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[Elfnet]

Recently I started to play Strasector again, with a new idea (some arbitrary limitations) = I (role)played with the following rules:

Normal start and difficulty, without mods, don’t join any of the factions, don’t go for the early Technology Cache, put the player’s ship into automatic mode in battles, but also: I wil only do legitimate businesses.

This means no pirating and more importantly: I don’t buy any goods, ships or weapons from the black market/from pirates.


The start was grindy, since I had basicly no weapons (and because I forgot how to play the game), so I gathered a small fleet of blocade runner Hound’s, but than I got bored and used the procurement mission exploit to get 1 M cash early.

With the money, I bought an Eagle, Falcons and some smaller ships and I thought I could go to do bounties, explore new worlds and dominate the galaxy.


I was wrong. In every station and planet, legally I could only buy garbage weapons, like Minig Lasers, Annihilator rockets or the single Harpoon missile lauchers.

Ok, fair, you couldn’t buy military tech on every farmland, but even Tri-Tachions and the other military factions don’t sell me real weapons and I couldn’t find enough from salvaging. Even when I gained the trust of the Hegemony (so I could buy from their military market), even a puny Tactical Laser is require commission.

I tried to crush small enemies, recover all crappy vessels and strip them from their 0-1 weapons to use on my fleet (also get some delerict ships and ruins), but I still only have two Antimatter Blaster and one Ion Cannon/Phase Lance + a single Harpoon/Antropos torpedo racks.


My question is: the only viable way with these rules are either mods, trade-only or carrier-only builds - or am I missing something?

I get it, this playthou’s rules are dumb, but it’s already cicle 208 and I’m stuck, making means ends with the occasion transport mission or 50k bounty (since I could crush them with my cruisers equipped nothing but Airbalest cannons and a ton of mining lasers + 2x1 Harpoons).

I tried to avoid buying ships/goods from the black market before, since it makes the game way too easy, but I also always equipped my ships with weapons from there (notedly I bought weapons in the Refit screen regardless of the seller) and without this huge advance, I just watch helplessly as 150-200+ k bounties pop up expecting the exact army I have. Only with actual weapons, instead of space sticks and laser pointers.


Thank you for reading throu and tolerating my engrish (and my general disregard for the rules of the english grammar), if you have some opinion or resolution on this matter, I appreciate it if you share with me below.

[intrinsic_parity]

You can take a commission that gives you access to a factions military market. You should also go to the biggest markets, the small ones are going to be bad. You can also find good weapons by exploring, they will show up in research stations, and weapon/technology caches. The other good source of weapons is recovery after battle. You can try to salvage wreckage from other people battles and the salvage from bounties is usually decent. That being said, a fleet with an eagle, multiple falcons and a decent number of destroyers should at least be able to do some of the easier ~150k bounties without too much trouble. If not, then put some ships in storage and grind more missions to buy more ships until you have enough ships to feel comfortable (and also practice piloting in missions or in the simulator). Pulse lasers/arblest are usable even though they are not good and you should be able to find a couple better weapons to outfit your flagship. You really don't need the top weapons to kill the easier pirate bounties.

[Elfnet]

I don’t want to repeat myself. Ok, I lied:

As I stated, I tried to avoid commission, since I wanted to do my own faction later and also don’t want to get involved in the faction battles (yes, I gathered some blueprints so if I build a colony, I could manufacture them, but I want to build a combat worthy fleet first, gather about 0,5-1 M eccess money and than build up my money printing planet, but that is super grindy if I restrain myself and not using exploits.

As I also said, weapon cache’s don’t really offer too many weapons (basicly 1-2 random ones what tends to be some large ones that almost none of the smaller ships can equip), and even the main faction station’s don’t sold good weapons (small stations don’t even have military markets), while after battler recovery isn’t really an option either, since they also don't yield a ton of usefull weapons.

Against bigger bounties I can’t really win, because while an Eagle with a decent module setup can survive relatively long against destroyers, if armed only with Mining Lasers, even some Mules or frigates can kill it eventually.

