THE TRIBE (Expansion pack)

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

The tribe is the new expansion pack for Gratuitous Space Battles.

This pack adds a completely new race to the game : The Tribe. The tribe are essentially space-faring hippies who live the utopian dream, despairing at the warlike ways of other, lesser species. Because the constant terror of intergalactic war is just bad karma, the tribe have taken it upon themselves to bring peace to the galaxy in the only practical way forwards: The total destruction of all other life forms, regrettable and ‘negative’ though this may seem in the short term.


The tribe are not big fans of shields and armor like lesser species. Instead, they build their ship hulls to last, and everything on a tribe ship is extra tough. Don’t expect them to go running the minute their shields are down. In addition, they are masters of repair technology, even managing to squeeze the tech into tribe frigates. Plus, they bring a new piece of fun to the battle: Kinetic weapons. Shorter range, but able to fire rapid-firing salvos.
The tribe expansion is a data-only expansion that doesn’t change you version number (but you will need version 1.26 to run with the tribe). The pack adds new ships, new modules, and new scenarios.

Full details (and a video of the new ships) can be found here:
positech.co.uk/gratuitousspa … tribe.html

You can install the expansion regardless where you bought the game, but of course you do actually need the full game :smiley: It should be no problem to use the tribe and the new maps in online challenges. Please direct any support nightmares and general technical disasters to the support forum :smiley:
Also please don’t call me evil for not making the tribe free. Those extremely high-poly spaceship models aren’t cheap :D.

2

You must be a very productive person. So, an expansion pack bi- or even monthly? Sounds good to me :slight_smile:

3

W00t. Paid, but the order messed up so now I gotta wait for it to be unravelled.

Given I have a tendency to build ships without armour, and usually with only minimal shields anyway… I have a suspicion I may find the Tribe to be overpowered… Soon see.

4

Question, are the new modules only usable on Tribe ships? For example the kinetic weapons?

5

Loaded the Tribes Expansion (hooray!) but the Races, Hulls, and Modules do not show up in Fleet HQ. Other than the 2 new missions at the bottom, the only place I can see that it loaded the new expansion fleet is if you open up the Ship Builder and change hulls. Maybe it is because everything is already unlocked, but why not show it in Fleet HQ? You can change your race to Tribe, so it seems to work…but what am I missing here?

6

Everything in the tribe is already unlocked, so you do not need to do anything in fleet HQ. Some people really dislike unlocking stuff, and I took a ‘balanced view’ that it would be best to pre-unlock the whole tribe fleet.

7

Just bought this, looking forward to trying it out.

I mostly bought it for the new scenarios. Please consider an expansion focussed on scenarios - either adding lots, or adding an editor, or both.

8

Thanks Cliff, guess I was viewing the Fleet HQ as more of an inventory than just the unlockable items. Have been playing this since you opened up the preorder Betas and can’t wait to see where you are taking us in the future. Got new ideas for the Tribe already. I’ll keep paying for cat food! :slight_smile:

9

I’m running the paid-for version 1.23 and tried to add on the expansion. The installer didn’t show any errors, but I don’t see the new content. Is 1.23 the latest release, and if not, where can I get the latest GSB version?

thanks,
Andrew

edit - never mind, have to re-download from the email I was sent - should have googled first

10

If you don’t mind a pricing opinion from the peanut gallery, you should consider lowering the price on the main game now, or else launching a combo pack. With The Tribe, newcomers will now be facing a $28 entry fee for GSB. If I can be perfectly frank, when I first bought and played GSB I told my friends it was good “but really more of a $15 game”. Obviously I was willing to go up to $22 and I think $6 for the expansion is fair enough but $28 may be a hard sell to newcomers.

Will people without the expansion pack be able to play against expansion pack fleets? That may be worth considering. From a generating-sales point of view I’m not sure what would do a better job: trying to play Challenges and not being able to because you don’t have the expansion pack, or being able to and seeing all these cool ships that you can’t build because you didn’t buy the expansion pack. Certainly the latter would be less frustrating and possibly more enticing. In fact, it might be wise to put The Tribe on the race selection screen with a big “REQUIRES EXPANSION PACK” sticker across it as a heads up to people who don’t know there IS an expansion pack (e.g., Steam buyers who don’t visit the forums).

11

You need to update. basically if you have put the serial code in on the on-line screen (and picked a username) the game should (once per day) check for an update and download a patch to version 1.26
The tribe uses some weapons that are only in 1.26, so you need to have the latest version.

12

Thank you.

13

New race seems pretty cool so far. Haven’t played it against many challenges I’ve already played, so it’s hard to tell if it’s imbalanced or just fun…

Fighters: Their fighters are terrible when it comes to speed (no fighters with speed bonus…) but the double HP makes them a lot of fun with carriers - slap a couple of engines on a fighter and it’s chance of making it back for repairs is very very high. Very fun to watch, and I found myself needing two or three times as many carriers as I use with other races.

Repair Tanking: I had some fun with a ship made almost entirely of their high performance, high capacity repair module… Far from indestructible, but they can repair up from near death pretty quick.

HP Tanking: Camoflage module has a lot more HP than any other module… I stacked a ship with tons of these, and with the Tribe HP bonus it came out at over 11,000 HP. That’s a lot of damage to soak. Cost nearly 4k though, not cheap…

14

Got the expansion. I like what you did with the new race. They have a very distinctive play style. At some point it would be cool to go back and do the same kind of thing for the other races – make them a bit more unique. The new guns, repair systems and hull bonuses really make the Tribe stand out from the rest in terms of uniqueness. (I especially like that their frigate can repair.)

15

So…the new repair systems are race-specific, are the new kinetic weapon modules race-specific as well?

16

Currently, they only seem to be available when designing a Tribe ship.

17

Is this expansion going to be released on steam?

I much prefer getting stuff through steam for backup/ease of install purposes =)

18

Will this be made available via Impluse anytime soon?

19

I need to fix a few minor cosmetic things before I get the expansion sent out anywhere else. So right now its only available from me, but I’m sure it will be on there at some point.

20

I wish the kinetic weapons were available to more races. Are they only balanced for Tribes, or can anyone use them with their current associated costs?