known for their great strength and intelligence. However, rather than using their influence and innate talents, The Kchor cherish their privacy and prefer to trade and explore peacefully. They are famous for their Kchor Brandy, a favorite indulgence across the known Universe.

Fabricants – Class “B” Mutation (Rational : Cybernetic : Sanctioned)

A number of mutations were discovered on the HSS Outland when the ships arrived. These Sleepers had a rare condition and were in a late state of mutagenic drift, having crossed genetic material with a parasitic species that flourished in their Vats. In their current stage of drift, they could not be exposed to the oxygen-rich atmosphere that Humans breath. It was hypothesized that their skin was transitioning toward a hardened exoskeleton.

Considered “unrecoverable”, Fabricants were initially scheduled for termination. A young scientist, Garrius Brons, fabricated a prototype Exo-Suit and AI module that sealed the Fabricants in a permanent outer skin. After a few trials, the suit was adapted and a modification of this suit is in use to this day.

Fabricants are incredibly talented engineers and were instrumental in FTL travel, having worked closely with Garrius Brons. Over time, they have adapted their suits and AI becoming more machine than human. They prefer to name themselves alphanumerically, and their ability to assimilate traits from common items is a closely held secret. Little is known about their culture and habits. When it comes to engineering, mathematics, and science, no other species in the known universe come close to the Fabricant.

A few things left to do - I'm working on these for the next content patch:

Fabricants

•   +Bonus to crafting/learning
•   +Bonus to scanning
•   Unique voice audio


Kchor

•   +CRIT bonus with melee weapons
•   +CRIT bonus with heavy weapons
•   A few animation transitions that need tuning


Here is a list of fixes/updates/additions in this patch.

ADDED: The Kchor and Fabricants. You will find these two mutations on stations throughout the universe. Fabricants and Kchor can now be recruited as Mercs and added to your party when exploring.
UPDATED: Several Shikaru armor materials updated
UPDATED: A number of weapon SFX for timing
UPDATED: Ranged weapon muzzle flash lighting
UPDATED: Weapon, armor, shields, and mods now display a colored border based on quality in the equipped slots for each crew member. The quality level of these items now has a dedicated display field in rollover info.
UPDATED: Hundreds of animations updated - including increasing overall speed of animations in combat.
--Animation timings on end walk in and out of combat for less delay when navigating.
--All human animations adjusted for less foot sliding, better hit animations and overall speed
--Fixed a large number of wonky animations that have been plaguing the game for a long time.
--A number of enemy animations updated
--Unique animations added for 2Hand Pierce weapons
--Mapped all animations to the KCHOR
--Mapped all animations to the Fabricants
--I have a number of animations that I am still working on and there are a few
transitions that need to be fixed.
FIXED: A bug that would cause music to stop playing in some cases.
FIXED: A bug related to sound volume settings not being correctly saved and loaded.
FIXED: In some cases, it was difficult to enter your first starship after exiting the Aznari Ruins.
FIXED: A number of broken weapons SFX.
FIXED: When loading to space, rarely the ship camera would rotate uncontrollably.
FIXED: A number of stability fixes.
FIXED: A bug with crafted epic tier "laser beam" turrets.
FIXED: A few typos.

Note that as with all new patches, shaders will need to compile causing a short period of "hitching" for each area with new materials that need to be processed. This goes away in a short time once the shaders are compiled.

Thank you as always for supporting Stellar Tactics, and happy holidays!


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on January 17, 2020, 11:26:52 PM
Performance, shaders and QoL
Fri, 17 January 2020

A few updates, bug fixes and new performance enhancements

Today's patch includes a number of performance enhancements, a pre-compiled shader system, and a few QoL updates.

Shaders are now pre-compiled when you launch the game.
--The majority of all shaders are now generated via a database at game launch. I would say 80% of all shaders are in the d-base now and more will be added over time.
--As you play the game, if a shader is not pre-compiled it is added to the database and saved so the shader does not need to be compiled on the fly ever again.
--Certain video drivers could crash - though this was very rare - when compiling complex shaders on the fly. This patch should address that.
--In some cases, when entering an area the first time after this patch, there may be a short period of stuttering as shaders are initially linked to materials.

You can now adjust mission length when speaking with a faction agent - Short - AVG 40 Min, Medium - AVG 1-2 Hrs, Long - AVG 2-4 Hrs.

You can now browse available missions while the mission window is open by selecting the "Next" button. A new mission will be offered.

You can now double click crew equipment (shields, armor, weapons) to equip them from inventory. Mods and devices need to be placed manually.

Active status effects are now displayed below each crew member's portrait along with their active duration.

Various code optimizations for performance.

A few changes to the way the physics engine handles movement.

A few changes to the animation system.

A few animation fixes/updates.

A few changes to idle and facing blend animations so they can be interrupted when moving characters. This makes movement more responsive.

The game now generates a backup "sav_dat.xml" file that is not stored on the Steam Cloud when saving the game - just in case there is a disk write error of some kind.

A possible fix for a rare lockup when healing.

FIXED: A bug that was causing random animation and physics slowdown.
FIXED: A bug that would leave idle states running at 1.5x normal speed in certain cases.
FIXED: Autosave when leaving the Dauntless.
FIXED: A bug that would leave equipment quality color border visible when unequipping an item.
UPDATED: When grenades and medkits are enabled, a reminder message is displayed when ending your turn to deselect these items from the toolbar. I think in some cases, this was causing confusion. I'll be looking into an automated solution for this.
UPDATED: Ship collision damage reduced. Collision damage now affects shields and armor.

I'm continuing to work on a few things:
--Weapon special attacks.
--Combat pace.
--Streamlining of perks so they are available earlier in the game with more frequent updates.
--Better inventory sorting.
And more...

I'll keep everyone posted as I make progress.


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on March 07, 2020, 12:02:12 AM
Progress Update - Combat tuning and more
Fri, 6 March 2020

Combat balance, navigation, pugilist weapons, new extended targeting UI and more.


I've been working hard on this next patch. My goal with this is to address a number of weapon class balance issues, weapon differentiation, navigation, blocking and more. Check out the video for a preview.

https://youtu.be/LCGxJ_Duc8M



I'm hoping to get this patch out in the coming week for everyone. This will be part one of a major update to the combat system. The second part will include adjustments to the current perks and the addition of skill trees for the various combat skills including special attacks, passives and other ways to enhance combat performance and pace.

Here are a few notes for the upcoming patch. The overall goal of these changes is to:

1) Balance combat
2) Provide more weapon differentiation
3) Give the player more choices, more often to develop their crew
4) Improve the pace of the game and reward the player frequently

Once this work is done, I'll be moving on to the boarding system, a second pass at space combat, filling out the universe with more diversion missions, events, and long term goals and adding interesting and unique content to flesh out the overall experience. At that point, the game will finally be at full Alpha and I'll concentrate on adding the rest of the story to the game, which includes Psionics and a few other things that are part of the main storyline.

INCREASED CARGO VOLUME:
All smaller ships, including the starter ship, have higher base cargo volumes. Cargo expansions for these ships will also be larger (scaled from the base cargo volume of the ship). Adjustments to cargo expansions are not retroactive so you will need to buy new cargo expansions if you want the extra volume.

NEW: ROLLOVER INFO AND RIGHT CLICK EXTENDED INFO HUD
A new rollover info display. This display shows additional information at a glance - enemy difficulty, CTH, Remaining AP/Total AP, HP, shield points, and active debuffs. Right-clicking an enemy will display the extended info and targeting UI. I've had a number of comments that "hunting the pixel" is not fun - so, this revised hud lets you select individual body targets with the extended UI. When this UI is active, the targeted enemy is locked until you right-click again, press escape or the space bar. The extended information displays:

--Buttons that can be clicked to attack head, torso, legs, and arms
--You can reload your ranged weapon
--You can change ranged weapon fire modes
--Extended targeting information including min/max damage, range penalties if any and status effects that can be inflicted including the percent chance of inflicting the effects.
--Enemy resistance information (innate and shield totals) based on the active crew members' perception STAT. The currently selected weapon damage type highlights that particular resist icon.
Note that you can still attack without opening the extended info HUD, add attacks to the combat queue and even fine aim if you want to. None of that has changed.

RESISTS: Resists are now more important and can be reviewed by right-clicking enemies with the new popup extended info UI. Higher perception will display more resist information in the extended info popup when right-clicking enemies. Some second and third-tier enemies are immune to certain types of damage. Having an array of weapons that deal various types of damage can help you take your enemies down much faster. You now have options to change the base damage type of melee weapons (see below) to adjust your damage type strategy.

Resists have always been in the game, however, without a way to see them, it could seem at times that it took a long time to defeat a specific enemy. With the new display, you can now adjust your weapons to a enemy's weakness. An enemy that might take 10 attacks using kinetic weapons may only take 3-5 attacks using a weapon that does toxic damage. This is more important as your crew progresses.

Mitigation is now displayed in the combat log showing damage reduction from shields, armor/perks and defend.

PERSONAL SHIELDS REBALANCED
Personal shields were OP - they have been adjusted. Several things were done without modifying the loot tables so current shields are still viable without a reset.

--"The slow blade" - Melee weapons deplete shields faster than ranged weapons.
--The cost of recharging shields is now increased. The result is energy reserves for shields are depleted faster.

RIFLES AND HEAVY WEAPONS
--These weapon types now incur a ranged CTH penalty (unwieldy) when fired at close range. This promotes the use of sidearms and shotguns in close combat situations. You either need to move to range, or use your sidearms if you do not want to incur the penalty. There may be skill tree selections that adjust this penalty down when the skill tree's go in the game. A red rifle icon will display on the rollover info UI if you are incurring a penalty at your current range.

SHOTGUNS
--Range slightly reduced for any newly purchased, dropped or crafted shotguns going forward.


SHOTGUNS, SMG'S, AND FLAMETHROWERS
These weapons now have a chance to inflict spread damage in a cone in front of the firing combatant. This effect only applies to enemies within a certain range directly in front of the firing character and applies 5-10% of the initial base damage to enemies in the weapons field of view before mitigation. This value will be increased with future changes to weapon skill tree selections.
--SMG'S MUST BE IN BURST OR FULL AUTO MODES


MELEE WEAPONS
Frequency Modulators now allow you to add specific damage types to melee weapons ( thermal, electric, toxic and bleed). In addition to changing the base damage type of melee weapons from kinetic, these mods also have a chance to trigger an additional damage burst that bypasses all defenses, including Defend. The new secondary effect on this mod type replaces the critical modifier which was redundant and applied by other mods. Bleed and toxic augments also apply the bleed and poisoned status effects. Crafting adjusted for the changes above.

When a Frequency Modulator is equipped, melee weapons now display a unique particle effect associated with the various damage types.

The above changes also apply to NPC's in the universe.

Changes to Frequency Modulators are not retroactive, so older modulators will have the +CRIT secondary modifier.

PUGILIST WEAPONS
Pugilist weapons are in the game now. They are a way to augment to your melee skill with mods and damage bonuses, no special visual weapons are equipped at this time.
--While pugilist weapons to apply a small amount of base damage that scales by level and quality, primary damage derived from the characters skill level and stats.
--Mods - Melee mods and nano's can be applied to pugilist weapons bringing them in line with other melee weapons. Overall, pugilism is very effective.
--Crafting - You can craft pugilist weapons by deconstructing weapons you find. Schematics can be found by salvaging pugilist weapons or as rare random drops.
--You do not need to equip pugilist weapons to fight hand 2 hand, just unequip your current weapon as it has always been.
--Starting a new game and placing weapon points in the pugilism weapon skill will equip a starting pugilist weapon.
--Pugilist weapons can be equipped in primary and/or secondary slots.

UPDATED COMBAT BLOCKING/NAVIGATION
You can now move through your crew if they are blocking corridors or doorways. NPC's can still block you and you can block NPC's. IMO, this change is a huge improvement and I think a lot of new players were put off by being blocked by their own crew members. Being able to block an enemy is a tactic ("Paladins! To the doors!")

Crew members and NPC's now have discreet areas around them where movement is blocked. That is, you cannot click in a character's immediate area. This helps with pile-up and should help with missed combat clicks that move your crew when you intended to attack.
Missed clicks and crew members being left behind is now much less likely.

At level 80+ of melee skill, it is no longer possible to move small distances in combat (one node) for free.

Thats all I have for now. Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on March 14, 2020, 01:21:49 AM
Combat update patch released
Fri 13 March 2020


Lots of changes below. I'll keep an eye on the bug forums over the next few days for any problems and patch out any blockers or major bugs.

I'll be moving on to updates to the pace and timing of skill and perk rewards (more frequent rewards and useful skills) and the boarding system. This update will be quite a bit of work and will include some changes to the visuals in Star Systems, adjustments to space combat, and more. It will take a while and I'll keep you all posted as I make progress.

