I am now beginning to set minor goals such as tac count and hull. Thanks for that advice!

As long as you are adding AP, there's really no need to worry too much about ranking too fast around where you are.

There's really not a lot you can do before Rank 900 that will either make or break your game, apart from adding 4 or 5000 decks.
Deep down, your long term ship strength is defined by AP and packing as much punch as you can.

Small ship at Rank 250 and a small ship at Rank 1000 are 2 entirely different beasts

I'll give you a good comparison since I see you on my BT all the time.
Go to bottom of post for recommendations.

NMGod
Rank 266 Aerlen Fixer
Combat Reputation: Insane

79 Energy Rate
1245 Energy (+480 without relays)
24604 Hull
3713 Shield

Battles 64136 (Grand Legend)
Player Kills 3353
Deaths from Players 25
Non-Player Kills 1312
Planets Found 506
Planets Occupied 59
Planets Captured 68
Missions Completed 342
Scans Performed 4300
Successful Hacks 1798
Successful Raids 3126

Ship Design Vulture
Size Class Heavy Dreadnaught
Ships/Allies Vortov, Hired Mercenary, Cuniculus, Lepus Adjutant, Anubix, AI Assault Drone, Apparitious II, Bane Familiar, Thraccti, Scruuge Defector
Weapons CK69 Assault Sentry, Dominion Tri-Blaster x4, Cerulean Fighter, Combat Analyzer, Prototype Mech XV
Energy Elios Collector x2, HyperChannel Relay x4, Omicron Injector
Sensors AI Supercomputer
Hull Perfect Syncopated Plating x5, Scruuge Overcharged Hypernode x2, Protean Arsenal x3
Shields Q-Phase Battery Array, Harmonic Resonator
Cloaking CipherBot x2, Gamma Channeler
Defenses Velox Thruster x3, Sha'din Forcevoider x2, Dark Phase Engine, Dark Complex Thruster x3, Trinity-Core Drive x2, Thrust Stabilizer

Anubix, AI Assault Drone
Rank: 66
Apparitious II, Bane Familiar
Rank: 28
Cuniculus, Lepus Adjutant
Rank: 7
Thraccti, Scruuge Defector
Rank: 43
Vortov, Hired Mercenary - BAD DECISION (didn't realize), Doubled my upkeep
Rank: 2

Size Class: Heavy Dreadnaught
Space: 649 / 650
Attack: 6729
Defense: 8205
Scan: 206
Cloak: 358
Cargo: 19817 / 37000
Upkeep: 6.4B
Aerlen: Defense +30%
Fixer: Hull +30%

650 Decks
37000 Cargo
1560 Engineers
4997 Tactical Officers
3357 Helmsmen
4289 Scientists

Total Medal Points Awarded: 810 of 2265

Minerals 13444 units / hour 0 / 78500
Artifacts 11987 points / hour 24859 / 122000
Production: 13395 research / hour 0/86900

Research Tree
Quasi-Chaotic Force: Complete
Proxy-Universe Reactions: 1/4
Force Obviation Fields: 1/3
Inverse Flux Jamming: 1/3
Syncopated Phase Matter: Complete
Entropy Field Warping: Complete
Continuum Analysis: Complete
Topopolis Rings: 0/1
Universal Maintenance: 0.5/1 - Currently working on

To many uninstalled modules to mention


I think you would work on PVP while you are still relatively low ranked.
You Need to keep a combat rep of Insane, this will stop people targeting you drastically.
Working on getting you Dominion Cannons and upgrades is strongly recommended, they have great stats, I don't use research weapons at all!
Along with DC's you will also be able to upgrade to Protean Arsenal and less important getting/upgrading CK69 Assault Sentry

Keep working on your hull research, get Perfect Syncopated Plating x5 installed and don't remove it ^^
Keep you decks nice and low, once you get Perfect Syncopated Plating I would say it would be worth pushing up to 499(don't go 500 it changes your class). Of course keep this as low as possible but make sure you can get in Perfect Syncopated Plating x5 + anything else you really want. Max research scan takes 96 space per unit so 480 space will allow you to install them all for scan run.

The other thing you need to work on is your Medals. Get to 800!

And last but not least, AP, AP!, AP!!!!! AND MORE AP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is total bollocks. how you rank is the ONLY thing you have control over. if you do the auto.rank mission thing ... you will definitely have a very different (and i would say weaker) ship than someone who ranks with more purpose. obviously, i advocate the PvP route for maximum xp efficiency, but depending on your rank range, the NPC route is smart for certain ranks in terms of acquiring ctp efficiently.


this is somewhat true, but only because at rank 250, the magnitude of difference in the number of hits to take you down is much less than at rank 1000, compared to other ships in your rank range. so you have the major hassle of swapping mods in exchange for only a bit more toughness.

however, ranking quickly to rank 1000 before pausing is a recipe in frustration as it encompasses two very different playing styles ... and most who try can not handle the transition. better to purposely rank more slowly so that when your AP does finally catch up, you will continue to rank with purpose instead of chasing the newest shiny massively xp.inefficient npc or mission drop.

Sheesh Senator... all I was saying is that worrying too much about ranking too fast is not as important to the later game as lifting your AP and not growing your decks too much.
If you are increasing your AP at a good rate, you can progress however you like.
I wasn't recommending they should speed rank to 1000, just suggesting they didn't need to freeze around 250, especially with their current productions.

As a general rule, auto-ranking missions would completely contradict the very first thing that prefaced my comment: "As long as you are adding AP..."

The whole point of mentioning the difference in Rank 250 small ships and Rank 1000 small ships was simply to illustrate that there is a lot of leeway.
Short of going deck-crazy there is very little you can do that will permanently harm your ship in the long term.

