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  • Annoying Video Game Helper: Local friendly ships will often keep firing on a disabled enemy even if you want to loot or capture it. Escorts are a bit better about this, as they'll stop firing when the target is disabled, but that doesn't stop overkill from any projectiles already in flight, or cross-fire if there's a still-active enemy in the way.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Out of the two main story branches currently implemented, most players prefer Free Worlds Reconciliation to its counterpart Checkmate. Reasons for this include a better reward(long spoiler) , as well as the fact that Checkmate has you take more and more extreme measures to ensure the Free World's sovereignty, which the very existence of the Reconciliation branch proves aren't necessary. Some players claim this gives the two branches a "good ending/evil ending" dynamic, rather than the authors' intent for both sides to have their pluses and minuses. There's an ongoing debate on how to rectify this.
  • Demonic Spiders: Kor Mereti ships. They have a nasty combo of disruptor beams which not only ignore shields but allow other weapons to bypass them as well, and slicer beams which do effective damage against hull. They also drop mines that split into groups of five upon deployment that can make navigation hazardous. And if they're hitting you with disruptors at the same time, the mines can drop you from 100% hull to disabled/dead very quickly. Slow ships basically have no chance against them. Fortunately, they become friendly during the Wanderer storyline, though soon after that the Korath Exiles start fielding their own copies.
  • Fan Nickname: The player character is often referred to in the fan community as "First Last" or a variation on it, due to the text replacements used for where the player's name is supposed to go being represented in the game files as <first> for the first name and <last> for the last name.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Unlike Escape Velocity, there's no hard limit to the amount of escort ships you can employ as long as you can afford the associated crew costs, and crew are cheap as long as you only need them for a day's worth of fighting. As a result, you can bring a fleet of 20-some-odd captured pirate warships with only default equipment down on any enemy fleet and wipe them out with sheer numbers. This starts getting costlier to pull off in story missions towards the end of and after the Free Worlds storyline (and in the future the Republic and Syndicate storylines), thanks to missions beginning to require the use of jump drives, who are considerably harder to acquire in any numbers than crew and a fleet of 20-ish captured pirate warships, but costlier does not mean impossible.
    • The Cloaking Device obtained as part of the Free Worlds Reconciliation story. It works on everyone, and the only penalty to using it (other than not being able to fire weapons) is a small drain on energy and fuel which ramscoops and a decent generator can counteract. It single-handedly lets you explore systems guarded by much bigger enemies than you can take on directly, and it makes scouting, smuggling, and blockade running missions (or really any mission where shooting isn't required) downright trivial.
    • The Flamethrower, and heat-based weapons in general. They can easily disable ships within seconds by overheating them, even if they have shields up. And unlike their counterpart ion weapons, most ships tend to run close to their heat limit. In addition, most heat weapons are just decently powerful even without heat, whereas all ion weapons save the Skylance have some sort of weakness (the Ion cannon, Ion Rain and Ion Hail have relatively low damage outputs, and the EMP torpedoes have their ammunition sold only in one corner of the galaxy, in addition to having pitiful ammo capacity and being likely to hit yourself).
  • Goddamned Bats: If cargo space severely exceeds the strength of the player's ships and weapons, they will be consistently harassed by pirate raiding parties, upwards to being attacked in every single star system easily accessible by human ships. While normally a threat for early-game players, mid to late-game player fleets are so strong that they're capable of taking on several fleets, especially when many of these raiding parties could very well consist of nothing more than a Sparrow, aka, one of the weakest combat ships in the game.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Carrier-based fighters and drones. In theory, they're a straight upgrade from how they worked in the Escape Velocity series. Hangars are built into your ship instead of taking up outfit space, they can carry any kind of fighter instead of needing dedicated bays for each type (though drones are separate), and fighters are as customizable as any other ship rather than being stuck with the defaults. In practice, however, most fighters die too easily to be much more use than missiles, and when they're destroyed you also lose any hard-earned upgrades you gave them, which could instead have been given to bigger, more survivable escorts (which unlike fighters, are not limited in numbers by your flagship).
  • The Scrappy: The Wanderers are disliked to hated by some portions of the community. This mostly originates from the fact they're shown to effectively worship the Pug, who control the galaxy from behind the scenes. The Wanderer's reputation isn't helped by their Perfect Pacifist People demeanour, compared to how most other factions (even those we'd consider "good" by present-day human standards) have plainly visible, realistic flaws. Humanity struggles with Corrupt Politicians, Corrupt Corporate Executives, and rampant piracy, the Hai are stagnant, the Coalition is under an oppressive government, and the Korath are The Remnant of an empire devastated by war, the Builders were destroyed by the Ka'het which were their own creations, etc.

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