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[Paul]

Medusas are great for chasing down fleeing ships, I keep one on hand for that with safety overrides. 180 speed and the phase skimmer means you can catch anything.

Hammerheads are much better brawling ships though imo. Kinetic weapons are better suited for quickly tearing ships apart, combine some assault chainguns and machineguns (both high dps) with the hammerhead's ability and you get a monster.

The hammerhead setup I mentioned in my other comment can take on big fleets solo. I randomly found 3 pirate bounty fleets sitting around a planet, rushed and attacked and had them all at once. It was 2 enemy hammerheads, a buffalo, 4 kites, 4 wolves, 2 lashers, a cerberus, and a one of those mudskipper mk2s. 12 frigates and 3 destroyers. I had them all dead in just over 2 minutes right after my peak performance time ran out.

It only works with the player in charge though. The AI is really dumb with them set up like that. Maybe an aggressive officer would do better, but just AI controlled they are way too cautious and never actually get close enough to do anything. Even against frigates they just dance around at their max weapon range and the machine guns never fire and the other weapons just miss repeatedly. Instead of going in for the quick point blank kill they try to kite enemies that have longer range guns.

[EnigmaticHat]

Yeah but 2x flux dissipation seems like kinda a game breaker so I'm avoiding it

[a1s]

2. What are marines for now?

Trade. Just think of them as crates of armor with a human transportation system.

[Mini]

I don't know how to actually complete the mission?  Like is there a way to find the derelict i'm supposed to scan, and what do I do once I've found it?

The mission description will have a hint about where the thing you have to scan is (e.g. around a barren planet), just go to wherever it says and then the one you need to scan will have an exclamation mark like every other mission objective. Just interact with it and use the scan option (only appears on ones you have the mission for). Don't take ones that just say "in the system" or whatever unspecific stuff, they are very annoying to find.

[Ygdrad]

Anyone got some tricks for sustainable system defense/faction commission bounty-hunting? I've got a small fleet consisting of 1x enforcer destroyer, 2x vigilance support frigates, 1x wayfarer combat freighter, and 1x sheperd drone tender. My problem is that even if I only deploy 2 or 3 ships into combat, I'm hemorrhaging supplies. I don't get enough back from combat and then I have to buy more and the meager faction commission bounties aren't anywhere near high enough to cover costs so I'm hanging on by a thread.

[EnigmaticHat]

A destroyer is simply too expensive to employ for that kind of mission.  You're better off with one or two really well optimized frigates.  Faction commissions aren't a living on their own, they're more of an excuse to get paid on top of other bounties/loot.  If you haven't already, invest two points into getting the 50% maintenance reduction skill.  Even if you don't get any other leadership skills its still worth it.

Generally those kind of battles you'll be facing large numbers of crappy degraded combat freighters, so what you want is a flux efficient ship that's good at killing hull and can backpedal decently fast (since its kinda like a zombie movie).  Unfortunately the pirates also employ lashers, which is one of the better hulls out there and for a pirate ship of that size is well shielded.  Generally I'd say you want either a TT frigate with energy weapons, and figure out some way to kite the little guys (wolf or TT brawler backpedaling is a nice cheap way to get some work done), or you want to go with a lasher of your own.  Kit it out with at least 3 autocannons and set them to an autofiring group, then if you come up against a ship without shields turn off the autofiring with ctrl+num.  Give it either salamander missiles (for the reasuability/utility) or if you can get an extended missile racks upgrade put the hammer rockets on it.  8 rockets pretty much means 8 dead ships and the low OP cost of the rockets offsets the high OP cost of the upgrade.  Pay attention to the faction fleets in the area to infer where the pirates are, and try to killsteal from fights that are already in progress.

You might want to transition away from bounty hunting for now to build yourself a nest egg.  Smuggling is good business and your fleet is decently suited for it (except that drone tender is probably too slow).  This advice is all based on a previous version of the game, but anyway.  Hack into the faction relays to get a constant stream of information about trade events.  If a trade event sends a useful or expensive item down in cost, buy it in bulk on the black market and then sell it elsewhere or use it for yourself.  If the price goes up from an event, find a cheap seller in a different system, buy on the black market, then ferry it into the system and sell on the black market.  As long as events are in progress, you can keep buying and selling at a profit in multiple trips.  If you find an event that lets you buy and sell from two markets that are right next to each other you can make a fortune overnight.  Don't carry contraband unless you're confident in your abilities, take legit transport contracts to pass the time between your smuggling gigs, and always have one faction that doesn't know you're a criminal.

