I wonder why this is? Like I've been waiting for over a decade for Creative Assembly to improve the AI in their Total War games to no avail. Could it be that they're deliberately not improving the AI? Or is it just an extreme case of laziness? If just four guys can create great AI I'm not sure I can think of any other explanation.
KageMinowara probably a matter of complexity/gain. The effort and people they would need to develop smart AI is a supply dump they are not willing to commit to.
At around 33:20 you said energy weapons don't make enemy shields generate hard flux, but that's actually only true for energy (beam) damage. Blasters and the like generate hard flux for enemy shields.
Like 2/3 of energy weapons are not beam weapons,therefore they generate hard flux. Beam weapons are generally divided into 3 groups:1)point defense lasers,where soft flux damage to shields is not really a downside unless dealing with shielded fighters(tactical laser,pd laser,burst pd laser etc) 2) suppression beams with high range,being annoying from afar,best used on fast frigate to distract part of enemy ships(tactical laser,ion beam etc). 3) medium range but high burst damage,best for situations when enemy shields are almost overloaded or down,dealing heavy damage to armor(tachyon lance,phase lance). Some mods add beam weapons thet still apply to this classification. Beam weapons are very special,but very useful if you understand their strength.
Great video! I liked how thorough you were with this. I have a couple critiques... -I didn't see you covering "active" flux venting compared to "passive" venting - A brief note about that would have been nice for thoroughness in regards to why it's a feature of note (disables shields, active ship abilities, and weapons). -I would have liked to hear a bit more about carriers and fighters - how to change their behavior, what replacement rate can do to you in the middle of a battle, and so on. -You were half-right about the "no hard flux from energy weapons" part: It's only beam weapons that have this property, while other energy weapons still generate hard flux when hitting shields. -I think this video would have benefitted from an explanation of the weapon mount types, and how they can be used effectively. Ballistic, Energy, Missile, and Universal mounts are pretty easy to guess, but there's the secondary types such as Composite (ballistic/missile), Hybrid (ballistic/energy), and Synergy (missile/energy) mounts. Overall a great video, and I did learn a few things about combat from this! Thanks!
Any assignment in battle costs a command point, but there is a cooldown. For a few seconds after giving an order, all further orders are free. This means you can reshuffle all fleet orders every couple of minutes (less if you invest in the relevant character skill). It also means you want some sort of standard initial set of orders to give for one point at the beginning of a battle. There is one exception: You can cancel an order at any time. This lets you e.g. immediately let escorting ships loose when the battle turns into a clean up operation.
In that regards you can also now toggle "Full Assault" in the tactical map and it cancels all orders and gives the ai a kill order against all enemy ships for when your escorts are no longer necessary, say during a clean-up.
This video was amazing, thank god you made it. I've just got the game though I did watch about 12 hours of people playing the game I still didn't understand any of the combat in respect to the nitty gritty details. Just want to say thanks mate you're a legend.
A very helpful control I found hidden away in the controls is one that locks your camera onto the ship you're targeting; I think it's the T button by default. This is great if you're running with the control scheme of controlling your ship facing with your mouse directly, like JDCollie does, and you have a ship which is all about front facing the enemy. With this you can lock your camera onto the targeted ship, simply place you mouse right in the center of the screen on the ship you're locked onto, and your ship will automatically do its best to face directly at the enemy ship. Obviously not something that should be used without thought all the time; you could find yourself accidentally leaving your rear exposed to different enemies. You may also want to avoid using it if the enemy you're locking onto is far away from your own ship, because then your own ship would be off the screen. Either hitting the camera lock button again or removing your lock on the enemy ship should return your camera to normal. I've found it especially handy when either I don't want forward facing weapons with limited arcs to accidentally go off the enemy ship; something I've found it unfortunately easy to do when the camera decides to shift suddenly because my mouse was moving- or times when I'm trying to take down a little frigate that keeps zipping around out of my weapon arcs because I can't keep my mouse cursor on them; they can't escape the mouse cursor if the screen is locked directly on them.
So early it's still 360P haha. Your tutorials and video's are very good and entertaining, always just want drop whatever I am doing and watch them right away as soon as I see them. Hopefully you'll continue to get more viewers and subscribers!
Great tutorial. Thanks for not including background music like so many other tutorials do for some reason. And your voice is nice and calming so that's another good thing compared to the thousands of other HEY WHATS UP GUYS youtubers out there.
Found this video when searching how to attack a space station. This was all super helpful. I watched the whole thing and subscribed. Now I need to find one about space station combat...lol.
Thank you, really outstanding video. Well organised, logically presented, clear and comprehensive. I have probably played 60 hours at this point and NOW I realise my combat knowledge was effectively zero before this lol
Awesome tutorial!! I do run a lot of converted bays, as in almost every ship. It is great at distracting the enemy, and they kill a lot of Kites, and "annoyance level" ships.
It's certainly a valid option, and probably pretty decent for allowing freighters to escape pursuits (I may have to give that a try in a pirate playthrough). I still think other hull mods are a better use of OP though.
@@jdcollie258 I personally put SO on my freighters if I can afford the OP; especially on freighters made for SO. Really works well for disengaging against enemies too big to fail.
