decks... you want decks at your rank ... more decks more you can put on your ship dont worry about getting any crew untill you start seeing arts that give you crew or extra ranks points other than the rank points you get from going up in rank... having a large crew is something you wont have to worry about for a while and will come into play when you are trying to raid... but at your size and rank the decks are for sure the way to go

Your missing the point. He's purposely talking about going with the small ship build, meaning he wants to keep his ship as small as possible to reduce incoming damage, instead of relying on heavy defense mods, which take up quite a significant number of decks.

Well, they wouldn't put the points into defense, they would go to attack. If you have a really small ship you don't need defense, so they would have over 600 attack from those rank points. If you keep your ship really small for a long time, you'll be fighting high level people who can't do much damage to you, but who you can do a lot of damage to you. In the end you probably won't be as powerful as someone who started at the same time, because of energy limits, but you could be strong for your level, which is fun for some people.

For those players on scout PVP route, they don't even need scanners. They even can afford to own much fewer planets but all production are on artifact alone. They don't even need RP for tech in anything other than hull technology, planetary structure and maybe energy for relays alone. They do not need cloak, scan, weapon, and defense at all that really frees up lot of RP requirement so they can afford to have 1 or 2 RP-only planets to become very strong.. They can rely on legion to feed shared planets for them to colonize or invade....

One of biggest drawback they will face with scout route is hacking or getting hacked. They will find themselves hacked too easy but since they won't have many planets to start with so they won't lose much at all and still can fight well even with no planets.. Their upkeep will be basically nil or very tiny thanks to hull modules (just 1) so they don't even need mining as well as RP..

They will find raiding so much easier to farm artifact points off high level players. High level players will not be able to do much damage. They will be about same as low level players other than more hull/defense to sustain.. But farming those high rank players will be very attractive for low rank scout PVP'ers due to higher AP/energy ratio per raid. They will be able to raid high rank players with high degree of success.. For best PVP scout, I would say Konqul fixer or Konqul raider.

I did have my wife try GL out and I told her to try PVP scout out. She is about 66 ranks now I think and been able to farm rank 150 to 200 players easily and actually pissed off whole legion and they only gave my wife reason to farm more victims and legion actually gave up and stayed the hell away from my wife. My strategy that I gave to her works very well. She even had only 5 or 6 planets under her control and she even didn't even need any more.. I did give her $20 to buy all brackets to start off so she can fight very well off the bat hoping to get her hooked on GL last fall.. Unfortunately, she lost interest in GL few months ago. She only played for few months so her scout is collecting dust ever since and never ranked up so far.. I sure am curious how rank 100-200 would look for her design (well it's my design that I gave to her).. Would be nice to have GL to allow 2nd ship on same account so I can experiment scout route and see how it goes.. I told her to invest all RPs only into hull technology and it served her well.. Mining planets were a joke cuz she gets enuf money off daily rewards to finance her neglectible ship upkeep and some structure upgrades. She did had 1 planet invaded by someone else but she easily get another, comparable one to colonize.

Nocifer Deathblade, I think you are quite the smart one, so could you please tell me which modules to strive for? level 11 with only 40 deck, 28 research points per hour (because one of my members said i should have more research points), and 22 minerals per hour.
almost 1/2 on titanium improvements and
1/3 on linear induction(for research)

Don't inflate his ego.

Pinky are you planning on going the scout route and staying tiny? That would greatly depend on what you would want to do with your ship and planets.

planning to stay with 40 deck and I want to put 3 rank points in tactical officers and the rest in energy

just do deck space till rank 120 then hit the engineers. Or do a 3 and 2 kinda thing.


EDIT: Don't put the rank points in to tact, helmsmen ,or scientist, yet . Wait till you have nuff erg and deck to do what you want but at your rank it will be a wast.

as it says above, the bigger the ship the more damage that happens, and I dont want to have a lot of damage done to me

i have gone with the big ship build with over 600 decks at lvl100 the way i see it as wepons and defences improve the big ship design is stronger the higher you go in levels. yeah it may take 70 energy or more to take out the small ship size but with all this space i can fit in moduals to protect from hacking and attacks and if nessisary i can retool my ship to max out hacking or attacking depending on the target. yeah its more expencive but credits have never been a problem i still have 2.8 B.

