A shortish, overall strategy guide to Shortest Trip To Earth

An overall strategy guide to the game, in its 1.0, post-release state, aimed at beginner and intermediate players. The guide includes tips on weapon load-out and targeting, slot management, resource management, battle and cruise configurations (beyond just crew assignment), and more.

Introduction

This guide assumes that you've played through the tutorial, and understand the basic mechanics of the game.

The structure of the guide is somewhat random. One way to structure it might be to follow how the game starts: with ship and perks selection. However, I feel that unless you have a good understanding of the mechanics of the game, starting there would be overly complex, and overwhelming to a new player. We need to start with the normal, basic stuff, and then perhaps circle back to the beginning.

If you're already an intermediate or better player, some of the info might be obvious to you, but I'd still recommend at least skimming through it - the overall strategies tend to come together if you have a decent understanding of the underlying game mechanics. I don't consider myself to be particularly good at this game, and I suspect far more correct and in depth guides will be available shortly, I'm just writing this one since information seems to be very scarce at the time of writing (2019/09/05).

Updates

• 2019/09/09: Incorporated some feedback from Dr Hobo's comments re: bots to draw aggro, and farming vs. cryo.
  
• 2019/09/10: Split out weapons advice into two sections, and added more on weapons roles, as well as updates on energy weapons. Added specific tips about re-aiming weapons as the situation changes, as well a strategy to go into combat readiness (without wasting too many resources) when attacked unexpectedly on the system map. Added an entire section on crew assignments, as well as the potential use of SOS fishing.

Weapon selection

Combat is perhaps the main focus of the game, in the sense that it cannot be avoided (not that we'd want to, in any case). It's also one of the best ways to "make a profit" in the game, so it makes sense to ensure that your ship can easily take on the enemies.

Projectiles vs energy weapons

The two main options for weapons seem to be along the lines of projectile weapons versus energy weapons. At first glance, energy weapons seem to be a clear favourite, since they seem to shoot instantly, and don't use resources. The reality is a bit more nuanced.

Let's look at energy weapons first. Energy weapons require a lot of power to run. This is a problem in several ways; first, it can be problematic to power them at all. On some runs, good power sources are rare until much further into the run. Second, they cannibalise the same power that you could be using for additional shield generators or shield banks. Lastly, if your power sources take a hit, your weapons will most likely go down immediately, making them far more vulnerable than you'd think. Energy weapons are also not really "instant". They seem to apply their damage only at the end of their several-second-long effect. Although this is untested, I suspect that it may be advantageous to de-synchronise energy weapons, so that if one of them brings down the enemy shields in its own "turn", the other energy weapons get through, instead of being wasted on the shields. Update: this does not seem to be necessary in most cases, since you are unlikely to have the exact same reload time for multiple weapons.

Next, projectile weapons. These are typically either cannons, missiles, or gatling guns. Their main downsides are their heavy use of resources, and enemy point defence (PD). Some types of cannons can be reliably defeated by PD, so can be a complete waste of resources to use. On the other hand, these weapons typically only use 1 energy, freeing up the remaining for your own shields. To counter enemy PD, you should make use of volleys, where you fire all of your weapons at once. Luckily the developers have included a "hold fire" button next to the weapon quick list. Since at least one or two of your projectiles will still be taken our by the enemy, the game meta seems to favour weapons that shoot more projectiles at once rather than weapons that shoot fewer, stronger projectiles. In this sense, gatling, various miniguns and cannon-IIIs seem to work great. Once they reach the enemy ship, the effect will be instant, interrupting any weapons, PD, energy source, etc, that you aimed for. In my experience so far, they seem to be more effective than energy weapons, and can be overwhelmingly powerful. Update: energy weapons can be similarly overwhelmingly powerful, if done right. Instead of placing a heavy burden on your explosives stores, energy weapons need superior power sources, and preferably backups of good ones, in case one gets taken out completely.

Since they bypass shields, in many cases, your first volley will render a ship unable to meaningfully fight. In this case, unless it's already trying to warp away, switch to another target. Before you do though, have a look at the level of damage on the enemy ship - you can generally figure out roughly how many seconds / volleys' worth of time you have, before you're forced to switch back to finish it off.