A few highlights in case you don’t want to read through all the notes:

•   Cargo volume increased across most ships in the game.
•   You no longer block your own crew members in combat. NPCs can still block you and you can block NPCs.
•   EXP increases for salvaging, crafting, first aid, hacking and space skills.
•   Kchor and Fabricants now have innate bonuses (crafting, CRIT, scanning).
•   New rollover info and right-click extended hud for combat.
•   A pass at resists in the game.
•   Personal shields re-balanced.
•   Adjustments to rifles and heavy weapons with near range penalties (unwieldy).
•   Shotguns, SMG’s and flame throwers now do spread damage in a cone that affects multiple enemies.
•   Melee weapons now do more damage overall, additional damage to enemy shields and allow mods to be equipped that change the base damage of these weapons.
•   Pugilist weapons added – mods can be equipped. The only weapon type that can be equipped in the primary and secondary weapon slots.
•   Adjustments to crafting conditions – they occur less often.
•   Lots of small tuning adjustments to make the pace of combat faster – more work to do including new skills – active and passive, special attacks, perk adjustments, pace etc.


INCREASED CARGO VOLUME:
All smaller ships, including the starter ship, have higher base cargo volumes. Cargo expansions for these ships will also be larger (scaled from the base cargo volume of the ship). Adjustments to cargo expansions are not retroactive so you will need to buy new cargo expansions if you want the extra volume.

KCHOR
+ CRIT innate bonus with all melee weapons.
+ CRIT innate bonus with all heavy weapons.

FABRICANTS
--Fabricants are less likely to generate negative conditions when crafting regardless of skill level.
--Fabricants get a bonus to scanning ships and planets.

NEW: ROLLOVER INFO AND RIGHT CLICK EXTENDED INFO HUD
A new rollover info display. This display shows additional information at a glance - enemy difficulty, CTH, Remaining AP/Total AP, HP, shield points, and active debuffs. Right-clicking an enemy will display the extended info and targeting UI. I've had several comments that "hunting the pixel" is not fun - so, this revised hud lets you select individual body targets with the extended UI. When this UI is active, the targeted enemy is locked until you right-click again, press escape or the space bar. The extended information displays:
--Buttons that can be clicked to attack head, torso, legs, and arms
--You can reload your ranged weapon
--You can change ranged weapon fire modes
--Extended targeting information including min/max damage, range penalties if any and status effects that can be inflicted including the percent chance of inflicting the effects.
--Enemy resistance information (innate and shield totals) based on the active crew members' perception STAT. The currently selected weapon damage type highlights that particular resist icon.
Note that you can still attack without opening the extended info HUD, add attacks to the combat queue and even fine aim if you want to. None of that has changed.

RESISTS: Resists are now more important and can be reviewed by right-clicking enemies with the new popup extended info UI. Higher perception will display more resist information in the extended info popup when right-clicking enemies. Some second and third-tier enemies are immune to certain types of damage. Having an array of weapons that deal various types of damage can help you take your enemies down much faster. You now have options to change the base damage type of melee weapons (see below) to adjust your damage type strategy.

Resists have always been in the game, however, without a way to see them, it could seem at times that it took a long time to defeat a specific enemy. With the new display, you can now adjust your weapons to an enemy's weakness. An enemy that might take 10 attacks using kinetic weapons may only take 3-5 attacks using a weapon that does toxic damage. This is more important as your crew progresses.

Mitigation is now displayed in the combat log showing damage reduction from shields, armor/perks and defend.

PERSONAL SHIELDS REBALANCED
Personal shields were OP - they have been adjusted. Several things were done without modifying the loot tables so current shields are still viable without a reset.
--"The slow blade" - Melee weapons deplete shields faster than ranged weapons.
--The cost of recharging shields is now increased. The result is energy reserves for shields are depleted faster.

RIFLES AND HEAVY WEAPONS
--These weapon types now incur a ranged CTH penalty (unwieldy) when fired at close range. This promotes the use of sidearms and shotguns in close combat situations. You either need to move to range, or use your sidearms if you do not want to incur the penalty. There may be skill tree selections that adjust this penalty down when the skill tree's go in the game. A red rifle icon will display on the rollover info UI if the penalty is being applied at your current range to target.

SHOTGUNS
--Range slightly reduced for any newly purchased, dropped or crafted shotguns going forward.

SHOTGUNS, SMG'S, AND FLAMETHROWERS
These weapons now have a chance to inflict spread damage in a cone in front of the firing combatant. This effect only applies to enemies within a certain range directly in front of the firing character and applies up to 20% of the initial base damage to enemies in the weapons field of view before mitigation. This value will be increased with future changes to weapon skill tree selections. Status effects have a chance of being applied to secondary targets.
--SMG'S MUST BE IN BURST OR FULL AUTO MODES


MELEE WEAPONS
Frequency Modulators now allow you to add specific damage types to melee weapons ( thermal, electric, toxic and bleed). In addition to changing the base damage type of melee weapons from kinetic, these mods also have a chance to trigger an additional damage burst that bypasses all defenses, including Defend. The new secondary effect on this mod type replaces the critical modifier which was redundant and applied by other mods. Bleed and toxic augments also apply the bleed and poisoned status effects. Crafting adjusted for the changes above.

When a Frequency Modulator is equipped, melee weapons now display a unique particle effect associated with the various damage types.

The above changes also apply to NPCs in the universe.
Changes to Frequency Modulators are not retroactive, so older modulators will have the +CRIT secondary modifier.

Attacks of opportunity always inflict kinetic damage regardless of the modded damage type - at least for now.

PUGILIST WEAPONS
Pugilist weapons are in the game now. They are a way to augment to your melee skill with mods and damage bonuses, no special visual weapons are equipped at this time.
--While pugilist weapons to apply a small amount of base damage that scales by level and quality, primary damage derived from the characters skill level and stats.
--Mods - Melee mods and nano's can be applied to pugilist weapons bringing them in line with other melee weapons. Overall, pugilism is very effective.
--Crafting - You can craft pugilist weapons by deconstructing weapons you find. Schematics can be found by salvaging pugilist weapons or as rare random drops.
--You do not need to equip pugilist weapons to fight hand 2 hand, just unequip your current weapon as it has always been.
--Starting a new game and placing weapon points in the pugilism weapon skill will equip a starting pugilist weapon.
--Pugilist weapons can be equipped in primary and/or secondary slots.

UPDATED COMBAT BLOCKING/NAVIGATION
You can now move through your crew if they are blocking corridors or doorways. NPCs can still block you and you can block NPCs. IMO, this change is a huge improvement and I think a lot of new players were put off by being blocked by their own crew members. Being able to block an enemy is a tactic.

Crew members and NPCs now have discreet areas around them where movement is blocked. That is, you cannot click in a character's immediate area. This helps with pile-up and should help with missed combat clicks that move your crew when you intended to attack.

Crafting
--Reduced the chance of positive and negative crafting conditions
--Increased EXP gain for salvaging and crafting


FIXES AND UPDATES
FIXED: A bug related to key binds for the Q and E keys between space and ground key configurations.
FIXED: Double-clicking area exits could lock the game up in some cases - especially on the Dauntless when leaving.
FIXED: If a PC is in defend mode and hit during a round of combat, the display of the defend icon is correctly removed from the display.
FIXED: Status effects (toxic, bleed) that were mitigated completely by "Defend" are no longer applied to display 0 damage per tick.
FIXED: A number of fixes for occasionally missed clicks in the environment.
FIXED: Help hud not displaying in some cases.
FIXED: Intelligent Phage now have shields.
FIXED: The stash list no longer resets to the top on various actions.
FIXED: It was possible to add more than 10 crew members to your crew roster.
FIXED: Stairs in a specific mission location where you could get stuck.
FIXED: Broken dynamic lighting in one of the stations.
FIXED: If KO with status effects - status effects are now removed when you stand back up after combat.
FIXED: A bug that was deriving scanning bonuses from the incorrect crew member.
FIXED: In combat, if crew members are blocked by enemies and have a very long alternate navigation route to the target, they will no longer take the long route and a message is displayed to the screen.
FIXED: At level 80+ of melee skill, it is no longer possible to move small distances in combat (one node) for free.

UPDATED: Enemies in combat with the player no longer highlight when pressing the highlight key and cannot be targeted. Use the facing button while in combat - there is no AP cost to use this option.
UPDATED: If a NPCs target is blocked, they now make a second check for a new target nearby. If not, they handle various "blocked" tasks, like healing, looking for cover, etc.
UPDATED: Global tuning of enemy mitigation and shields.
UPDATED: Increased EXP gain for hacking and first aid
UPDATED: CTH values for burst and full-auto modes reduced globally based on range simulating less control when using these fire-modes.
UPDATED: CTH Values reduction values for various body parts are now fixed regardless of skill level, with the torso always receiving full CTH at any range. Head, arms, and legs receive a CTH penalty and bonuses to various status effects and damage.
UPDATED: Increased damage from "Bleed" and "Poison" status effects
UPDATED: Increased base damage from frag grenades
UPDATED: Numerous changes to resistances across all enemy types
UPDATED: Modulators and barrel mods now drop as loot more often and are the primary +DMG mod type for ranged and melee weapons.

I'm looking forward to your feedback on this patch. As always, thank you for supporting Stellar Tactics!


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 30, 2020, 01:25:04 AM
Boarding - First Look
Fri, 29 May 2020

A quick look at the new boarding system scheduled for release in June.

Well, I’m code complete on the boarding system as of today. I’ll be fixing a number of bugs, play testing, balancing, and finalizing everything over the next few weeks.

Here is a short video that highlights some of the features:

https://youtu.be/1tuFrImTx-Y


Boarding is accomplished by:
1) Disabling a ship's shields. At this point, a new icon appears next to the ship's target menu.
2) Selecting the subsystem targeting icon lets you target various ship subsystems (engines, turrets, and ship systems).
3) Once those are destroyed, you can board the ship.

You are competing against the enemy crew who is trying to repair their shields. In most cases, with decent turrets, this should never be a problem.

Every ship in the game (40) has had its interior modeled, enemies placed and objectives scripted. When you board a ship, you will need to eliminate the crew, repair or salvage various systems for components and place a beacon on the ship's helm.

Once a beacon is placed, you can then contact Arkus, a salvager who will give you a fixed price based on the current state of the ship. Repairing a ship before selling it will get you the best possible price, however, Arkus pays well below the market average for ships for his services. The prices are fair for the effort and he handles translocation, dismantling, and distribution. So, boarding is relatively balanced with most other activities in the game. Scrapping components is critical as these components can only be obtained by scrapping boarded ships. As you gain skill in repair, and with a decent salvaging skill (and upcoming perks), repairing ships to full capacity for full bonus sale prices to Arkus becomes easier.

I had hoped to get the updated skill and perk system in for this next patch but will need to work on this more after the release of the boarding patch. This patch has had a massive amount of work put into it and it’s taken a bit more time than I anticipated.

I hope you are all well and safe. Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on June 20, 2020, 01:43:29 AM
Disable, board, capture and sell enemy ships
Fri, 19 June 2020

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/6ee8d4388ec4be7f2e17236fafae750028ef4790.png)

I'm releasing the boarding content patch today. Every ship in the game can be boarded and I'd like to hear your feedback on the new system. This is one of the last core systems that needed to be implemented. It will be important as I expand the current mission system adding more variety, branching missions, and of course for the game story where there will be a number of ships that need to be boarded for various reasons. If you find any issues, please post in the bug forums and I'll take a look. As with all updates, there are likely edge cases and bugs that will only show up when people start playing the new content. I'll keep an eye on the forums and patch out any issues.

As it is, boarding is a nice add-on for the game. Short scenarios that net good returns. You can choose the repair/salvage mechanic for better sale value when contacting Arkus, though it is entirely up to you if you want to take the extra time to do this. No matter what, you will at least need to identify all the broken systems on the ship. Repairing them will develop your repair skill which will be used in future content updates when I expand the mission system. Scrapping components will improve your salvaging skill. More on this below.

With the addition of boarding, sub-system targeting is now in the game. This adds a new tactical layer to space combat allowing you to disable enemy engines, weapons, and systems - giving you time to deal with other ships in multi-ship combat scenarios.

Some of you have expressed an interest in walking around on your own ships. I want to say that this is not off the table. I'll be looking into it and I have some ideas I think you will like.

Others have mentioned that they want to keep the ships. Again, not off the table. I'll be looking into ways to expand the boarding system so you can earn ships through Arkus over time.


So whats next?

•   I'll be wrapping up the new perk system, rewarding perks earlier and more often. The next patch will complete all perks for the game including crafting, salvaging, and repair.
•   I'll be adding the new special weapon attacks. These will be rewarded at various skill levels and include active skills that can be placed in the two empty combat bar slots. This will round out the ground combat system nicely.
•   The weapon and armor repair system.
•   Expanding the mission system. Now that all core requirements are in the game - I can start working on making missions more varied, adding missions with multiple objects, and more.


Here are the patch notes:

Boarding enemy ships:
To board an enemy ship, you need to first disable the target ship's shields. Once this happens a new icon (subsystem targeting icon) is displayed to the right of the ships targeting menu on the left side of the screen. Selecting this icon will bring up the subsystem targeting menu. At this point, you can choose to target subsystems (weapons, engines, systems). Once a subsystem is selected, your weapons will start targeting that subsystem until you click the subsystem targeting icon a second time to disable targeting for all turrets. Disabling all three subsystems will disable the ship completely and a new button will be displayed. Approach within range of the ship and you can then board.
1.   Disable a ship's shields.
2.   Select the subsystem targeting icon and disable all three main ship systems. NOTE: To turn off subsystem targeting, select the subsystem targeting icon a second time. This will turn off all turrets.
3.   Approach the ship and select the "BOARD SHIP" button.