@@jdcollie258 on my main is Mule P Class combat freighter King Class cruiser 3 Heron fast attack carriers 1 d modded Hippocampus Class close support explorer Hawke P Class drone carrier Hammerhead C class standard defence freighter Dire Wolf D Class destroyer Hippocampus Class explorer cruiser Falcon D Class light attack All except the drone carrier are converted. Some carry really nasty fighters, some have the free ones. While I wreck just about everything I come into, minus really big fleets, or a bunch of energy weapons, I don't feel like my ships are hitting as hard. They're all fitted with the best weapons I can put on them before hullmods (I put reinforced bullheads on everything, and sometimes blast doors).
Very nice series of videos, they have been steadily improving. I'm sure with more effort and releases, you should have a decent following, especially since Starsector videos are pretty niche and this sort of content is much appreciated. Reason why I commented is that the timestamps for "Controls" and "UI" are swapped. I would really appreciate some videos regarding mods, particularly something like a ship tier-list for faction / ship mods, or an explanation of Nexerelin. Memes? But, I don't think it's worth diving into mods until you've finished discussing everything vanilla, and who knows, maybe you don't play with those mods :P Cheers.
it's actually better to switch to esdf instead of wasd. one, your hand rests more naturally on these keys. two, it allows you to use "a" to activate powerups, and three, you can use s and d to strafe, w and r to turn. it's a MUCH more natural setup. I set G to toggle the aim at cursor function, and also enable the default to be "active" for that, so you don't have to hold down the key. note that small ships, which turn rapidly, work perfect with using the aim at cursor function for strafing, while you will likely want to reverse the function (uncheck the box in the settings) for capital ships that turn very slowly. I highly recommend practicing combat by selecting a mission from the main menu, go to refit ship, and then set up a simulator to test your ship in combat against other types of ships. this will get you used to the controls, and how to properly move and strafe to avoid damage. DO NOT rely on your shields on a small ship. they overload quite quickly. better that you just learn not to get hit. You can also change your weapons and hull loadouts to experiment with what works best against different enemy types.
My mic must be very, very quiet normally, or my headphones exceptionally loud, because I had to *really* crank the volume to make it sound this way. Still, I'm glad it finally sounds the way it needs to!
@@jdcollie258 Obviously way too late for this run (tho I'm looking forward to the 0.95x run, given how much has changed), but FWIW WRT recording settings, take a look at Tuplex's vid th-cam.com/video/9lsg0slWZec/w-d-xo.html on how he sets up his recording system, both audio & visual. Even without the s/w packs he uses, his general advice still applies to all systems, esp WRT audio balancing
56:00 When you issue a command, a bar appears next to the command points, the one that says 'command frequency open.'. You can issue unlimited commands until that bar empties. Learned this because I'm shit at combat, but good at directing.
just finished your trade video. really enjoyed it. uhm...before i get into grinding my way through this, i'd like to say that officer personalities are a huge draw for me. i've tweaked the settings.json to allow me to have a huge fleet with scores of officers. (now that i have the mod for automatic orders it's less of an issue but i still like my officers so i can avoid installing the reinforced bulkheads, for recovery purposes) Having pilum ships (the razorback frigate with 2 medium missile capability is awesome. but for vanilla i usually went with the vigilance or better yet the buffalo mk2 - after realizing the latter was a destroyer with a 4 deployment cost. wow) with 'cautious' officers is awesome...and remember they can fire missiles so far outside the enemy's view range that they won't lose CR longevity. Having reckless pursuit officers in fast frigates - i love the hail (but the vanilla tempest equally yummy) for the cheap deployment and excellent ganking ability - for after action chasing routing fuel tankers My goto escort ship is the centurion with aggressive officers. i put them on the flanks of the missile echelon I honestly am a cruiser + collosus + phaeton kind of guy when it comes to the core idea of my fleet, and i've found that the pilum (modded or vanilla) is incredibly deadly to enemy star stations when used enmasse...i've even stopped fielding carriers currently speaking of carriers, the 'timid' personality of officer is perfect for carrier use. barricades are my favorite, but that's a mod ship. ---- anyways, i'll try to watch your video a bit before work, so i figure - like your trade vid - it'll take me a few days to grind
the video was great! very helpful could you do a fleet composition recommendation video next? also what mods are you using during the q&a section? thanks for the videos! EDIT: it seems you have answered to the graphical mods being "Lightshow" and "Graphics Lib" but I see weapon ranges far exceeding anything I've seen before, so a complete modlist would be nice
Fleet composition is largely down to player preference, but I have a general fleet design philosophy that seems to work pretty well. My tech level preference is low tech, so I'll use low tech ships as examples, but this doctorine can work for any tech level. At the core of my fleet are well armed and armored 'line' cruisers like the Dominator and Punisher (the latter is from Ship Weapon Pack mod). They slug it out with enemy heavies and feature powerful kinetic weapons, backed up by smaller high explosive guns and missiles for punching through armor. I like hammer and atropos class torpedoes in particular. These cruisers often have fair point defense, capable of swatting small missile salvos or 1-2 squadrons of fighters. Supporting the cruisers are 'fleet' carriers, large, well defended cruiser or capital sized carriers such as the Mora or Legion. Their squadrons contain a mix of kinetic fighters such as Broadswords, and HE damage bombers such as Kopesh rocket bombers and Perdition torpedo bombers. As for actual weapons, these carriers have emphasis on kinetic weapons that are effective defense against frigate and destroyer