KickStarter StarCrawlers - indie sci-fi dungeon crawling RPG

[sser]

Restarted on Hardcore.

Now fully recommend to play it on Hardcore. The difficulty feels far more tuned and I find myself actually using consumables. My crew is a Soldier (tank/main), Prototype (Mutation), C'thulhu Call Rep, and a Cyberninja (Assassin). I actually took 1-point in Coordination with the Ninja just to get the ability to have other allies proc 'combos.' IMO, he's the weakest of the bunch. Huge burst damage when he pops off, but everyone else is doing way more damage and of the AOE sort, too.

 

[bataille]

Restarted on Hardcore.

Now fully recommend to play it on Hardcore. The difficulty feels far more tuned and I find myself actually using consumables. My crew is a Soldier (tank/main), Prototype (Mutation), C'thulhu Call Rep, and a Cyberninja (Assassin). I actually took 1-point in Coordination with the Ninja just to get the ability to have other allies proc 'combos.' IMO, he's the weakest of the bunch. Huge burst damage when he pops off, but everyone else is doing way more damage and of the AOE sort, too.

Here's to your game not freezing on using Torrent by the void psyker, cheers!

 

[Sinatar]

Restarted on Hardcore.

Now fully recommend to play it on Hardcore. The difficulty feels far more tuned and I find myself actually using consumables. My crew is a Soldier (tank/main), Prototype (Mutation), C'thulhu Call Rep, and a Cyberninja (Assassin). I actually took 1-point in Coordination with the Ninja just to get the ability to have other allies proc 'combos.' IMO, he's the weakest of the bunch. Huge burst damage when he pops off, but everyone else is doing way more damage and of the AOE sort, too.

Cyberninja is garbage. I just dropped my lvl 30 ninja for a Force Psyker and he's far far far better. He does more damage (both single target and AOE), is tankier so survives better, can buff and protect the team and has crowd control. I feel like a jackass for sticking with the shitty Ninja for so long.

 

[sser]

Restarted on Hardcore.

Now fully recommend to play it on Hardcore. The difficulty feels far more tuned and I find myself actually using consumables. My crew is a Soldier (tank/main), Prototype (Mutation), C'thulhu Call Rep, and a Cyberninja (Assassin). I actually took 1-point in Coordination with the Ninja just to get the ability to have other allies proc 'combos.' IMO, he's the weakest of the bunch. Huge burst damage when he pops off, but everyone else is doing way more damage and of the AOE sort, too.

Cyberninja is garbage. I just dropped my lvl 30 ninja for a Force Psyker and he's far far far better. He does more damage (both single target and AOE), is tankier so survives better, can buff and protect the team and has crowd control. I feel like a jackass for sticking with the shitty Ninja for so long.

I LARP a bit with my chars so I don't mind.

 

[Reapa]

there's a very ugly jRPG hidden behind the roguelike mask of this game.

 

[thesheeep]

Wow, the difficulty ramps up significantly for this game, it seems.
It confuses me.

With a level 10 party, I get annihilated in every mission harder than normal.
And "normal" missions are either cakewalks or force me to use one healthpack after another.

One main reason for this is the enemy targeting. All enemies are focusing heavily on the same one or two characters, with no obvious logic to it.
First I thought that damage dealt increases threat, but that is just false. The rarely-targeted chars deal far more damage, and even if I let my mostly-targeted chars deal less damage on purpose, they are still the prime targets.
Then I thought low-armor chars are targeted first. But that is also inconsistent, as it just switched from one mission to the next and suddenly (without changing shields) other characters became the prime targets.

Taunting I tried, of course, but it just spreads damage among my chars evenly, leading to their deaths being close together instead of having some more time between different deaths

By the time I'm halfway done with a mission on hard, two characters are usually dead, so I can only reload.

I don't think my combat strategy is the problem here. It's just as in every blobber, really. Focus on getting one high-damage enemy down, then the next, use strong attacks as soon as possible to speed up the process, don't spread your damage over multiple enemies (making area attacks a pretty horrible choice if they don't happen to do a lot of damage). It's not exactly rocket science.
And yet I just keep getting my ass handed to me on hard missions. Not in a single fight, but I'm getting worn down eventually.

Is it my skill selection, maybe? I spread points between two trees, completely ignoring the third. Are you actually supposed to stick to one tree? Why even offer a choice past character creation, then? And some abilities are just traps (like the mentioned area attacks, except some special cases maybe).
Or the equipment? I give light armor & light shields to my void psyker, tactical stuff to my ninja, soldier and prototype get heavy stuff.

