Rather than just posting random stats, I figured I'd start tracking my stats on a daily basis with a specific goal in mind, namely, to no longer be laughable.

The quest began on February 19th, when I had disabled 174 players and been disabled 576 times (for a -402 differential) - this meant that I needed to improve my differential by killing 353 more people than disabled me to become feeble. That took me until April 30th, or 71 days. Once I became feeble, I quickly gained a positive differential and became balanced by May 8th (79 days total.) I've since gotten myself (almost) into the 50s in the few days since then, so my combat reputation is Deadly now. During this time I went from rank 344 to 456.



I expect that I'll get to insane much faster than I got out of Laughable, not just because it's a few less kills required but also because I've gotten better at avoiding being disabled and am a tougher ship now than I was then. Plus, folks don't immediately click to attack me now that I'm no longer laughable, and those that do have discovered I've pretty much always got a KVT running and if I'm not looking for a new planet to invade probably have a halc right behind it. (I discovered how incredibly annoying that was and adopted the practice for myself.)

My biggest limiting factors right now are my supply of null fuses, which started out in triple digits back in February and which now usually gets to around 2-3 dozen when I take 4 or 5 days off of PvPing to let them replenish, plus having goals related to medals, NPCing, and missions.

One of the best parts of this whole process is that I now interact much more often with folks outside my legion, mostly by them being annoyed when I was raiding anybody on my battle tab that I discovered was disabled every 12 hours while trying to collect yellows to rank Thraccti (now level 100) and then improving the relationship by explaining how much cheaper it is (in terms of energy and effort) to just trade badges back and forth every 12-24 hours. Not that that stopped me in my goal from improving my differential, but ranking Thraccti was a priority for a while.

Now that Thraccti and Sehrin are both rank 100, I'm concentrating on ranking Apparitius and Cuniculous, with the farming of dark badges also aiding in attaining the genetarr medal for hunting stryll assassins...only 16 of those to go, although I still have quite a few dark badges left to acquire. Spook is now rank 49 and Bunny is rank 59. In 80 medal points I'll be putting my focus onto hacking so that I can rank up Bainar; I've got the blue badges saved up to purchase him and should have a few ranks worth by the time I have the medal points as well.

My ship did see quite a bit of growth. I'm not too worried about being medium or large ship build...I pretty much assume every time I'm repaired that I'll be disabled soon, and if I'm online (which I am during most of the day most days) I'll try to defend but always make sure I time my repairs for when I have the energy to disable at least 3 people to make sure that my differential doesn't slip (in fact, it only slipped backwards on 5 days out of the 84 since I started tracking, and never more than -2.) I also try to avoid repairing on days I won't be doing PvP unless I can do so with a halc and calming amp up (there were 21 days where I did not get disabled or disable anybody.) As for size, I went from 1492 decks to 1952, averaging almost 6 per day (thought it's more like 8 per day the last couple weeks.) I do plan to stop and sit at 2000 decks for a while, however, as I phase out my reactors and let them fall into disrepair.



My helmsman growth was pretty straightfoward but is now flatlined as I've found other uses for 350 of the things (well, a use for 300, and another use for 50 once the legion finds Anubix.) Similarly, my scientists growth increased when I became a Genetarr and did more NPCing for stryll assassins, both for the medal and to rank my ally on the dark badges. I've been finding a lot of RSL Confinement Centers and they can pop on the scientists pretty quickly.

The really interesting part of that chart though was the racing that my rescued prisoners and rank points did. All rescued prisoners went to engineers, and all ranking points went to TACOs, and any other rank points I obtained through other means (such as daily reward) got split evenly between them. I wanted to see who would reach 2000 first. That race started at 1000 engineers and TACOs each; at the start of tracking, they were at 1202 engineers and 1366 TACOs. I mostly seemed to gain either 2-3 times the number of engineers to TACOs most days...or get no engineers at all. The race did wind up coming down to the wire, with engineers just barely winning...before the Q-Pedd event, when I took a few weeks off of PvP, I was losing helmsman pretty regularly to raids, and that made all the difference. (After Q-Pedd, I had protean armories and was a raider, so my chances of success vastly improved.) My artifact production has improved a fair bit, so it's fun to watch the engineers far outstrip teh TACOs until I get a legion mission that requires an NPC hunt wherein I blow through half a dozen ranks in a day. (Amazing how easy that is to do if you get to the point you can autorank.)

