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« on: July 23, 2023, 07:54:26 PM »
For exploring, you don't really want to rely on caches, not when it's possible to have the endurance or sustainment capabilities for long-range exploration. The unexplored sector has tons of ruins, derelict ships and stations that you can plunder for supplies and fuel, to the point where you actually just don't have the room to carry everything you find. The logistics skills are incredibly useful for increasing the longevity of your supplies and fuel as well as reducing your overall logistic needs; you can always swap out those skills later on when your fleet is more capable and you want to focus more on combat skills.
Ships like the Apogee, Venture and Odyssey are great for exploring though any cruiser or destroyer will do as your early flagship. Have a destroyer and a frigate or two as support and the rest should be tankers, freighters and salvage rigs. The Efficiency Overhaul Hullmod and Solar Shielding can both help a ton for exploring, IMO Solar Shielding is somewhat underrated as it lets you freely boost through storms for improved fuel-efficiency without worrying about your supplies burning away for CR repairs.
You can definitely let your ships handle themselves, 90% of ship combat comes down to how well you build your ships and your options are going to be limited early game. Once you have more money and can buy or find better weapons and hullmods it gets easier but in the beginning you'll struggle to find the weapons and even ships without too many bad Dmods to field. As a few rules of thumb, you want your non-point-defense weapon ranges to roughly match and have more flux vents than what the weapons generate if the ship isn't super fast or tanky; overfluxed ships won't be able to keep their shields up after firing for a bit(depending on how much flux capacity they have) so they'll need to either be fast enough to back away or tanky enough to hold up to enemy fire without shields.
Carrier fleets are 100% viable but probably rely a bit on having the right player skills and good fighters which can be surprisingly difficult to find in usable numbers. You'll also find carriers are kind of like frigates in that they rely on critical mass, you need to have probably at least 4 wings before you start seeing an appreciable effect. It's especially important once you get to having larger battles as there'll be a lot of PD and other *** in the air that can take out fighters and their ordnance at the point of contact, you'll likely still need some battlecarriers or regular combat vessels anyways to prevent the enemy ships from making contact with your backline carriers. Most people suggest pure fighters but IMO a mass of daggers and longbows unleashing waves of Atropos and Sabots can still be pretty potent.