If you only have a single target, and it's not warping away, make sure to disable your more explosives-hungry weapons. This can be done with the "Z" key, if you have the weapon selected. It may be worthwhile keeping a single, high hull damage laser on hand for this type of cleanup work. Remember that they can be swapped in during combat, at the cost of 10 seconds or so.

Weapon roles

You should think about your weapons loadout in terms of various roles you'd like your weapons to fulfil. This clarifies your tactics during the battle, but the game also seems to reward this style with better results (as opposed to just randomly selecting whatever weapon seems good, etc).

Disabling of enemy weapons: the disabling of the enemies' most dangerous weapons should be of primary importance. There are a number of ways to accomplish this on both the projectile and energy weapon side. Projectiles such as cannons and guns have the advantage that they bypass shields, so may take out really scary enemy guns before they get their first volley off. On the other hand, high evasion may make them really inaccurate, and leave the enemy guns online for a long time. On the energy side, almost all the lasers are decent at this job, as well as a variety of EMP-style guns. The cooldown on the EMP is long enough that a single gun can sometimes keep two or three enemy modules out of action permanently, while other weapons do their jobs.

Keeping the enemy busy: depending on the exact enemy composition, fires and module damage can overwhelm the enemy pretty quickly. Unfortunately many of the fire-based weapons are not very good, however weapons with a decent chance to start a fire as a secondary effect can fulfil this role. Sometimes the enemy AI pulls crew members from all over to handle the fire, crippling their effectiveness.

Cheap hull damager: especially with projectile-based builds, you should be aware of the relative cost per damage of the gun(s) you are using to finish off a disabled enemy ship. As an example, a Cannon-III is a great alpha strike weapon, frequently disabling one or more enemy guns on the first volley, but at 10 explosives per shot, is not economical. A gun which costs 1 explosive for a 3-damage volley is 3 or 4x better at this, but an energy weapon would be ideal. Of course, make sure you can take out the enemy ship quick enough, in case it starts to warp away.

Additional combat tips

When attacked from the rear

Fights where the enemies show up behind you can be particularly annoying (especially if they are using projectile weapons, as you will have hopefully set up your point defenses at the front, knowing that most fights happen from that direction). Your main issue is with your PD being in the wrong place, both to stop projectiles, and potentially, boarding parties. In these types of fights, do the following:

• Prioritise enemies with projectile weapons even more than usual. In terms of enemies with energy weapons, nothing changes.
  
• Remember that you can switch modules on the fly. The starter ship actually has hybrid slots in the top / bottom left of the ship, and you can move your PD here on the fly. This involves a 10 second downtime, but is usually worthwhile.
  
• One thing to remember is that power sources and shields should not be swapped out, the downtime will cause problems.
  
• Similarly, weapons cannot charge while swapping places.

Splitting your attacks on the first volley

If the enemies are particularly numerous, or you have a serious weapons advantage, you might consider splitting your attacks on the first volley already. I would only recommend doing this if you have 5 or more weapons, and you're fairly sure that the first 4 will already take the one ship out of commission for a while, and any more would be a waste. n all other cases, disable your primary target first (which is either your main threat, or the easiest one to kill).

Crew layout

Part of your "battle stance" preset should be the position where your free-flowing (repair, fire, and security) crew members stand. Some of the crew - especially fire bots - can be painfully slow to move, so I would recommend placing them somewhat centrally, and spread out to cover the entire ship. Security crew members should be toward the front of the ship by default, and moved to the back immediately in the event of a ship attacking from the rear.

As Dr Hobo comments below, a good mid-to-late-game strategy can be to pick up every bot that you can. They do not consume resources, so they are really just a cash sink, and you might be swimming in credits at this point. Make sure to spread them out all over the ship, so that they can easily get to fires and repair jobs, but perhaps even more importantly, to draw enemy aggro away from your more valuable crew members.

Point defences

Point defences are awesome. They take down slow moving enemy projectiles, and importantly, boarding parties. For this reason, I'd recommend at least 2 PD, but you can feel free to go much higher (I think on one run, I had 8 main weapons and 5 PD, for reference). Pay attention to their firing radius and time, as those are their main stats. It's definitely worthwhile to put a very good gunner on these (though perhaps, less important than on the primary weapons).

