I had a go at the spacer start and I can say it was a lot of fun.
Early in the game I felt forced to be a smuggler which I haven't ever really done before. Finding places to buy and sell drugs, machinery, organs and the like was amusing and reasonably profitable. I had to practise using the transponder, emergency and sustained burns and carefully choosing jump holes to avoid patrols with scanners and pirates with guns. I managed to make some money out of my defenseless Kite and when I found a pristine Wolf on the black market I snapped it up and looked around for someone to beat up. Unusually for so early in the game the Perseans had a phase lance which goes very nicely in the medium energy mount so taking out the ~50k bounty was easy enough and that got me a second Wolf. A second bounty resulted in a third Wolf and I was feeling pretty good about mastering the start.
Unfortunately the curve from here accelerates, the third bounty left me with -2 Wolves because Mules are just darned tough and when they stick like glue to their Enforcer it's very difficult for little frigates to sustain the damage. There's always an easy bounty that comes around but waiting for it isn't fun and while system bounties can be great I found myself getting swamped and unable to choose my battles. I'd never done much retreating in this game before, I always relied on the good ol' F5, F9 combo but I must have run away from at least a dozen in this stage. It's kinda fun working out how to protect the Dram while generally retreating up the map then getting the orders right so every ship makes it.
Having trouble keeping the kills rolling in I switched to exploration, a couple of Mudskippers with militarized systems to carry the people and machinery for surveying and for bringing home the booty plus a Dram to give me the range. If you're looking for these ships just hang out in systems where there's raids happening (carefully!), they come up all the time as derelicts. Getting 70k for going to a star system and not taking out a fleet is way easier than fighting so I soon amassed about 800k and was eager to colonise a Jungle world I'd found.
800k is not enough to start a colony. In fact I think double that would be more sensible, you need the biggest heaviest nastiest space station and fleet headquarters as a minimum and you need to be able to sustain the 50-100k a month in losses for the first few months to start up. A lot has been made about having a decent fleet to start a colony but I don't think it matters much, unless you have 2-4 capitals with plenty of support craft and you're prepared to hang around all the time you can't do much. I retreated from several invasion fleet battles, they're only really winnable at the station with your allies. At one point I needed to get a loan from the TT just to cover the costs of the colony and buy the last couple of buildings, it's a really nice trick to be able to do that.
The colony was a roller coaster, it had Decivilised Subpopulation which is terrible and should have counted the planet out because stability was always a problem. Whenever pirate activity increased or the LC reared their head I quickly went from making a small amount to losing a lot each month. Several times I had to rush back to the core worlds to take exploration or bounty missions to avoid debt from my dear planet.
My colony did get off the ground and once it did it grew quickly to size 8 where it was bringing in 250k a month easily covering my costs. During a Hegemony raid that failed an Onslaught popped out so I grabbed it, ordered another one and a few Centurions and Omens (I think they're the best support craft) and decided to take out the Technology cache! Just as I popped out of my system I got ambushed by the darn Perseans who brought 5 fleets and ripped my unable-to-run-away-from-anything-Onslaughts apart. I won the first two battles but couldn't survive or avoid the third. They're good ships but these one's had 3 and 4 D-mods (I never found a pristine forge despite searching a third of the sector). They chased the civilian craft down and I was left with only a Dram
Fortunately I'd done enough damage that the raid quickly failed thereafter and I was able to order new ships, an Apogee and supporting vessels to go have a better look for a forge, or an alpha core. That would be nice. So I was off exploring and watching the cash tick upwards past 1.5 million feeling like I'd probably won at this point when I got a bit of a shock. A raid by the religious nuts succeeded and took out my Megaport, suddenly instead of +250k the colony was -250k and it was going to be 120 days before it got fixed. Yes. One Hundred and Twenty days of being half a million a month worse off.
That's not the end though because without a star port you don't generate fleets which means that the next raid and the next raid and the next raid are successful, each one taking out a building and suddenly you're -300k a month and enough of buildings a wrecked that you won't make money any time soon.
Finally on my way to Hybrasil to beg the Tri Tachs for more money to attempt a recovery I got jumped by two fleets of Luddic Church who were on their way to taunt the Hegemony. I didn't have anything fast enough to escape the Hounds and Kites and got Spaced.
Unfortunately that's it for this game, without a fleet capable of making money quick or being able to abandon the colony I can't escape the debt and will settle down on Raesvelg where I got restarted, work at the bar, rent a small apartment on the cheaper west side of town and hope no one comes looking for me.
To Alex, thank you and your team for making an awesome game. I've been playing on and off since November 2015 and seeing it grow has been amazing.
