Hi all, I have finally reached rank 75 and would thus be freeze ranking for a while. Since I am freeze ranking, I thought I should make use of this opportunity to plan ahead for any improvements that can be made to my ship. I am running a SSB and would be used primarily for PvPing and afterwhich, a mixture of missions/PvPing. I aim to get 1k kills/raids as well as 2.6k hacks before rank 100 - which is very achievable imo. ( current kills:733/1000 Raids: 798/1000 hacks:511/2600). Thanks for your feedback
Crew:



Production/research:


Weapons:


Defense:


Hull:


Energy:


DEvices:

I will have to say. Do not freeze rank. slow rank if you must, but your productions are so low that freeze ranking will do you much more harm than good.
Two very important questions: How big is your e bar (to determine if you need those e mods for hacking/raiding), and how many days have you played (to see how efficient you ve been with your playtime)?

If you are going SSB, you can add another 3 decks still. SSB at low ranks is very hard to maitain due to the minimal decks. You want to focus on hull, and +% mods, and the Dom III cannons.
All your rank points should be going into TOs and engineers. Put more research into guns. Youll thank me for it when you find a shiny planet you want to invade

Stop researching cloak. You dont have planets worth cloaking, and you wont for a while.
Dont keep mods like parsers equipped unless your invading. Their atk/space is horrible.
Consider getting a 2nd Trinity Core Drive, I see you already got 1.
Also, you need much much more hull on. Research that branch further. And why are you using microgel when you have nanosphere researched?
Ideally you want 2-3 of those on at your rank. Take off the stuff like parsers that arent immediately useful and add at least 1 more hull.

The issue with this strategy at low ranks is you dont have the AP production to fuel the artifacts needed to get the CTL +% mods.
Nor do you get enough AP per day to efficiently pull Rescued Prisoners for free rank points.

There are statistics that users have done based on their AP pulls that lead to the following:
1 Prisoner will cost you approx 90k AP
1 Star Chart Purger will cost you approx 80k AP

I assume your base churns out 80k AP per day.
With your production of 713 AP/h, that only totals to 97k AP/day. That is only enough to gain about 1 prisoner. This translates into also getting approx 1 helmsmen.
So everyday by freezing, you will gain 3 defence, 3 rank points and 1 star chart purger. This is a very, very slow and inefficient way to grow your ship.

You want to rank up, gathering all the easy badges. Rank at whatever pace necessary to achieve your PvP goals. Do not rank wildly, but also do not sit around like a rock.
Unless your extremely active in participating in your legion, most higher ups will not be impressed by a legionmate that logs on to do a few hacks, collect, and log off.
You want to take better planets, focus on artifact planets only for now. Your legion should be able to help you with your ship upkeep, as it will be extremely cheap at low ranks.
Only taking mining planets atm if they are Mega Rich-range Toxics. Preferably Very Large, but Large is okay for now. Do NOT take average or smaller.
You want nothing worse than L VR, VL R, A UR, S MR. These planets can produce 200 AP/h for me, which means they can probably produce 125-150 AP/h for you. Anything below this do not even bother taking.
Research....only take VM R gas. Your legion should have a ton of these to alert for you.

As you rank up, important missions that give what players consider "key artifacts" to help your ship grow are unlocked. There are only a few, but by freeze ranking, you will never see them.
Unless you have a supplier of TMs to fund you (letting you get blackhat in just over 3 weeks), I suggest doing that medal in short spurts in moments where you choose to slow your ranking for a day or two. 2600 hacks without a ton of TMs takes a long, long time. Most people dont have the patience to hack 100 people a day using only the 15 timer, much less even handling 20 hacks a day with timer.

Case in point. I got blackhat the hard way without TMs. The duration it took me to do all 2600 hacks? about 150-175 days.
For me, I did that because I was preoccupied with RL. But I see those as wasted days. Those were 150-175 days I couldve spent progressing forwards. Thats 150-175 days I lost where I could have made significant gains before deciding to freeze rank or slow rank.

You only slow rank or freeze-rank when you have enough AP to make a difference. How do you know when this time has come? Its subjective and personal to each player, but a good way to determine when you have self-sufficient AP/h is when the base shipment no longer matters to you whether you miss it or not. Only then is it truly worth considering whether or not you should slow/freeze rank.

In my personal opinion, long term freeze rank is useless except for achieving very specific goals. Slow ranking for a long time can be useful, but you have to know that freeze ranking is only useful in short spurts. Think of it this way. If you never rank up, when are you ever going to see the later game content?

Please listen to Trinity3, they say everything nicely

DON'T LISTEN to shadow if you want a decent SSB. here is my SSB strategy guide: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=40535
shadow's only useful advice for your playstyle is to pay attention to Trinity. i don't agree with Trinity on everything, but it is all good food for thought.

i don't see that focusing on hacking / raiding is 'wasted' personally. the resources you get supplement your own meagre resources from your own planets. i am in an okay spot for AP/hr now, but for a very long time i was making a large percentage of my daily AP from raiding. i wish i had hacked more at an earlier rank when i did not have as many planets to husband and worry about crit.hack fails.

adding decks for scan or weapons for attack does not help you at your rank since you will not be able to take or defend any nice planets that you do happen to come across. better to get your mission exotic and dyson to put any nice artis on, and take planets that higher ranks will not want, but that still provide you with decent production for now.

if your legion ever harasses you for NOT ranking, know that we at Ancient Untouchables will welcome you with open arms. i have ranked WAY TOO MUCH since december, costing me much in terms of ctp from npc's. but i did get most of my missions of interest out of the way (still getting a temporal flux every rankup now) and expect to crawl my way up to rank 1200.