Anyhoo, totally agree with you on ranking with purpose, all I was trying to do was warn against slow ranking with low AP.
To my way of thinking at least, the OP would be better served by ranking with purpose and actively building AP than by slow ranking at their current production levels.
Definitely no auto-ranking from missions, especially Talth.

Ok, working on some medals(pvp ones) trying to reach 800.
AP, working on that.
I try not to speed rank, but when I start npcing, i really don't notice the amount of ranks I go up(when it happens its usually 2-3)
Working on kills and hull, added 10 more decks to fit some hull mods.

not really, there are a couple of laughables that i wont target simply because they are more work than some insanes

meh, they are ok for the first hundred ranks or so, after that it depends on ship build.
LSB >> may as well keep them not like you dont have the room
MSB >> if you want depends on what you value
SSB >> le nope.
a decision i made around rank 700 that i wish i had made earlier :
there are only 2 stats on your ship that you cannot passively increase, those are the only mods worth keeping... that and anything that says %, and most things that have some form of ability.

class doesnt have anything to do with it, like most other things about your ship its just a descriptor, and thanks to the medal system anyone can figure out your damage cap anyways, so your not hiding anything by hindering yourself based on a descriptor.

if you want medal points scan medals are a great way to get them, and 480 spaces aint gonna cut it.


max scan from just research mods + common artis > 4800 > +225 >> 5025 *15% > 5779 (rounded up)
medal points for all scanning medals : 10 > 25 > 40 > 50 >> 125 : also a good way to up your arti, since you'll be looking anyways

I know lots of PVPers that will only hit less than Insanes. Sure you tap others to clear them off you BT and based on that tap you can tell if they are easy or not but you always look to primarily target the sub Insane players.

While it is true thanks to the Goliath medal you can tell damage caps a few people are to lazy to look into medals so they use the descriptor as a general guideline, I don't think staying 1 rank below the next class up is going to harm your ship in anyway.



That is easily said when you are at higher ranks but at these low ranks research modules still play a big part of your ship. When you have the backing of all those extra ranks and the build up of all the arties research mods are not that great but they still are down here.



No doubt there! Just wouldn't want him to push his ship too high, too fast.

Working on pvping again, now that i've gotten my mission exotic(its still a bit of a mess).
Any missions/medals i should work towards? Atm, i'm working on :
Cleaning Crew
Menace to the Galaxy
And Black Hat

Updated, looking for mission suggestions(i do a few rounds right before ranking)

Do the easiest missions that give the least amount of exp, so you can get the mission tiered rewards: chron transistor and field balancer for extra energy and shield charge rate respectively.

Have you unlocked Temporal Flux Orbs? If not, Aeon Moon would be good.
Kronyn chain up to ergosphere filters, intraphasic hoveroids, orbital stabilizers - all good stuff imo if you haven't already got them.

Kronyn chain is up to Anomalous Appearance, did that for a bit.
Doing a round of orbital stabilizer for mission exotic atm.
Temp Flux orbs are a far away.
also working on the Voliir Chain whenever i have a chance.
RSL chain, kinda doing(have a bunch of Rsl anti Cryptexs

Saw note about people just bumping all insanes? Do you realize how cheap it is to get an 'insane' rep? It means practically nothing. It means even less when you consider so much of that 'rep' is constituted by killing 4-5 hit ships..wheeee

Anyone who taps, bumps, jostles a ship and does several hundred damage (or thousand) and its more than double your own, would be a total fool not to kill those people. IMO. I pay ZERO attention to laughable versus insane. What level of butt whooping you can lay upon the ship = better indicator.

Also saw comment to get 5 hull modules from research chain and keep them. I have ditch all 5 as brackets and % mod items as well as allies serve me much better and take up no space. Sure having a chunk of hull is nice. but better ap will drive that... a few more hits for taking up that space is , at least long term, very inefficient. I would argue that possibly even at low rank using 5 x syncopated maybe be less effective use of your space than other items.

Kill the weak, and bump the strong.

It ain't worth it dealing 10 damage to a ship that has a lot of hull, whether with high energy or by energy refills because "ain't nobody got time for that."

An easy way to tell if someone is weak or not is by looking at how big that person's ship is and probing them to see if they are dependent on modules for ship strength.

Whether insane reputation or not, more modules on deck like having a full set of researched weapons making up most of the players decks makes them glass cannons and an easy targets to weaponless ships with large tactical officers.

Another case is when a person's ship strength and stats consists of modules to try make their ship strong with little to no crew at all, that in reality ironically makes them extremely weaker than everyone else, especially those with large crews.

Thats what I do now, if i see that i am doing 100+ damage, then i go for the kill.



Don't have enough space for all of them, so i just make do with what i have, as i get better hull mods, i will start to replace the ones i currently have. Right now i got Perfect Syncopated Plating x3, Korteth Plating x2, BioMimetic Sealer II x3, Protean Armory x3 for hull, and that takes up a great majority of my decks.



Thats what i do now, i check the ship size, then tap them once, and finally probe them to see the difference.

As I'm gaining ranks, some of my other goals is to get hull to 15k unbuffed before rank 320 and def to 2.5k unbuffed by 310.

Also I have a question. What is more valuable for ssbs hull or defense? Or in other words is it better to have 13k hull and 2k def or 10k hull and 4k def?

Hull in my opinion, as you could have 0 defence, 10000 Hull and a dmg cap of just 20...think about how.much clicking that would be?! An extreme example but the principle is the same

Thats what i think.....also just got firewall medal, but too lazy to update the post

Working on Insurgent medal as well as deep meditation right now, almost done with both... will update my stats when buffs are gone.