On some ships, their close layout seems to make multiple PD likely to target the same individual incoming projectiles, which more often than not, is a waste. You might consider breaking these up by upgrading one of the hybrid slots to a weapon slot, and installing the PD elsewhere.

Another tip is that PD mounted in the centre or even towards the rear of the ship is definitely not wasted. Often, the AI will target your mid or rear ship, and these PDs will have plenty of time to take these down.

Frequently re-aim your weapons

Re-aim your weapons after every volley or two, if / as necessary. Two main events trigger this - firstly, as soon as you actually disable an enemy weapon, you may want to switch to taking down another weapon (assuming your aiming is accurate enough to target individual modules, which is possible with energy weapons). The second main event is the disabling the enemy engines or bridge, which lowers the ship's evasion. This makes your aiming area much more precise, which means that you might be able to target high-priority weapons which were previously not easy to hit (such as those clumps of weapons on the wings / arms of later ships). This will happen quite frequently, and you'll find that your less accurate weapons are now aimed at a tiny area squarely in the middle of the enemy ship, where nothing worthwhile exists. As mentioned previously, never aim your weapons before the enemy ships come to rest; if you do, they will merrily fire off into the void, with you getting frustrated about how inaccurate your guns are.

Combat and cruise stances on steroids

Most players are aware that there are buttons for saving and loading crew task assignments. In this section, we'll go over some additional tips.

Combat refit 201

You should definitely use the crew assignment saving and loading feature heavily, but you can also take the concept much further. Unfortunately, most of it is manual micro.

• Certain modules are not useful during combat, such as sensors. They can (and should be) powered off to redirect power to weapons and shields. You can also completely replace them just before (or during) combat with weapons, point defence, structural integrity modules, etc.
  
• Other modules which are worth replacing just in time include cryosleep, farms, research modules.
  
• Consider that container modules are similarly not useful during combat. If you remove them, you will temporarily be in an "excess" state, meaning movement on the map is not allowed, but no other negative factors will be applied.

The above strategy swapping of modules is very powerful, making your ship effectively have several more slots than it really does (at the cost of several module storage slots being constantly used by your replacement modules). It's main downside seems to be player sanity and tedium.

More mundane tips on stances

If you're not pulling module swapping tricks to get your ship into combat readiness, it's really just a matter of saving your crew assignments and clicking the "load" button. When you do this out of combat, it all happens deceptively fast; unfreezing from cryo-sleep is instant, and your crew seem to get to their stations really quickly. Don't let this fool you, if you are in a combat situation, or if you even just have an enemy ship chasing you on the map, this plays out much more slowly. Getting your crew to their stations can mean getting the first volley off before the enemy can, or vice-versa. To ensure that you're ready whenever possible:

• Always switch to combat mode before a warp jump. Since you don't know where you'll be landing in the other system, and quite often you are immediately attacked by one or more enemy fleets.
  
• Since the slowest part seems to be the unfreezing of the cryo process, and this is instant out of battle, you generally don't have to wait for your ship to reach full battle readiness. Unfrozen, your guys can usually reach their weapons stations before the first volley charges, and it seems that their skill is immediately applied to their weapon countdown (i.e. your weapon might drop from 13 seconds to 9 seconds as soon as the gunner is in place, even if we're already at 8 seconds charging, and the crew just got there).
  
• Obviously, always be on battle readiness before any sector exit nodes.
  
• Conversely, I'm yet to see an actual battle mini-game started from an event node, so it's generally not necessary to switch. Update: an event involving a monolith triggered a battle, still unsure how frequent this type of thing is.

