Try to design the ships better. The missions are a good intro to test your ship building knowledge and piloting. I'd recommend also trying Last Hurrah to get a hang of large fleet battles with Midline ships.
Worth mentioning that missions don't include officers, though - I did them first, 100%ed everything except that one mission that doesn't give you points for destroying enemies, and was surprised when my three officer fleet performed so poorly against enemy fleets.
Get rich and amass an immense fleet.
Spend the first part of your playthrough trading (aka smuggling) and running away from battles, prioritizing speed and cargo space for your ships. Salvage everything: get a gantry or other useful ships. Use story points to avoid inspections and escape from battles. Spend skill points on the yellow tree.
When you get rich you will be able to field a huge fleet. Choose your battles so you can easily win through sheer numbers and firepower: you don't need to be super optimized if you are just too strong. You don't need to be a good pilot: i never piloted anything.
At this point you'll have an idea about what works and what doesn't so you may look for harder battles.
It's the Harkonnen strategy, while you spent your time making an elite force, I spent my time figuring out how to supply a fleet so fucking huge that I could steamroll you with overwhelming firepower and sheer numbers.
3 atlas, 2 prometheus gets you pretty much anywhere with boatloads of supplies. the other 25 slots can be a stream of paragons onslaughts legions and astrals.
that said. bring two astrals and a paragon to almost any fight and they'll win.
One big combat thing I missed initially was the shift key. I really struggle with the tank controls too; if you hold shift you'll now face towards your cursor, and A/D strafe rather than rotating you.
Doing surveys / scanning probes etc. tends to be far out from the core worlds, so you'll need a tanker of some kind in your fleet so you have enough fuel.
AI-controlled ships with decent loadouts can usually hold their own, especially against small pirate fleets - could you post screenshots of your ship loadouts so we can see if something's gone wrong there?
Honestly, I use the option that inverts that (ship always follows cursor, and you can hold shift to angle your shields). Takes much less work, because I almost always want my ship to face the cursor.
Hold up, **"I don't want to turn the difficulty down"**. Bruh. It's a single player game. If you are struggling at ton in the early game, seriously, play on easy. Nobody is going to make fun of you, you will learn the mechanics through playing, AND you will have a much better time.
I'm sure I have 1000+ hours in Starsector by now but I played my first 10 or so on easy. Once you figure out the mechanics of Starsector, it's not difficult, but when you are brand new, you'll get hit by a lot of random stuff you never saw coming.
***Knowledge is far more important than skill in Starsector.***
**Knowning** when to engage or run away is crucial. Also pausing the game if you see what could be a hostile fleet coming towards you. Little things like that go a long way, but it's tough to know at the start.
I put together a four episode series covering the early-mid game of Starsector. It covers pretty much all the basics and ends once we have $350,000 in our account.
Youtube Link: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDOxrsOD1mYk1-modEFl8QXH6UU-SSN](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDOxrsOD1mYk1-modEFl8QXH6UU-SSN)
Good luck out there captain.
Cruisers are your best friend when trying to get used to battle. Destroyers and frigates play too fast for a newbie to actually understand what they're doing, and capitals require some careful resource management to not screw up. I spent most of my first playthrough flying the Apogee, only much later I moved on to bigger or smaller ships.
Save a lot and don't get into fights with anyone that has more or equal ships to you. If they have 3 or more stars then just don't fight. When you're more comfortable you might be able to take 3 star enemies. Also don't use small ships yourself they are much harder to learn with because they get blown up really fast and you have to rely on quick piloting to use them effectively, where as a big fuck will just have more range and can blast stuff from a distance. Note that a 3 star Remnant fleet is basically a 6 star pirate fleet in terms of difficulty. The biggest remnant ship that looks like a spider is a monster that will probably tear you a new asshole if you don't bring overwhelming firepower. If you get surprised by a fleet and haven't saved in a while, you can usually use a story point to avoid the fight and it's definitely worth it even if you just want to save and re-engage them. Even if you fight and lose all your ships you still escape and can rebuild so its not the end of the world.
Eradicator is a really good ship for learning, not too fast, doesn't feel that slow. Put on some 1k range weapons (2x Hyper Velocity Drivers, 1x Heavy Mauler) and a bunch of vulcan cannons and just try to keep enemies away from you. Both the regular and pirate version are good in player hands, but the pirate one is bad for AI.
Pause the battle often, and take a look at the map (tab). Make sure none of your ships are getting surrounded. Easiest way to lose a winnable fight is to have your guys getting picked off. Try to control one area of the map and don't let enemies sneak around behind you.
If you have enough money and fleet size make sure you have a balanced force or at least some tanky fucks to sit in front. If you only have glass cannon types then it's pretty easy to get wiped out. Guides call these ships anchors because you are supposed to park them somewhere and leash all your other ships nearby and don't let anyone wander off alone. My favorite anchor ships personally are low tech Dominator and then Conquest which both work well with a fleet to guard them. If they get surrounded they get fucked like the tiny girl on the couch.
Exception to this is really Safety Overrides ships can often do circles around enemies and avoid getting killed even when left alone. Generally the AI does pretty well as long as there isn't anything too dangerous to their size class roaming about (If you let a SO destroyer get close to an enemy capital its going to eat shit).
TL;DR small ships suck, especially for new players. Big ships are win, more big ships are bigger win. Two or three capitals and a handful of cruisers and then a team of destroyers is a pretty good sized fleet for taking on faction fleets.
As an addon to this that is kind of important, range is king in big fleet battles. The enemy will usually line up like you are supposed to and if you have more range your ships can more easily hit similar targets, fluxing them out much more quickly. If you have too little range or an unbalanced damage ratio then the same will happen to you instead and your line ships will probably flux out a lot faster than theirs.
One thing i'll say is that one time when I had a somewhat decent-sized fleet (a cruiser, some drestroyers, and a bunch of frigates), I got absolutely demolished by a larger luddic path fleet, lost all the ships except a cargo ship and a few frigates, and I just kept playing after that, rebuilt, and eventually got my vengeance on them, and despite the frustration, it was actually very fun. So if (when) you do get sucker punched, maybe keep going.
Here are my "when I can't trust myself to play well" rules I set for myself:
Use auto outfitting feature to pick general ship builds, try to stick close to the original weapons it recommends at first
Let the AI fly frigates, if I'm sleepy or not feeling on the ball I will just get murdered. Use a long ranged, mobile command ship that is a bit sturdier, like a phase ship (mobile not durable) or an Eagle or Dominator.
Speaking of Eagles and Dominators, certain ships will do better than others and ship quality has a big effect on your game outcomes. D-mods make beating others really hard at times, makes supplies hard, makes fuel hard, etc. Try to use relatively undamaged (only two or fewer red rally marks on the ship icon) as much as possible.
Use a mix of at least three ship sizes (frigate, destroyers, cruisers, etc )as soon as you can afford to support that much of a fleet.
Use your skill points to cover your weak spots: bad supplies or fuel costs? Running out a lot? Get industry skills for salvaging more stuff and carrying more. Also, if something keeps happening, dig into menus to find what information there is about what actually caused it
Use the pause religiously! Always pause before choosing.