 

[Zetor]

Threat is definitely a thing, but enemies will also choose semi-randomly if everyone's at the same threat level to them. Sometimes they'll go for the 'tank', other times for the 'mage'. The first turn is probably the most crucial one in the entire fight - you want to make sure none of the hard-hitting enemies can unload on your squishies and that you lock down any enemies that have a chance to go before your tank. In the early and midgame I achieved this by loading up my two squishies with tons of crowd control abilities, and just kept every enemy locked down in some way (charm, stun, possibly confuse) while my tank taunted the rest and the prototype took them apart with a super-charged (dogs of war + haiku) thunderclap attack. This way I could ensure my squishies were never getting focus fired, but battles took forever.

What worked for me even better in the end was to spec out my prototype as an 'offtank': pick up the single-target taunt that lasts like 3 turns and has damage dampening built in, and open with it on the enemy that has the most dangerous autoattacks. The soldier picked up 3 other 'kill these later'-type targets with an AOE attack (not taunt!) like a frag grenade, my hacker used the stun virus on the kill target followed by the various damage-over-time viruses, then the void psyker went on with destroying shields and single-target nuking. This way my soldier'd still have the option to taunt enemies if needed to fill in gaps followed up by juggernaut the next turn, but usually the enemies would be dead or mostly dead before turn 3 was over.

e: yeah, stick to one tree, hybridizing is not a good idea... also, some trees are definitely better than others.
e2: health management is also very important. Building for some easy way of getting a targeted (or better, party-wide) regeneration buff is a good idea. I used Siphon Life level 3 from my void psyker, but the hacker tier 2 ability from the right tree may work even better. The prototype's level 3 haiku skill can work in a pinch, if you make sure to use it early in each fight, and the small heal+buff in the soldier's Cry Havoc skill saved me a few times. Sometimes I intentionally passed a bunch of turns just so some characters would get an additional regen tick at the end of the fight when the last remaining enemy was stunned and/or had lethal DOT damage incoming (~degenerate gameplay~).

 

[thesheeep]

Hmmm, I think I'll invest in a skill reset, then. What a waste to let you hybridize if it's no good.
Or maybe it is meant that you invest into a second tree after being done with the first...

I don't have a single charm, stun or confuse skill

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Sykar]

Didnt have much time to play. Got to lvl7 on highest diff and past early spike everything is a cake walk.
Exploration checks are hard on this difficulty. It can be easy lvl lock, on quest same as party lvl, tackled by hacker with all points in rootkit and it would still be a failure.

Speccing my ninja into sneakery. I dont see dps issues like others. My ask is however about exploration: on tree description its said that it will help to avoid combat... I have not seen single check for that.

So far my hacker is handling 90% of checks(and mostly failing). Remaining 10% is on engineer to open various containers. Feels like my ninja and smuggler are wasted for exploration

I do not know about Ninja but I ran into pirates a few times and my Smuggler could try to negotiate with them. Like with the Hacker the attempts usually fail though. It is quite irritating that there is no feedback as to what your chances are or how it works or if you can improve your chances. It would be nice if you would at least get some sort of indicator in the character description.
Oh and one time I found some stuff in the mines which the soldier helped to apply to the weapnons for increased damage, forgot its name though.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I've seen smuggler checks and prototype checks but neither was particularly useful. Nothing like the Hacker letting you shut off traps and security.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

and yet my level 13 hacker keeps failing in level 8 missions. what am i missing?

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[HeatEXTEND]

We got this in the mail. It seems interesting enough to give them some publicity.

Features:
Classic first person dungeon crawling exploration
Procedurally generated environments with random encounters, traps, and enemies
Randomly generated and upgradeable loot

Shit.

 

[Reinhardt]

Feels like my ninja and smuggler are wasted for exploration

Ninja can sometimes do "psssh...nothin personnel...kid...".

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Iznaliu]

Currently playing this; it's good but lacks a certain amount of depth and variety

 

[Zetor]

iirc for hacker you need the left (rootkit) tree, and even with 15 points in it I was failing a lot. I guess it's because all the things you can hack are non-critical: either because you messed up (security panel / cameras / etc) or are trying to get into a place without a keycard (which should be lying around somewhere) or breaking into an Aurora vault for mad loot (which is something you would normally only be able to access if you called in some favors with Aurora, I guess?).

