Lost Fleet is a game currently (Oct 1st, 2022) in early access on steam. In this video, my buddy and I are playing through the cooperative campaign where we swap roles between different ships in a fleet, ultimately protecting our mothership as it makes its’ way from hyperspace-jump-portal to portal.
– Starting off with the Mule: an asteroid-resource miner, we make our way to the closest asteroid to begin collecting resources. By pressing “T” (or middle mouse button) for keyboard users, you can auto target the closest mineable resource. I use a combination of holding boost (shift) and toggling flight assist (holding spacebar) to get to the target faster. I also use my horn (secondary fire/right mouse) to let others know I’m coming in hot. Each ship has a different secondary fire with varying levels of usefulness; including shields, flares, short range jumps, weapon zooms, and of course a car horn.
– My strategy is to gather resources as a mule during most of the first map’s duration to take advantage of the 20% bonus resource grab I personally make. From what I understand is all resource gains are given out to each player on the team, regardless of who earns it, but each player had and individual bank they use to spend on ships. There is an additional computer partner that is purchasing ships with their own bank funds, which is invisible to the human players. I will pull up the buy menu (“B”/”G”) to buy different strikecraft to help guard myself and the other miners. A few Hornets are a great buy right away, but I tend to save up for the Raven as a more expensive but lethal anti-fighter cover guard.
– I try to hold out as long as I can on each level to get the most resources out of the map, but if the mothership is taking too much damage, and I don’t think buying a few Camels (healing/repair craft) will cut it, I will hyperspace-jump to the next map early buy pressing “J”. Luckily there is notification that comes up on the top of the screen that lets you know when your mothership reaches the jump and also when all of the resources have been mined on the map.
-The strategy for the second map is to ditch the Mule (if I haven’t already) and switch to the Ranger ship, which is the last ship on the left side of the buy menu. This ship has what you need to pester enemy Mules and take on small formations of fighters. With autocannons that will target hostile ships within a certain range, a primary fire that is a short range and quick-firing beam that can lock-on to fighters, and a secondary fire that is a rechargeable short-range jump, the Ranger is the king of this gas giant of a map. I use it to boost into enemy Mule groups, take out a few along with a fighter to two, collect their “loot” that looks like little glowing blue cubes, and jump out back towards my mothership to repair, (which is located by the underbelly). My aim is to have enough resources to afford the Hydra capital ship, going into the next map.
– Unfortunately, my funds are a little too low by the time a few enemy ships spawn and we move to the 3rd map. I settle for a Zeus ship, a long-range rail gun that can safely hit targets from a distance. In this case, the Leviathans who give a low moan indicating they have just spawned and are spewing out Biter, fighter-sized alien creatures and swarm ships a can quickly take down even larger capitals. My teammate did much better last map and had enough to buy the Hydra, so with our combined fire power and range, we are able to quickly and mostly un-harmed, take out the leviathans as they spawn.
– Next map is the Ice Shard Field map. What I do here is follow the Mules as they liberate ships trapped in the ice. When you are piloting a Mule, you can use your auto-target to detect SOS beacons from ice chunks and your mining laser with do damage to chip/melt the ship free from its icy prison. This will claim the ship for your team, and you can take control by holding “C” for keyboard, to surrender control of your current ship. Then by selecting the newly freed ship, you can hold “C” again to take command. You can do this to any ship at any time during the game. Now that we have command of this rescued ship, we can call up our buy menu (“B”/”G”) and select “Sell Ship”. After a few seconds, resources are added to our bank, and this is dependent on the remaining health points of the ship.
– Our goal now is to recover and sell as many ships as fast as we can in order to buy some big boy capitals which cost a whopping 7.5k each. My first buy is the Paragon, a massive carrier ship, capable of pumping out a bunch of strike-class ships and issuing command orders. This is my first time buying this ship so I was curious as too what it did. However I didn’t have much time to play around since I needed to keep getting as much resources while I still could, jumping just before it got too hot.
– This next map is a big peekaboo playground and everything is chaos as we purchase a total of 3 capitals before we’re out.
source
Nice gameplay, just sub for you man 👍