This is advice for anyone hunting NPCs at lower ranks or with a small ship.

The most important thing is attack to rip through NPCs as fast as possible. The next most important thing is hull to reduce time between repairs. At about rank 200 you may find repair costs get really expensive depending on what you have installed. I think it's when Intra-D colliders and null Ray tech get installed. This is when defence becomes important.

8 guns is vital. 5 hulls is useful. Defence is up to you. I think Massive levianth is the optimal size for an NPC hunting ship. You should be able to fit in most of the units for a bare NPC hunting build. I put all my rank points into ship till then. Ship bots have got me up to Heavy Star Destroyer.

I suggest installing no shields or shield generators especially if you've got a small ship. Maintaining a high attack is more important.

Keep your scan below 50 if you don't want to get those CTP ships. Above rank 350 you'll want to raise your scan because that's when Flamehawks start appearing.

Scan increases your chance of a crit hit which helps a little bit with killing ship quicker but not a lot. It's useful to block hackers - more useful than cloak because it has a better size/power ratio - but I'm not sure it has much value for NPC hunting ships. If space is short definitely don't add a scanner unless you want to find certain cloaked NPCs.

When going on an NPC blitz uninstall Drannik Power cores, Genetarr trasnmitters and any other energy cores which are cheap to repair during your scan blitz and install extra weapons or hull (if you have a small ship).

Kill the ships which take the fewest number of shots to kill. This slightly increases your chance of finding rares such as the TO Troop Carrier.

If anyone has any other tips please post them here.

If you want to find out other stategies for NPC hunting come join Torment. It's a new legion dedicated to NPC hunting.
http://apps.facebook.com/galaxylegion/l ... Q9MTIxNzk=

make sure you keep an eye on your experience bar and just before levelling you reinstall any energy modules that Remainder told you to uninstall... this will give you more times to attack... and as your current energy drops below max again you can gradually uninstall those energy modules again and swap back to attack modules...



also.. keep your scan below 20 if you don't want to get the stryll assassins... those burn through your energy like butter

I think I would come under the "small ship" build that Remainder was talking about, I am currently rank 445 and have 17398 npc kills.

My ship is a Heavy Leviathan. I have as many npc modules installed as possible. They way I have set up my ship is for max attack, max hull, max energy, some scan and as many npc defense modules. I currently dont have any researched defense modules installled because of a complete lack of space.

I have kept my upkeep as low as possible, currently 898 Million a day. This helps with both your daily upkeep and repair costs. I have over 3000 engineers, 600 tactical officers and over 800 helmsmen. I started with heavy research but have gradually moved to heavy artifact production.

Artifacts are best if you plan on npcing a lot, since you will get everything you need to keep attacking.

Im not going to go on about auto ranking but the more energy you have, the more npcs you can kill and the more elites you can get in on.

I have built up Torment to teach smaller ranks what they need to know to successfully and cheaply npc.