Speaking of production, I didn't start to track that daily until April 8th, so I don't have as much data. Basically, I went from 6894m / 9879a / 10721r to (currently) 9135m / 13052a / 12779r.



The bump you see in late April came off a period of NPCing where I had a lot of open planet slots and went on an invasion spree for a week. It was great.

Speaking of invasions, I also tracked badges.



I didn't bother including dark badges on that graph, though I did track them, because while the average per day is only a bit over 7, the average over the last 2 weeks is over 20 with some individual days over 80, which skewed the range on the chart quite a bit. Note that that chart is the number of badges collected in a day, not the total I had; I tracked how many badges I had each morning, and how many I spent, so this data set is more meaningful. (I actually have 2 sheets...one where I collect my daily numbers at the end of the day or first thing in the morning, and the other which is all automatically calculated which shows the individual values for each day as well as my overall average and my average for the past 2 weeks for each column.)

The last thing I tracked was was my captures, mission completions, hacks and raids, which you can see here:



Captures isn't that exciting, being relatively low compared to the others and limited to at most 1 per day (except at the new year when I used paradox generators to get lone conquorer...but that's not in this dataset.)

I've still got almost twice as many raids as I do kills, but I expect hacks will go up relatively soon.

For those interested, raw numbers on significant dates and the start of the month:


So...now for the slog to insane. I don't expect I'll keep up the stats forever...but will for at least a few more months. I might go for a monthly checkin and reduce the number of stats I actually track once I hit insane (probably remove the badges, anyway, as not being as useful when only looking at things once a month instead of daily.) The combat reputation isn't the only goal, but it's the prime motivator to start collecting stats so that I could actually see the progress I'm making. My next big goal is to raise my AP/hour. I primarily take just artifact planets these days, unless a really good mining planet presents itself or a phenomenal research planet that is outfitted for one or both of the other resources as well.

I am considering going back to kronyn hacker after I finish teh genetarr medals, not because I really need the research but because the only other race I've unlocked that I haven't been yet is Zolazin and that can wait for the legion mission to switch there. In the meantime, I can speed up turning all my gas planets into mass-production plasmas, at least 'til it's time to become a zolazin sabateur or I finish mylari.

I'm just over a month out from my 1 year anniversary, and am 80 medal points shy of unlocking everything that requires a certain number of medal points (at 820 now.)

If i took the game that serious, id have a really awesome ship by now.

My shiplog is nice though, its got lots of pretty pictures yours has just got rows of data. Pretty pictures > rows of data. Leave rows of data and charts to senator hung do the pretty pictures instead.

Pictures are nice too...





Note that I do change my ship and title at least once a week. It's nice having options now.

For research, I basically have gone through and gotten to what I want for planets first...namely, for weapons, shields, cloaks and actual planetary structures, my goal was what I could put on planets. I'm sticking to heavy thetacron guns as my biggest I'll install (currently got one at 80% upgrade and one at 20% from havoc coils, lesser guns I don't mind scrapping for the other 6 slots) and I'm currently finishing up defensive items to install a Trans-Entropy Drive and use my voliir biostabilizers. I'm at the point in legion research so I can donate to our level 6 base. My thoughts originally were to go for topopolis rings next, but then I realized if I did a bit more in cloaking I could replace 4 +500 cloak structures on a sentient I found with 3 +800 structures and free up room for a voliir transgenic lock and an xrp warp inhibitor. I've got about 2-3 days left for my defense research to finish that entire line, and then less than 8 days for the cloaks. After that, probably the topopolis rings. Not too worried about reactors since I've got enough engineers at this point I'll probably stop using my reactors to free up space and expense. I finished the scanners and have a bunch of them built...it costs 20 billion to repair them when I'm ready to scan, and takes quite a bit of cargo, but hey, don't have to take the time to save up the aidonium going forward at least.

tracking progress really helps with the motivation

one note about medal point requirements ... my understanding is that the raix chain unlocks a few items that require 1200 medal points ...

Looks like your ship is coming a long quite nicely, but see if you could get more efficient modules on your ships and maybe more engineers. It would be great if you could have a lot of energy without the need of modules.

I recommend hunting more scanning modules and maybe all of them if you can. Anything to give more bang for the decks you use is pretty good.