You have a limited amount of time to disable a ship's systems before the crew will repair the ship's shields and subsystems. A yellow bar above the subsystem targeting buttons will fill over time displaying that crews progress toward repairing the ship's shields. Once their shields go back up they will start repairing subsystems and you must bring their shields back down before you can board the ship.
•   Ion weapons are ideal for disabling shields and subsystems - however, other weapons will work. You do need to be careful of strike through damage to the hull as damage to the ship's hull is calculated into the value of the ship when selling it to Arkus. The best weapon for boarding would be ION weapons as they no do little to no damage against ship armor. Beam weapons are preferable and more cost-effective, though they do require a better warp drive.
•   Explosive turrets should be toggled off when targeting ships you want to board to avoid excess damage (missiles and plasma turrets).
•   Strikethrough perks should not be selected if you choose to board ships.
•   When targeting subsystems, missiles, and plasma turrets will be turned off automatically.
•   You can only board a disabled ship when other ships are not in combat with you. In the case of incursions, all other enemy incursion ships must be destroyed before boarding.
•   When boarding an incursion ship, incursion rewards will be granted just before you board the targeted ship.
•   You can only board one ship at a time. If you have active boarding objectives and exit the ship, then board another ship - the previously boarded ship will fly away.
•   If you fly away from a disabled ship - then return, and the left targeting menu is hidden, fire a few shots at the ship, and the subsystem targeting button will appear again. In some cases, the crew may be so busy that they don't notice you.
•   Ships have a chance to spawn a unique loot chest/crate that stores ship equipment of varying quality. When you do find one of these chests, the loot will be placed directly in your cargo hold if you have room.


Captured ship repair, salvage, and sale:
To sell a boarded ship, the following objectives must be completed:
1.   Eliminate the entire crew
2.   Repair/scrap all damaged ship systems or at least examine the damaged systems.
3.   Place a beacon at the helm of the ship. YOU MUST HAVE BEACONS in your ship's inventory or you will not be able to complete this objective.


Repairing ship systems above their default state before selling to Arkus will net you a bonus on his final price for the ship.

As an example, scrapping all items could net you around 50,000 credits when selling the ship. Repairing all systems to full (requiring a good number of parts) could net you as much as 200,000 credits.

Leaving a ship un-repaired and not scrapping any components will leave the ship in a state with a wide variance of value depending on the state of the systems onboard.

You must eliminate all enemies on the ship and review all damaged systems before you can activate the beacon at the ship's helm.

You can continue to repair and salvage components on the ship at any time, in case you decide to repair or salvage components. Once you place a beacon and notify Arkus, you will no longer be able to activate any ship systems for salvage or repair.

In general, you can completely ignore the repair system other than reviewing all systems if you want to. However, as mentioned above, repairing a ship always has a net positive effect on the number of credits you earn over time. The best strategy is to salvage and repair components. Over time, as your salvaging skill improves, you will salvage more parts. As you gain repair experience, repairing ship components becomes easier.

SALVAGING BONUSES - These will get rolled into the perks for Salvaging when I release them. All perks will be released in the next content patch - including - Salvaging, Crafting, and Repair.
LVL 20 +20% CHANCE FOR EXTRA COMPONENTS
LVL 40 +30% CHANCE FOR EXTRA COMPONENTS
LVL 60 +40% CHANCE FOR EXTRA COMPONENTS
LVL 80 +50% CHANCE FOR EXTRA COMPONENTS

You do not need to sell the boarded ship to Arkus. You can always exit the ship and go on about your business. If you dock, land, board another ship or enter FTL space, the ship will be gone when you return. You can exit the ship and reboard as long as you do not dock, land, or FTL from the system. If a ship is in a state where it can be boarded. Over time, a ship will repair it's shields first, then engines, weapons, and systems if there are still crew remaining on the ship and eventually fly away.

ADDED EXTREME DIFFICULTY MODE for ground combat. In this mode, the difficulty of enemies of all types is increased (DAMAGE, CTH, CRITS, STATS, ARMOR, etc,) and enemies are raised by one tier of difficulty. In this mode, there is more risk and more reward as enemies, in general, will drop better loot. Crew members will be K.O. on a regular basis. I would not recommend extreme mode until you have decent armor and a good arsenal of weapons that deliver various damage types.
--Basic enemies have a chance of being raised a single tier to single skull Elites.
--Elites will always be a tier higher. That is a single skull Lieutenant will always be a tier higher etc.
--I would not even attempt this mode until you have some experience with the game and decent equipment.
--Bring a ton of medkits!
--A reasonable level of skill in first-aid is recommended!
--You are going to need an arsenal of weapons that do a variety of damage types to switch between. Pay very close attention to enemy resistances and use weapons of the appropriate type.
--Switching to or from Elite requires a save and reload to re-initialize all enemies in the area. Any transition between areas will scale the encounters to extreme mode.


FIXED - A bug with the area map that could leave characters immobile.
FIXED – Micro-warp hull visual effect being left on after exiting warp.
FIXED - A rounding error when NPC's heal themselves displayed in the floating text.
FIXED - A bug that displayed incorrect info for HP and Shields when rolling over KO crew members
FIXED - Stability fixes including a few rare lockups on enemy end turns.
FIXED - In some cases, combat UI elements could be left on the screen until next turn.
FIXED - Crew members are less likely to be left behind when navigating.
FIXED - Eliminated character rotation when running upstairs and ramps.
ADDED - Occasionally, when looting, an NPC or chest/locker will reward a large sum of credits.
ADDED - Progress indicator toward next skill level up is now displayed at bottom of character screen (right panel - bottom) when selecting individual skills as a thin red bar over the progress bar.
ADDED - Added a bit of center axis tilt to ships when turning.
UPDATED: ION turrets now do minimal damage to ship armor. They may do some minor strike-through damage and strike through perks still apply to ION turrets.
UPDATED: Some work done on gravity and physics so characters stay pegged to the ground when running up and down stairs.
UPDATED: Enemy ragdoll is more "definitive" with the changes to gravity.
UPDATED: Disabled NPC ship conflict in star systems temporarily until I can work out better LOD for this system. It was causing frame rate drops and other issues.
UPDATED: All stations in the universe now have recruitable crew members and more of them. This will greatly increase the chance of finding the recruit you are looking for whether that be a male, female, Kchor, or Fabricant. It also increases the odds of finding a crew member with the starting skills you are looking for. NOTE: This only applies to stations you have not yet visited - the change is not retroactive.

I hope you all enjoy the patch. As always, thanks for supporting Stellar Tactics!

   
Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on September 26, 2020, 02:57:08 AM
Progress update
Fri, 25 September 2020

Revised perk progression, equipment wear, repair system, and more.
Here is a summary of the things you can expect for the next content patch. I hope to have this update ready for everyone by the end of next week.


Perks
The next patch will introduce the perks and skill tier bonuses for salvaging, crafting, and repair. All perks will be in the game. Some perks and tier bonuses have been revised to be more useful.

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/780c10e8445bddf8a9c7455ad4958fc539351d87.jpg)
Perk and tier bonus progression adjustments

Perks or skill tier bonuses will be rewarded every 5 levels with the next patch. Perk selection and preview has been completely overhauled so you can preview all skill perk and tier bonuses through skill level 100 at any time. Perks are still situational and you can switch between selections in each group as you have in the past.

The repair system and equipment wear

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/83b45af348f75ef019f33f87b411cc7cd8d75c8f.jpg)

Weapons, armor, and ship equipment will all degrade over time. The repair skill will allow you to repair gear through your inventory by pressing the spacebar when hovering over an item. Perk bonuses will allow you to apply additional durability bonuses to repaired items (max 125% condition) and repair tier bonuses will apply reduced item degradation to items, slowing the wear of items based on your current repair skill level. Wear progresses at a relatively slow pace so, you won't need to worry about repairing items every few missions.

The crafting perk line will allow you to apply permanent base durability bonuses to crafted equipment, assuming those perks are selected when crafting. The base durability for weapons, armor, shields, and ship equipment can be increased to 130% at the maximum crafting skill level.

Items that do degrade below 50% will have reduced functionality. Ranged weapons will misfire and jam, melee weapons will do less damage, armor will mitigate less damage, turrets will misfire, ship systems will have additional negative penalties.

•   Below 25% - Additional penalties are applied.
•   Below 5% - Items will barely function.
•   At 0% Items are non-functional and must be repaired.

A new slot in the crew manager will let you assign a crew member to a repair station. Repair experience is granted to the crew member in the ship repair slot. Ship damage and ship equipment will be repaired over time as you travel the universe, reducing the need to dock and repair. This will be automated as long as a crew member is assigned to maintenance. Of course, there are some situations where if you do take heavy damage, you may want to manually repair your ship equipment.

Ammo converter

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/8a29b4e48c98368c9e44e23f5b1278631fd1e4a5.jpg)
 
A new device will be available from Varadyn faction vendors that will allow you to convert any type of ammo into other types of ammo. The UI will be simple to use and you will be able to directly convert standard and heavy weapon ammo at the following ratios:

•   Pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun, and E-Cell to any other ammo type in this category = 1:1 ratio (1 for 1)
•   Pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun, and E-Cell to missile, fusion cell, flamer fuel, minigun = 3:1 ratio (3 for 1)
•   Missile, fusion cell, flamer fuel, minigun to any other ammo type in this category = 1:1 ratio (1 for 1)
•   Missile, fusion cell, flamer fuel, minigun to pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun and E-Cell = 1:3 ratio (1 for 3)

The device can be used in any ground location including missions.

New ranged weapon sound effects - Most of the ranged weapons in the game have new sound effects. I think they sound much better overall and they pack a lot of punch.

Schematics can be reviewed in the salvage UI so you can see what you have unlocked at any time.

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/247a9d1e3a3e7e07dc82c875e3c99b93838acf9e.jpg)

And of course, a number of bug fixes and issues that were on my list.

As with all patches, there will be no save game reset – you can just pick up the game and move forward from where you left off.

Once this patch is released, I’ll be finalizing the new weapon special attacks. I had hoped they would be finished at this time, but they need a lot more work. I expect these to be done in December along with a number of other smaller enhancements and QoL adjustments.

It will be great to finally be in a place where I will be working on the expanded mission system, more story content/locations, lore, new enemies, more armor sets, faction agents/merchants for the rest of the main factions, and of course - polish. It's been a long road getting to this point. I'm sure a lot of you are looking forward to the continuation of the game story and some of the features that will be unlocked through the story and side missions.

As always, thanks for supporting Stellar Tactics! I hope you all have a great weekend.



Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on October 03, 2020, 02:49:57 AM
Revised perk progression, equipment wear, repair system, and more
Fri, 2 October 2020

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/6ee8d4388ec4be7f2e17236fafae750028ef4790.png)

This patch updates the perk progression system, adds the last of the game perk/tier bonuses and the new repair system.
It's patch time again. Here are the details for the patch released today.


ADDED: REPAIR SYSTEM AND REPAIR PERKS
Rollover info now displays the current condition of items. As they degrade, they become less useful (less mitigation, weapon jams, lower damage, etc.).

Maintaining your weapons is easy. Just roll over the item you want to repair and press the [SPACE] key. Item repairs require finishing items that can be obtained by salvaging junk and gear that you find in your travels. Perks allow you to repair items above 100% to a maximum of +25 (125). Crafted items can gain up to +30 (130). Overall, any crafted item with the appropriate perks can have a maximum of 155 condition from crafting and repair bonuses. In addition - repair tier bonuses apply reduced item degradation as you progress to maximum skill level.

•   Repair perks have been added
•   I've provided 20 finishing items of every type as a one time grant for repair. These items will be added to your existing finishing items - or, when starting a new game, you will start with 20 finishing items of each type. This should cover repairs needed in the early game until players can salvage enough items for future repairs.


ADDED: EQUIPMENT WEAR
Equipment wear can be disabled in the options->gameplay menu.

Looted equipment will always be in some state of wear and will never be below 50%. This applies even if equipment wear is disabled.
•   Equipment wear penalties apply when equipment degrades below 50%
•   Below 25% - Additional penalties are applied.
•   Below 5% - Items will barely function.
•   At 0% Items are non-functional and must be repaired.
•   Vendors always sell items that are at 100% condition.
•   Electro damage does more wear to shields.
•   Thermal and explosive damage do more damage to armor.
•   Mods, devices, cargo expansions, and items equipped to a ship hardware mount point do not wear over time.
•   Wear to ship equipment is minimal when shields are up. Once a shield is down and you start taking damage to your hull, damage is increased.


ADDED: NEW SHIP REPAIR STATION
You can now assign a crew member to the ship repair station. This crew member will prioritize repairs to your ship over time, prioritizing the hull, then shields, engines, systems, and weapons. This crew member can repair onboard equipment to the current maximum condition and will receive repair experience over time as they repair your ship. I recommend a dedicated repair crew member for the job.

