Iv been debating for quite some time nowwith legionmates and in some cases here on the forum on whats the best ranking strategy Fast or Slow and I can now say that iv come to a conclusion on what is the best to choose. While slow ranking allows your ship to become extremely strong for your rank it puts you at an extreme disadvantage agasint people who have been playing for as long as you have that have been fast ranking, and you become highly limited by your energy. Fast ranking however puts you in a situation in which you are much weaker then everyone your rank and your damage cap (and with it amount you get hit for) rises. I however have found the solution.

Its situational and a bit complicated.
The factors the came into play however are simply enough,
1: Amount of scanned colonization worthy planets you have.
2: The amount of empty planet "slots" you have.

Iv done the math and while fast ranking does put you at a disadvantage agiasnt your peers, by slow ranking once you get to a certian rank along with turtling for a week or two you are able to be at about the same strength as your peers.
This point is when 2=1, due to the fact that how powerful your ship is mostly dependent on your planetary production. More research = better modules, More Minerals = ability to keep better modules ans well as colonize more planets, More artifacts = more rank points, decks, scientists, helmsmen, cargo, and other useful goodies. So as long as you have planets to take its worth it to rank up, even if its fast becasue by turtling you can regain your PVP ability within a few weeks if not days.
That being said once you have colonized all of those planets ranking up would only weaken your ship, so its no longer really worth it to rank quickly and at this point the best strategy is to slow rank until you can find more planets to take.


TL;DR
The best strategy is to fast rank until you run out of planets worth taking and then slow ranking until you find more.

Yeah it seems obvious doesn't it ? Fast rank ftw. You get more planets = more growth = more planets and power. The people that slow rank only care about their pvp stats, cause I don't see any other reason to do it. Actually I am sick of seeing posts about slow ranking play the fracking game already. I wish Dan would give them their zero xp debuff/buff so they would quit discussing it as a "strategy".

Slow ranking is good for being a good ship at your rank. The problem is NPCing brings such good planetary rewards. It was even better before the races came out which could boost planet production.

I used to rank pretty slowly but now I've got more stuff researached than I can afford to install I've started ranking a lot quicker. It's not to do with strategy per se. It's more game activity. I can do an hour of NPCing and level up a couple of times without using a Tri Matrix. I've jumped 4 ranks today with one Tri matrix. Done 20k of NPCing and the rest missions. Almost 2 hours of active game time.

Yeah I suppose it is one thing if you play casually or not that actively, as not everyone can. In that case having a lot of AP should help the ship grow , but of course having more AP planets will grow it faster

AP is a big struggle for me. There just aren't enough planets. The only way to boost it is using terraforrmers and they're hard to find. Research gets boosted by android scientists, those new RSL ships, RP dropped by NPCs and Rogue Labpods. Mining is even easier to boost with heavy NPCing. I have 9 massive planets at 17x mining or greater. My mission exotic is dedicated to arti as will be my Dyson if I ever get it.

Fast ranking by NPCing is a fine art though. It takes managing funds carefully. At higher ranks planet invasaion costs a lot. I spend a lot on repairs too. It takes high AP to get star chart purgers and high mining to afford the cost of a scan with top tier scanners.

Thankfully I should have research contracts by this weekend! (Currently Rank 525)

I agree. I am so tired of all this slow ranking ideas. I like to rank fast and I enjoy doing it and discovering new missions and colonizing new planets.

Slowing down for a season can be helpful, but the game needs to stop rewarding inactivity. I think there needs to be some algorithm that if a person does not do missions, NCPing, planetary invading or PVPing, then thier shipbot, helmsmen, tesserract, Prisoners etc. drops from arti's become almost nill.

research the stuff, install the stuff...though you wll need decks, which come from ranking.
if you can fit 8 def modules of the top 2 types, you can afford them then you are ranked enough.
you can play brackets off against def modules til you're blue in the face...def modules win out day to day

there is no need they're harming themselves by doing it although I'll agree sometimes you might want to slow it down if you get to far ahead of yourself

For me fast leveling works great, i can do now up to 10 levels a day if i want and have the time. More planets more artifacts -> better performance i am drannik builder and do npc runs all the time,
i get 12k artifacts per hour so with many neurals repair bots and shield restorer you can fight and fight and fight.... find npc get the high xp from them level again and so on. I get 88 energy per hour and have 5k max energy now with 2650 decks at lev 445, and the one point is true if you run out of good planets level slow, make misions, collect purgers and w8 for the next scan run.