Here is a small guide of what "helped" and hindered me progressing in the game at 1.3.5, after the beta fight changes.

I aim to get all game mechanics. I know I missed some, and that they're due to change.

I'll take any remarks into account =).

There are 8 different ships available to the player, each with their strength. Enemies got a few more. Those ships are shown in detail in the (currently only other) guide by bonzai101. These ships are:
- gunship (currently buyable from the "start" shop)
- assault (starting ship)
- tech (currently buyable from the "start" shop)
- pulsar (currently buyable from the "start" shop)
- lancer (currently buyable from the "start" shop)
- dreadnaught
- carrier.
- rogue.

Ships equipements vary and each one has it's specialty. Some have automatic weapons, and "targeted" weapons (which you have to aim manually), and can have "targeted" abilities. Also, your ships can be slotted with specific upgrades which includes active abilities or passive ones.

Ships can basically be set into these categories:
- small & "targeted abilities" damage dealing => tech, lancer, rogue.
- "automatic fire" damage dealing, in order of size, the gunship, the assault and the dreadnaught.
- support ships, pulsar focussing on repairs / boost while the carrier focuses on placing turrets & launching fighters.

Ships have "hull" and "shield" representing how much punishment it can take. Shield regenerates when untouched for a dozen of seconds, but as long as it's there, it protects completely your hull (except from one specialized shield piercing beam). If completely empty, shields enter "restart" mode, which takes 30 seconds, and sets the shield to full capacity once finished. Enemies work by the same rules and can mostly equip & evolve much like what a player can (more on that later).

As stated above, ships have different "abilities", and specialisations. They come in two different ways : experience and attachments. Attachements regroup weapons, abilities, and simple upgrades.

Weapons.

Each ship is limited to some kind of weaponry, making it somewhat unique. A ship can either equip:
- a "special" iconic weapon, like drone launcher (carrier), lance (lancer) and the rogue weapon (initially photon blast, but comes in a variety of names).
- a missile slot or a cannon slot (gunship, assault, dreadnaught)
- beams, which is the default weapon otherwise.

Special case for the dreadnaught, as it can equip a torpedo launcher, easily the best weapon in the game. Weapons are the "round" slot in your ship. All ship must have a weapon, it's not possible for you to remove it's last weapon.

Weapons can come with a level, and / or a modifier. The higher the level, the better the weapon is. If there is a modifier on a weapon, it is stronger than the "default" counterpart.

Example:
- the "burst cannon 1" can become a "burst cannon 3" dealing significantly increased damage.
- the "spider missile 1" is similar to the "strike missile 1" except it deals significantly increased damage by launching more missiles.

Abilities

Some attachments are abilities, and provide "activable" actions to your ship. The assault for example tends to have attachments giving it abilities to boost it's damage. The carrier will have the ability to deploy turrets & mines and so on.

Targeted abilities include buffs & repairs, and also some activated attacks, like the tech's clouds.

Targeted abilities & weapons launched by your opponents all have an animation, and they should be avoided. However, since there is no indication about where they're shooting, it's somewhat hard to do sometimes.

Upgrades

The rest of possible attachments are upgrades, they're passive and provide different bonus to your ship, like the ability to repair passively its hull, regen shields faster or give more damage, more shield, more hull...

That's about it for attachments.

Experience

There is a last amelioration possible for your ships, it's experience. AS they fight battles (and survive), your ship become more experienced. Getting to "regular" requires 3000 xp, "veteran" takes 4500 more xp and the last one is "elite" at 6000 more xp. Each level gives you a choice of 3 abilities which are similar in effect to upgrades.

Criticals

Last one, and it's a malus this time. When your ship die, you get "critical" damage. Criticals must be repaired buy buying a repair option in a shop, otherwise it's permanent. Their effect goes from merely crippling to nearly game-ending, and generally are the opposite of what you get in upgrades. When you get more than 5 of those on a ship, there is a chance of the ship being killed rather than disabled in combat.

The game itself is cut into 6 "sectors", which are themselves cut into a number of linked "nodes" (up to 20 as far as I've been able to tell). Everytime you move from a node to an unvisited one, you'll get a few "event" choices. There are 3 kinds of nodes:
- nodes with names on them. Those are shops, or quests.
- nodes with no names on them. Those are random events.
- yellow nodes with written "exit" on top of it. Do I really explain ? Ok, it enables moving to the next sector. The last sector contains the game's boss at the "exit".


In order to be succesful in moving around, there is 3 things that you must take into account:
- danger level. The higher it gets, the more power the ships you face have.
- supplies. Without supplies you will die as it tends to replace the game's event with random harmful ones. Like, instead of getting in a shop to buy supply, you get ambushed. Instead of an encounter you get no fight and increased danger level.
- your fleet must get stronger. This is mostly done by getting money & experience to buy new ships & attachments but you do get loot from missions which can go from next to nothing up to a dreadnaught (fairly rare though).

