STARSECTOR GUIDE MANUAL

One thing that may not be intuitive (and I honestly don't recall whether the tutorial mentions) is that ships with D-mods may be dinged up, but they're also cheaper to deploy which is very handy. I believe one of them is always a Hammerhead, which are very solid destroyers, but you don't need to take all of them. The mission-giver and the tutorial text both strongly suggest you pick a few up, yeah. Then they'll outnumber you by a factor of only 1.25 or so if you took all of the ships at the graveyard.very manageable. (You'll be far enough away from civilization that going dark won't be an immediate problem w/patrols.) Basically, wait for them to be (relatively) separated and then enter only one fleet's sensor radius, then draw it off before engaging.

STARSECTOR GUIDE MANUAL

Manual control until one wants to open fire and then handing off to the AI for actual combat, is a thing for noobs like us.Д®DIT: also, you're supposed to sneak around and engage only one of the miner fleets at a time. The markets point-restock once a month, so you can hold off on just about anything else (including officers) until the gate is re-opened.ДЄs I am a truly incompetent pilot, generally what I do is leave things on autopilot and use eliminate orders to get things targeted properly. The psuedo-commission gives enough weapons in storage to arm all of the ships improperly.ДЄbout the only thing worth buying before re-opening the gate, besides crew/supplies/fuel, is a militarized Kite. I never have enough cash for even crew/supplies/fuel until after re-opening the jump gate. Prior versions: should not be spending money on ship weapons this early (this caught me as a tomato surprise on my first playthrough). My first goal is often just finding a suitable location with small enough pirate gangs to farm ships, or to survey enough or perform enough quests without getting thwacked to afford some competent fleet members. Unlike M&B, this 'out-playing' is actually super-satisfying, and not just an AI stompfest.ДЄs far as the campaign goes - unlike other members of the genre, ship upkeep is too expensive to just play it in a straightforward manner.

This game is kind of like Mount and Blade, in that a highly-skilled player can generally take on larger fleets, and survive due to their ability to out-play the AI. Ship micromanagement is VERY important for most encounters, and second-by-second decisions can make or break your chosen approach. So a fair amount of the playerbase was well-versed in the combat before even touching the campaign, and that has certainly influenced subsequent balance.

It might help you to understand that the game was originally just a very detailed combat sim, and the campaign and starmap and whatnot were added partway through development. I would suggest playing easy and, like Nirur Torir said, to play around in the combat sim until it doesn't feel so clunky.

It can definitely fall into the 'hardcore' side of game design.

Starsector guide