How far do you think I will be from the ability to autorank?

3x Dark Energy Core (239*3)
2x Surge Plexi (50*2)
1x Drannik Core (50)
106 Engineers (106)
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973 Energy

Dominion Cannon Mk 3 x4 (150*4)
Heavy Antiproton x3 (250*3)
Vortul Blast Phaser x4 (75*4)
13 Tactical Officers (13)
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1663

*1.2 (Konqul)
*1.05 (Surge Plexus)
*1.05 (Surge Plexus)
*1.05 (Ancient Crystal Foci)
*1.1 (Crimson Obilisk)
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2541 Total Attack

Other stats:
Hull 6169 (Unbuffed)
Defence 937 (Unbuffed)

Decks: 775 (Titan)

At rank 121. Wanting to get up my rank considerably, as I think it will be beneficial in the long run, so what's my chance of auto-ranking?

I only have 2 surge plexi, and I need rank 130 to get the Okkilors, as most of my legion has out-ranked Akkiren.

there is a simple math for autoranking your current lvl X 10 = the energy you need to autorank
(at least that's what some autorankers told me)

Which makes you 250ish energy short.

227, although raising my energy up to the 10*rank mark will be hard. The Drannik Cores and final Surge Plexus would be +200, which would leave me 27 short. I could probably get past that.

Keep in mind that if you plan to autorank on NPCs, you need to maintain at least a 4.0xp ratio. Take your XP required to go from one level to the next and dived by 4. That tells you how much energy you need to have to autorank by putting your rank-up points into engineers only (or with better cores). Then work your attack up till you can get that 4.0xp ratio. Variably, do a full energy bar NPC run. Find your xp ratio and divide your xp required by that number. That will give you your energy required to autorank with your current attack setup.

Right... will do...

As a thought, do you think it would be worth changing to Inergon?

If you're planning to autorank on Missions for the most part, maybe. If you're looking at just NPCs, Konqul is the way to go IMHO, at least until you unlock Drannik.

BinaryMan is really the one you want to talk to though, maybe you should shoot him a PM and pick his brain.

Just make sure you have people online who can kill elites with you. It is really crappy when you have a bunch of 3 person elites clogging your BT.

I'd rather have that than full up on Hives and Hypergrids... lol

or a page of warp stations

thats lots of fun
you just make the bunny kill them...

Not everyone has a resident rabbit.

as an absolute minimum you need:

Rank x 10 energy
Rank x 20-30 attack
An extremely high artifact production.

Every time you rank up add your rank points to engineers, all other points should go into tac officers. You need the high art in order to get as many prisoners as possible.

Drannik is best but until you can unlock them Konqul is better than any of the others.

This is just a quick snipit. Next post I will add something interesting for you to read.

In order to auto level you need enough total energy for the full load you get from leveling to carry you on through to the next level. This means you will need a ton of energy and a way to use it that has a very high ratio of experience/energy. You will need to hunt NPCs while having very high attack power and you will need use all of your rank points from both leveling and rescued prisoners on engineers for a very long time in order to level automatically. It can then be sustained by using the rank points from leveling on engineers and using rank points from prisoners on whatever you wish. The experience/energy ratio possible with NPCs is much higher than missions, but you need a lot of good attack modules to improve it to the point where you get 4 experience for each point of energy spent for auto-leveling to be sustainable.



If an NPC gives you an average of 11 xp for an attack and an attack costs 5 energy then you would have an average 2.2 XP/energy ratio just for attacking an NPC. NPCs also give bonus experience on top of that once you disable them. If an NPC gives 38 bonus XP and you can disable it in 3 attacks that means you would have spent 15 energy to get 60 XP and would mean that on average for that NPC you are getting a 4.0 XP/energy ratio for that NPC. If you have high attack power and you can kill that NPC in 2 hits instead of 3, then that ratio would improve to a 6.0 XP/energy ratio. Attack buffs and XP buffs or being a race with an attack or XP bonus can help a lot to improve your returns as well.



It would seem that the higher your attack power, the more experience you receive per an energy spent, but this is misleading. NPCs have a damage cap equal to two and a half times their level. You cannot damage them more than that. Furthermore, the damage cap is based on a hyperbolic tangent. You don't have to know how a hyperbolic tangent is to understand what it means. It means the closer you get to that damage cap the more attack it will take to get even marginally closer. An NPC might have a damage cap of 500 and you might be hitting it for 400 but even doubling your attack power will only get you half as much closer to the damage cap so that you are only hitting it for 450. So, increasing your attack power actually has diminishing returns as you get closer to the damage cap.



It is usually more effective to focus on energy instead of attack because of how the damage cap works. You wil obviously need both, but energy is far more important in almost all instances. There are several other reasons why energy is more important than attack power. One of the simplest to understand is that your attack power is much more likely to be higher than your total energy. if your total energy was 1000 and your base attack power was 5000, then spending 50 rank points to get 100 engineers will increase your energy by 10% where the same 50 rank points spent on 100 tactical officers will only increase your attack by 2%. If your total energy is multiplied by your XP/energy ratio to determine your total XP from a load of energy, you want to improve one of those factors by a larger percentage to achieve the greatest total outcome.



