Any hints for beginner?

[Gunfreak]

I've played about 5 hours. I have 5 ships. 2 light 1 heavy cruiser, 1 assault frigate and a escort carrier is this an ok mix? Most of the ships have medium canons, missiles and a few laser things.

[D Scriptus]

As far as gameplay, since the voice commands haven't worked for me yet - the biggest thing was when I learned to pause time. This allows you to give commands and plan, and yes it's kinda of a cheat, but it also allows you to get out of your ship and grab some amazing screenshots.

Also great when someone knocks on your door with a package, you can just hit pause.

It really depends on what you want to do. The enemy fleet scales to match the size of your fleet, so you never really know what you're going up against.
I keep a group of heavy cruisers with cannon and stryker (?) missiles as both long range devastation and medium range front line, and I put myself in a battlecruiser or battleship.

The game lets you try whatever you want, swap out the carrier for a command ship and see if you like what that does. You can have up to 12 ships in the campaign, but you can finish it with only one in your 'fleet'.

Haven't played the same battle twice but they usually end up in my favour.
(commander difficulty)

Give a yell if you get stuck.

[Muppet Head]

I wish there was a more traditional mission structure, I'm not really feeling the 'replay a mission when you want to refuel' setup

[D Scriptus]

It might be more interesting if when you retreat to your base, the territory captured by the 'enemy' generated a random mission, I agree. There's a base you can refuel/repair/rearm at around the 4th or 5th mission I think, once that's unlocked you don't have to go back to your home base unless your making changed to your fleet.

All in all, good game design. If you have an idea you can always mention it in here, or on the dev's dischord channel. I'm curious what you mean by a more traditional mission structure. Myself I would like to see more varied & random missions in conquest for sure.

If you go back far enough, there are random generated campaigns in games like Longbow Gold, and IL-2 Sturmovik 1946, although a lot of modding was involved with Il-2.

For the campaign a short term solution could be to offer the player a range of missions for each territory, so at least it would be variable if not fully random.

[Muppet Head]

By more traditional I just mean you don't have to go back and redo a mission to upgrade your fleet. Beat a mission, spend whatever upgrade points you have, go on to the next mission. So always 'forward', not 'forward, backwards, forward, backward'.

What they seem to be aiming for is something like a 'conquest' map in an RTS where the enemy can move into a territory you've already captured, then you have to defend it, and tried to mix it with a straightforward mission setup. For me at least, it ends up being tedious. It would be better if there were other fleets that could help defend sectors, garrisons that could be left behind and so forth, but I know that's outside the scope of this game. Which is why I would prefer a simple mission list.

[PhaserFelix_YT]

Just saying, wait until you on mission 10. I lost 22 ships to it.
12 the first time, and then 10 more when I finally beated it which took an hour and alot of running away. I mean tactical retreat.