What platform are you playing on? Do you use a controller? Sometimes I wonder if the combat is more fun for keyboard/mouse users than it is for gamepad users.
Nope, I use keyboard and mouse. And it’s sluggish. Best you can do in a fight is hang still, then turn and shoot when they come close.
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Nope, keyboard and mouse. Would use my Saitek if I could, but alas…
Definitely not that bad. The controls are mostly OK, I think (although it took them until 1.38 to get there…). You just have to use your boost and your brakes right to stay behind an enemy. But there’s not that much point anymore to it, now that the enemy blows up if you so much as look at him sternly…
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I totally agree with you here, especially when playing in Normal mode. I use a controller and am still using a mostly unmodified starter ship and the flight mechanics are just fine. But I do need to get a proper fighter with some upgrades to get a proper comparison.
The biggest beef I have tho may have to do with enemy AI; they seem competent if we keep moving but are totally confused if we stop and just turn to fire at them.
The other beef I had during Atlas Rises was that the Photon Cannon was the only weapon that actually worked. Enemies seem much easier to hit now which makes battles more entertaining. I hope Hello Games are working on fleshing out space battles even more because this is an area of the game with a lot of potential!
Just so long as every battle doesn’t become deadly. If every scrape with pirates took ten minutes and was a huge drain on resources, it would be disruptive more than anything.
Going after bounties, or accepting missions from the guilds however… 
Huh? I thought all the weapons worked quite nicely. They weren’t too different from each other, true, but they all did their job.
Prior to Atlas Rises it was very easy (probably too easy) to hit with your weapons, especially the phase beam. When Atlas Rises dropped, HG made space combat more difficult by making it much, much harder to aim. We had all these nifty weapons but only the Photon Cannon really worked.
At least that was my experience on the PS4, maybe they worked better on PC?
So far I’ve only tried the photon cannon and the phase beam since NEXT, but I’d like to see how the other weapons perform now.
Never had any problems. Phase Beam still had a decent amount of auto-aim, infraknife was basically a photon cannon with higher rate of fire but less damage, and to miss something completely with the positron ejector is actually kind of difficult if you’re in range. Never tried the ballista admittedly, but it seemed to be everybody elses favourite, so I guess it was good.
The Photon cannon was probably the hardest to aim for me. The infraknife got more hits in due to higher ROF, the phase beam needed only general alignement anyways, and the ejector just blasted stuff everywhere in front of you…
It seems space combat gets harder, the more experienced you become. Once upon a time attackers would take you on singly - so you’d fight the first one, then the next, etc.
I just dropped out of warp into a new system. Within 10 seconds I received a hostile scan, which turned out to be six three-star pirates, who all attacked me at the same time. I have upgraded class S shields, but they were gone in about four seconds. If I hadn’t been able to run into the adjacent space station, I’d be very dead.
Not all battles are easy. Some are impossible.
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That 2nd picture from the top looks like an octopus!
These are great Sir_oops! I must try this too
@Wickerson this may useful, I use a Logitech PS4 type controller on PC. I swap back and forth from a wireless Mouse to Controller frequently but maybe spend 80% of my time using the controller with a wireless keyboard. The controller does everything except I am unable to type with it - as it is used on PC and not a dedicated PS4 machine. I leave every in game button at default.
When it comes to space battles and I really want to deal with pirates quickly and efficiently, I have found the keyboard and mouse on PC preferable. I can’t program every button I’d like on my ageing controller, so simply being able to switch quickly, back and forth, between targets using the number keys on the keyboard demands using a keyboard with mouse.
BUT flying the ship and button pressing the repairs during the battles, using the quick menu, is incredibly fast and a lifesaver - it’s just perfectly designed for controller button pressing (less finger movement). The keyboard approach to repairs often means taking my eyes off the screen to check I am on the right repair. and then pressing select.
Alternativelly turning and target line up and tracking for me works more precisely and faster(efficient not fps), using mouse with PC if I am in a hurry to switch off the game! Using the controller paddles for movement however, seem far looser and takes longer (though you can tighten up movement controls in options). The best PC tool for the job is mouse and keyboard (except fast repairing) unless maybe you can tune the controller movement axis.
Improving the upgrades for all weapons as well as the pulse engine movement upgrades seems to make quite a lot of difference to flight or fight approaches to game play. There seems to be a lot of variety in how weapons work I think and which to choose for whatever task you are doing.
