Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown got a lot of criticism (and sometimes praise) at its release for how difficult it is. This actually caught me off-guard when I played, because I played the demo back in November or December, and I thought the demo was really easy. Boy did that demo not do justice to the challenge of the actual game!
I struggled a lot and had to restart the game multiple times, and save-scum sectors over and over again, in order to learn how best to approach the game's challenges. Without giving away any specific spoilers, I particularly struggled to get through sectors 4 and 5 without running out of Deuterium. These sectors are, in my opinion, the peak of the game's difficulty. If you can get through sectors 4 and 5, I think the rest of the game should be mostly downhill. That isn't to say that the remaining game is easy. It will still require careful and methodical play. But if you get past sectors 4 and 5 in relatively good condition, then you should have developed the infrastructure and techniques to give yourself enough buffer for sub-optimal play that the rest of the game will feel a lot less stressful.
With that in mind, I want to coalesce my experience with the game and offer some tips to help new players get through sectors 1 through 5, without having to necessarily go through all the trial-and-error that I had to go through. These tips will be specifically focused on the early game, and I'm going to try to avoid any specific spoilers, as this post is intended for people who are stuck in the early sectors of the game, or people who have not played the game yet, but are considering doing so. Also, please check out the full review.
Across The Unknown can be unforgiving and difficult.
Power OFF rooms you aren't using
In my opinion, Deuterium is the most difficult resource to keep stockpiled. It's probably the most critical resource in the game, as it provides all the fuel for Voyager's trek across the Delta Quadrant. It is constantly being burned, and the more energy you are pulling from the warp core, the more Deuterium you are going to be burning. As such, managing the amount of energy Voyager is expending is critical to early game strategy.
To help keep your energy consumption down, and to prevent yourself from having to run the warp core at maximum power all the time, you should make a habit of disabling rooms (or decks) that you are not actively using. One of the easiest ways to conserve some power is to turn off Stellar Cartography. This room's energy can be cheesed to the point that it's basically free to use.
Certain rooms (like Stellar Cartography)
can be cheesed for energy-free use.
At present, it does not cost any energy to actually use Stellar Cartography, and you can scan points of interest from anywhere in a system. So what you can do is simply leave Stellar Cartography turned off while you travel. Then, after you enter a new system, turn it back on, scan all the points of interest without moving, and then turn it back off. This will reveal all the information about the system without costing you a single point of energy.
Other rooms, such as the Shuttle Bay, Aeroshuttle, Workshop, and Transporter can be similarly micro-managed.
Now, it is possible to run into events that use Stellar Cartography, or the Shuttlebay, or Transporter, for a system test. The Shuttlebay and Transporter are common, but I found Stellar Cartography checks to be very rare. Even so, if you're worried about needing Stellar Cartography, or any of the other rooms, to pass a test, you can simply toggle these rooms back on just before reaching the point of interest.
Emergency Quarters are good enough
Early in the game, you may be tempted to start building Crew Quarters and Officer Quarters to house your crew and improve morale. Don't do it! Instead, I recommend housing your crew entirely in Emergency Quarters, and leveling those quarters up to level 2 as quickly as is practical.
The early sectors are probably going to be the hardest in the game. You have fewer resources, less cargo space for storing a buffer of excess resources, and less power. Crew and Officer quarters take up more space than an Emergency Quarter, cost more materials to build, consume more power, and offer less capacity. In my opinion, the morale boost offered by proper quarters does not make up for these drawbacks in the early game.
Get everyone bunked up in Emergency Quarters before installing any Crew or Officer Quarters.
There are plenty of other opportunities to improve morale, such as providing better food, selecting certain options in Away Missions, making certain choices, and completing certain side objectives. Bottlenecks in physical resources are a lot harder to overcome in the early game, and won't be as much of a bottleneck if you focus on cheaper, more space-efficient Emergency Quarters.
Later in the game, when your morale is stabilized and you have some resources to spare, then you can start tearing down the Emergency Quarters and replace them with Crew Quarters and Officer Quarters. Just remember to plan out enough space for those larger rooms.
