Starsector New Player's Guide: Combat

hello everyone and welcome to star sector with me JD Colley today we're going to be looking at the new players guide to the basics of combat as well as some details about how to fit your ships and fleets for the best advantage in combat so without further ado let's get started all right first first section here I'm just going to quickly run over the user interface that you'll see in the combat screen first we have at the left our status indicator this shows us the various status effects affecting our ship these include things from having your ship have no flux so you get an engine boost ECM effects that you can have I won't go over what ECM is here is not important to a new player but it is a status effect that will affect your ship's performance see our changes things from active abilities etc these are all shown in the status effects section next we have our speed indicator which shows us how fast removing this is a absolute indicator not relative it does not show you the direction of your speed just how fast you are moving relative to zero after that we have our armor indicator this shows us our armor layout and how well our armor is holding up the brighter it is the better it is and as your ship takes damage you'll be able to see it become darker and darker until it reaches a kind of grayish color meaning you have no more armor in that section now you also have the ship identification information and showing the name of your ship its class in this case is an Apogee and then last but not least to the the loadout of your ship not generally useful to really know unless you're very familiar with the autofit settings but it's there next on our list are the flux hull and active ship system indicators they just show you whether or not your active system is running and of course your hip points and how much flux you have and then below that we have weapon groups and the weapons in those groups and whether they've been set to auto fire or not and whether or not they're linked or alternating in their fire pattern after that we have your weapon settings the settings I should say your ammunition counter charge counts for your weapons it shows the cooldown of weapons most weapons do not have ammunition but most of them do have some form of cool-down that will be indicated to here by a little bar that decreases you'll see it in combat alright so if we look at our ships we also see a little line coming away from them with a small little HUD icon there a HUD element that is the quick I'll flux hull and well see our indicators this is just to be able to give you some information at a glance for any ship on the field I mean they're kind of hard to see when you're actively moving around and you get used to it after a while but if you're having trouble seeing them just pause the game by pressing spacebar and you'll be able to get a good look at that to see how ships are doing and then over on the hound here that I have indicated I've targeted this ship and that ship is giving us information about it so in the top left we have our weapon loadout which is showing us what weapons that this hound has actives so you can use this to kind of figure out how to fight a ship then it also has its flux hull and CR indicators and then finally the identification information and speed and distance indicators and then last but not least around the edge of the screen we have off-screen indicators for things such as strategic points enemy and friendly ships missiles etc another top right you also have your deployment points your command points now those kind of things so there we go for the UI for some of you this may be a bit rudimentary but for those of you who were truly new to the game you may want to stick around just in case I cover some controls you didn't actually know we're there so first how do we control ship and star sector star sector uses the ASW DTS as well as Q and E which you may have not been aware of but the default scheme for the controls I'm not exactly sure which they are if we press escape and go to the settings and then the settings again I'm not entirely sure if the invert behavior is on or off by default I play with it on but with the button unchecked which I assume is probably the default your ship does not turn to your cursor your ship will only I'll use the cursor input for controlling your weapon arts which I'll go over in a minute for moving your ship w accelerates your ship which if you take your finger off w you will see your speed does not decrease that's because we're dealing with an area without friction so your ship will maintain its momentum if you press s your ship will slow down until it reaches zero and should you continue to press s you will move in Reverse c can be used to bring your ship to a stop completely it's useful for arresting your movement if you're not wanting to drift in a specific direction a and D control your left-to-right turning and Q and E will control your strafing allowing you to move left and right while maintaining your facing now if we go back into settings and rien vert this this is the way I play by the way now my ships facing is controlled with my mouse and a and D control whether or not I strafe so a strafe left D strace right in this situation Q and D would also control the facing but I have to be not controlling my ships facing through the mouse so if you hold shift in this mode you can control your ship the default in the default manner so you don't always have to go in and change the setting if you don't want you can just hold down shift and it will allow you to alter your control scheme to invert it to the other way this can be useful in certain situations if you play like I do and using the way of having your ship face your cursor this can be difficult for you to use ships that have broadside attacks because obviously your ships nose points towards your opponent or well it is controlling your facing and so if you want to be both aiming weapon marks and having your ship paint point away from your opponent and you're going to want to hold shift and control your ships facing manually with the keyboard alright so what other controls do we have right mouse will turn on your shields or if your ship has a phase cloak it will shift it into it's phased mode which I'll show right here and of course left mouse button fires your active weapon group if you look in the bottom left you can see that Group one with my two heavy mortars is currently my selected weapon group the number keys one through in this case four will shift between the various weapon groups that are available now as you can see groups 1 3 & 4 have highlighted boxes next to them and the Box on group 4 is blinking because I am currently controlling it this box of course is it says is auto fire you can toggle the auto fire of a weapon group by pressing ctrl + the number of the group so I just toggled off 1 there toggle it back on I can toggle 2 on and off 3 on and off and 4 on and off this can be useful in certain situations when you have a powerful or high-flux weapon you want to fire on auto but then want it to stop because you're becoming dangerously high on flux we'll go over what flux is in just a moment but it has use in certain you don't usually generally use it in the heat of a battle but it is good to know about all right let's see next on our list is f.f controls your active ability as you'd hear there is a little sound effect when I pressed it my guns have lit lit up and it says accelerated ammo feet are there in the bottom left it's now on cooldown a moment to go it said active now this little bar is decreasing that's the cool down and when it reaches nothing it's now ready again so if I press F again my accelerated ammo feeders no active in the case of the Hammerhead means I fire faster when it turns off you'll see my rate of fire has decreased there are many different active abilities in the game ranging from things like it's summer accelerated ammo feeders and flares to stuff like oh I don't know high energy focus that makes your energy weapons do more damage or teleports fighters back there's all sorts of things every ship has one now they do a lot to contribute to the the flavor of that ship and what makes it distinctly so you