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[Nimaniel]

I think we should collaborate (as a community) to make a post-version 0.7 beginners guide for vanilla Starsector.

Mainly triggered by people being put in escape pods since the advent of sensors, which results in fights that are too hard to handle.

Since the game is still changing a lot, we should not aim for a permanent guide full of chrome and polish, but just some quick tips, and a little explanation of game mechanics and opportunities to get through the early game.

Something along these lines:

- When starting a new game, it is easy to vastly overestimate your ability to fight without having any skills leveled up.
- Pause the game and hover your mouse over fleets to see what they are doing. Often they are chasing enemies that they can see because they have much better sensor strength than you.
- Follow friendly fleets that are chasing enemies. If you join their fights, you can pick up early xp, salvage and bounties with very little risk, and you can even help a slower larger friendly fleet catch a smaller faster fleet.
- etc.

In addition to advice like above, we should have a few short sections describing important things like sensor mechanics, with some advice on how to best use them in the early game.

We collect contributions for a bit, and then edit things together to something semi-coherent. Maybe we all learn a trick or two along the way, and get a guide that we can point to when we fall into the ahMahGawdDisGameIsHard-pit.

[cerberusti]

The first few notes:

1) Remember that half damage is off by default now, those used to playing with it on will need to take more care.  It really did get harder if you were playing with this on.

2) If you want to hunt pirates early on, do so in hyperspace.  They are pretty common, and you get some ludd ships attacking as well.  They are not common enough to be profitable anywhere I have found in normal space.

3) Go dark if you need to avoid ships, your sensor range is bigger than most enemies even with a smallish fleet if you do this.

[CrashToDesktop]

1. Do NOT by any means hold the Shift key to accelerate time.  It's a death sentence, since things just go by way too fast, even for larger fleets.

2. Use common sense.  Don't trade 100K worth of Harvested Organs on the Black Market and expect to get out scot-free.

3. Don't Go Dark as soon as a fleet starts chasing you.  You don't have enough distance between you and them early-game to Go Dark and then make a sharp turn and avoid the patrol at the same time as they're following your last seen travel vector.

[Abradolf Lincler]

1. Do NOT by any means hold the Shift key to accelerate time.  It's a death sentence, since things just go by way too fast, even for larger fleets.

2. Use common sense.  Don't trade 100K worth of Harvested Organs on the Black Market and expect to get out scot-free.

3. Don't Go Dark as soon as a fleet starts chasing you.  You don't have enough distance between you and them early-game to Go Dark and then make a sharp turn and avoid the patrol at the same time as they're following your last seen travel vector.

Why not shift key? all I do is shift key... Shift key is Love, Shift key is life.

[icepick37]

Put your gains in the bank until you have a steady foot hold. And by that I mean put ships and guns in storage (and anything else valuable to you).

This way you can take risks with your ship and just get a new one (and some fresh cash) if it doesn't work out. Win-win.

[FooF]

- True beginner's need to practice their twitch/aiming skills when piloting frigates. The risk/reward for frigate-play is tremendously high and IMO, the hardest learning curve there is. Beginners need to hone their maneuvering and aiming skills in the simulator for awhile until they can reliably take on two frigs at once. Fighting while outnumbered is absolutely necessary to make any sort of profit in the "normal" game so would be #1 on my list.

- Getting officers early and having them grow with you is a huge boon. Ashera more frequently has officers available than Jangala at start but check both. As for what skills to level up, everyone has their opinion. All of the level 5 perks are valuable, though I put an emphasis on flux/vent issues because very early on, you don't have the character skills to offset them. Likewise, top speed is always a plus when you're trying to run down stragglers.

- Never sell a weapon. Store it on the abandoned station on Ashera if you must (it's free) but the return on them is extremely low and needing to buy them can cripple your early gains.

- Hang out near the rings of Barad A/B if you're looking to pick a fight but simply jumping into hyperspace and wandering around the jump points of Corvus usually nets a few big fleet battles or a couple bands of pirates looking for an easy kill. There's a lot more "traffic" in hyperspace so if you can afford the fuel, your best bet for finding targets or being ambushed is by moving around the systems.