Unexpected attacks on the system map

Sometimes you will get attacked unexpectedly on the system map, especially during the early game where your sensors are worse than the enemy's. This is bad, because you will be in travel mode, and by default your crew will take at least 10-20 seconds to unfreeze and reach their assigned places. A few simple tricks can help make this situation manageable. As soon as you get attacked, you should immediately pause, switch to the combat preset, and cancel any ship move order you have going. This gives you a few seconds while the enemy ship travels to you. Next, dodge the enemy ship by giving a little move order to the side. Your ship is generally faster than the enemies' ships, so you could just keep running around until you are ready to fight. For the first 10 seconds or so, your organics consumption won't even be much higher than usual, since your crew is still busy unfreezing. As a last step, pick a spot you want to visit regardless of the enemy attack - typically an unvisited event location, and move near it. If we're going to be giving the enemies a bit of the ol' run around, might as well make the fuel used actually useful. Be careful, don't go too near the event, or you will actually automatically start it. This can be a legit strategy, since this buys you extra seconds, especially on those multi-stage events.

Resource management

In a large part, the game revolves around managing resources, and the supporting activities around this topic. We'll start with some general observations and tips, and then move on to specific resources and strategies.

Resource management overview

• Try to keep a nice empty buffer in your stores for most resource types (with some exceptions). This is because you should be visiting basically every point of interest on the system map, and taking every fight (unless your ship is unusually weak in combat). Your spoils should then fill up your stores very quickly. You do NOT want to have to dump resources, and the convert to fuel option is only marginally better than dumping (it converts at a horrible 10:1 ratio).
  
• Whenever you visit a station, make sure you sell off some of your resources, if they are above some threshold. I normally like to keep metal and synthetics at around 50-60% full, fuel at around 80-85% full, organics at 60%, explosives close to 90% (if I'm running a build that is heavy on projectile weapons). At some point, you will likely find yourself having far more of some resources than you can reasonably sell, so it's important to start this trend as soon as you're doing well. If the station you're in happens to have lots of capacity to buy your resources, consider scrapping unused modules you may have forgotten about.
  
• Conversely, do not scrap modules before you start to have a storage problem. Some modules can contain 3-4x as much resources as a single resource pack can store (quite aside from the fuel costs to make a resource pack), so they are very effective resource containers, too. When scrapping to free up space, always scrap in the order that makes most sense - starting with modules which only give you resources you have a lot of storage for, and / or modules which yield fewer resources (a slot is a slot, etc).
  
• If you happen to have modules which convert from one resource to another, they can be a good option to use, if you find yourself with excess materials. Always consider these when you're in excess. Other options for using resources quickly are drone repairs (synthetics), medbay (organics), repairing modules (synthetics), or repairing hull (metal). Another option might be crafting, though these tend to be sub-optimal, and you generally don't have space for modules, if you're in an excess situation. Always run through this checklist mentally, before you dump or convert resources.
  
• It's rare, but keep an eye out for stations which are willing to buy a resource from you for the full price. It can be worth it to sell a bit extra in these cases.
  
• Some modules are actually worth more when scrapped than their buying price. Most of these tend to have 3+ exotics in them, as well as other resources in the 50-100 range. This is fairly rare again, but well worthwhile to keep an eye out for.
  

Fuel management

• Fuel can be problematic to source, so it is generally better to have a terrible engine which has good fuel efficiency, than to have a top tier engine which requires 50 fuel to move.
  
• In some cases, it can be worthwhile to keep two engines on hand, and to keep swapping them, though the notes about sanity do applier here as well.

Organics management

• Make sure you identify individuals who have unusually high food requirements. -5 is the norm, but this number can easily go to -15 or more. Crew like this should either be in cryosleep, or producing organics.
  
• Organics making modules don't just make food, they also automatically zero the assigned crew's organics needs! This makes them far more useful than they initially seem. Note, however, that a max tier farm module only allows 3 crew 6 crew, while cryosleep can go up to 8. Thanks to Dr Hobo below for the correction about the max size; in general, if you have to pick between farming and cryo where they cater to equal numbers of crew, you should always prefer farming, as they are net positive as opposed to net zero. However, on average, the cryo modules you find will generally have a slightly larger capacity than the farms (by 1-2 crew), so it's a delicate balancing game. I tend to use a healthy mix of both.
  
• Try to ensure that you have a very low organics burn rate when travelling around the system map. A slightly positive number would be even better, if possible.
  
• If you have a decent or positive organics rate, using weapons which consume organics can be a great idea.
  
• Try to keep a spare cryosleep module in storage, in case your main one takes a hit and gets destroyed. Few things sink a ship faster than having another -60 organics consumption all of a sudden.
  
