Some initial reports about dev 8 say that the combat mode is rather too hard. This is perhaps not too surprising - I remember the last game I made, Asteroid Storm, where I had to make the game massively easier to make it playable by most people.

This isn't because I'm a particularly amazingly powerful gamer. It's just that if you're the one who wrote the game, you of course know all the tricks, and have spent a lot of time playing it.

So I'll be looking into toning down combat difficulty a bit in dev 9, or giving you readier access to bigger guns. But for now, here's some combat tips:

• The single laser cannon on your ship isn't very powerful, but you can find more weapons, or buy them from the Zrapta using space gold.
• You can move your cursor over any ship to get more information about its status.
• How easy it is to hit a ship depends on your distance, and on how many moves the enemy ship has left. The more moves it has left, the harder it is to hit. (The little green dots on the left of the ship represent the number of moves left.)
• Most enemy ships want to stay within a certain range of you. You can cause them to exhaust their moves by moving too close or too far away, making them easier to hit. Hence, with some ships, it makes sense to chase after them, and with others, to be chased by them.
• If you are fighting multiple enemies, eg robot drones, you can kill some of them, run away, and then come back with full shields and armor to finish off the rest.
• You can avoid nearly all combat situations with the right encounter choices, so if you're not powerful enough yet, be meek.