definitely want to get to know your ships active abilities on the subject of weapon groups another important control in some cases it's not actually important most the time but it can be useful if you're being overwhelmed by your weapon marks is the tilde key and on american keyboards it's the leftmost number right next to the one on your your keyboard above tab I'm not sure about other nationalities keyboards it can be different I believe by pressing this button will toggle your weapon arcs it can be useful in some circumstances I don't generally deal with it but it's good to know about another key that is good to know and you will use very often in battle is our our targets opponents that you have moused over or friendly so you can use it either way and it will give you information on them your guns will prioritize targets that are targeted so if there are two ships within your weapons arc and you have a gun set to auto fire and you're not currently selecting that weapons group your guns will prioritize the target that you have targeted so all things being equal between two ships your guns William for the target rather than the other one and yes as I mention there if you are controlling a weapons group that has auto fire enabled it will not fire unless you deselect that weapons group it considers the players the player having selected that weapon group as a manual override and will not use the auto fire function until you move away from that weapons group the final control I forgot to mention during my original recording session is the hold of fire control this is controlled by X I will toggle all of your weapons on and off including your point defense weapons this is useful in situations where firing your weapons will risk you overloading from enemy fire that's generally what I use it for to allow me to vent flux passively well may be able to keep my shield up that tends to be my primary use so a X toggles weapons so basic damage mechanics in star sector there are four primary kinds of damage that you can inflict and receive in combat the first is kinetic kinetic dust 200 percent damage to shields 50 percent damage to armor and 100 percent damage to Hull I will go over what those things are in just a moment high-explosive inflicts 50 percent damage to shields 200 percent damage to armor and 100 percent damage to Hall fragmentation inflicts 25 percent damage to shields 25 percent damage to armor and 200 percent damage to Hull and last energy damage inflicts 100 percent damage to all types of hull armor etc to learn what type of damage a specific weapon in flicks all you need to do is mouse over it on the refit screen or in other screens as well or the weapon is present and you can see here in the ancillary data section you can see the damage type in the case of this heavy mortar the damage type is high-explosive and you can see that breakdown and gave before listed below if we mouse over a rail gun this weapon is kinetic there are also high-explosive missiles fragmentation on the point defense weapon an energy on this other point defense weapon now obviously these different weapon types have different uses most combat vessels will have at least some kinetic weapons in order to help break through shields quickly and then have some kind of explosive payload to get through the armor afterwards most ships do not use fragmentation as a primary weapon type this is generally used for point defense because fragmentation is very powerful against hull and most missiles do not have much armor and same with Fighters meaning that these weapons are able to quickly overwhelm what small amount of armor they have and begin dealing tremendous amounts of fragmentation damage I believe I misspoke earlier I think I said one or two hundred percent damage versus halt it's one hundred percent not two hundred the reason for this is because most fragmentation weapons have astoundingly high DPS that's damage per second if we look here at a heavy mortar it has 220 damage per second which is quite respectable the railgun here is that 167 damage per second which again is pretty normal for this so weapon size and then here we look at this little guy the Vulcan cannon he's at 500 now the range is terrible at 250 but the damage itself is extremely respectable we go here and find ourselves the thumper it is a medium ballistic weapon it is also fragmentation and boasts a DPS of again 500 but this time with a range of 700 now this may seem like a lot at first but you have to multiply that 500 by 0.25 most of the time since most ships will have either shields or lots of armor or both mean you'll have to chew through those at the 0.25 percent rate or essentially a quarter rather than the 100% value you see listed on the card now the flipside if you manage to get sent through somebody shields and armor and this thing's hitting them they will die incredibly fast there's actually strategies that involve this using in this guy's case the Hammerhead or you mount bumpers on it and give it that's just safety overrides and then just Ram people driving this weapon straight through their armor and tearing them apart in seconds it's difficult to do and extremely dangerous but if it works you kill people faster than almost any other destroyer in the game it's also hilarious I wouldn't recommend doing it regularly but it could be a lot of fun once you figure out how anyway now let's look at where that hull armor and shield statistic I was talking about come I'm talking about earlier comes from so if we look up here in the top right on their ship card you can see B hull and armor the shield is a bit different and we'll get into that in a moment but the hull is your basic hit points if you have zero of these your ship explodes armor is an statistic that covers essentially the whole ship it's the number explaining how much damage each section of your ship can absorb your ship doesn't have a pool that covers the entire ship like hull is if you lose any a hit anywhere on an onion armored ship it will reduce its hull life its HP you could say however a hit on the left side of the hammerhead here like on this side right here will not inflict armored image on this side even if it takes a huge hit it did as long as the Splash Damage isn't large enough to actually hit the side of the ship even if I remove all of the armor from here there will still be armor over here so this is a description of how much armor the ship has on a part before it's struck and is reduced over time it does not regenerate in a battle unless the ship has a specific ability to do so which I don't believe exists in the vanilla game and then again hull is just a description of the total life points of the ship so if you get through the armor on a point on a ship you'll begin damaging its hull as but you have to keep hitting that point or you will not be reducing that the hull you'll have to get through the armor and the other places as well and I will show this later in combat I'm sure you've seen it before when you've been fighting but we'll go over it anyway now shields are a bit different shields are a combination of a few different factors actually let's see if we can bring up the card here it's okay we're gonna back out and then press f1 here so shields don't have hit points if you look here I went over this in the previous tutorial videos but you can see here that a ship has a flux / damaged number in this case it's a point eight for the hammerhead by default and then the ship itself has a flux capacity so assuming your ship is not firing any weapons or generating flux or any active abilities your shields hit points are the number listed in the flux capacity divided by the shield's flux per damage so this comes out to be fifty five hundred effective shield strength what this means is that you will be able to take around 5500 damage on your shield before you're forced to lower it either because you're trying to prevent an overload or because you overload now this isn't strictly true because there's another statistic above that that's a shield upkeep per second which means every second you have that shield enabled you'll be creating 100 flux per second also you have should flux dissipation which occurs even when your shields are up now it should be noted that it