Star Conflict: No, you can't sell ships

[Wardog]

Is anyone playing or played Star Conflict?
http://star-conflict.com/ (You can also get it on Steam).

I've been playing it for a while, but haven't seen any discussions of it here.


It's a free-to-play multiplayer space-shooter. (Often described as "World of Tanks in Space", but I haven't played that so I don't know how accurate the comparison is).

The designers seem keen on the "rule of three": there are three factions, three main ship classes, each with three sub-classes, and three damage types.

It's mostly PvP, but there are some PvE scenarios as well. Most of the game modes are variations of "controll the objective" gameplay:

Game modes:
Domination: There are three objectives. Each team starts with 100 points. Controlling an objective causes the opposing team to lose points; the more you control, the faster they lose them. First team to zero loses. You have unlimited respawns if you die.

Beacon Hunt: Like Domination, but only one beacon is active at any one time. You cannot respawn while your team controls the beacon.

Beacon Dapture: Like Domination, but both teams start with three beacons under their control. If a beacon is captured, you can't retake it. You have limited respawns. Win by capturing all enemy beacons, or destroying all their ships.

Detonation: Pick up a ball bomb. Fly to enemy base. Destroy base. Destroy all enemy bases to win.

Combat Recon: One member of each team is randomly selected to be the "captain". The captain gets a damage buff. Eveyone else gets unlimited respawns as long as the captain is alive. Destroy the enemy captain to win. (Or kill the most ships, if no/both captains are killed).

Factions:
There are three factions. Each faction has its own lines of ships to unlock, with their own bonuses, but you don't have to fight for a faction to do so. Completing missions for a faction earns Loyalty, which can be used to upgrade weapons and gear, and you can change faction (now, with no penalty) whenever you like. (Choosing a faction used to be much more significant, but isn't any more).

The Empire. Pretty much what you would expect from the name (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheEmpire). Has better armour and weapons, but tends to be slow and with weak shields.
The Federation. Ditto (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFederation). Has the fastest ships, and balanced armour and shields.
Jericho. High-tech cyborg religious fanatics. (It makes sense in context... possibly). Good shields.


Ship classes:
There are three ship classes: Interceptors, Fighters, and Frigates. Each subclass has a unique special ability. They can also be upgraded with various active modules (give extra abilities when activated), modifiers (passive buffs and stat modifiers) and weapons, munitions (modify weapon stats), and missiles.
Interceptors:
Fast, agile, but (usually) fragile and with limited firepower. Can capture objectives faster than other ships.
Recon: Fast. Special module accelerates ship to super-speed for a couple of seconds. Gets the best bonus to capturing objectives. Very good at capturing objectives. Not so good in an actual fight. Also very good at crashing into asteroids. Available to Empire, and at higher ranks, to Federation.

Covert Ops: The fastest 'ceptor (not counting the Recon's special ability). Has bonuses to weapon power, and the special module puts a DoT on its target. Active modules for further boosting damage, or stealth). Available to Federation, and later to Jericho.

EMC: Slowest, toughest inty. Active modules debuff targets. Special ability grants temporary invulnerability (and immobility), and stuns any enemies nearby when it wears off. Availabel to Jericho, and later to Empire.

Fighters:
General-purpose ships with good balance of speed, toughness, and firepower.
Command: Tank/buffer. Slowest, toughest, and least firepower. Special ability gives it an extra, temporary shield that absorbs all damage at teh expense of energy. Active modules give defensive or offensive buffs to nearby allies. Available to Jericho/Empire.

Gunship: Medium speed, medium toughness, better firepower. Special ability gives temp bonus to speed, agility, and rate of fire. Empire/Federation.

Tackler: fastest but weakest fighter. Special ability is a cloaking device. Active modules are mostly debuffs affecting speed or damage resistance. Mainly designed for dealing with interceptors. Federation/Jericho.

Frigates:
Big, slow, tough, have specialised roles.
Guard: Tank / area denial / debuffer. Toughest ship, and has a special ability that boosts resistance vs. a particular damage type. (Unlike most special abilities, this is always on, and "activating" it just cycles between which damage it protects against). Special modules slow nearby enemies, zap nearby enemies, and shoot down incoming missiles. Jericho/Federation.

Engineer: Healer / drone controller. Periodically launches a guard drone that shoots at nearby enemies, and can be sacrificed to restore shields. Active modules heal nearby allies, or place barriers, repair stations, or warp gates. Federation/Empire.

Long-range. Slow, fragile, has more guns than other frigates. Empire gets a "sniper" frigate, Jericho gets a guided-torpedo frigate. A handful of LRF players seem to be really dangerous, but unfortunately most players tend to sit at the spawn point and do nothing to help capture the objectives. Empire/Jericho.

Weapons:
Each ship can be fitted with one weapon type (you can change between matches). I won't list all the types (there are several, with different ones for the different ship classes), but they are all fall into one of three damage tpes: EM (good vs. shield, poor vs. armour), Kinetic (good vs. armour, poor vs. shields), or Thermal (balanced against both).


I think it's quite good fun, although it can be annoyingly grindy at times. (When I started, you unlocked ships by advancing your faction rank, but now you have to level up individual ships to unlock the next one in the tree).

You don't have to pay anything to play, but you can use "Gold Standards" (which you buy with real money) to get various bonuses to credits and loyalty (the other in-game currencies) and synergy (ship experience), upgrade equipment, and unlock premium ships. There is a bit of a debate as to whether it is "pay to win" or just "pay to grind less" (everything you can get with gold standards you can also buy with credits/loyalty or get as random loot drops, except the premium ships which are equivilent to max-synergy normal ships).

[tigerusthegreat]

Looks interesting, how customizable are the ships?

