I’ve played dozens of hours, but I still think I’m pretty much a noob. I’ve got 3 ships and the first 4 materials, although I’ve just started on the 4th, and the 3rd seems semi-useless. So I’m in the Titanium-age.

I play on normal difficulty, which seems maybe a bit too easy, but I hate changing difficulties in the middle of a playthrough.

Crazy Molly - Miner

This is the Crazy Molly. My first ship, and still a standard purifying mining ship. She’s alright. Decent speed and she makes money. Small and not much use in a fight.

Neanderthal - Corvette

My pride and joy, the second ship - Neanderthal. She can boost-cruise (intermittent boosting) at nearly 3000/ms, she’s got a modest but useful cargo capacity, and she’s got nearly all the firepower in the fleet so far. She’s covered in light titanium armour and has naonite stone on the front to act as a ram and fender. I somewhat unfairly abuse the fact that I seem to take a lot less collision damage than AI stations, when my firepower is found lacking.

Erectus - Fast Transport/Miner

She looks like the year 2002 in one picture

This is the Erectus. She’s an R-miner, and the main breadwinner since her christening. She’s covered in titanium armour for survivability and has a titanium stone ram, but she’s not actually meant for fighting. She’ll boost-cruise at close to 2000m/s and is meant to serve as both transport and miner.

Both Crazy Molly and Erectus suffer from poor jump capabilities, which I’m hoping to fix with research or by reaching better equipment stations.

Both Neanderthal and Erectus have been upgunned and slightly modified after the screenshots were taken, since I’ve been working on building new turrets on them today.

Next up I think I’ll build another combat ship. Either a larger vessel with several torpedo tubes or long range-guns, or another Neanderthal. After that, I feel the need for a light transport to use for cargo missions.

Show me your fleet!

  • cro_magnon_gilf@sopuli.xyzOPM
    0·
    5 months ago

    The ship designs are very central. You improve your ships with new gear, weapons and subsystems, but you also shape them to make sure they’ve got armour in the right places, that the guns have good firing arcs, and that they have important critical systems for what you need the ship to be able to do.

    But it’s also important to make new ships when you need them. You’ll identify your needs and try to create a new ship that can fill that need.

    The basis for your economy is mining and/or trade. You’ll need atleast one ship that can make you proper money, or mine the materials you need. So the focus is on multiple fronts. You don’t need to fight much if you don’t want to, but you will need to do some kind of business. That’ll probably be both mining and trading.

    The most lovely thing about the game is that you can both control your ships in person, and control them on a strategic level. So if you get a (or a bunch of) mining ships, you can make sure they do their job while you’re off hunting pirates in your combat ship.

    The focus is really where you want it to be. You decide! :)

    edit: and to answer the question more succinctly; you can make money from combat missions and use that to buy whatever materials or other thing you need, but it’s probably hard to avoid mining completely.