In my current endgame game, the only high-end big-ship blueprints I’ve reliably been able to find are carriers (plus an Onslaught blueprint and a Dominator blueprint, granted). By necessity, I’ve done more carrier experimentation than in past saves. Two fun loadouts:
-
Legion-class with four Khopesh wings. The Legion has enough point defense to get by without a fighter screen and can hit hard enough to fight off most frigates and destroyers, and the rocket bombers have plenty of firepower.
-
Astral-class with four Trident wings and two Broadsword wings. The Broadswords go in first and launch flares to confuse enemy PD, which makes the torpedoes from the Tridents much more effective. With the paired torpedoes, the Tridents do a ton of damage, and eight bombers’ worth is enough to overwhelm point defense even in the absence of the screening fighters. Bring two Astrals to fight a battlestation, and you don’t really need much else beyond screening ships if they’re coordinating their strikes.
Yes! Astrals are my favorite carriers by far. I have a similar setup with 1 Broadsword, 2 Longbows and 3 Daggers. The Longbows help break the shields first and then the torpedoes from the Daggers finish the job. The coordinated strikes are devastating. Anything less than a cap ship can go down in one bombing run. For some real fun I like to deploy 2 Astrals and a Paragon.
I need to take a few more exploration trips. I really want some better direct combat cruisers/capitals—I don’t have the right mindset to fly Onslaughts (“Get in his face and armor tank! He can’t hurt you if you’ve blown all the weapons off the front of his ship!”), and the next smallest pure combat ship I have is a Falcon (a bit too small) or a Doom (phase minelaying is fun, but it doesn’t last very long at peak performance).
Carto
572
After looking at the media on the developer’s site, this looks like a spiritual successor to the old Escape Velocity games. Can anyone confirm that?
In tactical gameplay terms, it puts me vaguely in mind of EV Nova, my only real point of familiarity with the latter series. Both the combat and the sandbox are much more complicated. On the flip side, I don’t think Starsector is ever likely to have as much story content out of the box as EV Nova did.
SamF7
574
I hit this point in the game a few times also. Shortly after ending the tutorial I’m broke and I can’t figure out a way to make money that doesn’t cost more money than I earn!
Then I started digging around on the intertoobs. A few things I’ve learned:
- Supplies are the killer. They usually about $100 a pop. Flying around burns supplies. You need to ditch ships with high supply requirements.
- Watch the “D-Mods” on ships you’ve captured. Damaged engines makes a ship slow (slowest ship = speed of entire FLEET). Slower fleet = longer to get where going = more maintenance cost.
- Another d-mod to avoid is the “higher maintenance”.
I’ve been selling the ships that are just too expensive to maintain, and that has made all the difference in the game post-tutorial.
I know I know, “But these captured ships are POWERFUL and COOL!”. Yes they are. But they are often simply un-maintainable. $$'s rule.
SamF7
Yeah, I do need to pay attention to speed and cost of ships. In starting over I’ve got a better balance on this I believe, fewer less expensive ships.
Playing the tutorial you get an option to salvage stuff and I just salvaged everything because I didn’t know any better (perhaps the tutorial could point out costs when this comes up, seems like it would have been good timing?). That pretty well doomed me on playing forward from the point the tutorial ended.
So, off into the wild blue yonder in a new campaign. Should prove interesting to see how long I last this go, I anticipate it might well take a few runs at this for me to get enough of a lay of the land to make it stick. Fine by me, having fun.
SamF7
576
I DID THE EXACT SAME THING!
- I salvaged every ship I could!
- Built a huge fleet!
- Won many battles!
Then I went broke …
SamF7
Why is this not on steam?
Because it’s not finished.
No excuse. I don’t like floating my CC info out there.
One thing to remember with d-mods: you can build a great midgame fleet around them, if you go for the Field Repairs skill at level 3. (In this release, anyway.) Field Repairs reduces the maintenance cost by 20% per d-mod (with diminishing returns), so you can have big cruisers or capital ships on the field much earlier than you might otherwise be able to support.
BMTMicro allows you to mail them the money if I remember correctly. No excuse.
tylertoo
583
And then you load it into your Steam library anyway.
How does one accomplish this sorcery?
Choose the last option, then point it to the game’s exe file and voila!
It’s really only useful for putting a shortcut in your library page and like a little tiny bit of other functionality though. Most of the stuff Steam does for games you own on Steam, like playtime tracking, is still not there.
Is this a ship or a fitting for a ship?