Manually repairing ship systems can apply bonuses based on your current repair skill and perk selections.
•   Ship repairs take place over time. Repair skill TIER bonuses improve the speed at which ship hull plating and components are repaired.
•   When paying for ship repairs on stations, only the hull armor of the ship is repaired. Other components need to be repaired manually or over time when a crew member is assigned to the crew repair station. Hull plating is repaired over time by crew members in the crew repair station.
•   If the crewmember assigned to the ship repair station is also in your ground crew, repairs will not take place while on stations or ground locations.
•   Repairs by a crew member in the repair station slot do not consume resources.


ADDED: SALVAGING PERK LINE
•   Additional components can be salvaged as you unlock skill TIER bonuses.
•   Perks added that provide bonuses to base salvaging failure, learning, and schematic experience.
•   Perk selections that allow for increased schematic discovery for weapons, mods, armor, shields, and ship schematics.
•   SCHEMATIC DISCOVERY PERKS - BONUSES FOR SELECTED SCHEMATIC DISCOVERY PERKS STACK FROM MULTIPLE CREW MEMBERS.
Each crew member can provide a +10% schematic discovery bonus for a total of a +40% bonus if all ACTIVE GROUND crew members have a skill level of 80 in salvaging and the correct discovery perks are selected.


ADDED: CRAFTING PERK LINE
Skill tier bonuses reward reduced chance of negative conditions, bonus finishing points at the start of crafting. Perk selections apply bonus action points, item durability, reduced negative condition duration, and positive condition bonuses for weapons, mods, armor, shields, and ship equipment.

ADDED: SCHEMATIC REVIEW IN SALVAGING DISPLAY
You can now view your unlocked schematics in the salvage display without needing to travel to a crafting table.

ADDED: NEW DEVICE - THE AMMO CONVERTER
A new device is available from Varadyn faction vendors that will allow you to convert any type of ammo into other types of ammo. The UI is simple to use and you will can convert standard and heavy weapon ammo at the following ratios:
•   Pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun, and E-Cell to any other ammo type in this category = 1:1 ratio (1 for 1)
•   Pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun, and E-Cell to missile, fusion cell, flamer fuel, minigun = 4:1 ratio (4 for 1)
•   Missile, fusion cell, flamer fuel, minigun to any other ammo type in this category = 1:1 ratio (1 for 1)
•   Missile, fusion cell, flamer fuel, minigun to pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun, and E-Cell = 1:4 ratio (1 for 4)
•   The device can be used in any ground location including missions.
•   This device is fairly expensive and requires that you complete a number of missions to earn the needed tokens from a Varadyn faction agent.


UPDATED: Perks or skill tier bonuses will be rewarded every 5 levels. Perk selection and preview has been completely overhauled so you can preview all skill perk and tier bonuses through skill level 100 at any time. Perks are still situational and you can switch between selections in each group as you have in the past.
IMPORTANT: You may need to assign perks in your current save now that these changes are posted. In many cases you may have a few perks available that you did not have before.

UPDATED: First aid perks overhauled - Reduced perk bonuses to healing, they were OP. Max skill tier bonuses grant a +75% bonus to healing in addition to the base medkit healing values (small, medium, and large). Perks now focus on removing status effects.

UPDATED: Explosives perk line revised with a focus on improved damage and inflicting status effects. Tier bonuses focus on CRIT and accuracy. Perk bonuses can apply addition damage and status effects:
•   Stun grenades can apply bleeding
•   Frag grenades can apply hobble
•   EMP grenades can apply cripple


UPDATED: Weapons, armor, shields, and ship equipment all degrade over time with use and damage. You can repair these items by hovering over equipped items, inventory, stash, cargo, and ship equipment in the various menu's and pressing [SPACE] on your keyboard.
UPDATED: Maximum weapon skill level when crafting weapons is now uncapped - max skill level is now 100.
UPDATED: The currently selected crew member is not reset when transitioning between ground locations.
UPDATED: Removed perception requirement in extended rollover UI for displaying target resist values. I'll likely tie the display of additional resist information to another system.
UPDATED: On the character information screen, when selecting a new crew member, the selected skill is not reset to rifles making it easier to compare perks and skill info between crew members.
UPDATED: New SFX for most ranged weapons.
UPDATED: FTL sound effect volume reduced.
UPDATED: Reduced amount of ammo dropped now that ammo converter is available. I'll likely adjust this over time with more playtesting.
UPDATED: In HARD and EXTREME ground difficulty modes, auto regeneration of HP after combat is disabled. You will need to heal crew members with medkits.
•   Shield and energy points will regen as usual.
•   Transitioning between areas will heal crew members to full health.
•   I'll gather feedback on this change and make adjustments as needed.

UPDATED: Increased melee proc damage from frequency modulator mods.

FIXED: PC's now display the correct amount healed in-game log if healing exceeds maximum health.
FIXED: When gaining a skill level in crafting, salvaging, and repair, a notification is sent to the screen.
FIXED: When various menus are open, key input for ship control is blocked (E.G. afterburners, thrusters, etc).
FIXED: When crafting ship equipment, some of the items were displaying an incorrect finishing item in the last stages of crafting.
FIXED: A few calculation errors in the progress toward the next skill level display on the character information screen.
FIXED: A rare case where beacons and ship ammo could be moved into the player backpack and stash inventories.
FIXED: A rare case where a crew member could die from a DOT (bleed or poison) at the end of combat leaving the game in a state where combat does not end.
FIXED: If a crew member is not assigned to the ship electronics station, you cannot scan ships or planets. A message is displayed on the screen in cases where a crew member is not assigned.
FIXED: Ship vendors now display whether a turret is a general turret mount or a missile mount in the ship information display.
FIXED: Ship hull damage cannot be repaired using the repair button in the ship info UI [K] when boarding an enemy ship.
FIXED: Crafting and salvaging menus now ignore background click events while displayed.
FIXED: Numerous small UI fixes/updates.

There are a lot of changes in this patch. I'll keep an eye on the forums over the next few days and patch any issues that pop up. Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics and have a great weekend!


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on December 22, 2020, 04:34:59 AM
Progress Update - Weapon special attacks and support skills
Mon, 21 December

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/6ee8d4388ec4be7f2e17236fafae750028ef4790.png)

New weapon attacks, support skills and QoL updates.

I'm posting a short WIP video today showing some of the new weapon special attacks and support skills. I'm also showing a few QoL changes that are coming in the next content patch. I expect the next content patch to be ready on January 8th.

Video: Progress Update - Weapon special attacks and support skills

https://youtu.be/mA-WNiN7raU


For those of you who have been playing Stellar Tactics, I'm sure you have noticed the two empty slots on the combat tool-bar. Those have always been reserved for weapon special attacks and support skills. These will be available from level 1 and increase in power as you gain skill in the weapon class they are associated with.

Special attacks are zero-AP cost attacks on a global cooldown timer. They provide a number of effects like PBAoE, target-based AE, and burst single target damage. The goal of the attacks is to give you additional options. Save them for a tough fight, or use them any time. The attacks make a big difference to the pace of the game. Also, because NPC's can use these attacks, you will need to be on your toes making sure your crew's HP is topped off.

The new support skills give you additional mobility, the ability to charge your shields, reflect damage, and the possibility to taunt enemies off of crew members who need a round to regroup.

In addition to the new support and combat skills, a few QoL updates are coming:

Dedicated crew members - You can now assign dedicated crew members to hacking, salvage, crafting, and repair. That means regardless of who engages these skills, the dedicated crew member will always perform the action and gain the EXP. For repair, it means you no longer need to drag weapons and armor off crew members into general inventory.

Crew member review - You can now review any crew member from the crew manager. This makes it easy to assign perks to any crew member without needing to move them into your ground crew.

Hacking update - You can now enter combination keys when hacking before the cooldown expires. This makes hacking a lot faster.

Boarding ships - There will now always be a container with the loot that would have dropped from the ship if you had destroyed it. This should make boarding a bit more profitable. In addition, larger ships will pay out more than smaller ships. Overall, I'll be adjusting the amount you get from ships marginally. Of course, repairing ships completely before selling them always pays the most.

Happy Holidays to all of you! Stay safe and thank you for supporting Stellar Tactics.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on January 09, 2021, 01:35:49 AM
Weapon special attacks, support skills and more
Fri, 8 January 2021

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/03abdaa66cb5d673b4d6ae33d941934d161590a5.png)

Hi all - I am happy to release the latest content patch for Stellar Tactics today. There are a lot of changes in this build so please read the patch notes below. I'll be monitoring the bug forums closely over the next few days and patching out any issues you might find. While I've done a lot of testing on this build, as you know, things happen. I hope you enjoy the changes.

I expect I'll be spending a week or two tweaking a few things with the special attacks, addressing issues (if any), and clearing a backlog of small issues that need to be looked into.

What's next? Sometime in the next week, I'll post an update covering what you can expect going forward. There are a lot of changes coming to Stellar Tactics and I'm really excited to be at a point where I'll be implementing new story content, expanding the mission system, polishing various rough edges, adding psionics, and more.

ADDED SPECIAL WEAPON ATTACKS AND SUPPORT SKILLS:
Weapon special attacks and support skills are now in the game. Note that enemies start using special attacks at around level 5. Players get all weapon skills at the start of the game and they improve over time with five total tiers increasing at skill levels 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100. Weapon skills are specific to each weapon type and several are shared (1hand slash and 1hand blunt). Initially these attacks are fairly weak, however, over time they scale nicely and you will be using them regularly in combat.

•   Special attacks and support skills use zero AP and can be triggered at any time if they are available as long as it is your turn in combat.
•   Special attacks are guaranteed to hit, however, DEFEND can mitigate damage.
•   Enemies start using special weapon attacks at level 5
•   Weapon special attacks are on global cooldown timers.
•   Support skills are reset at the beginning of combat. You can use sprint, taunt, and barrier at the start of each combat session.
•   You can use special attacks and support skills from both equipped weapons ( primary and secondary ) in the same round if global timers are reset by swapping weapons.
•   Special attacks, taunt, and barrier increase in power as you gain skill in that weapon class at levels 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100.
•   Game difficulty affects how NPC's use special attacks by changing how often they are used. The frequency and power of these effects from NPC's vary by enemy difficulty. A regular NPC will use them less often, a single skull enemy more often and bosses will use them most of the time when their cooldowns expire. On easy mode, these attacks are less likely to trigger - on extreme difficulty the attacks will be triggered more often.
•   Some enemies have special abilities. For example Phage vomit. Rather than triggering a special attack, they will use their special twice in one attack if they trigger a special. New enemies in future updates may have similar attacks that they use more than once in a combat round.


UPDATED - BOARDING:

•   When boarding a ship, there will always be a loot container that contains ship equipment loot similar to what would have been dropped if you had destroyed the ship. NOTE: Ore and ship ammo is not included in the loot table.
•   Enemy subsystem regeneration time increased by 30 seconds. It should now be easier to board ships with lower-tier ship equipment. Note that it has always been intended that boarding a ship with starter turrets would be difficult. Upgrading your turrets and systems will make boarding enemy ships much easier. While boarding, a ship may regenerate its shields, however, they go down faster after repaired by the enemy crew.
•   General reward for selling ships to Arkus increased by 30%. Selling a ship with multiple decks increased by 70%. Note that repairing ships to full always rewards more and yes, it does take some time to gather the components - though, with higher salvage skill, more components are rewarded. I will be adding side missions for Arkus and he/she/it will have missions that will let you earn better rewards as you develop your relationship.


ADDED - REVIEW AND UPDATE CREW PERKS/STATS FROM THE CREW MANAGER:
You can now edit crew member perks, stats, portrait, voice, and name in the CREW MANAGER for any crew member by selecting the crew member you want to edit from the list on the left and then clicking the "EDIT CREW MEMBER" button. This is very useful when adjusting space crew perks for mining, space combat etc. Previously, you needed to add the crew member to your active crew to make adjustments.

ADDED - DEDICATED CREW MEMBERS FOR HACKING, SALVAGING, CRAFTING, AND REPAIR
When activating any of these skills, you can now select the active crew member as dedicated. This means that no matter which crew member activates the skill, the dedicated crew member will be the crew member who's skills and perks are used. This crew member also receives all experience from actively using these skills.
If you would prefer to not use a dedicated crew member anymore, just select the portrait to remove the "check mark" and the crew member that initiates the skill will be used.
The first time any of these skills is used a popup is displayed explaining how to select this crew member as the dedicated crew.
SELECT DEDICATED CREW MEMBER: When any of the skill UI's are displayed, click the portrait and a checkmark will be displayed indicating this crew member is not the dedicated crew member for that skill.
REMOVE DEDICATED CREW MEMBER: When any of the skill UI's are displayed, click the portrait and the checkmark will be removed indicated a dedicated crew member is not selected for that skill.
--NOTE: Removing or replacing a crew member from your ground team in the crew manager will reset your currently active dedicated crew. You will need to re-assign a new crew member to the various tasks.

