Starship Theory – Combat and Trading Guide
There are three kinds of ship encounters in SST: Neutral, Trader, and Hostile.
Neutrals are just flying by. They won’t attack you if you don’t fire at them, and they don’t offer anything. You can Threaten them, however. If your ship is much stronger than theirs, they will pay you and leave. If it’s not, they will turn hostile, so be careful when threatening similarly armed ships. If you don’t interact, neutral ships will leave after a while.
Traders will act similar to neutral ships. The main difference is, while they’re still neutral, they will give you a few trade offers. They are displayed under the ship’s status window on the right side of the screen and will give you the details of the trade: what you’re trading, whether you’re buying or selling, how many units are up for trade, and how much credits will you get for it.
Be on the lookout for a crew member to buy, as more crew is always good if you can feed them.
Since 1.2, you can also sell crew members. Little arrows on the trade offer will allow you to decide who you want to sell.
Hostile ships will instantly enter combat with you.
Their ship status window is identical to your own, with the exception of the missing sensor stat.
Note that you can Bribe your opponent. This means that you will pay them the mentioned amount of credits, so they leave you alone and fly away. Bribes do not always work. You always lose credits, however.
The statistics shown are as follow:
Shield – the circular energy field around a ship is a shield. It will stop any projectiles and asteroids that touch it and take damage. Shields are continuously recharged by a special component, the Shield Booster. If you take out their Booster, shields won’t recharge. If you take out their Shield Cell, they won’t have any shields to recharge. Either way, both are good first targets when dealing with a shielded enemy.
The EMP Turret is very effective against shields, dealing 6 damage per shot (2 damage per second) to shields. It’s weak against hull and crew, but it’s still worth having against shields alone, as only the railgun deals more damage per second to shields.
Armor – this is the hull buffer. Armor can be repaired automatically with Armor Repairer, and it’s your first line of defense before damage is dealt with your hull. Armor plates increase your maximum armor, and they come fully repaired, so you can build plates first and worry about repairer later.
Hull – your structural integrity. If this reaches zero, your ship explodes. Game Over. You can increase your Hull hit points by building Hull braces, and your engineers will keep repairing them.
Heat – explained in the Mining section. Solar flares also deal heat damage now, so be careful about your weapon use when near a star.
Accuracy – your total accuracy, gained via manned Weapons Consoles. The more Combat skill your gunner has, the more accuracy you gain.
Evade – how likely enemy shots are to miss your ships and how likely you will evade asteroids.
When your ship is attacked, your shields take damage first. When they’re gone, the game calculates the hit – the attacker takes his accuracy and adds a random number in 1-10 range to it. That value is then compared with the defender’s Evade. If Evade is higher, the shot misses. If it’s lower or the random number was a 10, the projectile hits and damage is dealt with armor and components on hit tile. When armor is gone, the damage is dealt straight to the hull.
You’ll need one, or ideally two, Laser Turrets to be combat-ready. With two turrets, you can outdamage enemy engineer repairing, which will help you greatly.
If you can’t bribe your opponents and can’t win the fight, you can use the JumpDrive to jump away to safety. You need evasion above 0 to be able to jump, so you’ll need working engines. You also leave any crew outside the ship behind. Use Code Blue to force every crewman to stay inside the ship for a jump.
You can enable Autofire to let your turrets fire like NPCs do or aim manually. To aim, make sure your turrets are powered on, and select them, then click wherever you want to fire. Your turrets will now fire until you tell them to stop by selecting them and pressing X (or Stop Targeting from the context menu).
You can focus your fire on specific tiles of the enemy ship to disable their functions. Destroy turrets to stop them from firing, their reactors to cut power, or even their life support and walls, so they suffocate. Some fights will call for different strategies depending on enemy armaments. A safe bet is to aim for the guns if you can destroy them faster than their engineers can repair.
NPC ships will never build new components, but they will repair and replace the ones they’ve lost. So a destroyed laser turret means that an engineer will soon fly over and build a new laser turret in that spot. You can prevent this by destroying the hull underneath the component, as enemy crew won’t think to just move the damn thing one tile over.
