YMMV / Starsector

• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The game has a very active modding scene, most of which expand on the game by adding factions, ships, NPCs, quests, portraits, flags, Anti-Frustration Features, even battle dialogues and other utilities. There also megamods that new add gameplay features that is compatible to the base game the most famous being Nexerlin. Then there is the Archaen Order, a total conversion mod that drastically change how the game looks and plays, and are incompatible with other mods (with the exception of library and utility mods).
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Some fighter wings rival frigates in terms of durability and firepower. Since they also can be replaced during battle if a carrier is present, they don't have to worry as much about damage or ammo limits. As counter-intuitive as it seems, if a nearly depleted squadron is nearby, ignore all other threats to finish them off.
  • Wasps have high speed, a large squadron size, and decent armamemnt (you're being targeted by what amounts to six shorter-ranged Tactical Lasers). They also tend to fly right through your shields and disable half of your weapons in a single pass. A design that can handle several squadrons of Talons simultaneously can be shredded in seconds by a single Wasp group.
  • While other fighters might be more damaging, Thunders are probably the most annoying to fight. They are the fastest and have twice as much range as other strike craft, meaning a carrier can engage you with them from much farther away, and their combination of light machine guns and ion cannons means they both severely pressure your shields and any ship with partial-coverage shields will rapidly get its weapons and engines disabled. The community widely regards them as the most OP fighters for this reason.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The [EXTREMELY REDACTED] Omega are often referred to as "Doritos" due to their triangular ship designs, as well as to obscure their identity from newer players.
  • The Ziggurat is referred to as Ziggy for short.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Paragon-class is a deadly foe, but the standard layout has poor damage output and lacks all but three out of fifty potential extra flux vents. By fully utilizing four Tachyon Lances, and with kinetic weapons to support disabling a ship's weaponry with ease, the Paragon can retain immense firepower combined with maximum flux capacity and hullmods that allow it to vent hard flux with shields raised. This allows the Paragon to go toe-to-toe with multiple Onslaught-class ships at once, hitting them hard with plasma cannons and tanking anything they can throw at it with good tactical use of the Fortress Shield.
  • The Radiant-class Battleship was already one of the best possible ships to have in your fleet even with the restriction that an AI core could only operate it, and thus was not under direct player control, as the Radiant has great hull, armor, OP capacity, hardpoints, flux characteristics, shields, and a powerful mobility subsystem that lets it teleport short distances. Patch 0.95.1 made it possible for the player to control one directly, and even at the cost of a staggering 50 OP for the hullmod that allows direct control of the ship (and the hullmod cannot be built in to remove its massive OP cost), it's still by most accounts even better than the Paragon.
  • The Doom-class phase cruiser is a perennial favorite flagship due to its ability to drop powerful mines on top of ships while still phase cloaked. A single mine run can cripple a capital ship without even having to drop its shields. Three or four working together can take out multiple enemy capital ships without taking a single hit in return.
  • Domain-Era Cryosleepers completely trivialize getting colonies large enough to be productive, provided you can supply 10 organics (or 9, with an incredibly easy-to-get, low-risk-of-inspection gamma AI core). They allow any colony within 10 light-years to build a cryorevival facility, which gives colonial growth rate equal to the colony size times ten times what percentage of the range remains (so a colony 5 light years away only gets half the growth of a colony in the same system).
  • On the campaign side of things, selling Volturnian Lobster is this. They are cheap, legal (except in Luddic markets), huge in numbers, and often sell for four times their base price in other systems. They render drug smuggling rather pointless as the return is almost as high for none of the risks.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has a quite strong Chinese community. They're mainly found in Baidu, QQ and the fan website Fossic. They're well known for developing high-quality and impressive mods like ApproLight, Polaris Prime, Gudalanmu and the 0.9x port of Sundog's ICE mod.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Fighters. Carriers are commonly used throughout most of the stages of the game and while fighters are easily dispatched individually, they're always deployed in swarms which can quickly overwhelm and cripple even large warships. In extreme situations fighter swarms are easily capable of tearing apart heaviest of capital ships, like a Paragon or the Onslaught, and can seriously choke defenses of the space stations. AI is good enough at managing their fighter replacement rate that enemy fighters will never stop coming at you unless you deal with the source.
  • Pilum LRMs. These missiles do a decent amount of damage, but are slow and have terrible tracking. They remain a threat because they fire in salvoes of three every five seconds, the missiles fly for almost a minute before burning out, and most ships carrying them have multiple launchers. If you spend any time piloting a fast frigate, you quickly get used to the sight of twelve or more of these on your tail.
  • For the very early portions of the game, the Goddamned Bats would be anything with Omni-shields since it takes a significant investment in firepower to max their flux meter. Not to mention that they tend to drop their shields for a few moments to recharge, undoing a portion of your damage. On the other hand, it's a harsh lesson for newbies on why flanking is so important.
  • Ships with any phase cloak or the Temporal Shell system are generally a pain in the ass to hit, as they can zip around much faster than anything else, and ships with phase cloak can do that while also actually invulnerable and can uncloak in highly inconvenient places like right behind your shields.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The mission scoring system, where the only way to get 100% is by destroying every ship in the enemy fleet without taking any casualties on your own side. Prepare to restart the mission over and over because a single survivor from a fighter squadron managed to reach the edge of the map and escape, ruining your perfect score. The most frustrating aspect is that any enemy ships that weren't fielded (meaning you were able to take all the control points on the map, quite a feat in itself) count against your score. What's that? You managed to capture 3/4 of the enemy fleet intact without losing a single ship? I think a 19% score sounds fair! Though this is no longer the case in the new versions as retreated ships now count for more then destroying them.
  • With the latest updates, the 'Hostile Activity' meter. Intended to prevent players from trivializing the game with colonies, it instead forces the player to both use the pirates as a protection racket and give a planet-killer to the Luddic Path in order to appease each faction enough for major development, due to being a rapidly growing penalty with very few methods for reducing it beyond hunting down enemy bases.

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