Space Pirates and Zombies Essential Wiki Information and a Few Tips

Introduction

I know I'm crazy for creating a guide for a game that everyone has probably played and moved on from, but a lot of the prior guide material is dead and gone now. The wiki can only be found publicly via archive[web.archive.org] now. This is a gathering of some of the most important reference material especially as oriented towards ship-optimization and the core-systems difficulty spike.

Unfortunately, one article from the wiki does seem to have been lost to the sands of time, and that was the article on damage. However this steam thread answers the most important question, what does module size do for damage?

The answer:

Small (100%)

Medium (150%)

Large (225%)

Huge (337.5%)

The basic formula here is 1.5^N where "Small" means the same thing as 0. That scaling factor likely applies to everything that has anything to do with size, and even works for negative sizes (1.5^-1 is two-thirds).

For the purpose of the double turret mod, this means that you get +33% damage give or take (mostly take) because 1.5^-1 is two-thirds and 4/3 is +33%. For the triple turret mod, this gives you +100% damage (6/3). One reason that double/triple turret mods can give less DPS in practice is due to launchers and cannons (and possibly other weapon types) being fired in sequence rather than simultaneously. For larger ships with lots of weapons, using double/triple turrets will result in firing cycle issues (thanks to this guide for making me aware of this).

Unfortunately the wiki articles on missions were also not archived, so I don't have that information either.

Boosters

The effect of the booster modules (eg. cannon booster) has no tooltip in-game. The wiki page[web.archive.org] noted that the effectiveness of a booster varies based on four scaling factors.

The first scaling factor is size, based on the size fomulae above. A medium booster powering a medium weapon does the base effect, a small booster will have two-thirds of that effect, and a large booster +50% of that effect. Real-world experiments suggest that weapon boosters (cannon/beam etc) do not have size synergy. This may be because larger weapons are more efficient at precisely the same rate at which smaller boosters are less effective. Non-weapon boosters scale relative to the ship's hull size.

The second most important scaling factor is the subsystems research "booster overdrive" effect for which there is a tooltip in-game. It gives a roughly 7% increase in effectiveness to each booster per level with later levels giving a larger bonus.

Some specialists also provide a bonus (their tooltips will describe that also).

Finally, additional boosters have reduced effect. The first booster does the base effect, the second booster does 90% of that effect, the third 81% of base effect, and the nth 0.9^N multipled by the base effect.

Booster Base effectsAll weapon boosters give +15% damage and +10% reload speed. In addition beams get 10% longer and spinup 10% faster, while canons get +10% projectile speed and range. Shield boosters give +20% to max shield health, and +20% to reacharge speed and time. Cloak boosters are shield boosters for cloaking shields, and also reduce the cloak disruption time by 20%.

Other boosters vary. Reactor boosters give +25% to both recharge and capacity both, which is impressive. Crew boosters merely increase the crew capacity on a ship by 25% (although this still could be useful in and of itself depending on what you are doing). Engine boosters improve the thrust and turn speed of your engine by 25%, and also increase the max speed by 10%.

Weapon Booster ConsiderationsBecause weapon boosters give both +15% damage and (essentially) +10% weapon fire rate, the total increase in DPS given by the base effect is +26.5%. So in theory given an ample reactor (the overcharge reactor, for instance) 1 booster for every 4 beams. However, this may not bear out in practice this reddit post suggests that effect may be substantially greater. However the place that used to link to has also been lost to the sands of time.

Plugging in the formulae (I have not experimented comparing damage numbers myself) smaller slots for boosting is just fine, and even preferable, as a booster one size smaller will in theory still give a +17.67% bonus. In fact, have a table so you can see the decay from multiple boosters of various sizes (rounding to 2 decimals):

Size -2 Size -1 Size +0 Size +1 Size +2 1st Booster 11.78% 17.67% 26.5% 39.75% 59.63% 2nd Booster 10.44% 15.84% 23.85% 35.78% 53.67% 3rd Booster 9.40% 14.26% 21.47% 32.20% 48.30% 4th Booster 8.46% 12.83% 19.32% 28.98% 43.47% 5th Booster 7.61% 11.55% 17.39% 26.08% 39.12%

Note that even in a ship with five boosters, the first booster will still have full effect according to the wiki. No, I don't know whether the largest booster will always be counted as the first, and I haven't tested any of this, this is all strictly theoretical. But if the theory holds if you add everything up, five boosters one size smaller should give a combined bonus of +72.07%. Generally speaking, the damage from a cannon or beam booster even of two sizes smaller will be significant and generally greater than that of equipping extra missiles.

To begin to apply this to comparing ship loadouts, a ship with 2 medium weapons would gain a 75% damage boost by adding a large weapon slot, a 100% damage boost by adding two medium weapon slots, a ~40% damage boost by adding a large booster, and (I think) a ~50% damage boost by adding two medium boosters. That said, the boosters are cheaper on reactor power.

