The pirate base bounties do pay well though. Keep a look out for those in the Intel screen periodically.
I have never tried eliminating a base – I assume you need a shit-ton of firepower?
Depends on the base and if a fleet is guarding it.
Typically the size of the patrolling fleets is related to the base’s power. If you see giant fleets with like 3-4 capitals, the base would be tough.
What I would do is to attract the attention of a mega fleet some distance away, you can
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lure it away and then boost towards an unguarded base to just do a relatively simple battle, remember to raid first for goodies with ground troops.
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or, take on the fleet first, if you are up to it. You can normally take on the mega fleets, sometimes even if they have like 4-5 capitals when you have only 2. I use a border hugging technique.
Just last night, I took on a pirate fleet of about 4 Atlas MK2, 5-6 assorted crusiers and more than a dozen destroyers and frigates with an initial deployment of 1 Conquest, 1 Legion with 2x Apogee and 1 Eagle and a Falcon. I did not have the deployment points to put more. But I used my command points to order them to the bottom border of the screen, and they proceeded to tear up the incoming pirates.
The pirate ships are typically low quality so they overwhelm you with numbers by flanking. If you just let the AI take complete control, a small high quality fleet will get defeated the moment they get flanked.
But if you seal off your back against flanking by using the border, you’ll be able to outsmart the AI, they get into a traffic jam trying to get to you, and your missiles are in a target rich environment.
This is very helpful, thanks. I don’t think I’m ready, my fleet is only 8 ships, 1 capital. What is your fleet size and composition?
How is this accomplished? Simply by controlling your ship and staying near the edge?
I play like you, using only RTS. So I’ll left click on my ships and right click on a destination.
I do it when the battle starts so that the ships’ AI don’t have to figure out complicated stuff and just travel there. Then when the pirates start arriving, I’ll just selectively use command points to assign the bigger and nearer targets for my ships.
Having weapons range extenders like using long range weaponry and integrated targetting mods help a lot. Also get the command points replenishment skill so that you dont run out of command points to issue orders.
The fleet I ran in that battle was 1 conquest, 1 legion (carrier), 1 heron, 1 dominator, 1 eagle, 2 falcons, 2 apogees. I cant field all of them at once. But I’ll rotate them into battle.
Being at the bottom of the screen helps because the rotation is super fast, they can jump out since they are already at the bottom, and they fight immediately when they jump in.
OK, thanks, that helps a lot.
I have trouble finding these better ships. But I assume it is just a matter of searching multiple bases for the good stuff.
O yes. I spend a lot of time shopping around for juicy ships with no D-mods. They cost tons, but I think just doing missions will get a lot of dough, enough to start slowing upgrading.
I’m ruthless about selling ships I get in the beginning stage of the game. Anything with D-mods are sold immediately.
Using a fleet full of crappy ships basically just eats up supplies and fuel that you can save towards a powerful ship that can turn the battle. And being small, you can typically escape battles to fight another day. So I’m not a fan of flying around with ships recovered from battles.
Think I’m going to need to get me a real fleet like I mentioned above, because these guys aren’t that far off from where my colony is located and I know for a fact they’re just going to keep coming.
Right at this point I don’t have the fleet necessary just to take out their fleets, much less the base.
So, that’s the next step.
This game is just so good.
I find the bases easier compared to the mega fleets. Unless it’s a mega station itself. Most time, 1 capital plus 4-5 decent cruisers will do the trick for bases if you make sure it does not have a fleet guarding it.
Man, bigger fleets eat a lot of supplies and fuel, hard financially to stay in front of that, or least I find it is.
Yea, realistically, you’ll need some colonies to support a big fleet with more than 2 capitals I find. My fuel and supply costs are huge.
Look for the efficiency mod, as well as pick up skills that reduce supplies costs and fuel costs for the entire fleet.
Gotcha, will do. The couple places I just went don’t have capital ships, so guess I’ll have to keep an eye out for them everywhere I go. So I’m currently just going with a complement of cruisers and fast carriers since that’s what was available.
If you make it a habit to click on the buy tab on the fleet screen at every stop, you’ll be surprised that what’s on offer. In both normal and black markets.
I like how the economy in the game works. I’m at the point where I’m thinking about establishing a colony and so naturally I check where crew as the cheapest. Turns out people are desperate to leave the Luddic Path planet I had earlier nearly decivilized.
I did successfully decivilize the pirate planet. It already had a high hazard rating so I wasn’t planning to poach it. It turns out decivilizing a planet gives a -25% habitability modifier, due to Mad Max like breakdown of society that decivilization entails.
It does feel odd that I’m about to hire a thousand desperate Luddic Path cultists, for the bargain price of six credits each, and entrust them with building my first colony. Not to inspire feature creep, but perhaps in v2.0 they can add crew morale and mutiny effects.
Maybe not all members of a religion believes in its creed? =)
I’m not making judgments, I’m happy to give them a second chance (after I repeatedly bombed and raided their world). I just have to question the wisdom of trusting them to follow me.
Hmm, perhaps I just have to start my own cult. I mean these people have already shown a willingness to devote themselves to a cause. In this high tech space-faring era perhaps displays like raining down fire on the peoples and then descending from the heavens in a luxury nebula class chariot to spirit away the chosen survivors doesn’t count like it used to in more primitive times, but it’s got to count for something. Perhaps I’ll just temporarily install myself as their god-king and we’ll work democratic principles into the scholastic curriculum for the next generation.
In engineering, we have a maxim, “What you think is temporary typically turns out to be permanent, and extremely expensive to replace, almost irreplaceable.”
Edit: All Hail god-king Thrag… forever!
Pretty sure I’ve taken out a couple of bases near my sector where I’ve established a coupe colonies, so a thought occurred to me, do these things just keep coming back and reappearing in various sectors near your colonies?
In other words, can I not be rid of the pirates in my immediate vicinity by killing their base?
Just finished killing another one quite near to my colonies that I uncovered the location of from talking to someone at the bar at my colony, so wanted to know if they stay gone?
The pirate bases will keep popping up, I think it’s about once a month or so, I’m not sure what’s the time needed for the game to spawn another. To go on long explorations, you can build up a Military base from the Patrol HQ, having a couple will automatically take care of almost all invasions for you without intervention.
I think you’ve basically reached the “end game” at the present stage of development. The dev, Alex, remarked that at present, the pirates and Luddic paths cells keeps repeating because they act as “fillers”, and they need to be fixed once he adds more content.
Possibly time to try out the content mods? =)
Edit: I meant to say that the patrol fleets generated by your Military bases will be able to defeat incoming invasions. So you can leave the pirate base for a long time without much problems for yourself apart from the -1 stability hit and fractional accessibility hit.
Try vanilla but ironman. No reloading.