Fleet or capital ship?

[Sparky]

Is it worth it to have a fleet of smaller ships instead of just being one massive ship?

[Bobucles]

For the most part you have very little say in the matter. Higher level zones demand bigger ships, and ships have a tech cap on how big they can be. The module system splits up ship roles, it's not possible to put everything into a single super ship.

For moderate difficulties, a single main warship will do just fine. Harder modes definitely pressure you to bring 1 or more wingmen for extra firepower.

All difficulty settings benefit from a diverse fleet of mining, scrapping, trade and scout ships to provide steady income and map the galaxy. Do beware that the game suffers from providing very few mining turrets while also forcing you to replace them every few tiers. Invest in mining strike craft to fill in the blanks.

[Peely]

Like the loading screen says "Don't put all your resources into one ship or you will lose it." Fleets enable multi-tasking and variety of build and specialization. But look, if you want to build a 2-mile Sports Trilobite that's up to you matey. This great game lets you do you anyway you want.

[umop-apisdn]

Why not have a fleet of massive ships?

Joking aside, having a bunch of ships allows you to do more than one thing at a time.

In my last playthrough, I had two dozen ships; 8 miners, 6 salvagers, 8 combat ships, a scout, and a "rock tug" that was essentially just a big engine with a docking port on the front. All of them were carriers except the rock tug; travel to a new sector, smash any baddies, hoover up all the goodies, and move on to the next sector... "The swarm continues!"

Eventually, I settled down in a dustless and asteroid-free sector with a couple gates right next to an allied NPC's territory near the barrier and started dragging claimed asteroids into it and turning them into mines while turning my "founder" ships into factories.

In my current playthrough, I'm trying something different; I only have 4 ships, so far. It's going a bit slower on the economy side, but it's working okay.

[rickcarson]

I've seen fairly convincing arguments for the other way, though I think Bobucles might have a good point about difficulty level.

The counterpoint (OBSM - one big ship meta) is that if you only have one ship then it always has your best turrets. You don't need a fleet of mining vessels because you only need material for a single vessel, not a whole fleet. You don't need money for 20+ ships, you only need money for one ship (etc.)

As for mining the idea is you find a sector with some of those bigger than normal asteroids, and you mine them, and they're worth say 50-100k resources each (maybe more if you use raw lasers?).

So the OBSM approach is about (I assume) constantly modifying your ship for the challenges you're faced with.

--------

FWIW I don't know what the OBSM response is when you walk into a pirate stronghold and get locked down and then obliterated.

Also, I'm not saying it's a 'better' way of playing. But it's a possible approach. You can even beat the barrier with a single ship (allegedly), though instead of spoiling that I might leave it as a puzzle for people who might be interested.

--------

Also, I'm the sort of person who is happy to play games in 'non-traditional' ways even if others might argue that it's 'suboptimal', if I find that particular play style interesting or fun.

So I can see the appeal.

[Bobucles]

I've found that the biggest issue with running a fleet is their expense. A mining ship capable of supporting your flagship must also be a beefy ship. Size is a requirement to operate in higher tier zones, otherwise a purge fleet will 1-shot them in seconds. So the mining ship must be around half the cost of your prize flagship, else they can not mine flagship materials at all.

So you're running this fleet, and trying to get them to support your main ship. Unfortunately the mining ships only harvest enough ore to keep themselves up to date, plus maybe half of a second ship. Then the mining turrets become obsolete, the whole fleet needs to be upgraded, and all the profit they made is gone again. This process repeats half a dozen times as you tech up through the zones.

As a support ship, mining ships basically do nothing but feed their own growth and demand money for the entire game. You still end up with a lot of big ships, but they're always dragging behind and working on old tech, rather than supporting your cutting edge projects.

Merchant ships do make crazy good bank at least. They can support themselves and many other ships at once.

[rickcarson]

So I tried out the OBSM - didn't set a speed record for unlocking naonite, set a speed record for unlocking trinium by a huge margin, and then also set a speed record for unlocking xanion by a large margin (but not as much).

FWIW the respective unlocks were at roughly:
Naonite: 2 hours 40 minutes
Trinium: 3 hours
Xanion: 4 hours 40 minutes

By comparison my previous attempts clustered around 6 hours for trinium (approx 8 hours for vanilla) and 7-8 hours for xanion (approx 10-12 hours vanilla).

Example of why I say it would be slower in vanilla: I had to do all the mining myself, but SDK's refineries meant I didn't have to keep looping back to a resource depot.

There _were_ some quite favourable wormholes which helps a lot for a speedrun, but with a single ship with the best hyperspace modules I could find/buy it's less of an issue (e.g. only kitting out one ship instead of many).

NB: the xanion unlock was a proper slugfest, not a lucky stash drop or diplo-cheese. I got pirates, then a significant xanion incursion (effectively an extra wave of enemies) and then just as I was down to the last wave the sector was attacked by pirates. Rotters.

---------

So I feel it's less ... effective? Powerful? It _feels_ less efficient maybe? But I think there are some _significant_ time savings to be had by not having to kit out ~10 other ships, and then do it again with hand-me-down weapons when I get a good drop (etc.)

---------

Also, the final battle (to unlock xanion) might have been a lot less hairy if I'd shopped for better PD first (didn't get any good drops), or doubled up on the shield (I just had one flat and one multiplier). Or if I'd gotten luckier with the xsotan (usually I can get them and the pirates to slug it out, but this time they mostly focused on me instead. Double rotters!)

Or if I'd bothered to redo the torpedoes when I bumped the ship up to an 8 slot design - in my defense I'd used almost all of the ones I had just unlocking trinium and I didn't realise/know/anticipate they'd have dropped so many.