Looking at the medium hulls for a more practical application, the Raven is therefore competitive and probably slightly superior to the Saucer even using it as a direct damage ship rather than a drone carrier due to the large slot and four medium slots for boosters. That is just how excellent the bounty hunter hulls are for their class, and its all because of the volume of potential booster slots. Even though the Hound and the Tug are still my favorites of that size for their utility tracking down small craft and carrying cargo, the Hydra has the best DPS of any medium hull hands-down due entirely to having 4 medium slots that can be equipped with boosters, three weapons one of them oversized, and still having two small utility slots left over.

Gathering Rez And Goons Quickly To Get Back Into The Game

So there is a mid-game difficulty jump that lets you re-experience the feeling of having only tiny hulls and basic weapons, but your ships are much more expensive at that point. If you want to take an active approach to that part of the game, it will be necessary to farm some resources to replace the ones you will undoubtedly lose in fights. Additionally, it would be nice to have some spare Rez to purchase tech in order to be able to fight the Huge hulls, or before activating the point of no return. Or spare data for that matter, once you clone enough goons on each level up, buying data from science stations can be highly efficient. Here's a few approaches to getting Rez:

Strategy 1: MiningMining isn't as time consuming as it looks. While mining can be done on a random site (very often CIV vs UTA battles contain asteroid fields and slums, so there's something to do while one waits for ships to blow up), the most principled way to mine is to equip Huge mining lasers and go to civilian mining station which will have a very large asteroid, and put your mining lasers to work. You can then purchase (hire?) goons from civilian colony stations. You can equip mining lasers on regular weapon slots, but only Huge slots (which have a much increased spinup time) are able to crack the rock next to mining stations. so find something with a huge slot (including turret slots you can put a fixed turret mod on) and put a mining laser on it, then get to work.

It is quite quick once you have access to something that large enough weapon mount. The Cyclops is the only small hull that can do this, and it is a bounty hunter hull so that is harder to obtain. No medium hull is capable. Of the large hulls the Big Brother (which requires a fixed turret mount), the Brute (a bounty hunter hull), and the Grinder (which can actually equip a second Huge laser with the fixed mount and still one without) are capable.

The basic mechanic is that your ship shoots the asteroid, and then the AI ships (which you've given sizable cargo holds, hopefully) ferry it to the beacon. If the AI is being too greedy (waiting on a single Rez to be full, for instance) order that AI to repair. The AI will warp back to the mothership and deposit the Rez there, then warp back to the beacon and resume ferrying. It may help to set the AI to aggressive (assuming there are no hostiles in-system.

There are other methods that involve more AI management. You can use the 'i' key to have the AI ferry Rez to you rather than the beacon (say, if you're running a cargo vessel not near a beacon). Or, interestingly, fully automated AI mining (its slow, but doesn't require much human input).

Strategy 2: Doing easy missions in high-level systemsNot all of the missions are combat missions, sometimes you just need to destroy some objects. In these cases, bring a cloaking shield and focus on the objective. The downside to this approach is the need for jumping back and forth between an empty system and the mothership to get those quests to spawn. This is a lot more feasible when you already have access to multiple of the high level systems you want to farm in.

Some of the mission types also provide you with a strong allied vessel or perhaps more than one allied vessel IIRC. I'm not going to make a list of all the best missions to do, but although these missions may be considerably slower mining, they are also much more like playing the actual game. Basically, if the mission reward is more than 10% of your maximum Rez supply and won't lose you ships, it is eminently reasonable to consider that a strategy.

Strategy 3: Carrion feedingOne of the purposes of CIV vs UTA battles is to allow the player to gain access to larger ship hulls that are hard for the player to fight alone. However due to the number of ships involved it is also the easiest way other than trading Rez to acquire goons, and it also can supply a good amount of Rez to boot. Data, another key resource, is most plentiful at these events. Bribe both the civilian and United Terran Alliance authorities, and then go to one of these events and wait for them to kill each other. Or just bring cloaking shields and tell your AI companions to stay away from the thick of it, either or.

CIV vs UTA battles can also occur when you go to a friendly station. Larger ship hulls seem to me to be even more common in these events than the battle events above, often still have slums or asteroids and can be safer when there is hostile faction. Again, much of the Rez comes from farming the field, not just from the shooting war.

That being said this strategy is usually less useful as a strategy for farming Rez specifically. Farming goons to sell for Rez at mining stations is unlikely to be faster than farming Rez to buy goons at colony stations (though if you have an excess of goons and need Rez, you still want to do this). Generally this this third strategy is for when the main goal is gathering ship schematics or for when the other two strategies are not feasible (bad luck on missions, not having access to the Huge weapon slot for efficient mining, not having access to any friendly mining stations because you've angered them all).

Bounty Hunter Strongholds Wiki Info

Looking at the archive the archive[web.archive.org] , the wiki had the following information on Bounty Hunter Strongolds:

A Bounty Hunter stronghold is something you should fear, and rightly so. The initial dialogue that introduces these bases describes them as being "scary and armed to the teeth," which is probably the biggest understatement in the entire game. Words cannot describe how deadly these bases are.

Bounty hunter bases are usually armed with all of the best tech for their level, as well as armed with the BIGGEST tech for their level. By default, a stronghold is armed with 4 huge launchers, and 8 huge turret mounts, and a drone bay. This sounds like a lot; it is more than a lot.

