Snowforged Team is back here to celebrate the 3rd Anniversary and continue Starfall Tactics development along with short updates here

This past year appeared to be very eventful: we had a lot of fun with having the first Starfall Tactics Winter Cup which we, also for the first time, live-streamed on our Twitch Channel. And we certainly have some plans on making another tournament along with the next test - and that's really good news for all who love pvp in Starfall Tactics here Besides, there were four important tests: two Faction Wars tests where we tested many features for the MMO part, including ability to capture territories; a One-Week test to check new Ranked matches system and make a tournament; and a Character Test where we tested a huge update for the MMO mode.

That was a very exciting and productive year as the project got a lot of updates and meaningful changes: dozens of new ships and modules, new ranked matches system, new interface, ship progression, huge space structures, House (guild) system, carrier, new races, mining, Challenges, Personal Space structures, strategic resources and much, much more. We hope that upcoming year will bring even greater events, tests and updates as we come closer to the open stage.

And of course we have some news:

Crafting is a huge and important part of the game: it was implemented previously in the most basic form, for crafting ships. Now, as more resource types and ways to get them are to be added, we extend this system to something greater.

To build something you need a project - which is a single disposable thing you can get through many ways: acquire by leveling up, find as loot from NPC ships and bosses, get from research stations or black markets, buy from various space markets for IGC or just get by any other way.

The same way is going to be used to craft equipment. Equipment crafting also requires some time to be completed, depending on the complexity of the certain construction - you will see a timer saying how much time left until your equipment will be assembled and ready to be used.

There are other important things we should mention here:

• To craft faction equipment like special Nebulord lasers you will need, for example, a couple copies of usual laser, some resources and special parts which can be salvaged only from Nebulrod ships. That works for all equipment from NPC factions.
• There is an equipment you can get only or mainly by crafting it.
• Some projects can allow you to craft a pack of equipment - 10 Screechers autoguns, as an example.
• To craft something you will always need a project. Project is a thing of a single use only, so if you want to craft two Screechers Helskors, you need two projects.
• Projects are not account-wide items: each character should get them by their own.
• In addition to ship equipment, you will be also able to craft other stuff: for example - special consumables which are used to establish Personal Space Structures.
  

If you played some other MMO games, this crafting system should be familiar for you - it's pretty usual for many games and yet enough comfortable along with being entertaining - at least, you don't need to spend hours sitting and watching at grass. Instead, you just enjoy your playtime while collecting all the necessary resources, fight NPC factions in different events, explore the Galaxy or engage into battles with rivals who has a cargo full of precious resources.

We've also added a 750 long ship for Deprived faction, battleship Kolgrim:

We continue working on important game aspects, and this week we also have some news to share:

- Vanguard Battleship - Tizona

The next Battleship is joining Vanguard faction - Tizona. This ship looks just as great as you could imagine and sometimes can remind one famous enough spacecraft: 

Eclipse Battleship is also joining us next week - check out for updates on our Sketchfab page!

- Hexagonal Maps

A small, but nice improvement which is going to make your life in MMO mode more comfortable and logical: Hexagonal Maps.

In addition to their special form, they have a couple of other features: place, where you enter the hex on the Galaxy Map, directly affects on the place, where you can appear on the map. For example, if you chase your enemy and attack him from the top right side, you will enter your fleet from this top right side on the battlefield.

There are other changes which affect the way you leave the battle: Once the first ship of yours reaches the rim of the map and crosses it, other edges become inactive - red - and all remaining ships in your fleet can leave the battle only by crossing the same edge.

We hope that all these changes can help you clearly imagine the battlefield and understand it better.

- Ship Repairing

In the MMO mode, even if you lose the whole fleet, you have no penalties except of lost cargo. So, the loss of the single ship is not that painful here. Moreover, sometimes you can meet situations when after being defeated you can almost immediately jump into another battle, just spamming enemies in your system. And this situation doesn't look really great at all - your ships with hundreds and thousands of people on them become just a junk, a consumable with no limit you can sacrifice without any significant loss. Of course, a permanent loss of the ship would be too much here, so we decided to change our repairing system a little bit.