UPDATED - VSYNC AND FRAMERATE CAP OPTIONS:
Uncapping the framerate in the video options has been changed to give players more options. You can find a new slider in the video options menu. Default is VSYNC ON. The slider lets you cap your framerate to 30 FPS, 60 FPS, VSYNC ON, VSYNC 1/2, VSYNC 1/4, and NO LIMIT (no cap at all!). VSYNC is highly dependant on your system, monitor, and video card settings. This should give players more options and hopefully address issues of animation slowdown. If you have any issues, you can always either uncap the framerate completely by dragging the slider to the far right or set the framerate cap to 60FPS or even 30FPS.

I'll keep an eye on the bug forums to see if any of the VSYNC and framerate adjustments mentioned above cause any issues. VSYNC ON should always provide the best performance.

GENERAL PATCH NOTES:
UPDATED: Increased base Micro-Warp speed of ships.
UPDATED: Reduced spam-click timer so there is less delay when interacting with objects and NPC's.
UPDATED: Skyboxes for the main menu and FTL space.
UPDATED: Doubled faction token and faction standing rewards for agent missions.
UPDATED: Doubled positive/negative faction reward values for clearing explore locations.
UPDATED: Increase the number of credits rewarded when completing a faction agent mission
UPDATED: Faction display in the log map area now displays your current faction values as positive/negative values ranging from -50,000 (worst) to +50,000 (best). Neutral ranges from -10,000 - +10,000.
UPDATED: Hacking and auto-hacking are now faster. When entering the correct key code, the next combination digit begins immediately instead of waiting for the cooldown timer to expire.
UPDATED: Repair and Salvage experience bars when repairing/salvaging ship components on boarded ships now show experience toward the next level instead of total skill experience.
UPDATED: Adjusted bleed damage down a little.
UPDATED: The FTL guide entry is displayed the first time you enter FTL space. A reminder to accelerate is displayed on the screen when entering FTL space. Additional information added to the FTL guide entry noting that piloting skill and FTL drive quality affect SHIP speed in FTL space. Guide entries/tutorials will eventually get an overhaul.
UPDATED: Added new key binds. Your current key binds have been reset.
Keybind for toggling grenades on/off
Keybind for toggling med-kits on/off [P]
Keybind for scanning the selected target in space [DELETE]
Keybind for attacking the selected ship. When in space combat you can tab-target ships in combat with you, and press the attack key to switch all turrets to the new target. [RETURN]
FIXED: Neutral system stations would occasionally spawn faction agents that would give missions that could never be completed.
FIXED: It was possible to mount heavy turrets on light turret mount slots. I recommend replacing any heavy turrets mounted on light turret mount locations to avoid issues with space combat.
FIXED: Corrected ship info list below turrets on ship screen [K} so it correctly displays the mount point info for heavy/light turrets.
FIXED: If entering the Abandoned Facility and taking missions before completing the Slice Mines mission, it was possible you could not turn the Slice Mine mission in to Scarby Hurzog.
FIXED: Rollover highlights for a number of objects.
FIXED: When removing status effects using first-aid perkS, the status effect displayed under the crew portrait is updated immediately.
FIXED: A few minor visual glitches with projectiles.
FIXED: A few material errors with Kchor NPC's
FIXED: A skill rounding error when recruiting mercs that would round skills down one level occasionally.


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on January 17, 2021, 01:13:36 AM
New Horizons
Sat, January 16, 2021


What's next for Stellar Tactics
With the addition of the combat special attacks and support skills, the majority of all the core game systems are now in the game. While 2020 was difficult for everyone with the pandemic, I was still able to get a large amount of work done on the game with 19 total updates to the game and several sizeable additions including the boarding system. I’d like to thank all of you for your continued support. Stellar Tactics would not be possible without your generosity and feedback.

So, what can you expect going forward? Well, I’m very excited about the next steps so I thought I would give everyone a glance into the future of the game. Until now I’ve been mostly focused on developing the core structure of the game. Things like combat, space exploration, the universe, inventory, crafting, salvaging, loot and all of the systems that make up the foundation of what Stellar Tactics will be. That is, the container – the universe.

Now it’s time to start filling the universe with meaningful content. Characters you will engage with in various ways. I’d like to expand on the lore of the universe, give you ways to define your place, build relationships with various factions, and expand on the core systems I’ve worked hard to implement.

What does that mean? First, I’ll be working on the story. With that, more of what is happening in the universe will become apparent. Who are the key players? Who were the Aznari? What are the Jhemm? What is this threat that is coming? Should you trust Jensen and Rhamus? And of course, what is your part in all of this? There are likely many questions after playing the Prologue and my goal going forward is to give the player places to go, things to see and do, and to expand on the core of the game with meaningful content and encounters.

I’ll be expanding on the mission system with branching missions that have multiple objectives. Missions may lead to new missions and I'll be looking into new and better completion rewards.

I’ll be expanding the storylines of characters you have already met – like Arkus, Rhamus, Phestus, Scarby, Rodger Crayson, and more. Some of these characters will introduce new mission types for mining, smuggling, salvaging, and ways to earn ships from Arkus through the boarding system.

I'll be adding new enemy types and epic bosses.

I'll be adding new armor sets and clothing for characters.

I’ll be adding Psionics. Psionics will use a new weapon type – the Psi Amp which is rewarded from a series of side encounters related to the Coven. I won’t spoil anything here, though I will say that Psi will be a very useful skill to have with the ability to buff, debuff, heal, and generate various other effects that enhance your team.

I'll be adding faction warfare and unique encounters in FTL space. These will be random locations with exploration, salvaging, and special faction warfare opportunities.

I’ve made an investment in new tools that will help me create unique and diverse characters for the story, new portraits, and in-game models. A few examples below.

Some of these characters you will love to hate.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/ed9fabb618bbcd85f38c7726575dc841cfcc7a6a.png)

Others you will learn to rely on.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/a88a1b3d149a329cb56aeea861a605361dabf850.png)

And special crew members who have their own stories and backgrounds.
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/c8567863cb62786cea95058a0344fdc0d06f9e44.png)

(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/07583785eb0ca38a86ef89da8db4b189329ad35f.png)

I’ll be revising and adding more variety to the universe with new high-resolution custom skyboxes made just for Stellar Tactics by Tim Barton – an amazing artist who specializes in space environments. You can check out Tim Bartons work at this link: Tim Barton on Artstation https://www.artstation.com/cosmicspark
(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/f60e13c441ea8fde97e4d99ced84a0f1452a3234.png)

I’ll also be knocking off some of the rough edges, improving the game visuals, and addressing QoL issues many of you have been asking for. I will be working on tuning, looking at all of the systems as a whole and how they work with each other, and making changes where they make sense.

I'm going to be patching out a number of small bugs and addressing a few other issues at the end of next week. From that point, I’ll be focusing exclusively on the content mentioned above. It will likely be the longest period of time you have had to wait for a content update and I’ll keep you all posted as I make progress.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on January 31, 2021, 04:30:22 AM
Updated notes for 0.572
Sat, 30 January 2021

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/465490/ss_a971758dd80b180adf416f0fd2bf8d2565b74eec.1920x1080.jpg?t=1592933498)

UPDATED: If you have no weapons or a pugilist weapon in your sidearm slot, the secondary support skill has been changed to sprint. If the primary weapon slot is empty (fists) or a pugilist weapon is equipped, the support skill is taunt.
UPDATED: Updated the combat movement path marker to use a much faster system.
UPDATED: LOS lines are now displayed almost immediately when the combat movement cursor is moved to a position.
UPDATED: I did a lot of work on movement and pathing. Overhead objects, walls, and other objects no longer obstructed floor clicks. If you click the floor, your crew member should move to the location unless blocked. This includes how raycasts for movement interact with PC's, NPC's and the environment.
UPDATED: If a health kit is enabled, you can now click through overhead objects, etc to target crew members.

UPDATED: A few changes to the world map:
•   You can now scroll the area map using the left mouse button and zoom in-out using the mouse wheel.
•   World map uses a higher resolution map.
•   You can now zoom in much further on the world map.
•   World map now remembers your current zoom level and last position during the current game session. You can reset the map using the blue "+" icon on the map.

UPDATED: The star-map search feature loads much faster now. A few other new features:
•   The star map now lets you search star systems where you have placed a beacon by entering only a few characters. So, for example, you can search for "Achmedius" by entering "a" and pressing enter in the search field and Achmedius will be displayed along with any other systems that start with an "A". For systems where you have not placed a beacon, you need to enter the entire system name and press search to center the map on that system.
•   Entering "cargo" or "ship" in the search field and pressing enter will now display systems where you have cargo or ships.
•   The search feature now includes the sector coordinates and sector level for systems where you have placed beacons.

UPDATED: The VSYNC option now enables VSYNC and the frame limiter for the 60FPS and 30FPS options. I'm still doing work on how various high refresh monitors interact with game events and area loading.
ADDED: Added new icons to the star map that show you if you have a drone, ship, or cargo storage in a system. If you have placed a beacon in a system, the system has a new icon overlay that shows you at a glance if a beacon is already deployed in the system.
ADDED: If a crew member is at the 5 point skill cap, a warning is displayed when entering the inventory or character info screens noting that the crew member will not receive weapon skill experience until they reach the next level.
FIXED: When clicking at a specific position in the game world, the navigation marker in combat was not being correctly set to the exact movement position.
FIXED: When first entering an area and engaging in combat, the LOS markers and cover icon was not being displayed until an enemy took a single turn.
FIXED: A bug in the display of various perk bonuses in the ship skill bonus area.
FIXED: Enemy AI equipped with grenades would occasionally throw two grenades during their combat round.
FIXED: A number of UI inconsistencies related to closing various menus with the ESC key (LOG - Search, Trade-Net, Faction window).
FIXED: A few perk tooltip errors.
FIXED: The game would lock up if a crew member dies at the same time as the last enemy in an encounter with a missile launcher, DOT, or grenade. Could also happen if you were in combat mode with no enemies around and you threw a grenade and killed yourself - oops.
FIXED: When selecting crew portraits, special attacks for that crew member are now updated correctly in the toolbar.
FIXED: A bug with melee movement introduced with the special attacks system that could cause melee crew members to stop before reaching their target causing a loss of AP.


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on October 22, 2021, 11:52:32 PM
Progress update
Fri, 22 October 2021

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/7827fad93f8fe3db381e0b76ba1afe9ce978f8b7.png)

The Coven, Sovereignty, localization and more...

It’s been a very busy summer with me and my family moving across the country and a lot of time has been dedicated to preparing our old home, selling it, packing, and moving in to our new home. None the less, progress has been made. Now that I am settled in, I am working on Stellar Tactics at my usual pace.

The next update will be a big one and I’ll cover some of the details below. The biggest addition will be the introduction of Chapter 1 of the story. With Chapter 1, new characters will be introduced, primarily the introduction of the Coven and the Sovereignty. The story will continue with a communication from Dr. Jensen who needs your assistance as the doctors continue to look into ways to eliminate the Phage and further their knowledge related to the Jhemm.

The Coven is a specific mutation that presented itself on one of the four ships that made the transit with the remnants of the human race. The mutation applied itself to females while in cryonic suspension and resulted in uncontrolled Psionic powers. The Coven were immediately isolated and studied by scientists on arrival and eventually released to colonize, provided certain rules were followed. Specifically, anyone with the Coven mutation was subjected to surgical implants that subdued their powers. Psionic powers were outlawed and have been since the Arrival.

This did not go over well with The Coven and eventually they went into hiding and removed their implants, refining their powers. For hundreds of years, The Coven have not been seen and are nearly forgotten, though some still do business with them – smuggling goods for trade with the elusive and secretive faction.

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/bca3ea2dcca6ca9f39a8feca1cb70af93b7c9e7c.jpg)

In Chapter 1, you will be introduced to the Sovereignty – the ruling power. Taxes are paid, and for that, security and law are enforced by the Sovereignty . The six main Houses (Halamis, Aralion, Cilivon, Conrair, Shikaru and Varadyne) have control over their holdings and pay tribute to the Sovereignty who in turn provides special dispensation to the Houses. The Houses exert their power on the various sub-factions in the Stellar Tactics Universe.

Ayela will be your primary contact with the Sovereignty and will have missions that involve investigating the Phage, The Coven, Raiders, Scavvers as these are all ongoing threats to peace under the rule of the Sovereignty. Ayela has been looking for a crack squad of mercenaries for a few critical missions.

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/642bd0f7aa98ef4bfce497e4fd99508f163c2d3a.jpg)

Chapter 1 will also introduce more of the story related to the Jhemm and the menace they warn about in the Prologue. With this, Rhamus is still obsessed with the Jhemm and you will explore several of these locations in Chapter 1 which will introduce the “Azimuth” system. In addition to specific locations related to the story where you acquire Azimuth, a new random mission set has been developed for the Aznari ruins and you will find these occasionally when you scan planet surfaces. 18 new "creature" enemy types have been added for cave and ruins locations to increase the variety of enemy types you will encounter in the universe.

All of the original characters have had a facelift so they will match the new content in Chapter 1.

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/e705a4009b4b4ff247834b7f5d192fa6138d45ac.jpg)

Speaking of mission sets, 3 new random sets will be added to the game in addition to static locations for Chapter 1 of the story.