Currently, danger is set at 0 at each sector start, and raises by 1 for each node visited. Already visited nodes don't bring events back but do increase the danger level. Also, shops increase the power level.


At "low" danger level, enemy ships have a selection of multiple malus which are mostly equivalent to critical damage. At higher level, their equipment is replaced by higher level equipment and they get (potentially multiple) bonus mostly equivalent to what you gain when you gain levels. The sector you are currently in also applies bonus and malus to the enemy ships and enemy fleet composition - the farther in the game, the stronger they are.

Moving to unvisited nodes trigger events.

You generally get a choice of actions or get thrown directly into a fight. Sometimes you don't have a choice and nothing happens.

I won't spoil the events here, but basically, some choices will earn you rather high rewards, others will enable you to flee, and others to choose to fight (or not). An event may also trigger a quest, completion of which is generally worth it.

Completing an event may give you attachments, ships, supplies & credits. Finishing a combat will also award you experience for your ships. Being further along in the game improve the choice of attachements available (lvl 3 attachments are "common" late game and rare at the begining).

Currently, at the start of the game a fight nets about 2000 credits and 600 xp, and one near the end is about twice as much as this.

When choosing to fight an encounter, a battle starts. This pits you in a death fight against waves of opponents, sometime with things to protect, to destroy in addition to the spawning fleets.

About the mechanics of combat themselves, it's pretty "simple" individually, but since fights can be up to 5 VS 15, the pause button becomes your best friend rather fast.

Aggro

Aggro mechanics are pretty simple. The enemy shoots of the closest "first" found ship, unless it's been fired upon. In this case, it will focus on the one that dealt him the most damage. If you need to "spread" the damage of enemies, just pause, have each ship shot something different and watch the AI change targets.

Spawns

This is the complicated part. There are currently multiple spawn mechanic at work. All enemies seem to spawn in "waves", which then can (or not) be roaming the battlefield. Waves content and size are capped depending on what your fleet is composed of, and of the danger level, and of the sector you're in. The biggest the ships in your fleet, and the bigger the fleet, the biggest the opposition can get and the more numerous it can get.

As far as I've been able to notice there is no scaling to the equipment / xp of your ships.


Back to spawning mechanics, they can be of the following type:
- a wave spawns (possibly part of it behind and the other one in front of you), attacks you, and when it's cleaned-up another one appears.
- the spawns are location based. For example, mission involving capturing shipyards usually spawn an enemy wave when approaching said shipyard.
- the spawns are already there on the map at start.
- the spawns are event based (bring an cargo ship to said location, spawn).

Spawn type is dependant on the mission itself and has to be learned by trial and error.

For all spawn types but when it's already in the map, the quantity of enemies is capped. So if for example, you complete an event with killing half a wave whose size is the very maximum your fleet can get, you'll get another half wave. If you had cleaned everything, you would have gotten an entire wave. This is not true for when spawns are already on the map, then it's very possible to get opposing fleets 4 or 5 times larger than what you can handle. Also, devs are working on them but some missions are bugged.

Spawn quality & number

As stated above, the enemies you will face are mostly a "random" assortment of ships, whose number and quality scale to:
- the danger level,
- the amount of ships in your fleet.
- the sector you're in.

Basically at a low danger level and early in the game, enemy ships will spawn with several malus which are similar to criticals for your ship. So you'll fight ships with no starting shield, reduced damage, and reduced shield / hull.

On the opposite side, at higher danger level, you'll get high quality attachments in the enemy ships, multiple abilities, and bonus equivalent to your xp bonus for them too.

It's therefore a given for danger to remain as low as possible until you can afford to take on more dangerous opponents. Generally danger lvl 6 is suicidal before good xp / attachments are on your ships.

Attachments

Attachments are always a good idea, even if in a list of 20 possible buyable attachments, there is maybe 2 or 3 which are applicable to your fleet. It makes your fleet stronger and no scaling of any kind is involved, making it a sure way to get a power increase.

Ships
You should be careful when buying new ships. Why would you want to refrain from buying ships, you say ?

First of all because the enemy fleet instantly scales to the ship in the battle. What's nice is that it is also true if you lose a ship in a fight. In a 3 wave fight, if you lose half your fleet in the first wave, the next waves become smaller. Anyway, when you buy a ship, there is a sudden size increase in the opposition. That means that the tactics you were using suddenly need to be completely reworked, because what worked with 3 ships against 6 will not generally not work at 4 against 8. The "bigger" the new ship, the bigger the gap. This is my main "wipe" cause - I'm getting surprised by this sudden increase of strength as it requires an heavy rework of the strategy I've used and often they simply get too strong to beat, full stop. If it combines with a danger level increase (which often happens, because danger increases when visiting nodes, and shops count as nodes), it's even worse.

