You've done a pretty good job of describing me.

What I wanted out of the game was the ability to be competitive against anyone else playing the game, including cc warriors. The path I chose was dumping rank points into engineers and adding to decks when needed.

The main purpose of this was to get more resource production which kind of feeds itself. More minerals equals more credits to colonize more planets. More research equals reaching higher building structures quicker to get more resources and to reach higher energy research quicker to rank quicker to colonize more planets to get more resources. More artifacts equals more prisoners to rank quicker and etc etc etc.

When I first started playing, everyone recommended going heavy decks route. Here is a link to a post I put up 7 months ago advocationg going heavy engineers. viewtopic.php?t=2580. You'll notice that King Juggernaut replied to this post bringing up the option to slow play it.

The fast ranking option allowed me to-
1. Be involved in a small community of players (let's say top 50) where most people know or know of each other.
2. Having a lot of engineers, I never have to wait for energy to build up to do something. Gives me the freedom to fight npcs whenever and for as long as I want.
3. I get to look at Dan's ship and see if any new modules are coming out and if not, I can threaten to disable him .
4. Having more planets allows me to get more excess artifacts which I can give to legion mates who might be short on certain ones.
5. Having more planets allows me to have a larger research total in which I can waste on the CT lab.
6. Since credits received from daily reward increases with rank, I was able to get 56 bil once (down side is that it barely covered the expense of invading a planet then putting buildings on it).
7. Build a ship which is competitive against anyone in the game.

From what I have read on this thread, the Slow Ranker option seems to be mostly focused on "Don't do very much in the game" - because unless you are purely focusing on hacking or just not logging in very often, my in-game experience is that it is hard to avoid ranking at a reasonable rate even if you only do low xp/energy actions.

From what I have read on this thread, the Slow Ranker option seems to be mostly focused on "Don't do very much in the game" - because unless you are purely focusing on hacking or just not logging in very often, my in-game experience is that it is hard to avoid ranking at a reasonable rate even if you only do low xp/energy actions.

Which is dan's ship?

BTW: I slow ranked while my friend fast ranked. I got my weapons and armour researched, he poured it all into energy. He was disabled 16 times in 2 days, and quite the game. I'm now further then him, and am starting to speed rank...slowly, lol

1 catch to the slow ranker in the long run (in the short run, you are a bigger ship than everyone else, gratz)
but if u made it to rank 200 in say a year, when someone else made it to rank 500... they have probably got triple your artifact production due to planet slots... meaning they can sit at rank 500 with a way larger income than you while you edge your way to rank 500 and by then the arts they have received means they are a stronger rank 500 than you will be when you reach that point, am i correct?
So this leaves you with a constant balancing of a) trying to be strong compared to others and b) being a stronger person at higher ranks

mega it is true that the 500 hundrend will be stronger than you but only when the slow ranker is below his level but once the slow ranker reaches 500 he would be stronger than anyone else within his level and would be stronger than what the previous 500 guy was when he was 500. so slow ranking is better and Morkoth slow ranking does not mean you dont do anything in the game you can still pvp, npc as much as you want its just that you dont care about leveling up and slow rankers usually are interested in either just pvp or npc mission are basicly the thing that seperates fast rankers and slow rankers and slow rankers choose not to do mission as much.
i hope that clears somethings and if i said something wrong as a fact please correct me thanks

i would describe it as taking your ship, chopping it in half, and putting an artifact generator in the middle, and then taking ages to make it fly again
you would be shot in the foot to start with (and i am ruling out leveling with real money, so ur "power leveling" will be a little slower ) but after a while of sitting at rank 600, cashing in the income, that research will catch up and max out, and in the mean time, your art production is much larger than it is now. so if you waited for the time it would have taken you to reach 600 "naturally", you will have received way more art points
(i am focussing on arts because mining MAY be negated by potential upkeep and you are saying that by 600 you should complete the research tree anyway....)