may appear as if you vent passively a bit more slowly with your shields up this is because your shields do generate a small amount of flux per second while active and you're having to vent that in addition to the flux that you're venting normally now there are two kinds of flux there's hard flux and soft flux hard flux is generated by weapon strikes against your shields and a few different abilities it cannot be vented passively through your shields it has to be vented passively or actively while your shields are down on the other hand soft flux is able to be vented passively through shields or through normal venting but yes so the flux capacity divided by the shield flux per damage gives you a general idea about how strong your shields are and there's other factors involved with this as well there's shield arc and whether or not your ships have Omni shields or fixed frontal shields a frontal shield obviously stays on the front of your ship and cannot be controlled other than turning off and on an omni shield will face your mouse which adds the further complication for people who use mouse controls for heading like I do but it generally works pretty well alright now that we've covered the basics of damage and how that works and I'm not going to go into the specifics of armor calculations they're very complicated I think this the description I've given is probably sufficient enough for a beginner and if you want to know more you can look it up on the forums because they they've talked about it a lot it's very complicated all right I think next what we'll talk about is how to fit our ships for combat so the basics of ship fitting this is not by any means an exhaustive guide on the subject but a lot of people have asked how do I make my ships effective in combat the basics are you want to have the ability to lower your opponent's shields faster than they can lower yours now the initial idea most people will have then is to say oh I should just fit my ship with all kinetic weapons that would make it so that nobody will be able to fight me because they will never be able to keep their shields up because I inflict so much kinetic damage that they'll be forced to just keep their shields down and I'll be able to slowly pick them a death even though I'm not doing as much damage to their armor as I could be kind of and in some cases you can do this especially with some of the more powerful weapons like the Gauss cannon but most of the time what happens here is well there's two there's two problems first off you are still generating flux as you fire so you will also be generating flux and you will be taking damage on your shields as you fire as well as they're firing back at you meaning that your flux pool may not be good enough to kill them before you are forced to vent because of the lower speed you're doing damage to them because of your kinetic weakness the vs. armor additionally the AI is not entirely stupid if you have all kinetic weapons it's not going to raise its shields or its point to be much more willing to keep them down while attacking you because it knows it can't you can't inflict serious armor damage against it in a timely manner this is especially true on heavy armored low tech ships such as the Dominator and the enforcer they really loved armored tank you they will just face roll your kinetic storm of shells and then blow you out of the water because they have no flux and can fire everything well you do not so I would not recommend having an exclusively kinetic loadout it doesn't work as well as you think it does unless you just have an overwhelming number of weapons and in that case you're going to win anyway so a better mix generally tends to have a good set of kinetic weapons with a backup set of powerful or at least effective high explosive weapons so if we undo this we have our doubled 167 damage per second committing the form of railguns with an effective range of 700 and then our high explosive damage coming from our heavy mortars which we're getting 440 at a range of 700 because of the four separate mortar shells so that's a pretty decent spread the kinetic damage here is coming to what 334 I believe compared to the 440 from the high explosive and that high explosive if you continue firing while their shields are up will still be contributing 220 of that DPS per second are necessary DPS to the fight so you'll be doing a fair amount of damage at all times around 500 DPS constantly throughout the battle which is pretty respectable and of course once their shields are down you have these little guys the harpoons which are used when you have either overloaded an opponent or push their shields to the point where they have no choice but to lower them or overload they're classified are called finishers there you can see they're in their primary role their designs to finish off a wounded or crippled opponent so they can be a very effective means of delivering that high explosive damage and this is an opportunity if you are the kind of person you would really does want to outfit a ship fully with kinetics or very heavily kinetic you can have finishers like this and exploit their overwhelmed shields through missiles it's still pretty dangerous because like I said the AI will know if your direct fire weapons are all kinetic and use that against you let's see another option would be let's see let me take off some of these things and refit the ship I don't generally run expanded missile racks on hammerheads just I don't feel they're very good missile boats they can make use of it though I would it's not a bad choice by any means it's just not my personal decision but I like to put heavy autocannons on these guys and then follow it up that's just a light assault gun in this case you're trading out longer range kinetic DPS a100 longer range kinetic for slightly shorter range at 600 high explosive I do this because I find a lot of ships tend to have a lot of shields or rely heavily on them and of course any damage you do to armor is permanent so keeping their shields down it's better in my opinion than being able to do a lot of damage quickly while the shields are down it's just personal opinion I don't think I have a definitive answer on whether or not focusing on kinetics or high explosive is better that's just how I tend to see it so in general a slightly heavier focus on kinetics with a follow-up the solid follow-up of high explosive tend to be very effective right back in the refit screen we're looking here at a Medusa which is a high-tech destroyer and this ship uses the fourth damage type which is energy most energy mounts you have inflict energy damages not all of them there are some that do I believe but so much I'm not sure if this is vanilla I actually can't say with confidence that there are any that do anything else other there's one I take that I do know of one weapon that does non energy damage let's see it's right here this is the high intensity laser it inflicts explosive damage as an energy weapon and it's quite devastating to be honest but energy is of course 100% against hull armor and shields what this means is that it excels at maintaining a constant stream of DPS but it's very poor at burst it has no burst capacity in most cases unless there is a specific ability on the ship that gives it burst power such as high energy focus or things like that or if the weapon is specifically designed for burst damage such as the plasma cannon which fires and bursts the auto pulse laser most things though they just inflict their damage over time and because they don't have any primary focus they're not better against shields or hulls or armor they just keep doing their damage very consistently makes them very even performers but not necessarily stand out in any one way the one thing that energy weapons do very very well but other weapon types can't match is there are many beam weapons in them most of their weapon types have a projectile where as beams are an almost instant it's not a hit scan it doesn't just instantly reach their target but it is very quick and as long as they can continue tracking the target it continues to inflict damage completely as long as it's touching it it's its target now lots of other projectile weapons can actually hit outside their maximum