Post by redartrats on Jun 6, 2016 20:39:16 GMT -5
The best way to kill lots of ships in a short time is to become an independent captain. First get a decent ship and good combat skills (for indy captains, I generally prefer a gunner than a boarder, so max out pilot + tactics, and add a bit of stealth to minimize damage to your own ship -- not too much stealth as that will decrease the rate of encounters, plus you want most of your XP points allocateed to pilot/tactics). Learn where the indy planets are, and which ones have good economy / good repair availabilities, and always plan your routes around them. Then just go around the quadrant and shoot down everything that moves. My personal strategy is to always move in to close range, then spam Engines. If the enemy ship survives, loot and sell to pay for fuel and repairs. Forget about torps because (1) they are expensive to reload, (2) they tend to destroy the enemy ship completely so less looting opportunities. Boarding tends to cause too much collateral damage to your own ship/crew, which could be expensive and might offset the profits you reap from looting. So I always go for gunning the engines.
If you're brave enough you could also try contracting to pay for your pillaging, but that often distracts from the primary goal, which is to blast everything that moves out of the sky. It also may lead you too far away from high economy/repairs indy planets, which may threaten your survival.
One very successful indy captain I played recently spent most of his time at Traneldor B [23,26], and basically did short runs to the nearby Faction planets to Blockade them, shoot down anything that tries to stop him, and go back to Traneldor B to refuel/repair. Sometimes out of boredom he'd try to repeatedly land/take off from those Faction planets -- when you have rep in the deep red, this often generates more encounters than just blockading/patrolling (and btw I found patrolling useless -- it hardly turns up a single ship before using up all my fuel).
If you're brave enough you could also try contracting to pay for your pillaging, but that often distracts from the primary goal, which is to blast everything that moves out of the sky. It also may lead you too far away from high economy/repairs indy planets, which may threaten your survival.
One very successful indy captain I played recently spent most of his time at Traneldor B [23,26], and basically did short runs to the nearby Faction planets to Blockade them, shoot down anything that tries to stop him, and go back to Traneldor B to refuel/repair. Sometimes out of boredom he'd try to repeatedly land/take off from those Faction planets -- when you have rep in the deep red, this often generates more encounters than just blockading/patrolling (and btw I found patrolling useless -- it hardly turns up a single ship before using up all my fuel).
