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[Gherr]

Not sure if anyone else loves this game while sucking at piloting but if there are, is there a vanilla ship and loadout that you find easier to play with?

[Foraven]

Well, this game can be enjoyed even if you never personnaly fly any ship. I prefer not to fly my ships because when I do I quickly lose track of what is going on and may lose more ships due to not paying attention to the battle. So I end up playing admiral, but I enjoy it.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

Not sure if anyone else loves this game while sucking at piloting but if there are, is there a vanilla ship and loadout that you find easier to play with?

Stay as close as possible to flux neutral when customizing a ship's loadout. If a ship's weapon loadout has too much flux, control the most flux expensive group, and leave the other groups to autofire. Try to pilot ships with 360 shields so you don't have to worry about shield management. Press shift when you need to aim your ship at another ship, this causes your ship to rotate toward the curser and makes the A and D keys the strafe keys.

Faster ships, and ships with all direction movement systems are in general easier to pilot as you can escape from bad situations caused by serious miscalculations. Although some of them take practice to learn. Examples are the Hyperion, Aurora, Falcons, Brawlers, etc.

Safety overrides makes all ships good player ships due to the flux and speed bonus.

[keckles]

Holding 'Shift' will keep your ship pointed at your mouse just in case you didn't know, this is great for most ships which have the majority of their firepower facing frontally, this won't work as well for broadside-style ships. Starting out with something like a Destroyer or a light Cruiser is how I started learning to control the ships. It can still be hard to manage all the different weapon groupings, I think the best compromise is to position your ship yourself and then set the ship to Autopilot to let the AI handle the weapons and shields.

[PsychoThruster]

Use the pause button frequently to assess the situation, change weapon groups, etc. Similarly opening the tactical map will make you aware of potential flanking ships and give you a better view of the battle thus allowing you to plan your moves. Stick to flying the ship in a manner that befits it's role and choose targets accordingly. I think the falcon cruiser is a great ship to learn on, it's speed and mount layout make for an excellent frigate/destroyer hunter.

[BaBosa]

Not sure if anyone else loves this game while sucking at piloting but if there are, is there a vanilla ship and loadout that you find easier to play with?

Falcon P with 2 medium sabot pods, two proximity mine launchers, 1 small sabot and 1 small reaper with Smod expanded missile racks and missile autoloaders and also safety overrides and converted hanger with Xyphos.

Firering both medium sabots instantly overloads most cruisers and smaller ships and then proxies are your main DPS to kill ships but they can also finish off shields if they didn't instantly overload and they swat fighters and missiles.

Against big high tech ships set the small sabot on autofire and it'll spam sabots to help the medium sabots overload them. Against big low tech ships, use your speed and maneuvering jets to get behind them to fire reapers and the proxies.
Reapers are also good against any ship that tries to avoid overloading by dropping shields when you fire the sabots.
The Xyphos are your PD that work even when you're overloaded and they disable ships for you.
With Falcon's high base speed, safety overrides, and maneuvering jets, you're one of the fastest things around so you can charge and run away easily.
Since you only have missiles and fighters, all your flux is dedicated to your shields so you're pretty tanky too.
Definitely get the combat endurance, target analysis, missile specialization and field modulation skills. Helmsman, ordinance expertise, crew training, tactical drills, coordinated maneuvers, and flux regulation are all also good.

This can kill pretty much anything 1 on 1 with ease. The only real issues are Paragons which can fortress shield your sabots, radiants which are strong, fast and tanky and star fortresses which have too many weapons and HP. One or multiple machine gun monitors with an eliminate order can tie them up enough though. Also, the Invictus has so much HP that it takes more than half your proxies and reapers to kill so best have other ships to help kill it.

[Amoebka]

Missile boats and carriers generally require the least "micro", larger ships are easier than smaller ships, faster ships are easier than slow ships, and ships with turrets are easier than the ones with hardpoints.

Try out Falcon (P), Gryphon, Eradicator, Aurora, Heron, Pegasus and Astral.

For early game, Omen is pretty straightforward.

[MrTwister]

Play fleet admiral

[BaBosa]

Missile boats and carriers generally require the least "micro", larger ships are easier than smaller ships, faster ships are easier than slow ships, and ships with turrets are easier than the ones with hardpoints.

Try out Falcon (P), Gryphon, Eradicator, Aurora, Heron, Pegasus and Astral.

For early game, Omen is pretty straightforward.

Gryphon is slow and fragile so it can be pretty unforgiving.
I second Omens as being a solid choice. The emp emitter takes 500 flux to strike up to 20 times dealing 100 energy damage and 500 emp so it is really efficient and it can go around shields and hit the back of ships engines. Plus it’s fast with a 360 omni shield and good flux.

