Avoiding combat

Starsector is a game primarily about spaceship combat but sometimes you really don't want to have that fight. This page is a compendium of different ways to avoid a fight when you need to.

• Low sensor profile so they don't initially spot you

• Don't use Transponder outside of colonised systems
• Stop Sustained Burn when near suspicious unidentified sensor blips, particularly if large & moving
• Consider approaching suspect blips with Go Dark

• Emergency Burn to gain some breathing room
• Sustained Burn once you have some breathing room
• Interdiction Pulse once you have some breathing room to disable their movement abilities, then Emergency Burn yourself out of there
• Use Terrain, in particular if you are running from a larger fleet as terrain maluses often scale with fleet size

• Asteroid Belts or Hyperspace storms are particularly effective
• Make sure to Emergency Burn if running across a sun or near a black hole

• Go Dark can cause them to lose track of you and start inefficiently searching for you
• Sabotaging nearby system infrastructure owned by their faction such as Comms Relays can potentially distract them
• Transverse Jump out of the system (or into a nearby system)
• Dumping a sufficient quantity of loot (regardless of quality) can sometimes be enough of a distraction