Huge scary big guns aside, the moment this base takes any significant shield damage, it will turn all its batteries on you, THEN call in reinforcements. So not only do you have a wall of lasers, missiles, and bullets heading your way, but you also have equally deadly ships crawling up your ass.

Dealing with bounty hunters is an iffy business, but it can be both profitable and helpful. At the Stroghold, you may check and pay off your bounty, as well as participate in gladiator-esque battles-to-the-death, in ships and with crew and weaponry provided by the bounty hunters. These games are an excellent place for a skilled pilot to earn Rez, Data, and the most powerful of resources, Respect.

Should you have enough respect, the Bounty Hunters will occasionally warp in during a mission and lend you a helping hand, or you may even hire them to directly assault a Warp Gate blockade in their territory.

Overall, Bounty Hunters are untrustworthy, but make excellent allies.

The wiki then, in the same style, conveys the following useful information about destroying the strongholds:

In level 1-30 systems strongholds lack cloak scanners. Missile spam and cannons work well.

In core systems, they posses highly advanced beam weaponry including both Ion (ship disable) and leech (capacitor steal) on double mount turrets, a triple-torpedo rack, and a Titan Beam emitter on a turret. Due to the sheer long-range destructive power of these bases, cloaking is highly recommended.

In addition to the weapons above, expect mass drivers and particle cannons on the station. If you haven't found that information yet, be aware that one of the bounty hunter capship hulls (the Manta Ray) is kitted out with no less than 10 large weapon mounts, and the other one (the Mammoth) possesses a bomber mount.

In truth, the bounty hunter bases in the core systems doesn't seem as crazy to me as all that, and the achievement statistics bear this out (over half of all of the players with the game completion achievement have killed at least one of these most difficult bases). It is difficult, but far from insane. The most annoying part is that the beacon can do down very fast if anything de-aggros from your ships. The other difficult part is finding a good way to deal with the massive beam turret, as the larger hulls that dish out the hurt can have a real bad time when focused by it.

Notable Modules

Some modules are best-in-class, and this is my shortlist. Besides that list, all armors, engines, and three of the four reactors (High Capacity isn't as great) are of course essential, and all the booster modules except perhaps the Crew Booster and very nice to have indeed.

Non-Weapons: Thruster Engine. It is the essential engine, even though it requires two blueprints.

Stable Cloak. It comes back up so very fast, and there's a stealth mission in the main plot.

Fixed Turret Mod. Useful for farming and fighting both.

Engine Booster Module. This helps keep you moving when you're loaded down with the armor you need to stay alive.Weapons: Beam weapons other than Ion. Eventually you may move to something else as shields become less important, but literally every beam weapon is amazing at the stage of the game that they become available, except the Ion Emitter.

Particle Cannon. A beautiful weapon that is effective against all targets and is relatively easy on the reactor for its damage, at a time in the game when reactor recharge is at a premium. At the time it becomes available it is clearly the best weapon in the game, and some people may believe it to be the best weapon in the game, period.

Missile. Somewhat uniquely useful when it first becomes available and is slightly more versatile than the Torpedo.

Gravity Missile. Missiles don't deal a lot of damage, but this status effect is extremely, extremely useful.

Point defense. More essential than you realize.

Zapper Drones. Distracts enemy forces and deals with shields, without breaking the research budget.

(Cloaked) Bomber Drones. Tears apart unshielded ships.

I haven't played around too much with the Mass Bombs and Mines though, but I think those are specific to combat strategies that can be effective mostly under limited circumstances.

FAQ-like Tips

There are a few important controls that are buried in the menus that can be missed

You can lower/increase how many crew your ships start with after a refit/repair/jump by reducing/increasing the desired surplus crew in the refit screen from 20% to whatever you like. Use 100% for very difficult gate blockades, or 0% so you can conscript more new ones.

You can change which which weapon types are assigned to which firing buttons (missiles can go on button 1 just fine, really) in the tactics screen by clicking on advanced tactics. You can set turrets to autofire there, and some other neat stuff too.

B - Jettison cargo. You probably saw it in the tutorial, but if you're anything like me, you don't use this button enough in important fights.

N - Jettison armor plates. If they are already damaged they aren't very useful, and you can gain some much needed speed this way.

C - Disable shields. If your fortress shield is down, it isn't coming back up, so disable it to save on energy. Similarly, if your beacon is under attack, turn off your cloaking shield to regain aggro.

X - Slow down in place.

Shift - Disable ship rotation. Your ship will go straight forward, but you can still manually aim your turrets.

I - Toggle mule mode. This thing causes your AI wingmen to bring minerals to your ship rather than to the beacon. Very useful when running some sort of cargo vessel.

Other

Telling your ships to repair, even if they are at full health, is often a faster way to bring minerals back to a beacon.

You can retire specialists while in-mission, even if you cannot assign them. Look for the trash bin icon on the Hangar screen.

You can lower the difficulty mid-game, but you cannot increase it. Lowering the difficulty is a one-way trip.

Finally, when the game tells you something is the point of no-return, listen well and be prepared.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2251311995

Essential Wiki Information and a Few Tips