So I reached rank 300 yesterday. (I'll post my stats later in the thread- I'm on a comp that blocks FB right now)

I'm in a spot now where I want to do everything (which I obviously can't) so I've been looking for advice from more experienced players as to what they think is the best path to take.

So here's some of my immediate goals:

Get to 2k TOs (will have that in a weeks time)
Finish Kronyn chain (on the third chapter)
reach 1k kills (at 780ish, typically killing about 10-20 a day)

All of those goals are pretty easily achieved within the next dozen ranks or so. It's after finishing those goals that I'm not sure where to go from.

Missions I'm interested in doing, but I'm not sure what order to do them:

Silthion chain for the eventual Gemini's
Decrypting the Vault (just because those damn NPCs are SO ANNOYING)
Talth
Mylarai for the Kalvium Platings

I also just want to NPC til I find Caelon, but I can't auto rank yet, so I was thinking I should wait on that.

Speaking of auto-ranking, it's not something that I want to do ALL the time, but I would like to be able to do it occasionally off of NPCs when the need/desire is there. Right now I have 1k Engineers. After I hit 2k TOs I was thinking of just adding Engineers until I can auto-rank off of NPCs. Need to do some math to figure out how many that will be. Probably should upgrade reactors and relays too. Right now I have Intra-D Colliders and Wormhole Relays.

Currently researching syncopated plating, btw.

Anyways, interested in your thoughts, suggestions, criticisms etc!

Why are you finishing Kronyn? Becoming Kronyn will most likely be a waste of your time if you are gonna NPC.

Perhaps work on a mission chain that provides more NPC slots, get 6 slots and call it quits for awhile unless you are really going all out on NPCing.
The mission for the 8th slot is really energy intensive.

A lot of missions go real quick once you are able to autorank.

Leave decrypting the vault alone because those NPCs are gonna help you auto rank. There is a point where they are no longer good for your auto ranking but you have a few hundred ranks to go before worrying about that.
Not to mention the mission itself is a lot of energy to finish.

Lately I'm on the fence if I'll even BECOME Kronyn. But I want to finish it simply for the medal points. I'm at 450 medal points right now, and I want to get to 550 asap. My RP/hr is at 9.1k so it's not like I super need it.



So that would mean the Lazuli chain next. It's not a bad idea.



Huh. Noted.

11x rank in energy is a nice safe zone for auto ranking off NPCs, you're still too low in rank to be able to get a 4 exp:energy from them so it gives a bit of leeway.

Plenty of other medals to get you don't have to do kronyn to get a measly 15.

So that means I need 815 more E. But really, I need 975 if I want to rank with my 4 ion pulse ballistaes installed. If I upgrade to Supernova generators that takes 264 off the total, which brings me to 711, and if I upgrade my 3 remaining drannik power cores to encephalon cores that brings me to 651. So I should aim to add at least 700ish engineers because who knows when I'll get the remaining encephalon cores?

Also now I want to finish kronyn just to be stubborn. I am such a mule sometimes. I'm at least getting all the kronyn data cubes, thinking about selling those for CTP.

Get to the Controlling the Silthion mission in the Silthion chain first.
Hunt for Caelon and the Hybrid Larvae at the same time.

Gee, you're catching up to me pretty quickly. Not that I've really taken this game seriously in quite some time, so...


Anyways.

I wouldn't take anymore research planets with the sole exception of the VM/R gas every so often to blow your PDOs on, if you don't have any leftover.

Supernova Generator (Mk4s) have a total upkeep of 645M, which is a total of ~500M increase. Nice and subtle, eh? As long as you can afford the jump (which, after Syncopated Plating I'm skeptical of) they're worthwhile if you're trying to autorank - far moreso than Synco platings. Perfect Fermionics do me plenty well a hundred ranks above, and whilst nice to have, even before I went Aerlen (which was mostly for base defense purposes and for the lulz of doubling my attack in defense) I didn't have to repair when autoranking unless I came across large numbers of high attack NPCs.

Speaking of which, autoranking is going to get harder in 50 ranks with the addition of Flamehawks. If you want to autorank then, you need to be able to autorank - comfortably - before hand. This is where the Rogue Data Analyzer comes into play, since it dilutes Flamehawks and makes life a little easier. At the moment they're a hindrance. Also, the Chron Shifter NPCs are worth keeping around if you still have them.

Mission Chain wise, Silthion Chain should come before hunting Caelon as Cendant mentioned. Since the Hybrid Larvae has lower cloak than Caelon (1,500 vs 2,000), you can hunt for that at the same time. It's a relatively short chain, and the ability to see Queens is nice. Hives? Less so, but you gotta take the good with the bad, eh?

Mylarai and Talth chains. These are... kinda long. At 137k energy and over 400k energy (iirc), they're not something to be taking lightly. If you want to do them I have 2 strategies for you.