sized targets, and strong point defense. If possible, I also give them medium to long range missile launchers. Seperates from fleet carriers are 'escort carriers', small, frigate or destroyer grade carriers that host interceptor and fighter squadrons. Their primary goal is to provide a fighter screen to defend against enemy bomber or missile strikes, and to deal with enemy frigates which try to flank my line ships. Condors are not ideal for this role since they often fall victim to frigates themselves, I find Drovers and Shepards to be better canidates. Destroyers and frigates fill three roles in my fleet, each requiring different loadouts. Escort frigates/ destroyers are almost always equipped with hardened subsystems for increased endurance, and usually have a mix of strong point defense, anti fighter missiles and some form of kinetic weapon to drive off enemy frigates that attempt to flank whatever ship the escort is guarding. These escort ships are always given orders at the beginning of the battle to protect key warships such as heavy cruisers, capital carriers and battleships. Assault destroyers/ frigates are general purpose warships designed to hold the line of battle and/ or destroy other ships of similar size. Finally, strike destroyers and frigates are specialized ships that combine high mobility with heavy, anti-capital ordinance. They are designed to flank larger enemies, and deliver devastating salvos of torpedoes and high explosive shells to enemy ships which are already occupied with your line cruisers and/ or fighter swarms. Torpedo armed Wolf or Kite class frigates often preform this role well. Wolves are better at it and can mount powerful energy weapons such as mining blasters to back up their torpedoes, but the Kite is a much cheaper option, and can still deliver a respectable torpedo salvo. Gremlin class phase frigates are also great at this. A popular option that fits this role well is a safety override equipped Hammerhead class destroyer armed with HE chainguns. A bit unconventional, but Enforcers can also serve as hybrid Assault/ Strike destroyers if armed with a heavy torpedo armerment. They're a bit slow for a strike destroyer, but can still out manuver cruisers.
But serious question, how are deployment points calculated? I usually use only ~7 capital ships in my fleet, but in most of the engages im only able to use ~200 points (exception is only when i attack starbases without enemies reforcements and i get 345 at that point). (i know that you can set the overall battle size and thats in equation (500 currently)). Do i just must have more small ships in fleet so i could get that greater than 300 deployment points?
As far as I understand it, the deployment limits on both you and your opponent are there to roughly simulate the relative strength of each fleet. (Deployment limitations as a whole are a performance concession) So, if you have 300 deployment points worth of ships, and your enemy has 3000, it wouldn't make much sense to allow you to bring those full 300 points against only 300 of his. (100% of your fleet against 10% of his) Ideally the game would allow you to fight with your entire combat deployment against the enemy's entire deployment, but since very few people have PCs capable of running that smoothly, we have deployment limitations to simulate it. (and no, I don't know the exact formula used to calculate each fleets' respective deployment limitations, I don't think Alex has ever released that information) Hope that helps :D
I mostly just auto fit 3 assault carriers and 2 heavy cruisers with multiple disposables frigates and destroyers. Since this way is quite effective I never thought of personalising ships. Even in early game shepherd, mule, and glass cannon override frigates will do.
I roll with High Tech and all My fighters do EMP damage. This means they get around shields easily and start disabling systems. Meaning that a frigate and squad of EMP fighters can take down much larger pray with relative ease.
Still only 360p haha STILL WATCHING IT! I am by no means a new player in terms of combat [Defeated six REDACTED fleets yesterday, turns out the NPC's are REALLY good at combat] But I'm sure I'll learn something here anyway!
Probably going to have to watch this many many times :) Thanks JD for putting this out there. Did you ever put out a general ship guide or is that type of info embedded in other videos.
you can a lot of money by selling heavy armaments/marines/drugs/supplies etc to chalcedon. youll have to trade using the black market though but you make millions of space bitcoins
After a few days (a week or so?) of trying to learn this game my biggest problem now is knowing how strong my fleet/ships is/are and know how many ships to deploy for engagements. Any advice on this?
Probably late on this, but for new players asking this question as well: Experience. Not character experience, but your own experience. Theoretically you could win a lot of battles where you're incredibly outmatched. Start save scumming to learn how to win that one battle, or at least decrease your losses. Also, check the fleet star rating while mousing over them in the world screen. It'll give you a better indication when you're new. Generally, bigger is better, but certain ships punch above their weights, so to say - especially given certain loadouts
I know this old, but for later viewers, deployment points are based on multiple factors if I recall correctly. - Enemy Fleet Size vs Player Fleet Size - certain Leadership skills affecting deployment - if fleet combat is large enough, taking control of tactical satellite systems
The problem with your guide is that You assume we already know types of ships to get as well as mods & weapons are not in our possession yet. What ships to get? Which one to buy? And where?
When I was playing my first time I was just making as much money as I can by Sseth's way and just buy or build my own bunch of Big Guys. Bunch of capital ships, around 5-10 and all other slots filled with big cargo ships for smuggling big amounts of drugs, organs and other shit for Luddite Pathers and Pirates. And I was winning all the encounters only by the raw power of 10 Capital ships. And that's all. But now I want to dig deep into this combat system to understand how to actually destroy ships by myself
New orders don't spend command points, so long as the the "command frequency open" bar is not spent. once that empties, you'll need to spend points to assign new roles.