My void psyker had a very good success rate at mindwiping and/or driving security guards mad in the "you run into a patrol" pop-up, I think he only failed once in the entire playthrough. Maybe I just got lucky there...


e: Iznaliu I'd call this a "crawler-lite". It's got a lot of personality (mostly silly Borderlands-style and fourth-wall breaking stuff, but eh) and polish, but not much depth. Almost feels like a Blizzard game without an AAA budget. Still, anything that can act as a gateway drug for Wizardry is a good thing...

 

[Renevent]

Just finished the game, took about 20 hours. Overall I enjoyed it though I do think it's a pretty simple game that feels as if it's missing some mechanics.

Anyways anyone looking for awesome characters go hacker and spec malware. That one character was responsible for 80% of my entire team's damage output. Make sure to equip them with quick fast hitting weapons, and watch him burn through every enemy on screen. Basically you apply two debuffs (forget their name) to the enemy that's next to act, which between your passive and his turn will propagate the debuffs to every other enemy as well, and then on your next turn use kill switch. 90% of the time every enemy will be dead. My hacker with a good/fast weapon could destroy the entire enemy team before my Prototype had a chance to even charge it's weapon.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

in this thread i asked for some other crawlers, all your suggestions turned out to be exactly what i didn't ask for.
well done.

 

[Shackleton]

in this thread i asked for some other crawlers, all your suggestions turned out to be exactly what i didn't ask for.
well done.

The sad fact is, there is no crawler quite like Wizardry 8. I had a look back through the thread though and I was surprised no-one mentioned (that I saw) Might and Magic 6 or 7. Both of those, while not exactly traditional blobbers, are the closest thing I think to Wizardry 8. The 3D open world and the mobs you can see before you engage them, as well as the blob combat all strike me as akin to Wizardry 8. In many respects, MM6 and 7 have elements that are better than Wiz8, such as the ability to actually fly and the much faster combat.

I'd be surprised if you haven't played them already, but with Grayface's patches that add proper mouselook and other QoL improvements, they're both very playable today nearly 20 years after release.

 

[gestalt11]

at lvl12 tested various trees via reset and...

keeping ninja doesnt make much sense. Ima get psyker instead with 1st tree... heals, debuffs, dmg... it got it all
hacker 1st tree is nice... but doesnt make much sense without passive from 2nd tree. Without spread charging that ultimate skill takes forever. It is awesome though.

now for smuggler... his trees are weird as they make it not worth it to use another if you max any. For that reason as traps are nice you will be dropping fire trap in 90% of actions which is just boring. Tested gambling tree and dmg it offers is insane. From my tests best is 1st(single target) and last skill(small aoe). For that reason im thinking that its best to go for holo+gangbang on traps and put rest into gambling tree.
Lure trap is not useful with rigger around. Time bomb(due to missfire) and artifact are either useless or I dont get them.

Takedown on the combi tree is, by far, the most damaging single target attack in the game. The trick is not stacking combo points but to stack Setup. Putting combo strike on something and having a number of things hit it can stack 3-5 steup buffs in about a turn. With steup X on something you can easily do over 10,000 damage. The only other comparable thing is Virus stacking and kill switch.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

in this thread i asked for some other crawlers, all your suggestions turned out to be exactly what i didn't ask for.
well done.

The sad fact is, there is no crawler quite like Wizardry 8. I had a look back through the thread though and I was surprised no-one mentioned (that I saw) Might and Magic 6 or 7. Both of those, while not exactly traditional blobbers, are the closest thing I think to Wizardry 8. The 3D open world and the mobs you can see before you engage them, as well as the blob combat all strike me as akin to Wizardry 8. In many respects, MM6 and 7 have elements that are better than Wiz8, such as the ability to actually fly and the much faster combat.

I'd be surprised if you haven't played them already, but with Grayface's patches that add proper mouselook and other QoL improvements, they're both very playable today nearly 20 years after release.

How about Wizardry Tales of the Forsaken Land, Stranger of Sword City, Elminage Gothic, or Wizards and Warriors.

He asked for 6-man parties, or I would have recommended Might and Magic 10.

You're right though, nothing comes close to Wizardry 8. It's too high of a standard really. That game is one of a kind.

 

[Renevent]

Did anyone get to craft any of the class unique items? I never found all three items for any of them (or all three items and the recipe), and even if I did, I wasn't sure how you could craft them. It mentions something about an auto-crafter but those are in level and I only saw a single solitary one in my ~20 hours of playtime.