To give an example, what I mean is that if you "drop" an early dreadnaught, you will face, in most fight until end-game, a command ship (that's the large one from the tutorial), or up to a dozen small ones, but if you stay with 3 the starting ship, you will not see one, ever, and never get more than 7-8 enemy ships in a single fight.

The devs do claim that this scaling mechanic is in your favor but frankly it's difficult for me to see it in game.

Others

Other things to buy ? Yes, you should repair any critical damage you've got as some are close to being game ending (like the shield leak) and / or counter whatever you've gained from levelling. If you're in danger of being out of supply (usually not if you fight every encounter) you should buy supply.

Otherwise, keep your money for subsystems & ships. You'll notice after a few games which store sell what. The store "name" and description gives a good indication of what's in it and should be used to determine which path you'll use.

Why buy stuff ?

The final boss has "fixed" HP and fighting capabilities, you do have to increase your fleet size, although I've yet to find an optimal set-up. You have to choose to keep a low profile, but that prevents you from Xp-ing and equipping your ships if you buy only at the end of the game. Also, the later in the game you're at, the bigger the gap gets since it's also tied to danger level.

With experience and with your playstyle, you might find some set-up which fit you well and make you efficient at the game.

Tips:

- contrary to what your common sense may have dictacted, there is no reason why you should not buy only one ship or even no ships at game start. Keeping money to spend in an early sector 1 shop might give you the option to start with stuff unavailable with the default start. Enemies scale to your ship & fleet, so you're safe to go with a minimlist fleet until you find another ship shop. This can be a good way to understand the game's mechanic better as there are less ships in the screen.
- priorize attachments over new ships because of the scaling mechanic.
- never get in a fight with danger level 6 before you get some good XP / attachments on your ships.
- choose the shorter path.
- avoid shops if you don't need to buy stuff.
- NEVER, EVER, run low on supplies. No supplies means 2 danger level / sector and then death.
- choose to fight your way out of situations. Currently my feeling is that event barely ever get more loot as a reward compared to a fight, but since they don't give XP, and quite often give nothing at all...
- don't complete events which are not in your way to the exit. Too dangerous to get in a fight at danger 8-9 because you wanted to complete this or that.
- visit shops last. When doing a run, try to do shops at danger level 6+. Since there is no fight in shops (generally) you're safe. This helps maximise your money / XP.

In combat, while there is a defense bonus when not moving, kiting will make 80 to 90% of shots miss. Next best thing are drones. Any damage to hull can more or less be considered permanent unless you've gotten hull upgrade repair in attachment / with level up.

For the final boss, you will need high damage to hull. Keep that in mind when choosing new ships. Pulsars are not going to be able to beat the final boss by themselves.

Preferences:

I'm not fond of micro-management, so my playstyle tends to favor "passive" stuff.

I currently have the most fun starting with an Assault + Gunship, keeping money for a better ship in the next ship shop. I currently would buy more of them with a few carriers. My choice of weapon is missiles. I feel like it's a better weapon compared to the guns because even if it's easy to avoid the enemy does not avoid anything, because it's an area weapons and quite often enemies are on top of each other, and because the longer range makes your fleet that much safer when kiting / fighting as a whole.

I tend not to use rogue / lancer because they're too fragile & fast, often rushing in front of my assaults and dying. But if managed properly, the extra damage those do is game-turning.

Pulsar was my go-to second ship before, but now that it does not repair hulls anymore, it's meh. It can reset, however, the "shield restart" mechanic, making it particularly good with ships which have the "regen in combat" upgrade / attachment.

Carriers are great damage soakers because of how the aggro mechanic works, all enemies focus on mines / drones enabling you to focus on them easily.

Tech are fun ships. The cloud of death are awesome work of mass destruction when played properly.

Last, but not least... the dreadnaught. While it's a rather bad tank (high life & shield but no more resistance) and it's slow (so the last to get in the fight), with torpedoes & high number of weapon and attachments slots, it's an highly powerful (if slow) ship. Too bad the scaling tends to spawn (short-lived) command ships as a retaliation.

I've yet to fully explore the game - I know I'm missing some mechanics (exact details of how danger works.

I have no clue whatsoever why the enemies don't increase in function of the danger level / sector number with a "fixed" final encounter. Due to that, it's difficult to guide people on what to buy / if they should buy. Getting a larger fleet should be a "no-brainer" "yes of course" decision.

Otherwise this game is really nice and devs, despite some strange design decision, are committed to improving the game.

Some things may be wrong / others will get outdated. Please comment, I'll upgrade the guide =).