Raid Raids Raiding
Contents |
What is Raiding ?
Raiding allows your ship to steal unspent mineral or artifact resources from an enemy ship[1]. You can use a Spy Probe - Resources before raiding a disabled ship. You can still get a successful raid when the enemy ship has zero resources, but you will not gain any resources. Successfully raiding higher ranked ships will yield better results as they usually have more resources on hand.
Raiding is a crew to crew battle. A large crew increases your raiding chances and lowers the chance of one of your crew dying. Players start the game with 100 crew members, consisting of 5 Tactical Officers, 5 Helmsmen, 80 Engineers, and 10 Scientists. Opponents with a large crew can cause you to fail in your raid attempt. A normal raid failure only costs you the 5 energy. However, a critical raid failure causes you to lose one crew member (usually a Tactical Officer).
How to Raid BT targets
To raid a target on the battle tab, your target must first be disabled. Once a target is disabled, raiding costs 5 energy. The raid cool down timer is 15 minutes on success, 5 minutes on failure. Time Manipulators can be used to raid a target multiple times, but that can result in severe retaliation by some targets. There are occasional rumblings about Badging Etiquette, but there are no in-game restrictions on multi-raiding other than the limit on TM offensive actions, currently set at 100 (28aug2012).
BT Raiding Results and Rewards
From Dan (the game developer)'s post on the forum, the following outcomes are possible:
Critical Success: You will steal a larger amount of resources
Success: You will steal a normal amount of resources
Failure: You will receive no resources
Critical Failure: One of your crewmembers will die during the raid.
A 'successful' raid results in you stealing Artifact Points (AP) or Mineral Points (MP) from your opponent at random. If the ship has no artifact points, you will instead steal mineral points, and vice versa. You will be awarded a yellow badge for completing a raid, even if your opponent has nothing to steal (raid succeeds, but does not add to your successful raids stat). However, you can only get one yellow badge from a player within any 12 hour period.
Yellow badges can be used to purchase Battle Market Artifacts, including up to 3 Protean Hulls (Armory or Arsenal) that, when installed on your ship, will increase raiding chance success. Other ways to boost the raiding success chance include the Raider profession, the Thraccti, Scruuge Defector ally, the Darmos Nerve Gas effect from the Darmos Nerve Turret activated ability, and the Systematic avarice buff from the legion base's Universal Service Terminal.
There are currently a number of Medals that are awarded for successful raids.
- The 'Boarding Party' medal is awarded for 10 successful raids.
- The 'Intruder Alert' medal is awarded for 100 successful raids.
- The 'Cleaning Crew' medal is awarded for 1000 successful raids.
- The 'My Cargo Runneth Over' medal is awarded for 5000 successful raids. You also receive 'The Marauder' title, currently the highest title in the game for successful raiders.
- The 'Equal Opportunity' medal is awarded for successfully raiding a pilot from each playable profession.
- The 'Doorbuster Sale' medal is awarded for successfully raiding a pilot from each playable race during the Scruuge seasonal event.
Advanced Raiding Tips
Here are some known strategies:
1. ice-fishing
- waiting for someone else to disable players on your bt, and then snagging a raid
- pros: energy-efficient, can raid multiple times with time manipulators, less likely to be retaliated against if the victim uses up all their energy retaliating against the original disabler, no xp so slower to rank up
- cons: waiting ... waiting ... waiting
2. kill what you eat
- disabling 'weaker' players on your bt and collecting both a red and a yellow
- pros: 2 badges in one-go, targeting those with higher resources lower crew, improve your own battle rep
- cons: much more likely to get a decent retal, uses up much more energy, especially if you pick the wrong target and they end up being tougher than they originally appeared, ranks you up much faster, disable actions cut the amount of time manipulators that can be used purely for raiding
3. old school
- anyone in your bt is a valid target, up to zero-ing (especially in wartime)
- pros: get to the medals VERY quickly
- cons: requires a decent ship build, both for attack efficiency, and the inevitable retals from legion alerts, your targets will begin to empty out their cargo holds more frequently, leaving you with a badge but no progress towards the medal. as with #2, your disable actions cut the amount of time manipulators that can be used purely for raiding
4. locked on target
- opponents that appear on your battle log, either via alerts or from pvp attacks on you, can be targeted for 48 hours. you can either disable them or wait for them to be disabled by someone else. this also works for the top10 ships on the kills leaderboard. basically, if they are disabled, you can raid every 15 minutes without using any time manipulators
- pros: saves on time manipulators, can get lots of raids from those with large action counts
- cons: those with large action counts often do not take kindly to being multi.raided and may retaliate ... with extreme prejudice
Base Raids
There is a primer on Base Raids on the Base Combat wiki page.