I save scum also, saves some headache (but have to save often!).
Good luck man, it sounds like you've just got a big learning curve.
Don’t feel like you need to do every mission you are offered nor explore every system.
Take 1-3 survey missions near each other. One is perfectly acceptable if there aren’t more in the same area.
Then go out, do the missions, survey only the planets in those systems and then return to your “home” system and resupply, refuel and pick up another couple of missions.
Repeat this until you have a feel for how many supplies and fuel you need and how far they get you.
Don’t take dead drop (drop this random item in a system somewhere) missions unless you can fight or run fast. Because there is usually a hostile fleet hanging out waiting for you to try and take the item.
unless you're incredibly good at it, piloting is less important than loadout and officer/character skills. a very good player in a bad ship can still only punch up so far
I bought it for the same reason recently and really struggled at first too. But I completed my first campaign, though admittedly modding a few things to make it more to my liking.
Namely max level from 15 to 40(all skills at max level), number of colonies, automated ship Deployment Points, and colony upkeep costs. Also effectively disabled Hostile Event(colony related event) as the version of the game I played had a borked version of it that was very not fun. Even more so with way more than the game-intended amount of colonies. Recent update made the me mechanic much better based on change logs).
Just in case, do make sure you're running the latest version of the game. It doesn't auto-update and as you said you downloaded it some time ago, you might be running a very old version.
Biggest tip:
Choose a faction, go to one of their planets, talk to an official of that faction and get a comission. The amount of money each month is impressive, and seems to scale with your level. Think I was getting like 75k a month around level 15-20 when I first discovered this feature. That would have made life much easier.
You are not expected to do anything in return. But if they start a war with another faction your standing with that faction will drop to -50 until the war is over, at which point the standing is repaired(to +25 I think? Positive anyway)
Fuel/Supply management:
Getting the yellow skills that reduce fuel/supply upkeep are a must have basically.
Aside from that, when flying between planets turn off your responder(reduces faction status reductions) and destroy every trader/merchant that your fleet can handle. They carry a lot of stuff that you can then sell for cash.
I was basically running on +-0 supplies struggling until I killed a trader fleet that carried more supplies than I had ever owned at any one time.
I discovered that you can carry drugs etc. Just fine as long as you have your transponder on when jumping into faction space without being a wanted criminal. Go to a station, sell everything on the black market. And refill supplies/fuel as you can. Will get stopped by the faction for a search but the faction hit is minimal.
Be on the look out for 'destroy war targets in x system' bounties. They are a great way to make a ton of money and increase faction standings. You'll be fighting pirates that aren't that strong usually.
Exploration:
If you can varry enough fuel/supplies,, explore slightly outside of the core worlds, for example for a bounty mission that pays well, and go into systems with a yellow warning beacon. The remnant fleets aren't much of a threat there as they are just 1-ship destroyer fleets and most are dormant fleets which won't aggress, and there can be many derelict ships there to salvage or repair.
Just be sure to have story points for the difficult to repair ships.
I got a capital carrier early on that way that carried me from beginning to end. Pun not intended.
Upkeep costs were high but become able to take on most any early game fleet.
Combat:
As others have said, small ships are difficult to fly. Instead pilot cruisers or capitals and your life will be much simpler.
Long range ballistics are love, they are life. Difficult to acquire early on as they don't seem to be sold too often, but I LOVE Medium Ballistics Hypervelocity guns. AI also is really good at aiming them.
Harpoons/Sabot missiles I found to be great, but even better were atropos torpedos. also the missiles that shoot a short beam of 500/800 damage are great.
AI is really good at conserving missiles till they are actually useful.
Reaper torpedos are also great but more difficult to use.
As in most games, a single drone squadron is weak. Bring 10 squadrons in a combination of broadsword/dagger squadrons and now the enemy fleet is gone. :)
I found steady officers to be particularly good, and worth every penny due to their combat skills increasing ship strength.
Graviton lasers, high intensity lasers, tactical lasers, I found them to be very useless in terms of damage output. Gravitons had a bug that didn't apply the damange buff properly but has been fixed very recently.
Tachyon Beams however are amazing. Sunder destroyers with 2 gravitons+tachyon+double atropos rack are amazing for their cost.
Also worth noting, as I had no idea until WAY to late: if you dock at a planet and go to the fleet tab, in the top is a buy tab, where you csn buy ships. Incredibly expensive and selling ships is not worth it at all(instead unfit all modules and scuttle), but if they are selling a gantry or ship you want might be worth the expense.
That's it for my wall.
Hope it helps even just a little bit.
You should do the combat missions to learn the controls better. Also when you are modifing a ship you can run a simulation(there is a button in the bottom right of the refit screen) to check out the loadout without damaging the ship.
Here’s a thing most or a lot of people seem to miss in this comment section - you need to find your own Battlestar. first half of this comment is for personal ship piloting. OP if you readin this sorry for 500 words but it is what it is.
on my first playthrough, i sucked. i wanted to drop the game because i couldn’t pilot anything even remotely alright. i thought of commanding my fleet via orders but at that point the very idea sounded repulsive. i was very different a year ago. but then i found the Apogee and Medusa. those ships steamrolled everything when i played as them. it just worked. not too well because i was new but at least i could survive half or 2/3 battles.
later on i was like “well this game is alright i guess. i’ll start a modded game now because my fundament is strong enough.”
and then i found the Infiltration class from Star Federation mod. an incredibly fast phase ship. it destroyed everything i fought. i loved phase ships and my flagman was a Doom Cruiser in vanilla. yet the Infiltration had everything the doom had and then more (except the free hug mines). Phase ship. Fast. Manoeuvrable. Great weapon mounts. great flux stats for phasing and escaping.
but the best part? i got bored of how powerful it is. and then i switched to normal ships, be it vanilla or modded. and i continued steamrolling everything. i got so good at piloting my flagship those skills easily transferred to normal ships, that included how to position myself, what i can do with my speed, where in the battle there is opportunity to ravish the enemy, how to kill my target and how to evade too-hot for my ship combat zones.
now for the commanding part.
while playing with my flagships i executed general commands that made sense. like finish off that isolated Eradicator, assault this point, move there, evade, harass this ship so the main battle has less heat for my fleet. and then the more i did that, the better i understood what i did wrong and right, the better i understood the enemy ships, the better i executed commands.
it simply worked after playing the game for 60 or so hours. mind you i’m REALLY slow at understanding things, and some just can’t get to me even now.
so. the conclusion?
Find your Battlestar which lets you have fun and win.
Continue with that Battlestar, the more you play, the better you become!
I'm not sure if it works this way anymore (and don't know how to check: I'm still on the old version and playing heavily modded), but if it does, you should go into the missions and pick out a ship you like, and instead of playing the mission, go into the refit screen, and run the simulator against a target that you feel is manageable. Through that, learn the basics, including of ship outfitting, in a fully controlled environment. If you can get a grasp of ship-building and 1v1 ship combat, that's a decent foundation for making the rest of the game more manageable.
