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[Great Order]

Tridents can be good for Legions too. Their big issue is they're slow, but if you're going to be getting into knife fight range with a Legion (My favourite being the XIV for those double turreted missile mounts) then you can get a *lot* of extra atropos torpedoes against close range enemies. Even better, anyone tries to flank you just target them and let the 16 torpedoes tear them apart.

Apparently Sarissas are also good for Legions, being the low-tech answer to the Xyphos. Haven't given them a go myself.

[AlStar]

Carrier LPC review:
...

Excellent review! I need to step up my fighter game. I must say, I like the idea of throwing converted hangars onto everything - I've never thought of trying that before.

I managed to cheese my way into a Diktat battleship the other day. Went through their storyline missions, which end with a large, mean, frighteningly competent mercenary fleet guarding a debris field. I came in the first time with a fleet that was too full of itself by half, and learned the hard way that being able to sweep away giant pirate fleets does not translate to doing the same against well armed, armored, and captained ships.

Built myself back up, with a fleet that I was fairly sure could probably take the fleet. Went through the jump portal... and found the mercenaries busy with several pirate fleets - turns out there was a pirate bounty event active in the Diktat system, so they were swarming everywhere. While they were busy, I ambled over to the debris field, scooped up the objective, and turned it in for a shiny new battleship.

Why fight, when you can let the pirates do that?

[Great Order]

You can also get an Executor for free by mentioning it to Marco at the end of the quest. He'll go and give you one for free.

[Loud Whispers]

Apparently Sarissas are also good for Legions, being the low-tech answer to the Xyphos. Haven't given them a go myself.

Sarissas might be really good for the Prometheus MKII, being the Ludd friendly version of the Xyphos

Why fight, when you can let the pirates do that?

It's also super juicy for a salvage run. Why spend supplies on fights when you can just sit outside and get 100% salvage for 0% deployment cost ;P

Also I got absolutely styled on by a single Invictus, holy Ludd. I was up against an adversary fleet led by an Atlas MKII, an Onslaught, a Battlecarrier and an Invictus. My battlecruiser managed to take out the first three capitals, but after the enemy fleet was defeated all I had left was an army of shepherd drone tenders and two light cruisers. This Invictus was ALONE in the middle of the map and I kept scoring engine flameouts on it, and a billion mining drones were just swarming all over this in between flak bursts.

The Invictus just turned around and slowly flew up the map in between engine flameouts and just left, as if my entire fleet wasn't even there. Praise the bricc

[Micro102]

One thing that's always irked me is that it feels like they made "Low-Tech" and "High-Tech" equal in battle strength. Technology should simply improve things so it feels off when higher tech isn't something to strive for.

[Dostoevsky]

That was/is actually an explicit design choice - the idea is less that it's a linear progression and more that it's representing different eras of combat theory, each with their own advantages and flaws. (And also that it makes for more interesting gameplay.)

High tech usually is a bit easier on the whole, because shielding and mobility is more forgiving (and arguably has a higher skill ceiling too) than armor and slugging. This used to be much more the case in prior versions, in my opinion, and the dev has put in work to try and even it out a bit more.

[Sirus]

Like Dostoevsky says, the "tech levels" are more design philosophies than anything else. High tech ships might be newer than low tech, but they're also running under very different design considerations. Broadly speaking:

Low tech ships favor ballistic weapons and heavy armor, while having inefficient shields or even dropping the shields outright in some cases. Their supply usage tends to be low, but so does their fuel efficiency.
High tech ships favor powerful shields and energy weapons, while also tending to be agile. They pay for this with thinner armor and a greater need to watch their flux levels, not to mention generally being more expensive to run. You've got some high-tech frigates that cost more supplies per month (not to mention CR recovery) than some low-tech destroyers.
Midline ships are, well, midline. They tend to be somewhat balanced and economical to run, and mount a wider variety of weapons.

[Orb]

High tech ships are better, but only in a one to one comparison. They're more expensive to deploy.

A modern military of high tech ships with modern supply chains to back it up probably obliterates low tech. But given the state of the universe, it can be hard to find those spare parts you know? You can find 10 junkers and spare parts for every Wolf.

[Great Order]

You know, there's one glaring flaw with the AI and that's its tendency to run away from ships needing support.

I had a ship getting flanked, and two more ships within range to help. Their decision making was to, despite having full armour and no flux, run as far away as possible.

Of course, the instant the ship got destroyed they then charged in to kill the flankers. I can only assume the captain of the dead ship owed the other captains money or something and never paid it back.

