Best Strategies and Ships for the Different Difficulties

I see a lot of nuke reccomendations here, and I've tried a lot, but nothing seems to compete with bolter drones and a full complement of projectile cannons, with one ion cannon.

Ion cannons with fire rate and range upgraded almost match the range of the projectile cannons, and the projectiles are both a highly effective point defense, in numbers. Add the bolter drones to the equation with manual targeting, and you can tear nearly any threat to shreds. The drones are also an effective missile sponge and point defense in their own right.

A fun strategy for after you have beaten the game a few times and are looking for new challenges.

All bug gun ships with no fighters. Maxed out reload time projectile cannons are super effective and if you have enough thye just melt everything and looks super good doing it.

Just remember to run when you need to.

Try it and have fun.

Capital ship, 2 energy cannons with maxed reload, 3 projectile cannons with maxed reload. It's a fun strategy, and you can make it all the way through the second system with this loadout if you are lucky. At some point you will find you have a ton of scrap, so you might as well call in reinforcements and give them a similar loadout to finish the game!

I haven't had much nuke success either Lurkily, they probably just feel weak when you are used to how op projectile cannons can be haha.

The main problem I have with nukes is that their fire rate cannot be mitigated well, and more than one of them usually just target the same ship at the same time. Maybe with manual control . . .

I usually employ no more than one energy cannon, and try to upgrade both reload and range on that single weapon. Everything else is projectile cannons with reload, bolter fighters with maxxed ship count if I have bays available. I don't bother with light weaponry (gatlings, etc) at all until I've filled out my formation and have no more heavy weapons to buy.

My bottleneck in upgrades is usually upgrade modules, but if I've filled out the upgrades mentioned above, I'll generally start dropping damage upgrades onto weapons that permit them - they're reliable upgrades in that they always improve a single stat without reducing others, so they neither cripple a weapon, nor undo the benefit of the otherwise powerful upgrades I've invested in.

I just want to say, the fact that I have a roadmap to successful fleet upgrades, and the fact that it's hard to deviate from this roadmap without suffering - even with rare weapons involved - is not a good thing. I would REALLY like to see more diverse strategies, in both weapon choice and upgrade choice, be viable.

I have some questions. The devs and in-game text seem to highly reccomend the flak cannon – however, its’ stats, when I’ve found it, do not seem to outperform the particle cannon.

You have to check what species the flak cannon comes from. The trolgar flak cannon is much more powerful than the wanderer (twice as powerful, in fact). The trolgar one is indeed more powerful than the particle cannon (125 DPS before upgrade, IIRC).

There are differences for various weapons depending on species. They are not the same, it's really important to check, otherwise you can end up with a really wimpy weapon that you thought was good.
Examples of good weapons:
- Wanderer missiles/rockets usually have very long range
- Trolgar guns tend to be more powerful (particle cannon, flak)
- Celestial / Schillae mega plasma cannons are the only good ones. Wanderer/Trolgar others are terrible and not worth the money. Celestial is a bit better vs. shields.
- Humans seem to have better plasma cannons than trolgar/wanderer.

Note: I haven't checked these stats since the new version came out.

The trick with Flak, Vulcan, energy gatlin, and some other is that they fire multiple bullets per shot (even after accounting to burst), so real dps is 2 or more X larger than is obvious from numbers.

Iam attempting to use some of the strategies here but I still seem to get wasted on the 3rd mission. I can handle 3-4 ships at medium to long range, but I always seem to get mobbed by a fleet of ships while I'm already fighting 3 or 4. 8 on 3 is tough.

Update: I finally beat it on Normal Difficulty! Yeah!