After a week or so of both casual, and intense gaming sessions, here's some feedback in yet another wall of words :
Overall impression and shameless endorsement:
This is already a seriously kickass game experience! And the big content updates are not even in yet...it boggles my sleep-deprived-due-to-work-and-starsector-until-midnight-for-the-past-week mind.
To the undecided: Haven't bought the game yet?: just buy this. It's that good.
Starsector has many of the good things about Star Fleet Command II: Orion Pirates that I recall, and on a dynamic map. It's what you want to play after beating the Space Pirates and Zombies campaign after having defeated and flown all of the Bounty Hunter ships.
Then come onto the forum and tell us what you love (or want to see improved) about it. There's so much going on in this game experience already that, even after reading nearly all of the fifteen most recent pages of the general discussion forum...I know that I'm still missing key elements.
And a developer (and a large veteran community) that is listening and responding even to pure newbies who didn't spend five minutes searching the already well detailed/discussed threads here, and on reddit before asking the obvious.
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Lessons learned
1. To other new players reading this that, like me, got hammered badly in their first combats: Learn to first win the flux duel before thinking about damage. Literally: the flux bar on your ship, raising shields only when you need it, and your target's flux are far more important to watch than the relative health bars.
2. The other thing that I didn't understand: jettison the excess fuel and cargo. The supply cost overhead to haul too much will cause you eventually to have to restart. Sure, refit that junk shieldless freighter with the four negative hull modifications (or "D-mods" as vets around here call them) if that's what is takes to get cargo space.
3. Hyperspace (and especially, the initial jump point emergence) is a dangerous place. It is essential to deactivate your transponder and build speed. There are really large sharks swimming around. Huge like the things you find in Subnautica that make you paddle away in terror.
Well one more lession for hyperspace travel: activate the full range option in the galaxy map...you need to ensure you have the fuel to return and quite a bit more.
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Play vanilla, then install some essential mods.
I liked balanced additions to the vanilla gameplay. So I ended up with quite a conservative list that I keep playing.
The first three of the following add a well balanced mix of weapons and ships that enhance the original factions really well. So well, in fact, that I cannot tell where vanilla stops, and the mods start. There's a lot of sandbox replayability: randomized core worlds, number of core worlds, number of random factions, etc. The rest are great additions (and several are required for many of the big faction mods as well).
Nexerelin
Dynasector
Ship/Weapon Pack
AutoSave
Common Radar
LazyLib
Version Checker
ZZ Audio Plus
ZZ GraphicsLib
(I tried some of the other faction mods, and while extremely cool...I first want to try (and fight against) a lot more vanilla fleet setups before venturing against them)
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Favorite early things:
1. 1000 range is a sweet spot for this newbie player.
My fave early destroyer to pilot is a Wolf with quad tactical laser and Swarm SRMs. Adding 300 flux, keeping an enemy ship's shields up and unable to shed this flux load, with near-constant firing? From 1000 range? And if they drop shields they also receive that as damage? Well sign me up.
A Sunder destroyer with bigger beams and more range potential? Check.
Except if there are fighters...then someone please provide a CAP squadron or two?
I haven't done nearly as well in combat once the range closes with something big, armored, and able to hit back hard. I look to change that in my current game where I will build and try to play a close range ship with lots of guns.
2. The Salamander missile system. Just wow. Currently I primarily both equip, and defend against, this single weapon system. Seeking missile that delivers EMP disablement of engines. It is deadly to a player-helmed ship. They circle reasonably far out and approach from behind (where many players likely don't build their ships with much PD to the rear quarters). Just two of these missiles can disable a frigate and convert it into an uncontrolled target that cannot change its current vector. So if caught turning? You are now spinning around and exposing your hull to everyone for way too many seconds. Were going straight? You will continue that way just as you are. Oh well those are probably Mark IX rounds incoming.
Oh and they come featured in regenerating ammo systems. Such terror and such yum.
Yet I find that there isn't a lot of discussion about them (at least in the 15 pages deep I've ventured in the forums). After a week of play up until now, I'd managed to avoid being hit by them...even over fighters they are a reason to mount accurate PD to flanks and aft. At least in the early game. I'm going to see how far I can continue to make a Salamander-heavy fleet loadout work for me. Of course mixed with lots of other flying objects as cover.