• Organics will be the main limiting factor to your number of crew, and the crew in turn, will limit the number of modules you can use which require (or really need) an operator. Of course, this is in addition to the number of slots on the ship in the first place. As an example, however, if you have 6 main weapons, you will certainly need 6 crew manning them. You will definitely have at least 1 bridge and 1 shield crew. Some repair, fire, and security crew, as well as operators for 2+ PDs will be required, which means that you have at least 10 operators which need some form of cryo sleep, or meaningful work during cruise. Plan ahead in terms of cryo sleep and farms.

Metals management

• Metals are fairly important for repairing your ship, and also critical for upgrading core slots to hybrid and then weapons slots. Depending on your strategy, you may want to have two or three extra weapons slots, which would each need at least 1000 metal. Depending on your ship and storage options, it might be difficult to even amass this much metal, so plan ahead. Straight after such an upgrade, you probably also want to have a little bit of metal on hand for emergency repairs, in case you have a bad fight.
  
• As the tutorial points out, repairing hull is actually cheaper at stations, so do so when you can. It might be worthwhile to switch off the auto repair feature, and micro this manually, if / when necessary.
  
• Towards the late game, if you are doing well, metal might also be in a massive surplus. Some weapons use metals to fire, and they can be good alternatives to explosives based weapons.

Credits management

• Your main source of income will probably be / should be selling of resources you've won through events and fights.
  
• If you happen to have several low-organics-needs crew members with high research capability, it can be easily worthwhile to have a research module for when you're moving around on the map.
  
• Crysleep modules which generate income don't tell you how much they make, but in my experience, it can be pretty decent, equalling the output of research modules.

Exotics management

• Exotics are essentially alternate currency. They can generally be sold en-masse to stations for decent money, and upgrading to weapons slots also requires 10 (I think).
  
• Keep 3-4 on hand for traders who you don't wish to buy their wares from. They typically will give you 50+ credits for the exotic, plus 15 or so of some resource, making it a great deal.

Crew skills assignment

In this section, we'll take a look at some of the main areas you can assign your crew to. Clearly, you want them to train skills that will bring the most benefit to you. In general, if you can support it, you'll want to have your bridge, shields, and all of your guns and point defence systems manned. But beyond that, what should your priorities be?

Dedicated bridge crew

You should leave at least one permanent crew member on the bridge, making sure that both their travel and combat preset is the bridge room. This is because when the last bridge crew leaves the room, weapons and shields that are unmanned will have their effects reset. In other words, you will start the battle with your shields uncharged, and if your crew are still running around, your weapons not charging. Since this crew member will be permanently in the bridge, it makes sense to train their bridge skill to max. Also, importantly, only use reasonably low organics using crew members for this role (-4 or -5, etc). It makes no sense to have a -17 person standing in bridge eating all the food. Having those as secondary bridgemen is fine, of course, they can join once they are out of cryo.

Dedicated sensor crew

By dedicated, I mean a crew member whose primary skill is sensors, and will spend most or all their time operating the sensors. Since sensors don't do anything during combat, this person would still have a separate role during combat. If you have the crew to spare, having someone train up sensors is an excellent idea, because the bonus scales to double radius (IIRC), meaning that you're actually seeing 4x more area on the map. The first, obvious way this helps is for you is to highlight additional event locations you might otherwise miss. The second is just as important, by scanning far-away locations, you can often optimise the order in which you want to visit them in any given system. Lastly, they tend to alert you to enemy fleet locations before they surprise you, removing a minor irritation and potentially dangerous situation.