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/74cf3e96a4a19ec8de7aa07143a7ce1140aa85fc.jpg)

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/0d17fa958bbe1960d897f5f2c1278fe8303a920c.jpg)

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/3af62e214b7480ac0a22e8ce491fe03d1e2824b6.jpg)

The first pass of localization is complete for French, Spanish, Russian and German. Note that as a first pass at localization, the French, Spanish, and Russian localizations are likely very rough. The German translation is in very good shape thanks to community members who joined the translation effort. The localizations will be included in the upcoming content patch. When the content patch launches, I will open up localization again for these languages for anyone who is interested in joining.

Oh, and did I mention that Stellar Tactics is getting it's final UI? Daniel did an amazing job with the UI and the implementation work is almost complete. There are still some rough edges here and there - overall, it's coming along nicely.

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/a80f4ec419f7b2d0f87aa757204421156605ced8.jpg)

That’s it for now. No ETA on the release of this content patch. I do hope to get everything finished before the end of this year and I will keep you updated as I make progress.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on December 04, 2021, 12:52:12 AM
Updated UI, translations and bug fixes
Fri, 3 December 2021

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/7827fad93f8fe3db381e0b76ba1afe9ce978f8b7.png)

Updated UI, translations to German, French, Spanish, Russian and various fixes

Hello all! I’m posting a patch today that fixes a number of issues. This is primarily a stability and bug fix patch with a few other bells and whistles. It’s important to note that this is not the Chapter 1 patch. I am busy working on that and will post progress updates as things move along.

Note that a lot of data was touched for this patch so the download will be fairly large.

Here is what you will find in the patch:
1) A major stability fix related to level load lockups
2) A number of other fixes listed below
3) The updated game UI.
4) A first pass at localization to Spanish, French, German and Russian languages.
5) A warning screen if compatibility issues related to drivers and 3D rendering support are discovered when the game loads.

LOCALIZATION -French, German, Spanish and Russian
Localization is VERY ROUGH right now. I'm sure there will be a number of embarrassing language issues and typos. If you want to join the localization process to clean up the rough edges, check the link below for more info and the pinned topic at the top of that forum. I'll post translation edits and fixes with future patches as they become available.

Join the community translation. I'm looking for a few people who are interested in editing and updating the Spanish, French and Russian translations. The German translation is in good shape.

Join the translation

    You can change the language in the "Gameplay" tab of the options screen.
    In some cases text in various languages may be too large for the UI and scroll past the boundaries of the UI area. If you notice these, please report them on the translation sub-forum here. A screenshot would really help.
    Report translation issues here! https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/13/?snr=2_groupannouncements_detail_
    Old mission data is not localized. That data is saved in your current save and will continue to be displayed in English. New missions that you take will be localized.
    Some items in your inventory in existing saves may have descriptions and other information that are part of the save and will not be translated. New items of the same type found or purchased from vendors - like health packs - will be translated.
    Almost everything should be translated, however, I am still looking for places where English text is displayed in a field so expect that there will still be a small number of places where a fix is needed.
    Things that need to be translated or won't be translated for technical reasons: Crafting component suffixes, mod names, system names, character names, names of minerals, commodity names, and weapons names. There may also be a few other areas that are not translated that will get fixed over time.



Removed the HELP screen. Pressing "H" now opens the guide directly. The help screen is obsolete as all keys can be viewed and edited in the options menu and most of the information on that screen is available in the guide.

A warning interface is displayed at the main menu if your PC is not compatible with Stellar Tactics. This covers failed shader compilation and a review of all the core graphics requirements to run the game. If your system fails the check, an interface is displayed that provides a few suggestions like updating your drivers and making sure your system is utilizing your dedicated graphics GPU instead of the on-board low-power Intel GPU.

Optimizations in may areas
UPDATED: Load times improved.
UPDATED: After completing the Phestus mission, FTL drives are now available in Achmedius at ship equipment vendors.
UPDATED: Universe ship manager performance updates - especially for games that have hundreds of hours of stored ship, system and station data.
UPDATED: Reduced the size of the selected ship reticle. Added transparency to selection options.
UPDATED: New portraits for main story characters (Rhamus, Jensen etc.) to match future story content portraits.
UPDATED: Precaching of dynamically loaded assets in space to avoid hitches.
UPDATED: You can now loot all by pressing the space bar.
UPDATED: NPC ships attack each other once again. I'll keep an eye on the forums in case there are any issues. Keep an eye out for free loot chests from these battles.
UPDATED: The game UI has been revised with a new custom UI.
FIXED: A random lockup when transitioning between areas during the loading screen.
FIXED: A random lockup in space combat.
FIXED: A random crash when displaying the line of sight indicators in ground combat.
FIXED: A potential lock up in the early game when opening the ship screen before launching to space.
FIXED: The left arrow when selecting crew voices on the portrait/name/voice editing UI was not working.
FIXED: In some cases, incursions were not being triggered. If you are in a state where incursions will not trigger, travel to another star system and the issue should be resolved.
FIXED: When crafting, a message is displayed on the screen if your inventory is full. You can no longer start crafting a schematic if your inventory or cargo are full.
FIXED: The ship storage display is now closed when pressing ESC if in the ship UI.
FIXED: A bug related to initializing incursions after Rhamus/Jensen leave crew on trade station.
FIXED: Infinite experience when crafting (processing items by pressing the enter key).
FIXED: KO crew members could block movement in narrow passageways.


Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on December 22, 2021, 04:17:35 AM
Patch 0.599
Wed, 22 December

(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/465490/ss_ebe7facad4e814db1a15b0f63a2e493a83406d66.1920x1080.jpg)

Patch Notes 0.599
12/20/21 - 0.599

Updated: Localization updated for French, Russian, German and Spanish. A HUGE thank you to everyone working on the translation! This is an ongoing project.

Updated: Mining drones will launch with the most recent drone launch state set using a new button on the drone manager window.

Fixed: Drone retrieve button is now hidden if a drone is not in a state where it can be retrieved.
Fixed: A fix for dedicated hacking, craft, salvage and repair crew members that are removed from the party and/or no longer have active hacking devices equipped. The dedicated crew flag gets reset and the currently selected crew member initiates the hack (if they have a hacking device), repair, crafting etc. Thanks for reporting the issue.
Fixed: Humanoid NPC's were rarely if ever throwing grenades. Skull NPC's have a higher chance of having grenade inventory. The chance of a NPC throwing a grenade is based on the games difficulty level set in the options menu.
Fixed: A rare lockup related to attacks of opportunity.
FIXED: A lockup when selecting a friendly planetary starbase on a planet that is out of range - approaching and selecting the landing icon. Previously, a second selection was required when in range.
FIXED: Ship icons on screen are now cleared when loading a quicksave or autosave to a ground location from space.

Consolidated patch notes/hotfixes:

12/11/21 - 0.596b

HOTFIX - If a dedicated crew member has been removed from the party or no longer has a hacking tool, the dedicated hacker is reset. The first time you hack, the flag is cleared so you will see a blank hacking UI. The second time you hack you can set a new dedicated crew member - someone who has a hacking tool equipped. I'll look for a better solution for this.

12/10/21 - 0.596

Fixed - An issue with character creation when assigning skill points.
Fixed - A number of localization fixes.

12/9/21 - 0.595

Updated - Darkened background of weapon UI in ground exploration. Updated fonts so ammo count, AP Requirement and fire mode stand out better on the background.
Updated - Moved health kit and grenade count from over selected icons to field above grenades and health kits. Added AP cost to rollover info.
Updated - Text in hacking window over progress bar moved where it can be seen.
Updated - A few updates to new icons on main UI so icons stand out better.

Fixed - If you have a dedicated hacker and remove the hacking tool, a message is sent to your log letting you know who your dedicated hacker is and that the hacker does not have a hacking tool equipped. If you are in a situation where you cannot hack, you need to equip the dedicated hacker with a hacking tool
Fixed - Loot UI - 4th loot slot in upper row fixed when clicking to loot.
Fixed - Loot UI now only responds to "SPACE" when looting all instead of any key.
Fixed - Grenade blast radius is displayed correctly when using the keyboard shortcut
Fixed - When out of combat and moving, weapons now swap correctly with the hotkey or weapon swap icon. You cannot swap weapons while moving in combat. You must be stationary.
Fixed - A large number of edits to UI elements that had issues with translated text.

12/4/21 - 0.593b

Fixed - Ship beam weapons now function as intended
Fixed - Russian translation progression when first arriving in Ruins

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on June 08, 2022, 02:45:32 PM
Progress update
Tue, 7 June 2022

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/7827fad93f8fe3db381e0b76ba1afe9ce978f8b7.png)

Story content, Psionics and more...

Chapter 1 has been a long time coming. A lot of work went into this and I'm finally at a point where everything is in the game and I'm testing and cleaning things up.

The video below is work in progress so expect a few typos and issues. I'm still cleaning up some of the Psionic UI, dialogue and various text used.

https://youtu.be/Y3pp-70DgC4


Lets talk about what you can expect.

First, new story content. The game story previously ended in Achmedius. The story now continues as things start to ramp up in the Universe. Old acquaintances, new friends and a continuation of the Phage and Jhemm story lines - among other things.

Psionics can be unlocked through the main story of The Coven. The Psionic Amplifier is a weapon of sorts that gets equipped in your sidearm slot. Holding the device allows a crew member with appropriate stats (minimum 20 INT) cast amplifications.

Beyond that, you can edit and create your own amplifications in the Psionic Editor. The device has several already loaded. Intelligence and Perception are the primary stats for the amplifier and as you apply points to these stats, you are able to overload the amplifier without damaging yourself. This gives you access to secondary effects like status effects and buffs that can be applied to crew members. Buffs remain on crew members until you transition to a new area. The editor also lets you arrange your effects on the toolbar.

Psionics include:
Single Target, Point Blank Area, Group - Note that the Group type effect will target all enemies, even enemies that are not in line of sight.

Effect:
Heal - Heals damage and can buff all stats (STR, AGI etc.)
Cleanse - Chance to remove negative status effects. Buffs various resistances.
Damage - Kinetic, electro, bleed, explosive, thermal and toxic. Applies various status effects.

You can overload any amplification, just be aware that doing this could harm your crewmember and even knock them out. That said, it may be useful to set up a few "Hail Mary" amplifications for those critical moments.

A few other things you can expect:
Aznari Ruins have been added to the Universe. These locations can be found as part of the main story where you receive a device that lets you pinpoint these ruins on planet surfaces. Eventually these will lead you to Aznari Hubs where the Jhemm are located. One thing that will not make it into this build is Azimuth system. That will come in the Chapter 2 update.

A simple re-spec has been added to the character information screen. I'll eventually add a side mission and a cost to re-specs. For now, I thought it was appropriate to add this so you can tinker with various builds.

Salvaging wrecks has been added. These are somewhat hard to find as you cannot scan for them, so look for them as you travel through Star Systems. If you do find one, you can mine the wreckage for high quality ore, rare earth minerals and bonus ship repair materials (used to repair boarded ships). Most systems will have wreckage floating around.

Many new enemies - specifically in the Aznari Ruins and caves.

The Coven have arrived and will show up in mission areas where Scavvers are found.

Some Phage are Psionic now. Beware...

Of course, there will be a myriad of fixes and updates to various systems in the game including the highly requested Arach screech fix, immediate movement on Micro-Warp and a few other things people have requested.

That's all I have for now. Thanks as always for supporting Stellar Tactics!

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on July 23, 2022, 02:59:06 AM
First Chapter, Psionics and more!
Fri, 22 July 2022

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/8bb98351a5c6a8d726493250ba5bd829e32f89aa.png)

Meet new friends...and enemies! Build your Psionic specialist and enjoy all the new QoL improvements.

The first major story update since the game released is now available. Over the last few years I have been primarily focused on all the core game systems - ground and space combat, salvaging, crafting, trade, special attacks, perks, progression, the ship boarding system and more. It's been great to spend the last few months actually working on the story...finally. This is the first of three major story content updates what will bring the game closer to final release. I hope you all enjoy the new content!


KEY FEATURES

Chapter 1 of the Stellar Tactics story. New missions, new encounters.
To trigger the story content you must:
1) Unlock the FTL drive
2) Unlock smuggling. Speak with Forley Coresh on Achmedius trade station standing near the bar area of the station by the stairs and complete his mission. Everyone should be able to smuggle contraband...right? Doesn't mean you need to do it.

There are several places in the narrative where you will need to wait for a NPC to contact you. Just go about your business for a 1/2 hour or so, and eventually, when entering FTL space, you will receive a communication that moves the story forward. This includes the start of the new content where you will be contacted after a period of time.

You will be heading into deep space and there will be higher level ships in various areas you will travel through. Remember, you can always micro-warp to escape ship combat. So, not a big deal...really.

I highly recommend getting the best FTL drive you can afford. Slogging through FTL space with a low tier FTL drive is - well...slow. The piloting perk tree has ship speed perks and tiers that increase your speed.

Just my 2 credits - don't rush the content. Take time to place beacons, take missions if you can and build your crew.

Make sure to place beacons in the systems you will visit. You may need to return and translocating is the fastest way to get back when you need to.


