Maneuvering and Positioning

Mastering your ships handling and positioning allows you to apply more damage while taking less in return. This is one of the most important skills to learn, but also very abstract and hard to explain, as all ships fly differently.

Strafing (lateral and vertical thrust) is used to evade enemy projectiles, to move the player into a favorable position, and to assist in aiming projectile weaponry with low shotspeed (as it inherits the ships movement).

Boost is used to amplify strafing movements, and to quickly perform orientation & vector changes. Strafing & Reverse (“boost bleeding”), and timed deploying and retracting of cargo hatch / landing gear (“boost capping”) are used to avoid overshooting the boost. The goal here is not to have the maximum speed possible at the end of the boost, but rather somewhere between 50% and 100% cruise speed, in order to have the right speed to be able to effectively correct vector and attitude after the boost has ended. This also keeps the engagement distance small, avoiding jousting.