- Speaking of ambushes, if you stay with a frigate fleet and put a few points into top-speed (or use SO), very few enemies will be able to catch you as you retreat. Luddic Path are very quick but they're rarely in numbers that should bother you if you're decent with a frigate. Everything else you're going to be more nimble than, unless you're picking fights with Tri-Tach Tempests (never a good idea).

- I usually don't pick up a second ship until I have about 30k in the bank and even then I don't go overboard. By then, I usually have enough weapons stockpiled that I can arm it for free or for little cost.

- Oh, first thing you should do when you start is pick up 10-15 "green" crew. They're cheap and after a few battles, they'll be "regulars" or "veterans." When you do get that second ship eventually, you won't need to buy more experienced crew. After .7, having extra crew doesn't cost you anything and you always use the most experienced anyway. So, having 25% more crew than you need getting XP saves you from having to pay more for them later. Higher CR is always a good thing and it can have a profound impact on your AI fleet.

[Vinyl Dash]

If you're struggling with pirate or pathers in the early game, strongly consider getting an ion cannon.

 A lot of the ships you fight at that point in the game, from cerberi, to hounds, to broadswords, talons and piranhas, are unshielded. The ion cannon single-handedly shuts down most of their weapons and engines almost permanently.

[Megas]

- Never sell a weapon. Store it on the abandoned station on Ashera if you must (it's free) but the return on them is extremely low and needing to buy them can cripple your early gains.

Thumper is very bad.  I sell them if I can or jettison them if I need more cargo space.  There is one Hammerhead high-skill configuration that can put Thumper to decent use, but that requires additional OP and hullmods (edit: and railguns, a rare weapon) early-game players do not have.

There are other less optimal weapons you may sell if you rarely use them and/or enemies cannot stop dropping them.  For example, I probably would sell excess mining blasters once I get enough pulse lasers, mining blasters only useful for player-only shield-breaker configurations because pulse laser is superior in almost every way.  Arbalest is another weapon that while decent, is ubiquitous and outperformed by other weapons, and you will not use it much past the early-game.

[Nimaniel]

Editing this into a concise list of tips for starting out is going to be more tricky than I expected, because I disagree with a fair share of the advice so far.

Like picking fights with Ludd Path (an excellent way to get yourself killed), waiting to get a second ship (I would advice the opposite), buying green crew (which will actually make your situation worse), keeping all weapons (at least we can turn this into good advice by saying which weapons you should generally keep and which are fairly safe to sell)...

But we also have a lot of good and interesting advice.

[FooF]

- Never sell a weapon. Store it on the abandoned station on Ashera if you must (it's free) but the return on them is extremely low and needing to buy them can cripple your early gains.

Thumper is very bad.  I sell them if I can or jettison them if I need more cargo space.  There is one Hammerhead high-skill configuration that can put Thumper to decent use, but that requires additional OP and hullmods (edit: and railguns, a rare weapon) early-game players do not have.

There are other less optimal weapons you may sell if you rarely use them and/or enemies cannot stop dropping them.  For example, I probably would sell excess mining blasters once I get enough pulse lasers, mining blasters only useful for player-only shield-breaker configurations because pulse laser is superior in almost every way.  Arbalest is another weapon that while decent, is ubiquitous and outperformed by other weapons, and you will not use it much past the early-game.

"Never" should probably be nuanced a bit, as Megas points out, more as a "general rule of thumb." Someone just getting into the game wouldn't know Thumpers are very limited in usefulness but even then, weapons sell for so little that unless you're starved for cargo room, you might as well keep them. Of course, as players learn which weapons are good/bad, they'll make more judicious decisions over what they want to keep after a fight. Until they reach that point, I would simply advise that selling weapons, even on the black market, is not a primary income generator and it is far more efficient (cost-wise) to simply keep your own stockpile.

[ChrisH]

https://gyazo.com/153ce5b8ffd4200bfd62de612c2246c6 <-- Says it all

[Megas]

The point of a guide is to provide tips to player so they do not need to find out the hard way.  Know that a weapon is bad and the enemy keeps giving such junk?  Sell it!  Thumper is a junk weapon, and pirates keep shoveling it at you.  Mining blaster is almost obsolete once you have enough pulse lasers for everyone (and more in case you wipe).  You can sell junk weapons.  They do not sell for much, but better than nothing if you have junk to dispose of.