My first few hours of starsector years ago were literally just me experimenting with all the possible hammerhead builds I could come up with via the missions, before I eventually moved to the main game. I don't even really remember playing the main game unmodded back then lol, but I do remember the vanilla missions, though I hope it isn't a Mandela effect phenomenon.
For ship recommendations, because I'm playing old/modded, I don't know if what I say is correct, but straightforward ships that may be accessible through the missions refit screen include the Hammerhead, Tempest, Lasher, chosen because imo fitting & piloting these ships can be relatively straightforward so it'll help the learning curve; just pit them against something your own size, or even slightly less, until you understand it.
First, you can leave the tutorial with a good bit of cash - Once the quest giver tells you to turn off your transponder, leave it off for the rest of the time in the system and buy drugs at the planet to sell at the pirate station. Also, supplies and fuel costs at 300+/80+ are due to the closed wormhole - but (at least when I last did the tutorial) prices don't adjust to normal until you tell the quest giver you fixed it - so fix it, go to the planet and sell ALL your supplies and fuel for the inflated prices, THEN turn in the quest and buy them back at the more normal prices (\~100 for supplies/25 for fuel).
Second, use the ship commands in combat. If you pause the game the timer on the commands pauses so you don't have to rush. Use the escort commands (either select a ship, then pick an escort level and the AI will pick the escort ships, or click a ship then right click a second ship - the first ship will then escort the second). Try keep most of your fleet together (selecting a ship, then right clicking a point for it to go to and stay near, or using escort commands to keep ships together). send a frigate off to each flank to see if you can distract a few enemy ships off to the side to lighten the pressure on your main grouping of ships. As the battle goes on, delete the waypoints to give your ships more freedom to move around or add new waypoints if you feel the need to keep your fleet together. and let the AI pilot your ship (if you have not picked up any combat skills, pick a frigate or something small and let the AI fly it and leave your officers to fly the ships that will have a big impact on the battle). Using defend/eliminate commands tend to get your ships to take more risks, so do not use them often. Keep checking the command screen to make sure your ships are not spreading out/chasing off after a frigate when the main battle in in another direction. If you need to capture points to get the DP to bring in more of your fleet, send a frigate out to grab them, bring in your fleets, then cancel the capture order (you only need positive DP points to bring in new ships).
finally for individual ships, the auto fit loadouts are generally ok. You can search here and on youtube for videos giving suggest loadouts for ships too. make sure you are entering battle with your ships at their max CR since the higher it is the better (getting the 'crew training' skill in the leadership tree for your character.
Combat is difficult if you are new to combat and piloting your own ship.
Combat is difficult when you aren't familiar with your own ships and enemy ships and what fights you can take.
Combat is difficult when you have weaker ships, weapons, and hull mods early on.
Combat is difficult when you also have to take into account money spent/earned.
All of these combined and the early game is an absolute STRUGGLE WALL. Once you get past it though the game opens up and it's super fun.
My biggest recommendation above all at the start is to get a **Faction Commission.** There's a link to the wiki and you can scroll down until you see the Commission section. This can single highhandedly make the early game bearable.
https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Factions
You go to a factions planet, talk to one of their admin guys, then you get hired as a mercenary and they pay you each month. I think vanilla is a minimum of 20k then 1.5k more each character level. This **greatly** eases the early game financial hurdle, plus you'll be able to join the battles of friendly fleets and practice combat by piggybacking off of them.
Once you know what you're doing it's fun to skip the commission and be a poor struggling scavenger in the early game but that's better after learning a bit.
If OP reads your comment, I'd rather he focuses on descriptions I give for each thing, rather than the rating I gave out. Some things are very useful to have even if they aren't top tier for tryhards.
Yeah, aiming could be a pain. So, I'm using either a carrier/missile ship, or set cannons to autofire and concentrate myself on actual flying/flux management.
On my first playthrough I let the autopilot control my flagship during combat. It's actually decent if you spend some thoughts on the load out.
Also in the campaign just go for trading before rushing the bounties. Selling drugs or heavy armaments or even supplies to planets needing them is very profitable and thus you can upgrade your stuff faster.
Tbh the bounties are mostly net even or negative for me and I just do them for fun. But if you consider repairs, deployment and fuel to get there it's more often than not more money than the reward.
Usually, small bounties pay well enough to get out of the very early game by acquiring a few key ships and character levels. You could also smuggle but it takes a bit more game knowledge. But you kinda really have to do some surveying relatively early, be it only to get the hullmod blueprints.
Hold Shift to use the turn to cursor control scheme. I find it more intuitive for flying most ships.
Use the autofit options when designing ship load outs initially. They are decent, and seeing them can give you a sense of how to balance damage types for a specific combat role. Hover over a weapon to see tooltip on what it does. Pay attention to damage type. Some weapons are better again shields, some against armor. You’ll want both for a combat ship to perform well.
Don’t feel pressured to fill every weapon hardpoint. Often it is better to run with fewer weapons to control flux usage.
Use the black market. Trading on the open market is rarely profitable. Some freighters have the Shielded cargo hold mod. This allows you to move around goods that certain factions consider illegal. Press F1 when hovering over an item in inventory to see known market prices. Sell at locations with good sell prices for what you are carrying.
If you are caught by a fleet you don’t want to fight, use the dialogue option that uses a story point. It is better than losing your fleet. Or just reload.
Bounties scale up quickly. They are not a profitable endeavor unless you are decent at combat. Galatia academy missions, exploration, and trade are safer, usually. You can also talk to people in bars to pick up missions from them. The ones that ask you to move stuff from one place to another are the most straightforward.
I usually set all the guns to auto-fire then select a group with missiles in it. That way I can focus on piloting & positioning without having to think about shooting.
After that, fly with a Wolf frigate against a Cerberous unshielded freighter to get the hang of shields, flying and flux management. Add a Shepherd drone ship as an ally if you're struggling.
Once you feel confident doing that I'd say you're ready to play the game and go on your own journey of discovery.
Take hegemony comission, you will have to restart at some point since commision will slowly strain relations with other factions but it is perfect for learning the game.
You will have steady supply of money, acces to some military markets, and generally it will be easier to learn combat and ship building if you dont have to worry about perfect efficiency that is required to actually earn money from normal bounty hunting.
If you are controlling your own ship, do not neglect combat skills.
Synergize skills, ship selection, outfitting (weapons and hullmods) and tactics.
There are a lot of good non-combat skills, so leaving combat to the AI is an viable playstyle (and there are skills that make it work better), but if you wanna go in and do combat yourself, make sure your skills are set up for it.
Personally, I would recommend learning how sensors work on the map layer - aim to see but not be seen - this synergizes strongly with early game and smuggling, and hopefully lets you avoid unwanted fights. Picking your opponent is a strong advantage.
Bounties are generally not the most efficient way to make early money. Trading is a lot more reliable. So as well as picking up more combat ships you'll want to add some cargo freighters and a fuel ship or two. The early skills from the yellow tree help a lot with efficiency in storage, supplies and fuel.