[Woodzyowl]

I've been playing for a while (to the degree that I just got my first T4 ship). If anybody played it before and found it fairly lackluster, it has improved greatly since that one game critic wrote a video review of it. I'm Woodzyowl in game.

How customizable the ships are depends on what kind of customization you're talking about.

In terms of what they can do: you can change everything that you wouldn't expect integrated into a ship (specifically the hull, shielding, and engines). However, you can get modules that will modify those three aspects slightly.

In terms of visual customization: most of the ships are already pretty sweet looking, but you can get them recolored or put emblems on them for a small number of Gold Standards. The shapes of the ships is unchangeable.

[Wardog]

Further to the customization:

Each ship has one weapon slot, one munition slot, and one missile slot.

Depending on the ship rank, they also have 2 to 4 active module slots, and 0 to 9 ship modifier slots.
Most active modules are sub-class specific, but some are generic (e.g. healing, anti-missile flares, etc).

Ship modifiers are classified as hull, shield, engine, capacitor, or computer modifiers, and different ships have different number and types of slot. (E.g. the Rank 5 Jerico guard frigate has shield slots and one capacitor slot, while the Rank 5 Fed guard has 2 shield and 1 engine slots).

Hull mods generally affect hull (hp, damage resistance, regeneration), and shield mods generally do the same for your shield. Capacitor mods affect your energy (used to power active mods), generally affecting max or regeneration rate of energy. Engine mods generally affect your speed, acceleration, afterburners, or agility.

Of the above four type, most improve a relevant stat a bit, or improve them more at the expense of some other stat, or sacrifice them to improve something else. Some have affects that aren't so obviously related to hull/shield/engines/capacator, e.g. a hull mod that improves missile cooldowns, or a capacator mod that makes you invunerable for a second if your hull drops below 15%.

Computer mods tend to be more miscellaneous effects like improve scanner range, target lock time, crit chance, etc.

There are 4 weapon types for each ship class (except in Tier 1, where you just get 1).
Generally, interceptor guns are short range, fighter guns are medium range, and frigate guns are long range. Very roughly, you have three "averagish" guns covering the three damage type, plus a forth weapon that behaves more unusually.
Interceptor:
"Pulse laser" (short-range high-dps hitscan weapon)
"Plasma gun" (projectile weapon)
"RF Blaster" (Short-range high dps version of plasma gun. Prolonged firing reduces accuracy)
"Shrapnel Cannon" (basically a shotgun)

Fighter:
"Ion emiter" (Short-range hitscan weapon. Also reduces target's damage resistance)
"Singularity cannon" (Aka the bubble gun, or the beachball. Big, slow-moving projectiles that can go through multiple targets)
"Assault railgun" (Good general-purpose machinegun).
"Gauss cannon" (Long range, slow-firing, low-dps railgun. Can be charged up for more damage).

Frigate:
"Beam cannon": long-range hit-scan weapon.
"Heavy blaster": medium range, and the only laser (thermal) gun that is not a hitscan beam. Shoots several projectiles with each shot; rate of fire starts low, but increases the longer you hold down fire.
"Positron cannon": long-range projectile weapon. Repeated firing improves the accuracy.
"Coil mortar": Medium range explosive projectiles. Very good in PvE, when facing groups of weak enemies.

Weapons and modules have 4 levels (the way you upgrade them was changed in a recent patch).
You buy the Mk1 version with credits, and can upgrade it to Mk2 using either credits or an upgrade kit (got as random loot when you win a match). Upgrading to Mk3 is done with Loyalty vouchers (obtained by completing missions for a faction) or with Gold Standards (real money). Upgrading to Mk4 is doen with upgrade kits or artefacts (both loot drops).

Munitions alter the behaviour of weapons (generally a small % bonus to damage or, depending on the weapon type, a larger change to one stat (damage/range/rate of fire/projectile speed/spread/ overheating) at the expense of another.

For missile you generally have a choice of either a medium range, medium (thermal) damage homing missile, or, depending on ship class and tier, something more interesting (different damage types, a salvo of non-homing missiles, mines, a super-powerful but nigh-impossible-to-use death beam, etc).

Edited to add:
The other form of customiztion are "Implants", which affect all your ships, and allow you to e.g. improve your missiles (+ range, or + speed and agility, or + damage), or improve your active mods (powefuller effects, or reduced cooldown, or reduced energy consumption), etc.

[tigerusthegreat]

started playing, it seems like a lot of fun and a style of gameplay I haven't had in a while (the ship control is really intuitive with a mouse and keyboard, I wonder if joystick support is there/any good).

Only ahve my little T1 frigate, but I like it so far. Did a litle PVP (did better than I thought) and PVE (which was fun).

Username: MarshallTigerus if anyone wants to add me.

[GloatingSwine]

Can you still farm points in the PvE modes by playing a Command ship and turning on the buff modules from the start, thereby getting assists for almost every kill in the whole match?

I loved that.

[Wardog]

Can you still farm points in the PvE modes by playing a Command ship and turning on the buff modules from the start, thereby getting assists for almost every kill in the whole match?

I loved that.

Yes. Yes you can.

(And engineers can do the same, with the added bonus of damage assists from their drones).

[tigerusthegreat]

Yes. Yes you can.

(And engineers can do the same, with the added bonus of damage assists from their drones).

I just wish my engineer hull wasn't such a frickin slowboat. I feel like a sitting duck in the danged thing, even if I like the lasers much better than my railguns (no leading targets, yes please)

[Woodzyowl]

Bad news: Now we can sell ships. At 25% of the original price.

Link of doom (http://forum.star-conflict.com/index.php?/topic/21658-star-conflict-obt-v099/)