You can attain 16x Energy:Rank (just autorank in the meantime) and simply autorank the chains. Your ship wont exactly be stunning for your rank, but that's not massively important really and it'll get you back to playing normally MUCH more quickly. It takes over a year to do Talth on recharge alone, and 3-4 months for Mylarai. That's at 120 recharge. Obviously, with rank-up energy much much quicker.

Kronyn chain is a nice, short one with generally decent rewards. Nice to do, if just for medal points and Tier Rewards (though there is more efficient for the latter). Speaking of which, I do recommend cleaning up any of the low-energy missions you have lying around. The Krionite Transducer (83 Ended?) is exceedingly good and worth working towards. Then there's the Chron Transistor if you don't have that yet. It's kinda half-way, iirc and you should do.

Lazuli, Sha'din and Zolazin are the three chains that give NPC slots, off the top of my head. You should already have Zolazin done (up to the NPC slots at least, and the Glavis Devices if they're after. I really don't remember.) Sha'din (Zortah's) chain gives some really nice other rewards, including +8% cloak modules and an ability (plus some research structure. Eh.). It is, however, very very long. Longer than Taltherian, I think. Then there's Lazuli. It's much shorter, but the drops are meh at best. Your choice.

With about a year's worth of missions there, I think that's enough talk on that...

Right. Stats.
As already mentioned, depending on your goals there's a few targets you could go for with energy.
11:1 will get you an autorank without RSL implant, but a long chain of tough NPCs or slow takedowns due to locking tougher bosses could screw you over.
12:1 will get a much safer autorank, and you can start to spend a little energy on missions/bases at the end of the rank.
16:1 will give you a safe autorank and allow you to autorank off of some missions with RSL+Neural (Then going Inergon is also a nice choice, since you'll be spending a lot of energy at once it adds up - particularly if you dump into bases etc.).

Personally? Get to 12:1, then think about if you want to bother going for 16:1. Bare in mind the only other "quick" way to do Talth is to use GP. You can do it in much, much less time than a year if you rank daily though, so I dunno. Depends on your patience. Personally, I'm waiting for the 16:1, but not focusing on it.

Attack-wise, it's generally best to judge it against Chargers. They should take 3 shots when buffed. MAX. Preferably 2. In a while, the caps will allow you to 1 shot, but you'll have to wait a while.

Not taking anymore research planets. I've got two project gases right now (both have SSs) and I have a few other M/R gases that are laying around from my first 50 ranks.


Right now my MP is 9.4/hr. I'm not having any issues with credits at all. My upkeep is 1.5B currently, and I donate 2B to the base every day and the creds are still piling up. Plus I sell a few hundred artis here and there whenever they start to overflow in the cargo area. So I'm not overly concerned about upkeep, but I'll keep your points in mind especially re: synco plating. I just like being a tough nut to crack!


I don't have the Chron Shifter NPCs anymore, but I'll leave the Rogue Data Analyzers.


Def going to do Silthion before hunting for Caelon, kill two birds with one stone so to speak.



I don't want to get to 16x, I don't think. at least not yet. Talth is such a monster. I think I'm going to put that one on the backburner for now, as I don't want my ship strength to suffer any more than it is with the pace I'm ranking. I think maybe I'll come back to Mylarai once I find Caelon/Silthion.


I just rechecked the Kronyn chain, I really want those ergosphere filters so I'm at least working through that before I start Silthion I think. The Krionite Transducer is a long ways off for me. It's the 23rd tier and my next tier reward is 15.


I finished Zolazin around rank 130 iirc, so I have 4 NPC slots open right now. I'm definitely on the fence as to whether or not I'll do Lazuli before I start NPCing or if I'll do a combination of hunting for Caelon and picking at the Lazuli chain.



alright, so I'll aim somewhere between 11:1 and 12:1 for a safe auto-rank with room for basing. As I said before, I don't NEED to auto-rank, I just want to be able to when I'm purely NPCing. Thanks for the tip on the chargers. As of right now, it takes 3 shots for me to take one down. But I'm not buffing while NPCing just yet, as I'm still working on the Seeing Red medal. Today I'm going to switch to Inergon Explorer for a bit as I'm going for the 750 medal (I'm going to barely eek it out, but I'll get it) and after that I'm going Konq Fixer even though my heart is really in Aerlen.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses so far guys, you've been really great!

do talith first, this will help the most
follow that up with mylarari, this will be a long stretch so it gives you time to uplift a planet or 2 depending on your rank cycle ( how often you rank )
then do controlling the silthion >> you can NPC hunt for the meteors, the silthion and caelon at the same time, while upping your planets

Konqul Excavator is pretty superior to Konqul Fixer, generally.

Fixer for the base. tough nut to crack, remember?



YES.

No. I just can't do everything at once. Should have specified.

Mylarai first, at least up until the Kalviums, as those are guaranteed rewards and can provide quite a large amount of hull without being too energy intensive. Based on my own personal experiences, I would then say Talth, followed by the Silthion chain, followed by hunting for the Caelon/Larva, followed by Decryp. As far as I can tell, the Data Analyzers give a fair amount of XP, annoying as they are.

