Overview
General tips and what to expect when playing this game.
General
The game is generally a space sandbox game with the goal of upgrading your ship and taking on further difficult challenges.
Making Money
There are three primary ways to make money, mining, missions, and trading.
Mining:
This is what the game teaches you initially. Fly out from a safe a outpost with the best drill you’ve managed and complete the drill mini game until your cargo is full and go sell. This method generates income the slowest but has almost zero inherit danger so can be used with ease at higher difficulties.
Missions:
Different types of missions are given in the space lounges, some are inherantly more dangerous than others and pay based on difficulty, standing with the faction, and most importantly, the number of medals you have unlocked. MIssions were by far my preferred method of income, the gameplay is more varied and generate arguably the most income. The key is to unlock medals (see wiki), several medals are niche and can be unlocked immediately, others will require better gear and time. Pick a race from each conflict, Terran vs Vossk, Nivelian vs Mido and do missions for that race to eventually receive a +100% bonus reward for these missions.
Trading:
I read some guides on trading initially and simply was not a fan. In order to trade effectively you’ll need approx 300 free cargo space, half a million credits, and a khador drive. At that point, you will unlock the pan system (see wiki) and buy organs in pan to sell in Wolf-Reisner followed by implants / rare plants / rare animals to sell back in pan. The income is just alright, comparable to missions depending on your medal count but has quite the startup cost and is quite boring.
Blueprints:
Purchase blueprints that you find both for the medals and a potential income. At each station you can purchase all it’s general blueprint commodities (mechanical supplies, optics, hydraulics, etc) and go over to blueprint and dump all these new commodities into a blueprint (anything green can be added to). Even sending these materials to another station where the blueprint it located, will generally always net an income when selling the completed item. The wiki has a list of which blueprints are more profitable.
Combat Tips
Most combat will begin with an approach where both ships are flying directly at each other. You can typically strafe one direction and dodge the enemy fire until they get closer. Once closer, it’s almost impossible to maneuver and dodge all the fire so your options are, destroy it before it gets that close by use of a missile or other secondary, disable it with emp, or cloak. All of these methods are effective, but will cost you credits so only use if necessary.
When fighting several ships, your best bet is the same as above on a larger scale. Either you have to take out the ships faster than they can get through your defenses (not effective on higher difficulties), disable groups of ships at once with EMP (requires enemy ships to bunch up), or spam cloak. If you are having issues with combat, purchase a U-Tool or build a Shadow Ninja (see wiki) and keep energy cells handy.
Weapons are mostly created equal. The exception being the endgame MaxHeat thermal weapon homes on a locked target. Unfortunately target locking isn’t very reliable so you won’t want to be entirely reliant on this weapon. Whichever weapon you use is mostly up to personal preference.
Turrets… turrets are useless in my opinion. They are not automated and you essentially leave your ship flying straight ahead to fire a single gun that does medicore damage.
Other
Get yourself the blueprint for Rhoda Blackhole. It increase cargo by 100% and will make playing generally more enjoyable.