Hello folks,
I was purchased this game for my birthday by a friend and am loving it. It feels like a mix between Star Sonata (an old 2D top-down fleet-building MMO) and Stellaris to me. I wanted to share my experience, ask some questions, and give a little feedback on the game as I understand it 8 hours in (so: not at all).
The Experience:
I started with an Apogee and a few other little ships I didn't understand the value of. After immediately attempting to flee Galatia and losing my entire fleet to the pirates at the fringe jump point, I save scummed and actually finished the tutorial (but not the academy quests, which I didn't know about until today).
I figured out that I could buy and sell supplies/crew/weapons on the black market of independent or pirate space stations without paying tariffs and seemingly no impact on reputation, so I did that until I got 250k credits which I assumed meant I was rich.
Throughout this I seemed to run into a pirate fleet every time I went into hyperspace. I soon realized that having your transponder on in hyperspace was for chumps, but not after a string of victories which netted me 4 pirate Falcons (with tons of d-mods and several needing story points to get). Damn these ships are awesome! I suck at fitting but with annihilators in the front and a sabot in the back just one of these ships seems able to instantly overload anything shy of a capital and then dunk it with two annihilator pods and chainguns or maulers up close.
I'm only level 10 but I took nearly all the Logistics skills (except the d-mod removing one). Derelict Fleet is hilarious considering most of my current fleet is salvaged cruisers with 3-5 d-mods. It's so hard for the AI to kill my falcons especially with their inbuilt speed mods. I'm still not sure what to think about d-mods really. A lot of them don't affect weapon damage or speed and the reduced maintenance and deployment cost means that my fleet of 7 cruisers and 15 other vessels only needs 4 supplies per day (although 20 fuel/ly kinda sucks) and can all be deployed pretty much every time I fight.
I found some survey data on a probe which indicated a habitable world. I figured it was basically impossible to make a colony on anything but an earthlike planet and so rushed 20 light-years out of the core to put a colony down. I had a bunch of these gamma core things so of course I put those in every industry I could afford, which was about 2. Later I built a Freeport mining colony in the same system which... yeah may not have been the best idea in retrospect. I ran out of fuel several times trying to get back to the core before taking the fuel salvaging/reducing skill and getting a few Drams.
Currently, I'm milking a commission with the Persean League. I made an easily million fighting pirates in a core system with a system bounty, plus salvaged a bunch of delicious weapons. I still don't understand the star rating of enemy fleets or bases. 1 star pirate, scavenger, or Ludd fleets routinely pursue and initiate fights with me only to get crumped on sloppy-style by the Falcon squad, while 2 star enemy fleets sometimes want to run away. I can also dunk a 2-star space station no problem but have no idea how challenging those are supposed to be without 4 pirate Falcons.
My colonies suck ass and the Freeport mining colony is on the verge of decivilizing thanks to some Luddic dicks. I tried to clap the base they were operating out of but couldn't successfully lure away a 3-star Luddic fleet in the same system. I'd love for them to make me money but am pretty sure I just need to bite the bullet, abandon them to the Ludds, and focus on system and personal bounties which consistently give money, supplies, fuel, and weapons. I've still never seen or fought a capital besides a domain mothership which stunted on my starting fleet very early on when I tried to fight it.
Some Feedback:
I really love this game. It seems well thought-out, the emergent complexity in ship and fleet design is really nice but actually not too complicated once you understand flux and OP. There haven't been any game-breaking bugs, and the surprising moments (like huge Scavenger fleets suddenly becoming hostile, or going into a system with a distress beacon only to get stomped by these funky cyan blue dudes) are fun and rewarding even when you die in a fire. I am a total sucker for 2D top-down space games and Starsector is everything I have ever wanted. The art style is awesome, the sound design is great, and the gameplay is great. Kudos to the dev(s?) for their vision and sticking by the game for the last decade!
I tried to get back into EVE Online recently and deeply deeply hated the F2P direction they've taken with increasing microtransactions, pay-to-not-grind gameplay (literally takes 2 weeks to train some single basic skills to 5 in that game) and reducing player income from basically every activity while adding more and more expensive lategame content. They've made that game so much less fun and rewarding for the sake of inflating hours played and maximizing extraction from players. Starsector is immediately gratifying and doesn't feel like the gameplay is making you grind for the sole purpose of extending hours played or making it seem like there's more content than there actually is.
I've been frustrated at times with the order system and friendly AI. I was playing with ship fittings and tried to remove the point defense from my Falcons (which all have aggressive max-level officers) so I could instead force the Shrikes I use as escorts into that role. Instead, every ship of mine stopped closing with enemies as soon as there was a single enemy missile or fighter in the air. I was almost fully wiped several times by fleets of Ludds or Pirates I'd stomped in 5 minutes the day before. No amount of orders or escort assignments would change that.