range but they do so it tremendously reduced damage and of course you have to lead your targets effectively because otherwise you're just not going to connect I do think though that energy weapons are very effective some standouts that I've seen for especially for strike craft one ships you use for attacking there's the poults laser very good this thing's mounting burst lasers which are generally a PD weapon a point defence weapon but it can be make point defense weapons in case you're curious can be used to attack and non point defense targets so you don't just shoot at fighters and missiles the point offense weapons they will fire upon other ships as well if they're within range another great weapon is the pulse laser the IR pulse laser so it's basically a teeny version of this thing it does pretty good DPS it has decent range it has decent flux per shot in fact that is one of the standouts again of energy weapons is they have very efficient flux usage most of the time if you look here like say the tactical laser again the one flux per damage that that's quite good and then things like this 0.5 so excellent but their damage per second is very very low so anyway those are things to keep in mind when fitting your ships you're going to want to focus on a damage type for your primary damage such as I generally choose kinetic because I think it's better at getting shields down unless of course you are flying high-tech in which case you're going to be just using energy weapons and in that case you're going to want to choose between bursts and range because tactical lasers and other beams tend to have very good range in case that this thing has a thousand range I'm other weapons oh yes the graviton beam is a kinetic energy weapon so but these are all beams so do you want to focus on sustained damage through beams or do you want to focus on burst damage through things like the antimatter blaster and burst lasers those are all decisions you'll have to be making as you fit your ships before we move on there is a fifth damage type I forgot about EMP damage if we look here at the salamander mrm we have EMP EMP is not of itself inflict any damage to hull what it does do though is inflict temporary damage to systems so your engines your guns etc these things each of these items that your engines and weapons have their own hit points these hit points are hidden and they regenerate over time but EMP weapons can inflict damage on them and disable them your first encounters with this will undoubtably be salamanders when they wrap around behind your ship and take out your engines by EMP em of course your engines do come back online and this is true of all things disabled by EMP they do come back over time there are I believe weapons let's me check let's go sorry I sometimes I think ahead of what my mouth but I believe there are some weapons that are capable of penetrating shields at very high flux so ion beam here that is a an energy weapon that deals primary damage through EMP it as it says here in its tooltips as it hits on hull and armor periodically arc to weapons and engines dealing extra EMP and energy damage hits on shields have a chance to generate a shield penetrating arc based on the targets hard flux level so what this means is you can actually shoot a ship through its shields with this weapon assuming that the ship has enough hard flux to allow it to happen I believe it's over 50% now one detail I didn't mention about energy weapons is energy weapons do not generate hard flux as you can see in the tooltip this means that you cannot use this weapon to its full potential without having something else to go along with it that can generate hard flux so keep that in mind it means of that if you are dealing with ships that have very high passive flux values you're not going to be very effective against them with energy weapons because they'll be able to keep their shields up and still effectively vent your damage it also means that ships that use primarily energy weapons are going to struggle against faster ships because they can't force them to flux nearly as easily because ship can just dance out of range while keeping its shields up and still be able to maintain its its flux eventing statistics so that's another thing to keep in mind when choosing energy weapons again there is no real best weapon here they all have their strengths they'll have their weaknesses so I would just mostly focus on what is working best for your ship additionally you want to consider obviously what you have available in the Payne you're not going to have an infinite list of every weapon in the game available to you you're only gonna have certain things and in most cases the gun you have is better than the gun you don't now there are times when you're gonna want to leave guns or ships without weapon mounts on times not always but if you're there certain ships that just have more hard points than they have the Ordnance points to be able to use so if you're trying like for instance this Aurora here is built to be a very heavy hitting frontal assault ship and also to have escorts on its flanks to help it deal with point defense problems and stop people from getting around behind it as a result it's used its entire ordnance point allotment to fit itself out with a very heavy alpha strike all of its weapons are on the front they all have a frontal arc they can all hit the same target and they have massive burst damage the antimatter blaster it's a projectile weapon that has tremendous damage per shot as you can see it's damage per second is only 137 but it's damage per shot is 1,400 making this a particularly devastating weapon if there happens to be more than one of them and they ambushed you this is a great weapon to stick on phase ships by the way similarly the heavy blaster is a very bursty weapon it's has a fairly low low refire rate but every shot packs a punch so in essence this whole ship is designed around hitting very very hard what without much regard for any other factors this isn't necessarily approach I'd recommend because very rarely will you be in a situation where you can have such a dedicated ship to a single goal and especially because you'll rarely have a fleet or you know that you're going to fight this is a mission so you kind of know this setup you're going to be deal with dealing with there's no bombers here and you also have ships you know you can rely on to keep these away from you in the chaotic campaign this is not necessarily going to be true and so you're not yet only going to want to have such a one-trick pony as a ship but there are circumstances where it can be very very useful another situation comes to mind our pursuit craft ones that are designed to run down fleeing ships and don't generally take part in larger line battles those ships can often be fitted much more purpose-built than other ships because they're only the only combat they're ever going to face is against ships that are fleeing so that you can design them for that role very easily you don't ever want to well in the case of this one you did but you don't ever really want to neglect your point defense and part of the reason they did so here is because they're relying on the ships that will be escorting this Aurora to take care of that for them which is an acceptable approach if you have a ship that is exceptionally well designed for point defense a low-tech example is the enforcer the enforcer is a great ship for a point defense duties due to its exceptional weapon coverage and some medium mounts that allow it to have flak cannons if you have those things escorting you on your flanks there's not that's gonna be that much it's going to get past them so you can use them for flak duty and you can develop more of your ordnance on your main ship towards dealing damage to other capitals that's a an example I in the end I can't give you really specific oh you should always fit your ship this way because for example in the case of this ship this ship is a perfectly adequate fit for somebody who just does not have access to a better thing like a heavy mauler or a hypervelocity driver you know that the mortar it's yeah not as good a weapon but it's also a lot cheaper and ordnance points and it's a lot cheaper in general it just costs