So ... far from optimal play. Probably not even 'good' to be honest.

[rickcarson]

Update: unlocked Avorion in 12 hours and 44 minutes playing with only one ship. It's significantly faster than my normal speedruns. The next closest was basically three hours longer - and that was a huge outlier (I was testing a weapon mod-pack and ended up deciding they were way OP :D and so I've dialled them back a lot since then).

Even with ridiculously long mining times to build my beefy boi 10 slotter, the difficulties associated with what was effectively a self-nerf (not using explorers makes a bunch of the crossing the barrier quests a lot more difficult than they need to be), no discernible source of income (other than exploring and flogging off all the asteroids (I assume that stations violate the One Big Ship Meta ethos (I could see an argument either way))), a second self-nerf (not using shipyards to build ships is a big self-gimp (for the massive rep gain)) ....

... even with all those 'disadvantages' it's still a _large_ time saving.


I guess also not shopping for captains saved a whole bunch of hours :D

[uni790]

Personally I keep one main combat ship (mine) then build one smallish dedicated mining ship to automine sectors while I deal with anything that spawns, once hangers come into play I make a flight of salvage fighters for extra resources, beyond that though I only ever make extras to deliver the artefacts to the spots to get into the centre.

[Mad Scientist]

I pilot a large ship, and have at least 3 of the same ship escorting me with varying primarily cannons. It's enough to take on about 11 ships in the Naonite/Trinium regions. I've also made 2 salvager ships that mine the wreckages when I'm done obliterating a hostile area.

Smaller ships don't really do well in mid range or higher areas. Best to swarm with larger ships.

[rickcarson]

Originally posted by Mad Scientist:

I pilot a large ship, and have at least 3 of the same ship escorting me with varying primarily cannons. It's enough to take on about 11 ships in the Naonite/Trinium regions. I've also made 2 salvager ships that mine the wreckages when I'm done obliterating a hostile area.

Smaller ships don't really do well in mid range or higher areas. Best to swarm with larger ships.

You can unlock Trinium (by fighting) with about half a dozen size 4 ships, but you might lose a couple of them in the process. (Easily rebuilt though)

I think the essence of the one big capital ship is that you can save the resources you would have spent on a same sized escort and then when you get the next size upgrade you can just upgrade your flagship and keep going.

The advantage (especially if you spend time farming swoks) of a swarm of ships is that for any given fight you can bring along a lot more turrets.

However, there's a kind of paradox here, because most of your turrets are garbage compared to your best turret.

E.g. once you've put 12-15 slots worth of turrets onto a single ship you've pretty much used up all your good turrets (that you found in area N). You can keep farming area N for another ten good turrets, or you can press into area N+1 and spend the same amount of time, but now the turrets you're finding are area N+1 turrets instead of area N turrets, and the good ones from N+1 _will_ be better than the good ones from area N ....

However the _best_ turret (or two) from area N will still be better than your average 'good' turret from area N+1 (and maybe even most of the 'average good' turrets from area N+2).

---------

That said, I don't necessarily _recommend_ pressing on or 'speed-running'.

What I _DO_ recommend is finding one of the (many) time-sinks in the game that you enjoy and then wallow in it. Go hog wild. Do you Boo. :D

After all, as a sandbox there's a lot of ways of trading off the things you gained from the activities you enjoyed for the resources/currency of what ever activity you didn't enjoy.

E.g. maximising your _fun_ per hour rather than abstract notions of 'efficiency' gives a better _player_ payoff.

[rickcarson]

So I tried a four ship meta. One explorer, one miner (eventually a carrier), my main ship and Lady Adventurous. I slapped a bunch of hyperspace subsystems on Lady and she therefore got delegated all the ♥♥♥♥ tasks like exodus and bottan :D

It was slower than the One Big Ship Meta, all the way up to unlocking the barrier, where it was very slightly faster.

I think there's an intrinsic time cost to setting up each ship, which I never clawed back until right at the end.

--------

I have an idea that a three ship meta might be slightly better than a four ship meta, but explorer + miner wasn't it (and you need the explorer to bump up the miner missions if you run them)

That said I did kind of think that I would do a sort of leap-frogging thing where the explorer would explore an area and then the miner would move up and start a 1 hour mission in that area, rinse and repeat yada yada, and that might have been good, but the demands from 4 ships was just too much.

[Ori]

Originally posted by rickcarson:

I've seen fairly convincing arguments for the other way, though I think Bobucles might have a good point about difficulty level.

The counterpoint (OBSM - one big ship meta) is that if you only have one ship then it always has your best turrets. You don't need a fleet of mining vessels because you only need material for a single vessel, not a whole fleet. You don't need money for 20+ ships, you only need money for one ship (etc.)

As for mining the idea is you find a sector with some of those bigger than normal asteroids, and you mine them, and they're worth say 50-100k resources each (maybe more if you use raw lasers?).

So the OBSM approach is about (I assume) constantly modifying your ship for the challenges you're faced with.

--------

FWIW I don't know what the OBSM response is when you walk into a pirate stronghold and get locked down and then obliterated.

Also, I'm not saying it's a 'better' way of playing. But it's a possible approach. You can even beat the barrier with a single ship (allegedly), though instead of spoiling that I might leave it as a puzzle for people who might be interested.

--------

Also, I'm the sort of person who is happy to play games in 'non-traditional' ways even if others might argue that it's 'suboptimal', if I find that particular play style interesting or fun.

So I can see the appeal.

The only thing I can tell you for the walking into a pirate stronghold and getting obliterated is to replace the armor with stone, as it costs half the materials for over 2 times the HP. I do this all the time and it lets me smack out a capital ship that can casually solo every boss, as long as the entire exterior is turret base and stone.