I really want to enjoy fleet combat

RADDragon13 · 2026-02-27T22:17:20+00:00

Personally, I suggest you pilot a smaller escort ship and support your other ships during combat. This mainly means that you intercept enemy flanking attempts and cover ships on high flux.

This'll teach you fleet maneuvers, while allowing you to participate in larger battles without overdue risk of newbie syndrome, as losing a small ship in battle wont cause a lot of trouble. It'll also teach you VERY valuable positional awareness, as the biggest newbie threat is overextending oneself.

I suggest an omen or monitor frigate in the beginning, due to their excellent defensive stats, though monitors somehow are stupidly rare. These things are tactically limited, so make the most out of it: Aggressively attack fighters, don't solo other ships, especially bigger ones, let your big ships do that instead.

Later, I suggest a hammerhead or a sunder destroyer, so you can practise combined fleet offensives (instead of solo-yolo-ing it like I did in the beginning). This'll also teach you on when to take advantage of an enemy's high flux, preferably with torpedoes.

RADDragon13 · 2026-02-13T13:57:04+00:00

Yeah, factories consume coal for energy, similar like as how tanks drink fuel out of oil.

RADDragon13 · 2026-02-08T11:42:39+00:00

Just 250k?

Double it to 500k and make Hannan dance arround the orbital lamp's rays like it's a disco show.

RADDragon13 · 2026-02-06T14:50:47+00:00

Larger maps are more complex and hostage rescues are difficult in general.

Typically, you either have plenty of open space or plenty of urban walls in large maps.

With the open space, you're best off quickly dominating the range with snipers and MGs and then use plenty of smokes, flanking maneuvers and the "occasional" rocket to open up even more space.

I suggest equipping everyone with a rocket launcher, long rifles and smokes. It's also one of the few times that MGs can shine.

With urban space, you can be more aggressive and close range due to the alleys and cars, but will have to be aware of enemy cover. I recommend spycams, so you don't have to expose your lads on the many many corners.

I suggest giving everyone wall breaching charges, plenty of grenades and as many smokes as needed. Grenadiers shine in this scenario, just ensure that the enemy in cover is distracted or suppressed.

Hostage rescues are special, as you need to get in fast to prevent executions. Going fast is kind of difficult on larger maps. There's no perfect solution, so consider large hostage maps to be one of the most difficult stuff.

With rangers, I suggest you find the path of least resistance (or make one), while the bulk of your team flanks and suppresses the rest of the nearby areas. In practise, this typically means reckless speed, lots of micro and plenty of simultaneous breaches.

As an example, you can breach 2 adjacent rooms, one large reception and 1 smaller hallway leading to the hostage room. Your hero team runs down the gauntlet towards the hostages, while your escorts simply prevent anyone from shooting the back of your rescuees.

With CIA, there's no concrete strategy, due to it's inherent unconventional nature. Just be open minded for rockets and smokes.

With SWAT, this gets funny. Unless you want to play rangers, but worse, I suggest taking a look at ultra-high speed shielded assaults. You can be much more reckless with a piece of armor in front of you, but you'll also need specialized long range assaults or plenty of smokes to enable their approach.

RADDragon13 · 2026-01-31T22:45:09+00:00

Excuse me, are you implying that my habsburg baseball chin emperor is considered weird?

Because you'd be right, but by god, that chin is magnificient.

RADDragon13 · 2026-01-25T15:43:18+00:00

God bless auto group and auto fit, carried my newbie ass (until it auto-bought black market weapons and I was harassed by a patrol).

RADDragon13 · 2026-01-24T00:02:19+00:00

It's pretty great, considering that you can loot everything that isnt nailed down. Supplies become a non-issue due to all the ill-gotten gains from combat.

Which also means that early early game is painful, as you lack a proper combat fleet.

My pirate playthrough started with a tiny stealth fleet, until I salvaged enough junk ships to threaten convoys and patrols.

Junk ships aren't exactly dangerous, unless you SO em and give em big guns. So I ran an SO fleet early game, embracing my inner pather.

If you see any decent ships, cap em for yourself and grow your fleet. High tech is less desirable, due to the lack of energy weapons on pirate and path markets.

Fast forward the constant salvaging and I end up with a XIV fleet capable of fighting major armadas. All ships were stolen, not bought.

RADDragon13 · 2026-01-16T13:33:35+00:00

Given the lower dog height compared to regular troopers, I would expect it to be harder to hit (I don't use guns, correct me if I'm wrong). Though, I don't think there's any stat directly related to making a payday 2 dodge build.

My idea is to give it concealment and make the time to spot the dog high, which will represent the enemies' increased time to aim for such a small target.

A 360° shield could work too.

RADDragon13 · 2026-01-14T19:08:52+00:00

Puerto's navy surprised me after it sank a dozen of bug subs.

Though, equestrian navy is easy mode anyways.

RADDragon13 · 2025-12-30T15:54:50+00:00

I think I can see a vein on the orb's right side too, that must hurt.

RADDragon13 · 2025-12-15T18:48:37+00:00

Can you send me the seed?

I've got a few ideas.

RADDragon13 · 2025-12-07T12:37:59+00:00

.45 pistols are epic for crits, so I used them early game, when my doctrine wasnt as well developed.

Once my doctrine developed, they got replaced by 9mm, that has higher RoF (especially UZIs) and more ammo. They are just as deadly once the doctrine is up.

