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[cabang]

If you don't mind me asking, why is your fleet still so small after doing some other bounties?

I've done just 4 ~50-60k starter bounties (plus about 30k profit from attacking a pirate system from a commercial bar bounty, I just couldn't resist the 100% free money of a place I was going for a bounty anyways!) and I've got 2 hammerheads, a drover, 2 shrikes, 3 omens, 2 lashers, 2 cerberi (distraction, easy recovery). The cerberi and 1 omen were recoveries; the others were black market purchases (hammerhead with a 5% d mod for the cheapness, the others pristine). I don't have AM blasters for the omens yet, but they are still decent with IR pulses vs pirates.

I don't think my fleet is all that small - I have 1 cruiser, 6 destroyers, and 4 combat oriented frigates.  I think that is more combat power than what you have listed, and I have done only a small handful of bounties. But as soon as I had beefed up my fleet (bought my first cruiser and 3 more destroyers), suddenly the bounties all had 2 battleships + 6 cruisers + destroyers and smaller ships.  I didn't want to try to match that, too easy to go bankrupt paying for such a large fleet, especially starting out relatively early in the game.  Kinda puzzled as to why the bounty fleets got so huged, and will I ever catch up or will they keep expanding as I expand my fleet.

I think the best advice I've heard so far - take bounty missions from contacts.  Those are far easier (many are too easy in fact) than the ones that pop up on the intel screen.

[cabang]

Focusing on bounty hunting on a first ever playthrough certainly isn't the easiest path. I think the more familiar you get with ships, weapons, loadouts, and all of their capabilities together should enable you to do bounties much more effectively. I would encourage you to spend a lot of time in the simulator, testing ships, weapons, perfecting loadouts and finding ones that you like; eventually devising strategy and fine tuning your fleet doctrine. As well as the right S-mods and officer skills to put in them to maximize effectiveness. It is possible to suffer no losses at all except on rare occasions, and after that its pure profit.

Just as a personal note I think destroyers are quite limited in their useful service life before they become a liability compared to other hull sizes, so I typically don't invest much into them, but that's just me.

Appreciate the advice for practicing in the sim and perfecting loadouts, so maybe you can help me understand something.  As much as I want to perfect my fleet composition, loadouts, tactics, etc - my experience with the game so far is that optimizing doesn't matter that much, if you bring a bigger fleet than the enemy, you win. If their fleet is bigger, you run.  There is little incentive (unfortunately) to have a close battle with an evenly matched fleet, since even if you win you'll likely take expensive losses.  It's not like you get a much bigger reward for fighting a tough battle.  It seems highly optimized fleets and tactics only become important in a close fight where you need the edge.

[BaBosa]

Focusing on bounty hunting on a first ever playthrough certainly isn't the easiest path. I think the more familiar you get with ships, weapons, loadouts, and all of their capabilities together should enable you to do bounties much more effectively. I would encourage you to spend a lot of time in the simulator, testing ships, weapons, perfecting loadouts and finding ones that you like; eventually devising strategy and fine tuning your fleet doctrine. As well as the right S-mods and officer skills to put in them to maximize effectiveness. It is possible to suffer no losses at all except on rare occasions, and after that its pure profit.

Just as a personal note I think destroyers are quite limited in their useful service life before they become a liability compared to other hull sizes, so I typically don't invest much into them, but that's just me.

Appreciate the advice for practicing in the sim and perfecting loadouts, so maybe you can help me understand something.  As much as I want to perfect my fleet composition, loadouts, tactics, etc - my experience with the game so far is that optimizing doesn't matter that much, if you bring a bigger fleet than the enemy, you win. If their fleet is bigger, you run.  There is little incentive (unfortunately) to have a close battle with an evenly matched fleet, since even if you win you'll likely take expensive losses.  It's not like you get a much bigger reward for fighting a tough battle.  It seems highly optimized fleets and tactics only become important in a close fight where you need the edge.

In general you’re not incentivised to fight random fleets. What you get normally only covers the deployment costs and some travel costs. You’re supposed to fight fleets that have some other source of reward like a bounty or creating trade deficits.

That said piloting a ship yourself well or a very well optimised ship can punch above its weight and fight a fight that at first glance looks close or unfavourable could actually be completely fine.