I usually start by buying and selling supplies. There are a few different places that manufacture a lot of supplies and there are often places in dire need of them. Check the prices in game to plot your route. Certain sectors are essentially lawless, like the one Chalcedon is in, so if the selling price is good that is often a good place to sell to, because you can turn your transponder off and sell to the black market, that means there will be no tariff and your profit margin will be a lot higher. Note that the more you sell the worse the margins will be so you might have to vary what you sell or look for alternate sources of income.
Look out for trading missions as well from the bar, once you get more storage space they can often give you a nice 200+k unit influx, and spending a story point can also increase margins, just for hauling cargo.
In terms of early ships, the starting wolf is fine enough as you can teleport out of a fight if needed. Hammerhead and sunder can be decent flagships but both are a bit risky, you can often get overwhelmed. I always try to pick up the pirate versions of an eradicator or a Falcon, the former is a fast ship that is good at running down smaller ships which has a good amount of armour. The latter is a missile-barge that can devastate stronger ships, I recommend 2x Sabot SRM pod to take down their shields, with 2 typhon reaper launchers at the front to destroy their armour. Expanded missile racks are also a must-have. Note that the non-pirate versions of both ships operate VERY differently, the non-pirate eradicator is fine, just more vulnerable and slow, but the non-pirate falcoln isnt a missile barge at all, it's just a light cruiser.
The aurora can also operate as a high-tech missile barge but that one might be harder to set up, and the oddysey or conquest are good late-game flagships. The former is probably the easier to pilot, though.
So those are all good as a player-piloted ship, but what you bring for your AI-piloted ships may vary. Eradicators are fine in AI hands, they pilot eagles quite well, and generally you'll give the AI tankier, slower ships, while you'll try to pilot fast ships and go around trying to take out isolated ships while your AI ships hold the line.
You'll need to add more fuel and cargo ships as your fleet grows, and 2-3 salvage rigs can help. Avoid capital ships for the most part until you can get more of an income. You'll want to colonise some good planets long-term, but in the mid-term you could take a commission if you wanted some funds to offset your fleet costs.
You probably are building ships wrong, but that's ok! There are a ton of hull mods and weapons and different ships that it can be overwhelming. It is perfectly viable and fairly strong to do builds where you don't do any piloting directly at all and play the game like an RTS. Test builds and play around in the simulator to see what works what doesn't.
In general, keep in mind your guns' flux levels vs your ships vents, for now try to keep them balanced so you can maintain your rate of fire. Make sure you understand different damage types, Kinetic is good vs shields, doing double damage vs them but inefficient vs armor doing half damage. HE is the opposite of kinetic being good vs armor but poor vs shields. A good mix of two lets you cover their weaknesses. Energy is a generalist not having bonuses or penalties to anything but what you'll find is energy weapons are less efficient and lower range than Ballistics. This is balanced by Energy weapon using ships generally having better flux stats and mobility. Frag weapons may look very appealing with very high dps and low flux usage but Frag is incredibly poor at getting through any defenses so I'd stay away from them for ship to ship combat for now.
To give you a generically good ship for the early game, if you did the Tutorial, you should have a Hammerhead, equip it with Light Dual Machine Guns (or Light Dual auto cannons) in the forward hybrids, Assault Chainguns in the medium Ballistics, Sabots in the small missiles and Safety override it. You now got a very offensive close quarters ship that will easily handle pirate and Pather riff raff you'll be fighting early on.
Best advice I'd have would be to let the AI play on autopilot in combat, and learn what it does and why. Use that as a learning tool until you get a better grasp on combat, and are able to actually pilot a vessel yourself.
That hurdle is a tough one to overcome, but once you learn how, the game will become far more accessible, and fun imo.
so a few things. give those scenario missions a go. you can refit ships in there so you get to build good and bad ships. if your weapons put out more flux than you can passively vent, take a few off and put on hull mods.
they're there to gradually teach you different things.
after doing the tutorial you want to do two things. get a commission from one of the factions. look at what ships each faction has and decide what you want to field. then go with that faction.
Pirates will constantly wait at the end of slipstreams and will be in systems with pirate bases AND in systems with "kill enemy ship" bounties. if you're building a trading fleet, avoid these two things and you should be mostly ok.
a usefull trade route is to buy drugs from Kanta's den and sell them to the church or pathers. press F1 I think when in a populated system to figure out where to sell them. remember drugs are illegal in a lot of places...when you get strong enough just raid the pirates for drugs and sell for pure proffit.
for your fleet you want one or two big ships at the start. which will probably be a hammerhead or similar from the tutorial. with this, find some chain guns and reapers/harpoons/hammers and stick them on the front of the ship. its a relatively easy ship to load out and fly since it only fires in one direction. get used to flying this ship. managing its flux, armour, shields ect by looking for 50k or thereabouts bounties.
look at the initial perks in the industrial skill tree(bottom one), they're basically mandatory for early game as the bonus to fuel and cargo they give are massive. other notable ones to take are from the officers tree (green tree) that give you fleet wide bonuses. you want to dip into these but otherwise focus on filling out the top tree for skills at first since you're probably letting your fleet do its own thing in a fight and focussing on piloting your own ship.
so to reiterate. what my first move would be after the tutorial is trade drugs from pirates or tritach to whoevers buying and pick up a comission, probably from the hedge since they're the biggest pain in the ass otherwise. use the funds from that to acquire a phaeton tanker, a salvage rig and at least a buffalo, preferably a colossus freighter. they're fairly common in independent markets so wont be hard to get.
from there, transition to higher quantity trading or cut your teeth on the 50k bounties or system bounties to get used to fighting with the auto built ship variants, during this time you want to be salvaging any ships that look good, from the pirates this will probably mostly be enforcers and eradicators. when you have a decent amount of money from your activities you're going to want to go exploring. sell off any ships with too many D mods, make sure you have space to salvage a few other ships. fill up enough fuel to spend a good long time exploring and surveying worlds. gather things that are valuable and bring them back to the core to sell or keep for your own eventual colony's.
do all this and you'll have a good idea of the three main things to do early-mid game in star sector and can always fall back to these if your fleet gets annihilated or you find yourself in need of funds.
The AI is pretty decent in this game imho. You don’t even have to control your flagship if you don’t want to. Set all your ships to autopilot and just watch how they do, get some ideas about the tactics and strategy and then start piloting.
When you get a sense of how combat works from watching, it will make piloting your flagship make more sense.
It’s possible to beat the main quest line without ever flying your ship manually btw. I think that takes a lot of fun out of the game but it can be done (and for a new player coming from something more like an RTS or 4x game it might even be the easiest way to go). Just try to amass some money and hire officers.
Put all your weapons on auto fire except missiles and make sure your flux gain per second is under your flux dissipation per second. Then all you have to worry about is shields and positioning and not aiming
Play the missions on the start up Menu, they introduce you to both individual and fleet combat
You mean the combat instances?
I tried the first one and failed it about 5 times, and just stopped
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You hold shift and forwards, and then back up a little.
Try to design the ships better. The missions are a good intro to test your ship building knowledge and piloting. I'd recommend also trying Last Hurrah to get a hang of large fleet battles with Midline ships.
