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[Dawn]

Hey guys. I came here as part of the (presumably) huge influx of people from Sseth's video. I'm in love with the concept of this game but find myself overwhelmed by its scope and mechanics.

I was thinking of going with a true neutral / chaotic neutral, "loner" smuggler / explorer but I've since realized it's unrealistic to expect to be able to play yhe the entire game with a "fleet" of a ship or two, not to mention the crew system destroys the "lone wolf" headcanon; thus, I was looking for some pointers on some playstyles, fleet comps., etc. that are as close as possible to my preferred playstyle while being feasible.

Thanks in advance.

[SCC]

Starsector is a game about fleet combat (and other stuff) and trying to do stuff with just a small number of ships is sometimes doable, but most often very suboptimal. For smuggler/explorer playstyle, you most likely want to get some combat ships and mostly combat freighters otherwise, without going over destroyer-size vessels to avoid being slowed down (with the Falcon being an exception, since it's a cruiser with destroyer level burn). Which ships in particular do you want? Hounds, Cerberuses, pirate Mules, as they have a built-in hullmod that decreases the chances of patrols finding smuggled goods.

[Thaago]

You can do lone bounty hunter assassinations by using a single phase ship and just killing the enemy leader... but its rather tricky and not exactly beginner friendly play.

[Dawn]

Thank you both for your advice, I'll take it into consideration.

[Terenin]

Much like what SCC said, some combat ships and freighters will be very useful to you, indeed, some low-tech and many pirate designs in that regard work very well due to shielded cargo bays letting you smuggle contraband without much fear of a scan. Keeping the fleet on the light side works too. Smuggling in a super freighter is not the best idea... Pay attention to burn levels on the ships you get, and the shielded bays.

Personally? Tried smuggling for a while, though it wasn't my thing, I had a lot of success with Pirate class Mule, Cerberus, Hound, and if you can accept the Burn Level 8 and have the mod for it (I think it's a mod ship) the pirate Buffalo. The pirate Camel heavy frigate is also a very nice combat ships and able freighter to boot. My fleet ended up being some 20+ mix of Cerberus, Camel and Hound, most of them pirate ships, as all these have burn-level 10 - they are optimal for fast smugglers. Mules drop you to 9, and the Buffalo to 8, so keep that in mind.

If you have the mods for it, there's a number of other ships too, like the Luddic Path Cerberus and Hound, the Post-Collapse Venom and Shark, the low-tech Rock Hound and ofc the regular Cerberus and Hound ships, whom I think are vanilla. Once you have the ships, it's all about figuring out where you can... acquire... some contraband and where it sells for the most.

Good luck out there!

[pedro1_1]

and if you can accept the Burn Level 8 and have the mod for it (I think it's a mod ship) the pirate Buffalo.

It's vanilla

[Plantissue]

Hey guys. I came here as part of the (presumably) huge influx of people from Sseth's video. I'm in love with the concept of this game but find myself overwhelmed by its scope and mechanics.

I was thinking of going with a true neutral / chaotic neutral, "loner" smuggler / explorer but I've since realized it's unrealistic to expect to be able to play yhe the entire game with a "fleet" of a ship or two, not to mention the crew system destroys the "lone wolf" headcanon; thus, I was looking for some pointers on some playstyles, fleet comps., etc. that are as close as possible to my preferred playstyle while being feasible.

Thanks in advance.

The game is not suited that well into playing the same single ship all game. There is only a few things that can be done with a single ship. You can do so, but you will be missing out on a lot of the game.

Limiting to one or two ships will nearly always mean that you are vulnerable to anything that can catch you, even if it is 2 capital ships as everything can choose to runaway from or catch 2 capital ships and anything that will choose to catch a pair of capital ships will almost always be able to destroy one. So you are forced into using burn 10+ frigates.  Not that it matters if you "die", you just start over ina  new place with a new ship with all your money intact, so you don't lose much since you only had a single ship to lose.

If you explore, you will need a Dram, a fuel ship. As a single ship you can either explore with a single dram, and only do analyze missions, which is exciting once. You can explore with just a Dram, but you are very vulnerable and you will never gain the full advantages of exploration.

Or you can choose to smuggle or trade cargo missions, where you will be forced to avoid patrols and pirates when smuggling and pirates for everything else. It's a lot of fun, avoiding patrols, toggling transponder on and off constantly, but again the game acts against it because mostly speaking, your sensor strength is the same as your detection range until you get Sensor skills and being a solo ship actually means that you can be detected in an disproportionately large radius. You can make a lot of money smuggling, but what will you do with that money? And you can always get more money faster, but adding a second and a third ship and so on till you are too big to easily smuggle, but you can always continue to do trade missions.

You can always try hunting bounties, but if you do so, you will either find bounty missions scale quickly away from you as you have a single ship, if you can even get to the system in the first place, or you are limited in the system bounties you can select and in any case doing so would mean the game throws even more derelicts at you to absorb into your fleet than normal.

The Hound is basically built for single ship playstyle as when it has safety overides hullmod, it can safely retreat from everthing and I think everyone should play this playstyle at least once for fun. Cerberus and Wayfarer and Shepherd are also good for it but I'm unsure if they can run away from the Pather/Pirate Hounds in time.

[Dawn]

Thanks again for the advice, I've decided to start off as a smuggler using all the advice here and on Reddit and just see how I feel as I go, probably end up establishing an industrial civilization and having to fend off the Luddic Path