[Maeleth]

One thing I'd like to add here is to try and refrain from using Safety Overrides as much as possible, for a few reasons:

 1) On a smaller ships it makes them too "floaty", having greater speed and thus inertia. Combined with their subpar overall survivability, extremely low HP on engines/weapons and limited flux pool, this often leads to being unable to retreat in time (if at all) and eating a bunch of ordnance that would otherwise harmlessly bounce off a shield.

 2) Hampering the learning process about flux management and fleet behavior on greater scale. You can't vent with SO, and venting is the cornerstone of efficient combat - my finger is glued to the V key 100% of the time, and so should yours. Having enough flux to attack, defend, safely retreat, rescue allies or finish off an overloaded opponent is absolutely crucial at every stage of battle.

 Also, while using SO you're most likely playing a twitch shooter type of game, zipping here and there and everywhere, tunnel visioning in a small area around player ship and not doing much else. But the key to victory is learning about your AI friends' behavior - when they deem proper to launch a missile or commit to full assault, when they feel insecure and retreat, when they roam around the edges of battle lines and seek for easy targets, simply derp around and eat a full Hammer salvo to the hull, etc. You might not be the best pilot out there, but a full complement of officers that you've personally studied and understood is a game changer.

 3) Limited build potential - SO usually forces player to partake in a knife fight while eating up to 40% of ships total OP. While yes, having a mighty SO flagship is both efficient and fun, newer player would benefit greatly from experimenting with different loadouts, range categories, and learning how individual weapons (besides their on paper DPS and flux/dmg ratio) behave in actual combat scenario.

[Grievous69]

One thing I'd like to add here is to try and refrain from using Safety Overrides as much as possible, for a few reasons:

 1) On a smaller ships it makes them too "floaty", having greater speed and thus inertia. Combined with their subpar overall survivability, extremely low HP on engines/weapons and limited flux pool, this often leads to being unable to retreat in time (if at all) and eating a bunch of ordnance that would otherwise harmlessly bounce off a shield.

 2) Hampering the learning process about flux management and fleet behavior on greater scale. You can't vent with SO, and venting is the cornerstone of efficient combat - my finger is glued to the V key 100% of the time, and so should yours. Having enough flux to attack, defend, safely retreat, rescue allies or finish off an overloaded opponent is absolutely crucial at every stage of battle.

 Also, while using SO you're most likely playing a twitch shooter type of game, zipping here and there and everywhere, tunnel visioning in a small area around player ship and not doing much else. But the key to victory is learning about your AI friends' behavior - when they deem proper to launch a missile or commit to full assault, when they feel insecure and retreat, when they roam around the edges of battle lines and seek for easy targets, simply derp around and eat a full Hammer salvo to the hull, etc. You might not be the best pilot out there, but a full complement of officers that you've personally studied and understood is a game changer.

 3) Limited build potential - SO usually forces player to partake in a knife fight while eating up to 40% of ships total OP. While yes, having a mighty SO flagship is both efficient and fun, newer player would benefit greatly from experimenting with different loadouts, range categories, and learning how individual weapons (besides their on paper DPS and flux/dmg ratio) behave in actual combat scenario.

Man of logic, man of common sense, but most of all, a man of honor.

I spread love to all my fellow SO haters <3

[Megas]

I do not like SO, but I will use it on AI ships that have short range (or flux problems with basic weapons) and struggle to retreat in a timely manner to retreat.  Nothing is more frustrating than watching an AI ship do nothing but retreat for nearly a minute trying to escape to vent but failing and possibly dying.  SO lets ships stuck on retreat do so more easily.  SO is for ships that waste too much time cowering or stalling.

I never want to use SO on the flagship because I waste too much time thinking about the right-click button after I press [V] to drop shields and it does not work.  Having elite Field Modulation helps, but it is a luxury I cannot afford on normal ships.  eFM is great on phase ships, but I do not want SO on phase ships because Delicate Machinery makes their CR decay too fast to make post-PPT combat worthwhile.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Well there's a few things you can do to make piloting easier. You want to reduce the number of things you have to manually control so you can focus on flux and movement.

• Stick to frontal shields/frontal shield conversion
• Manually control only 1 fire group
• That fire group should be missiles
• Faster ships won't get bogged down in a bad position

An example would be the shrike if you get frontal shields (and extended is a good idea for that matter). You manually control the medium missile and leave the turrets on autofire, which limits your focus to just flux, positioning, and when to fire the missile. You can make it even easier by choosing guided missiles (sabots) so you don't even have to aim them!

[Gherr]

You have all been so helpful. Thanks!

[Demoncard]

You've got a lot of wonderful advice already, but I'd to add that the simulator reached via the fitting screen really helps with practicing. If you're having trouble with shield or flux management, or really anything else you're uncomfortable with, you may find it better to learn it there in safety and in conditions you're curious about, than to learn after actually losing your flagship a hundred different ways. Simulating your ideas always pays dividends. Frantically trying to learn while your hull is being breached is no good.