First-time player thoughts

[Kazeto]

I don't know about ships for sale as it is, but doing racial quests (the ones you get from embassies) for a single race 0enough times will give you that race's ship. The easiest is probably the bankers' quest, you just need to thrown a few millions of credits at them.


Now moving onto the next thing, oxygen. I don't know what your oxygen capacity is, but I stopped having this problem once I got over 100 of it (any of the “walker” items—mountain walkers, water walkers, hazmat suits, or thermal isolators, depending on the planet—also help) which is something you can have by mid-teen sectors, really. The game tracks absolute distance to where you are from the pod rather than real distance as required due to the terrain being a maze, so some planets are really risky until then.

I've seen the auto-explore weird out and continue to explore for a bit longer, though, so it is a possibility that it did that in your case. But I have no idea what triggers this, and it did stop before I got across the point of no return, so I can't say if it's the same thing.


With gashers and the lack of a multi-target weapon, I don't know if you dislike crafting or simply are not aware it exists, but even without any officers that have crafting-enhancing skills, you can make items that aren't all that bad. So you can just go to an earlier sector, buy every item that is cheap enough, dismantle it, repeat with station from the next or previous sector, and after not too long you will be able to craft your own weapons. And those fairly often are multi-target.


Officer training ... once you get good at making your away team people survive, it's easy enough to get a lot of experience by sending all of your officers on away missions. The only issue is oxygen because with all 6 officers on away team you will have ridiculous amounts of health compared to the damage dealt by monsters. Add a scientist with that skill that constantly heals damage and you'll be a juggernaut (I had been walking on planets that dealt environment damage to me, and my health actually regenerated instead of being lost over time).


The one about other ships doing nothing while pirates shoot away at you, I honestly have no idea but I suspect it has to do with how race relationships work. I've actually seen other races attack each other more often than I get attacked (though, considering I have a set of weapons that can destroy anything that looks wrong at me from half a sector away, I don't blame them for not trying) and usually stuff like that evolves into a sector-based war between the two nations involved while the rest of the nations chill out, spare the really rare situations where a third race joins too (why, I have no idea).


Outside of those few, I more or less (with some more, with some less) agree with what you wrote, so I'll end there.

[yeahjim]

Kazeto,

Thanks for the advice. You're right - I'd mostly ignored crafting, at my own peril. I also hadn't ever run into hand scanners despite multiple playthroughs. That definitely makes things easier. However, I dunno, I guess I was just never a fan of the infinite spawner baddies in roguelikes.

Auto-explore is definitely wonky and can get you killed. Not in the sense of, "oh, now enemies are blocking my way back," but in the sense of your guys walking off to one corner and asphyxiating. It seems to happen more on shipwrecks and planets with ruins on the surface.

[Kazeto]

Originally Posted by yeahjim

Thanks for the advice. You're right - I'd mostly ignored crafting, at my own peril. I also hadn't ever run into hand scanners despite multiple playthroughs. That definitely makes things easier. However, I dunno, I guess I was just never a fan of the infinite spawner baddies in roguelikes.

Ah, true that, those can be annoying. But for the most part, having any area-of-effect or multi-target attack capability (I haven't ever seen the former in this game, but the latter is easy enough to obtain) makes those easier, or at least more manageable. Sure, there are still places that simply can't be completely cleaned out, but it's always possible to control their population well enough to clear the whole map of goodies and other monsters.

And if we are talking about multiplying enemies being annoying, then here's a more annoying one: puffers, the monsters that can multiply themselves on death. Admittedly, those only annoy the completionists as they deal low damage compared to other monsters, don't seem to deal any status effects nor inflict diseases, and don't even move (and thus are great for getting experience once you get a shotgun or machinegun or whatever else of that sort).

Originally Posted by yeahjim

Auto-explore is definitely wonky and can get you killed. Not in the sense of, "oh, now enemies are blocking my way back," but in the sense of your guys walking off to one corner and asphyxiating. It seems to happen more on shipwrecks and planets with ruins on the surface.

I think that one has something to do with how auto-explore doesn't stop until everything is explored and some caves and shipwrecks have tiles that count but cannot be seen without a hand scanner (or can't be seen ever, in some cases, unless there's an item I'm missing that allows teleporting during away missions). Considering that the auto-explore seems to work in small-ish steps, it's not inconceivable that it could try to reach such a spot and run like a moron between two close-but-not-yet-close-enough locations.


Oh, and it's possible to stop such foolishness of the script by simply right-clicking anywhere. So if you pay attention, that's some sort of solution.