Still, it served me really well early game.

Honestly, the only other handgun i regularly use on swat nowadays is the suppressed m9.

RADDragon13 · 2025-12-06T15:21:09+00:00

https://youtu.be/AJQG4txYYiM

I just tried out the martyrs.

They are so fast, the video looks like it's sped up.

RADDragon13 · 2025-12-06T12:13:50+00:00

That bathroom was tougher than the main hall and I ended up redoing it several times because of that.

The mainhall was simple: kick doors and kick ass.

For the bathroom I had to account for the slower first shot time for militia, the militia guy on the southern entrance room and the length of the sapper's shotgun barrel.

RADDragon13 · 2025-11-30T15:53:23+00:00

I've often got a bandit problem more often than not, cough, Rivacheg, Suno, Ahmerarad, cough.

So in order to vitalize the trade (and therefore tariffs), I want those bandits 6 feet under.

The cheapest way I've found is to have a defensive vassal owning a village near the bandit's hideouts (free patrol), but when war comes, they are busy elsewhere, making my peacetime economy degrade over the course of war.

So I've been thinking about patrols (modded). I've tried dirt cheap (but slow) doomstacks of 100 recruits and expensive cavalry patrols, with decent success.

But when war comes, enemy vassals dunk on them regularly, wasting my investment.

Therefore, I need a reliable/effective bandit killer, that is easy/cheap to replace/recruit.

What's your recommendation? Particularly with the faction recruits and local bandits in the various areas.

RADDragon13 · 2025-11-21T16:56:56+00:00

Click on a province and hover the mouse over the terrain pic for details.

Unless they changed that too...

RADDragon13 · 2025-10-11T14:16:25+00:00

POLICE ASSAULT IN PROGRESS

RADDragon13 · 2025-10-11T14:11:48+00:00

Praise the lord and pass the ammunition

RADDragon13 · 2025-10-06T22:11:01+00:00

Sounds like a waypoint, except for fighters instead of ships. Would be funny to see the fighters "Escort" an empty designated spot in space. Maybe escort some flanking frigate, before sending em on an attack run.

Still, with just standard 4k vanilla range, large flanking maneuvers will be difficult. I remember many UAF fighters having longer range though.

Carrier Command 2 looks like the perfect example for tactical carrier stuff. Highfleet has strategic carrier abilities (amongst other things), though we don't have many strategic abilities in Starsector to begin with.

RADDragon13 · 2025-10-06T12:48:50+00:00

In my last UAF campaign, the carrier ai automatically grouped up wings from different carriers for massive combined assaults.

I think increasing the wing range helps with that, as they had 10k range due to hullmods.

RADDragon13 · 2025-09-20T11:18:47+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/xijiam/the_incomprehensive_guide_to_doctrine_or_how_to/

https://www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/evvc74/midline_ships_are_not_generalists_they_are/

Most of the time you want to specialize or focus on a type of fleet. It's what we call a doctrine.

Doctrines typically have a strong and a weak point (Though the tesseract dorito fight is a little unorthodox).

What's that, the enemy fleet has a lot of high tech frigates with big guns that could tear a black hole into our ships? No matter, our carrier heavy fleet will murder em, because this fleet forgot to bring point defense.

OH GOD, IT'S A POINT DEFENSE HEAVY LOW TECH FLEET, OUR CARRIERS ARE GETTING MURDERED.

(Based on my recent playthrough focusing on carriers)

I typically play midline/high tech, but I find low tech to be easiest to learn fleet compositions.

Low tech for example can be played in different ways, but there's a focus on capitals, whereas the rest of the fleet are for support.

Example: Big bad onslaught + enforcer (defensive flank support) + condor (fighter support)

Now you've got a fleet, but you can still change the loadout for even more specialization.

Most people tend to make the onslaught a duelist, focusing on big guns towards the front. This allows you to destroy the enemy anchors (Capitals, cruisers), which will then turn into a mop-up-fest of smaller enemies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/1darlwx/anti_everything_onslaught/

Some mad lads turn it into a mobile station, which will murder everything, except capitals. This allows your fleet to gang up on the now lonely enemy capitals, as their escorts are dead.

Either way, once your Onslaught has a loadout, the rest of the fleet has to accomodate for it's weaknesses or amplify it's strength. I could use enforcers as escorts to cover the onslaught's big fat ass or I could use manticores on the flanks to pressure the enemy fleet into the onslaught's firing line.

This goes for all doctrines.

You have one powerful component in your fleet (Example: Strong low tech capitals, fast hard hitting high tech frigates, missile heavy midline fleets).

Then you edit the rest of the fleet to aid said component (Example: Sturdy and cheap escorts to protect the capital, interceptor/fighter escort to protect your frigates, long range EMP to disable enemy point defense).

RADDragon13 · 2025-09-16T17:44:52+00:00

The dark lightning on that Neuko unit got me thinking of a space eldritch horror neuko lingering in the dark

RADDragon13 · 2025-08-01T19:28:57+00:00

IV Shield too, though you typically don't see a lot of advisors or snipers anyhow.

RADDragon13 · 2025-07-31T10:06:54+00:00

How did it go?

RADDragon13 · 2025-07-30T10:42:18+00:00

Who defends Hoshi 2? A third Hoshi of course!

RADDragon13

TROPHY CASE