Stellar Tactics - Abandoned Facility (KZ-MR7)

[Silver]

Stellar Tactics has received a large content patch which adds the abandoned facility KZ-MR7.

Unlimited procedural missions, equipment stash, streamlined game start, mercenaries, new enemies, tons of gear to loot, updated space stations, new character portraits, turn order bar, grenades and med-kits moved out of the secondary weapon slot and much more...this is a big patch!

I'd like to thank everyone one of you for supporting the development of Stellar Tactics and for your patience. There has been an enormous amount of work put into the game over the last few months. I don't want to overhype this build, though I do think you are going to like what you find (I hope). The game just took a very big leap forward towards Alpha.

[...]

With that, here is what you will find in 0.051!

Procedural missions have been added to the game. The abandoned Halamis Research Station has re-appeared on the surface of Achmedius VIII. You will find a new NPC near the entrance of the Trade Station in Achmedius who will recruit you. A few things about the procedural mission system.

• The level cap is set to 60 - this applies to global team member levels and skills
• There are three mission categories right now; eliminate boss, clear facility and gather. More are coming (destroy, activate and rescue).
• Missions are offered in short, medium and long variants - long missions take quite a while. The longer the mission, the better the rewards and tokens. You can reject a mission and another will be generated.
• You can abandon a procedural mission. Story missions cannot be abandoned. You must leave the facility to abandon missions. A button is displayed in the mission log area with red text that says "ABANDON" and is only displayed if you are not located in the mission area. Clicking the button will remove the mission from your active missions list. No rewards will be granted for the abandoned mission. You can only take one mission at a time from the Halamis agent, so, this frees you up to take further missions if you are having difficulty completing your currently assigned task.
• Tokens are granted for missions - more tokens for longer missions. Faction tokens can be spent at faction merchants for unique armor, devices and other goods. Faction merchants are not in the game yet. They will be going in very soon, so save those tokens! Besides a new armor set, there is at least one device that will be going on this vendor that every one of you is going to want - believe me!
• Every time you enter the facility the layout is randomly generated. That is, locations are assembled to create a unique facility layout. Enemy placement, enemy types, loot and the placement of objectives changes every time a mission is generated.
• Other than the basic background story of the facility, there is no story content in this update. This is the first pass at procedural mission content that will be persisted throughout the universe. Other "mission sets" and enemies will be developed in the future for variants on the system. Story content is different and non-procedural. I do plan to add flavor logs and other interesting mission variants in the future.
• The slice mines have been moved to another planet.

New portraits replaced the old portrait system. There are a total of 20 to choose from. If you load an existing game, I assign a portrait to your team members automatically (other than Rhamus and Jensen - NPC portraits are not changed).

• Auto-assignment of portraits may display duplicates.
• To change portraits, enter the character information screen ("C"), select the portrait from the portrait GUI in the upper left of the screen. Once the character you want to change is selected, left click the larger single portrait on the character information screen. A new window will pop up that lets you assign a new portrait, voice and name.
• You can change any team members portrait, name and voice at any time.

When starting a new game, you can now choose to skip the Dauntless. After the universe data is generated, you will create a single character, starting the game without a full team. You will be able to add new team members on the Trade station, where you will find several mercenaries willing to join you in your travels.
The mission information UI on the log screen now allows sorting by active and completed missions. Active missions are displayed by default.

NPC's can now join your team. There are several on the Achmedius Trade Station.

• The doctors will leave your team the next time you enter the trade station. If you are already on the trade station, walk near the entry and they will leave your team. This leaves you room to add three new and permanent team members by recruiting them on the station.
• Save before your recruit your merc's in case you want to make changes. The Mercenary manger is not yet in the game. It will go in at a later time allow you to add and remove merc's from your active party.
• Mercenaries have assigned combat skills. They will tell you which skills they are proficient with.
• Mercenaries set their level to your existing team's average level.
• Even though the mercenaries skills may not exactly match what you are looking for, you can still progress that team member and customize them by equipping the appropriate weapon types of your choosing.
• Once a new NPC joins your team, you will be able to change their appearance, voice and name.
• The NPC's physical model appearance will change to match the selected portrait the next time you change locations or save and reload the game. I'll be doing some work in the future so the models match the portraits better!
• The new team member will have a number of stat points to assign depending on what level you are when you ask the mercenary to join your team.
  [...]

More information.

 

[Darkheart]

Worth jumping on already?
I so want this to be good and try for myself!

 

[They Live]

i will buy this sooner or later...

 

[CRD]

Worth jumping on already?
I so want this to be good and try for myself!

yes, its already pretty good

 

[Darkheart]

yes, its already pretty good

Bought it and am installing now. Happy Easter to me!

 

[CRD]

I bought it on release just to support the developer and well, I have a blast playing it for about 20 25 hours and they are adding content and balancing at a decent pace.

I think is gonna be a really really great game on release.

 

[Darkheart]

Pretty much liked the first 2 hours so far, but load times are long at each area change and my chars move a bit like under water. Hope it will be optimized some more in the future. Very good potential!

 

[Kirk]

Bought it today and quickly refunded. The characters looking like they are running underwater was too distracting for me. Looked like a great indie effort, however, the pacing is awful in the intro. First mission is to run around with your super slow four characters in an area that is big and empty flipping switches.

 

[Darkheart]

There was a new patch today and my team is moving much more fluid now, aka no more underwater struggling. Thumbs up!

 

[StellarTactics]

I wanted to thank all of your for supporting the game. I try to patch out any issues as quickly as I can. That slo-mo bug was annoying.

The starting area is in the process of being completely redone visually and I'm integrating a lot of community feedback that includes better tutorial screens and making the Dauntless a bit more streamlined. It's really important that it is up to par with the rest of the game visually. Beyond that it needs to provide everyone with an impression of what they can expect as far as game-play in the rest of the game.

You can skip the Dauntless completely right now. It's a feature I added in the patch Friday. I recommend skipping the Dauntless for now unless you enjoy the back-story, a few challenging battles and some nice loot at the beginning, not to mention a bit of a unusual plot twist.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the rest of the game. The Steam forums are sane and safe for posting and there are a lot of very helpful people on the forums. The community has been growing quickly and I'm really grateful for the feedback and enthusiasm that is growing around Stellar Tactics. Feel free to post suggestions, bugs and comments on the forums. I read them daily.

 

[Carnifex]

I've spent a lot of time on this a few months back, and that's unusual for me because I tend to wait till after even the general release before jumping into new games, with all the patching going on these days. I've had a lot of fun with this one, and after I finish my current game I'm probably going to jump back into this or try Battle Brothers. If you are on the fence on this game, I'd recommend you give it a shot.

 

[Capt. Huggy Face]

I know this is a pet peeve of mine for my own reasons, but has the font size been increased?

I played a demo very early on, and a font-size slider sure would have been appreciated by me. It looked pretty possible, as I recall. I seem to remember scrolling windows were already in the game (for the combat log or something), so even if there were a spacing problem, if you're trying to fit every dialogue into just one window, the dialog box could be made scrollable, too.