I've been doing some extensive research on building effective Miners and fighters. During the DEV upgrades, I've seen many changes in the past month. I'm testing on Local Server only. Survival mode, and Hard Setting.
The area I'm testing involves STARTING OFF NEW, Building your first miner ship and how to use Shops to quickly get yourself up and going very quickly.
I'm currently testing with DEV build 124.
First off, build your first Miner ship, Start with your Mining Computer and Mining modules. Use them all, buy another 100 - 200 modules too if you like. Now do your power, You don't need to use them all at first, now lets buy some logic chambers and some conduits too, start with 20 / 10. Now start building up your power, keep in mind your reactors will need to be at a certain distance from stabilisers , and you want them far enough away in order to get 100% Effectiveness. Keep on swapping back and forth in Build and Flight Mode to test them out. Hit G to bring Salvager to weapons hot bar and test away. Keep building up as much reactors and stabilisers until the 2 bars on the Right in Flight mode becomes green. Now hit TAB-SHIP-REACTORS and look at top bar for how many chambers you will need, and purchase enough needed. connect chambers via Conduit directly to your reactors. Hit TAB-SHIP-REACTORS go to LOGISTICS CHAMBER tree and MINING BONUS, level up your MINING BONUS 3 times to max. Now add your thruster modules. throw them all on, you'll need them. Now buy 1 STORAGE and 100 cargo. Place your storage block first, hit C on that block and start placing all your storage blocks, continue forming your ship. Now hit C on Salvage computer and V on Storage . place down your Faction module. Create a faction and faction your ship.
You should now have a working Mining Ship, Before we star mining, lets do 1 more thing first. Hit U - Save Blueprint of entered Structure. Give it a name MK 1. There will be more upgrades once we start making some money. Find the ship in the blueprints list, click it, Permisions, take the check out of ENEMY CAN USE. Now buy 6 of the same blueprints. You can RIGHT Click on blueprint in Inventory - then edit, to add blocks to list and spawn them later.
Here is our priorities now.
- Mine asteroids within someone else's factioned sector first, you will get their mining bonus too. Can't see any asteroids in the navigation panel! Hit preferences and add asteroids to your list.
- Stay far away from Pirates, you have no shields or armor yet, you've been warned. always keep an eye out for them, you should also have your jump drive in your hot bar at the ready. Can't find it! Hit G and add it to your Hot Bar.
- Begin Making Our First Fleet. Its time to make some serious money
- Upgrading your ships, adding shields and armor to your ships.
- Now we are ready to venture into new unexplored territories and Start our own Home base, claim the sector as our own, and building our base. Keep in mind, it will cost 50,000 credits to start a new base.
- Notes to keep in mind, you must explore 15 - 16 sectors before you can see the full map with stations and shops. For now, you will depend on navigation saved points. So you wont get lost. (home base, shops, and good mining locations. You may also save areas that contain Pirates so you can stay away from them for now. he he he )
We will now harvest our first asteroid. And sell it all to the closest shop. Congratulations, you are now a multi- millionaire. Ok lets make a second ship. go into first blueprint, see how many blocks are needed and purchase from the shop. You should have enough money to complete your second ship and probably start your 3rd ship.
lets start our first fleet. Hit K and create a new fleet, name it what you want. Click on your fleet name and add your first ship in first. Spawn your 2nd ship and any other ships that is ready to spawn too. Go back into fleet panel by hitting K click on your new fleet name and add ships to your fleet. So now you should have 2 or 3 ships in your first fleet. Lets do some more harvesting. You will have to be in same sector the asteroid is in before your fleet commands - mine this sector will work. Do not add any AI modules as of yet, it wont work, your ship will wander away or do a dance for you, any fleet commands won't do anything. (last tested using DEV build 123)
So basically you will be mining and selling until you can build up your fleet with existing blueprints until you have all 7 ships in your fleet. Keep in mind that the ship you are in will not auto mine like the others in your fleet, you will have to do it manually.