Flying experience, swivelling about to look out the windows, taking pictures and switching weapon cycling and general play (even base building) is just best on the controller, it’s fun. There is only one controller to hold while relaxing on the sofa playing No Man’s Sky!
In conclusion. Mouse and Keyboard are best for Space Battles particularly on PC. But the controller used with PC, is just simply more efficient, fun and makes for absorbing atmosphere of flying something ‘real’. Customised personally the way you want the controller can do almost everything without any keyboard. I’d be interested to feel how the game plays on a dedicated games console compared with my PC hybrid approach.
As for weapons I have recently re-equipped my fighter with NEXT weaponry. The laser is extremely powerful and canons BUT the best weapon currently has been the rockets with the rocket boost attachment. It almost knocks pirates out from the skies in one strike. So I tend to use laser and rockets at the moment. Since NEXT it seems more precise but that could be because I have set up the upgrades correctly for once!
The other weapons are also efficient for different reasons like the farming of freighter resources or meteorite materials. I haven’t done much multi-play space battles but I imagine if I were to join a battle. One player would be best to collect resources whilst the others take out fighters. Both should use best weapons for the respective jobs.
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Thanks johnnycloud, this is a big help! You really put some perspective on how the game plays on different platforms. It seems PC players using a mouse and keyboard have a some advantage over those using a controller while dogfighting. Although it’s probably not a huge advantage, especially after acquiring a good ship and some pulse engine upgrades.
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Hey everyone, looks like the developers of Rebel Galaxy have solved the problem all space sims have with combat. And the game looks pretty sweet too! Take a look:
Maybe Hello Games will flesh out the space battles to play out more like this. Either way, I’ll be picking up this one.
Edit: Also, missles!
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You mean “Wing commander: Privateer, rock 'n roll edition” 
I watched that video yesterday, and it sure as hell feels nostalgic, but I’m not sure how well it’s going to work for me… Basically, NMS is the first game that has a non-newtonian flight model I could get into since I-War saw the light of day all that time ago, and NMS managed to do that by space combat really not being a big part of the game.
In any case, if anybody at HG ever takes a look at that video, they might want to pay close attention to the part at 39:40… 
(Yes, I know it’s more complicated when you have multiplayer. Just do it as a GoG exclusive feature )
Also, make sure to watch all the way until 43:20…
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I think I played this. Was one of the free games on Psn a few months before NMS came out if I recall. Had a battle system similar to the boat mechanics in AC:Black Flag or similar pirate ship games.
Me and my house mate at the time referred to it as “Euro Truck Simulator… IIIIN SPAAACE”. Soundtrack really helped set the tone
Yeah, this is the next one in the series. More of a classical space combat sim. If you watch the video, it screams “we liked WC: Privateer a loooot” as loud as it possibly can without anybody just straight-up admitting “yeah, we’re remaking privateer”.
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Now I’m trying to figure out which wing commander game I played religiously when I was a kid.
It would’ve been mid nineties, before the film was a thing, but could easily be any of the first bunch as it was on loan from a friend of my older brother.
All I can recall is nobody liked me on board our space station bar the odd few whose respect you earn from first mission or two and you could see all the characters kill count on a scoreboard and all I ever tried to achieve in the game was have more kills than whoever the cocky jerk player was.
I don’t think it had the FMVs introduced in 3 but it might have.
I dunno if I’m confusing my memory’s of an fmvless wing commander with my memories of the FMV-heavy Dark Forces 2:jedi Knight and its expansions or not.
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@toddumptious Was Mark Hamill in it? If not, then it was probably Wing Commander II
@jedidia It’s hard to believe they included Photoshop in the ship editor!
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Well, Photoshop is a lot more than just a drawing interface, but the whole thing is pretty impressive. I do wonder how they justified the resources to develop that thing. At first I suspected that they had the luck of having somebody familiar enough with the GIMP code base to port some of its functionality over, but the GNU-license would make this problematic, so I don’t think this is the case. But I really have no idea how you convince a project manager to allow you to go this far overboard with a tangential feature, even in an indie company…
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Was searching for Emeril on an aggressive sentinel planet when I flew into this planet-side battle.
It wasn’t a massive battle so I joined in. Shot down one and tried to capture impact.
It seems ships vanish at the moment of impact.
With the Pirates taken care of, the posse headed back into space.
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