In terms of actually achieving autoleveling it is important to note that each level takes more experience than the last. 40 more XP to be exact. This has several implications. Since the XP required goes up each level, rank points spent on things that do not contribute to this strategy will actually get you further away from achieving auto-leveling. If you choose not to have any engineers, even with the max recharge rate it will eventually take days if not a whole week to level even with the best energy tech. Another more positive way at looking at it would be if you are already at the point where the full load of energy gives you 80% of the experience you need to get to the next level, then having 1/8th more energy should get you 90% there. If you have 10% left instead of 20% left then you are leveling twice as fast for only 1/8th more energy. This means that even if you don't yet have the energy to auto-level, investments in energy will still have an increasingly exponential return as you get closer to auto-leveling.



The way I figured out that sustainable auto-leveling was possible in the first place was when I read on the wiki that each level takes 40 experience more than the last. I peiced together that I was already getting better than a 4.0 xp/energy return from NPCs, and that the 5 rank points gained from leveling could be used to obtain 10 engineers so it should be possible to level automatically if there were any other significant source of rank points I could use to get more engineers. Fortunately there was: RESCUED PRISONERS. I had always had a high artifact production and had used it to have nearly double the decks I should be able to have at my rank. I had enough for every module except scanners and cloak and those wouldn't help any of the factors contributing to the strategy (everything else pretty much does) and rank points spent on things other than the strategy only take me further away. so I made the switch right then to using every single point on engineers. I had always liked PVP and I had to debate with myself if I was going to get tactical officers, which had the appearance of being slightly less useful for leveling but better for PVP. The reason I decided against it was that I was already receiving more rank points from prisoners than leveling and after acheiving auto-leveling it would still be possible to use all rank points from prisoners on tactical officers and it seemed apparent that artifact production from being a higher level is what is what would get me more tactical officers in the long run.



You need rescued prisoners. A lot of them. Acheiving auto-leveling is impossible without artifact production and would take a very long time to acheive without a high artifact production. Artifacts become more effective than research as you move up the tech tree anyways. I am only going to give one example why. Proxy universe reactors take 3.2 million RP and improve your energy by about 90 each tier if you install all three. If those 3.2 million research points were artifact points you would have drawn more than enough rescued prisoners to raise your engineers by 90 at the same time as improving your hull, shields, decks (from ship-bots) all at the same time and you would get plenty of other disposable artifacts. In one way or another artifacts can permanently improve every stat except scan and cloak. None of the benefits from artifacts require upkeep, which means you won't need mining planets to support them and they don't require decks either. That being said, I still wouldn't be caught dead without the best energy tech possible. Any improvement to energy will get you that much closer to auto-leveling.



You need a 4.0 xp/energy ratio to auto-level sustainably since each level takes 40 more xp and you can only get 10 energy from leveling. That means the total energy required is exactly equal to your level multiplied by 10. Your level with a zero at the end. This is the easiest way to figure out how much energy you need. Each rescued prisoner gives 3 rank points and thus 6 energy/engineers. Figuring out how many rescued prisoners you would need is simple arithmetic at that point. Another way of looking at is that rank points from leveling keep the time required to level the same each level and a prisoner shaves a set amount of time off the time you need to wait. You save 3 minutes each prisoner when you have the best relays. It is actually more time saved when your relays arent as good. So you save an hour off the time it takes to level for each 20 prisoners. Do that however many times and you are no longer waiting at all. It may seem unattainable to get that many prisoners, and it certainly won't happen overnight. Rank points from leveling that aren't spent on engineers will actually increase the time it takes to level. You can rank as fast as you want and maintain the same wait time as long as you spend rank points from leveling on engineers. Considering that, it seems silly to think that ranking would ever be a bad thing. It is even advisable if it can help to increase your artifact production and increase the rate at which you approach auto-leveling.



It seems like a secret that the amount of terraformers you get from disabling NPCs is so high. I get maybe one for each hour of clicking. Terraformers are the only NPC drop that increase artifact production so they are best used on artifact planets in my opinion. Taltherians can only raise artifact production once every 40 hours. Planet data optimizers are equally as common as terraformers. Toxic purifiers are twice as common as either and work twice as well. You can get pages and pages of maxed out planets if you can auto-level. You are better off leveling even if you have tons of open planet slots for these drops alone. The other reason to level even if you have lots of open planet slots is that it raises your max energy without raising whatever energy deficit you have in terms of achieving auto-leveling. This means that each energy cube or tri-matrix you save for later will be much more effective. You can finish missions faster this way. It is worth noting though that if you have enough energy to auto-level and you use an energy cube that you will probably end up with surplus energy that you can't even use except on the base since it can take up to 2000 at a time. Before the bases came out I was doing using refills without XP buffs to do missions because you get more completions if you waste less energy.