[Loud Whispers]

One thing that's always irked me is that it feels like they made "Low-Tech" and "High-Tech" equal in battle strength. Technology should simply improve things so it feels off when higher tech isn't something to strive for.

"Low-Tech" isn't "Primitive-Tech." Lore-wise starsector has a spectrum:

-Improvised and salvaged ships, like pather and pirate ships. These ones are truly "primitive" or at the very least, "daring." The equivalent of strapping a howitzer onto the back of a toyota and calling it a day.

-Low-tech classes that are obsolete like the Invictus, which were developed for combat conditions at their time with the best tech available at the time. No shields, lots of armour, low speed, low flux weapons, high crew count e.t.c.
Notably none of the Invictus's problems would have been a problem for humanity in the era where the space gates were still active. This progresses with the Hegemony dominating the galaxy with a high focus on heavy capital ships dueling with heavy capital ships, leading to the birth of the Onslaught, or experiments on heavy capital ships capable of operating in all theatres without support - the battlecarrier being the first real foray into adopting strike fighters.

-The midline divergence occurs around about here, with the midline rebels taking a look at the battlecarrier and the Hegemony's heavy cruisers and thinking "what if we thinned the armour and upgunned it." This is where we start seeing stuff like Eagle light cruisers, Gryphon missile cruisers and the Conquest battlecruiser. It's noteworthy here that Hegemony ships still slaughter midline ships in a head-on duel, but the midline rebels try to tackle the Hegemony's dominance by fielding faster, smaller fleets. So neither side's ships are superior tech wise per se, but they are designed to fulfil different combat roles.

-Tri-Tach develops the high tech fleet here, alongside the AI fleets. More flux capacity, energy-based weapons, more shield-coverage, more automated systems (less crew), more "experimental" tech like teleportation and phase drives, leading to fully automated ships. Notably this also makes for more delicate ships, and with a lot of the "high tech" coming from the automation and not necessarily any weapons or flux systems. A good example would be the derelict ships which date from this era - already inferior to their contemporaries at the time they were built, they were built nonetheless because the Hegemony did not lack for industrial might and it saw no problem with sending massed waves of AI ships to attack rebels.

-Collapse of the gate system. First AI war. Second AI war. Legendary XIV battlegroup arrives and wins. Current Hegemony continues slimming down the armour of their ships to make them slightly faster to better deal with Tri-tach wolfpacks whilst still being more up-armoured and up-gunned than Persean midline ships. But the low-tech, midline and high-tech are all seeing continuous development parallel to each other. The only difference is by this point low-tech doctrine is based around heavy armour, flux-efficient weapons with high crew (reduce use of automation) and unmatched frontal firepower. Midline is based around speed, devastating broadsides, missiles and carrier actions. High tech is based on minimally crewed, experimental weapon systems like phase drives, EMP arc emitters, fortress shields, AI-core usage e.t.c. but sophistication does not always equal superiority. Just different philosophy

You know, there's one glaring flaw with the AI and that's its tendency to run away from ships needing support.

I had a ship getting flanked, and two more ships within range to help. Their decision making was to, despite having full armour and no flux, run as far away as possible.

Of course, the instant the ship got destroyed they then charged in to kill the flankers. I can only assume the captain of the dead ship owed the other captains money or something and never paid it back.

A good way to control fleets and get them to support one another is to set a waypoint and mark it as "defend." This will group up the ships, and even when they scatter due to enemy intrusion they will stay close to the waypoint with supporting fire arcs. And if there are too many enemy ships in the area you can always delete the waypoint without spending a command point

[Great Order]

I've just tripled my fleet size.

Had plenty of money, but not enough to really expand my fleet. I came into a shitload of ships when the Hegemony tried invading Cruor.

There were somewhere around 6 fights with the invasion fleets before the heavy Sindrian fleets came in to end it. Falcons, Hammerheads, Eagles all over the damn place, some regular some Sindrian. Had some vulture scavengers too, but the Hegemony reinforced me there and we sent them packing.

I actually had to scuttle some ships to keep under the limit.

[Salmeuk]

this game was never afraid to let you stumble into wealth or prosperity. As compared to earlier games like Freelancer or EV: Nova (where the player's progression was very much anchored to a series of ships, weapons, and quests) Starsector feels much more open. yet it shares the same general feeling of these games - Against all odds, make something of yourself, Space Captain!

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, the considerations of Starsector are more "what do you want to do" and "how are you going to support a fleet of that size?"

It's perfectly viable to run around with a handful of cruisers and destroyers living off the land, so to speak, but once you start massing cap ships you're pretty much obliged to have a commission with one of the major factions or a colony of your own (or both) just to keep them supplied and the crews paid.

