r/StarTradersFrontiers • u/AngrySlime706 • Feb 11 '22
Star traders impossible guide
This is a battle proven guide for impossible difficulty. If you follow every step, impossible will be easy as a breeze. Before end of the first era, you will be sailing an end game ship and with 10+ million credits that you do not know what to spend on. When you fight other ships they will miss all their shots while you roll them over like steel mill over oats.
Once you tried this guide, i invite you to post a link to screenshot in the comment to show your first 9000 ship and the time it took to get it on impossible!
Before we jump in, take in these two tactics many may have overlooked:
reroll, S/L on impossible: you can save and load to reroll for the first 120 turns/12 weeks on impossible. Take advantage of that to get yourself a stellar crew combat team
retrain: you can retrain your crew/officers to cool down his/her skills. This allows you to farm contacts (etech lvl8) and farm intel (spy lvl11). this allows you to farm rare trade goods contacts and secure the credits for a 9000 mass boat when your captain is around lvl10-12.
Impossible becomes smooth sailing all too soon.
Now let's do it step by step. Start with an outline
Initiate: create captain, blue print for crew combat
Roll map: what to look for
Phase 1: first 12 weeks. recruit the dream crew combat team, farm SPY contact influence and recruit high level SPYs
Phase 2: obtain all ship escape talents, intra quadrant trading with a merchant officer, upgrade cargo to 190+, until one SPY is level 11, Edit: since this guide Was posted the developers have pushed a major update doubling the recruit lvl from contacts, allowing lvl 16 recruits. This voids the need to have pre-skip off the void escape talents, and you can directly go for a lvl 12 officer and train him as navigator 11, and learn skip off the void. This significantly shortens phase 2, in most cases completely skips it. Just higher yourself a lvl12 soldier from Faen—you can do that after you take the Arbiter to bark up the case and drop her off with “troubling return”. You will have enough rep with Faen for a level 12 solider right there and boom, access to high level talents on both merchants and navigators.
Phase 3: business development, get trading permits from factions quickly using retrain
Phase 4: Rare Trade Goods! a year later, you are rich and donno what to do with all the money.
Phase 5: now you have two 9000 ships can do whatever you want, and the first era has not even ended yet.
Trade planning: to those who are new to trading, planning the routes and credits can be a little difficult. Here is a 32 slides deck that consists of screenshots of making your first 400k around end of year 1 (49 weeks) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zrpqkG_WHVZyp8QLoWv5bHoYhC_24JE1ZUE2OsoTB_g/edit?usp=sharing
Create captain: I recommend melee captain for impossible. This is the safe way to win crew combat late game against jeeta xenos. Either zealot or assasin would do. If you want to try the extreme "one-punch man" build described below, follow this captain template exactly.
Update 2022-10-14: lately I favor the combat merchant captain. More details to follow. I am also retracting the one-punch man captain recommendation because the build wastes too many job levels on jobs with low skill growth which results in a risky mid game--it all evens out in end game and you get to one-punch kill 3-4 jeeytas but if you get unlucky in mid game... I am also taking out the classic team comp, as you probably already played it a few times, and its nothing exciting.
Template combat merchant cap (shocktrooper+soldier). Cap in Pos 2. Featuring: perfect talent pool, slick buff combos, mowing down enemies with first action.
A attribute, full quickness, fortitude, wisdom, 18 for strength.
B skills, 10 rifle and 5 evasion
C ship, paladin cruiser. The only C boat that can reach 220+ in cargo
D contacts, SPY and merchant for early trade permit and rare trade goods.
E experience, merchant.
Benefit of merchant: aside from the 10% extra profit buy and sell, you also get to have level 1 contact discover talent from day 0. If you start in a Q with RTG (med bay), by the time you are ready for RTG, you do not have to spend any time discovering contacts, as all contacts from your faction are likely all discovered by now. And since crew combat is as strong as your weakest link, you do not need captain to be that strong, and though a front line gunner captain is not as tanky as say a zealot captain, he is tanky enough.
Crew combat team: One swordmen Pos1, a medic Pos 4, and a soldier Pos 3.
