Being the kind and helpful person you must be to have seen the title of this post and clicked it, you must have thought that you would find some simple and obvious question regarding the new update from someone who just purchased the game.
But, sadly, you are not so lucky.
I have recently found myself totally lost and confused as to what to do with myself in the more recent updates. I haven't played this game in a while, perhaps around the days of 0.5 something, and when it was called starfarer. Back when nomads got updated in a timely manor and there was only one system. Now I feel like some kind of old man that doesn't know internet explorer sucks.
All I really did back then, and really all you could do, was tear hostile factions (and sometimes everyone else when I ran out of victims) apart, and hand pick a fleet, trying new combinations as I thought them up. But now in the face of multiple systems and many, many changes, I feel quite lost. The details of the trading system are lost on me: I get the idea of how it all should work, and even experimented with interrupting trade a few times- with success- just to see what would happen. But its pretty hard to keep track of it all in practice. Whats more, even finding pirates or what have you to pick on now seems quite hard. As everything is so spread out, you don't have the luxury of having plenty to choose from, or a steady supply of fleets around your size. Moving between systems is expensive, and they all seem sparsely populated, and only by a handful of factions. Trying to collect bounties usually ends up being mostly waiting around for something you can either A; catch, or B; kill. This is a far cry from the old melee of having every faction in a single huge system. The advantages are definitely there, but its left me confused.
So, rather than flail around for hours, I've decided to ask you guys, as in my experience Starfarersector has a very helpful community. As someone who would rather be dog fighting most of the day rather than trading, what should I be doing, and what am I missing?