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[Gothars]

In preparation for the revision of the Newbie Guide thread, and after that the manual:

I would love to hear any good tips and strategies you guys can come up with, especially regarding anything new in this update. Pro-tactics and beginner tips are welcome, don't worry that something is to banal, we're basically all noobs again now.

I'll start:

- Your Logistics Rating is influenced by the supplies your crew/marines consume daily, by the fixed daily supply costs of your ships and by any supply costs that are generated by going over the limit in cargo-, crew- or fuel-capacity. Supplies consumed by repairs do not count towards your LR, and CR regeneration is already covered by the fixed daily supply costs.

- If an enemy fleet tries to escape, use "harry" to lower their CR. If you are faster than they are, you might be able to catch up with them and repeat it, so they lose all CR before you finally engage them directly. An easy victory.

- If you're at a station, hover over the "Repair your ships at the station's dockyard"-option to see how many supplies are needed to get back to full repair and CR. If you have less, long journeys might be dangerous.

[Voyager I]

-At the beginning of a new game, you can immediately sell your starting Marines and some of your Supplies to buy, crew, and equip a Lasher from the Hegemony Station, immediately doubling the size of your fleet and letting you skip the '10 minute 1v1 strafe wars with a Hound' portion of the early game.

-Unstable Injectors are a really good upgrade for early game frigates.  Speed on frigates is great in general, and they'll make your starting Wolf/Lasher fast enough to run down Hounds and murder them in the face instead of getting kited until they run out of ammo.  Don't get hit by Salamanders.

-Keep your burn speed at 5 or higher to run down Buffalo/Condor fleets and kill them for their sweet, sweet supplies.  Pack a Freighter to maximize your supply *** potential.

[Alfalfa]

At first, there was joy; then came the confusion, which led to anger, eventually subsumed by fear.  Finally, control was established, resulting in glorious victory, and giving birth to new hope!

In other words, I think I've gotten a handle on how this update works.  Sort of.


So, supplies are crazy expensive.  How to not waste them:

Watch your logistics rating, anything below 100% will cost extra supplies.  

Bring freighters, it's terrible to get critically needed supplies only to watch them hemorrhage out rapidly due to your suddenly 10% logistics.

Don't repair prizes, they will cost more in supplies than you will receive in credits.

Mothball ships you aren't using, they cost essentially nothing both in terms of supplies and logistics.

Minimize the number of ships replenishing CR, ships with full CR use a fraction of the supplies.

Consider your deployments.  It's not worth chasing down fighters and frigates if you already have destroyers to loot.

Don't use too many interceptors.  Talons use 4 supplies/day, Wasps use 9, a Hyperion uses 3.

Minimize/forego the use of marines, each 10 marines cost 1 supply per day.  I finally got my (large) fleet's supply usage down to 45/day, 30 of which is my 300 marines.

[xenoargh]

Buy Hounds.

Hounds with front shields if you have the Flux Dissipation bonuses and OPs; Hounds with Infernium to chase things down, Hounds to carry more Supplies.  In the world of small ships being most efficient, the Hound is king.

Supplies are the real money.  Guns are often worth less than their equivalent cargo space in Supplies.

[CopperCoyote]

Less is more: The less you need to defeat an enemy the more your loot is going to be. Try to field as small a force as you can without taking too much damage.

Don't arm your freighters: If you're in an escape scenario the only time you want your freighters losing their 0 flux speed bonus is when they need to shield against a missile. The PD is usually too little too late. The tarsus is potentially the only caveat. It can't use it's shields whilst burn driving, and at that time it moves so fast it can potentially shoot down most missiles. Even then only the rear two turrets matter.

Fighters are persistent: Anti-fighter weaponry is more useful now that fighters have more replacements in the carriers. Beams particularly shine at this task.

Spoiler

The pun is accidental, but i'm running with it

[close]

Save for a rainy day: The bigger your fleet the more supplies you'll need if things go poorly. As a general guideline have enough supplies saved to fix all of you ships from 0. If you don't like being bound to a single star system use enough freighters to carry enough supplies to repair at least half your ships (with extra room for new loot of course).

