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[Mephansteras]

Oh, and carriers! Get a couple of Herons in your fleet and the AI will win against most small fleets without you doing much active combat at all. Heck, I tend to do 'Admiral' style fights all the time once I get a decent fleet going.
The AI isn't as good an experienced player, but they are often better than a novice player. And if you use a carrier as your flagship you can reasonably just be hands off on the specifics of what your ship does and focus on the overall tactics of your fleet without worrying too much about getting your ship exploded.

[Salmeuk]

It can definitely fall into the 'hardcore' side of game design. I would suggest playing easy and, like Nirur Torir said, to play around in the combat sim until it doesn't feel so clunky.

It might help you to understand that the game was originally just a very detailed combat sim, and the campaign and starmap and whatnot were added partway through development. So a fair amount of the playerbase was well-versed in the combat before even touching the campaign, and that has certainly influenced subsequent balance. Ship micromanagement is VERY important for most encounters, and second-by-second decisions can make or break your chosen approach. This game is kind of like Mount and Blade, in that a highly-skilled player can generally take on larger fleets, and survive due to their ability to out-play the AI. Unlike M&B, this 'out-playing' is actually super-satisfying, and not just an AI stompfest.

As far as the campaign goes - unlike other members of the genre, ship upkeep is too expensive to just play it in a straightforward manner. My first goal is often just finding a suitable location with small enough pirate gangs to farm ships, or to survey enough or perform enough quests without getting thwacked to afford some competent fleet members.

The AI isn't as good an experienced player, but they are often better than a novice player.

This so much. When you first pick up the game, you are playing a somewhat imbalanced game, since you are a very unskilled pilot. If you choose to command your most powerful flagship and then drop the ball because you don't know how to distance yourself or balance flux buildup / venting and also shield management.. yeah you won't make it very far. Try instead to control the smaller, less critical ships, and do your best to survive and do what damage you can. Honestly a fun playstyle..

[motorbitch]

thanks for your advise, it is very helpful and it reall hits many of the things that frustrate me currently.

you mentioned upkeep and that one should not take on to many ships early. i actually read this before. so this actually makes it so frustrating right now. i cant make a qualified decission. how many ships i need to fight that tutorial fleet? how many are to many? the game does not give me any hint. it forces me to trial and error this, and throws me into a loop of boredom and frustration where i had to do the same meta-management gaming over and over again to find the working sweet spot.
btw, the game did not even give me the option to NOT play the tutorial.

edit: actually if i wanted to try different salvage ships i had to go reload day 7 from 30, because whenever i did NOT take in one of the ships i HAD to salvage it. good stuff. how to piss of new players 101

[zaimoni]

i made it through the tutorial to the point where i should do some mumbo jumbo to reactivate a jump point or whatever. i am supposed to take out two miner fleets. i do have 3 combat ships, two wolf frigate one hammer head cruiser, and two civillians that are mostly useless in combat.
the issue is the rogue miner fleets outnumber me more then 2:1, and even if i engage them alone as i am told, they just annihilate me. ....
i dont see what to do here. i spend all the money i had to outfit my ships as well as i could with my money and the aviable weapons, but it does not seem to be anywhere enough.

Prior versions: should not be spending money on ship weapons this early (this caught me as a tomato surprise on my first playthrough).  I never have enough cash for even crew/supplies/fuel until after re-opening the jump gate.  The psuedo-commission gives enough weapons in storage to arm all of the ships improperly.

About the only thing worth buying before re-opening the gate, besides crew/supplies/fuel, is a militarized Kite.  The markets point-restock once a month, so you can hold off on just about anything else (including officers) until the gate is re-opened.

As I am a truly incompetent pilot, generally what I do is leave things on autopilot and use eliminate orders to get things targeted properly.  Manual control until one wants to open fire and then handing off to the AI for actual combat, is a thing for noobs like us.

EDIT: also, you're supposed to sneak around and engage only one of the miner fleets at a time.  (You'll be far enough away from civilization that going dark won't be an immediate problem w/patrols.)  Basically, wait for them to be (relatively) separated and then enter only one fleet's sensor radius, then draw it off before engaging.  Then they'll outnumber you by a factor of only 1.25 or so if you took all of the ships at the graveyard...very manageable.

maybe i was supposed to claim more ships from the graveyard? i took all combat ships i could without spending story points, and as they all where pretty fucked up i decided not to spend very rare resources on them. ....

Prior versions, yes you just take them all (the story point mechanic is "new" and almost certainly is not balanced for new players).

[AzyWng]

There are more than a few videos of players going through the tutorial on Youtube. Perhaps watching them might give you a better idea of what to do?

Also, I've found that having ships stick together in combat can help them survive. This can be done by either selecting some ships and right-clicking on other ships (this will cause the ships to escort them) or by creating a "defend" command (click on the map or an objective and hit "D"). Some ships might still wind up splitting off or getting too aggressive, but it's still better than the fleet charging in in a big uncoordinated mob.