Dedicated farmers

Since farms also serve as immediate cryo-bays for their crew, it is a strong option. One skill point generates 1 organic unit per 100 ru. 100 ru seems to be roughly one line across the screen in a system. On average, it seems that you'd probably do around 100 ru (or perhaps 150) to complete a system. If a sector has 8-10 systems, that puts us at around 800 to 1500 ru travelled. To compare maxing farming points versus just using whatever you happen to have, let's assume we have a shroomery with 3 slots. On the default side, we may have a single highly trained crew member with say 6 skill, plus two more, with skills at 3 and 2. This brings us to 11 skill in total, or, 110 skill points applied over 10 sectors. With a dedicated crew scenario where we max farming, this would be our starting point, roughly increasing by one with each sector. This works out to 215 skill points over the course of the 10 sectors (the crew top out at their respective points). At 110 skill points, our range of 800 to 1500 ru per sector would give us 880 to 1650 organics produced, while at 215, it would yield 1720 to 3225. Put another way, roughly in the region of two times as much, as if we hadn't trained it. Lower starting points push the ratio to closer to 2.5x. So, is it worth it to do this? If you are able to reliably offload organics at stations, this is a great way to make some money on the side. If you have decent storage capacity, and are diligent in offloading organics, you should rarely have wastage. If you are simply selling the organics to buy other resources you're short on, you're going to be doing so at a 50% loss (sell at 1, buy other resources at 2). To compensate, I'd recommend using a very efficient engine. You're essentially trading fuel for organics when you travel - something you have to do in any case - so you might as well optimise the ratio at which the conversion happens.

Dedicated researchers

Unlike food farms, research modules don't zero your crew's organics usage. They are also generally quite limited in space, with 3 crew being the largest I've seen. They produce 1 credit per 100 ru travelled per skill point, although the seem to be "advanced" versions with even more limited crew space (I've only ever seen 1-crew versions of the advanced kind), which yield 2 credit per 100 ru. The first question is what the break even point is for having a crew member do research, versus grow food, versus be in cryo.

• Research vs cryo: profitable as long as [research skill] > [organics consumption]. As an example, a crew member with 7 research and -4 organics use is generally profitable, unless you find yourself having to constantly buy organics at 2x the price, in which case it is a slight loss.
  
• Research vs food production: profitable as long as [research] - [organics consumption] > [food skill]. Example: a crew member with 8 research, -4 food consumption and 2 food growth skill is producing 8 credits per 100 ru at the cost of 4 food, instead of generating a nett of 2 food.
  
• Research vs standing around: obviously, anything is better than consuming food without doing anything productive.

Similar to the food calculations, we can estimate research output over the entire game. A single crew member of skill 4 would generate 320 to 600 credits in the entire game. If we constantly upgrade the research skill, this would scale to 600 to 1125 credits. The advanced research module, with its double generation, might be worth considering.

A few final notes about research / credits. The main advantage of research is that it directly generates the game's currency, which can immediately be spent. It never needs to be converted to fuel, and you can always convert it to other resources at stations at a 50% loss. It is also the primary currency that you use to buy modules, repairs, and crew members. As such, it is a more convenient form of currency than organics. However, unlike farms, you are inherently losing organics while producing research, so it's generally done at a small disadvantage. At the end of the day, experiment with what trade-offs work with your ship, available slot space, modules, crew, and general situation.

Starting the game

Ship selection

At the beginning, your ship selection is likely to be severely limited. I've found the starting ship to be quite difficult in the late game, however it's plenty good enough to unlock the medium-sized ships, which simply require a few sectors to be completed. Those in turn should be enough to unlock the largest ships, which are generally more than enough to beat the game with. At that point, I suppose the game's charm would be similar to most rougelikes, in the sense that you try to beat the game with increasingly more odd builds, most of which are actually less powerful than the ones you originally beat the game with (but perhaps even more fun!).

Perk selection

Not all perks are equal, nor is their cost necessarily an indicator of the value you're getting. Keep this in mind when choosing perks. Typical examples are spending 2 fate to unlock 1 exotic resource, while you can just buy a module plus extra resources with the same number of fate points, scrap the module, and end up with your exotic plus a few hundred resources for the same price. At the early stages, you will likely have a fair amount of fate points to spend, but not a lot to spend it on, so perhaps just taking everything that looks good can work.

In general, I recommend having a drone repair and medbay capability for all ships as a backup feature. Late game crew are incredibly valuable due to their skill levels, and losing them should be avoided.

Know your ship and game plan

Take a good look at your ship when you start out. One aspect to look out for is hidden hybrid slots, which can be good to know about, for later PD installation or weapons slot upgrades. Identify unused or sub-optimal container modules. On the starting ship for example, 1 organics container tends to be unnecessary right off the bat (though you may choose to keep it installed). Typically, single-resource containers make less than perfect use of space, especially on smaller ships. This might be overwhelming at first, so play a fair bit, and soon enough it will become second nature.