Some may be asking, I did all that mining but never got anything in my inventory. Well that's because its all in your storage chest. Go into build mode, point cursor on storage chest and hit R, There it is, at this point, make this storage your personal storage. This way when you go to a shop and sell, Hit I - Inventory, hit cargo, and everything in your storage chest will be visible.
At this time you can make money easily, and your fleet can do most of the work for you, lets start on our defenses now. Starting with some shield capacitors and shield regenerators. Throw on 50 of each on all the ships. now to cover everything up. Its a little expensive but buy as much standard armor you can, and start covering up all your systems, Reactors, stabilisers, conduits, and chambers, make sure you cover up all your cargo spaces too.
A few lessons I've learned when dealing with fleets.
- Mining, some times when you give the command to mine this sector, they just want to dance around instead. Every now and then, and sometimes often, you will have to exit the game, start it back up. go to TOOLs and Erase Cache, then start the game. Voila! upon restarting, your fleet is now mining.
- AI's won't work
- The old Jammer computer will be on it's way out due to the new power system , now can be found within the stealth chambers. 2 chambers joined in series, first chamber set to strength 3, second set to Jammer. You can add an additional Stealth chamber on it's own to manipulate time durations and other stuff for your jammer.
- Cloaking, requires strength of 4, and it's own separate chamber set to cloak. You might be able to do 3 chambers in a series to do a cloak and jam, first chamber set to strength 4 , second to jam, and third to cloak.
- Some notes on Jammers and cloakers with fleets. It will only work in the ship you are in, Fleet command to cloak or jam may put your fleet into a "Trade mode" instead and wander off. So at this point, it won't work. This is why I went for the shields instead.
- Aiming, I have noticed, if you build an a-semetrical ship, aiming is off , (left clicking) from the core point of view. you need to add a camera centered from point of weapon, or support tool, to be accurate. For fleets, If you build this type of ship, There aim will always be off due to the fact, they aim from the core point of view, or Computer point of view. I tried making a new ship, this time centering the core and computer behind the output beams had a 500% increase in hitrates and salvaging.
- Here is a LOL and another learning lesson, back in dev 121, there was an issue with the Faction Module, Game crashed if you used a faction module on a ship or station. At that time mining fleets were able to work fine without the faction module. I was rich with resources. Then in Dev 123 this was rectified. My ships were mining away, but the block count of asteroid never moved, unless I hit it myself. Hmmmm, they reinstated the faction module, each ship must have a faction module before they will eat away an asteroid. I suspect the same with other weapons. Now I'm getting richer.
- Shields, you can add some Defence modules and add 50% to your Capacity and your Recharge rate, works well on all ships. Don't get confused with the word BASE, it's not just for stations, its for the base of structure for any ship or station.
- Upgrades, Any upgrades done should be saved as a blueprint as often as you can. Remember to make sure the enemy can't use it too.
- Turrets, at this point, anything with a turret will not work as of DEV 123, The same applies to docking, to a ship or a station, it may appear to work at first, then the NullPointers will come in, and the docked entity will vanish in time.
- Combat, I made 3 fleets, each was an upgrade from a previous using various modules All were hefty fighters 60m length ships, fleet 1 had the basics, fleet 2 basics + chamber upgrades, fleet 3 as previous + faction module. This was in Dev 119. I moved all 3 fleets to same sector, and one of the fleets started shooting the other fleets. Like shooting fish in a barrel, So I had to separate the children. These Fighters were very effective when we took down an Eta Pirate station along with there isanths. Some ships were badly chewed up but we did it when I added the ion effects to half my ships.
End Notes, what I have provided you so far is how any newbie can start off a new world and start expanding quickly. My method of ship building may be different than others, but it gives you a better learning curve in order to learn the new power system. I like to start with what needs the most power first, in miners, its having enough power to efficiently power your mining beams without losing all power. The same method can be used when making fighters too. Start with your weapon of choice, the bigger the better. Do your power, then add your chambers shields and armor. It's that simple. Yes, there will be lots of "OMG's","WTF's", and "LOL's". Lets have some fun.