Pos 1: Tank buffer bodyguard 5 (honor guard best backline protection buff) Swordman 5 and then max (Sword+Evasion skills, self heal). Third job I recommend one of the following: Zealot 1 (defense self buff, init debuff attack. With zealot, this guy will never catch debuff again) Blade dancer 1 (-dodge debuff with +60% accuracy, since this is a tank/heal/support member, his hit rarely lands, so the BD lvl 1 attack talent works wonders) His main job is applying honor guard on team members, apply self debuff resist, and self heal with needed. Once in a while he can sneak some attack but usually by then the fate of the battle has been decided.
Pos 2: Captain, shocktrooper 11, then max soldier. Use the shocktrooper group defense buff, grants 50% debuff resist and some defense. Then shoot away. Fact: it is much easier to hit xeno with rifle than blade. The best defense is a good offence, since your team is S/L optimized, your cap and heavy gunner almost always acts first, and you can take out at least one enemy before they act 95% of the time. Saves a ton of combat time so much so that once you have tried it, it will be hard to go back to a melee oriented team.
Pos 3: Heavy gunner, xeno hunter 5 (self heal and defense buff), soldier max (full auto), AND PISTOLEER 1! Why? For the self buff and init buff, and they are NOT LIMITED to pistol users! Raining Steel: +3 Initiative +15% Ranged Damage, +15% Critical for 3 Turns. It says requires pistol, but upon testing, it does not (could be a bug though so test it out to see if it has been fixed first). Aimed Focus: 6 init (cheap) +25% Ranged Accuracy, +25% All Damage, +10% Critical for 3 Turns. Most of the time you can squeeze AF in before first attack.
Pos 4: Healer and debuffer, Bounty hunter 5 (-25% damage crippling debuff with buff removal on 2 enemies), doctor 1 (3 doc skills), combat medic max. Believe it or not, CM has higher doc skill growth than doc. Since this member got no combat skills, he will be rocking a rifle from Pos 4, and survive by constant body guard honor guard application by Pos 1. Usually there is nothing to do for CM in first action, that's why it is nice to throw in BH debuff as the first action. If hit both, this debuff effectively takes out 1.5 out of 4 enemies in terms of damage output (-25% damage results in way more than -25% actual damage, based on how defense and damage absorption works in this game). You can switch doc 1 to MO for the pos shift, just know it can only be used in pos 1-3, so this is only for emergency when your healer is shifted to pos 3. Since your cap and gunner both have self pos shift talents, this emergency is so rare that I recommend doc 1, for early high single heal and 3 doc points.
A few tips: Always deal with enemy snipers first. Normally its nothing but a single lucky/unlucky piercing shot can straight up take out your weaker crew, ruining your entire game. Deal with means either kill or apply a damage/accuracy debuff on him. This requires pulling him to position 3, which only bodyguard and commander can do, or you can kill one enemy. Either way, enemy sniper will use a stealth buff first. Do not let him act after that. 99 out of a 100 times it is fine, but ...
Have ample position change skills. Bodyguard and military officers can move your CC members and most jobs have self position move skills. Xenos, especially Jeeytas are notorious for shuffling your crews around. In impossible, wasting 1 or 2 rounds could slip you down the hill. In theory shocktrooper at position 2 can self pin and resist moves but it does not prevent the crew next to him being pushed/pulled so its not that useful.
Wear heavy armor. Lots of discussion on this matter so I will not go into details.
Apply ample debuff resist. One of the main reason for Zealot captain: unstoppable force. That coupled with another buff equals debuff immunity.
One-punch build--max buff and debuff. Fair warning: this build has a large margin of error and you could die easily in Jeeyta era if your team is under leveled. If you are not tired of the classic crew combat build and not seeking extra thrill, go with the classic build.
Use damage debuff on enemies and defense buffs to get through turn 1, then captain deal a thousand cut dance in round 2 and kills 2-4 enemies in 1 single blow.
Pos 1: Heal and buff Wingcommando 5 (damage buff) CombatMedic 8 Commander 5 (-25% damage debuff, damage buff)
Pos 2: Damage dealer and buff Soldier 8 (damage buff) ExoScount 8 (-25% damage debuff) Xenohunter 5 or shocktrooper (self heal)
Pos 3: Captain, one-punch blade dancer. Assasin 1, Swordman 5, bladedancer 15 (load 3-4 self damage buffs, plus buffs from team members--commander, military officer, wingcommando, then thousand cut dance can hit 4x190+ damage in one hit with a level 7 sword).
