Space Reign: 1.0 Beginners Guide

I’m enjoying Space Reign a lot (space RTS is my bread and butter), so here’s a quick player guide as I notice there aren’t any so far. Note that v1.0 has some teething issues – primarily balance & bug related, but nothing that is in my opinion fatal. It’s a great, small game, overall, and well worth the price.

• I recommend a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of L-RAM-VLS-I (anti-ship) and SM-17-VLS-I (anti-fighter) respectively. The BULLFROG with this loadout will carry you through the first 15 hours, honestly.
• Set them to “High Launcher Use” for the Alpha Strike capability. You will always have time to rearm – don’t worry about running out.
• Swarm missiles are trash (except on fighters – see below) because they take too long to fire, and miss too frequently.
• All other weapons do not compare to the raw DPS of the above two missiles. You literally don’t need turret weapons. Not even the defender turret: I really tried to make it viable, but it’s just not worth it when you can just tank missile shots & repair between engagements… At least not until Threat4 or above.
• Missiles also have significant range and accuracy advantages. They rarely miss or get countered, and you can fire them at double the range of guns.
• After firing enough missiles to kill an enemy ship, select a new target before the missiles land, for higher effective DPS.

• Enter a sector using the orange contract icon. This will give you time to clear out any already visible enemies, which should be your initial focus. This gives you all nearby Control Points (to easily resupply), and prevents situations where enemies have a numerical advantage during “Contracts”.
• Then you can spam “Contracts” and “Side Objectives” (which often require you to fly around and manually search). Short contracts are best; i.e. “Search & Destroy”, “Fleet Interception” and “Outpost Assault”.
• If your goal is to farm, stick to RTS-style “Direct Control” mode. Entering first-person “In Control” mode often means your other ships will die to silliness.
• Create two strike groups as soon as is feasible. Have one focused on contracts, and the other focused on eliminating ad-hoc red on map.
• Stay in the sector until you level up your company level, or until you have enough cash to meaningfully upgrade your fleet.
• Enemy encounter difficulty scales up fast. Stick to the Threat1 areas even when you begin to earn less from them.
• Level up your ships fully before expanding your fleet – you won’t be able to expand your fleet quickly enough anyway, due to ship count and CP limits.
• When doing the “Conquer Sector” (flag icon) missions, send your entire fleet to each Control Point – they often contain overwhelming enemy numbers.
• Supply ships are also OP – just make sure they don’t die.

1. As mentioned, missiles are far too good, currently. Their DPS is so high, and countering them effectively costs too many weapon slots. My gut feeling is that defensive turrets & countermeasure options deserve their own slots. Defensive turrets should also shoot fighters, IMHO.
2. Turrets are similar enough to each other to have no meaningful distinctions, from what I’ve been able to tell, so far. It’s cool that they have sustained firepower, but, without map or gameplay changes limiting resupply frequency, that problem is trivial to avoid, making missiles the clear choice always.
3. Threat levels increase extremely quickly. Threat2 is about 5x more deadly than Threat1.
4. I’m a fan of how Ship AI will focus down targets, but often, anti-fighter missiles take too long to initially deploy. I.e. Enemy fighters get one strafing run off before the initial salvo is fired, often.
5. As ships do not level up alongside the player (e.g. by gaining armour, or slots), Medium sized ships become far too fragile even by Threat4.

Fighters require a lot of micro-managing & babysitting. They die fast. If you want to use them:

• Anti-Fighter: HYENA equipped with 2x Gatling G-62A, 2x PACK-S Swarm Missile is probably the best anti-fighter loadout.
• Anti-Ship Alpha Strike: GRYPHON equipped with 2x L-RAM Heavy Missile. But honestly; by the time you want to use it, enemy ships will be strong enough to tank it, and your fighters will die so fast, it’s basically not worth it. And your Medium ships will be lobbing 16+ missiles at it anyway, which typically overkills everything.
• Use hotkeys to quickly assign individual targets. It’s not a typical RTS in that there are no control groups, which is a little finnicky.

I just want to reiterate that I’m really enjoying the game, but here are the issues I’ve had so far:

• Fighters often fly directly into enemy ships, causing them to briefly stop, where they will be hit by all enemy turret projectiles, rapidly depleting health.
• Your missile ships occasionally fly too close to enemies – preventing them from firing their missiles (pic). You need to manually move them away – where they should start firing again. If they don’t, re-issue the attack order on the enemy ship. This is the case even if set to 6km engagement range.
• Your ships often stop moving entirely when in combat, especially when assigned to move to a stopped objective. This will again cause them to die quickly.
• Telling a ship to move to a location doesn’t always change their mode to “Passive”.
• Similarly; sometimes right-clicking on enemy formations doesn’t trigger an attack order.

• Losing all ships often means you don’t have enough money to re-buy even one of them – when it happened to me (after entering Threat2 before my fleet was ready), I could only afford a single fighter with a single weapon, and the game didn’t tell me how much money I needed to save up to get back my other ships, leading to a soft-lock. I lost a few hours to this, RIP.
• Defensive anti-missile missiles often only fire at missiles that have already missed. They need to be patched to be viable.
• It’s hard to click on Control Points when they’re surrounded by ships.
• When ships lose sight of their target, they return to their previous waypoint, often flying out of combat.
• Enemy ships that have been killed still show as red on the UI.
• It’s a little odd how some Control Points offer repairs, but others don’t.

• There is no easy way to view all ships ammo counts at once (except for the yellow and red icons, but they trigger a little too late IMHO) – nor whether or not any of your ships are currently being resupplied (I have to manually cycle through them to find out).
• You cannot select multiple ships via their icons (e.g. by holding shift).
• Why have a ship limit as well as a ship point limit? IMHO it just limits fleet customization arbitrarily. E.g. I wanted to try a fighter-only fleet within the first few hours, but wasn’t able to.
• No way to tell ships to retreat when below a specific health.
• Controlling a ship from the map should change its mode into “Direct Contol” mode.
• No time/game speed mechanic.
• No ability to equip countermeasures on non-fighters. I wouldn’t even mind if it took a weapons lot.
• Let me assign a ships engagement distance in the fleet manager.
• Cannot have 2+ contracts running at once.
• The top-right toggles aren’t saved between deployments – I have to re-enable “Show Identification Range” every time.
• Too few audio barks when our own ships are getting hurt. One at 50% Hull would be nice IMHO. 15% is too low – often already too late.
• No UI feedback when resupply fails due to lack of resources at the Control Point.
• Apart from colour, differentiating different missile types in-flight is impossible.
• Once a missile is fired, it won’t retarget if the enemy ship gets destroyed, even if it was only just fired. It’s a little annoying.
• IMHO, “Direct Control” sounds too much like “In Control”, but it’s a nitpick.
• Pressing F while selecting multiple ships should cycle focus through them.
• Control groups would be appreciated, and/or allow us to re-order ships, so existing Alpha keys can be effectively assigned at will.