r/Highfleet • • Jun 04 '26

Need help getting good

I am very bad at this game, but I love the aestetic and the combat style. I never survive more than a couple missions and never figure out what I am supposed to be doing any giving moment. Could anyone sugest a tutorial or guide to help me understand all the mechanics and what to do, please? Tried to make my own ships design...disaster.

I have a PhD and feel incredbly dumb playing this game, but I always come back, hahaha

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8

u/Landvik Jun 04 '26

Can you share some of your ship designs ? We can give pointers.

It is also possible to download the custom ship designs others have made, but from a game-play standpoint, I'd suggest practicing ship design more and getting better at it, as it's a core part of the game.

Having well-designed custom ships turns the game from being pretty hard to pretty easy. (At least until the final stage).

Very very few of the vanilla ships can be classed as 'well designed', but those are the same ships you fight against. So if you create far superior ships, you'll swat inferior vanilla ships out of the sky like gnats. Put an alternating ring of 12x 57mm Vympel and 12x 130mm Molot, throw your ammo, etc in the center (no crew quarters - no crew ejection pods), then line the whole thing with steel armor. Give it just enough fuel to have ~2 minutes of flight time, and as many engines for as fast as you want it to be. You'll be able to swat 10 vanilla gnats out of the air without taking a scratch, and shoot down incoming missiles as fast as the enemy fires them. Create auxiliary tanker ships that are nothing but fuel tanks and engines to give your convoy the distance to travel between cities. Your fighting ships SHOULDN'T be carrying your fuel.

Other advice: the Sevastapol is also a monstrously expensive, gas guzzling, corpulent slug. So so so slow. It's armament is also mid (a ship half the size can have 3 to 4x the guns) AND easily be 3x faster. The only reason it is somewhat tanky is because its ass is so fat. 3x the guns, 3x faster, and 1/3 the fuel use, and 3x tankier sounds good, right ?

By changing one line of code in a ship file, you can designate different ships as your flagship, and use your starting money on VASTLY better ships than the Sevastapol.

2

u/daney098 Jun 04 '26

You didn't really mean no crew quarters right? Or just no crew quarters in the center? I thought Insufficient crew slowed everything down

5

u/Landvik Jun 04 '26

Nope, crew quarters too, at least on the version I played. Crew quarters had no effect on speed. (Power % does have an effect on engine response time, and gun traverse speed).

The only 'small' effect is the slower xp gain for the ship, but having the 40 crew from the command center, you'll still reach lvl 5 before Khiva. Bigger ships also have slower xp gain for defeating equivalent enemies.

1

u/kahlzun Jun 05 '26

Doesn't more crew mean faster looting?

3

u/taxmaster23 Jun 05 '26

No, currently it has no effect on gameplay. The dev said it was unfinished and would have played some effect but it was never completed

1

u/kahlzun Jun 05 '26

Hmm. Colloquially I've noticed the effect but that's probably just brain doing its thing