To anyone watching this, i recommend looking over the command points system over at fractal softworks forums as the information here is wrong on multiple points and missed an entire mechanic with it.
Indeed, you can even tweak the zoom levels. I'm not doing so at the moment however because i want the onscreen experience to be as close to the default a new player would experience as possible.
Hi, I have a question about attacking, because I do not think you covered it and I do not get it in this game. I have noticed that when you select several ships and attack with them on tactical view (slect->right click), they actually attack what I tell them to (this is my current strategy). However when I use orders like 'Engage' only like 2-3 ships attack and rest sit and do nothing... I can do this a few times on multiple ships but noticed that not entire fleet is being engaged (at least that's what I can see by arrows) and often ships are shifted between targets. The ship attacked often picks those ships off and takes on others, others engage, die and it repeats (kinda like in action movies ;) ). Like carriers have their fighters just chilling around them, rest is moving pointlessly. This is very confusing. Also noticed that you cannot have both 'Engage' and 'Fighter strike' on one enemy ship. Why? What if I want both fighers and ships to attack some ship? Can you explain this?
The select-right click assigns the ships an 'Eliminate' order, rather than engage. Eliminate orders cause the ships in question to pursue their targets with complete disregard for other targets in the area. Because you directly assigned those ships, the game doesn't try to reassign them to keep orders distributed. Engage assigns a percentage of your fleet to attack the target, and tries to keep that percentage balanced between engage orders. As to why you can't have an Engage and a Fighter Strike order on the same target, I think that is just a UI limitation.
Well, you can technically do it automatically, but that is known as "overloading" and disables your ship while it's happening. :) For manual venting, press 'v'
best combat strategy i found out after playing the game for 3 day thath you never command your own ship just use auto lolXD i lost my flagship lots time . when i had it run on outau i beat way stronger fleet.(ofc i am commandingthe whole fleet with combat point). its seems to me thath ai is better controliing just single ship. while its better if the player send command for the whole fleet.
It depends on your weapon setup. The AI is good at certain things but if you want to hold off on using limited ammo it might be best to command your ship personally.
In general, an experienced player is far more deadly than the AI in any single ship. That being said, I always give my weapon control over to the AI and focus on flying and commanding.
@@jdcollie258 I agree, it's also more useful to have the player control the ship in certain setups. I have 4 autcannons on one Dominator so I just accelerate towards enemy ships and melt them.
This member of the Merchants guild thanks you for your service
Hey fellow member of the Merchants guild
Was that review really a year ago... oof
Is that a reference to Sseth?
Hey hey
yeah I got the game because of that video :D
Its funny that a game with so small dev team has much better AI then most of the AAA-games
Honestly. I usually put high tech ships to be controlled by AI because they can phase shift, use mines, etc... just way better than I can
@@Cluelessish I always put my ship on autopilot because the ai is so much better than I am with any ship
I wonder why this is? Like I've been waiting for over a decade for Creative Assembly to improve the AI in their Total War games to no avail. Could it be that they're deliberately not improving the AI? Or is it just an extreme case of laziness? If just four guys can create great AI I'm not sure I can think of any other explanation.
KageMinowara probably a matter of complexity/gain.
The effort and people they would need to develop smart AI is a supply dump they are not willing to commit to.
You say that, but friendly frigates have this interesting habit of drifting in front of my ship as soon as I hit the ammo feeder.
many thanks from the merchant guild
This game has so much dedication put into it by the developers, a true indie title!
At around 33:20 you said energy weapons don't make enemy shields generate hard flux, but that's actually only true for energy (beam) damage. Blasters and the like generate hard flux for enemy shields.
Like 2/3 of energy weapons are not beam weapons,therefore they generate hard flux. Beam weapons are generally divided into 3 groups:1)point defense lasers,where soft flux damage to shields is not really a downside unless dealing with shielded fighters(tactical laser,pd laser,burst pd laser etc) 2) suppression beams with high range,being annoying from afar,best used on fast frigate to distract part of enemy ships(tactical laser,ion beam etc). 3) medium range but high burst damage,best for situations when enemy shields are almost overloaded or down,dealing heavy damage to armor(tachyon lance,phase lance). Some mods add beam weapons thet still apply to this classification. Beam weapons are very special,but very useful if you understand their strength.
There is a systems mod that makes beams generate hard flux damage, reducing beam range by 50% as well for balance.
Volume is much better now. Thanks for making these.
Great video! I liked how thorough you were with this. I have a couple critiques...
-I didn't see you covering "active" flux venting compared to "passive" venting - A brief note about that would have been nice for thoroughness in regards to why it's a feature of note (disables shields, active ship abilities, and weapons).
-I would have liked to hear a bit more about carriers and fighters - how to change their behavior, what replacement rate can do to you in the middle of a battle, and so on.
-You were half-right about the "no hard flux from energy weapons" part: It's only beam weapons that have this property, while other energy weapons still generate hard flux when hitting shields.
-I think this video would have benefitted from an explanation of the weapon mount types, and how they can be used effectively. Ballistic, Energy, Missile, and Universal mounts are pretty easy to guess, but there's the secondary types such as Composite (ballistic/missile), Hybrid (ballistic/energy), and Synergy (missile/energy) mounts.
Overall a great video, and I did learn a few things about combat from this! Thanks!