less than it's more available and I wouldn't say holdout to get the other weapon if you can use it like this then I'll use what's available first and then of course upgrade when you can would be my recommendations all right so moving on to actual combat all right now we're ready for the combat section of the tutorial we're going to go over how to actually fight so as you can see I have set my what missiles to my number one weapon group I have the only reason they do this is because the game defaults you to weapon group one and I like being able to control my missiles in the case of salamanders it's actually not critically important because these weapons have infinite ammunition the district I'm so I could set them to auto fire and just let them fire away and it would probably have similar to effect to me actually controlling them but I'll keep control them for now just to for fun I guess in your case you may want to have direct control of a weapon group that has actual guns in it and if you do that's great you'll be more precise than my ship will be because you'll be able to lead properly whereas mine will be depending on auto fire but in the end I don't find it makes a tremendous difference especially these kind of knife fights that you get with frigates and that's what we're going to be doing first is fighting a frigate with a forget because you're going to be doing this a lot in the campaign ideally I'd be fighting a wolf because there are wolves everywhere you'll fight them and they're super annoying but I don't have one available if we look here in reinforcements tab for the opponents I don't actually see a wolf there are pirate wolves but and I'm probably blind and someone's going to point it out to me in the comment section how I missed it but I do not see a standard wolf class frigate available here to fight against so we're just going to fight another Lasher and see how it goes so basics going to be accelerating towards your opponent when they get within range of your sensors you will see them on the map for slower ships you may see them as a little sensor beep they're long before you actually are able to visually identify them and your ships as you can see have a range of vision if you had a friendly ship over here let's see if I have any allies I can bring nope this is a simulation you'd be able to see their own circle and if there was any ships that they were being able to see you would also see them as well as these kind of sensor blips on your screen so that's what that means and it gives you just the range from the center of your screen to the shipping question so as you can see as I move farther away it increases that range number and as I go closer it decreases friendly ships are listed in green enemies and are listed as red and destroyed ships are listed as are from let's see allies your list of as yellow and I think destroyed ships are either green or yellow I'm not absolutely certain off the top of my head we'll see here in a moment hopefully when we kill him and not when he kills us so you mouse over an opponent you press far and it targets them this can also be done on the strategic combat screen by clicking on the opponent I needed pressing R or selecting his target there's also some other controls here we'll go over them in just a moment so let's get in here and it start a fight I'm going to launch my missiles at him to force him to engage those a little bit raise my shields no and he seems to be doing a better job than me with his kinetic weapons we look here he has to light autocannons which are light to dual autocannons which are kinetic weapons and he has three Vulcans so he's going to be doing more kinetic damage than I am which is important to note and he is now currently venting I will do the same because I stand no advantage at that range to keeping my guns acted or my shields active so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to tank his kinetic damage on my armor because if you look here his flux is high mine is low I am able to continue firing he's going to have to stop either firing or lower his shields one of the two and well I have to do neither of those things I can now raise my shields and unload into him if I so desire and because my accelerated ammo feeder is ready I am going to do just that so my guns are firing quickly he's forced to then he's going to take hits from EMP weapons now that he cannot stop and he isn't deep amount of trouble now you can see his hull is now very low and if you look at his little armored thing we basically shredded his armor off of his entire ship in comparison if you look at mine in the bottom left I have taken some armor damage on my nose but it actually hasn't broken through quite yet and I have taken no whole damage now if you find yourself in the situation oh hold on a moment I apologize my daughter just woke up with a stuffy nose I was crying anyway if you find yourself in a situation like me where you're about to kill an opponent at close range make sure your shields are up mine are not if I do not raise my shields when he dies I'm going to take damage from it because ships in star sector when they explode do so with an AoE they will do damage to everything around them it is possible for this to actually chain through ships if the explosion is powerful enough so you'll have one ship detonate kill the ship next to it it also detonates and this combine explosion of those two kill a third on onward and as propagating through as many ships as there are close enough to be damaged by the explosions I've seen this kill as many as three capital ships next to each other these explosions are not to be taken lightly and it is worth overloading if you have to to prevent them from from hitting you another note shields take an infinite amount of damage on a hit a single shot will never be able to kill you through a shield to my knowledge unless it's a ion hit that is capable of penetrating your shields and inflicting EMP damage and you have no hole left so I could be able one hole left and you take an EMP hit on a shield that also has a huge amounts of hard flux and then boom but in practice this doesn't happen very often and so what I mean is that if your shields if your flux is completely filled and you have a huge shell coming your way like say the blast from a or like a Reaper torpedo is an excellent example this it's a very large torpedo it's red you'll have lots of them fired at you by pirates throughout the game they do 4000 damage that's more than I have hole twice over obviously I can't tank hits like that and if I'm full-on flux and I put my shield I'm gonna overload but the thing is if I put up my shield even if that Reaper hits me head-on full brunt completely right on the nose as long as my shield is up it had and has oh it was long my shields are up which means it does have some flux left if it hits me I overload but I will take no damage from that actual strike this is very important it means that you can sit on top of massive explosions and as long as you are shielded for the initial impact you should take no damage now of course in the case of chain explosions like I described before obviously this is not true because you will not be shielded for the second explosion if the first one overloaded you but it's a good thing to note so I'm going to unpause and raise my shields immediately so I don't get Gib to buy my own kill all right there we saw that you can see here three damaged numbers a yellow one which is let's see that is armor damage a red one which is hull damage being inflicted and then this blue one which is shield damage obviously his shields were offline at the time so that was a hit against my shields my shields took 219 damage I believe these things these explosions they inflict high explosive damage so that was actually four hundred and what thirty-six damage like that yeah the point is don't don't be close to people without your shields up if they go about to blow up even if their friends like pay attention to ships around you if the ship next to you is about to pop raise your shields and face them because if he explodes right here it doesn't matter if my shields are up or not I'll still take directional damage from it before we move on to actual combat we first need to