Possible Spoilers so perhaps do not read the Logs if you haven’t begun your own fleet yet.
Disclaimer out the way, the creative descriptions are fun to (re-)read if you haven’t found time to send your crews off doing frigate missions lately. They’re nicely written. So if you wrote them thanks! They really add mystery and imagination to the game. Actually some of the logs make me want to go and seek out the fleet ships to help
Fleets are a great addition I think to the game, the balance just about right as an accompanying subtext to our adventures.
Some of them have some quite worrying events happening to the crews and makes me wonder if future game updates might make these ‘events’ more player/multiplayer focused. Each log could potentially with care be fleshed out into entire story lines which would be cool. This game has endless possibilities. Perhaps that’s the plan
Anyway I thought I’d post a few of the descriptions as I wondered how different they maybe between player games. Maybe we can discover what other posts might hint at future story lines and adventures.
Please click the pictures for full descriptions. This first one was astonishingly detailed, and I felt like the fleet had been having more fun than me! lol not fair!! lol
For the longest time I just just paid attention to what each encounter recovered. The messages for so long were pretty stagnant. Then today, I noticed several encounters had no conclusion! At the end of the brief it would say something like, “continuing surveillance” and other similar messages.
It’ll be really cool if what you pointed out and these open-ended encounters turn out to be new involving aspects of the game.
Our frigates have skill levels and each mission has a difficulty level. I assumed that when there is no outcome listed it means I failed my skill roll. Roll as in dice roll.
If this were an RPG, the game master would do a skill check by assigning a difficulty value, and the player gets to roll one or more dice, and the player succeeds if the sum they rolled is higher than the difficulty value. The player can argue “my character is highly trained” or “has the proper tool” and then the GM either allows them extra dice or dice with more faces (which increases the max sum I can roll).
This is a common game mechanic how to reward higher skill with better chances of beating a higher difficulty in a game of chance.
Maybe I roll as many dice as I send frigates, and the class of the frigate determines how many faces each die has (d6, d8, d10, d12). The more s-class frigates I have, the higher my chances of rolling a sum that beats a 5-star difficulty. But if I only have a few C class frigates, I only get a few d4s and it’s barely possible to roll a sum that beats a 1-star difficultly. And if you don’t reach the target sum, you gain no loot. And if you even “roll a 1” then the frigate gets damaged, perhaps.
You know these kind of games? Of course I don’t know how it’s implemented. But that’s what the frigate mechanics remind me of.
If you view the frigate logs after missions, you can actually see this mechanic in action.
If you send out a frigate group on a mission, and their combined score is higher than the mission difficulty, then there is a high probability that they will succeed (profit) from all the situations they encounter.
However, if there is a negative incident - ships damaged, crew killed, etc - which reduces your group skill score, you then find that they will visit planets, but find nothing, encounter trade opportunities, but lose money, etc.
It’s fascinating - and it’s all there in the logs.
It’s pretty mind boggling, just how much detail this game actually includes - and how much of it is hidden below the surface.
This game quietly watches and records absolutely everything you do. I don’t know how HG managed to store that density of data in such small save files, but they did. It’s extraordinary.
I have a little question on another matter. Did S class frigates on Survival never get damaged ? Can anyone confirm it ?
Edit:
I wonder because i made a few ‘rules’ on my survival gameplay. I never repair frigates… Now I’m the Vyk mental oriented. If crew cannot sustain own ship they are weak and worthless in that approach. I lost many frigates due to this, but one can survive without being damaged. Now crew continue their missions, I have information about damage in the logs, but they always return to the freighter without damage. It looks like they are repairing the ship themselves. Maybe they understood after the example of others that if they don’t teach it, they won’t survive. Looks like they get little sentient…
On Normal i have 15 S-classes frigates, sent on daily missions. One of them will always break down. On survival I have about effective 100 day gameplay and on each of these i send frigates on missions. That one S-class never get broken regardless of what the log shows.
I have an S-class that has damage resistance as a perk, it can usually go one or two incidents without taking lasting damage. I do think I’ve seen another S-class without the perk damaged, but I’m not sure. Haven’t payed too close attention.
But I definitely noticed that the one with the perk has never been truly damaged.
I don’t understand, how did you get from frigate missions to that statement, can you give me some examples?
Because I was about to complain about the opposite, that it loses so many of my discoveries. These frigate logs we talk about are lost after you close the window! Completed missions are nowhere tracked. You can’t compare starships or review sold starships. How many of these anomalous encounters have you had while pulsing, and where, and what did they give you? You don’t know because it’s not logged. Systems I scan without landing don’t remember any planet details (possibly fixed since last week?). I could upload years of “waypoints” on my discoveries screen and it does not even record the local coordinates, I’ll never find these waypoints again - at least not using the current GUI. You can’t even get a log of recently visited systems…
Would a spacefaring society treat daily discovery of new planets like we treat our daily commute? Heck, most mobiles have recorded more data about boring commutes than our traveler about their most exciting discoveries…
Heck, most mobiles have recorded more data about boring commutes than our traveler about their most exciting discoveries…