Until that moment, you could repair your ships on special Repair Stations in Open Space for IGC and repair & get back your destroyed ships for free - on Mothership. Now, if you get your ships destroyed on Galaxy Map, they can't be immediately returned into your Detachment. Instead, they'll have a repair time - don't worry, it's not going to last for ages - just a short period to make you value them a little more. Their repair time also depends on the class and construction complexity for each ship. At the same time, we are thinking about removing Repair Stations from the map, reworking them or just leave it as an additional way to repair your ship.

The autumn has come and we are happy to meet the new season

Sunrise, Eclipse Battleship

The third Battleship which belongs to Eclipse faction is already here! Classic eclipse design of Sunrise brings you another ship to admire, use it as an effective assault force and a part of you great fleet.

Survival mode & Loot Boxes

Just a couple tests ago Survival mode got an update which brought many cool features, including special loot boxes. These loot boxes could appear after certain enemy waves and give you a significant amount or IGC and XP if you collect them.

Due to all the changes - extended crafting system and resources in particular, we decided to modify these boxes to let them fit actual concept better.

Now loot boxes in Survival mode, instead of IGC and XP, give you special resource - Neitherium. This resources will be automatically converted to IGC on Survival completion.

And Cheers to you from the Snowforged Team and thanks once again for staying with us! With hope that our happy faces will make you smile a little more this week

Until that moment, Starfall Tactics had just some characters, which presented their faction to give you a general vision and understanding. Now, as the time has come to start creating quest lines - at least for introductions and tutorials - the need to implement new characters arises. And today we are lifting the veil from new faces you will see while playing the game.

First of all, let's look at another set of faction portraits - this time for pirate factions. All of them - P.Y.R.A.M.I.D., Screechers and Nebulords were presented as ships and abstract guys - you could only guess how they look like from their ship designs and descriptions. You could say that knowing them in face is not that important for the game where everything you see on the screen is your fleet consisting from ships...But if you know the personality and see the face of the enemy, everything becomes just a little bit more real and personal. All in all, we fight not against ships but against a whole faction which consists from humans (at least in this case), right?

So let's have a look at typical representants of three pirate bands - P.Y.R.A.M.I.D., Screechers and Nebulords:

Since we started creating portraits, patrolman of Eclipse, Deprived and Vanguard also got pictured:

And that's not all: Starfall Tactics Universe does have more personalities to present: today we are glad to introduce you the first three Eclipse and Deprived characters along with their short bios!

These characters are going to help you learn game basics and will tell you different stories in missions once we implement quest system which already stands on the doorstep: we already started preparing technical basis for them, giving it soem time between other important tasks.

In addition to portraits, we are going to create animated 3D models for each of these new characters - they will talk with you during various missions, encounters, events and just anywhere we need them speaking. Although Starfall Tactics is not a very story oriented game, we strive to make all game aspects both qualitative and interesting for you to try: that's where our game designers, programmers and artists will unite to make all the best quests and characters for you.

Making and animating a set of characters along with writing quest scenarios is not an easy task, so expect it to fully arrive into the game not earlier when Starfall Tactics comes to early access. But when it does arrive - expect it to be great

And here are they:

Sketches, not actual in-game models

• Assistant Alan Lee, Eclipse

Many implants allow Alan Lee to aggregate and analyze tons of information in real time, so he successfully combines roles of secretary and first assistant while staying effective and observant. He always has his own opinion and does not hesitate to share it, but don't really like getting into direct confrontation. Alan is also a very faithful person and it's definitely not a typical quality for members of Eclipse corp., where everything has a certain price.

• Huntmaster Ollaya, Deprived

Ollaya is 40 y.o. huntress who has repeatedly proved her talent as a leader and a strategist. She clearly understands Vanguard and Eclipse psychological behavior models, which directly affects her success on the battlefield and makes her indispensable. Refuses to take the post of the Sachem as she prefers the Hunt itself with its incomparable sense of danger, challenge and triumph.

