Mid-game Combat

This page is to aid understanding of basic combat, for players who have advanced into mid-game Starsector.

Concepts

First, a review. Weapons deal Damage, which is resisted by your Shield

• Light and Heavy autocannons deal 200% to shield. Needlers are a high tech autocannon.
• Mortars and assault guns deal damage to armor.
• Lasers do 100% damage, ( Energy Pulse weapons deal hard flux. Other Energy weapons don't deal hard Flux, so are less threatening.)

See the Damage page for a breakdown of the four damage types.

Armor isn't just for decoration

So long as your shield is up, it can block all incoming damage. If you increase your flux capacity, this increases the tank of your shield. What may not be obvious is how a weaker ship can bully down your shield, if it's fitted with autocannons. This can be quite frustrating, especially if the enemy ship is also faster than you. Again, somewhat surprisingly, is that the enemy autocannon ship isn't a real threat to you if you have moderate armor. Armor is also resistant to weapons that do low per-shot damage. Imagine weapon damage is multipled by this expression: 1/(1+(a-w)). You can see if your gun damage (w) is close to the armor value (a) your guns will do full damage, but quickly falls off if a is several times larger than w. So- the enemy ship that can wreck your shields, might be quite harmless if you have moderate armor. If this isn't intuitive, try flying the Vanguard frigate for a few rounds, you will learn what kind of damage you can ignore when you have front armor, and then what happens when you lose the front armor.

Capacitor? I hardly knew her.

Why put more Flux capacitors on the ship you will pilot? A fool never plans to be shot incessantly, and I don't plan for it either.

A smart player knows that if his/her ship has a minimum of Flux Capacity, they will invariablly have to spend more time without the shields up. This will be particularly painful on the Sunder or the Shrike, which are two medium-size ships, but without the armor to shrug off damage from low-damage attacks.

It's also interesting to note that ships that can fire Annihilator missiles continuously can appear to be more deadly than they should be. The ship that fires missles constantly (like the Pirate Falcon) can afford to drop it's sheilds, and manage it's capacitor. The ship getting continuously shot can't afford to do that. A medium rack of Reaper Torpedos makes sure to remind the victim that they need to die.

CR

Review of combat readiness. It's not just malfunctions. CR is also quite important in the autoresolve.

• 50-70% CR is normal performance
• 0-50% CR you will lose Movement Speed, and huge gais/losses in damage taken, and damage inflicted.
• Enemies at 100% CR are hard to kill.

Fleet Commands

Since I'm trying to minimize ship losses, I usually try and keep my ships together, so that the weaker ships don't get separated from their protection. I can do this with move orders, escort orders, or defend orders.

Often one order on the Command screen is enough to keep my fleet together. Oddly, there's two kinds of orders... having a ship do something, or the order onto a ship. You have to cancel the two types of orders separately. For example, cancelling a move order won't cancel the escort order, since that's an order *onto* the ship to be escorted.

For some reason, some civilian ships ignore defend and escort orders. Retreat orders can be unintentionally fatal. Unless the retreating ship is already quickly moving away. Enemy ships can sense the retreat order, as they see the retreating ship turn its shield away from them.

Calculated Aggression

You'll often be in a battle where you know you can win, but the ships aren't really doing anything- shooting a minimal amount and backing off. This might seem kind of dumb, but it's really not... the AI isn't dumb. Try running in with your own ship- see what happens, you'll quickly lose your ship. In fact, the enemy fleet was quite threatening! That said, the AI tends to fire on the ship with the weakest defenses, even to the point of ignoring the most dangerous enemy. Nor does it priortize the most threatening enemy, even just to make it back off.

There's a trick in the fitting screen to make any ship more aggressive. Just add more flux capacity. Ships with higher flux cap can take more damage, and thus are more ready to run in. You can also hire reckless officers, whom you have to babysit since, they'll unintentionally face off with enemy ships that can kill them easily. This isn't much of a problem if they're piloting a ship with Rugged Construction since the the d-mod penalties on those ships are so small. Again- counterintuitively, taking weapons off your ship, to improve their shields, will make them more aggressive. Also ships might act timid if they lack point defense. You can also make your ships attack a specific ship from the command screen. Beware doing this onto a faster ship, as your fleet will quickly get into a poor position. Also see AI Behaviour.

If you can disable the engines of specific enemy ship, you may then select ten friendly ships with mouse-drag on the command screen, who are then ordered to attack immediately.

Theats to you

Flying around killing ships while your flux is high might seem really smart, but if the enemy has harpoon missile pods, it can get dumb pretty fast. The AI counts every bit of your ship's hard flux as a weakness, at which point the enemy fleet senses a potential kill, (Let's say there's an enemy Venture and two Manticores) The enemy will fire missiles... 6 times 4 harpoon missiles straight at your ship. Bad day.

Try fighting high-tech enemies like Persean league or Tri-Tachyon. You will see that even with the same ships, the better weapons (needlers instead of autocannons, phase lance instead of Pulse laser) and better officers make a real difference. BTW, zero-flux movement is a large speed boost present on all ships. If you can drop shields and get your flux to zero, you'll get about 30-40 more move speed

Ship Fittings

The AI pilot doesn't know what it's role is. So, the ship you fit out as an armor killer, might never close distance and use it's close-range weapons. If you look at the damage inflicted by each weapon (from the mod "Detailed Combat Results" on the forum), you'll see that it varies from match to match. That is, ships with long-range weapons, often will never use the short-range weapons unless the enemy closes on them.

High-flux weapons will often backfire on the pilot. You can often spot the Wolf with the Heavy Blaster since it dies every match.

Missles on your own ship

• Breach and Atropos missiles if you can't aim
• Hammers and Reapers if you can, and want big boom
• Annihilator rockets if you're cool
• Sabot SRM if you want to overload the enemy

Other

Get a feel for how dangerous pirate ships are. In particular, the pirate Falcon with multiple Reaper Torpedos, and the Eradicator with annihilator rockets.

Some battles you can only win if you select the Full Assault! mode. Usually you do this after you clear the frigate trash (to ensure the most dangerous enemies get hit hard). You can also boost a single ship's aggressiveness by going to the Command screen and clicking "Search and Destroy" or 'S'. You lose a Command point when you cancel Full Assault! mode, but you have the Command Frequencies Open so you can issue multiple commands after cancelling, until you close the command screen. (Show video feed 'F' does not cancel Command Frequencies Open)