This is a fantastic concept. Since the dev's stated goal is to build community and get input, I thought I'd share my first impressions as a player in case they are useful. There are also not a lot of tactics or tips threads on the forum that I can find, so I'll write about that. This is a diary of my experimentation, not a recipe!
Bounty hunter, let's go! My first impression was that I should be incrementally building a well-rounded ship with each bounty and then letting it fight autonomously. I also did this because I couldn't figure out how to control my ship very well at first. Let's call that plan A!
Whoa! OK. The big problem with my plan seems to be that beams and guns require an opening in the armor and they have to face the enemy. Since the enemy also has beams and guns facing me, combat becomes a contest to see whose ship's bow will cook/explode the slowest. Since you can't armor the opening and components are expensive to repair, bounties aren't profitable if you take much damage by frying your front end every time.
No problem, I thought. I'll use shields. Name that Plan B. I saved up for some shields, but they were knocked out too quickly. My little dudes were too slow to bring power to them to bring them back online. Well, there are these moving walkways and a fab ship editor. Hmmm...
Plan C: Maybe the secret is to have shields that can be replenished continuously through some careful placement of moving walkways and contiguous rooms. Battery banks (and ammo magazines for that matter) seem to just act as a cache, letting the energy be stored closer to where it is needed, but then when the bank is empty, things slow down to the round-trip time from the reactor (or ammo factory). Careful battery bank placement keeps shields up longer, but then they go down and I still get into an expensive front frying contest. Crap.
Well, if battery banks just store power after it is manufactured, what about manufacturing more of it (Plan D)? Put the reactors right next to where the power is used, and overbuild reactors so they don't run out. It's expensive, but maybe I can get continuously powered shields? Huh. Well that's a bad trade off. It looks like putting the reactors close to the shields means that if the shields do fall your ship explodes dramatically when the reactors are hit. Strike that approach.
One more try with the shields: What if I need a combination of ship design and tactics, and I need to stop letting it fight on its own? Label that Plan E. I'll put one layer of shields all around the ship, and build it like a Borg cube? One gun, thruster, shield, etc. on each side. Then when I get near the enemy, I rotate the shielded ship slowly so that the shields never fall. Hah. That works well. Really well. It's a little tricky to get the ship rotating but once you get the hang of it the shields never fall! Oh wait, here's a multi-electro-bolt-toting shield-busting enemy. There goes that design.
Maybe I'm thinking through this the wrong way. What if I need to make a fast pass by the enemy? Put double the thrusters on my ships that the enemy ships have, and use missiles? If I use a whole bunch of launchers and only one factory, I can dump a slew of missiles in my first shot and then speed away, overwhelming whatever defense the enemy has while I fly out of range to build more missiles! It's a fun plan -- plan F -- but it totally doesn't work.
First, it looks like doubling the engines on my ship doesn't produce a fast ship. It is very hard to get the fast pass to work and it takes some luck. You can make a fast pass only if the enemy is going the right direction. Dang. Doubling the engines doesn't seem to double the thrust, or anything like it. This doesn't seem very intuitive. I don't understand how to make a fast ship. That's problem #1.
Problem #2 is that on a fast pass, it's quite common that 100% of my missiles don't hit anything. I just throw them into space and they circle around and around, then disappear. That makes this ship design useless. Back to the drawing board.
The help documents emphasize that getting the little dudes to load the missiles is key to missile effectiveness. Plan G will be a missile launcher that fires continuously. I'll balance the missile factories, magazines, launchers, reactors, and crew so that this thing fires missiles continuously over the long haul. Huh. After some experimentation I discover that there is really no combination of moving walkways that will make this happen. The best approach is always to locate the factory adjacent to the launcher with no ammo magazines. And a reactor next to the factory. Then put some bunks in there and a fire extinguisher for good measure, then remove all the doors so that enough crew has to stay in that part of the ship and feed the missiles (because they can't get out). This is my first big success. Plan G's self-contained missile complex can be cut-and-pasted as often as I can afford it. Also I can combine this with plan E (rotating shielded cube or circle shape).
In sum:
A: well-rounded ship without shields (sucked)
B: add shields (just delays things)
C: lots of battery banks (just delays things a little longer)
D: more reactors (ship explodes)
E: slowly rotating shielded Borg cube (works very well)
F: fast-pass missile ship (totally sucks, maybe bugged)
G: autonomous missile-build/fire complexes with no doors (works very well)
Some weirdness discovered: Adding thrusters doesn't work as I would expect it to. At high speed or at certain locations of enemy ships, all missiles fired will routinely miss.
Keep up the good work. If this kind of thing is useful I can post more.