discuss flux flux is possibly the most important statistic and star sector and I'll tell you why it determines whether or not you die so here on the UI you can see by your ship there's a little indicator that says flux this is also shown in the bottom left with the flux statistic right here the flux is essentially the amount of energy your ship can absorb whether that be essentially energy recoil from your own weapons or energy on your shields or in some cases energy from your phase coils or from active abilities if you reach a full flux bar and you take a single point of flux damage so full full bar completely filled you take one point over your maximum of flux damage or your ship will become what we call overloaded I'll show a little clip of that here and what it means is that your ship is no longer able to use shields weapons or abilities it also means that you will be forced to wait for a few seconds while your ship overcomes the overload and you'll be able to fight again this is of course a terrible thing to have happened to you and the AI is programmed to exploit it if you are overloaded they will unleash every missile they have at you in an attempt to kill you immediately so you want to avoid being fluxed one thing you should note is that you cannot flux yourself out it's not possible for fighting other kinds of ships for example fighting phase ships they're actually not that difficult to fight assuming you have the right equipment for it they're mostly just annoying fighting a phase ship comes down to forcing their phase coil to overload phase ships generate flux whenever they are phase shifted and they will do so whenever they're under fire their AI is very very over cautious in that way and you can exploit this by firing say point defense weapons at them if they're close enough and they'll just stay completely submerged like a in their subspace field while there's flux slowly builds um beam weapons in particular are excellent at forcing phase ships to stay cloaked because they have very long range and you can keep them active at very low flux for a very long time basically creating an area of denial for phase ships the downside being of course that beams kind of lack the capacity to immediately kill them once they come out of phase but it's still an important note if you're just trying to keep them away from you beam weapons and point defense weapons are a great way of keeping those ships away from you actually killing them is another matter because phase ships are faster than you generally when they're phased if you do have a ship fast enough to run them down then by all means just follow them if you're faster than they are they've already lost because they have very low armor and as soon as they come out of their phase cloak they're usually going to be almost fluxed out anyway so they won't be able to fire any much and you'll usually just tear them to shreds in a matter of seconds if you are not faster than them then killing them comes down to one of three potential tactics the first of which is just to wait them out let them try and come in and when they duck out just fire whatever you can at them and slowly wear them down over time it does eventually work they'll start taking damage usually they won't phase out quickly enough or they'll phase out or face back in a little too close to you and your weapons arcs and still get a couple hits in and they cannot immediately resubmit go back into phase cloak instantly aslam all cool down on the ability the second way this is the way it'll happen a lot of times unfortunately you'll have to wait for their CR to run out because once they reach 0 % CR they cannot faze cloak honestly that's how it happens a lot because you often won't have the ships fast enough to hunt them down the Third Way and by far the most satisfying in my opinion is to hunt them with fighters fighters will just Harry phase ships while they're in there they're phased state and pounce on them instantly as soon as they come out phase ships often have poor point defense and they'll just get torn to pieces so you can just dedicate a wing of Fighters to killing them and oftentimes they will for other kinds of ships phase skimmers like the wolf and Medusa those ships are pretty hard to kill often because they dance out of your range to kill them you're going to want to focus on flanking tactics try not to engage them in one-on-one if you do have to engage them in one-on-one try and bring weapons that can disable engines such as salamanders because well the wolf has pretty decent point defense if you manage to get a missile through that they're going to a very rough time most phase schemers have fairly low armor because they tend to be on high tech ships and as a result they're not going to do too well if you do manage to catch them out and force them to be a impede for low tech ships they tend to be slower have a lot of armor and fairly poor shields for them you're going to maybe want to bring a little more high explosive than usual or at least some good missiles they'd also tend to have very good weapon arcs dominators enforcers on slots all of them have excellent weapon arcs beside from the Dominator or not the nominators the onslaught has a kind of large weak spot in its rear but aside from directly behind it there's an onslaught right there in the background I slide from directly behind it it is generally a very strong ship in terms of its its weapon arcs you're not going to find too many blind spots for them weapons such as salamanders tend to be less effective because they usually carry things like flak so instead you're just going to want to focus on overwhelming their shield generators burst damage can be very good for this anything that's able to overwhelm that shield generator a single hit is really nice which means anti black matter blasters can be very useful against low tech ships especially the smaller ones that their frigates can be very very dangerous in that they're just very fast and they pair well with safety overrides makes them some of the fastest ships if not the fastest ships in the game but in general it's mostly just pounding through their armor the basic concepts of battle are essentially don't fight alone use your friends for cover and focus on targets all right so what you see before us now is what I like to refer to as the strategic combat screen this is the real-time strategy part of the game where you can issue orders to your various ships and see a general overview of where everyone is relative to yourself so wow do we control this the basics are you can move your screen around by edge scrolling with your mouse you can pause and resume the game from here you can also use this and do this with spacebar as you normally can with the tactical side and then if you click on ships you are given a large sort of controls as you can see here there are assignments and there are direct orders assignments are dynamic these will let's see if we give one say for your ear for this Medusa let's give him a light escort this will dynamically assign a ship to this Medusa now if we take this ship and we right-click on this nav boy which will order him to capture it you see now that this little tempest over here has taken up the escort order this is useful for giving orders in combat that you don't want to have to constantly renew as ships are destroyed or forced to retreat in things it's a very easy way to assign escorts to ships you may also notice that doing so does not take a command point so whereas assigning ships to escort normally actually does not okay never mind I thought maybe they did it does not but this will allow you to have your escorts and setup so assignments are very useful in that way and these ships will focus on staying near the ships that they are assigned to do they'll try and stay on a flank if you assign two ships to a ship it'll try and stay on opposite flanks usually be careful with this it can cause those ships to get killed by forcing them into positions they can't handle if you say turn they'll try and stay on the flank and it might swing them into a weapons arcs of somebody they can't handle the the firepower off they're not as bad about it in this patch of star sector but in previous versions it's been a pretty serious