Phase ships are the A Grade idiots of starsector AI, from what I've seen. It's just... really bad at handling phase cloaking. I'm not necessarily good with them, but the AI is holy shit bad.
Also any kind of high mobility ability they're just... not wise with. At all.
The one exception is the DOOM + an officer with systems expertise. You don't even need to put weapons on the DOOM. It just BRTTTTTTTTTs mines on top of the enemy, pulls out with phase, recharges its mines and does it all over again. It's a terrifying phase mine bukakke machine
If you want to keep with a Stardust Ventures only theme, I'd see if you can find some Storm Heralds. They're pretty tanky in most situations. And, yeah, if you can get a Storm Bringer battlecruiser you'll find that it'll handle almost anything that gets thrown at it. Still a good bit more fragile than something low-tech like an Onslaught, but it's got the speed and shield capacity to get out of bad situations that the slower capitals can't.
Well, based on my general experiences. Never used the Realistic Combat mod, so things might work out slightly differently.
In any case, love the after action reports. Always fun seeing how other folks use my ships!
I think it'll make a good flagship. Still just scrounging up cash and trying to nurture my colony into a proper money-maker. Realistic combat mod is pretty fun - most of the changes it makes are just increasing the rock-paper-scissors elements of the game. It also stealth-nerfs a lot of the auto-healing remnants, since in RCM taking damage lowers CR and so it's actually possible to wear down the CR of teleporting big thick remant battleships. Some of the key changes:
-Everything is much longer range. E.g. laser beams tend to have 10,000 range, ballistics around 4,000 range.
-Everything is much faster, but with much lower acceleration/mobility. This really works in favour of high tech or ships like the stardust where it really trains you how to maintain bearings and keep circling behind frontal-firepower style ships.
-It's a lot harder to always keep your shields up. So you have to dodge, force the enemy away with gunfire or wait for the enemy to run out of flux.
-Armour/hull is ablative instead of being a HP stat. So it's more important to keep your damage focused on one area of the enemy ship than to spread it out everywhere.
-Hits are calculated by the angle they strike on hulls. So a hit that strikes a ship on a 45* angle will do less damage than one on a 90* head on hit. Hulls like the stardust boys that are basically flying triangles helps make them a bit more resilient, whilst a lot of mod ships that add big wings and blocks make them more vulnerable
Need to get the mod that adds explosion size based on fuel carried if you haven't. That'd make it seriously boomy (And add another type of IED ship that relies on the AI being too stupid to get away)
Also the Luddic Path IED submod is glorious
I love that enough people complained about the Luddic Path enhancement mod that the mod maker split the IED mod into its own submod, because they hated how they could be smashing apart a luddic fleet only for a deranged tanker to fly into their capital ship and detonate
Just as Ludd intended
My helm control is awful.
Does this just get better with practice?
Just remember to hold down shift to make your ship automatically follow your mouse cursor, and whilst holding down shift it changes the nature of the wasd keys. So when you hold down shift, instead of rotating your ship, a and d strafe the ship left or right, whilst w and s control forwards/backwards acceleration. Use the c key to reduce your speed.
I would recommend giving the missions a try. The missions helped me a lot, and also I found it easier to start off with big fat slow ships like the oddyssey and then work my way down to smaller, faster ships
Yeah I feel like use of the black market is almost mandatory - 30% tariff is ridiculous. Makes me appreciate living in a state with only 6% sales tax…
I also have to laugh that consumable supplies are around 100˘ but durable people are around 30˘.
And I have to decide how to dig out of my 0-supply hole…
-Exploration missions in the early game provide flat fees. Place a comm-sniffer in a hegemony or sindrian system with lots of planets. I always make sure the exploration mission is for a place that is marked clearly in the mission, e.g. "an orbital probe orbiting around a gas giant in the xyz system" instead of the more nightmarish ones "a hulk drifting far from the centre of xyz" where you could end up wasting time and supplies.
-If you have a combat fleet and don't care about pissing people off, start targeting smugglers and seizing their cargo in hyperspace. When your combat fleet is large enough, begin targeting trade fleets. You get the double whammy of being able to disrupt the supply of the destination planet, smuggling their own goods back to them at a markup price.
-Bounties, if you care about pissing people off.
-Exploring bars to find someone "with a concerned expression" on their face is a great source of money for those who want to RP as civilian space truckers. As long as you have the storage capacity, you can transport goods at great markup price. The best part is this mission scales with your storage size - if you have loads of atlases, the money potential is
huge. Just make sure you're friendly with the destination market first...
Oh yeah, and you can 100% run away with the cargo you're given and sell it yourself instead of delivering it to the marked destination market.
Just uh... Be ready for the consequences.
-Exploit market disruptions and trade imbalances. Nexerellin wars provide lots of disruptions, but even in base game there are a lot of reliable supply issues. Some markets like the luddic church normally have a huge deficit of luxury goods due to their laws, whilst over-producing on food or organics they can't sell. Checking the galactic market and seeing who is overproducing something someone else is in deficit in can let you do legitimate, tax-paying trade whilst making fat profit.
-If you have Nexerellin, rent out a single tiny shuttle. Fly to a planet that is about to be invaded. Buy
every single organic, crew, marines, fuel, supplies, domestic goods and heavy machinery. Place them all into storage. If the invading power allows for legal trade of things like luxury goods, drugs, organs, heavy weapons, buy all of the legal ones and place them in storage too. [Don't store anything which is illegal to the new polity, in case the new polity wins the invasion and your illegal goods get trapped in storage - incurring the monthly fee until you manage to bribe a new invasion into seizing the planet to free your goods].
Assuming everything goes to plan, the invading fleet will destroy the orbital station and bombard the planet. At that point you don't really care who wins, just that the war causes enough damage and disruption. This massively increases the demand for the above mentioned goods. Go dark, sneak back into the port (really easy to do with just one tiny shuttle in the middle of a war), taking all of your goods out of storage and selling it on the black market. If you pull off the ultimate war short, you can make over 3,000,000 credits in one day. Even better if your fleet is stored nearby, and after you're done doing black market shorts you use your cargo-haulers to haul legitimate trade of supplies in-system.