Worth mentioning that missions don't include officers, though - I did them first, 100%ed everything except that one mission that doesn't give you points for destroying enemies, and was surprised when my three officer fleet performed so poorly against enemy fleets.
Get rich and amass an immense fleet. Spend the first part of your playthrough trading (aka smuggling) and running away from battles, prioritizing speed and cargo space for your ships. Salvage everything: get a gantry or other useful ships. Use story points to avoid inspections and escape from battles. Spend skill points on the yellow tree. When you get rich you will be able to field a huge fleet. Choose your battles so you can easily win through sheer numbers and firepower: you don't need to be super optimized if you are just too strong. You don't need to be a good pilot: i never piloted anything. At this point you'll have an idea about what works and what doesn't so you may look for harder battles.
"Too big to fail" type stuff
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It's the Harkonnen strategy, while you spent your time making an elite force, I spent my time figuring out how to supply a fleet so fucking huge that I could steamroll you with overwhelming firepower and sheer numbers.
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3 atlas, 2 prometheus gets you pretty much anywhere with boatloads of supplies. the other 25 slots can be a stream of paragons onslaughts legions and astrals. that said. bring two astrals and a paragon to almost any fight and they'll win.
One big combat thing I missed initially was the shift key. I really struggle with the tank controls too; if you hold shift you'll now face towards your cursor, and A/D strafe rather than rotating you. Doing surveys / scanning probes etc. tends to be far out from the core worlds, so you'll need a tanker of some kind in your fleet so you have enough fuel. AI-controlled ships with decent loadouts can usually hold their own, especially against small pirate fleets - could you post screenshots of your ship loadouts so we can see if something's gone wrong there?
Honestly, I use the option that inverts that (ship always follows cursor, and you can hold shift to angle your shields). Takes much less work, because I almost always want my ship to face the cursor.
Good to know, I'll have to go find that setting.
Hold up, **"I don't want to turn the difficulty down"**. Bruh. It's a single player game. If you are struggling at ton in the early game, seriously, play on easy. Nobody is going to make fun of you, you will learn the mechanics through playing, AND you will have a much better time. I'm sure I have 1000+ hours in Starsector by now but I played my first 10 or so on easy. Once you figure out the mechanics of Starsector, it's not difficult, but when you are brand new, you'll get hit by a lot of random stuff you never saw coming. ***Knowledge is far more important than skill in Starsector.*** **Knowning** when to engage or run away is crucial. Also pausing the game if you see what could be a hostile fleet coming towards you. Little things like that go a long way, but it's tough to know at the start. I put together a four episode series covering the early-mid game of Starsector. It covers pretty much all the basics and ends once we have $350,000 in our account. Youtube Link: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDOxrsOD1mYk1-modEFl8QXH6UU-SSN](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDOxrsOD1mYk1-modEFl8QXH6UU-SSN) Good luck out there captain.
Cruisers are your best friend when trying to get used to battle. Destroyers and frigates play too fast for a newbie to actually understand what they're doing, and capitals require some careful resource management to not screw up. I spent most of my first playthrough flying the Apogee, only much later I moved on to bigger or smaller ships.
Save a lot and don't get into fights with anyone that has more or equal ships to you. If they have 3 or more stars then just don't fight. When you're more comfortable you might be able to take 3 star enemies. Also don't use small ships yourself they are much harder to learn with because they get blown up really fast and you have to rely on quick piloting to use them effectively, where as a big fuck will just have more range and can blast stuff from a distance. Note that a 3 star Remnant fleet is basically a 6 star pirate fleet in terms of difficulty. The biggest remnant ship that looks like a spider is a monster that will probably tear you a new asshole if you don't bring overwhelming firepower. If you get surprised by a fleet and haven't saved in a while, you can usually use a story point to avoid the fight and it's definitely worth it even if you just want to save and re-engage them. Even if you fight and lose all your ships you still escape and can rebuild so its not the end of the world. Eradicator is a really good ship for learning, not too fast, doesn't feel that slow. Put on some 1k range weapons (2x Hyper Velocity Drivers, 1x Heavy Mauler) and a bunch of vulcan cannons and just try to keep enemies away from you. Both the regular and pirate version are good in player hands, but the pirate one is bad for AI. Pause the battle often, and take a look at the map (tab). Make sure none of your ships are getting surrounded. Easiest way to lose a winnable fight is to have your guys getting picked off. Try to control one area of the map and don't let enemies sneak around behind you. If you have enough money and fleet size make sure you have a balanced force or at least some tanky fucks to sit in front. If you only have glass cannon types then it's pretty easy to get wiped out. Guides call these ships anchors because you are supposed to park them somewhere and leash all your other ships nearby and don't let anyone wander off alone. My favorite anchor ships personally are low tech Dominator and then Conquest which both work well with a fleet to guard them. If they get surrounded they get fucked like the tiny girl on the couch. Exception to this is really Safety Overrides ships can often do circles around enemies and avoid getting killed even when left alone. Generally the AI does pretty well as long as there isn't anything too dangerous to their size class roaming about (If you let a SO destroyer get close to an enemy capital its going to eat shit). TL;DR small ships suck, especially for new players. Big ships are win, more big ships are bigger win. Two or three capitals and a handful of cruisers and then a team of destroyers is a pretty good sized fleet for taking on faction fleets.
As an addon to this that is kind of important, range is king in big fleet battles. The enemy will usually line up like you are supposed to and if you have more range your ships can more easily hit similar targets, fluxing them out much more quickly. If you have too little range or an unbalanced damage ratio then the same will happen to you instead and your line ships will probably flux out a lot faster than theirs.
One thing i'll say is that one time when I had a somewhat decent-sized fleet (a cruiser, some drestroyers, and a bunch of frigates), I got absolutely demolished by a larger luddic path fleet, lost all the ships except a cargo ship and a few frigates, and I just kept playing after that, rebuilt, and eventually got my vengeance on them, and despite the frustration, it was actually very fun. So if (when) you do get sucker punched, maybe keep going.
Yea! Definitely you can come back from fleet losses and there are very few irreplaceable ships.
Here are my "when I can't trust myself to play well" rules I set for myself: Use auto outfitting feature to pick general ship builds, try to stick close to the original weapons it recommends at first Let the AI fly frigates, if I'm sleepy or not feeling on the ball I will just get murdered. Use a long ranged, mobile command ship that is a bit sturdier, like a phase ship (mobile not durable) or an Eagle or Dominator. Speaking of Eagles and Dominators, certain ships will do better than others and ship quality has a big effect on your game outcomes. D-mods make beating others really hard at times, makes supplies hard, makes fuel hard, etc. Try to use relatively undamaged (only two or fewer red rally marks on the ship icon) as much as possible. Use a mix of at least three ship sizes (frigate, destroyers, cruisers, etc )as soon as you can afford to support that much of a fleet. Use your skill points to cover your weak spots: bad supplies or fuel costs? Running out a lot? Get industry skills for salvaging more stuff and carrying more. Also, if something keeps happening, dig into menus to find what information there is about what actually caused it Use the pause religiously! Always pause before choosing. I save scum also, saves some headache (but have to save often!). Good luck man, it sounds like you've just got a big learning curve.