problem where escorts get killed because of how their positioning forces them to move on the other controls we have here our transfer command which will allow you to shift yourself to another ship we can do that here if we say transfer to let's transfer to Medusa as you can see here a tiny ship will pop out a little shuttle and it will zip on over to the Medusa and now we should have control of said Medusa the other controls we have our show video feed which will allow us to see through the eyes I mean the ship that we are leading I believe this also works for allies but I'm not entirely certain of that you cannot do anything in this mode and if you press any controls they will return you to the strategic overlay and then we have the more info button so if you click on a ship you press this and you're able to see the ship's info card finally we have the attack and defense orders and such so we have the Search and Destroy order which will cause the ships in question that are selected to begin searching for opponents give that order to someone and see if we gave it it's little wolf he now has a shorter arrow he means it's going to go looking for people I believe this is generally the default behavior of ships but I could be mistaken about this essentially what this means is it will return its to the default behavior of hunting rather than having it being assigned to assignments so this basically exempts a ship from assignments we also have the retreat order which will tell us if to back off and we have the direct retreat so a retreat order will they'll just try and get away like if there's a ship over here or right like an enemy ship right here that they're trying to reap a tree pass though give it a wide berth and try and keep away from it the direct direct retreat order just tells it to get out and it will pay less attention to such things and just try and make for the exit as fast as it can ignoring enemy targets as much as possible there are a couple other orders that you can assign and we have to see the enemy's for those to be visible so let's move forward and as you can see our view in the fog of war extends to include the radius that our friends our friendly ships can see and if we hold on just a moment now we have some enemy ships who also you can have orders on strategic points these orders are capture assault rally task force a rally civilian craft so the capture one will just assign a usually a frigate but not always just an unassigned ship starting with frigates and moving upwards to capture the assigned point and if they are like they'll they'll try and defend it as well so that that's a standing order as it says enough ships will be assigned to Imaginary Forces in the vicinity and once the object is secured this time it will change to control so to defend the objective attack just sends a bunch of ships at it a significant number of ships will be assigned regardless of whether there are any any enemy ships in the vicinity so this is a great command for like if you are beginning a fight like we are put an attack command on the beacon where you really want the battle to be drawn to and it will send a large portion of your fleet over there rally task force it orders it this is a custom group so this is a great button for moving carriers for example it says no ships will be assigned automatically only ships that receive direct orders to carry out this assignment will do so so this is a good way to get ships to go places you can also do that in bike waypoints so just left clicking on the map will allow you to create a waypoint clicking somewhere else will cancel it and you can assign assignments to these such as rally civilian or just Task Force or defend so defend is a group order and he'd been one of the does not have an assignment will be assigned to defend this position it's very useful that way like I said that for the rally task force if I pick a I guess I make this rally point and then I can assign a carrier to it and he'll stick around here rather than charging into the enemy so that's a useful thing to know and then for our enemy commands we can set a target which now has a little X around indicating that it is our target it can also gain more info about it showing the info card to the ship in question we can order our fleets to avoid the ship this is useful when you have things like saying onslaught on the enemy side that you just don't want your fleet messing with you giving it a void order and people will stay away from it as best they can and then last but not least there are the fighter commands fighters strike and engage your fighter strike eliminate and engage these are useful for coordinating attacks for fighter striking you're coming air carriers will send ships to attack I believe let's see yes so order fighters should attack the ship carriers assigned to this task will send their fighters to attack it and will Tempest it within fighter range but otherwise maneuver and choose your own Knight or known fighter targets independently so if you just normally right-click on a target it will attack it like a normal attack if you do this with a carrier it defaults to the fighter strike and the carrier will stay away from the target and get with fighters very useful you'll use that a lot with carrier fleets less so obviously with other groups then we have eliminate which basically says kill this thing now this is this is your nuclear option if you want something dead right now regardless of the threat posed to your own fleet use eliminate I would not use this button casually it can get you killed because your ships will begin to act a lot more recklessly so they will expose themselves to much greater danger than they normally would the engage button is what you want to use more often it basically says hey set this as your target it gives them a primary target and that'll fight it they'll engage it as the name implies but they won't go out of their way to attack something that would expose them to risk a great example of this would say be putting this on a carrier that's standing in the front line like if a Mora moves up with the front line which is a later game carrier you put an engaged order on it and they will fire on it directly when it's close to them fighter groups and stuff not federate groups that use a strike order for that but if you use this on normal ships though they'll prioritize it when it's close to them but if it backs off because it overloads and enemy ships closing around it they won't dive after it if you put the eliminate command on it they just might so you probably don't want to use the eliminate command unless you have a priority target that needs to die right now all right let's see what else there is I believe that is the majority if all of the orders that you can issue in combat we additionally have full assault and full retreat disease or just map wide orders when you do this it says are you sure we're gonna fool assault cancel all existing assignments and make your ships engaging a forces more aggressively potentially exposing themselves to greater danger this here is a great button for when you've won the battle when you know you're not going to lose any more ships like when it's just not possible when the enemy is fleeing or disorganized or whatever this base it says hey stop defending any potential strategic points forget your escort assignments just go kill them it's basically a shortcut it isn't strictly necessary per se but I mean you could just cancel all of the things but basically just it is a shortcut that allows you to cancel all of your existing assignments and additionally makes your ships a little more more a little bit more reckless which is good if you're trying to hunt down enemies full retreat is a separate command this one's a bit different you will not be able to deploy reinforcements or give any more orders they're serious about that you can't give any orders of any kind and as a result of clicking this button your entire fleet will turn around and try and get out I'm in the case of pursuits or you are being chased they'll try and get out through the north side of the map but either way they'll try and reach the end of the map that you came from normally or that time that you're trying to reach if it's a pursuit