• Businessman Mr. Evan Van der Hallen, Eclipse

Mr. Evans is a great businessman with an extremely extensive field of interests and dozens of expensive high-quality implants, carefully hidden all over his body. This exemplary family man, who already has several great-grandchildren over 12 years old, made his fortune on fraud with securities.
 

Another thing we would love to add into the game is a faction progression. Basically, it gives a real goal and a reason to actually participate in wars for territories not just for the fact of dominance, but also to get profits for your fleet and the whole faction you belong to. Faction progression is directly connected with Strategic Resources feature we talked about in June: "A certain level of income of each of the Strategic Resources opens access to some kind of factional equipment or ship."

There are three types of Strategic Resources you can find on planets in Inner Regions (a contested space where you can meet pirates and other rivals):

• Radioactive metals - higher income levels of this resource make new weapons available for purchase on your home planet.
• Superconductors - give you access to unique special modules.
• Noble gases - allow you to get new ship modifications on new income levels.

The higher income level of a resource faction has for the past several hours, the greater things you can acquire: there are 5 income levels in total, each of them gives exclusive rewards you won’t be able to find anywhere else. They are also different for every faction. All these rewards can be purchased on home planets by spending a certain amount of reputation points which you, as a faithful faction member, earned while helping your faction.

For example, Noble gases income levels give you access to the following ships:

• Lvl.1 - battlecruiser "Glow Reflection", Regent modification
• Lvl.2 - battlecruiser "Dazzling Spark", Eureka modification
• Lvl.3 - battleship "Solar Winds", Sunrise modification
• Lvl.4 - battleship "Aureola", Paragon modification
• Lvl.5 - dreadnought "Halo", Premier modification

All ship modifications are going to have special skins, so you will surely recognize them:  

 
Each Commander can get unlimited number of each reward, unless he or she runs out of reputation points. These items might be or might not be included into ranked mode - it highly depends on balance issues and current set of equipment available for Ranked Mode.

We already started preparing all the necessary equipment, and here is a short list of Vanguard weapons, which they can get for higher Radioactive metals income:

• Lvl.1 "Stingray", Kinetic, size 1x4 - Electromagnetic kinetic weapon, accelerating the projectile to ultra-high speeds along 2 rails. Pierces through ships.
• Lvl.2 "Large CQC Laser", Energy, size3x2 - CQC laser modification of bigger size.
• Lvl.3 "Tornado Rocket Launcher", Kinetic, size 3x2 - Rocket Launcher modification with 8000m range and average rate of fire comparable to Hurricane Rocket Launcher.
• Lvl.4 "Frag cannon", Kinetic, size 3х3 - Middle range cannon with increased crew damage. Has low firing rate, fires with single shells.
• Lvl.5 "Volcano", Energy, size 3х2 - Blaster machine gun. Weapon dispersion increases with time, while cooldown - decreases.

Eclipse faction relies on energy weapons - so here is their list of rewards:

• Lvl.1 "Assault Laser", Energy, size 2x2 - Medium Laser analogue - has less range and more DPS.
• Lvl.2 "Thunderbolt", Energy, size 1x3 - Plasma Missile Launcher, has 9000 range.
• Lvl.3 "Lancet", Kinetic, size 1x3 - Small Gauss Cannon analogue.
• Lvl.4 "Assault Plasma Cannon", Energy, size 2x2 - Plasma Cannon with lower range and decreased cooldown.
• Lvl.5 "Evaporator", Energy, size 1x4 - Large Heat laser with a very long range.

In a previous post we haven't mentioned one important fact about faction equipment and ships: although they depend on different resources, they are connected in a certain way. All ships and equipment designed so that the first income level of each resource, for example, allows you to assemble a certain ship build - Blazing Fist modification with Stingray laser and Scouting drone module. In other words, each faction ship modification constructed to easiliy fit modules and weapons you get for the same income levels of other resources. We hope that this system is going to motivate you to maintain the same income level of each resource and look for new territories you can conquer.