PSIONICS
--Psionics are powered by a special device - the Psionic Amplifier - a reward granted when playing through the story. This device is equipped in the sidearm slot on any one crew member.
--There is only one Psionic Amplifier. There are no upgrades and they do not drop as loot.
--Instead of improved variants dropping, the player is given a lot of control over how the device works.
--The device cannot be sold or destroyed.
--The Psionic Amplifier requires at least 20 BASE INT to equip. That is a PURE 20 INT not modified by equipment bonuses. It does not have a skill type that levels like other weapons. It does not have perks or mod slots. Instead, the device has a rudimentary interface that lets you create and edit psionic amplifications - the Psionic Editor. The higher your INT/PER, the more power you have to overload and to add a secondary effect to amplifications.
--The power of psionic amplifications is governed by INT and partially by PER. Bonus INT and PER above your BASE INT does affect your amplifications.
--INT and PER are the key STATS for psionics. INT has the greatest effect and PER provides a lower bonus. So, respec to INT/PER and loot that +INT/+PER gear.
--The power of your amplifications related to INT/PER is expressed as available MIND. As your stats increase, the amount of available MIND increases. Through the use of the Psionic Editor, you will notice that INT/PER increase the power of amplifications and reduce the possibility of damaging your crew member.
--There is no limiting resource to Psionic amplifications. That is, you can use psionics indefinitely unless you are overloading and then Medkits are a resource you want available.
--Psionics cannot sprint. Instead, their specials for the sidearm slot are locked and used as reference and to access the Psionic Editor.
--For psionics, it's important to understand "Initiative" which is used to calculate turn order. Initiative is calculated primarily from DEX and AGI with a bonus from INT. So, you will likely want to pump some stat points into DEX or AGI depending on whether or not your primary weapon is ranged or melee.


PSIONIC EDITOR:
The editor can be accessed after equipping the amplifier in your sidearm slot. The amplifier needs to be selected as your active weapon. You will find an icon on the toolbar where special attacks are usually located. Your currently equipped amplification is displayed in the first of the two special attack slots. The editor icon is the second icon in the special attack area.
To edit an amplification:
--Open the editor by selecting the "cog" icon on the toolbar.
--Select the amplification you want to edit in the list and select "EDIT AMPLIFICATION".
--You can now select the attack type, effect type and a secondary effect from the lists on the left.
--You can edit the name of the amplification.
--You can edit the description of the amplification.
--You can overload the amplification by sliding the bar to the right. Note that you can actually harm your crew member if the mind cost enters the "HEALTH COST PER CAST" area.
--You can select a icon for the amplification by clicking the icon.
When you are done, select "SAVE AMPLIFICATION"

To create a amplification:
Same process as above. The only difference is that you will select "CREATE AMPLIFICATION" and save a new amplification by clicking "SAVE".

Ordering the amplification bar:
The amplification bar is displayed in and out of combat when the amplifier is equipped and your sidearm is selected. Damage amplifications cannot be used when out of combat.
You can change the order of amplifications in the bar by opening the Psionic Editor and dragging the icons from the list at the top of the editor to the bar at the bottom of the UI.

Amplifications toolbar:
Damage amplifications - Select a amplification from the bar (or use the hotkeys 1 - 8). Note that amplification is loaded into the toolbar below. Like any ranged weapon, just target the enemy and fire. You can queue multiple amplifications and targets using the combat queue (Shift-Click and then space bar to unleash).

Heals and cleanses.
Select a heal or cleanse from the hot bar. Note the icon is flashing. Like medkits, these amplifications require you to click a target or portrait. If you want to disable the amplification, you must select another amplification. Subsequent uses of the amplification can be triggered by clicking or using the hotkey for that amplification. Note that while a heal or cleanse amplification is selected and active, weapon swap, medkits and grenades cannot be used.

Psionic GROUP amplifications can target a single enemy and damage all enemies in that group, even if they are not visible. Heals, buffs and cleanses target your entire crew regardless of visibility.

Psionic PBAoE amplifications deal damage in a area around the targeted enemy. Heals, buffs and cleanses target crew in the area of the targeted crew member.
Overloading a psionic amplification can damage a crew member. In certain circumstances, this may be useful for additional negative or positive effects. I'm leaving it to you to decide.

Psionics can heal, remove status effects and buff stats. Buffs last through the entire area. When you transition between areas, the buff is lost.

For now, there is no indication that a buff is active. I'll be adding this in a future update. You can reference your base stats to see if a bonus is active.

An important note: This is the first pass of Psionics. I'll be making adjustments over time to the system. I will be looking at expanding on the system to add other effects and upgrades through Chapter 2 of the story.


FACTION AGENTS
Faction agents for Houses Conrair, Aralion and Cilivon are now active. You can spend your tokens on legendary ship equipment. Epic ship ship equipment must be crafted. Each faction specializes in various equipment types.

Faction agent vendors for Houses Halamis, Shikaru and Varadyne now also trade high tier weapons, shields and mods for faction tokens. They can occasionally carry high quality level 1 weapons if you are considering swapping your weapon spec. You can always find level 1 weapons on a vendor at Achmedius Trade Station.

RESPEC
You can now reset crew stats. For now, this is free and you can reset your STATS at any time for all crew members. You will find a new button on the character information panel [C] in the upper left corner above the stat allocation area of the UI.

Some Phage and all Coven enemies use psionic attacks.

The Coven are now included in the main game story. They can also be found in various random mission locations and as targets for random missions assigned by faction agents.

SALVAGING WRECKS
Wrecks can now be found in star systems. These can be mined and offer higher quality ore and random ship repair components used to repair equipment on boarded ships. These are discovery locations. Scanning a planet or ship may show a green highlight briefly indicating the location of a wreck.
Salvaging wrecks completely will generate a loot crate.

AZNARI RUINS
Aznari ruins can be found after triggering a certain mission in the main story. These areas have new enemy types.

NEW LOOT
In ground combat, skull enemies may occasionally drop loot chests with high quality gear.


QOL CHANGES

SALVAGE UI QoL
•   Schematics that are being learned through salvaging are now displayed on the salvaging UI with percent complete in the Schematics view on the right of the screen. Completed schematics show no % complete.
•   Selecting an item to salvage now displays items that can be salvaged in the disassembly pane of the salvage UI.
•   When selecting an item to salvage, pressing ESC will cancel that item rather than exiting the salvage UI allowing you to select another item to disassemble.


Right clicking an equip-able item other than mods in your inventory will equip it. Double click still works to equip items.

The stat allocation widget now allocates stats quickly when you click and hold the mouse over the allocation arrows.

Your ships now accelerate immediately when micro-warping.

When looting, if you do not have the room in inventory for all ammo, the loot container will close and a message will be sent to display that you do not have enough room in inventory for the ammo. Just a note that there is a ammo converter in the game that you can purchase from one of the faction vendors. I leave ammo in the containers in case you have an ammo converter and want to convert ammo in inventory to another ammo type to make room.

Sorting:
•   Added sorting for the stash. You can now sort by quality, name, value, type and quantity.
•   Added sorting to vendors. You can sort by quality, type, value and quantity.
•   Added a compact inventory icon to the upper right of the shared inventory area. This organizes in the following order - med kits, grenades, devices, armor, melee weapons, ranged weapons and finally - vendor trash.
•   I will be adding improved sorting to the cargo, cargo storage and other areas in the next update.


Removed the annoying vendor dialog. When you click a vendor, the vendor UI is displayed immediately.

When out of combat, pressing the reload hotkey [R] will reload all weapons for all crew members. Right click to reload all still works.


GENERAL NOTES

Translations for the new content will be rough for a while. I'll post updates over the next month as translations to German, Spanish, Russian and French languages progress.

Updated - When boarding a ship, space combat experience is rewarded when selling the ship to Arkus. You can still get experience by exiting the ship and not selling to Arkus, then blowing up the ship. Or, as usual, by destroying ships in space combat without boarding.
Updated - Difficulty setting modifications to NPC's now kick in at level 1. Previously, difficulty settings for hard and extreme had no effect on NPC's until your crews average level was level 5 or greater.
Updated - Ramped up Extreme difficulty mode.
Updated - Various enemy types have Psionic skills - especially Coven and Phage.
Updated - You will no longer be able to swap weapons from inventory during combat. Weapons, armor and shields cannot be unequipped during combat. You can swap mods and devices while in combat. For example, swapping a damage type mod to adjust melee weapon damage types based on enemy weaknesses. Swapping heavy weapons to avoid reload penalties was OP. Also, with special attacks added, this could in some cases lead to triggering multiple special attacks in a single combat scenario making content trivial.
Updated - Dauntless - Removed grenades from "Captain".
Updated - Added cave areas to random missions at the Facility in Achmedius.
Updated - Devices can not be destroyed or sold. They are considered key items.
Updated - Replaced some of the Arach sound effects.
Updated - Grenade damage adjusted -> down.
Updated - Increased 2 hand melee CTH and damage.
Updated - You can now rollover status effects for descriptions (bleeding, defend, poisoned etc.) in the extended targeting UI.
Updated - Increased LOS visual angle for NPC's and PC's so they do not have tunnel vision.
Updated - Performance improvements in space. - LOD, distance clipping, UI performance related to NPC ship labels etc.
Updated - In space, when a target is selected and obstructed by a planet, the target reticle is faded to let you know the target is on the other side of the planet.
Updated - In space, if a ship is obstructed by a planetary object, the label is faded.
Updated - When rolling over repair material icons in the equipment repair UI, the name of the repair material is displayed.
Updated - Reduced chance of a random attack taking place when entering a star system from a station, ground location and FTL space.

Fixed - When a grenade is active, occasionally you would move instead of throw the grenade when you clicked.
Fixed - When gaining piloting skill in space combat, the log was displaying the incorrect string - WEAPONRY. Piloting skill gains were not affected - just the display string in the log.
Fixed - If armor was unequipped in combat, the player was invulnerable to damage. This was related to an error in the equipment wear system.
Fixed - Universe search now responds correctly to enter key - searching the existing list of systems with beacons first and if no result, entire universe database.
Fixed - Arach parts are now considered vendor trash and are sold when selling all junk.
Fixed - After clearing the slice mines for Scarby, the return location is selected when choosing the mission in the objectives tracker in space.
Fixed - The approach button is now displayed after scanning a planet. Previously a scan would hide the approach button until you selected the planet again.
Fixed - Cleaned up various sub faction agents that should not be giving missions at this time. They will return eventually and provide alternate mission types (The Syndicate, The Church etc...).
Fixed - When boarding the Frontier CG-1 several doors on this ship could not be hacked/opened.
Fixed - In some cases, when looting a ship equipment crate on boarded ships - not all equipment was being moved to the cargo hold.
Fixed - You can now craft "Rare" weapons with up to 3 mod slots.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on May 21, 2023, 06:38:38 PM
Chapter 2 released!
Fri, 19 May 2023

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/25220226/8bb98351a5c6a8d726493250ba5bd829e32f89aa.png)

The story continues with Chapter 2. Introducing Azimuth, new missions and more!


I'm pleased to release Chapter 2 today. It's been a long road and I do hope everyone enjoys the new content. As always, it is likely a few bugs will surface over the next few days so I will keep an eye on the forums for any issues. If you do find any issues, please post on the bug forums here. Any details and screenshots you can provide will help: https://steamcommunity.com/app/465490/discussions/7/

Localization - The English and German versions of the game are in good shape at this time. French, Spanish and Russian translations will be very rough. If you are interested in translating any of these three languages, send a note to support@stellartactics.com and I'll get back to you.

CHAPTER 2
- Pick up where you left off after completing chapter 1 with a message when entering space. Note that there are some very tough battles in this chapter so, grenades, Azimuth (when you get it) and Psionics will really help.

AZIMUTH
- The final ground combat system to be implemented. Azimuth is a reward received during the chapter 2 story. It provides you with a variety of powerful effects that can be mixed and matched to both benefit your crew during combat and to debuff enemies. Effects last through an entire combat area so they are best used either at the start of an area or when you have tough enemies to defeat. Azimuth uses energy gathered over time through combat, space travel and by charging Azimuth with Aznari Shards. Chapter 3 (the final chapter) will introduce Azimuth which can be used in space combat.

MISSION NPCs
- Mission NPC's can now be found on stations. When pressing the highlight key (TAB by default), mission NPC's are highlighted in BLUE. These missions offer cash rewards, loot, faction tokens and general faction. All of these missions have several stages/locations that need to be visited with different objectives and pay out rewards based on the number of stages required to complete the mission for the NPC. This is the first pass at NPC missions. I expect that I will be expanding on and refining the NPC mission system over time.


TRADE AND SMUGGLING MISSIONS
- Trade and smuggling missions will be offered occasionally when entering a star system that has orbiting stations. These missions are only offered if a star system does not have an ACCEPTED buy or sell order registered in your Trade Net. Expand your trade network using beacons to take advantage of these missions.

    These missions always pay out bonuses that are above market value so it is always worthwhile taking the missions when offered.
    There is no timer so you can have as many as 20 of these missions available at any time. 20 is the maximum number of active trades allowed via the Trade-Net.
    Note that you can fulfil ore and refined ore missions by mining and refining ore yourself. Or, you can just buy the goods on the Trade Net. Of course, mining and refining ore will offer the most profit from these contracts.
    The volume required by these missions - that is the number of items needed to fulfil a contract, is based on your current cargo capacity. Ships with more cargo will be offered larger batches of commodities to trade.
    Trade contracts scale based on the amount of credits you have available when the contract is offered.
    There are special contracts that reward a very high return. These are offered by NPCs you have met through the games story content.
    Trade contracts can be canceled in the Trade-Net with no penalty.


