New player questions

[Grey Buddhist]

Just bought a Frigate and am wondering how to make it better/faster?
Some questions...

1) If I put stuff on it to lower my Mass, does this make it lighter...thus faster?
2) If I put stuff on it to lower engine Burn, does that help my speed? what is Burn?
3) I put 4x triple missile launchers on it, with a basic targetting computer....but it seemed to take a loooong time to take out one pirate...is this normal? It was a small/fast pirate...so would small lasers have been better against them?

Trying to make the ship faster....normal speed faster AND turbo speed faster.
Also trying to get a weapons loadout that can tear thru Pirates...or at least kill them efficiently and fast.

Thank you for any answers. Love this game.

[uraniborg]

Great, glad you love the game!

1) Mass reduction items do increase your ship speed. You should see a difference in your speed with and without the item equipped. It also increases turn speed. Other ways to increase speed include:
a) Train skills for Ship Mass Engineering, Ship Thruster Systems, Ship Afterburner Systems
b) Passive items: Thrusters, Afterburners (these stack, you can use multiples of the same item)

2) Engine burn is the rate of energy consumption and will not change your speed. You won't loose energy as quickly. The skill Ship Engine Burner does the same thing.

3) Targetting system doesn't affect weapons, it affects how many targets you can have "active" in your target list on the right hand side of the interface. Missiles should be good at taking out pirates, and 4 triples should be quite good. Sometimes you have to double-click your target, or hit the button to attack this target next to the weapon modules to make sure you're actually targetting what you think you are. Were they all loaded and pointing with a clear shot? Did the pirate use ECM and disable them? Were they cycling and firing off missiles (you could see number of missiles going down)? What types of missiles did you have and did you remember to click beneath the launcher icon to load them? Sorry this is a common mistake and comes up a lot!

Lasers are good too and the advantage is they don't need ammo, but they use up energy so you need a ship that can supply enough energy so you don't run out mid fight and get stranded out in space! For that reason I don't like using them at lower levels.

Other than missiles or lasers, another popular choice is the 20mm Auto Canons, they are my favorite. They are fast and fire a burst of 6 projectiles at once, they don't use much energy like lasers do. Don't bother trying to use 60 mm cannons or beam weapons against the small pirates because they're likely to miss the target.

[Grey Buddhist]

@ uraniborg

3) when I have a target (raider) highlighted, I also click the little icon next to the weapons that says something like target the highlighted target with all weapons. I also auto-power up all the weapons immediately when enemies are sighted. Those two seem to auto ensure enemy targets are auto-targetted and auto-fired at. I did see the enemy raider get hit...then after awhile get hit again, just seemed to take a long time...I am thinking my weapon 'recycling' time was the reason.
Launchers should auto-reload, as long as they are active, right?
I have only used the basic/normal missiles. Are the other types worth the extra expense? Which one(s) do you recommend?

First weapon I got from a raider kill was 20mm with the basic/normal ammo. I thought it was not worth using against slow/fast ships...am I wrong? I would love to put 4 of them on my frigate if they are good.
Which one is recommended: 20mm, 20mm x2, or 20mm automatic?
I thought weapons vs ship types were as follows (please let me know if it is different):

Against small/fast ships

Lasers (best)
missiles (great)
20 mm (good)
Beam-60mm-torpedoes (not worth it)

Against large/slow ships
Beam-60mm (best)
Torpedo (really good against non-moving targets)
20mm (great)
missiles (great)
Lasers (good)

On a side note, I tend to mine alot, and refine stuff alot, what is your preferred methods for the following:

- Making money fast
- Earning skill points fast

And finally, is there a way to save the game so if you die you can actually reload the save before your dead? I like saving alot...and prefer not to die as I get closer to affording multimillion ingame-dollar ships.

[uraniborg]

3) everything sounds good here. I suppose it depends how long is too-long. If weapons are being fired and the right target is getting hit, everything seems to be working. There are better missiles out there for sure. There's three damage types, energy, explosive, and kinetic. Basic missiles to 1 point of damage to each, modified by the launcher level too I think. Some missiles to a lot of damage to one type and a small amount to the other two, some do a more even spread. I usually buy different kinds of missiles that cover all the damage types, and use different missiles in multiple launchers. Some ships have resistance to one or more damage types so it's possible this can affect how long it takes to kill them.

Your list of weapons is fine, I would say that missiles can always be very good since they don't miss and you can get up to a penta launcher so the rate of fire is potentially huge.

Ya you should totally try the 20 mm Auto Cannons, even the basic ones you get from raiders are good. But the regular 20 mm cannons (not auto) that come in single or double barrels are not that great in my opinion, they have a very slow rate of fire. So the Auto Cannons are the way to go, they are the ones that look like a Gatling gun. Also they have different levels of ammo, just like the missiles do. They use a lot of ammo though so you'll have to buy a lot of it quite often.

The best way I've found to make money is by mining high level ores. Refining usually gets more money than the ore is worth but it can take a lot of time. Adamyte and Gradeon ores aren't worth very much so try to find the highest level you can. Belasite is very profitable if you can find it. They keys are to have a lot of cargo space, a lot of life support so you can stay out mining long enough to fill your hold, and mining lasers of a high enough level to make it go fast. Hiring a mining merc can help out a lot, even a combat merc with a large cargo hold can help because you can transfer ore between your cargo hold and your mercs to stay out longer. You need to watch the mers though, because if they run out of energy they stop mining and you have to tell them to go back to the station. Also if they're cargo hold is small you have to transfer the ore out quite often.