Short version:
senators "advice" is law
no actual advice tho?
oh wait heres the advice: instead of adding more decks for scan mods ( you can scan inactive and unoccupied planets senator ) just drop $50+ dollars for a dyson/exotic
why didn't I think of that?

SAndy...............sandy vaginaaaaaaaaaa

was referring to Trinity's comment.

the only reason i have ranked as fast as i have recently is only because i have had to farm the temporal flux mission, so not lame at all if the intention is to take advantage of the SSB build by ranking more slowly.

actually, at my rank (844) i need to DROP scan to get more targets.


my 'advice' is not law. but unlike you, i know how to build a SSB and appreciate them. you obviously do not appreciate SSB's nor do you understand why someone might want to build one. you are free to advise someone to 'add more decks' but when the OP has already clearly indicated that they are going SSB, that advice is BAD and INAPPROPRIATE and you are just wasting everybody's time.

Yet you yourself have told people in other threads at a low rank to choose a suitable number of decks build up to that and grow back into SSB mode. For this particular person that seems like it might be REALLY good adivce.

just proves my point that my advice is not 'law' but is indeed situational. the OP indicated that they intended to freeze rank at rank 75 to get make some progress on the PvP medals. as such, there is no need to add decks (intended for hull / scan runs) since they will not be doing much scanning, nor ranking into the range of any ships where they will need the extra hull.

Thank you all for your advice! I wanted to freeze rank initally because of me getting busier in RL and being in the level range to encounter a Vortul, Crimson Annihilator to get their vortul plates. WHat you guys siad made sense, so I would just slow rank to beef up my ship's defenses then.

@trinitythree I an 132 days in and have 398 max energy( with 2 elios equipped). The only reason that I can keeping a parser equipped is so that I can have a 50 scan to encounter some of the better NPCs.

@shadowpoison. Thanks for your advice but I don't think i need that many decks right now as i am also trying to save bots for anubix when I get to level 200

@senatorhung Wow. How much did you raid to get that large a percentage of your daily AP from raiding.

If you can get your hands on, or already have a Stryll Hunt Sensor then you should switch the Parser out for that. 51 scan is all you need to find Troop Carriers, and it will free up 20 decks.

that's a good recommendation from Serne .. i actually have demolished my parsers since i won't be putting them on for another 300 ranks or so. have 4 in cargo ready to re.install tho.


rank: ap/hr, successful raids

80: 1201, 482 (that ap/hr INCLUDES the mission exotic and mission dyson)
90: 2213, 1079
100: 2730, 1968
200: 6912, 4239

The only main issue I had with him pursuing those medals that early is he doesnt have the AP necessary to produce the TMs. I highly doubt he has the CTP to trade for the ~3000 TMs he needs, and usually most legion are willing to donate a few hundred TMs, but not thousands to a low ranks cause.

That type of donation typically requires you to be an established reset with sponsors and good friends.

I forgot to mention better sensors to equip like that stryll sensor. Somehow I talked bout the parser but not that. But Serne summed it up perfectly, you only need 51 scan.

Id say you are doing okay for 132 days. If you have 398 e max only, then you will probably need to keep them on if you can get TMs for a hacking spree. The most important thing you need to know when you are SSB is you will need to change your mods around, a lot. If you dont need that e around, then take them off. Its nice to have that extra e, but if you know your not going to use it, save the space for more hull.

One other thing about SSBs, they need to have higher AP than an average player of similar rank. This is to drive the production of helmsmen, prisoners, brackets and xcharge cells. You need this to mitigate the stat loss incurred by having less decks, as it is much easier to get higher atk/def/hull from mods than from artifacts in the beginning.

The faster you can bring up your AP, the faster you can turn this disadvantage around, draw even, and soon turn it into an advantage do to your AP supremacy. Ship mods have finite benefit, AP has infinite benefit. That is why SSBs that achieve good AP become insane ships at the high ranks. They invest in AP much earlier and thus there is more time that they are soaking in AP than similar ranked players.

On a completely separate note, I strongly support SSBs. Senator and me do disagree on things, but I do agree with him that a late-game SSB is probably one of the best outcomes for a ship.
By then, you have enough decks for almost anything you need (ie scan runs, important +% mods,etc) and any lesser mods are mitigated by your AP. For me my belief is that it is better to start out large and ease into SSB, but to each their own. I do not want to enforce my methods on anyone else.

And in regards to you, shadowspoison:


Red is your response. About that...it all depends on how you built your planets. There are very few planets I can afford to lose due to crit hacks. Its rare for a crit fail to occur to me, but every couple of times it ends up being one of my planets. As 3/4 of my planets I deem irreplaceable to maintain my progress...hacking is a very big issue for me. It all depends on the players situation, so I dont think you should immediately judge others like this. In fact, I just lost two 15x planets in the last 3 weeks from crit fails. I know this particular quote is not directed at OP, but you were quick to judge senator, and I dont think it was right to do so without knowing his planet situation, and what he deems as a "worthy risk" and what he considers irreplaceable.

I have a strict SSB - rank 594 with 614 decks, 24000+ TOs, 10000+ helmsmen, 60000+ hull before hull mods - but I had roughly 220 decks around rank 100 because prior to that, my best planet (at the time) was crit hacked and attacked. I do think it's better to grow into SSB, mainly due to planet-related issues (limited size = limited scan = limited planets that are important for growth, limited planets on scan that might protect your own planets from being hacked), but it's been a while since I've been in that rank range and I know the game has changed a lot.

(Also, regarding Anubix - even if you add some decks now, you'll still have enough ship bots for Anubix by rank 200, and likely way before you reach 200)