BOARDING MISSIONS
- Phestus will offer simple boarding missions - so he can retire, you know. He will start giving you missions once you have a FTL Drive after you complete his story mission in Achmedius.

    Only one boarding mission is offered at a time.
    To receive the reward, board any ship of the type that Phestus needs parts for. When selling the ship to Arkus, Arkus will route the parts to Phestus and Phestus will reward you.
    These missions cannot be abandoned. To get another mission, you should complete the current mission provided by Phestus.
    These missions are basically a bonus to the payout you receive and give players specific ships to target.
    Pick your targets carefully. Boarding ships will reduce your standing with the owners main faction.



A NEW MISSION TYPE
related to the chapter 2 story line. This is a ongoing permanent mission in your log. You will know what it is when you you get it.

ACCESS STATION CARGO FROM SPACE:
You can now approach any non-hostile station and access the stations cargo terminal without boarding. This makes it a lot easier to store ore you are mining and deliver trade goods between stations. To display the cargo icon, click the station itself in space when you are close enough to board. A new icon will be displayed allowing you access to the cargo interface.

ADDED NOTES ON THE STAR MAP:
You can now add notes to star systems on the star map. Selecting any star system will display a notes area above the lower-center detail console. Star systems that have notes will display a green box around the star system.

YOU CAN NOW VIEW SHIP REPAIR COMPONENTS:
Harvested ship repair components used for boarding can now be viewed on the ship menu [K] by selecting the new button under the ore refinery. Note that ship repair components used to repair boarded ships can be harvested from other ships, or, ideally by salvaging wreckage in Star Systems. Salvaging wreckages is the best way to gather these materials.


GENERAL PATCH NOTES:

UPDATED - Additional checks are now in place to avoid bad enemy target clicks that lead to movement instead of attacks. In addition, when rolling over an enemy in combat, the enemy will pause animation so you can get a very "clean" target selection. Previously, some enemies animations could lead to bad information at the moment a player would click, leading to an unintended move. Hopefully this reduces or eliminates these annoyances. Let me know what you think on the forums. Is this better, worse?
UPDATED - Fog of war data on the ground area map [M] now persists between areas and saves.
UPDATED - Phestus will now give you a mission to meet with Forley Coresh in Achmedius after you purchase the FTL drive from him when exiting his station. This fixes the missing quest link that would lead players to the start of Chapter 1. Regardless of when you got your FTL drive, the next time you enter a star system, the new mission will be triggered if you have not already spoken with Forley Coresh.
UPDATED - Added directional indicators to the mini-map/radar for N,S,E and W. The "camera" FOV indicator now has a arrow tick mark for identifying the direction your camera is facing.
UPDATED - Reduced INT bonuses to initiative for player and NPC's. This still needs work as INT is generating too much initiative.
UPDATED - When pressing the highlight key bind, NPC's that can be recruited are now highlighted in green. NPC's that have procedural missions are highlighted in blue. Faction agents are highlighted in blue.
UPDATED - Ship loot containers now display distance to the players ship.
UPDATED - Moved star system player spawn point and jump points away from planetary orbits to avoid possibly intersecting with a planets on spawn.
UPDATED - No random attacks when entering Achmedius - this is to smooth out the starting experience in the game. This also applies to attacks related to carrying contraband.
UPDATED - Added more responses when selecting NPCs.
FIXED - Removed shields from creature type enemies.
FIXED - A number of typos in the English language files.
FIXED - Multiple clicks on exits and during loading could lead to a level lockup or misaligned camera.
FIXED - Corrected feedback text to log when delivering trade contracts.
FIXED - Several localization errors.
FIXED - Various areas - map and mini-map did not correctly display the map background.
FIXED - A non-critical bug related to experience when selling ships to Arkus.
FIXED - Visual error with Psionic bleed projectiles.
FIXED - Mission objectives UI under radar/map for boarded areas and new areas that use the UI is now correctly displayed when entering or re-entering these areas.


AND FINALLY, A SUPPORTER DLC

I am also releasing a supporter pack for Stellar Tactics today. I've been asked many times to add a way to help support the game. I finally decided to put together a few things that I think people would like. It contains a unique ship not found elsewhere in the universe, poster art, 3D printer models for those of you who have 3D printers and a few other things. For those of you who do decide to purchase the DLC, many thanks. And as always, regardless of whether you purchase the DLC, thank you for supporting the game.


WHATS NEXT:

Well, Chapter 3 of course! Here is a list of things I'll be looking at. Some of these may be released between now and the Chapter 3 content.

    With Azimuth in the game, I'll be able to make final adjustments to the combat system.
    Adjusting the initiative system and exposing more information when rolling initiative.
    Better STAT descriptions that are in line with any changes I make above.
    Mining system changes. The current mining system is fairly basic. I'd like to make this a bit more interesting.
    Adjustments to various effects in the game.
    Tweaks to space combat.
    Knocking off rough edges everywhere. That includes final passes at the various game systems.
    Expanded faction warfare system and FTL map events.
    Advanced game settings.



Two answer two common questions I see:
[Q] When will achievements be added.
[A] After chapter 3 is complete so I can tie achievements into all the game content.

[Q] When will custom portrait support be added.
[A] With chapter 3.

Many will ask - when? When will chapter 3 be finished? December. Of course, I may need more time - we will see. I'll keep everyone posted as I make progress.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on June 16, 2023, 01:58:06 AM
Recent patch notes and latest - pooled EXP.
Thu, 15 June 2023

(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/465490/ss_ebe7facad4e814db1a15b0f63a2e493a83406d66.jpg)

6/15/23 - 0.715
UPDATED: Pooled experience. Pooled experience will even out general experience gain between dedicated ground crew members so they level at an equivalent pace.
--General experience is now rewarded at the end of each combat session and the pooled total experience will be divided equally between each crew member regardless of KO.
--Leveling will progress a bit faster with pooled experience.
--Crew members who are behind will slowly catch up to the rest of the team.
--Skill gain will remain as it is now.
--Pooled experience is enabled by DEFAULT.
--You can switch to the original method of gaining ground combat experience by turning of "POOL COMBAT EXP BETWEEN CREW" option in the options->gameplay menu if you prefer to micro-manage EXP.

UPDATED: Crew members in ship station slots will now recieve a small amount of general level experience along with the usual skill experience when a ship is destroyed.
UPDATED: Any mission that gives a reward (loot) will now also reward a small amount of general level experience when completed/turned in.
UPDATED: A few changes to the option settings being saved and loaded. I've also added debug info to help track options not being saved correctly on some systems. If you do have any problems with settings, please send your log from that game session to support@stellartactics.com. You can find the log in the game install folder->"Log" folder.
UPDATED: Enemies no long fade when they die, and remain until you leave the area.
FIXED: A bug related to the combat queue when initializing the combat queue with an attack requiring more ammo than the weapon has loaded.
FIXED: Crew member Azimuth AP bonuses were not being applied when reloading the area from a save where the Azimuth effect was triggered.
FIXED: When ending a turn quickly, it was possible that the UI would end in a state where the end turn hotkeys would not respond and you had to manually click a end turn option.

6/2/23 - 0.714
UPDATED: Raised level cap from 60 to 80
UPDATED: Adjustments to initiative to level out how INT affects turn order.
FIXED: Shields and mods once again display item quality borders in the shared inventory.
FIXED: Various pressed key inputs will not activate ship functions while in inventory, log, ship and character info screens.
FIXED: Azimuth screen can no longer be opened while hacking.
FIXED: Ship component wear was not being copied from and to ship storage correctly. Note, in some cases the game may reset a ships equipment wear values when tranferred to/from storage if needed to 100% the first time this is done.
FIXED: Possible fix for rare state where a player character could be unable to move after transitioning to a new ground location.
FIXED: A bug related to universe data load on 32bit systems.
FIXED: A fix for a case where speaking with Rhamus and then Rodger Crayson during the main campaign could block progression.
FIXED: A few translation errors.

5/25/23 - 0.713
UPDATED - Increased the number of bonus equipment repair components received from salvaging.
UPDATED - Some work done on shotgun AOE related to enemy position above or below player position. I'm still looking at this closely.
FIXED - Grenades not damaging or applying effects to enemies. This bug applied to all grenade types - frag, stun, etc.
FIXED - Missiles not damaging or applying effects to enemies.
FIXED - Missiles could get caught on world geometry and explode prematurely when you had clear LOS to the enemy target.
FIXED - Aznari shards had no rollover info and were not displayed in the stash.
FIXED - Aznari shards are now visible in inventory after using the sort option and are sortable in stash.
FIXED - Aznari shards that were sold to vendors did not show in vendor inventory immediately after selling the shard.

5/22/23 - 0.712
FIXED - The game would lock up when boarding incursion ships.
FIXED - Phestus was not delivering boarding mission rewards when when you sold a ship to Arkus.
FIXED - The game would lock up if you opened the crew manager [J] and then opened the inventory, log, character info or ship UI.

HOTFIX 5/21/23 - 0.710
NPC's were issuing new procedural missions at the Achmedius Trade station. While that was not intended (and is now fixed) and generally would not break anything - a procedural mission from Forley Coresh would break the dialog needed to progress with the chapter 1 story.

If you took a procedural mission from Forley Coresh and he now responds with a "." in the dialog window, just save your game next to him, reload that save and all should proceed as normal.

If you have taken procedural missions from NPC's on Achmedius Trade Port, I recommend opening the log, selecting these missions (missions with a persons name followed by a x/x where x is a number, and then abandon the missions. Missions will not be issued by NPC's on that particular trade station any more.

Title: Re: Stellar Tactics
Post by: Asid on September 26, 2023, 12:02:07 AM
Roadmap to release
Mon, September 25, 2023

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/25220226/8bb98351a5c6a8d726493250ba5bd829e32f89aa.png)

Progress update and roadmap to release

Well, Fall is here in the Northern hemisphere and I'm excited to post the remaining development tasks for Stellar Tactics over the next few months. There has been an absolute flurry of activity here on my part preparing content for Chapter 3, delivering on promises I made for a crew mission system and a bunch of QOL adjustments based on player feedback.

Stellar Tactics has been in EA for a long time. I realize for some, this has been annoying. People want to play a final game - right? Others don't mind contributing to the game with ideas, feedback and bug reports. I have a lot to be thankful for in that the community has been incredibly helpful in so many ways.

However, I need to be realistic. By that I mean, development needs a clear and final end point. There are so many great ideas from players and of course I have ideas myself. Unfortunately, not all of these can be realized or I would spend the rest of my life in Early Access. Up to this point, I've been very clear about what I wanted to accomplish, I've had fixed goals, an end point in mind and we are closing in on that vision - finally.

What does this mean? It means I'm going to be focused on the last chapter of the game, final features, a lot of cleanup, stability, tuning and various other bits that should polish the game up nicely in coming months. Here is the roadmap:

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//25220226/eaf7bd0533f290b4fe2f53c68a4e6d5905f67e51.png)

As you can see, I have a patch coming in October with a few new features, quality of life improvements and a good number of bug fixes.

The mining system update changes the mining system from a passive to an active process. A few notes and of course more details will come when the patch is release

--You manage the energy of each turret to keep the asteroids temperature in a "sweet spot"
--This "sweet spot" is initially small and expands as you gain levels in the mining skill.
--Below the ideal temperature, you mine less ore.
--Above the ideal temperature, you mine less ore and the asteroid is depleted much faster.
--Asteroids at an ideal mining temperature provide bonus ore.
--Your perks will work as they always have.
--Asteroids can only be targeted by a single turret. You can target multiple turrets to separate asteroids.
--Salvaging derelict ships works as it always has - you can target all turrets at one time

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//25220226/23c19ce7fcfb4e801fbc1f8b748a3a2b7688a35a.png)

The crew mission system will allow players to assign inactive crew members (crew members not assigned to ground crew or ship stations) to various mission types. Crew members will always receive EXP even if they fail the mission, however, failed missions will reward fewer credits and less experience. An example would be to send a inactive crew member on a rescue mission where they have a chance to gain combat experience in the weapon types they currently have equipped. Over time, crew members rank up and harder missions become available that reward better rewards.

I think the "Advanced settings" will be a welcome addition. Players will be able to tweak many things in their game, including the cost of ships, how much experience you gain for various activities, combat difficulty, and much more. In a sandbox, I believe there is no perfect default setting for everyone. More options are always better. You will be able to reset to defaults at any time.

Fast travel - Really, for me, it cannot be space if there is no time spent...well...traveling. However, so many players have commented that it takes too long to travel in FTL space. So, I've added a way to target a star system, within a certain range of course, and immediately travel to that location. This can only be done in FTL space from point to point. Notice the new icon below the Star System info screen in the upper left. Whether or not you use it is up to you.

(https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//25220226/48f3bd54c3ea2486a65ae8191dded69cb79f0dd0.png)

That's all I have for now. I'll keep you posted as I get closer to releasing the October update.