You can train the Cargo Stacker skill, buy Cargo expansions, and/or choose a ship with high base cargo. Don't use Light miners if you can get Medium or Heavy miners because the higher ones will return more ore per cycle than the light ones. Buy the best life support items you can find so you can stay out longer. I find there's a balance between having enough cargo space versus enough mining capacity to actually fill the space before you run out of life support. Try to keep them in balance to be most efficient.

To get skill points, you'll get them from leveling up so anything that gives experience helps, like mining, and killing raiders. Getting medals from achievements give a lot of skill points too. These come from doing a lot of one thing, like firing a lot of missiles, firing a lot of lasers, killing a certain number of raiders. There's a specific mining achievement for mining the first 20,000 ore for each ore type that gives 50 skill points, which is really good. So I actually went back and mined all the low level ores just to get these points.

[uraniborg]

Oh ya, as for saving you can always open the menu and hit "Save" without leaving the game, and if you die you get the option to load the last save or to continue after death. You can't have multiple saves as far as I know, but you can go out and copy your "saves" folder in the Astrox Imperium MOD folder, and if you need to you can copy it back.

[astyanyx]

Just to clarify, the game automatically saves every time you dock, undock, or gate. If the screen is loading it is saving.

[Grey Buddhist]

Thanks for the answers.

Next question...what do the numbers (on each mission) mean? I see some with 1...and others with 2. the numbers are in the upper left of the mission picture.

Also if I could buy advanced afterbuner...or advanced thruster...which is good to boost basic speed? or are both good for speed?

[Grey Buddhist]

@astyanyx - So there is no 'you died, so even if you saved you have to start over...from the very beginning' type penalty?

[uraniborg]

Thrusters affect your base speed, afterburners are a boost that uses more energy but is a lot faster, you have to click the button or hits CAPS LOCK to turn on afterburners. I usually prefer thrusters before afterburners, but I like having one of each.

[Grey Buddhist]

Basic Cloak Field Generator - If I put this on a shuttle (so I can explore the whole universe 'safely', does it keep me hidden from all enemies, always? Or am I better off putting a weapon in my 1 active slot?

also...in case my patience runs out (to get my dreadnought up and running) is there a way to cheat and edit something in the files, with notepad, to give myself enough money to buy a dreadnought?
I saw another post somewhere that someone mentioned all the game files are editable with notepad (I think), so wondering if it exists...and if it does, how to do it?

[uraniborg]

Yes it's easy to give yourself money or anything else, and the Dev, Momoguru, generally is fine with this. It's a single player game so have fun the way you want to!

You can edit most things in your 'saves\NAME' folder using the 'player_data.txt' file in Notepad or similar. Your credits are there, and level, skill points, ships, mercs, and skills you've trained. Some of it's harder to figure out, like the SKILL section refers to skills by number that are located elsewhere, in the skills_database file, so you can't immediately tell what skill is what.

You can give yourself enough money to buy anything but you also need the skill to pilot a dreadnought. You could give yourself a ton of skill points and then just train at the University in game. Other wise add the correct skill line to your file. For the dreadnought, it would be for instance:

SKILL;237;0;250

By the way, the full default path to these folders is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Astrox Imperium\Astrox Imperium_Data\MOD\saves\

Editing what ships you have directly is a bit trickier because several files need to be changed in multiple areas and you need to know how they interact.

I'm not sure if you put a cloak on how effective it is. But using a shuttle to zoom around the galaxy is a good way to do it.

[astyanyx]

Depending on death setting you either go back to the starting sector with the starting ship but keep your levels and skills and money, or you start at the last save, which is usually when you entered the sector or left the station. If there is a permadeath I haven't noticed it. However I think Momo temporarily took away the death condition slider while he is working on the first campaign story line. Any modder wanting to tinker with this can find it in the player options file as
WORLD_OPTIONS_death_penalty;0

As for "cheating" the official standpoint is this is a single player game made from the ground up for modding. It is only cheating if you say it is. You want to go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Astrox Imperium\Astrox Imperium_Data\MOD\saves and find the player_data file. The two best lines in the file are PLAYER;credits;224192.90 and
PLAYER;skill_points;2 with both of those numbers editable into the holy $#@! range. Be sure to look around, there are all sorts of moddable goodies in all your save folders, like adding stuff to the station markets.

[Grey Buddhist]

@uraniborg and @astyanyx - Thank you. It is nice to get such fast, and complete, answers back.

[Grey Buddhist]

Question:

If you have Mercs who use weapons that require ammo (missiles, 20mm, etc....) do you have to buy them ammo and transfer it to their ship to keep them using them? Or do they automatically rearm themselves?

Is there any way to buy a new/better ship for a Merc?

[uraniborg]

Yes you will need to restock their ammo in their cargo hold for them.

Currently the only way is to retire your Merc while docked at a station and hire a new one in a better ship. Actually you could edit the mercs npc_ship_data file to change their ship too but that's not part of the game itself. But it's something I do occasionally.

[Grey Buddhist]

another Merc question.

How does Merc Life Support and sector space speed work?
Does their LS and Speed match yours always? No matter what ship they are in?
Or can they be slower, and have less LS than you?
I see a good Merc I can hire (270 is cost, carrier ship), but I'm gonna be travelling in areas where LS and Speed could make a difference (areas that may have pirates/raiders, areas that we need to rush thru) and while my Frigate is adequate (lvl 3 LS items, 2x ADV Thrusters...more if I need them), I don't want to hire a merc that will die in the first harsh LS zone, or who cannot outrun pirates if we need to.

NON-Merc question: Are there any Mods that you recommend at this time?