All that being said, your little fleet could probably grab a few of the big bounties if you could afford the fuel to get out there.  Just make sure the bounty doesn't expire before you arrive...

[Aklyon]

If you can fight, you can linger around near bigger fights and salvage the remains of ships that come out of them (or if you are crap at salvaging, jus blow up the remains into smaller pieces and loot the debris field.) And Shepards are great cheap cargo space with some minor distraction ability if you need an extra ship in the fight at 100 space each.

[Paul]

Wow, this hammerhead build is kind of OP actually...

I just took down a hegemony detachment with an onslaught pretty much solo with it. I had some frigates flying to capture the nav relay and sensor jammer but did all the killing myself. I avoided the big guy at first and quickly wrecked the supporting frigates and destroyers without taking too much damage. Then got in behind the onslaught. Fired both torpedoes into the engines then just hammered away at it with everything I had until it died. The rear guns on it almost got me and I had to juggle shields up and down and strafe around a bit to avoid some of them, and my armor and 2/3 of my hull was gone by the time it was done, but geez.

A single destroyer taking out an entire fleet with battleship, 3 destroyers, and like 5 frigates.

[Aklyon]

Safety Overrides tends to make things much stronger or much easier to blow up, or both.

[EnigmaticHat]

I tried out safety overrides in the simulator, got some pretty OP results.  Sunderer with 2x graviton beam + tachyon lance pretty much shredded through anything, even without skills.  I shudder to think what I could have done with character skills.

It honestly seems like a pretty ridiculous upgrade.  Flux dissipation is the most important thing in this game, and movespeed is second most imporant since it allows you to use said dissipation and prevent the enemy from using it.  Or to put it differently, if you gave both an enforcer and a dominator 600 dissipation, they would be pretty comparable in power level despite the dominator being supposedly a tier higher ship class.  You basically get zero flux boost with your shields up and actively vent constantly whenever your shields are down.

The stated weakness of CR reduction is not much of a weakness at all, really its more that the OP cost + the range reduction are crippling to certain ships.  But they matter little enough to other ship types.  Honestly, the CR weakness should be replaced with "suffer critical malfunctions if you would suffer normal malfunctions, suffer normal malfunctions in situations where you would have no malfunctions."  That would be about balanced in my estimation, and fit with the risk vs reward flavor of the thing.

[Kanil]

SO ships are... not a good choice for larger battles.

They allow you to crush through small fleets with remarkable ease, but when your slugging it out with 50 remnants, you aren't going to win the fight in 90 seconds.

[Majestic7]

Aren't SO ships very vulnerable to EMP attacks since every second wasted stunned is a fraction of your life spent?

[Kanil]

Conceptually, yes. In practice, I don't think it matters much. But anything that wastes time is bad for a SO ship. Simply having your hostiles watch eachother's backs preventing you from picking off the weaklings is a huge problem with a SO ship, and usually not an issue for a not-SO ship.

You can easily beat a trio of Enforcers with your SO Medusa, but you have to spread them out a bit and try to only fight one at a time, and if they insist on clumping up then you can soon find yourself running out of time and CR.

Similarly picking off all the frigate escorts can be excessively time consuming.

[Flying Dice]

Hoo boy. Running an Aurora right now, haven't for ages since I don't really like their hardpoint layout, but the plasma boost thing that got added makes them much nicer. Just KISS, two pulse lasers and two tac lasers in the forward turrets, two burst PD in the back, three AM blasters in frontal hull-mounts, advanced turret gyros, stab+accel shields, maxed flux capacity and vents. Can solo burn down anything short of battlecruisers on up without taking return damage, very nice sustainable DPS build--the AMs of course work both to outpace the enemy on flux buildup and to crack armor.

Still shit against frigate wolfpacks, but everything decently big has been for ages. No reason to run anything but a pack of high-end frigates and support ships these days beyond the fun of it, what with the absurd cost of supplies.

[Taricus]

Correction, anything big that isn't a paragon. That being said frigates usually lack the punch to take down bigger ships and/or carriers. Especially since in the latter case since fighters WILL swarm and annihilate you.