Build backups of critical rooms early
One of the best pieces of advice that I can give for the early sectors of Across the Unknown is to build a second (or maybe even third) copy of certain key infrastructure. Multiple Cargo Bays will be an absolute necessity, since each Cargo Bay can only hold a single type of resource. Other rooms, such as the Science Lab, Sickbay, Engineering Office, and Phaser Control Room should get a secondary room as well. And sooner rather than later. This will increase the capacity or output of these rooms, while also providing redundancy in case of damage or loss of power.
Put rooms on multiple decks
It may initially seem optimal to try to cram all your important rooms onto a single deck, so that you don't have to spend power on more decks than you need. But this can actually be a trap.
First of all, if you loose power to that deck, usually due to sustaining damage to the Life Support controls during combat, then you'll loose all your critical infrastructure. For example, if you build multiple Science Labs, but they're all on the same deck, then loosing power to that deck will mean you loose all of your science production. This is true regardless of whether the deck looses power due to damage from combat, or if you simply had to turn the deck off to conserve power. Having these labs spread across multiple decks means that if you loose power to one deck, you'll still have at least some science output.
Stack backup copies of key rooms on adjacent decks.
Worse yet, if the same deck -- say, Deck 5 -- happens to house your only copy of the Sickbay, Hydroponics Bay, Science Lab, Biology Lab, Cargo Bay, Phaser Control Room, and Observation Deck, and that deck loses power, then basically all of Voyager's output will be gone, and you will be in big trouble. Having these rooms spread out across multiple decks, or having redundancy across multiple decks, makes it much less likely that a single disabled deck can lead to a catastrophic loss of functionality.
It's OK to have all this infrastructure on one deck, just in case you do need to cut power and only have enough power for a single deck. But if you do that, then make sure you are following the previous tip and building redundant copies of rooms on other decks.
Secondly, later in the game, you can gain access to more powerful versions of some rooms that stagger multiple decks. Spreading your rooms out across multiple decks will make building these larger, multi-deck rooms easier. For one thing, if you have Cargo Bays or Hydroponics Bays stacked on top of each other, it's easier to dismantle the old single-deck rooms and replace them with the double-decker upgrade, without having to tear apart half the ship to make room.
Stacking rooms on multiple decks also makes it much easier to slot new multi-deck rooms, such as Waste Processing, into your layout without having to dismantle any existing rooms.
As such, early in the game, I highly recommend just going through all the room options in the construction wheel, and look at the size and shape of all rooms that will ever be available. This way, you can start planning for how you want to organize these rooms, and won't fall victim to a "gotcha!" when you research a new room, only to find out that you didn't leave enough space to actually build it anywhere.
Pay attention to the rewards in Away Missions
In my first attempt at the game, whenever I would send out an Away Mission, I would focus on trying to get the most likely outcome. I didn't even notice that each choice offered different resource rewards. As such, I frequently chose the path of least resistance, which usually offered fewer (if any) resource rewards. And when I was getting resources in Away Missions, they were often resources that I already possessed, and so I wouldn't have enough cargo space to actually keep them. I would walk out of many Away Missions with hardly anything to show for it, other than story progress.
Don't make the same mistake!
Check the risk and reward of each choice before committing to one in an Away Mission.
Make sure you are looking at the rewards offered by a particular choice, and also the risk assessment, and use that information to decide which options to take. If 2 options have a similar chance of success, but one of those options offers a resource that you are starving for, then you have an opportunity to give yourself a buffer on that scarce resource.
If there isn't a particular resource that you need, or if you're already near capacity on all your hard resources, then I would recommend focusing more on taking the options that provide Science points. There is no cap (that I'm aware of) on how many Science points you can have stored, so you'll never "waste" Science points the way you might waste Deuterium by collecting Deuterium while your Deuterium storage is already at or near capacity.
Warp directly to where you want to go
When travelling between systems, don't simply hold the button on the system in the Sector Map to travel to the system in general. This will often warp you to an arbitrary point at the edge of the system, and force you to have to spend additional cycles moving at impulse to wherever you actually want to go. Instead, you should drill down and select which specific point of interest you want to warp to in the other system. Warping directly to an objective location, or to a resource-rich cluster of planets, can spare you from crucial cycles of unnecessary impulse travel.