[Talinoth]

Appreciate the advice for practicing in the sim and perfecting loadouts, so maybe you can help me understand something.  As much as I want to perfect my fleet composition, loadouts, tactics, etc - my experience with the game so far is that optimizing doesn't matter that much, if you bring a bigger fleet than the enemy, you win. If their fleet is bigger, you run.  There is little incentive (unfortunately) to have a close battle with an evenly matched fleet, since even if you win you'll likely take expensive losses.  It's not like you get a much bigger reward for fighting a tough battle.  It seems highly optimized fleets and tactics only become important in a close fight where you need the edge.

As much as I want to perfect my fleet composition, loadouts, tactics, etc - my experience with the game so far is that optimizing doesn't matter that much, if you bring a bigger fleet than the enemy, you win. If their fleet is bigger, you run.
... seems highly optimized fleets and tactics only become important in a close fight where you need the edge.

You're somewhat underestimating how much smart ship builds matter. Even a small advantage in ship power between two evenly matched fleets can result in a snowball victory - for example, a 6v6 and one of your ships kills an opponent (now it's a 6v5, with two ships able to freely attack one enemy and that pressured ship will die fast) and you can do much more than gain "small" advantages. It's quite possible to score breathtaking victories against fleets 2x, 3x (or more!) yours with good loadouts - and with intelligent commands, even more.
One of the little things that keeps Starsector's difficulty bearable for new players is that the AI factions don't perfectly optimise their builds - strip out the bs like Reinforced Bulkheads and Blast Doors, max out Vents on any normal ship that gets into extended gunfights (that's most of them), put Capacitors on phase ships (and sometimes SO ships), try to match weapon ranges to within 50-100 range of each other for most reasonable Officer and ship build combinations, put the great mods like Expanded Deck Crews on carriers and Hardened Shields + Integrated Targeting Unit on most warships, and don't necessarily fill *all* of your gun slots but almost always fill all of your missile slots! This is what very broadly works the best for most AI-piloted ships.

There is little incentive (unfortunately) to have a close battle with an evenly matched fleet, since even if you win you'll likely take expensive losses. It's not like you get a much bigger reward for fighting a tough battle.  It seems highly optimized fleets and tactics only become important in a close fight where you need the edge.

You do get more exp, which means you can level up new Officers faster and gain more story points - though I'm not sure if that's vanilla behaviour or not. You can also gain flawless victories over fleets much larger than yours (especially if your individual ships are very strong for their DP cost, or you have a strong flagship) and these can be very rewarding in terms of loot compared to the Supplies you spend. If your builds are strong enough, you can massively lengthen the time you spend away from the Core Worlds by gaining more Supplies from fights than you spend, allowing you to chain fights to stay out in the field for months (or even cycles!) at a time.

There are several fights even in the Vanilla game where if you don't have a fleet optimised well enough to steamroll most of the game, you will instead be flattened. Full [REDACTED] fleets (especially the big one that has a phase skimmer), [SUPER-REDACTED], the very musical phase ship, and a certain fleet with lots of phase ships that shows up in the story when you start asking too many questions - these are all very dangerous.

Going beyond Vanilla, into mods used so often I consider them part of the core experience:
- Nexerelin (a mod so commonly used it's almost considered part of the core gameplay experience) rewards you with +reputation with multiple factions when you win "impressive victories". A combat-oriented player can thus build rapport with almost everyone they're not actively at war against. Nexerelin also puts in huge bounty hunter fleets that chase you when you blow up too many faction fleets or raid them too often, and even though those ships are usually quite "normal" there is a lot of them and they're very hard fights.
- Commissioned Crews is a lovely mod that gives all ships in the world (including NPC fleets) randomised stat bonuses and penalties based on their "reputation" that shifts and grows over time. A Loyalty attribute is also added - ships that win more fights and kill more enemies eventually become Fiercely Loyal to their captains (loyalty boosts the positive stats, suppresses the negative ones and keeps your ships fighting longer) and more quickly gain Fame (which unlocks new stats and boosts existing ones).
- Ruthless Sector penalises your exp gains when fighting fleets much smaller and weaker than your own. To level up in any reasonable timeframe, you need to find real fights.
- Vayra's Sector IBB bounties are often very tough fights. They like to use S-mods too, and that's just the start.

[PizzaInSpace]

Huh I'm suprised people are more focused on bounty hunting when you can perform illegal black market trading for profit. But when I do these runs and want to kill enemies I basically rush to save up about 2 mil or around(the extra cash is to remove d-mods or buy another capital ship right away) and then go after fleets that utilize pirate ships since they tend to die very quickly(not luddic as they tend to play a lowtech remnant fleet). Or if you feel like that's too much to deal with use a seed that has pre existing derelict capital ships floating in star systems(hegemony and tri-tach ships are pretty abundant due to the previous AI wars) and you can easily enjoy yourself that way. Only play challenging if you can handle the trial and error that the game teaches us all the time.