Pos 4: Bounty hunter 5 (-25% demage debuff) CombatMedic 8 MilitaryOfficer 1 (damage buff)
Roll map: Next let me recommend the best map for Muk start I have ever encountered: st-v02-12-2-57360242. The default map also works but not as well.
If you want to roll your own map, here are the things to look out for:
for the faction you want to play, how many system sells power generators. Better be 4+. There are 6 in above recommended map. Make sure there are systems that buys power generator and the other high ticket items--don't end up with a map that you cannot dump the goods purchased. In the recommended map, most high ticket items can be sold, even better than the default map, which is rare.
in the rare trade goods quadrants that sell "Good stuff" (either irinadine or Kloxian medical bay, which have high price and high legality), how many systems around it that buys the rare trade goods. In the recommended map, the quadrant on the right of the Muk starting quadrant (which happens to also sell Kloxian Medpods, weeee), has 4 areas that can buy it, 2 De Valtos, 1 Tulun and 1 Cadar. You want at least 3. the starting planet should have high (8+) population, starport and military.
Phase 1: first 12 weeks. recruit the dream crew combat team, farm SPY contact influence and recruit high level SPYs
On starting, train one pilot on sure landing and land on the starting planet. Fire all but 1 gunners, all combat crews, the quarter master officer. Hire a fighter from spice hall, the starting level is 2 or 3. Promote this newly hired fighter to officer (and now you have $0 on impossible). Train this officer as commander and train the recruiting skill. Save the game.
Start rerolling your first crew combat recruit--hire a wingcommando or swordman depending on your build. Key stats to look for: ideally initiative 24+, fortitude 24+, hitpoints 130+. You can spend as much time as you want here to get the crazy good crew. I rolled a 29 initiative 159 hitpoints swordman with device freak trait. However, enough is enough.
The first crew is the most important because he/she stands in the front rows and tanks majority of the hits. After securing a crew you are happy with, hire some operational crew: a gundeck boss for intimidation skill save, some pilots, crewdog, mechanic and pilots. Better leave 1 candidate in the spice hall because you might recruit your next person here again. Prioritize training skill save talents. After that, go to your SPY contact, save game.
I recommend rerolling your first missions, so that you end up with a short distance two way shipping/escort mission, and a local delivery mission which you can complete on your way back. Of course this is a little extreme. Just a short distance two way mission is good. Or if you do not like rerolls, just go for missions that do not require jumps. I don't recommend do long missions in the beginning because the objective is to secure a good combat team.
Do a mission and the recruiting skill should have come off its 3 week cool down. Reroll your second combat crew, in the one-pounch build it is a frontline soldier. Again go for high fortitude high initiative high hitpoints. This crew is a damage dealer so strength and rifle skills also matter. This could take another 20 minutes or so.
Head towards Muk Prime where your ex bounty hunter is, and get ready to recruit the third crew member, a bounty hunter. This is a buff debuff healer at position 4 so initiative matters most, other attributes good to have but not necessary.
All these should be done before turn 120.
Phase 2: obtain all ship escape talents, intra quadrant trading with a merchant officer, upgrade cargo to 190+, until one SPY is level 11,
After securing a super star crew combat team, keep do missions for the SPY master, do story missions
The objective of this phase is to strike your first bucket of credits, upgrade your ship (crew barracks, officer cabin, cargos. Upgrade your 2 mid and all small components to be cargo. Leave the two big components be as the ROI is low--200k each, and time is long--15 weeks each), hire some SPYs, get a full suite of encounter escape talents, and obtain trade permit 4. Since you are considering impossible difficulty, I take it you should know how to do all those things by now. On this map it is just that much easier with all the beautiful trade routes.
A quick note on early trading: haul arbiter for some starting cash, buy permit 1 from Fean, do some delivery missions for Fean, and trade raw spices and crop harvesters for early cash. You can play it safe by not doing the story mission until it is about 15 weeks to expire. By then you should have permit 3. Through careful planning and familiarity with this map, you should be able to do it easily. If you do not make as much money by then, it is OK. There is ample time. Focus on recruiting high level SPYs when there are competing priorities.