I play this on my work laptop all the time, thanks Sseth and thank you JDCollie!
great tutorials
you can really see the steady improvement in these videos as the series goes on
Thanks! The improvement has a lot to do with you guys. You're all giving me a lot of good advice and recommendations about what I can work on :D
Great vids.
Can you do one on Ship Types and fleet
composition.
Any assignment in battle costs a command point, but there is a cooldown. For a few seconds after giving an order, all further orders are free. This means you can reshuffle all fleet orders every couple of minutes (less if you invest in the relevant character skill). It also means you want some sort of standard initial set of orders to give for one point at the beginning of a battle.
There is one exception: You can cancel an order at any time. This lets you e.g. immediately let escorting ships loose when the battle turns into a clean up operation.
Ooh, good to know. I'll add this to the corrections in the description.
In that regards you can also now toggle "Full Assault" in the tactical map and it cancels all orders and gives the ai a kill order against all enemy ships for when your escorts are no longer necessary, say during a clean-up.
This video was amazing, thank god you made it. I've just got the game though I did watch about 12 hours of people playing the game I still didn't understand any of the combat in respect to the nitty gritty details. Just want to say thanks mate you're a legend.
A very helpful control I found hidden away in the controls is one that locks your camera onto the ship you're targeting; I think it's the T button by default. This is great if you're running with the control scheme of controlling your ship facing with your mouse directly, like JDCollie does, and you have a ship which is all about front facing the enemy. With this you can lock your camera onto the targeted ship, simply place you mouse right in the center of the screen on the ship you're locked onto, and your ship will automatically do its best to face directly at the enemy ship.
Obviously not something that should be used without thought all the time; you could find yourself accidentally leaving your rear exposed to different enemies. You may also want to avoid using it if the enemy you're locking onto is far away from your own ship, because then your own ship would be off the screen. Either hitting the camera lock button again or removing your lock on the enemy ship should return your camera to normal.
I've found it especially handy when either I don't want forward facing weapons with limited arcs to accidentally go off the enemy ship; something I've found it unfortunately easy to do when the camera decides to shift suddenly because my mouse was moving- or times when I'm trying to take down a little frigate that keeps zipping around out of my weapon arcs because I can't keep my mouse cursor on them; they can't escape the mouse cursor if the screen is locked directly on them.
if you're running away from the ship at the first place, there has been some tactical error in your plans
It took me around a dozen hours and 4 captains before I realized you could control your own ship. I never felt like more of an idiot.
Wait, you can control your own ship in this game????
@@Error_-xn7po yes
So early it's still 360P haha. Your tutorials and video's are very good and entertaining, always just want drop whatever I am doing and watch them right away as soon as I see them. Hopefully you'll continue to get more viewers and subscribers!
also has a very comfy voice to listen to
More please! I love listening to your videos while I work. I've had starsector for 5 years but I just love learning new things about it
Great tutorial. Thanks for not including background music like so many other tutorials do for some reason. And your voice is nice and calming so that's another good thing compared to the thousands of other HEY WHATS UP GUYS youtubers out there.
Found this video when searching how to attack a space station. This was all super helpful. I watched the whole thing and subscribed. Now I need to find one about space station combat...lol.
Thank you! Very helpful video. I had no idea you could change the fitting of ships for missions. That alone has been a game changer.
Thank you for demystifying this aspect of the game!
Thank you, really outstanding video. Well organised, logically presented, clear and comprehensive. I have probably played 60 hours at this point and NOW I realise my combat knowledge was effectively zero before this lol
Excellent job explaining this fairly complicated game!
Glad I could help!
Appreciate the video. Very helpful for a new player.
Fantastic guide, thank you. I had no idea about so many things so this was perfect.
Awesome tutorial!!
I do run a lot of converted bays, as in almost every ship.
It is great at distracting the enemy, and they kill a lot of Kites, and "annoyance level" ships.
It's certainly a valid option, and probably pretty decent for allowing freighters to escape pursuits (I may have to give that a try in a pirate playthrough). I still think other hull mods are a better use of OP though.
@@jdcollie258 I personally put SO on my freighters if I can afford the OP; especially on freighters made for SO.
Really works well for disengaging against enemies too big to fail.
@@jdcollie258 yeah, I'm still looking to figure out how to get a heavier hitting fleet.
@@jamespondy0 What is your fleet composed of right now?
@@jdcollie258 on my main is
Mule P Class combat freighter
King Class cruiser
3 Heron fast attack carriers 1 d modded
Hippocampus Class close support explorer
Hawke P Class drone carrier
Hammerhead C class standard defence freighter
Dire Wolf D Class destroyer
Hippocampus Class explorer cruiser
Falcon D Class light attack
All except the drone carrier are converted. Some carry really nasty fighters, some have the free ones.
While I wreck just about everything I come into, minus really big fleets, or a bunch of energy weapons, I don't feel like my ships are hitting as hard. They're all fitted with the best weapons I can put on them before hullmods (I put reinforced bullheads on everything, and sometimes blast doors).
Hey there, just got into this game a few days ago, and wanted to say I really appreciate this video, thanks a bunch! *snortsnort*
I've learned quite a bit from this series, thanks.
This game looks awesome. Great guide
Love these vids! I'v learned a lot from your series so far, even though I've been playing Starsector off and on for a few years!
Thanks for the video! I know it is old, but it seems to have a lot of good info in it to help me getting started playing.