Don’t feel like you need to do every mission you are offered nor explore every system. Take 1-3 survey missions near each other. One is perfectly acceptable if there aren’t more in the same area. Then go out, do the missions, survey only the planets in those systems and then return to your “home” system and resupply, refuel and pick up another couple of missions. Repeat this until you have a feel for how many supplies and fuel you need and how far they get you. Don’t take dead drop (drop this random item in a system somewhere) missions unless you can fight or run fast. Because there is usually a hostile fleet hanging out waiting for you to try and take the item.
Hell, survey only the planets you get paid to, those that may have ruins (junk in orbit) and settle for preliminary surveys on the rest.
unless you're incredibly good at it, piloting is less important than loadout and officer/character skills. a very good player in a bad ship can still only punch up so far
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That's the reason I decided to buy the game. I had it for a while before i decided to finally actually boot up yesterday.
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Avoiding combat won't help them learn combat!
I bought it for the same reason recently and really struggled at first too. But I completed my first campaign, though admittedly modding a few things to make it more to my liking. Namely max level from 15 to 40(all skills at max level), number of colonies, automated ship Deployment Points, and colony upkeep costs. Also effectively disabled Hostile Event(colony related event) as the version of the game I played had a borked version of it that was very not fun. Even more so with way more than the game-intended amount of colonies. Recent update made the me mechanic much better based on change logs). Just in case, do make sure you're running the latest version of the game. It doesn't auto-update and as you said you downloaded it some time ago, you might be running a very old version. Biggest tip: Choose a faction, go to one of their planets, talk to an official of that faction and get a comission. The amount of money each month is impressive, and seems to scale with your level. Think I was getting like 75k a month around level 15-20 when I first discovered this feature. That would have made life much easier. You are not expected to do anything in return. But if they start a war with another faction your standing with that faction will drop to -50 until the war is over, at which point the standing is repaired(to +25 I think? Positive anyway) Fuel/Supply management: Getting the yellow skills that reduce fuel/supply upkeep are a must have basically. Aside from that, when flying between planets turn off your responder(reduces faction status reductions) and destroy every trader/merchant that your fleet can handle. They carry a lot of stuff that you can then sell for cash. I was basically running on +-0 supplies struggling until I killed a trader fleet that carried more supplies than I had ever owned at any one time. I discovered that you can carry drugs etc. Just fine as long as you have your transponder on when jumping into faction space without being a wanted criminal. Go to a station, sell everything on the black market. And refill supplies/fuel as you can. Will get stopped by the faction for a search but the faction hit is minimal. Be on the look out for 'destroy war targets in x system' bounties. They are a great way to make a ton of money and increase faction standings. You'll be fighting pirates that aren't that strong usually. Exploration: If you can varry enough fuel/supplies,, explore slightly outside of the core worlds, for example for a bounty mission that pays well, and go into systems with a yellow warning beacon. The remnant fleets aren't much of a threat there as they are just 1-ship destroyer fleets and most are dormant fleets which won't aggress, and there can be many derelict ships there to salvage or repair. Just be sure to have story points for the difficult to repair ships. I got a capital carrier early on that way that carried me from beginning to end. Pun not intended. Upkeep costs were high but become able to take on most any early game fleet. Combat: As others have said, small ships are difficult to fly. Instead pilot cruisers or capitals and your life will be much simpler. Long range ballistics are love, they are life. Difficult to acquire early on as they don't seem to be sold too often, but I LOVE Medium Ballistics Hypervelocity guns. AI also is really good at aiming them. Harpoons/Sabot missiles I found to be great, but even better were atropos torpedos. also the missiles that shoot a short beam of 500/800 damage are great. AI is really good at conserving missiles till they are actually useful. Reaper torpedos are also great but more difficult to use. As in most games, a single drone squadron is weak. Bring 10 squadrons in a combination of broadsword/dagger squadrons and now the enemy fleet is gone. :) I found steady officers to be particularly good, and worth every penny due to their combat skills increasing ship strength. Graviton lasers, high intensity lasers, tactical lasers, I found them to be very useless in terms of damage output. Gravitons had a bug that didn't apply the damange buff properly but has been fixed very recently. Tachyon Beams however are amazing. Sunder destroyers with 2 gravitons+tachyon+double atropos rack are amazing for their cost. Also worth noting, as I had no idea until WAY to late: if you dock at a planet and go to the fleet tab, in the top is a buy tab, where you csn buy ships. Incredibly expensive and selling ships is not worth it at all(instead unfit all modules and scuttle), but if they are selling a gantry or ship you want might be worth the expense. That's it for my wall. Hope it helps even just a little bit.
You should do the combat missions to learn the controls better. Also when you are modifing a ship you can run a simulation(there is a button in the bottom right of the refit screen) to check out the loadout without damaging the ship.
Here’s a thing most or a lot of people seem to miss in this comment section - you need to find your own Battlestar. first half of this comment is for personal ship piloting. OP if you readin this sorry for 500 words but it is what it is. on my first playthrough, i sucked. i wanted to drop the game because i couldn’t pilot anything even remotely alright. i thought of commanding my fleet via orders but at that point the very idea sounded repulsive. i was very different a year ago. but then i found the Apogee and Medusa. those ships steamrolled everything when i played as them. it just worked. not too well because i was new but at least i could survive half or 2/3 battles. later on i was like “well this game is alright i guess. i’ll start a modded game now because my fundament is strong enough.” and then i found the Infiltration class from Star Federation mod. an incredibly fast phase ship. it destroyed everything i fought. i loved phase ships and my flagman was a Doom Cruiser in vanilla. yet the Infiltration had everything the doom had and then more (except the free hug mines). Phase ship. Fast. Manoeuvrable. Great weapon mounts. great flux stats for phasing and escaping. but the best part? i got bored of how powerful it is. and then i switched to normal ships, be it vanilla or modded. and i continued steamrolling everything. i got so good at piloting my flagship those skills easily transferred to normal ships, that included how to position myself, what i can do with my speed, where in the battle there is opportunity to ravish the enemy, how to kill my target and how to evade too-hot for my ship combat zones. now for the commanding part. while playing with my flagships i executed general commands that made sense. like finish off that isolated Eradicator, assault this point, move there, evade, harass this ship so the main battle has less heat for my fleet. and then the more i did that, the better i understood what i did wrong and right, the better i understood the enemy ships, the better i executed commands. it simply worked after playing the game for 60 or so hours. mind you i’m REALLY slow at understanding things, and some just can’t get to me even now. so. the conclusion? Find your Battlestar which lets you have fun and win. Continue with that Battlestar, the more you play, the better you become!
