Hello fellow spacefarer,

Thanks for downloading this mod.

After the initial excitement of boosting your ship to 1000 velocity, it is likely that you'll soon face your first ship battle with SCO. Many people have complained the difficulty of effectively engaging a hostile ship in combat, commonly:

- Enemy ships are always flying at high speed, and out of weapon range 99% of the time.
- Having a hard time landing hits at all. Projectiles don't seem to travel fast enough.
- I can only land hits and damage an enemy ship when we joust at each other.
- The damage dealt during jousting isn't enough to break a shield.
- By the time I turn over and joust again, enemy has already regenerated its shield.

These difficulties are originated from the fact you're flying your ship in different ways than I anticipated. Let me expain it further.

I used to play a hell lot of Free Space 1 & 2 throughout my college years. Both are old-titled spaceship dogfight simulators, which turns out to be surprisingly similar to what Starfield has to offer. I'm so used to fly in a way what those games require me to do to survive dogfights on hard difficulty, that I forgot not everyone has the same experience. Additional, since vanilla Starfield's ship combat doesn't really challenge player to optimize their flying skills & tactics, it's only normal for people to have difficulties dealing with new challenges provided by SCO.

So, back to it.

SCO is an overhaul, and will require a change of mindset from vanilla game. If you're a veteran player of flight simulation or dogfight simulators, you should feel right at home. Here're some tactics for the starters.

- In space combat, Velocity is not the key. Delta Velocity (the change of velocity) is. You can have all the speed you want, but delta velocity is what gives you dodging and accuracy. You ship has better Delta Velocity when it's at half throttle. You should have your ship in that status most of the time.

- In space combat, you should reach top speed only when you're doing an Evasion. You don't need high velocity to land a hit. Consider speed as a value that increases your evasion but reduces your attack rate and accuracy. It's best practice to slow down when you're about to attack.

- Don't do joustings, unless you're doing so for an Evasion. This is quite different from vanilla. Let's do a quick math on time of engagement. Vanilla top speed is 180, Particle weapon range is like 3000. You can have up to 3000/180/2 = 8.3 seconds to kill that ship. In SCO, let's say you're both at 1k, with a weapon of similar range, you'll only have 3000/1000/2 = 1.5 seconds to shoot, and probably going to miss most of the shots. So if you're planning to charge head on, know that you're either going to slow down to attack, or you're rolling a full speed crossover, which can be considered as an evasive move (not an attack move).

- An actual kill is almost always started by attacking from side or behind, and then successfully maintaining a relative speed and distance. If you're attacking from behind, try to match the speed of your target once it's in range. It's ideal if you can follow your target at a distance slightly below the maxinum weapon range, since it'll be a lot easier to maintain a visual contact and to cut corners when target turns.

- Know when to stop chasing your enemy. If target ship fires a booster, it's often better to just let it go, instead of firing booster too and chasing it like crazy. If you fire a booster too, both of you will be flying at high speed. If target ship does an unexpected sharp turn, you'll only have a split second to react, or overshoot. And since you're chasing it, you are likely to have a bigger speed and thus a bigger turning radius. Unless you have a high Mobility ship, it'll be a matter of time you lose track of a target. By the time you've done your circling, target ship could have already regenerated its shield. So, it's better to let it go, and send a missile to do the chasing for you. Tail the target at a cruise speed instead. You can then save precious booster fuel for next attack.

- Mobility is much more important in SCO than in vanilla. Let's do some more math here. Say you're flying at cruise speed, a hostile ship passes over your location, and you're taking a 180 degree turn to face that ship. With vanilla speed at 180, if it takes 3.14 seconds to turn, you'll draw a half circle with radius of 180 m, and eventually find the target ((3.14 * 180) ^ 2 + (2 * 180) ^ 2) ^ 0.5 = 670 meters away, within 1/4 of your weapon range. In SCO, if both of your speed is 700, by the time you finish the turn, target will be 2606 meters away, on the edge of your weapon range. Basically the speed of turning is an important factor now. If you're building a combat ship, you'll want its Mobility as high as possible, or it'll have a lackluster performance in actual combat.

- In space combat, spaceships can outrun missiles if they have a high enough velocity. Starfield's missiles fly at a speed of 600 to 800. Though there're no countermeasures in Starfield, in SCO, you can simply outrun those missiles by firing booster at a high speed.

- In space combat, Delta Velocity is precious, as it is vital resource for both attack and defence moves. You can get delta velocity in 3 ways: engines (slow), boosters (fast but limited, only accelerates) and thrusters (free and fast, but only decelerates). Thrusters are especially useful and can be used to do many crazy moves. If you optimize your flight path by utilizing more thrusters and less boosters, you can have significant advantages to your opponent.

- It's highly recommended to install at least one Laser weapon on ship. It'll make short work of shields and significantly increase the range you can control. It's recommended to always use combined weapon types, so that your ship can handle more situations.

- It's recommended to install a Computer Core whatever weapons you use, since it can cut down target locking time, which is especially useful when facing multiple enemies.

- If you're facing multiple opponents, try taking out the weakest ones first. Class A ships can be dispatched rather quickly with proper weapon builds. If you have some good engine but not so much firepower, you can switch all power to engine and escape in full speed, only to come back and take out one enemy ship at a time.

- Turrets are no longer the "silver bullets" as they are in vanilla game. They're still useful as long as you can match speed with your target. However, they'll probably never shoot as accurately as you, a seasoned pilot, can do.

- Power management can be the last puzzle to difficult battles. This is quite similar to vanilla, with exception that you don't need to keep a full shield all the time once you know what you're doing, but you'll always want to have your engines powered up to a good extend. Power saving is the same with vanilla game, you can save some power by keeping auto guns (weapons with an ammo pool) at low power, semi guns (weapons that recharges at each launch) at full power and missiles at minimum 1 power.

That's all I can think of now. I hope you find this article helpful, and enjoy Ship Combat Overhaul as much as I do.