Thanks for all the info. I can't say I understand much of it at this point, though I have bookmarked your playthrough and will start watching and learning today. Thanks for all the tips! They will all make more sense once I have a better understanding of the game. I assume there's a decent tutorial to help someone new get started?
Oh, I have your ship builds bookmarked as well. That will give me a good start. Thanks!
Two more questions...
In the videos I've seen so far, the enemy ships explode when destroyed. Do yours explode and are lost forever as well, or do you get them back is an extremely damaged, but repairable state?
When a ship hits 0 hull (or -1 hull), the ship explodes. Sometimes this results in the ship splitting into pieces, but other times it remains whole in a destroyed state. The
Reinforced Bulkheads Hull Mod makes it so ships are almost always recoverable if destroyed in combat.
A ship that was destroyed during, but recovered after, a battle gains hull mods that are known as (D) Mods, or Damaged Mods. These detract from the ship in some way, but there is a skill that allows you to either take advantage of these (D) Mods or have a random chance to remove one per amount of time. Most ships are still combat ready with (D) Mods.
Regardless of whether the ship was yours, allied, or hostile during the battle, you have some chance to recover the ship so long as it didn't break apart. With the advent of Story Points, some ships are recoverable for free after the battle, but other ships will cost story points to recover.
Is there a way to slow combat as it appears you can slow the game when traveling around? When I watch combat on YouTube I find there is so much going on that it's very hard to keep up. At those speeds I feel I wouldn't know if my ships performed well or not or what tweaks I would need to make. Thanks!
You can pause the game in combat by pressing Space. Phase ships can enter P-Space (Phase Space) wherein they move at normal speed, but normal space moves in slow-motion.
In Battle, you can press TAB to go to the Command Map, which is where you issue commands to the captains of ships. These captains will attempt to follow these commands in as safe a way as possible for their ships.
Basically, if a ship survives the battle, assume it performed well.
You can also test ships in simulation via the Refit screen.
I have some slightly dated tutorials for Starsector which you can find here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDjE6j_BlALgeytqKrYKzzm9ZPy1poGO0