First Mission Combat Walkthrough
Welcome to the first mission guide!
An understanding of combat mechanics is essential to success in Starsector. This guide will walk you through a first combat mission while explaining key concepts. You can find this same information live, in-game, with stuff exploding as you learn in the Combat Tutorials accessed via the Tutorials button in-game.
But you’re hear to read. And learn. So follow along with and prepare yourself for tactical space combat!
1. Launch Starsector
2. Select “Missions”
The default starting mission is “A Fistful of Credits”. The goal is to defeat the enemy ship and not get blown up yourself. You have one allied ship which mostly serves to distract the enemy from you.
3. Press the “Play Mission” button.
The mission will load and you will be presented with the deployment window. In campaign mode, you may want to deploy only certain ships from your fleet into a battle. Here we want to deploy everything.
4. Select “All” then press the “Deploy” button.
You have deployed your fleet! This is the tactical map, a high-level overview of the battlefield.
Note that the game is paused so you can plan your attack and give orders to ships under your command. We’re not going to worry about giving orders; the AI is good at taking care of itself.
Your piloted ship is the one with a green box around it plus a command star. Your ally is the other ship with the green box.
5. Press the “tab” key to go to the battle map.
You will see your ships flying in to the battlefield. Press spacebar to pause the game. Use the mousewheel to zoom in and out and pan with the mouse around the screen to see nearby objects. Information about your ship appears in the lower-left corner.
Important things to note:
- Flux: This is like heat built up from firing weapons or taking damage with your energy shields. It starts at zero and if it exceeds your ships capacity, you will overload. Overloading halts your ability to use shields or weapons for a few seconds while flux is drained. You don’t want to be overloaded. You want to overload your enemy so you can deal damage without being blocked by shields or shot at.
- Hull: These are your hitpoints. When they drop to zero, you’re dead.
- Weapon Groups: These are your weapons. Your ship has various turrets and hardpoints which are grouped by number. You can manually select a weapon group using keys 1 through 5 on your keyboard, like an FPS game. You can fire by press the left mouse button. You can set any number of groups to auto-fire, which lets the AI decide when to fire. It’s pretty smart about handling weapons, but oftentimes you want to override the AI’s decisions. Your ship can fire as many weapon groups at a time as it can, provided your flux is not overloaded.
Try switching between weapon groups using the number keys. You will see that they highlight when selected. If you select a weapon group set to “autofire”, your control will override the AI and you can manually fire using the left mouse button.
Weapon group 1 is your primary offensive weapon, a pair of forward-facing guns. When you find the enemy, hit them with this.
Weapon group 2 is linked to your missiles. These are very slow to reload, so you’ll want to fire them at the right moment. These are special heat-seeking missiles that will fly around your enemy and hit their engines, disabling movement. If you use these correctly, you will leave your enemy drifting in space while you attack them from any angle you like with your guns in weapon group 1.
Weapon group 3 is a set of point-defense turrets, meaning it consists of small machine guns that try to shoot down enemy missiles and fighters. It is set to autofire. It’s best to let these turrets do their job.
6. Press spacebar to unpause. (Remember that you can pause again at any time to stop the action.)
Use the W A S D keys to move your ship.
- W move forward
- S reverses thrust
- A turns you left
- D turns you right
- (and C brings you to an absolute stop)
Your ship has a maximum speed, so once you hit it you don’t have to hold down the forward button.
Pilot your ship toward the top of the screen. When you see the enemy ship —
7. Press spacebar to pause the game.
The larger ship with the orange diamond overlay is the enemy. Move your cursor near the enemy and press the R key to toggle taRget information.
Just like you, the enemy has weapon groups, flux points, and hull points. Just like you, they can be overloaded by overflowing flux points and destroyed by losing all their hull points.
8. Right-click to start raising your shields, unpause with spacebar, and fire your weapons at the enemy with left-click
(You can initiate the raising or lower of shields and switch weapon groups even when the game is paused.)
Fire some shots at the enemy and watch the enemy hit you with their weapons. Your shield will absorb damage as flux. Let’s deal with that flux.
9. Reverse thrust with the S key until you’re out of range of the enemy. Lower your shields with a right-click.
When your shields are down and you’re not firing weapons, your flux will slowly drain.
To dump flux more rapidly, hit the V key to Vent flux. While venting you cannot use shields or fire weapons so it is best to do this when you are out of immediate danger.
10. Move toward the enemy again and be ready for a fight.
Raise your shields and move into weapon range. They’re probably fighting your friend, so you can take this opportunity to launch a kn0ck-out blow.
Press the 2 key to switch to your missile. Left-click twice to launch two in quick succession. These special missiles will circle around and disable the enemy’s engines.
Press the 1 key to switch back to your primary guns. You can just fire away at the front of the enemy ship, but it’s tactically sound to circle around and hit them in the engines where they’re more vulnerable and have less weapon coverage.
Let’s circle-strafe around them. Center your mouse on the enemy ship and hold the shift key. This activates strafe mode and will keep your ship pointing at the mouse cursor position.
- W thrusts your ship toward the mouse cursor position
- S reverses your ship away from the mouse cursor position
- A circles you around the cursor position left (or clockwise)
- D circles you around the cursor position right (or counter-clockwise)
- (and C still brings you to an absolute stop)
Press A or D to circle left or right around your target to shoot them in the back by holding down left click while weapon group 1 is activated.
Keep an eye on your flux and pull back to Vent if you need to!
By using a combination of these moves, you will prevail against your enemy. There are more details to combat tactics, and many more ships and weapons to explore, but with these basics you have enough to get by.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re off to a good start! From here we recommend that you play through the in-game tutorials then try a few of the easier missions to get accustomed to life combat.
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