Way better than I could've explained. Thank you, ZackDark. However, I have a bone to pick with you. ;)

Regarding that "bathtub," good sir, you should note that it boosts over 500 m/s fully loaded for combat. This is very fast for such a large ship. Those guns are five plasma accelerators modded for efficiency (literally the only way I could fire all five at once). If I hit your Vulture with a full salvo, you'd better be wearing your brown pants.

That ship is an absolute monster. Like Cthulu, but fast.

Hope these help, Korny...

And Phisto should be ashamed of flying it!

;p

All kidding aside, this game's dogfighting is a bit more like a game of chess than a game of reflexes. Unless you're way overpowered or a LOT faster than the enemy ship, you have to carefully switch power from engines to weapons to shields and back (the three columns on the right of the map) as the fight progresses. Boosting eats a chunk off of the ENG bar, regenerating shields eats SYS and firing weapons consume WEP.

As you can notice, he is constantly boosting to try and outmaneuver the enemy ship (which can be seen in the 3D map as the red triangle). On top of that, his weapon must be one hell of cannon, because it takes over half his WEP reserve per shot.

The map is a mess because it is listing all the asteroids around, but essentially, the disc is the plane of the ship and a bar rising above and dipping below it represent how far from the plane any given object is, as well as the origin of the bars represent how far within the plane they are from you.

Now, it looks kind of slow and potshot-y because his ship, while very maneuverable for its class, is still quite big, so the enemy has a slight advantage on speed. I, for one, favor the Vulture, which is a tiny fighter that allows for big guns, so I just zip around big enemies flying ships like Phisto's and busting their subsystems, like shield generator and engines until they're sitting ducks. On the downside, if Phisto's gun even grazes my ship, I'll at the very least lose all my shield and a bit of my hull, possibly damaging some subsystem.

Thanks for the context, though I'm still not super hyped for this game if these are the exciting moments (no offense to Phisto, I'm more of a fast-paced tactical combat kind of guy).

Either way, sounds like I'd be a Vulture kind of guy myself; I love "hit hard, hit fast, but don't get hit" gameplay.