I have 2 in my legion that are playing scout there is a dmg cap on that size of ship I do not know if there is one on any other but the most dmg they take is 15 they do not need def only attack as for planets we feed them to those two and if they need money we send high end minerals so they don't need to mine. if your going to go small I have seen scout class work vary well and our higher level scout of level 66 has taken out a 140 with little problem so from what I can see and have seen scouts have a dmg cap research was best for planet development and artifacts are key hope this helps you

ok it seems there is actually no one here who is actually a small ship build. well i am so here are the FACTS.
1, yes there is a damage cap
2, yes it is half of your deck size. (all ship classes regardless of how big your damage cap is still 1/2 of deck space)
3, scouts are VERY hard to play you must be patient
4, small ships still include the frigate class in my eyes

ok a few other things to note.
SCANNING: is very difficult in a small build artifacts help but only so far you generally cap out at about 50 planets. so if you have a good legion you should have a few to choose from. also star chart purgers are your best friends.

FIGHTING: yes you are a little wasp annoying bears so expect a bit of flak. Also the occasional disable. You will excell in this area however you may find at early levels you lack the energy to finish the job.

DEFENCE: don't need it ever. don't waste ranks in it period! you will get android helmsmen to bump up this stat anyway

HACKING: you are terribly weak the only defence you have is making sure you spend your research points first however you can find a nice balance later i will explain.

ARTIFACTS: are your life money is not important and research is second thought. when colonising its ART, ART, ART!

dristate may i suggest this path to your build i am finding quite successful.

Firstly never put any ranks ever in decks. first rule. you will get ship bots from artifact drops don't scrap them just yet.

ok firstly let me explain the differences between the smaller vessels

Scout 20 - 49 decks max damage cap is 25
Light Frigate 50 -99 decks max damage cap is 50
Frigate 100 -149 decks max damage cap is 75

now each one has its advantages and disadvantages. firstly however when you level you should only worry about 2 stats.
Engineers and tactical officers. when you level put 3 in tactical and 2 in engineers. continue this until you have around 200 base energy then focus on tactical officers. Every level from then on your attack will rise by a minimum of 10 points. 12 if you have the racial bonus.

while the scout has a low damage cap its weaknesses were mentioned earlier hard to find planets and vunerable to hacks.
the light figate gives you a little more space to move and you can off set the higher damage cap with hull modules. but this allows some room for scanners or cloak the two most important mission for you to finish at low level are the zolazin mission that gives the zolazin jammers best cloak modules in the game and at low level the 80 cloak for 20 space is not bad. the second mission is the stryll one that gives you styrll transponders. again 20 space but you get 40 scan and 40 defence. the 40 defence is not important but the scan is good ratio.

the frigate is what I have decided to sit at 75 damage cap offset by added hull. and you are still taken down in similar ammount of hits if you balance your hull right. however at level 55 you should finish the genetarr mission that gives genetarr transmitters. all 4 over level 55 give a total of 80 energy and 220 scanning. this opens up about 100 planets and gives you a defence against casual hackers. works out to be a good balance. of course your attack will be still good as all your rank points go into tactical officers.

well have a play and i hope this helps remember to try new things and discover your own balance

In the April patch, the damage ceiling is changed!
Now, the damage limit is half your rank + 19, if its higher than half your decks. So, this strategy is now rendered...useless!
AND i'd gotten to lvl 46 as a scout<grrr>

level 45, I was doing great until the patch, now Its much easier for me to get disabled. I dislike it a lot, planning to give away my good planets and leaving the game, not much to do now.

NOoo!

Blucifer and Pinky, don't give up now! There is plenty you can still do. This is NOT all bad for us scout ships! MadHatred of HC, you too! Don't give up. If you would like, I can discuss some strategies to make the most of this new patch.

Scout monsters are no more, but taking advantage of the damage caps is still a good enough proposition that people out there will still think you're exploiting somehow!!

PM me if you want to hear what I've learned so far.

Ejjakai
The Trust

with the new update scouts cant be that durable like before. now the minimum damage for any scout would be (rank + 19) * 0.5

So a rank 150 will have max damage of 84.. would still be sweet. but not like before.

WTF you have 43x megarich DYSON PLANET, a prime advantage over any scout in the galaxy, DONT QUIT

sorry, i deleted my rant. complaining serves no purpose.