Leave resources in case you have to backtrack
It might be tempting, and might even seem optimal, to systematically gather every resource in a system before moving onto the next one. But this is another trap that the game sets for you. Most sectors will require you to backtrack to systems you've already passed through. If you already cleared that system of all its resources (particularly Deuterium and food) then you may find yourself running low, with no way to replenish your supplies.
Leave clusters of resources in each system, in case you have to backtrack.
I recommend leaving some resource clusters within each system -- especially Deuterium and food. You can't stop mid-warp, so you have to plan your pit stops before committing to a warp movement. Trying to warp through 2 or 3 systems can easily take 20 or more cycles, which is plenty of time to burn through your Deuterium and/or food reserves, and leave you stuck in Gray Mode when you drop out of warp at your destination. I recommend that if you have to warp through multiple systems, that you make a habit of stopping at a cluster of resources within each system you pass through, in order to collect some Deuterium and/or food to replenish your supplies before moving onto the next system. You can then warp directly to the desired location in the next system, without necessarily having to spend a single full cycle stopped in the intervening system.
Target opponent weapons
Combat in Across The Unknown can be a very dull and passive experience if you let it be. You can literally just take your hand off the controller or keyboard and let Voyager do its thing without any input from you. Though I definitely do not advise doing that! By taking a more proactive approach, the system will not only be more engaging, but you will also get more optimal results.
For example, in battles against multiple opponents, I recommend targeting the Weapons systems of the weakest opponents first. Don't keep firing until the opponent is destroyed, surrenders, or retreats. Simply take out the weapons, and then switch to the next weakest opponent. This may drag out the overall length of individual encounters, but it can spare you resources in the long term.
Target opponent weapons, in order to minimize the attacks they get to make against Voyager.
Disabling an opponent's weapons means that's one fewer ship that is shooting at you. This means fewer, and less frequent attacks over the course of the battle. This gives your shields more time to recharge between opponent attacks, which means fewer attacks will go through the shields and damage the hull, disable a room, or injure crew.
Once all the opponents' weapons are offline, you can go back and target engines or the warp core to finish them off and formally end the fight.
You can sequence break in the tutorial
This final tip is a little bit more geared towards players who might be restarting a campaign after either dying or giving up. Though first-time players can utilize this technique as well. Basically, you do not have to wait until the game tutorializes a particular mechanic before you start exploiting that mechanic. Small sequence-breaks in the first sector can help give you a headstart and ease some of the pressure that the next few sectors may put on you.
The most notable such sequence breaks are that you can repair the Science Lab and start researching technologies before the game instructs you to, and you can start assigning heroes to rooms before the game tells you to. Assigning heroes early will probably only provide marginal benefits, if any. However, assigning someone to the Science Lab can boost your early research rate. This, combined with conducting research before you are tutorialized to do so, can be a big boon. You can unlock infrastructure such as Hydroponics Bays, the Biology Lab, or even Level 2 upgrades to some rooms, quite a bit earlier than otherwise.
Assigning a hero to the Science Lab, and beginning research before being tutorialized can give you a jump start.
If you do start researching early, be careful that you don't burn through all your science points, as this can actually hurt you if you don't save enough science points to research required technologies in subsequent sectors. To offset this, you should prioritize visiting points of interest that provide science, and also prioritize taking science points as a reward for Away Mission choices. Prioritizing science like this will give you a large buffer of research points, and will help you to unlock more techs sooner.
If you are restarting the campaign, then you can also use your foreknowledge of the upcoming sectors' objectives and challenges to plan out what technologies you want to reach for early, and which rooms you want to boost with heroes.
Good luck surviving the Delta Quadrant!
I hope these tips help you to be the best Captain Janeway that you can possibly be. Well, at least in terms of logistics. When it comes to the moral and ethical decisions that the Delta Quadrant will be throwing at you, you're on your own!
You're on your own when it comes to making moral and ethical decisions!