Fire 'em if you've got 'em: If you have a good shot for a missile then fire it. Don't be afraid of the added CR costs because the faster you defeat your foes the less risk your ships are in.

Those are all the tips i can think of currently.

[Borgoid]

so they loose all CR before you finally engage them directly. An easy victory.

Loose... He'h

[Flare]

Ox tug ships pull the slowest ship up to the limit of its own speed. Larger ships will need more tugs to reach the speed of a tug.

[Gothars]

- The Command&Control station in Askonia is a great place to intercept neutral traders. They come very regularly, have only light escorts and lots of supplies or fuel. And you can sell everything directly at the station without having to haul it around.

[rex]

I seriously recommend picking up freighters to people having supply problems. You will get plenty dropped by enemy fleets, you just can't use them. Get freighters. This means you won't be forced to leave them while scavenging or burn through them when over capacity. If you are buying supplies, you have done something wrong. Ideally you will want to store a few thousand at the abandoned station as a reserve, in case you do make a few mistakes or when you want to move to a higher supply per day fleet(caps and cruisers).

Pick up every single tug you can find. Speed is life. Tugs and max burn tech skill, means you can run down fleets you would not normally be able to catch. Between the two it is trivial to get a fleet with multiple caps and buffalo frigates up to 7 or 8 max burn. You can run away from anything, and you can catch anything. Instead of losing out of faster, smaller fleets, you can grind their CR dust(harrying-duhh... can't remember the proper homophone), and in a pursuit with a few frigates/fighters.  Every now and then these CR = 0 ships might fire a weapon or raise their shields, but they are sitting ducks for anything that can catch them.

Also, fun fact, you can flank in pursuit mode now, with fighters and frigates. The AI for this might have some problems actually finding ships to kill.  They don't tend to get all the way to the middle of the lane.  Just drop a defend point in the middle of the map. Your flanker will go towards it, and then you just dismiss the defend point and they will start searching for enemies starting from there.

These couple points have allowed me to manage High Tech Cap fleets, Frigate Swarms, Massive carrier fleets, and more sane balanced things.  And, I don't worry too much about engagements anymore. It's actually become almost annoyingly easy.

[harperrb]

Good stuff guys, thanks,

[icepick37]

I can share some don'ts...   :p

Do NOT under any circumstances:
*Go to askonia until you have a good handle on your supply chain
*fly into hyperspace with insufficient fuel.  D:  (especially only 1 fuel, haha. Yes I'm that dumb)
*waste your cr on dumb engagements...  If the enemy is going to get away, just let them go. It ain't worth it.

[Andy H.K.]

• If you're into hot-dropping pirates, the current shortest route is via hyperspace - enter through Corvus Jump point alpha and exit from planet III gravity well. Note that this is a one-way trip so you still need to worry about extraction, although pirate hidden base is close by and you can resupply and sell loots there... Seriously we need more gas giants....
• With the advent of CR, it is wise to pick your fight and what to deploy. Small fleets of hounds and talons are not worth catching once you grow to a certain size. Even for a fleet with destroyer-size hull, usually it's okay to deploy a few frigates and fighters since those are what you realistically can actually catch - you can always escalate if it seems firepower is lacking.

[Gothars]

You can bring an AI piloted ship to fire all its missiles at an enemy as he comes into range, which makes for impressive alpha-strikes.

Just group the missiles together with the PD weapons. The AI will have no choice but to set the group on autofire, so the missiles will be triggered when an enemy is range. Note that missiles have different target arcs, Harpoons and Sabots must face an enemy, Salamanders  fire regardless of facing, so they are best for this.

Useful for hunter-killer loadouts for pursuit scenarios.

[xenoargh]

Good tip, it's one of the reasons why I wanted auto-fire on low-ammo missiles in this build and I'm so glad Alex did that for us

[Psygnosis]

In the face of a salamander. Back away from the target.

This goes double for ships with front facing only shields.

I think salamanders probably cause the most newbie heartache in the game.

If a hound is giving you trouble, instead of retreating you can alternatively run him out of ammo if you have shields, its a long and boring process, but it beats loosing a ship because of a stalemate.