I found this game and youre guide and it helps me out alot. Thank you for the many important details and this guide.
Great tutorials, thanks. Looking forward to more.
You've earned yourself a subscription friend
Your videos are phenomenal, thank you.
Very nice series of videos, they have been steadily improving. I'm sure with more effort and releases, you should have a decent following, especially since Starsector videos are pretty niche and this sort of content is much appreciated.
Reason why I commented is that the timestamps for "Controls" and "UI" are swapped.
I would really appreciate some videos regarding mods, particularly something like a ship tier-list for faction / ship mods, or an explanation of Nexerelin. Memes? But, I don't think it's worth diving into mods until you've finished discussing everything vanilla, and who knows, maybe you don't play with those mods :P Cheers.
Man Starsector is an awesome game. I only picked it up recently, but it’s brilliant.
Thank you for making these videos, they've been very helpful to me.
Thank you for the tutorial / tips explained a lot
I probably have 40 hours in the game and i learned a few new things in the first 15 minutes of this video lol.
I'm a simple man, i see a JDCollie video, i smash the like
:D
Video really deserve a like!
Thank you for this
Thanks for the effort put into this
Great video for a great game
Great video! Helped me a lot!
You're doing God's work :)
it's actually better to switch to esdf instead of wasd. one, your hand rests more naturally on these keys. two, it allows you to use "a" to activate powerups, and three, you can use s and d to strafe, w and r to turn. it's a MUCH more natural setup. I set G to toggle the aim at cursor function, and also enable the default to be "active" for that, so you don't have to hold down the key. note that small ships, which turn rapidly, work perfect with using the aim at cursor function for strafing, while you will likely want to reverse the function (uncheck the box in the settings) for capital ships that turn very slowly.
I highly recommend practicing combat by selecting a mission from the main menu, go to refit ship, and then set up a simulator to test your ship in combat against other types of ships. this will get you used to the controls, and how to properly move and strafe to avoid damage. DO NOT rely on your shields on a small ship. they overload quite quickly. better that you just learn not to get hit. You can also change your weapons and hull loadouts to experiment with what works best against different enemy types.
56:00 I think it does use a command point but because you'd directed a ship to move already to the nav point it was part of the same command point.
Praise the gods! Volume normalization!
My mic must be very, very quiet normally, or my headphones exceptionally loud, because I had to *really* crank the volume to make it sound this way. Still, I'm glad it finally sounds the way it needs to!
@@jdcollie258 Obviously way too late for this run (tho I'm looking forward to the 0.95x run, given how much has changed), but FWIW WRT recording settings, take a look at Tuplex's vid th-cam.com/video/9lsg0slWZec/w-d-xo.html on how he sets up his recording system, both audio & visual. Even without the s/w packs he uses, his general advice still applies to all systems, esp WRT audio balancing
56:00 When you issue a command, a bar appears next to the command points, the one that says 'command frequency open.'. You can issue unlimited commands until that bar empties.
Learned this because I'm shit at combat, but good at directing.
Did you miss V or was I not paying attention? Vents your flux rapidly at the cost of disabling your shield and weapons.
48:41, such a beautiful transition.
The gitting gud is real. Thanks man, maybe now I won't just set all my ships to auto-pilot and get angry when they get destroyed.
very helpful video , thanks.
just finished your trade video. really enjoyed it.
uhm...before i get into grinding my way through this, i'd like to say that officer personalities are a huge draw for me. i've tweaked the settings.json to allow me to have a huge fleet with scores of officers. (now that i have the mod for automatic orders it's less of an issue but i still like my officers so i can avoid installing the reinforced bulkheads, for recovery purposes)
Having pilum ships (the razorback frigate with 2 medium missile capability is awesome. but for vanilla i usually went with the vigilance or better yet the buffalo mk2 - after realizing the latter was a destroyer with a 4 deployment cost. wow) with 'cautious' officers is awesome...and remember they can fire missiles so far outside the enemy's view range that they won't lose CR longevity.
Having reckless pursuit officers in fast frigates - i love the hail (but the vanilla tempest equally yummy) for the cheap deployment and excellent ganking ability - for after action chasing routing fuel tankers
My goto escort ship is the centurion with aggressive officers. i put them on the flanks of the missile echelon
I honestly am a cruiser + collosus + phaeton kind of guy when it comes to the core idea of my fleet, and i've found that the pilum (modded or vanilla) is incredibly deadly to enemy star stations when used enmasse...i've even stopped fielding carriers currently
speaking of carriers, the 'timid' personality of officer is perfect for carrier use. barricades are my favorite, but that's a mod ship.
----
anyways, i'll try to watch your video a bit before work, so i figure - like your trade vid - it'll take me a few days to grind
I learnt from this 1 hour video what was summarised in a 6 minute video earlier. RIP me. I was hoping for an hour long video I'd suck less.
the video was great! very helpful
could you do a fleet composition recommendation video next?
also what mods are you using during the q&a section?
thanks for the videos!
EDIT: it seems you have answered to the graphical mods being "Lightshow" and "Graphics Lib" but I see weapon ranges far exceeding anything I've seen before, so a complete modlist would be nice
Fleet composition is largely down to player preference, but I have a general fleet design philosophy that seems to work pretty well. My tech level preference is low tech, so I'll use low tech ships as examples, but this doctorine can work for any tech level.