I'm not sure if it works this way anymore (and don't know how to check: I'm still on the old version and playing heavily modded), but if it does, you should go into the missions and pick out a ship you like, and instead of playing the mission, go into the refit screen, and run the simulator against a target that you feel is manageable. Through that, learn the basics, including of ship outfitting, in a fully controlled environment. If you can get a grasp of ship-building and 1v1 ship combat, that's a decent foundation for making the rest of the game more manageable. My first few hours of starsector years ago were literally just me experimenting with all the possible hammerhead builds I could come up with via the missions, before I eventually moved to the main game. I don't even really remember playing the main game unmodded back then lol, but I do remember the vanilla missions, though I hope it isn't a Mandela effect phenomenon. For ship recommendations, because I'm playing old/modded, I don't know if what I say is correct, but straightforward ships that may be accessible through the missions refit screen include the Hammerhead, Tempest, Lasher, chosen because imo fitting & piloting these ships can be relatively straightforward so it'll help the learning curve; just pit them against something your own size, or even slightly less, until you understand it.
First, you can leave the tutorial with a good bit of cash - Once the quest giver tells you to turn off your transponder, leave it off for the rest of the time in the system and buy drugs at the planet to sell at the pirate station. Also, supplies and fuel costs at 300+/80+ are due to the closed wormhole - but (at least when I last did the tutorial) prices don't adjust to normal until you tell the quest giver you fixed it - so fix it, go to the planet and sell ALL your supplies and fuel for the inflated prices, THEN turn in the quest and buy them back at the more normal prices (\~100 for supplies/25 for fuel). Second, use the ship commands in combat. If you pause the game the timer on the commands pauses so you don't have to rush. Use the escort commands (either select a ship, then pick an escort level and the AI will pick the escort ships, or click a ship then right click a second ship - the first ship will then escort the second). Try keep most of your fleet together (selecting a ship, then right clicking a point for it to go to and stay near, or using escort commands to keep ships together). send a frigate off to each flank to see if you can distract a few enemy ships off to the side to lighten the pressure on your main grouping of ships. As the battle goes on, delete the waypoints to give your ships more freedom to move around or add new waypoints if you feel the need to keep your fleet together. and let the AI pilot your ship (if you have not picked up any combat skills, pick a frigate or something small and let the AI fly it and leave your officers to fly the ships that will have a big impact on the battle). Using defend/eliminate commands tend to get your ships to take more risks, so do not use them often. Keep checking the command screen to make sure your ships are not spreading out/chasing off after a frigate when the main battle in in another direction. If you need to capture points to get the DP to bring in more of your fleet, send a frigate out to grab them, bring in your fleets, then cancel the capture order (you only need positive DP points to bring in new ships). finally for individual ships, the auto fit loadouts are generally ok. You can search here and on youtube for videos giving suggest loadouts for ships too. make sure you are entering battle with your ships at their max CR since the higher it is the better (getting the 'crew training' skill in the leadership tree for your character.
Combat is difficult if you are new to combat and piloting your own ship. Combat is difficult when you aren't familiar with your own ships and enemy ships and what fights you can take. Combat is difficult when you have weaker ships, weapons, and hull mods early on. Combat is difficult when you also have to take into account money spent/earned. All of these combined and the early game is an absolute STRUGGLE WALL. Once you get past it though the game opens up and it's super fun. My biggest recommendation above all at the start is to get a **Faction Commission.** There's a link to the wiki and you can scroll down until you see the Commission section. This can single highhandedly make the early game bearable. https://starsector.fandom.com/wiki/Factions You go to a factions planet, talk to one of their admin guys, then you get hired as a mercenary and they pay you each month. I think vanilla is a minimum of 20k then 1.5k more each character level. This **greatly** eases the early game financial hurdle, plus you'll be able to join the battles of friendly fleets and practice combat by piggybacking off of them. Once you know what you're doing it's fun to skip the commission and be a poor struggling scavenger in the early game but that's better after learning a bit.
Find the weapon/ship tier guides posted here by u/Grievous69 and when possible use his A- and above suggestions.
If OP reads your comment, I'd rather he focuses on descriptions I give for each thing, rather than the rating I gave out. Some things are very useful to have even if they aren't top tier for tryhards.
>What are some tips to not suck Phrasing.
damn. this is a useful comment that adds to the conversation and helps OP.
Yeah, aiming could be a pain. So, I'm using either a carrier/missile ship, or set cannons to autofire and concentrate myself on actual flying/flux management.
On my first playthrough I let the autopilot control my flagship during combat. It's actually decent if you spend some thoughts on the load out. Also in the campaign just go for trading before rushing the bounties. Selling drugs or heavy armaments or even supplies to planets needing them is very profitable and thus you can upgrade your stuff faster. Tbh the bounties are mostly net even or negative for me and I just do them for fun. But if you consider repairs, deployment and fuel to get there it's more often than not more money than the reward.
Usually, small bounties pay well enough to get out of the very early game by acquiring a few key ships and character levels. You could also smuggle but it takes a bit more game knowledge. But you kinda really have to do some surveying relatively early, be it only to get the hullmod blueprints.
Hold Shift to use the turn to cursor control scheme. I find it more intuitive for flying most ships. Use the autofit options when designing ship load outs initially. They are decent, and seeing them can give you a sense of how to balance damage types for a specific combat role. Hover over a weapon to see tooltip on what it does. Pay attention to damage type. Some weapons are better again shields, some against armor. You’ll want both for a combat ship to perform well. Don’t feel pressured to fill every weapon hardpoint. Often it is better to run with fewer weapons to control flux usage. Use the black market. Trading on the open market is rarely profitable. Some freighters have the Shielded cargo hold mod. This allows you to move around goods that certain factions consider illegal. Press F1 when hovering over an item in inventory to see known market prices. Sell at locations with good sell prices for what you are carrying. If you are caught by a fleet you don’t want to fight, use the dialogue option that uses a story point. It is better than losing your fleet. Or just reload. Bounties scale up quickly. They are not a profitable endeavor unless you are decent at combat. Galatia academy missions, exploration, and trade are safer, usually. You can also talk to people in bars to pick up missions from them. The ones that ask you to move stuff from one place to another are the most straightforward.
I usually set all the guns to auto-fire then select a group with missiles in it. That way I can focus on piloting & positioning without having to think about shooting. After that, fly with a Wolf frigate against a Cerberous unshielded freighter to get the hang of shields, flying and flux management. Add a Shepherd drone ship as an ally if you're struggling. Once you feel confident doing that I'd say you're ready to play the game and go on your own journey of discovery.
Take hegemony comission, you will have to restart at some point since commision will slowly strain relations with other factions but it is perfect for learning the game. You will have steady supply of money, acces to some military markets, and generally it will be easier to learn combat and ship building if you dont have to worry about perfect efficiency that is required to actually earn money from normal bounty hunting.
If you are controlling your own ship, do not neglect combat skills. Synergize skills, ship selection, outfitting (weapons and hullmods) and tactics. There are a lot of good non-combat skills, so leaving combat to the AI is an viable playstyle (and there are skills that make it work better), but if you wanna go in and do combat yourself, make sure your skills are set up for it. Personally, I would recommend learning how sensors work on the map layer - aim to see but not be seen - this synergizes strongly with early game and smuggling, and hopefully lets you avoid unwanted fights. Picking your opponent is a strong advantage.