Now let's come back to our faction equipment lists:

Deprived weapon

• Lvl.1"Storm Rocket Launcher", Kinetic, size 1x2 - weapon, designed to hit small and maneuverable targets. Launches several rockets at a time, has average firing rate, good burst damage but lower DPS (damage per second).
• Lvl.2 "Reconstruction Beam", Energy, size 2x2 - equipment for remote (up to 6000m) repairservices. Uses laser ray focus to connect damaged coating elements, delivers subatomic gel to the damaged.
• Lvl.3 "Eradicate Cannon", Kinetic, size 4x2 - battery, which shoots with exploding shells and permanently damages target ships so they can never be fully repaired.Shoots with several projectiles, just like a usual shotgun. Lowers maximum ship armor.
• Lvl.4 "Plasma Dissolver", Energy, size 2x4 - Heavy Plasma Cannon modification with increased range.
• Lvl.5 "Valkyrie", Kinetic, size 3x3- rocket tower, which guides rocket flight and immediately launches another rocket once it hits target ship. It means that at closer distances it has higher firing rate.

_  
Here are all new weapons for Vanguard, Eclipse and Deprived:

Faction special modules

• "Scouting Drone" - Vanguard, lvl.1, activatable - Drone scout. Moves in a straight line and reveals everything on its way.
• "Omicron Generator" - Deprived, lvl.1, activatable - Creates a special area which deals damage to enemies and heals friendly ships for the same amount. Has limited duration.
• "Force Weapon Reload" - Eclipse lvl.3, activatable - Forced reload. As a matter of urgency, makes all weapons ready to fire. Deals damage to ship structure on activation.
• "Selfstasis module" - Deprived, lvl.3, activatable - Module, which puts an initial ship into special stasis for a limited amount of time: it drastically increases recovery rate for structure, armor and shields.
• "Sabotage Squad" - Vanguard, lvl.4, activatable - Boarding module which has a sabotage squad instead of usual troopers. Turns off ship functional systems (modules).

Vanguard ships

• Lvl.1 - battlecruiser "Blazing Fist", Curtana modification
• Lvl.2 - battlecruiser "Iron Guard", Tarnhelm modification
• Lvl.3 - battleship "Esprit de corps", Tizona modification
• Lvl.4 - battleship "Spirit of Rage", Ichaival modification
• Lvl.5 - dreadnought "God of War", Mjolnir modification

We know that you've been waiting for this since previous test and here we are with the greatest news of the day, answering your main question and revealing the next test date: Starfall Tactics NPC Factions test starts 26th October and ends 5th November!

This time you are going to see a lot of changes and new content in the MMO part of Starfall Tactics: new factions, resource system, crafting and basic quests are going to bring you completely new feelings along with all other changes we've been working on during these long summer and autumn days.

And that's not all the good news: As we already mentioned, along with this test, we are holding another important event on 3th and 4th November: the second test Tournament!

This Tournament is a really important event for the game as it helps us see the game from another, player side, get possible problems, balance issues and, of course, gives some inspiration to us and a lot of fun to players

So, at the moment we are preparing the game for the test - adding new content, fixing critical bugs and just make all new features work together well, and there is definitely some other news about new stuff we would love to share here:

New Faction Modules:  

• Perfect Sensor, P.Y.R.A.M.Y.D., activatable - On activation shows all enemy ships on the map for a short period of time.
• Nebula Jump Module, Nebulords, activatable - Allows warping your ship into any nebula on the map.
• Robber Gang, Nebulords, activatable - Allows robbing enemy ships: takes away enemy cargo.

Pirate bases are bringing surprises in its turn and make raids more exciting with new special abilities!

• Screechers Mothership uses special Self Destruction module with a bigger explosion range - this explosion is able to easily destroy your frigates.
• P.Y.R.A.M.Y.D. launches a strong gravity impulse, which pushes all ships away, even if they are really far from the Mothership.
• Nebulord technologies allow their Mothership to warp away from you in certain situations.

Other updates

Outer regions of the space in Starfall Tactics are not just a bunch of systems with pirates, their bases and rare resources. There are also some planets inhabited by neutral people who just want to live a normal life on their own, outside of this massive faction conflict.