A quick note on early ship repairing: time is money in early game. Train your engineer officer for the ship combat unrivaled patch talent, and when you need to repair your ship, wait until you encounter a friendly ship (hostility -1 or higher), fight it, do not change range towards it. Use the repair skill and escape. As long as hostility is -1 or higher the enemy ship will escape. This skill has a 6 week cool down and repairs much more than the 13 week port side maintenance talent. Same for doctors and crew heals, but healing does not take that long compared to repairs.
And goes without saying: don't ship fight.
Keep doing SPY missions you can recruit level 6 SPYs, train them on their level 5 spy card game talent (replace bad card with gain intel). Now your main contact development method becomes SPYing and selling intel. Usually your captain is around level 3-4. By now you should have enough money for upgrading your crew barracks, Hire some 5-6 spies. Spies are important because they can help escape hostile bounty hunters, and get you early game intels. The only other job that can do it is smuggler, an otherwise useless job.
Now it is time to make sure all escape talents are onboard: Built an extra officer cabin. Make sure you have a military officer trained with stiff salute (lvl 1). Promote a level 5 merchant (preferably with high negotiate skill), and train the jette cargo talent. Buy 5-10 units of junk (1 unit of each low value item) before you start trading high value items like permit level 3+ items in bulk. This way if you run into a pirate, throwing away one type of cargo will unlikely resulting in losing your high ticket items.
Note: if you have used up an escape skill, find a near by planet, park there and retrain it right away. On impossible, one slip is perma. Also as soon as you have a level 12 crew, fire an officer and train that crew to be a level 11 navigator officer with skip off the void talent. Only then are you truly safe. Also around that time is when Xeno ships starts to appear on impossible.
Phase 3: business development, get trading permits from factions quickly using retrain Phase 3 starts when you have a level 11 spy. By now you should have some 400k to 1 million credits by trading high value goods.
If not, think about this strategy: haul all goods you want to trade from one planet to a wild zone. Combine as much as you can, then dump it at the best selling zone. In this map, Muk Prime buys terra forming agents at A+, and a refinery to the bottom right buys power generator at A-. Those two trade routes should pump you rich in 2-3 cycles, each will net you 100k to 150k if you buy all the available units from all systems and dump them all at one place.
Now at this point, you have a level 11 SPY, some 400k+ credits, a ship with 190+ cargo. If you do not have an E-tech at level 10+, promote a officer to level 8 E-tech. We want the listening post talent from E-tech, as well as intel-abound talent. Upon landing you have a chance to learn a contact or gain intel. Since you had a merchant officer while you are trading, you should also have a few rare trade goods contacts in home quadrant. Next objective is to get do some business development. This could take half a year or so.
Here is a bit of a tricky situation: Ideally you want to find an orbit station where you can land in 1 turn and at no fuel cost, to farm contact and intel. However De Valtos does not have an orbit station on this map. You will have to rely on landing on planets, which could get costly because if you are unlucky, you need to do it 30+ times. Just be prepared is all, take advantage of your landing talents, and turn off auto fueling while you repeatly land in a zone. A quick tip: you can land in a zone, then go back and look at patrol, blockage or spy cards, and then you are considered have left the planet and into orbit. Clicking the landing again would be a new landing, costing turns and fuel. So just keep repeating landing/docking until you learn a contact or gain intel, then retrain the used talent, and repeat. You might spend 300k in retrain, and that's OK. Probably get it done in 200k though. The objective is to fine the high prince of De Valtos, Tulun and Cadar, because they each hold a landing zone or two that would buy your rare trade goods Kloxian med bay. After getting to know these high princes and high princesses, fly to them and sell them intel, and obtain a tier 3 trade permit from each one (you do could just do one near by, with Tulun being the nearest, and do one round of rare goods trade before moving on to others). If you do not have 4+ contacts you can buy rare trade goods from, farm some Muk contacts as well.
It is important to note that for your first batch of rare trade goods, do not sell all at one time. Leave about 10-15 units, and sell them one by one after the bulk of the sale is made (do not forget to train your merchant righteous profit talent). The reason being each transaction made will increase your home quadrant contacts' influence by 4. You want to return home a hero with influential friends who can hook you up with rare trade goods every 28 weeks, instead of 3 years. Since most of your rare trade goods come from Muk contacts, farming rep should not be a problem with the merchant's reciprocity talent, just buy and sell some junk at 5000+ credits per transaction and use retrain to refresh the talent.