I agreed Arbalest is a decent weapon, but even an Eagle have only 3 medium ballistic weapon mount, the rest is energy (I could only reliably buy Mining lasers and Mining blasers for that) plus the 2 small missile mount (2x1 Harpoon), and I can’t make a 13xArbalest ballistic cruiser and while I sometimes could buy Arbalest in the market, I never found any Pulse lasers (ok, I found one, but from salvaging, not from buying and I need way more than one).

[Wyvern]

Focus on rep with the Independents, they've got a military market that doesn't require a commission in the Askonia system.  And hope that it hasn't been crippled by pirate raids.

[RedHellion]

I've never bought weapons, ships, or hullmods from any market in my current playthough. Only things I've bought from pirates or black market were supplies, fuel, and crew. All my weapons were farmed from completed bounties or from debris fields, research stations, etc on the occasional survey/exploration trip outside of the core systems.

I was doing a "junker" run though, with high industry skills and pretty much entirely running a fleet entirely made up of salvaged ships with one or two d-mods. You still shouldn't have had as many issues as you seem to with weapons. Maybe you advanced through trade so quickly that the bounties escalated out of your engagement level before you were able to keep up using the weapons and ships salvaged from previous bounties? Having a couple of Shepherds or Salvage Gantries with you to increase total salvage can also help a lot.

Maybe try doing a bunch of exploration missions, salvage research stations and probes for guns and search planetary ruins, if doing bounties to take guns from defeated deserters is a no-go.

[xenoargh]

Go exploring and farm the [REDACTED].  You can score a lot of high-end weapons that way. 

Get Blueprints from exploration.  Instead of hoarding them, give them to a Faction.  They'll start having that thing for sale (you may need a Commission to access, though).

If you use the above stunt, you can have Pirates that have High Tech weapons and gear you can get, mounted on their still-lousy hulls (i.e., easy fights to get good gear).  Just don't give them Blueprints for Paragons, lol!

Or pick a Faction you are OK making mad and Raid them; you can get surprising things from Raiding the Pirate / Pathers sometimes (they have Colonies, if you're paying attention).

Or just pick Bounties that feature Deserters; if you have Salvaging high-enough, you'll be drowning in good loot.  It's a boring way to play though, since you have to wait for Deserter Bounties to show up.

[SapphireSage]

Get Blueprints from exploration.  Instead of hoarding them, give them to a Faction.  They'll start having that thing for sale (you may need a Commission to access, though).

AFAIK, only pirates will learn blueprints and then only from BPs sold to Black Markets.

[Elfnet]

Thanks, I totally forget some of the options and didn't even know this giving away blueprints stuff.


I reloaded one of my older saves where I had +100% with the independent faction just to check, and while they don’t offer much, at least there I could buy something to start with. I never really considered raids - I tried them once or twice before, but that mostly seemed pointless and a waste of resources (but mostly time), but in this case this could work.

With the /thing totally not connected to the company faction/ is while a good source of weapons, are also randomized, so if I’m for example wanted to arm a Paragon with nothing else but Gravion beams and Burst PD’s (and maybe 4 Plasma Cannons or something specific) I need to grind a lot and hope the best.

But overall the situation is not as hopeless as it first seen, so thanks for the answers.

Also: I'm a packrat hoarder - giving up on a meaningless Blueprint or even an AI Core is almost impossible for me, but I will try.

[outdated]

I haven't bought a single weapon so far. Salvaged weapons are enough for anything, at least if you hoard them through the entire game.

[Paul_Kauphart]

In my current playthrough, I barely bought any weapons at all (except in the rare case I was looking for a specific weapon for my flagship), however I kept hoarding every single weapon I found, first in the abandonned station orbiting Asharu, then in my colony, and I ended up with a huge selection of most weapons available in the game. That means focussing the early game on salvage and exploration of the sector though.

[Igncom1]

I will say that the selection of weapons from shops is fairly terrible right now. In the open market I get it, but even the military markets don't have a proper surplus of what the factions are using overall.

If you can get a surplus battleship, in the open market, then why not decent weapons? I get having warships in the open market in the more dubious factions who don't care about the result of their actions. But otherwise at least cap it at the destroyer or cruiser level for the open market.

Not that using the black-market ever now and then is all that bad.... also who is bothering to buy small civilian shuttles off the black market? Why would you even bother?