As they live very close to pirate-owned systems, they often require your help in protection from pirate bands and sometimes can order resource delivery - get ready to complete a couple tasks for a great reward. At the same time neutral planets often have Trading posts, offering you various equipment and ship projects - there is only a limited amount of them, but product range of Trading posts is periodically updated, so you can get back there with time.

 

New resources already were announced in previous updates, and now we are just showing three of them which will be used for crafting and can be mined in asteroid fields:

• Arkonite - common resource. Can be found in any rich asteroid field.
• Adamantane - common resources, which are more rare and more valuable than Arkonite, but still can be found in every rich asteroid field.
• Neitherium - rare resource for high-level crafting. Can be found only in rich asteroid fields in Outer Regions. Very expensive.

The game looks cool! It's hard to get an overview of the game though with such large amnounts of info. Maybe try to focus on your main selling points?

I would also be careful with using the term "next-gen". It's so over-used it starts to just sound negative and pretentious. Especially since your videos and screenshots looks rather retro. Thats's not a bad thing, but calling it "next gen"probably is. Compared to other games, let's say starcraft 2 (which is itself definitely not "next gen" now)

On 20.10.2017 at 3:20 PM, suliman said:

The game looks cool! It's hard to get an overview of the game though with such large amnounts of info. Maybe try to focus on your main selling points?

I would also be careful with using the term "next-gen". It's so over-used it starts to just sound negative and pretentious. Especially since your videos and screenshots looks rather retro. Thats's not a bad thing, but calling it "next gen"probably is. Compared to other games, let's say starcraft 2 (which is itself definitely not "next gen" now)

May be you are right here... Bur really, there is too much stuff to tell about. I think I should make another short post telling about genera; features then

The New Frontiers Open Test has just started! Hurry up to be the first who checks out all the great things Snowforged Team has prepared for you: new NPC faction, Rings system, PvP mode, ships, weapons, mining system, tasks, pirate fleets, detachments, recall system, ship model progression and more - read the full list of changes here. Open up the door to endless adventures and explore all the seven Rings of Starfall Tactics Galaxy!

No keys required - the test is open to everyone! To start playing Starfall Tactics follow these instructions:

1. Register on starfalltactics.com
2. Download Starfall Tactics launcher here.
3. Install Launcher - it will download the game client. Remember, that the game is not available for x32 systems during tests.
4. Push the "Play" button and start playing Starfall Tactics!
5. Join in the discussion with other Commanders at our Forum and on Discord Channel
   

Got troubles or want to report something? Use #help & #bugreport Discord channel, create a topic on the forum or send a letter to support@snowforged.com!

So, what's new?

What's new? Well, there are a lot of things to check:

• New PvP mode - Domination
• Custom games
• New recipes
• New tasks
• New ships - battlecruisers
• Weapons
• Party system for the MMO mode
• Recall system which allows you to warp in additional ships on the Galaxy map
• The first neutral faction - Mineworkers
• Ship model progression
• Rebalance for special modules, shields, armor, weapons, layouts and hull characteristics.
• Reworked pirate fleets
• Rings system
• Equipment quality system
• Reworked detachments
• Cool quest rewards
• Special fleet abilities for the global map (to be announced in the next WIP!)
• New visual ship customization abilities
• And various improvements, designed to make your playtime even more enjoyable!
  

The test is over and it's been a while since we posted previous portion of updates. So todays post will be a bit longer than usual And, well, here is the short list of changes:

1) Extended Character Progression system - New Frontiers test has brought a great feature - special fleet skills for the MMO mode. And it was just the first step to the extended character progression: Now we are going to bring more awesome abilities along with the new system - players will get new "talents" with each level - active or passive abilities, which give certain advantages during the game in the MMO mode.

Players start without action slots at all, but with time they get more of them until they reach a maximum number. Action slots are used to equip special fleet abilities.[/i]

New Frontiers test has brought you a great feature - special fleet skills for the MMO mode. And it was just the first step to the extended character progression! Now we are going to bring more awesome abilities along with the new system: you will get new "talents" with each level - active or passive abilities, which give certain advantages during the game in the MMO mode.