Even if you acheive sustainable auto-leveling there are some bottlenecks that can slow you down. The first would be your repair timer. Your buffs can expire while you are waiting to repair. Your neural interface buff is REALY important to have and it only lasts 15 minutes. Repair nanodrones are a way around the timer and so are time manipulators. Having high defense/hull/shields will help reduce this bottleneck as well. I had enough decks for all available defenses before switching to engineers but it may or may not be worth it to neglect decks for defensive purposes in favor of engineers just to be able to start earlier down that path since ship-bots will eventually add up anyways. I don't have the experience to say whether it is a bad idea or not. Repairs can cost a lot of credits as well so thats another thing to consider. If you are already auto-leveling it is inevitable that you will run out of neural interfaces. The only way around that is to get them from someone else. It is possible to run out of other buffs as well, but its pretty hard. Even with these limitations you should still be leveling MUCH faster than you would be able to without a high energy build.



The reason I think a high-energy build works better than being "powerful for your level" is that you are increasing how fast that you are becoming more powerful with instead of just becoming more powerful. I'm talking about the ability to produce more artifacts. Artifact production improves pretty much everything at a linear rate at the same time whereas research is inversely exponential and artifacts improve your stats at an ever increasing rate as your production gets higher from leveling more and having more planets. It sounds convoluted, but its true. If you have a vendetta against someone you can simply outgrow them. Most of PVP involves getting notified and fighting the highest ranks in the game anyways, so being strong for your level doesn't seem like a significant concern. You would want more rank points if it didn't raise some number (your rank). Your rank affects almost nothing besides the xp required to level and it being higher isn't going to hurt you. I don't see any real drawback to leveling whenever you can except the time it involves clicking NPCs. Not doing it is like procrastinating on doing work. It won't increase your energy deficit as long as you spend the rank points from leveling on engineers. Leveling just doesn't do anything bad, at all. It seems like leveling now instead of later is always better. You can spend a week doing a mission that will give a module that increases your attack by 100 or you can level several more times hunting NPCs and permenantly increasing your production and getting those 100 tacical officers in a month and you will continue getting them every subsequent month and you will forever be ahead by those levels and that production if you don't slack off.



If you choose to get even more engineers after you have already achieved auto-leveling, instead of using your prisoners to start getting tactical officers, something funny happens. You end up with an over-abundance of energy that can only be used on missions or the legion base. You can use more energy on missions than you could ever hope to generate with relays or normal leveling. If you have 500 more energy than it takes to level, then you can spend several times that amount before you have the energy remaining to back to NPCs to auto-level the rest of the way to the next level because the missions themselves give XP. If you have 110% of the energy that leveling takes, you can use 30% of your energy on a mission that gives a 3 xp/energy return because 10%*3 is 30%. Something like that at least. Since you can level as fast as you can click and you get extra energy for missions every time you level that means that you could dedicate thousands of energy an hour to missions at the same time as leveling super fast. Thats a hell of a lot more than the 120/hr from having the best relays. It is another good reason to neglect missions untill you can already auto-level. Some missions are still helpful for NPCs though like the ones that give you more NPC slots and the drannik chain for higher NPC attack. Mostly it is best to stick to the archetype of leveling>production>power>leveling though instead of expecting the loot from missions to be worth a damn. it isn't.



Not spending that energy on NPCs means you level faster since it is less time spent clicking each level. You can probably spend 10-15 minutes auto-leveling at lower levels but once it becomes upwards of an hour, it doesn't seem quite so "automatic". This can fix that, though in terms of resources, terraformers are a simple function of time spent clicking, so it only gives you more planets slots and total energy. Still not a bad thing. You'll just want to do it later so there is no reason to wait. it is usefull for clearing missions and doing the star chart purger missions a kajillion times. You can always revert your surplus by getting tactical officers instead of engineers for however many levels.



I don't use the rank points from prisoners on decks for 2 reasons. The first is that i can get those from ship-bots and once i have max decks, each ship-bot i get is sort of like not having a few engineers or tactical officers. The other is that decks raise your damage cap. That certainly won't stop me from using ship bots though. I started 1000 decks ago when more decks only meant more scan and cloak. Those 1000 decks pretty much all went to mission artifacts and random stuff and i still only have room for 1 cloaking module and no scanners still.



One trick that is pretty much necesary after you can auto-level is reducing your scan to get less rares. It only affects rares that have a cloak stat. The majority of NPCs with cloak are big bosses that will clog up your battle tab. For the most part they have bad XP and bad loot. It doesn't affect single player NPCs like the ones that drop terraformers or anything. The wiki lists what has however much cloak. You wont be missing much and if you use cloak you can expect to be stopped in your tracks by 10 person NPCs.

That's more than even I write on the subject typically... or is it ? Did he just assemble all of my posts or something ?

Just add all rank points to engineers, and try to get attack higher (raises xp ratio). It's tough to maintain 4.0 ratio with scan > 20, so I would say you need more energy than anything. Note energy is better than attack if you have limited rank points.

Lol! Bob doesn't type that fast! That's a cut and paste of a document he put together for our legion 3 months ago. It helped me a lot with my understanding of the importance of energy in general and auto ranking in particular.

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I am Vyger...

Very well put. I hope you don't mind me stealing that and posting it for my old legion. I gave you credit for it.

Holy Mother of God man! You'd have to pay me to read all that!