After a blueprint has been learned, the playerвЂ™s heavy industry becomes capable of producing the items in question вЂ“ there are lots of details here, and weвЂ™ll get to those in a bit, but thatвЂ™s the basic system. This works similarly to how players learn new hull-mods. For example, they might acquire the blueprint for a Medusa-class destroyer or a Heavy Mauler, a ballistic weapon. That is to say, if blueprints have to work a certain way for the gameplay to come together, then hands will be waved.ДЄ вЂњblueprintвЂќ is an item the player can find and right-click to вЂњlearnвЂќ. Copying these is difficult-to-impossible, and their dwindling supply contributes to the gradual decline of the Sector.В This is the base weвЂ™ll use to develop the manufacturing mechanics, making adjustments to cover the demands of gameplay, as needed. If youвЂ™ve been keeping track of the backstory, most heavy manufacturing in the Sector is done using вЂњblueprintsвЂќ вЂ“ precise specifications for building a ship or a weapon, that an automated factory can use to build the item. Not so much that itвЂ™s a chore to manage, but enough to cover the things the player will naturally want to do.

Now that the player can establish colonies and manage a faction of their own, we need more detail. To be fair, thatвЂ™s all that needed to be there, since it was not something the player could interact with in more detail than attacking those fleets. How starships get produced has been heavily abstracted so far вЂ“ thereвЂ™s a colony, and it spawns fleets made up of faction-appropriate ships, and thatвЂ™s about all there was to it.

This is simplifying things a great deal, of course, and there are exceptions, but this is a high-level overview. The dynamics you get when they face each other is that high tech ships dart in and out of engagement range, relying on shields to see them through, while low tech ships try to make them pay a price for closing in. Low tech is slower and more ponderous, has high armor and hull integrity, with efficient longer-ranged weapons. High tech has speed, good shields, and fairly inefficient (but varied!) lower-ranged weapons. The key thing is that high tech is not intended to be better than low tech, just a different way of doing things. There are others, and it gets blurry in places, but for this post, these two are whatвЂ™s important. There are lots of ways to slice that pie, too, but letвЂ™s look at tech levels вЂ“ namely, вЂњLow TechвЂќ and вЂњHigh TechвЂќ. So, letвЂ™s start by taking a brief step back and looking at the kinds of ships there are in the game.

This blog post is a tricky one to write вЂ“ all the pieces are interrelated, and figuring out where to start, and how much background info to provide вЂ“ to make sure this is comprehensible without having a PhD in StarsectologyвЂ¦ well, right, tricky.

Starsector ships not attacking