How a Pilot Grows

You start with a Shuttlecraft, ten thousand credits and a rating of Harmless. Everything after that is one ladder with four rungs — money, then a reputation, then ships you could never have bought, then a difficulty setting that makes all of it count. This page is that ladder, and almost none of it is written down anywhere in the game.

Your combat rating is a hidden sum of the crews of everything you have killed. A world's prices are a fixed opinion it holds and never shows you. The most profitable move available to you is not a weapon or a ship, it is a manoeuvre nobody mentions. If you have not left the ground yet, the New Pilot's Guide comes first; this is what comes after.

Your first million

You can finish this game without firing a shot. 60 worlds run a commodity exchange, each with its own idea of what things are worth, and the difference between those opinions is your income.

Where each good is cheap and where it pays is a question the galaxy atlas answers directly, with the map lit up to match:

Or let someone else own the cargo

The mission computer on any inhabited world carries an endless supply of delivery and ferry jobs. They pay less per ton than a good trade route, but they carry no risk of buying into a market you cannot reach, and the rush jobs — the ones with a deadline — pay considerably better.

Generated pay varies with distance and cargo, so those are orders of magnitude. The written missions pay exactly what their entries say, deadline included.

Making a name

Money buys a better hull, and a better hull is what lets you survive a fight. But money alone will not get you a storyline: for that the galaxy has to have heard of you. Combat here is Newtonian and unforgiving — you have a heading, a throttle and inertia, and nothing stops when you let go of the key — and most fights are decided before they start, by what you bought with the first rung.

What the galaxy thinks of you as a fighter is one hidden number: your rating is the sum of the crew complements of every ship you have destroyed. Kill a Shuttlecraft and you have earned one point. Kill a Confederate Cruiser and you have earned 1,029. Governments look at that number before trusting you with anything serious, which is why forty-three missions will not be offered until it is high enough.

Since a kill is worth its crew, the crew column of the ship registry doubles as a price list for reputation — and, not coincidentally, as a ranking of how hard each thing is to kill. A Shuttlecraft is one point; the Alien Cruiser is 650.

Taking what you cannot afford

Once you can win a fight, you stop having to pay for ships. This is the rung most pilots never find, and it is worth more than either of the two below it.

Winning the fight first

• Match the weapon to the hull. Fast, light ships want quick-firing weapons; heavy warships can carry slow batteries that would leave a fighter defenceless between shots.
• Shields regenerate, armour does not. Break off, let your shields come back, come again. Armour damage is permanent until you land.
• Not every attack needs an answer. Small ships are not built for prolonged fights. Withdrawing costs you nothing but pride.
• Turrets fire while you run. A rear-quadrant or 360° turret changes what "retreating" means.
• Fighters are ablative. Bays launch fighters that soak damage and shoot back, and they come home to be repaired for free.
• Missiles can be jammed; torpedoes cannot. The guided missile is the only weapon in the game a Missile Jammer works against — which is why the warships carry torpedoes.

The tactics are condensed from Ambrosia's own playing tips, preserved in full in the archive. The jamming point is not from the tips: it is read out of the resource dump, where the guided missile carries the only jamming vulnerability in the game.

What actually happens when you take a ship

The question nobody answers plainly: does the prize join you, or do you lose the one you flew in on? Neither. The game asks you, and whichever way you answer, you normally end up with both ships.

Do you want to use this ship as an escort, or would you rather trade places with its captain and use it as your own ship?

Before you get the choice

Boarding a disabled ship opens a menu — cargo, credits, ammunition, fuel, and then the two buttons that matter: Capture Ship and Demand Tribute. Choose to capture and the game shows you your capture odds before you commit, so this is never a blind gamble. Ambrosia's own ship tables give the rule behind that number in five words: More crew = higher chance of capturing a ship — which is why the crew column in the registry is worth reading before you pick a target.

Two things can go wrong. The attempt simply fails — Your attempt to capture this ship was unsuccessful. — or it goes worse: Oops! You tripped this ship's security self-destruct mechanism. You can also walk away after looking at the odds, and the game notes that without judgement.

What a fleet is actually for

• Cargo is counted across the whole fleet. Every escort's hold is yours, which turns a captured freighter into a permanent raise on every trade run.
• You command them. Fighters, medium ships, warships, freighters or all ships can each be told to defend, attack, hold position, return to the hangar or fly formation.
• They are property. At a shipyard an escort can be upgraded or sold off — some hulls cannot be upgraded, and the game says which.
• They can walk. The game keeps hired escorts and captured ones as separate kinds, and an escort that goes unpaid defects: Due to lack of pay, one of your escorts has defected.
• Fighters count. A disabled fighter can be captured like anything else.

Every quotation above is a string out of the game's own resources — the boarding menu, the capture dialogue and the fleet messages, verbatim. The tips in the archived playing tips agree from the other side: With a bit of luck, you can even pick up a few escorts by disabling enemy vessels… The one number nobody can give you is the escort ceiling itself: the game has a message for hitting it and never writes the figure down anywhere we can read.

Playing for keeps

A checkbox on the new-pilot screen: "when you're dead, you're dead. No reincarnation allowed." Normally, dying costs you your ship and some money, and the ladder above is a grind you can always restart. Under strict play the pilot file is finished when you are. Nothing about the game changes except what every rung is worth.

The shortcuts

There are no cheat keys in Escape Velocity. There are, however, ways up the ladder that skip several rungs: four weapons no outfitter will ever sell you, a handful of bugs Ambrosia clearly knew about and never fixed — two of which hand you free ships — and a set of key combinations at the title screen that nobody would have found by accident.

The weapons you cannot buy

Bugs worth knowing

• Free fighters. Buy two or more bays. Launch everything, recall them, and once one has docked order them to stop. Launch again and you get extra fighters, proportional to how many bays you have.
• Free Lightnings. Demand tribute from a world defended by Lightnings, disable the defenders and board them. Fly them or sell them — a Lightning is worth a million credits. The galaxy now says which worlds those are, and there is exactly one: New Cydonia.
• The neutron blaster trick. Sell a secondary weapon while it is your selected weapon and you keep using it until you switch. Reportedly there is a bonus when this is done with the neutron blaster.
• Scamming Sol. Certain items — armour especially — sell in the Sol system for more than you paid for them.
• Gambling. Hold the space bar down while gambling and your luck improves substantially for the first three rolls.

The title screen

1. Hold X as the title screen loads.
2. Click the title picture holding option-command-shift.
3. Click the title picture holding shift-M-B, then holding option-M-B.

Jokes hidden in the star map

A good third of the empty systems are references. Nobody ever comments on them; they are just there, on the map, waiting for you to notice.

Special items, cheats and easter eggs as documented by Ambrosia in the game's own help pages; the originals are preserved in the archive. The star-map references are our own reading of the map.