Have a good understanding of what you currently have installed, what you can do without, what your ideal endgame setup might look like, and so on. This way, you can always make decisions that progress you towards the next step in your plans. And, since the game is somewhat random, you kind of have to be ready when something comes along, so that instead of accidentally scrapping a module you say "ah, yeah, I've been looking for that for 4 sectors now".

Random tips

In this section, we'll go into some tips that don't fit in anywhere else in the guide.

S.O.S. fishing

The S.O.S. signal can be used when you've say, run out fuel. It essentially gives you the ability to summon enemies to your location. Sometimes they may be straight up helpful, but usually the result will be a fight, which hopefully leads to resource gain. In my experience, these fights tend to be slightly above average in difficulty for the sector you are in, and may well scale in some way (I haven't abused this feature enough to really know).

Nevertheless, if you find yourself doing well but perhaps low on resources, remember that you can summon a fight often resulting in 2-3 modules, just by using the SOS button. This can be useful if you've recently gained in combat strength, but have had fewer encounters than ideal.

Wrap-up

That's it for now, hopefully this guide has been useful to you. I might update it from time to time, if I have time to play, and happen to learn something new. As mentioned, I'm relatively new at the game myself, and only really posted this guide because there seems to be a lack of guides out there. I've outlined my own experiences with the game so far, and I'm sure there are many other valid strategies - in fact, if you have feedback or tips for me, I'd love to hear them! :)

[Aiven ✞]

Good guide. A lot of the fun with such games for me is to figure stuff out myself, but each to their own. I finished the game on easy with the Easy Tiger without module swapping (that I didn't think about), after unlocking 4 expensive permanent perks first (restarting the game a couple of times).

[UUDO]

I'd like to use these tips for building the STE official wiki website. How does that sound?

[Shiro]

last thing I can't skip is targeting reactors. At least in some cases, there is possibility to break most enemy's reactors, culling his energy supply. This doesn't really affect physical weapons, point defences, nukes or boarders - unless you manage to break ALL reactors (those escort ships I mentioned might have just one reactor, for example). But energy deficit affects greatly shields and energy weapons; ECMs and engines are also tend to be disabled, making further hits easier.
Of course sometimes reactors are spread and its better to hit weapons anyway... its all depends on enemy loadout.

[Shiro]

on the other hand, I didn't really experienced much need to manually stop in case I'm attacked - having engine switching or storages uninstalled stops me automatically :)

anotheg thing I want to mention is that when multiple enemies are attacking, often (especially in early sectors) its one primary ship with weaker escort(s). Frequently, escorts don't even have (decent) point defences. This allows to just send DYI fuelpack nuke there, pretty much eliminating escort instantly; fire actually deals decent damage against modules

[Shiro]

For using 2 engines and/or unequipping storages: notably this makes player unable to move while modules are being installed, and in case of storages you can't move at all. So this makes player unable to prepare to ambush with merely preparing while fleeing.
In my previous experience, even just loading combat preset is detrimental, as energy hunger you mentionned (energy weapons + shields) means that I must have extra reactor for combat module-build - and I had it not installed in travel build...
now that I am more experienced I can tell that in that case, its better to have some of storages installed instead of weapons, which means you at least can call alarm while enemy is coming, then stop and change modules. Since energy weapons take time to pierce thru shields anyway, you won't lose much especially if weapons that stay are EMP rays that are supergood against shields anyway

[Eurotrash]

Thanks for the comments & tips Dr Hobo! I've updated the guide slightly :)

[Dr Hobo]

Good guide!

Although, the farming modules go all the way up to 5 crew - you actually see quite a few rat ships with them but they seem to be very rare as loot. I prefer them to cryosleep since if you can get a positive income, you can safely sell more of your food to stations and almost all stations will buy it from you.

Also I recommend buying every drone you come across and can afford - almost all the drones are combat capable and sheer numbers will win boarding engagements. Spread them across your ship so theres always one to draw aggro. Plus no food upkeep.