3. Semi-hard core sandbox play:
Like XCom: Enemy Unknown and XCom2, the game really shines when playing "semi" hard core...no save scumming for me unless I really screw up and get intercepted by 25 ships or something.
There's nothing quite like being a bit tired and thinking "that's a friendly here deep in purple people land no worries" and it turns out to be a pirate armada twice your weight in cruiser metal and a ton of frigates coming to say hi. My d-mod single carrier, single cruiser, and four destroyers and I'm flying a Wolf vs. THAT? And I fail to evade and all of my support ships are deployed as well?
...and actually defeating all of their combat ships and only losing a 1/3 of overall ships.
My early key to the semi-hard core experience: the "reinforced hull" modification. It has a very high chance of allow that "lost" ship to be recovered. Damaged, but alive. Sorry about the crew that weren't picked up during Search and Rescue though. All my ships have Reinforced Hull. Sorry about my bank account but as Michael Jordan said: "To learn to succeed, you must first learn to fail": learn that is why Starsector has a pause button. Use it when nearing a jump gate or emerging to/from hyperspace. Large unknown contacts are to be evaded. Just because.
Unfortunately I was compelled to attach my late watch officer to a Salamander and fire him out the tube. He survived, was picked up during SAR and is back on duty as a fighter pilot.
Suggestions and feedback:
1. Squadrons:
(caveat: I don't entirely understand how a carrier draws from its crew for squadron deployment. I'm assuming that every crew member, all the way down to skeleton crew level, is considered a "potential fighter or bomber pilot" if the current Combat Rating of the carrier allows it to field the squadrons)
a. Tweak squadron lifetime: I read several very detailed discussions about whether or not carriers (and their fighters) are unbalanced. My simple suggestion is to examine and tweak the endurance of the squadrons, but otherwise leave their combat power relatively the same as now.
- the carriers evidently are a hyperspace-capable nanoforge factory and hauler of a ton of raw material to pump out armed, fueled, and ready fighters and bombers. Great! But surely they don't have and endless supply of military-grade pilots. So a set, limited, number of crew that may be considered "pilots". Even though the carrier may have Combat Rating budget...there can only be so many pilots available. Late in an engagement: there will no longer be pilots and thus no more squadrons.
Starsector missiles are ammo as surely as the squadrons are...
b. Also: If implementing the above, please add a hullmod that allows a carrier to host more pilots and/or rare "pilot pods" weapons: medium or large weapon "bays" that have "a bunch of pilots in hammocks, sipping beer and watching Top Gun movie reruns". Maybe only the pirates have these...
c. And those "pilots" are useless as skeleton crew. They just sleep in their hammocks and fly their little planes unless told to sit in a chair and written instructions to press the blue buttons at a certain time by their ground crew that are actually flying the ship.
2. Need a persistent HUD warning in bold red text for new players about excessive cargo or fuel. This was the #1 issue with my first four hours of playing the game. I sunk my first bank account flying around without knowing I had too much stuff (I think i might have closed a popup warning without having read it accidentally).
A single popup message about a persistent money draining issue isn't enough to help new players...
3. I would luv an "enemy suppression barrage" artillery missile: it fires a downrange packet of autonomous drones that slow and damage small stuff in set area of effect: missiles and drones. Kind of like the COL Launcher in SOTS1:
http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/COL_LauncherI.e. you could blanket a ship being swarmed by fighters. Watch out: the drone AI are indiscriminate and will kill most everything small in their operational radius.
Or "mostly lock down" a heavy carrier or missile ship's local launch capability as you move in to engage.
Perhaps large missiles are ignored by the drones which confuse them with shuttles...
I noted that one recent big mod, the Interstellar Imperium, just released a recent version that included a nasty swarm missile. But I was thinking something for "downrange area denial for a set period of time". A reason to *recall* fighters and hold missile launches. Like when faced with the "triple ripple" defense in the Honor Harrington book series.
http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Triple_rippleThe artillery missile does nothing to a proper starship though.
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I'd better stop there...it's midnight
...time to sleep before resuming my d-mod ragtag motley band.