At the core of my fleet are well armed and armored 'line' cruisers like the Dominator and Punisher (the latter is from Ship Weapon Pack mod). They slug it out with enemy heavies and feature powerful kinetic weapons, backed up by smaller high explosive guns and missiles for punching through armor. I like hammer and atropos class torpedoes in particular. These cruisers often have fair point defense, capable of swatting small missile salvos or 1-2 squadrons of fighters.
Supporting the cruisers are 'fleet' carriers, large, well defended cruiser or capital sized carriers such as the Mora or Legion. Their squadrons contain a mix of kinetic fighters such as Broadswords, and HE damage bombers such as Kopesh rocket bombers and Perdition torpedo bombers. As for actual weapons, these carriers have emphasis on kinetic weapons that are effective defense against frigate and destroyer sized targets, and strong point defense. If possible, I also give them medium to long range missile launchers.
Seperates from fleet carriers are 'escort carriers', small, frigate or destroyer grade carriers that host interceptor and fighter squadrons. Their primary goal is to provide a fighter screen to defend against enemy bomber or missile strikes, and to deal with enemy frigates which try to flank my line ships. Condors are not ideal for this role since they often fall victim to frigates themselves, I find Drovers and Shepards to be better canidates.
Destroyers and frigates fill three roles in my fleet, each requiring different loadouts.
Escort frigates/ destroyers are almost always equipped with hardened subsystems for increased endurance, and usually have a mix of strong point defense, anti fighter missiles and some form of kinetic weapon to drive off enemy frigates that attempt to flank whatever ship the escort is guarding. These escort ships are always given orders at the beginning of the battle to protect key warships such as heavy cruisers, capital carriers and battleships.
Assault destroyers/ frigates are general purpose warships designed to hold the line of battle and/ or destroy other ships of similar size.
Finally, strike destroyers and frigates are specialized ships that combine high mobility with heavy, anti-capital ordinance. They are designed to flank larger enemies, and deliver devastating salvos of torpedoes and high explosive shells to enemy ships which are already occupied with your line cruisers and/ or fighter swarms. Torpedo armed Wolf or Kite class frigates often preform this role well. Wolves are better at it and can mount powerful energy weapons such as mining blasters to back up their torpedoes, but the Kite is a much cheaper option, and can still deliver a respectable torpedo salvo. Gremlin class phase frigates are also great at this. A popular option that fits this role well is a safety override equipped Hammerhead class destroyer armed with HE chainguns. A bit unconventional, but Enforcers can also serve as hybrid Assault/ Strike destroyers if armed with a heavy torpedo armerment. They're a bit slow for a strike destroyer, but can still out manuver cruisers.
But serious question, how are deployment points calculated? I usually use only ~7 capital ships in my fleet, but in most of the engages im only able to use ~200 points (exception is only when i attack starbases without enemies reforcements and i get 345 at that point). (i know that you can set the overall battle size and thats in equation (500 currently)). Do i just must have more small ships in fleet so i could get that greater than 300 deployment points?
As far as I understand it, the deployment limits on both you and your opponent are there to roughly simulate the relative strength of each fleet. (Deployment limitations as a whole are a performance concession) So, if you have 300 deployment points worth of ships, and your enemy has 3000, it wouldn't make much sense to allow you to bring those full 300 points against only 300 of his. (100% of your fleet against 10% of his)
Ideally the game would allow you to fight with your entire combat deployment against the enemy's entire deployment, but since very few people have PCs capable of running that smoothly, we have deployment limitations to simulate it. (and no, I don't know the exact formula used to calculate each fleets' respective deployment limitations, I don't think Alex has ever released that information)
Hope that helps :D
Thank you.
Thanks for the tips
What are the orange bars on the differnt ships in the batle preview screen. I always have a hard time judging my enemies strength
I think you're referring to flux and hitpoints.
@@Kitkat-986 or observed demods..
I mostly just auto fit 3 assault carriers and 2 heavy cruisers with multiple disposables frigates and destroyers. Since this way is quite effective I never thought of personalising ships.
Even in early game shepherd, mule, and glass cannon override frigates will do.
I roll with High Tech and all My fighters do EMP damage. This means they get around shields easily and start disabling systems. Meaning that a frigate and squad of EMP fighters can take down much larger pray with relative ease.
I hope you can make the presentation more exciting, or more excitement in your delivery. It's like listening to a lecture 😂
You can toggle your weapon arcs😭😭😅! That is nice
Still only 360p haha
STILL WATCHING IT!
I am by no means a new player in terms of combat [Defeated six REDACTED fleets yesterday, turns out the NPC's are REALLY good at combat]
But I'm sure I'll learn something here anyway!
Probably going to have to watch this many many times :) Thanks JD for putting this out there. Did you ever put out a general ship guide or is that type of info embedded in other videos.
Where is the updated starsector combat guide? :D
@0:17 - Controls
@4:01 - User Interface - It's actually reverse, just saying
Either this is dated or wrong, but only Beams do Soft Flux damage, all Projectiles do Hard Flux damage.
Ballistics past their range also do soft flux
Great tutorial next vid 10 ways to make/play money
you can a lot of money by selling heavy armaments/marines/drugs/supplies etc to chalcedon. youll have to trade using the black market though but you make millions of space bitcoins
+!!!!! awesome stuff
After a few days (a week or so?) of trying to learn this game my biggest problem now is knowing how strong my fleet/ships is/are and know how many ships to deploy for engagements. Any advice on this?
