Ready to battle?

How to combat successfully?

 * 1) You should definitely use the crew assignment saving and loading feature heavily, but you can also take the concept much further. Unfortunately, most of it is manual.
 * Certain modules are not useful during combat, such as sensors. They can (and should be) powered off to redirect power to weapons and shields. You can also completely replace them just before (or during) combat with weapons, point defence, structural integrity modules, etc.
 * Other modules which are worth replacing just in time include cryosleep, farms, research modules.
 * Consider that container modules are similarly not useful during combat. If you remove them, you will temporarily be in an "excess" state, meaning movement on the map is not allowed (you won’t be moving during battle anyway), but no other negative factors will be applied.
 * 1) Position your point-defence on the edge of engagement even if flanked
 * 2) Frequently re-aim your weapons if your target modules/weapons have been destroyed.
 * 3) Have roughly 30+ shield points for most encounters with 2x shield modules to handle small arms fire.
 * 4) Focus your fire on important things first. Make sure you’re using shield-penetrating weapons if the enemy has a shield. Take out enemies’ weapons, point-defence and power source. Usually aiming for reactors is more efficient than other modules as some ships may even have a single power supply for 2-3 turrets on the edge of the ship that are hard to hit.
 * 5) The closer the ship is to your guns the more accurate your shots are.
 * 6) NUKE EM! Don’t be afraid to spam mass nukes on a enemy ship in dire situations or during boss fights. You can easily acquire or make a full payload between major fights.  Don’t have nukes? Craft them.
 * 7) Have 200+ of metals/synthetics for repairing modules/ship during fights. The more the better..
 * 8) The enemy will ALWAYS nuke the center of your ship.
 * 9) Crew layout  part of your battle preset should be the position where your free-flowing (repair, fire, and security) crew members stand. Some of the crew - especially fire bots - can be painfully slow to move, so it’s recommended to place them somewhat centrally, and spread out to cover the entire ship. Security crew members should be toward the front of the ship by default, and moved to the back immediately in the event of a ship attacking from the rear.

How to compare weapons?
General rule of thumb when swapping out a weapon with a new one:


 * 1) Load time should be smaller
 * 2) Accuracy should be higher
 * 3) Damage radius should be smaller (sounds weird, but that makes the weapon more accurate)
 * 4) Having weapons with no deflection, shield penetration and high fire chance are better than weapons without them.

Tips on stance
If you're not pulling module swapping tricks to get your ship into combat readiness, it's really just a matter of saving your crew assignments and clicking the "load" button. When you do this out of combat, it all happens deceptively fast; unfreezing from cryo-sleep is instant, and your crew seem to get to their stations really quickly. Don't let this fool you, if you are in a combat situation, or if you even just have an enemy ship chasing you on the map, this plays out much more slowly. Getting your crew to their stations can mean getting the first volley off before the enemy can, or vice-versa. To ensure that you're ready whenever possible:


 * Always switch to combat mode before a warp jump. Since you don't know where you'll be landing in the other system, and quite often you are immediately attacked by one or more enemy fleets.
 * Since the slowest part seems to be the unfreezing of the cryo process, and this is instant out of battle, you generally don't have to wait for your ship to reach full battle readiness. Unfrozen, your guys can usually reach their weapons stations before the first volley charges, and it seems that their skill is immediately applied to their weapon countdown (i.e. your weapon might drop from 13 seconds to 9 seconds as soon as the gunner is in place, even if we're already at 8 seconds charging, and the crew just got there).
 * Obviously, always be battle ready before any sector exit nodes.



Disabling of enemy weapons
The disabling of the enemies' most dangerous weapons should be of primary importance. There are a number of ways to accomplish this on both the projectile and energy weapon side. Projectiles such as cannons and guns have the advantage that they bypass shields, so may take out really scary enemy guns before they get their first volley off. On the other hand, high evasion may make them really inaccurate, and leave the enemy guns online for a long time. On the energy side, almost all the lasers are decent at this job, as well as a variety of EMP-style guns. The cooldown on the EMP is long enough that a single gun can sometimes keep two or three enemy modules out of action permanently, while other weapons do their jobs.

Keeping the enemy busy


Depending on the exact enemy composition, fires and module damage can overwhelm the enemy pretty quickly. Unfortunately many of the fire-based weapons are not very good, however weapons with a decent chance to start a fire as a secondary effect can fulfil this role. Sometimes the enemy AI pulls crew members from all over to handle the fire, crippling their effectiveness.

When attacked from the rear
Fights where the enemies show up behind you can be particularly annoying (especially if they are using projectile weapons, as you will have hopefully set up your point defenses at the front, knowing that most fights happen from that direction). Your main issue is with your PD being in the wrong place, both to stop projectiles, and potentially, boarding parties. In these types of fights, do the following:


 * Prioritise enemies with projectile weapons even more than usual. In terms of enemies with energy weapons, nothing changes.
 * Remember that you can switch modules on the fly. The starter ship actually has hybrid slots in the top / bottom left of the ship, and you can move your PD here on the fly. This involves a 10 second downtime, but is usually worthwhile.
 * One thing to remember is that power sources and shields should not be swapped out, the downtime will cause problems.
 * Similarly, weapons cannot charge while swapping places.

The crew


A  good mid-to-late-game strategy can be to pick up every bot that you can. They do not consume resources, so they are really just a cash sink, and you might be swimming in credits at this point. Make sure to spread them out all over the ship, so that they can easily get to fires and repair jobs, but perhaps even more importantly, to draw enemy aggression away from your more valuable crew members.