I have been wondering, is it better to have all plating, or some plating or some defense. Also, I've been putting all my rank points in deck, is that right?

lots of good forum threads on ship building you should check them out and see what kind of ship will fit your needs

Assuming you are low ranked for the most part yes it is. However don't add decks willy nilly, save up the rank points until you have enough to add the new modules. The size of your ship affects how much damage you take during combat, and if you are looking to be an efficiently PvP you want as low a damage cap as possible. at first (if you want to do it like I did) add as many hulls and guns as possible and worry about defence once you get to a higher rank, don't put on any shields yet or cloak or scan.

Do not put rank points into cargo whatsoever, as you get higher production you will get artifacts that will boost that on your own. Also try to put a few into engineers, when I was just starting out someone told me (it was Blake or Epic I really can't remember comm chatter from 7 months ago) that no matter how good a ship you have, if you don't have enough energy in the tank you won't be able to do anything. Worry about Tactical officers and engineers later on.

I agree with everything that Billik said, with the exception of this statement, i have only 200 engineers at rank 251 and i'm ranking a bit fast for comfort. If you need energy, get relays, install 4 of them, Superconductive relays and power conduits are kinda useless, plasma relays help a little bit. Relays become more and more efficient the further you research into energy.

A few engineers are helpful though as it helps for raiding, with the side effect of giving you a little extra energy.

i tend to be the pariah on these threads but ill continue to throw my .02$ in anyways
1. define what goals you want to achieve in the game, i.e. have all ship mods installed, have the mimum amount of decks for the lowest damage cap etc...
2. define what it is about pvp that you enjoy... if anything.
3. do you have PvP / mission goals that you are working towards?
4. build your ship accordingly

I'll use me as an example
when I started the game:
1. I wanted to have all ship modules ever installed on my floating fortress of squishy doom
2. I like hacking more in PvP than anything else, for a couple of reasons.
3. PvP goals -> have all PvP gear by rank 100, mission goals-> have kalvium plating by rank 150
4. Someone said that being a jack of all trades doesnt work - I think it was darth flag, but i could be wrong it was a LONG time ago, so dont quote me on that .

I can tell you that my build at low levels consisted of all defense and low hull / attack. At low ranks people are looking for quick easy kills and high numbers on the damage output. simply taking the quick part out doesnt really do it, if you make it so that you take very little damage, they are more than likely to 1 or 2 hit and move on, now hardcore PvPer's will almost always stick it out.

Also I had high cloak, which kept me off of the radar of heavy PvPers, and a fair amount of scan, so i could find those who were just looking to do missions, for easy kills w/ little chance of retal.

Figure out what your play style is and everything will fall into place for ya, hope this helped.

High decks will force you to use defence, low decks will force you not to use defence. If you're in the middle then you're probably doing it wrong.

Putting all of your rank points into decks works to a point. It may be worth considering TOs or Engineers for the additional rank points gained through rescued prisoners, as decks have finite use.

From discussions with a low ranking friend of mine, the mentality of "defence only at high ranks" no longer holds true. Low rank attack means that a small amount of defence goes a long way. The example they gave me was that with 50 decks they could add 2 hulls or 1 defence. Adding the one defence would nearly double their endurance, but adding the hulls would fall short. They run quite a mid-high deck build.

Thank you all, so...the smaller a deck, the less damage that I'll take, (damage cap) , maybe that's why it's annoying yo take down non pvp type players, well you know?. I have 101 and at lvl 15, maybe a little high. Perhaps I'll reach 20 then rank a tad slower. Thanks for all the input.

The damage cap is really only pertinant agaisnt bases, players will seldom ever hit you damage cap.

Not true. i can hit 2 ships with the same defense one with 2k decks and one with 6k i will do way more damage to the guy with 6k decks.

As your cap goes up you will get hit for more every shot.

Proven best method is ONLY add decks to where it is effective against your damage cap. IE... only enough decks to hit your cap, throw the rest into energy or tacts, or both. Near max hull and add defense. Then full hull, and more defense.

True people will only seldom hot your damage cap, however the damage cap is directly 'involved' in how much damage you deal/take. Someone else can probably explain it better, but say your hitting half the someones damage cap. So a damage cap of 1000 means you hit 500 damage, a damage cap of 2000 means you hit 1000 damage. I think it works something like that but as I said someone else could probably explain it much better.

No thats explained pretty well actually

and your forgetting defense / scan / claok for crits. From my stand point damage cap is rather pointless but i see major jums in the damage I do to others ALL the time. best example i can give is from this morning I hit someone for 230 damage next 3 shots where 741, 855, 812. If you can crit often enough you can win, but hey what do i know I only do hacks

Someone with low decks will take less damage with the same defence, because the damage done is multiplied by the damage cap.

And people with low decks dont have claok, i crit them all the time they are my favorite people to knock around . When i pick my targets off of my bt i base it on how much of their ship i can see and nothing else.

Yea... he knows , ill be honest though i try to avoid fixers, sometimes they are to much work

Exact opposite for me. Lots of guys with lots of decks and not the def to make up for it. il hit for 700-1k damage.

I also run a fair decent amount of cloak for my rank as well so it tends to keep me off of the BT of most anything below 5-600. BUt next time I see a home one person i'll slap em around a bit, and see if they alert me. wouldnt mind testing this against someone high ranked than me.