Probably late on this, but for new players asking this question as well:
Experience. Not character experience, but your own experience. Theoretically you could win a lot of battles where you're incredibly outmatched. Start save scumming to learn how to win that one battle, or at least decrease your losses.
Also, check the fleet star rating while mousing over them in the world screen. It'll give you a better indication when you're new.
Generally, bigger is better, but certain ships punch above their weights, so to say - especially given certain loadouts
You can go full auto in weapons by selecting an unused weapons group number
Thank you
What do you think is better that auto pulser cannon. Or that laser with explosive damage
Nice. Thank you.
Personally, I just strap 2 double flak cannons on an enforcer and kamikaze it into the enemy fleet. So far it has not let me down!
Okay, how to increase fleet points as mentioned in the video?
I know this old, but for later viewers, deployment points are based on multiple factors if I recall correctly.
- Enemy Fleet Size vs Player Fleet Size
- certain Leadership skills affecting deployment
- if fleet combat is large enough, taking control of tactical satellite systems
Uhh, how do i change batlle screes, change the RTS style to the mouse control style, im kinda lost.
TAB key on keyboard
good!
Is there a way to up the resolution of this game?
You may want to check the forums. I've seen some threads recently about workarounds that allow the game to look good on 4k resolutions.
The problem with your guide is that You assume we already know types of ships to get as well as mods & weapons are not in our possession yet. What ships to get? Which one to buy? And where?
When I was playing my first time I was just making as much money as I can by Sseth's way and just buy or build my own bunch of Big Guys. Bunch of capital ships, around 5-10 and all other slots filled with big cargo ships for smuggling big amounts of drugs, organs and other shit for Luddite Pathers and Pirates. And I was winning all the encounters only by the raw power of 10 Capital ships. And that's all. But now I want to dig deep into this combat system to understand how to actually destroy ships by myself
New orders don't spend command points, so long as the the "command frequency open" bar is not spent. once that empties, you'll need to spend points to assign new roles.
He hey people, Sseth here!!
To anyone watching this, i recommend looking over the command points system over at fractal softworks forums as the information here is wrong on multiple points and missed an entire mechanic with it.
You should be able to tweak some base settings in the game, like max player levels, officers, max deployment size, etc. Just mentioning
Indeed, you can even tweak the zoom levels. I'm not doing so at the moment however because i want the onscreen experience to be as close to the default a new player would experience as possible.
You can fire all weapons but you have to go into the fittings and set them all to the same group.
my combat doesnt look like this. my ship is transparent in the center of my screen and the other ships are tiny
Hi, I have a question about attacking, because I do not think you covered it and I do not get it in this game. I have noticed that when you select several ships and attack with them on tactical view (slect->right click), they actually attack what I tell them to (this is my current strategy). However when I use orders like 'Engage' only like 2-3 ships attack and rest sit and do nothing... I can do this a few times on multiple ships but noticed that not entire fleet is being engaged (at least that's what I can see by arrows) and often ships are shifted between targets. The ship attacked often picks those ships off and takes on others, others engage, die and it repeats (kinda like in action movies ;) ). Like carriers have their fighters just chilling around them, rest is moving pointlessly. This is very confusing. Also noticed that you cannot have both 'Engage' and 'Fighter strike' on one enemy ship. Why? What if I want both fighers and ships to attack some ship? Can you explain this?
The select-right click assigns the ships an 'Eliminate' order, rather than engage. Eliminate orders cause the ships in question to pursue their targets with complete disregard for other targets in the area. Because you directly assigned those ships, the game doesn't try to reassign them to keep orders distributed.
Engage assigns a percentage of your fleet to attack the target, and tries to keep that percentage balanced between engage orders.
As to why you can't have an Engage and a Fighter Strike order on the same target, I think that is just a UI limitation.
hey hey people
You should do asmr. You have a extremely calming voice.
wait, you are saying I can steer my flag ship? what the hell? well that will make things easier
Amazing Video Thank you "new here to the game" [Pirates inbound] fuuuuuu-
Hey hey pipol
hey this is pretty good
Is venting flux automatic or I have to manual do it?
Well, you can technically do it automatically, but that is known as "overloading" and disables your ship while it's happening. :)
For manual venting, press 'v'
I can take out an onslaught with my starter fleet... until it gets a PD escort
Years ago it was possible in theory to take out an entire fleet with a Hyperion or Medusa heh
Masta
best combat strategy i found out after playing the game for 3 day thath you never command your own ship just use auto lolXD i lost my flagship lots time . when i had it run on outau i beat way stronger fleet.(ofc i am commandingthe whole fleet with combat point). its seems to me thath ai is better controliing just single ship. while its better if the player send command for the whole fleet.
It depends on your weapon setup. The AI is good at certain things but if you want to hold off on using limited ammo it might be best to command your ship personally.
In general, an experienced player is far more deadly than the AI in any single ship. That being said, I always give my weapon control over to the AI and focus on flying and commanding.
@@jdcollie258 I agree, it's also more useful to have the player control the ship in certain setups. I have 4 autcannons on one Dominator so I just accelerate towards enemy ships and melt them.