Well I am considering playing a small ship or very low deck ship. Any advice on this strategy or play style. My concerns are NPC ships and planetary attacks does the damage cap also follow with them. I am also interested in any other problems, issues, or set back that might have plagued anyone who has followed this very low deck space path.

There are many different threads on this idea. Just search for small ship build or scout. Both will give you more. This is one of the threads that I remembered. viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2843&hilit=small+ship+build

Get to 400-500 decks, then just use shipbots and/or rescued prisoners for decks; the only reason to do it is to put rank points into something else. I recommend something you can't get with other artifacts, engineers and tactical officers are the hardest to raise (only rescued prisoners will do it). You will have to manage decks carefully, but you can unlock most missions if you do this. I don't recommend a "no deck/minimize decks" build to reduce damage, you'll miss out on being able to take on npc bosses and some missions.

I found that if you put all your rank points into ship decks then you get more stats then if you spent them all on things like engineers and helmsmen. The more decks you have, the more modules you can get so the better stats you can accheive

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yes the damage limit counts for planets and npc's as well, but the small ship build is realy only good for pvp and it's very specialized at that. 300-400 decks is realy probably way too much. Stick with just enough decks to stick all 5 hull on and 4 relays. You'll be succeptible to being hacked, but that's the trade off. For npc farming the big ship build will do you much better. The nice thing about the small ship build is that if you don't like it you can always reverse course later.

"If you put all your rank points into ship decks then you get more stats then if you spent them all on things like engineers and helmsmen. The more decks you have, the more modules you can get so the better stats you can achieve"

-- It's a long term thing and it requires a lot of patience, but you will eventually have "enough" decks to fit most of the important stuff. Half my ship is weapons but I can fit all of them >:)

"yes the damage limit counts for planets and npc's as well, but the small ship build is realy only good for pvp and it's very specialized at that. 300-400 decks is realy probably way too much. Stick with just enough decks to stick all 5 hull on and 4 relays. You'll be succeptible to being hacked, but that's the trade off. For npc farming the big ship build will do you much better. The nice thing about the small ship build is that if you don't like it you can always reverse course later."

-- I'm able to NPC farm fairly well even with low decks, but you end up repairing a lot. You have to use NPC modules since they are cheap to repair when swapping stuff around; some are very efficient. I have 6k energy and ranked 30 times last night from quickly proceeding through a high XP ratio mission. If you optimize your energy usage, you WILL rank faster than everyone else. Whether you WANT to do that or not depends. I do it purely for the planets and higher resources it brings (well, also my energy bar keeps increasing). Most people are happier with a combination of the two, like rank points into engineers but prisoner rank points into decks, or vice versa.

You have 6000 energy? That's like an entire battery of 4 yr olds on Jolt! What do you have to boost your power systems that high?

Engineers, tons of them, i'd say.

3856 Engineers. Every rank point into it since about rank 120. I am also Inergon. If you can maintain a certain max energy to the XP requirement for your rank, then certain missions can be accomplished with a neural+RSL implant all at once, along with a bunch of other missions with the "extra" energy you have (otherwise it goes wasted). A mission with a base ratio of 2.5-2.6 qualifies for this; the new mission chain that was just released, all three of them fall into this category of high XP ratio. NPC farming without XP buffs can yield 3.0+ ratio if you are a bit selective about bosses and flush flamehawks with exotic algorithm. It takes a bit of thought to see how it works, but it's pretty effective. Also, the massive crew raids well when I've tried, though I'm not a big PvP player.

I'm curious. What rank are you now BinaryMan?

I also wonder who has the second most engineers. The person with the most engineers is easy, that's me.

Will be 450 tonight.

I beat you!! 4050!! Oh wait! 4,050 into tactical officers I have.. Never mind.. Heh.

Think I'm going to experiment with this. Still putting all points into decks for a while, but I'm close to Goliath-class. When I hit that, I'll go all-engineers til I have at least 500 of the little buggers running around complaining that they can't change the laws of physics and see how that goes.

It's all up to personal preference. I would say tho with low decks, try to size up with shipbots to fit all NPC modules before you tech up heavily. It's very tempting to maximize tech but a small ship is going to be light on defense if you want to have any reasonable attack (about half my ship is weapons) and you will repair a lot and be swapping and repairing modules to suit the situation -- keep that cost low. Builder is recommended.

If you already have a decent decks, say 1500+, you will notice a more pronounced effect depending on rank to adding in some energy storage when ranking, and you can equip more freely (NPC modules are still pretty efficient tho and cheap).