Despite many hours in this game, I’m kind of stuck getting to the level where I can build a colony. My commander is level 27, and I have a strong fleet of 12 ships. But I only hover around $350K, and the missions I get are either too difficult, or not lucrative enough to do more than break even. In other words, the missions I can complete bring in around $100k, but that ends up getting spent on repairs and supplies. Higher yield missions are too difficult and I get decimated and have to reload.
In short, I’m stalled. I don’t know enough about comparing ships and weapons to know how to effectively upgrade either. I’m spinning my wheels. Mostly I’m doing bounty missions to destroy pirate fleets or pirate bases. Any advice would be appreciated.
Personal bounty and pirate base missions have high overhead. Get a few colossus freighters and look for transport missions in bars. Some are really high paying without a lot of risk if you have the burn to stay out of trouble.
With militarized subsystems and augmented field drives you can have both high burn and high cargo capacity.
Also to help break even on combat get a salvage rig or two and also equip support ships like your tankers with salvage gantries. When you assess fresh large debris fields you want to see a percent well over one hundred.
At some point make sure to do some exploring. With high salvage exploring ruins and other things you find can be lucrative and it’s very important to find good blueprints before starting colonies. Use an explore mission to fund an expedition and explore as much as you can on the way. Make sure to have support ships with surveying equipment to keep supply costs down.
Plus you’ll want to find that ideal system to colonize, and I do emphasize system, not planet. Rich but high hazzard worlds in the same system as habitable worlds can be very useful and profitable. My 200 hazard world is currently my biggest source of income.
I misspoke about one thing, the max salvage number you get is not from debris fields but when you salvage a derelict ship. With the skill bonus and salvage equipment I currently get a 194% max value.
I just took on a domain mothership and received a pristine nanoforge! It was a huge risk as I still lack a capital ship in my fleet. I went in with three plasma cannon equipped Apogees, four Medusae, four drovers with a variety of high tech and remnant figters, and my Sunder. Since domain automated defense ships are slow and don’t have great range I was able to use superior range and speed to wear them down and defeat them.
Its even better than that, it lets you analyze the data in groups of battles as well as battle by battle. So in some fights because of how the positioning plays out, certain ships might perform better or worse than under average conditions. So you can look at the stats from your last 5 or 10 or whatever battles and see the averages.
Going to have to check that mod out for sure! Good find.
In the department of the little things putting a smile on my face, just completed construction of my first ship. Had AI and pristine nanoforge installed in heavy industry at one of my colonies just complete an Astral carrier. First battle using it was impressive.
About a month out from getting my hands on my first paragon. That should be some fun, although I got to admit the onslaughts I bought from hegemony have been more than capable.
But that is after all a lot of the fun of this game, getting your hands on ships and kitting them out to see what they can do in battle.
I got the salvage gantry and surveying equipment confused in a comment above. Salvage gantry isn’t available as a hullmod you can add to just any ship. You need ships that already have it built in like Salvage Rigs or Shepherds to bolster your salvaging capability.
When going on exploration missions, once you find the hullmod for it you can load up your tankers and cargo ships with surveying equipment to reduce surveying costs.
Where did you get the blueprints for the Astral and Paragon? Did you raid a Tri-Tachyon world to get them or did you find them through regular exploration?
I’ve found multiple high tech and midline blueprint packages from research stations, ruins, etc. For capital ships I’ve only found the low tech Legion, which I haven’t tried out yet. I keep toying with the idea of raiding core worlds with orbital words to see if I can get more blueprints. I’ve even done a little recon when visiting systems, but the worlds that produce ships tend to have ships in orbit all the time so trying to go dark and sneak in a marine raid doesn’t seem too feasible.
Thanks to better salvaging, I just came upon a shit ton of blueprints, including four that are worth a total of about $1.2 million space bucks if I sell them rather than learn them. Which I’m tempted to do, because it will allow me to finally start my work on building a strong colony (I currently have about $775K).
They are:
Collosus Mk II Freighter (worth 85K)
Eagle class Cruiser (worth 190K)
Prometheus Mk II modified Tanker (worth $310K)
Legion class Battlecarrier (worth $572K)
Should I sell these for the huge cash influx or learn them?