I've since learned from scattered forum posts and wiki articles that your AI really badly needs point defense, even a cursory 1-2 vulcans, before it feels "safe" enough to charge in and brawl. It felt like there was no feedback from my AI officers at all and I had to spend an hour reading the forums and reddit to figure out the problem. I understand that an advanced player would immediately understand that leaving an AI ship without point defense is dumb and bad but it wasn't obvious to me at first how it would affect my AI. If I could talk to the captains or hear their "thoughts" in battle somehow (like: "I don't have enough point defense/escorts to fight the enemies head-on") it would've saved me a lot of hair-tearing.
It's also been difficult to learn which ships are threats. I got used to clapping pirate ass before fighting (and losing badly to) Hegemony and Independent cruiser fleets which were much smaller than mine. I have since learned that those fleets had Hi-Tech ships with 0 d-mods, as opposed to the low-tech pirates with tons of d-mods I was used to fighting. The star ratings for all those fleets were the same. If the tutorial had you fight a fleet of low-tech pirate ships and then showed you what it was like to fight high-tech faction ships without d-mods, I would have understood the difference much better (although I understand that losing and dying is part of the game.) In EVE Online, parts of the combat tutorials show you what it's like to face and die to an overwhelming force and I feel like that helped me understand that game better.
Establishing colonies was really fun even though I had no clue what I was doing and *** up pretty bad with putting AI cores and story points into everything before realizing how much the Hegemony and Luddites hated that one simple trick. If there was some kind of colonization tutorial, or maybe even a mission to establish a colony for another faction so you know what the process is and how to find a good system, I definitely would have felt a little better when the Luddic Incidents started rolling in.
This last one is because I am big noob at the game, but I don't (read: can't) pilot my own ship. It really feels like early on in the game, it's too difficult to understand weapon types, grouping, shields and flux, venting, etc. etc. to also worry about steering and positioning. This game requires a shocking amount of coordination to hold shift, move the mouse to aim, WASD/QE to move, crtl+# to control autofire, vent, raise and direct shields, etc. while also trying to be strategic. I wish I could do something like let the AI control positioning, venting, and shields (which it seems way better at than a player anyways) while I focus on one or two manually-controlled weapon groups. It also wasn't clear to me for the longest time that if I even briefly accidentally hit W or something, my ship's AI is totally disabled. I wish I could "lock" my autopilot on, or hire an officer to fly and fight my ship as the captain while I serve more in the role of an Admiral like in real navies.
Lastly, Some Questions:
How can I judge the reasonability of my fleet? As in, is it stupid to have 7 cruisers and 7 escorts? Is 4 supplies/day and 20 fuel/ly low or high for what I have? I turn a profit in fuel in every fight, credits in most fights (either from my commission, bounties, or selling recovered goods), and supplies in some fights (against bigger fleets or merchant fleets). I can make 1 million and stay supply/fuel neutral in an hour or so when there's a system bounty active so it doesn't seem like I'm being turbodumb. I just wonder if I'm doing something incredibly stupid or wasteful and don't realize it because I have nothing to compare it with.
What logistics ships are most economical? I read a guide by forum user SCC (or something) which showed the Colossus as being almost as efficient as an Atlas on a cargo-space-per-supplies-consumed metric and more efficient on a cargo-space-per-fuel-consumed basis, so I planned on sticking with my 2 Colossi. They do reduce my fleet burn level to 7 instead of 8 but I took the skill which raises fleet burn level so that seems fine. I also have 3 Drams, which I thought was better than 1 Phaeton but am not so sure now. I also have never found any salvage rigs for sale anywhere and my colony has 0 credits to spend on building them despite sending me 20k credits a month. Are 2 Colossi and 3 Drams reasonable for my needs, and where do I find salvage rigs?
I also don't know what to think about burn levels or sensor range. I have a base burn of 8 with the skill that increases it and identical sensor/detection ranges of about 1500. My burn level seems fine for a fleet with 7 cruisers, and although fast enemy fleets can catch me sometimes, I'm also able to catch much faster enemy fleets by making them use their emergency burn, tailing them until it runs out, and then activating my own emergency burn ability. I don't detect enemies from very far away however, which has resulted in some hilariously surprising encounters with the entire Luddic Path armada. Is my current burn level/sensor profile reasonable for a fleet of my size?
I'm pretty sure having 4 falcons with an average of 4 d-mods each has a pretty big negative impact on sensor range and detectability, as nearly all the d-mods on all my ships either screw with sensors, increase crew requirements, or decrease armor. But with Derelict Fleet they are shockingly tough for light cruisers and they do so much damage I just can't bring myself to leave them behind. Is refitting worth it or is Derelict Fleet as powerful as it seems?
Finally, on officers, I have 5 aggressive ones, 1 reckless, and a mercenary (after letting another Merc officer go after 1 year). Are the mercenary officers worth the story points and credits? Can I win hard enough and earn enough drip so that I can hire them permanently without SP?
I have a bunch more specific questions about Annihilator vs. Harpoon pods on my Pirate Falcons or the Gryphon I found (and have treated as a gunboat until now... I didn't even know it had a large missile slot...) but this is already a wall of text and I'll try to do some experimenting on my own.
Thank you, fellow forum users, for reading this mess of a post and than you, devs, for making an amazing game!