[TaLaR]

Open market sells only few basic weapons, Military will only sell good stuff to commission holder with high rep and you chose not to use Black market. On top of that only autopilot combat, so you can't out-skill opponents to seriously profit via combat either.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but you are fairly thorough in cornering yourself.

...Well I suppose you could ignore combat completely and just smuggle for huge profits until you have enough money for large carrier fleet. Sparks are of course best, but Talon spam works too.

[Elfnet]

...Well I suppose you could ignore combat completely and just smuggle for huge profits...

Smuggling doesn't seem too legitimate to me.   

In the end, I started a new game, gathered a small and mostly weaponless yet fast group of ships, occasionly I transported goods, but mostly made exploration missions, than got a planet, so I had a steady stream of money and a way to build ships. At first I just pumped out smaller ships which got obliterated (but slowly got more and more blueprints and weapons from fights and delericts), later mass produced Falcons and Odysseys with Plasma Cannons and now I swim in money and have most of the blueprints, but before that I just sit helplessly and watched my fleet decimated again and again, because the deployment cost doesn't consider if the ship has no weapons.

[Serenitis]

This means no pirating and more importantly: I don’t buy any goods, ships or weapons from the black market/from pirates.

don’t join any of the factions

P. much how I play by default.

Early game I will do system bounties and transport missions, and any ships that interest me I can salvage in the meantime to bulk out my fleet. Sheps are good here.
Weapons at this stage are about evenly split between salvage and bought from markets.
This continues until I find the efficiency overhaul and surveying equipment mods in whichever markets I'm visiting. And then my fleet gets overhauled and set up for exploring.

Tbh, you can make a fairly decent amount of cash just by doing transport missions, and nothing else.
It's not super interesting for the most part, but it's quick and fairly risk-free.
The only exception I would make is transporting fuel. I generally don't bother doing this as it almost always requires I buy extra ships just to fit the amounts involved. Which is not really useful when I'm broke, and a hoop I don't care enough to jump through when I'm not.

Basically just picking a direction around the core systems, surveying anything that has a reasonable cost and sucking up any wrecks and debris fields for as far as you feel comfortable going.
If you find any survey missions going in your direction these can be picked up (something I admittedly don't bother with when I probably should).
Doing this will almost always give you a few useful ships from salvage which will allow you to expand your fleet further. Pheaton and Colossus with intact engines are amongst the best possible finds here.
Learn any blueprints you recover (that you want) and save the rest, and keep a stock of all the various weapons you find. Maybe a half-dozen of each, and pick up more as you use them to equip your ships.
If you stumble on any named bounties you can handle, those can give you a nice boost.
When your cargo gets full and/or fuel gets low, head back to the core and sell off whatever you don't want.
(I have some kind of magpie complex where I refuse to sell survey data or forges to anyone, you might not be so..... Constrained.)

The cheeky bit is selling all your 'left over' blueprints to a pirate black market, as noted above.
This gives you three benefits:

• Firstly, you get a decent chunk of money for selling blueprints at all. And the lack of tariffs exaggerates this.
• The pirates will then start producing items which you can then salvage from thier wrecks, thus greatly expanding the quality of recovered  loot.
• It is very likely that you will also get paid for doing this by way of a bounty of some kind.

At this stage, almost all my weapons and equipment come from salvage.

Then just keep on doing this until you can roll over all but the biggest bounty fleets, scan any planet for almost zero cost, and haul multiple thousands of resources back to the core. Continually upgrading your fleet as you go.
Named bounties are a good income. Up to the point where they become unreasonably difficult.
Pirate base bounties are excellent as they not only give you cash for killing them, but give you cash for dropping off your unwanted blueprints before you do so.
Pather base bounties are also good, but usually a much tougher fight. And frequently not just one fight either.
All of these also make good 'jumping off' points to further your exploration of the sector, by acting as a remote resupply stop with all that delicious salvage.

At this stage your fleet is essentially a mobile nation, and almost self-sufficient for supplies and fuel taken from salvage. With your only real limiting factors being crew and cargo space.
Eventually, you'll find somewhere that ticks all the right boxes for you to settle down and you can start building.