The first level up. You start without action slots at all, but with time you get more of them until you reach a maximum number. Action slots are used to equip special fleet abilities.

There will be a wide variety of different abilities available, which gives you a great option for fleet customization. However, the maximum number of abilities you can use at the same time is limited to 6 (can be changed).

And here are a couple of upcoming passive skills:

Ability, which passively increases your vision radius on the star system map. It won't give such a bonus as active analog (Advanced Sensor), however, it is greatly compensated as you have no need to wait for a cooldown and just permanently have increased vision. However, nothing stops you from using both abilities - it's a good choice if you are going to explore a lot of new systems.

This ability passively increases your speed while you travel across the Galaxy in Starfall Tactics. Just as passive vision boost, it won't give as much speed as active analogue, but can definitely make it all more comfortable: you can run away from pirates much faster, while also having a nice advantage if you chase someone.

2) Getting detachments

Detachment system has already made a long way through reworks and improvements in Starfall Tactics and, as we hope, became even better than before. Still, as character progression system gets significant update and extension we've described above, detachments can't find a place as a reward on level up anymore.

In exchange, new detachments become available once you create the next Warp Stabilizer and get new access level.

3) Other improvements

• Repair all button is now available in the Shipyard - now you won't need to manually push this button on each ship if you want to get all of them back.
• Filters for Mothership inventory - we've decided to add the same equipment filters as in the ship editor in Shipyard, so now you won't get lost in hundreds of different things you have.
• Weapon groups - this improvement will make your ship panel take less space by hiding weapon icons when you select ships if there are too much of them. For example, instead of 10 auto gun icons, it will only show one icon with the number of guns installed.
• Disabling cargo boxes and mining resources on minimap - now you can hide cargo box and resource icons from the minimap.
• Ability to see layouts of unavailable ships - now you can check the layout of all faction ships which you don't have yet.
• Move a full stack of items by pressing a single combination of buttons - with SHIFT+Right Click.
• And more.
  

4) Galaxy Map

Galaxy Map has always been a very important subject of various changes and improvements as that's a very important part of the game which helps you navigate in the Starfall Tactics Galaxy. And now we are working on making the whole map and territory borders, in particular, look better - here is a work in progress screenshot of how it all looks now:

5) Domination mode adjustment

After past Domination Tournament it was decided to keep the new mode mostly without global changes, but still, we wanted to somehow reward players for destroying enemy ships there. So, we've implemented a special reward for destroying ships: now you get 10% of the Warp Point cost of the enemy ship as winning points.

6) Plasma Arc Module

Along with all the great improvements and content we will tell you about in the next articles, we've decided to create just a couple of modules to help you destroy ship swarms you are likely to meet when engaging certain pirate fleets:

Plasma Arc Module is an activatable special module. By activating it, you can choose a target within a certain radius which will immediately get plasma damage. After hitting the first target, Plasma Arc module automatically chooses the next target which must be close enough and deals damage to it, then gets to the next one. It can't hit the same ship twice and deactivates when there are no eligible ships in range.

7)B.H.S. Launcher

The second module is a close friend of the Plasma Arc as it also jumps from one ship to another - however, there are several important differences:

B.H.S. Launcher creates a projectile on activation, which immediately goes to the target ship and deals damage to it. After that, it chooses the next enemy ship within range, gets to it and also deals damage. This effect stops if there are no ships in range or if it reaches the maximum number of "jumps". Unlike Plasma Arc, it can hit the same ship twice, so it can be effective against smaller swarms.

8) Binary Stars

If you start exploring the real Universe, you will be surprised how many interesting things and unsolved mysteries there are in the world. For example, while we usually think of a star system as of a single star with some planets around it, in fact, there can be more than one star in the system. Did you know, that about half of the stars visible in the night sky are binary stars? Yes, that's true and we decided to pay respect to this fact and add some binary stars to the Starfall Tactics galaxy:

Wow, looks like that's all for now:)  Check out news section on starfalltactics.com in case you need more info on these updates.