[motorbitch]

i actually did watch some before i cried.
aaaanyway. managed to kill that fleet. it was much more easy once i started to give orders via the map instead of just flying my one ship and once i killed the right ship first. turns out that carrier was really squishy. when i killed that first left the big one for last, the fight was much more easy.

regarding claiming all the ships, i dont think that would have been a good idea. there where like 10 of them and exept for two, all these i thought where good required story points to claim. anyway, got over that obstacle now, and i am free to pick my own fights. i think i will manage now. thanks for your input.
what was most helpful was the tip that the game was a combat sim first.

[Dostoevsky]

maybe i was supposed to claim more ships from the graveyard? i took all combat ships i could without spending story points, and as they all where pretty fucked up i decided not to spend very rare ressources on them.

The mission-giver and the tutorial text both strongly suggest you pick a few up, yeah. I believe one of them is always a Hammerhead, which are very solid destroyers, but you don't need to take all of them.

One thing that may not be intuitive (and I honestly don't recall whether the tutorial mentions) is that ships with D-mods may be dinged up, but they're also cheaper to deploy which is very handy. Most d-mods are pretty manageable, and over time you'll get a sense of which to avoid on which hull types.

Another thing that the tutorial fails to mention (probably because the tutorial was made in an earlier version where this wasn't the case) is that buying ships is pretty darn expensive early on. Scavenged vessels (likely with d-mods) are probably going to be your primary source for a while.

And agreed with others that spending some time in the combat sim, the main-menu missions, or the main-menu tutorial are all very good ideas.

Another tip for dealing with money early on is getting an actual commission. After you finish the tutorial missions you can talk to the person who gave you them or most other base commanders in the Hegemony to get one - the tutorial missions should give you enough reputation for them to be amenable. The stipend gives a lot of economic breathing room.

There are ways to earn a lot of money through trading, but doing so effectively generally relies on the less legal sorts of trading.

The 'main story' also includes a mission giver contact with pretty decent missions, starting that up is as easy as

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

visiting Galatia Academy Station post-tutorial.

One final thing - someone put together a guide on ship loadouts that may be worth a read. It's pretty long, but the "IKEA Instructions" and the Capacitors/Vents portion of the Core Concepts should cover the basics.

[forsaken1111]

Also there is a skill which will slowly remove d-mods from your fleet's ships, so even heavily d-modded ships are worth grabbing if they fit your fleet deployment and you plan to grab that skill.

[Dostoevsky]

The counterpart skill to that is actually kinda-sorta-hilariously broken at the moment, allowing some ridiculously tanky scrapheaps if abused right. It'll probably get a nerf at some point, though, and the repair one is the more sensible choice overall.

[forsaken1111]

In my case I found a XIV Legion with a few d-mods so I spent some time just hanging around with only it in my fleet so that skill would remove its d-mods then I built in some nice hullmods with storypoints and it was the core of my fleet after that

[motorbitch]

thanks guy, you are very helpful.

one more question, is it intended that its more expensive to repair degradation then to buy a ship without degradations? this seems a bit counter intuitive. it also seems to me to make little sense to me. finally, it makes me strip and refit my ships for apparently not good reason.

edit: there are options to get rid of the d-mods without full refit at a shipyard? the game explicitly claims something different.

[forsaken1111]

edit: there are options to get rid of the d-mods without full refit at a shipyard? the game explicitly claims something different.

It's a new skill in the latest release.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Frumple]

thanks guy, you are very helpful.

one more question, is it intended that its more expensive to repair degradation then to buy a ship without degradations? this seems a bit counter intuitive.

For what it's worth, this isn't unknown or uncommon in real life, especially with certain things. Sometimes, due to various issues with parts availability or labor costs or whatever, it can be cheaper to just buy a replacement than to fix up what you have (especially with labor or lost time costs factored in). It's apparently fairly normal for microwaves or any number of electronics to be more expensive to repair than replace.

I could see it making sense for spaceships in particular, tbh. Cheaper to build where the infrastructure is and fly the thing to distant markets than build the repair capability local, or somethin'.

e: also d-mods are suppposed to be serious damage, iirc. We're not talking fender bender equivalent, more like a car frame bent into a figure eight. Normal repair facilities probably wouldn't cut it, you're talking major (and expensive) refit juju.

[forsaken1111]

Keep in mind that in the fiction of starsector, people don't just go build a ship. Ships and equipment are made using massive nanoforges which essentially 3d print the ships/equipment. This is why you need blueprints to make anything, even if you already own a ship. You can't just copy the existing item, you need the blueprint in a form the forges can understand. Not every area of ships are easily accessible after construction outside of a dockyard, and d-mods represent serious damage to deep systems or core internals which can't be repaired in the field and require intense labor to disassemble half the ship or something to even get to.

[Dostoevsky]

In terms of game mechanics the repair of D-Mods is intended primarily for especially rare (or even unique) vessels; d-mods are intended to be an ever-present thing for both mechanics and lore reasons.

And if the game claims that's the only way, I suspect that's because the language predates the latest version (in the last version it was the only way). If you make a note of where that text is I can post it as a bug report in the official forums - in my experience they're pretty responsive.