[Talinoth]

Huh I'm suprised people are more focused on bounty hunting when you can perform illegal black market trading for profit. But when I do these runs and want to kill enemies I basically rush to save up about 2 mil or around(the extra cash is to remove d-mods or buy another capital ship right away) and then go after fleets that utilize pirate ships since they tend to die very quickly(not luddic as they tend to play a lowtech remnant fleet). Or if you feel like that's too much to deal with use a seed that has pre existing derelict capital ships floating in star systems(hegemony and tri-tach ships are pretty abundant due to the previous AI wars) and you can easily enjoy yourself that way. Only play challenging if you can handle the trial and error that the game teaches us all the time.

A few faction mods kill the usual Black Market trade opportunities (by adding larger Pirate/Pather markets that resolve commodity shortages) like HMI, Keruvim etc, and Starpocalypse stops you from using the Black Market at "lawful" planets/stations if you come in with your transponder on, and conversely stop you from using the Open Market with it off. It's a real hassle!
There's also a serious opportunity cost to trading - it's time that you're not exploring outside of the Core Worlds, delaying your colonial efforts. You can scan a bunch of planets and do bounties at the same time, and it's far more fun than smuggling. If you're really lucky, you'll run into a Pirate station that you can sell like 1000 Heavy Armaments to, raid to get your stuff back free of charge and then blow up to claim the bounty on it.

[PizzaInSpace]

Never use mods since they tend to either be too overpowered or they can get outdated upon further releases of the game but yeah that sounds like a good mod to try but tend to go for mods that offer a story based form of content rather than station or ship based anymore.

[Ronin]

Focusing on bounty hunting on a first ever playthrough certainly isn't the easiest path. I think the more familiar you get with ships, weapons, loadouts, and all of their capabilities together should enable you to do bounties much more effectively. I would encourage you to spend a lot of time in the simulator, testing ships, weapons, perfecting loadouts and finding ones that you like; eventually devising strategy and fine tuning your fleet doctrine. As well as the right S-mods and officer skills to put in them to maximize effectiveness. It is possible to suffer no losses at all except on rare occasions, and after that its pure profit.

Just as a personal note I think destroyers are quite limited in their useful service life before they become a liability compared to other hull sizes, so I typically don't invest much into them, but that's just me.

Appreciate the advice for practicing in the sim and perfecting loadouts, so maybe you can help me understand something.  As much as I want to perfect my fleet composition, loadouts, tactics, etc - my experience with the game so far is that optimizing doesn't matter that much, if you bring a bigger fleet than the enemy, you win. If their fleet is bigger, you run.  There is little incentive (unfortunately) to have a close battle with an evenly matched fleet, since even if you win you'll likely take expensive losses.  It's not like you get a much bigger reward for fighting a tough battle.  It seems highly optimized fleets and tactics only become important in a close fight where you need the edge.

I think Talinoth put it quite well; if your individual ships are effective enough then encounters without any other incentive will still offer experience and a profit in supplies and other salvage, as long as you don't overdeploy. You can also bring a salvage rig or two and some shepherds to increase your salvage profit - they pay for themselves but their bonuses have diminishing returns. It depends on how confident you are though, that you won't suffer losses, and ultimately taking any engagement will be up to your discretion, which will improve with time and experience.

Some things are much more dangerous of course, to the point where you can't even trust the danger rating of the fleet. I've felt for a long time that Pathers one such example, and excruciatingly common to boot. I personally like to take challenges and don't like to run from a fight but I've had to force myself to accept that they are not worth the risk for the earlier part of the game.

Smuggling in the black market is of course far more money and much simpler than all of this, but I think it comes down to preference. I spent plenty of time doing that and it feels so broken to me that I might as well just open the console and addcredits. So I just mix in limited opportunistic smuggling while traveling and focus on other things.

[PizzaInSpace]

A good point of view with how combat works. I mean if the game were exploitable to the point massive fleets were easy to defeat early on it would've been more mundane as it is but for me the ability to utilize multiple methods in surviving the persean sector is what really makes the game more unique and what some mods tend to lack as they revolve around better ships and factions. shame you do not get an opportunity yet to start out from different factions and different systems since it all ties down to the galatian incident. Hopefully by version 1.0 or further versions they give us the ability to choose which faction sector we start in. Still hoping to try a luddic path or pirate start where everybody is against you rather than a hard difficulty being set up.