My reasoning behind this, aside from the Analyzers as stated above, is because optimally Caelon and the Larva should be hunted at the same time. It took me an extremely small amount of time to find Caelon, however I'm now thousands of NPC kills in on the Larva with no progress (I hoped to obtain Geminis before proceeding to the Taltherian chain, however it has gotten to such a point that I have decided to work on Taltherian afterwards). In addition, one of our other leaders (Ravadge, who is a fairly intensive NPCer) didn't find the Larva for about eight months; thinking about the amount of time it could be before I found it, I personally reasoned that the number of uplifts that could be provided via the Taltherian's ability during the time I may spend hunting the Larva could be quite large.

If you keep chron shifter and data analyzer enabled, it'll help as fixed rank npcs eventually have lower stats than matched. It will reduce the number of rare drops a bit however. It is a bit of a crutch but diluting also the assassins and flamehawks spawn rate will help you a lot. Talth will give near the highest XP for the first missions. Most of the mission rewards are marginal, what you really need is a growing number of AP planets so that you can grow your energy+attack beyond what you get from tech mods. You can pump energy until you autorank, then pump attack and add a bit of energy; being able to autorank generally means being able to dump some extra energy into missions, or the purger mission (for more chances at AP planets). The growth really is almost completely dependent on having a high AP. At your rank if you can afford it, a higher generator tech will help a lot.

Alright. Stats! (enter slow rankers here to tell me how crap my stats are )

Kara Thrace
Konqul Fixer
Rank 302

Battles 64335 (Grand Legend)
Player Kills 813
Deaths from Players 144
Non-Player Kills 4494
Planets Found 651
Planets Occupied 76
Planets Captured 30
Missions Completed 535
Scans Performed 4575
Successful Hacks 487
Successful Raids 383

Size Class: Leviathan
Space: 1638 / 1638
Attack: 6793
Defense: 5775
Scan: 371
Cloak: 380
Cargo: 7647.3 / 11760
Upkeep: 1.5B

Energy: 2485 (when I have reactors on, which is only during rank ups)
Hull: 12994
Shield: 1785

Weapons: Heavy Null Ray x8, Dominion Cannon - Mark III x4, Chromatic Cannon, Cerulean Fighter, Composite Ray - Type D, Vortul Blast Phaser x4, Ion Pulse Ballistae x4, Prototype Mech XV, Combat Analyzer

Energy: Surge Plexus x2, F.A.T.H.E.R. x2, Silthion T-Plasma Hub x2, Wormhole Relay x4, Omicron Injector, Chron-Transistor

Sensors: Merged DataNode, Tachyon Router, AI Supercomputer

Hull: Perfect Fermionic Armor x5, Scruuge Hypernode x2, BioMimetic Sealer II x4, Korteth Plating x2, Protean Armory x3

Shields: Harmonic Resonator, Q-Phase Battery Array

Cloaking: Gamma Channeler

Defenses Exergonic Inverter - Mark III x4, Velox Thruster, Sha'din Forcevoider x2, Silthion T-Phase Utricle x4, Dark Phase Engine x3, Dark Complex Thruster, Auto-Evasion Node, Trinity-Core Drive x2, BM50 Convoy Shuttle, Thrust Stabilizer, Subspace Compressor

So that's the build, currently. I plan on adding decks via shipbots to 2k decks, and then stopping there for awhile while I figure out exactly what else I want. I'm definitely aiming for a MSB, prob on the smaller size. So far I've had crap luck with korteths, I ALWAYS get plating, no matter how many I kill. so those will be updated as soon as the RNG quits its sick joke. can only fit 1 of my BM50s on right now, but that's not a big deal as they aren't the most deck efficient anyways. Still need 3 more composite rays, 2 more velox thrusters, 2 more sha'din forcevoiders, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

Productions:
Minerals 8590 units / hour (I misspoke earlier in the thread, sorry TB)
Artifacts 11406 points / hour
Research 9248 research / hour

Currently no planet slots open as I did a big scan yesterday and filled up with goodies.

So that puts my ship strength at 41.7 with the first formula, and 11.1 with the second formula.



I'm not really sure what you mean by the last sentence. what's a "higher generator tech"??

higher generator tech= would be higher energy mod, seeing as they are generators.

I think he means higher resource generators, actually.

Compare to people who have played as long as you not to people your rank.

A dark engine.

Since you are staying a MSB, I would suggest not adding space for thrusters just upgrade your dampeners to thrusters and then use the trelilth things to upgrade 2 of them and sell off the other 2.

Your stats are actually quite good.

I'm curious. Are you someone who's put money into Dysons and the like? Your productions are pretty high.

236 days played.

and yes, a dark engine. Also, I forgot to post my crew:

1000 Engineers
1756 Tactical Officers
685 Helmsmen
1356 Scientists