and they'll ignore all other factors this is generally used only when you are in very very deep crap and just are trying to save whatever you can because you're going to lose ships this way because it basically becomes an everyman for themselves in moment your fastest ships will escape as quickly as possible and anything that gets left behind and caught by the enemy fleets just going to die additional buttons you can see here our reinforcements this allows you to deploy more ships if you had them available eye-full deployed at the beginning of this battle so I don't have any available but if I had more ships available I could click them it would tell me how many fleet points and coincidentally how many um supply caught or what my supply cost would be but these little things here are fleet points it's telling me how many I can have I could have a total of 223 in this battle and so you will be limited by this in some cases I have my fleet battle or my maximum battle size set to 500 you can increase this or decrease this if you don't have a very powerful computer you may want to decrease this because this will obviously make the things run faster it'll be less you know projectiles to simulate and such and so your your computer will be able to run it more easily in my case I don't care and I like big fights some people say it makes it more with the game easier I don't know if it does enough people have said it I believe it but I don't necessarily know why nor do I particularly care I just like big epic battles so I said it as high as I can anyway yeah so you'll be able to deploy more ships here and then we have the command points indicator this is how many orders you're able to give you start off with a maximum number of somewhere between like three and I don't know upwards of seven eight nine and you cannot issue orders past the number of command points you have so if you have zero command points available you will not be able to issue any orders which is very frustrating but this little bar here you can't see it doing anything right now but it's actually filling up very slowly if you watch it carefully you'll see it kind of slowly move a few pixels at time so I get one command point every 84 seconds ish well not every 84 maybe it's about a hundred every 100 seconds due to my leadership skills if you put more points into certain leadership skills you'll have more command points available to you there's also the command center home on I believe it is that can increase the number of command points you have and increase the regeneration rate anyway if you are a person who loves giving specific orders a lot you may want to focus on getting more of these if you're not don't worry about it but anyway that is what you do here on the screen the strategic overlay you also can have a little indicator here in the bottom left of the armor layout flux level hull and CR of the ship you are selecting currently if we go here for a sec and turn out my autopilot nope it's already enabled right let's just let this run for just a second and you'll be able to see these increase so this little guy here just took a hit and his flux is up a bit his whole alright is he are still studying everything but if you watch this these little crosses or whatever they are our missile indicators they're showing that there are missiles on the field and the little triangles are fighters green are friendly red are hostile and then for each ship you'll see a small arrow pointing away from it this is the heading of the ship so you can tell which direction they're facing in general those kind of things are not something you really need to worry about too much because obviously you can just look here on the tactical level and you can see these things if you like sitting here on the overlay in combat you can certainly do that and that information is available to you actually I should say I think and be let's see all right so the red arrow is there heading the little blue arrow you see here is their actual direction of movement so alright no I I said that wrong the red arrow is there facing the blue arrow is their heading which way they're going not that's a big point but anyway so that is our tutorial of the overlay alright last but not least I just wanted to cover a few questions people have asked me regarding combat oriented things first question someone had was can I shoot manually for more than one assigned weapon group or needed do I need to limit myself to one the answer is obviously one you cannot fire from more than one weapon group manually that's what auto fire is for you can switch between weapon groups but you cannot fire from a scene weapon group were for it more than one single weapon group another person asked does the computer know not to fire anti-armor weapons while shields are up I don't want to manually shoot anti-shia shoot anti shield weapons and want to be able to toggle on and off the anti armor the answer is no the ships weapons do not have any capacity to recognize what they are shooting at your auto fire stuff the AI does to a degree but your own ship that you are controlling the auto fire systems do not have that ability so your anti shield weapons will gladly and gleefully fire at armor given the option and similarly your anti-armor weapons will fire at shields if you don't like that recommend to putting those weapons in separate weapon groups and either manually controlling them or toggling them on and off with auto fire let's see another person wanted to know to what extent can you modify your ship to serve a different purpose than its intended one you can do that you can't modify a ship to do it but the extent is fairly limited if you want to know the effectiveness of modifying a ship to serve outside if it's normal capacity look no farther than the pirates that's pretty much all they do most of their ships or modified freighters of various kinds does I've designed a to serve a combat purpose they are okay they're not great you're going to have to outnumber your opponent to use them effectively they do work in a pinch though especially early in the game you may want to use those things there are whole mods that allows ships to serve outside of their their stock roles such as there is a makeshift flight deck mod all mod that will allow you to have a fighter base on say a freighter and the fighter bays will have a much slower replacement rate than a normal a dedicated carrier would which makes sense I mean obviously the manufacturing systems in the ship that build the new fighters aren't going to be effective as one that is purpose-built for that and it's just not going to be as well set up for it so it's not going to function as well it just makes sense in the lore of the game and it's built that way into the gameplay as a balancing factor to prevent you from turning ships that really really shouldn't be carriers into terrifyingly powerful ones so you can do it personally I wouldn't recommend it though I don't feel it's a particularly good use of your ships especially when they're almost always better purpose-built options out there so it is what it is if you want to do it go right ahead but it usually isn't worth it anyway well that does it for the questions I think thank you guys so much for watching I hope I did answer the questions you had and if I didn't please feel free to leave your questions in the comments below I do read them it might make take me a while to get back to you I might wait to address it in a video such as this and but I will get there eventually if you like what you saw here please leave a like it helps me know that you guys are enjoying it it also helps me to get a bit more recognition in the YouTube algorithms so that people are able to find this when they look for tutorials which helps out and if you want to see more videos like this and you aren't subscribed please do so I hit make three videos a week most are sector so there'll be more star sector to come anyway thank you all for joining me and I will see you next time

Channel: JDCollie

Views: 99,380

Keywords: starsector, tutorial, new player, starfarer, modded, mods, refitting, hotkeys, let's play, guide, combat

Id: LzQOwp13MHw

Length: 76min 3sec (4563 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019