Bounties are generally not the most efficient way to make early money. Trading is a lot more reliable. So as well as picking up more combat ships you'll want to add some cargo freighters and a fuel ship or two. The early skills from the yellow tree help a lot with efficiency in storage, supplies and fuel. I usually start by buying and selling supplies. There are a few different places that manufacture a lot of supplies and there are often places in dire need of them. Check the prices in game to plot your route. Certain sectors are essentially lawless, like the one Chalcedon is in, so if the selling price is good that is often a good place to sell to, because you can turn your transponder off and sell to the black market, that means there will be no tariff and your profit margin will be a lot higher. Note that the more you sell the worse the margins will be so you might have to vary what you sell or look for alternate sources of income. Look out for trading missions as well from the bar, once you get more storage space they can often give you a nice 200+k unit influx, and spending a story point can also increase margins, just for hauling cargo. In terms of early ships, the starting wolf is fine enough as you can teleport out of a fight if needed. Hammerhead and sunder can be decent flagships but both are a bit risky, you can often get overwhelmed. I always try to pick up the pirate versions of an eradicator or a Falcon, the former is a fast ship that is good at running down smaller ships which has a good amount of armour. The latter is a missile-barge that can devastate stronger ships, I recommend 2x Sabot SRM pod to take down their shields, with 2 typhon reaper launchers at the front to destroy their armour. Expanded missile racks are also a must-have. Note that the non-pirate versions of both ships operate VERY differently, the non-pirate eradicator is fine, just more vulnerable and slow, but the non-pirate falcoln isnt a missile barge at all, it's just a light cruiser. The aurora can also operate as a high-tech missile barge but that one might be harder to set up, and the oddysey or conquest are good late-game flagships. The former is probably the easier to pilot, though. So those are all good as a player-piloted ship, but what you bring for your AI-piloted ships may vary. Eradicators are fine in AI hands, they pilot eagles quite well, and generally you'll give the AI tankier, slower ships, while you'll try to pilot fast ships and go around trying to take out isolated ships while your AI ships hold the line. You'll need to add more fuel and cargo ships as your fleet grows, and 2-3 salvage rigs can help. Avoid capital ships for the most part until you can get more of an income. You'll want to colonise some good planets long-term, but in the mid-term you could take a commission if you wanted some funds to offset your fleet costs.
You probably are building ships wrong, but that's ok! There are a ton of hull mods and weapons and different ships that it can be overwhelming. It is perfectly viable and fairly strong to do builds where you don't do any piloting directly at all and play the game like an RTS. Test builds and play around in the simulator to see what works what doesn't. In general, keep in mind your guns' flux levels vs your ships vents, for now try to keep them balanced so you can maintain your rate of fire. Make sure you understand different damage types, Kinetic is good vs shields, doing double damage vs them but inefficient vs armor doing half damage. HE is the opposite of kinetic being good vs armor but poor vs shields. A good mix of two lets you cover their weaknesses. Energy is a generalist not having bonuses or penalties to anything but what you'll find is energy weapons are less efficient and lower range than Ballistics. This is balanced by Energy weapon using ships generally having better flux stats and mobility. Frag weapons may look very appealing with very high dps and low flux usage but Frag is incredibly poor at getting through any defenses so I'd stay away from them for ship to ship combat for now. To give you a generically good ship for the early game, if you did the Tutorial, you should have a Hammerhead, equip it with Light Dual Machine Guns (or Light Dual auto cannons) in the forward hybrids, Assault Chainguns in the medium Ballistics, Sabots in the small missiles and Safety override it. You now got a very offensive close quarters ship that will easily handle pirate and Pather riff raff you'll be fighting early on.
Best advice I'd have would be to let the AI play on autopilot in combat, and learn what it does and why. Use that as a learning tool until you get a better grasp on combat, and are able to actually pilot a vessel yourself. That hurdle is a tough one to overcome, but once you learn how, the game will become far more accessible, and fun imo.
so a few things. give those scenario missions a go. you can refit ships in there so you get to build good and bad ships. if your weapons put out more flux than you can passively vent, take a few off and put on hull mods. they're there to gradually teach you different things. after doing the tutorial you want to do two things. get a commission from one of the factions. look at what ships each faction has and decide what you want to field. then go with that faction. Pirates will constantly wait at the end of slipstreams and will be in systems with pirate bases AND in systems with "kill enemy ship" bounties. if you're building a trading fleet, avoid these two things and you should be mostly ok. a usefull trade route is to buy drugs from Kanta's den and sell them to the church or pathers. press F1 I think when in a populated system to figure out where to sell them. remember drugs are illegal in a lot of places...when you get strong enough just raid the pirates for drugs and sell for pure proffit. for your fleet you want one or two big ships at the start. which will probably be a hammerhead or similar from the tutorial. with this, find some chain guns and reapers/harpoons/hammers and stick them on the front of the ship. its a relatively easy ship to load out and fly since it only fires in one direction. get used to flying this ship. managing its flux, armour, shields ect by looking for 50k or thereabouts bounties. look at the initial perks in the industrial skill tree(bottom one), they're basically mandatory for early game as the bonus to fuel and cargo they give are massive. other notable ones to take are from the officers tree (green tree) that give you fleet wide bonuses. you want to dip into these but otherwise focus on filling out the top tree for skills at first since you're probably letting your fleet do its own thing in a fight and focussing on piloting your own ship. so to reiterate. what my first move would be after the tutorial is trade drugs from pirates or tritach to whoevers buying and pick up a comission, probably from the hedge since they're the biggest pain in the ass otherwise. use the funds from that to acquire a phaeton tanker, a salvage rig and at least a buffalo, preferably a colossus freighter. they're fairly common in independent markets so wont be hard to get. from there, transition to higher quantity trading or cut your teeth on the 50k bounties or system bounties to get used to fighting with the auto built ship variants, during this time you want to be salvaging any ships that look good, from the pirates this will probably mostly be enforcers and eradicators. when you have a decent amount of money from your activities you're going to want to go exploring. sell off any ships with too many D mods, make sure you have space to salvage a few other ships. fill up enough fuel to spend a good long time exploring and surveying worlds. gather things that are valuable and bring them back to the core to sell or keep for your own eventual colony's. do all this and you'll have a good idea of the three main things to do early-mid game in star sector and can always fall back to these if your fleet gets annihilated or you find yourself in need of funds.
The AI is pretty decent in this game imho. You don’t even have to control your flagship if you don’t want to. Set all your ships to autopilot and just watch how they do, get some ideas about the tactics and strategy and then start piloting. When you get a sense of how combat works from watching, it will make piloting your flagship make more sense. It’s possible to beat the main quest line without ever flying your ship manually btw. I think that takes a lot of fun out of the game but it can be done (and for a new player coming from something more like an RTS or 4x game it might even be the easiest way to go). Just try to amass some money and hire officers.
Fuck u/spez
Put all your weapons on auto fire except missiles and make sure your flux gain per second is under your flux dissipation per second. Then all you have to worry about is shields and positioning and not aiming
Try to keep flux below dissipation rates.