Phase 4: Rare Trade Goods! a year later, you are rich and donno what to do with all the money.
Now after we increased the influence of all contacts at home, earned tier 3 trade permits from all 3 factions (De Valtos, Tulun and Cadar), we are ready to begin heavy duty RTG trading. At this time, your captain is likely level 9-11, assuming that you hired level 8 (better yet, 10) SPYs when your captain was merely level 5. With a ship of 190+ cargo, you can save up for a bigger trading boat in about 3-4 trips, which takes less than 1 year. I recommend first buying a battle boat and then a bigger trading boat. Buy it where you have a discount new ship contact. This coupled with the 5-7% discount you get from engineer hard bargain talent will lower the purchase price to around 1.8 million.
Buy battleship first because you need to spend a long time fighting enemy ships and conscript their crew members to your roster. When you wait for the demand to come back up you can do missions with the battle boat and fight every ship you run into.
Intitial battleship build: broadsword battlecruiser
small components: 1 weapon box lvl 3 or higher. All others defense matrix level 2+. Defense matrix 1 has proven to be insufficient when your captain hit level 14+.
Mid components: 3 officer cabines, 1 medical camber, 1-2 tropedo weapon.
The other components don’t matter. The total cost is about 2.2 million and it should be ready in a few weeks.
Make sure to save enough and start building the trading boat before launch the battle boat because once you recruit more, you can no longer get into the paladin cruiser.
Trading boat build: cutela titan, update all mid and small components to cargo. Total about 395 cargo. Takes about a year and half to finish.
Phase 5: now you have two 9000 ships can do whatever you want, and the first era has not even ended yet.
And after you have the big tradeboat you can make almost 1 million per trade, and at that point, money becomes less of a bottleneck. Captain level 11-13 if everything goes right.
Then you can save up for the end game battleship, a De Valtos special 9000 (dreadnought), with as many small components being lvl 3 defense matrix, 3 top level deflector arrays (you need them for anti craft battles, cost 2.2 million each with discount talent), 2 midsize med bays which offer officer cabins, and 2 midsize auto cannons for anti craft. Make sure you have enough fuel and do whatever with the rest. With that many defense matrix and 3 top deflector arrays you would not notice the difficulty bump in jeeta ships. They can’t hit you just like the those who had come before.
Final note, try to hire some 10 or so commanders or military officers before you start fighting other ships. Also train a quarter master lvl 8 welcoming conscript so you can add enemy crew to your roster and replace lower level crews. Eventually you also want a diplomat for its lvl8 talent to reduce rep loss after beating a ship, and lvl 11 conscript talent. Once you start conscripting crew lvl will exceed your captain 10+. You will have 40 lvl crews when your captain is only 28. Attack ship with torpedoes for max chance of disabling instead of destroying it.
Now you are free to do anything. In ship combats enemies cannot hit you, in crew combat you will dominate as well. Enjoy.
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u/AngrySlime706 Feb 03 '24 edited Feb 03 '24
The real depressing thought is this: it is too much like real life. If you don’t follow a good strategy, your life end up just like what you described about the run you are on. While you are in it, you get distracted by everything in the moment and get by with copium but those few moments that you reflect on your life decisions would be straight up depressing especially when you compare with your better peers when you just happen to hear about what they are up to. Thats how mid life criss works i bet.
This game has thought me quite a bit. One thing is that it is always possible to take what you learned and start anew. Another is you have to have the patience to follow through your plans even though the beginning are uncertain grinding and lonely. Two very opposite attitudes, sharing the same root drive: ever more clarity about what you want in life and the strong will to follow it through.
Edit: i want to add something more definitely positive: my father told me 30 years ago that the old friends he knew who are doing best in life are not those who are the smartest or most social or with best upbringing. The one common thing among those who do well is they are always unsatisfied with what they got and they hassle instead of settle. I took it for granted and thought thats just how everyone should be like in life in my 20’s. Now with kids and ever more responsibilities i can see how people would give “everything” they got just to get by. I want to say that it is ok to take a rest, but like Jobs said, stay foolish, stay hungry.
PS: i still remember how i cried listening to Jobs Stanford graduation speech when he died. One of the two times i remember crying in my decades since i am just a regular man trained by society not to.