[Loud Whispers]

I never sign commissions unless I want to RP as a specific faction just because I like the flavour of being a rogue starfarer. Technically I guess there are no downsides to taking up a commission unless you have nexerellin and lose market access due to faction hostilities... But I guess even in that case you can just get an independent commission and be friends with everyone still. Whatever the flavour, I find there are some things which work super well for making credits and cash:


Small fleet:
-For a nimble, small exploration fleet with high burn, exploration missions are amazing because they have a fixed payout. Install comm sniffers in systems with lots of planets and chain-accept loads of exploration missions in a planned-path and just rake in that early-game money. Also helps fund your transition into surveying planets, which also gives you a fixed-cost reward whilst building up your supply of blueprints/class V planet knowledge. Building up a fleet of drone tenders led by an apogee or something equivalent is super easy & you only need as much firepower as it takes to deal with derelicts... So not much at all.

-The hound smuggling fleet. Shielded cargo holds lets you get away with drug/weapon/organ trafficking to heavily patrolled systems like the Hegemony or Sindrian worlds whilst some of the planets controlled by Tri-Tach/Independents/Pirates don't care at all if you openly dock without your transponder on, letting you really squeeze your profit margins higher per unit. This also lets you benefit from some illicit procurement/smuggling contracts you find by smoozing in bars, which have the additional benefit of making you friendly with pirates allowing you to skimp on warships completely.

-The wolfpack pirates. Smuggler fleets are often small enough to barely even classify as a fleet and you can engage them with a starting frigate. Just sit outside a populous jump point dark and engage. As you scale up you can start preying on merchant convoys; if you keep your basic burn level at 10> or even 11> you are much faster than anything which can kill you and much faster than the things you want to eat. Hilariously killing merchant convoys causes supply issues so you can sell the looted goods to the market you just deprived aforementioned goods from at a serious markup. The relations hit is not so bad when the faction doesn't know who you are (it will give you a warning message if the target knows who you are before you engage).

Mid fleet
-Space trucking! The special bar event for "please transport these goods/fuel for me" scales with your storage hold space. I've noticed it's rarer to find these missions in the new update but they are godsends and can yield stupendous cash in between searching for "best place to buy/best place to sell" trade route runs, especially as you begin replacing buffalos and colossi with atlases & prometheuses.

-Bounty hunting. Once you have your first heavy cruiser bullying easy target bounties to steal their ships and amass a warfleet is fairly simple.

-Colonisation! I tend to patiently wait before I place my first colony. I look for a planet with super low hazard rating and food present, which usually amounts to a terran world with mild climate and farms. Food is a super cheap industry which yields great profit in the early months of planet growth, helping to pay for hazard pay & officer/admin fees. The low hazard rating lets you transition to heavier industries as it grows bigger. I've heard other people say you should have 1,000,000 minimum before you set up your colony and I've found 2,000,000> lets you comfortably set up all of the planet's defences whilst you faff about in the galaxy without having to worry.

With mods
Nexerellin allows you to do space mining runs, which have their charm. But the most hilarious style of nexerellin money-making imo is the short-selling war profiteer. Pilot a single kite with a crew of 5 dudes. Fly to a planet about to be invaded. Buy all of the goods the planet demands on the black and legit market right as the invasion fleet(s) arrive in system. Place all of the goods into local storage. You literally don't care if the invasion fleet wins or loses, all that matters is that the invasion fleet is strong enough to destroy the planet's orbital station and disrupt its market access. Amidst the chaos, sneak in with your transponder off and sell everything - if you can't do that, selling on open market is fine too as either way you'll make disgusting profit with operational costs of basically nothing.

With/without mods
Once you have enough planets of sufficient size to produce every good your faction demands, you usually have disgusting strategic levels of money, such that your problem is not that you can't afford supplies or fuel, but that no markets sell enough to feed your 100,000,000 paragons.
Is it possible to sustain such a gigafleet without commission or colony?

...In theory you could store your megaships on an abandoned station and only take them out when you want to unleash total war. No real benefits to doing this as not having the ability to produce hulls or acquire commission hulls is annoying when you really want certain weapons / hulls :|

[Il Palazzo]

D'you guys remember which mod changed the planet (market) sizes, so that they can grow past 6? I think there were two. One that straight-up added like four extra levels across the board, an another that made it so that a system with a colony ship could get to 7, matching the core planets.
I've read the description of all mods in the mod list, like, twice already. Can't seem to find either.