Definitely! And thanks for the heads up, I haven't gotten to the raix chain yet. Well, I'm not going to stop chasing medals...so hopefully by the time I can see them I'll have enough. Good motivation either way...





Actually, I've got half my scanners broken right now. I'm basically using as few decks as possible to keep over 2k scan so that I have a chance to find Caelon (I've already found the SIlthion Larvae). When I do go on a scanning or hacking run I'll be re-jiggering my ship to use more scan and cloak. As for engineers, that's been a focus since before I started tracking, and I'm getting them as quick as I can, hence the race against the TACOs (which I also want to increase as quick as I can...) Once I reach 3000 I'll put all rank points no matter the source towards whichever one lost, and then either start a new race or just start distributing evenly for a while. Haven't decided yet.

Most of my defensive modules are usually not installed since I don't have the deck space; once I finish the research tree, I'll be getting one of the top-end ones and then doubling it's strength with the voliir items (I'll probably just do 1 researched item and use 10 of the artis, saving 5 for when I have more decks.) As I switch to more of a focus on hacking instead of attacking, I'll likely uninstall some of my less efficient attack modules to free up some space; I'm working on my CK69 Assault Sentry and my second dominion cannon now (already have one tri-blaster upgraded)

I also have quite a few items in my cargo I just haven't bothered building as they aren't efficient enough. Once I reach more towards the end game and need to eek out that last few scan I'll probably build the modules then. (Same for defensive items, not sure if I'll ever build those though.)

Congrats on the improvement!

Have come across you on the BT several times, you have a great attitude and are a ton of fun to trade disables/raids/hacks with. Keep it up!

I noticed you were no longer laughable and stopped hitting you.

Good Work Mate!

I have just found you on BT, and taken some badges, some things I've noticed:
1. Hull and shield have significantly increased!
2. More defense than I previously encountered.
3. Taken around 250? energy to get the disable(not sure if it was 250 or 350)

Other than that, the only thing I can think is more AP, 13k is slightly above what I have, and I am about 100 ranks below.

Thanks! Regarding defense, I've been working a bit on that. I just finished the defense tree so I got a trans-entropy mark III which I upgraded to 100% using the voliir biostablizers...although I did have to uninstall most of my defensive modules and haven't put them back in yet (still wearing my reactors - I was autoleveling yesterday looking for xathe vortex entities.) I've also upgraded Cuniculous enough to get the defensive bonus, and haven't gotten any yet but am saving for velox thrusters.

It doesn't affect my defense but I finished the genetarr medals so switched back to hacker to finish the kronyn medal while also finishing the shared adventures medal...so I only needed 10 medal points to reach 900 so I spammed 15 completions of the XTS-9 mission so I could get Bainar. The only reason I wasn't halced up was because I needed to do some hacking to get Bainar to level 2 right away.

I am working on raising my AP - I'll still take mining planets come along and are really good, but stopped taking research planets unless it's stupidly great a while back. AP is definitely the preference. I'm relatively close to making my first rift as well which will definitely help. Just need a few more of the proper tributes and two more terraformers. I probably won't have enough enumeration crystals to take best effect but do have a pair saved up at least.

For the love of little kittens, please hold off on Rifting anything until you can max whatever it is you are using as a donor planet.

I'll be able to get it to 15x,17x,17x before turning into a gaia - it won't be maxed, but it will still be a lot better than anything else I have post-rift. And hopefully by the time I collect everything I'll have found another enumeration crystal or 3 (unlikely, but possible...)

It's currently an MR / 1x / 3x. I haven't used a reality transfuser on it yet either, so depending on what comes out of that I may just turn it into a gaia and then look for a new project, which would give me more time to find more crystals as well.

You can buy crystals from people for 2k ctp, or hit glass 6+ for decent chances. It should only take a week at most to gather 3 more crystals if you consistently tag glass bases.

Sad little kittens
Please wait until you have arti to 20x before Gaia-ing (regardless of Rifting or not).
Trust me, the wait is worth it.
With such limited numbers of "special" planets, it really does pay off to fully max each and every one, imo.

Take this man's advice, don't waste rifts like that..save them for 20x+ artifact planets. If you use them on lesser planets, you will greatly regret it in the future.

I've got 6 NPC slots now. And...I found Caelon.

So any non-PvP or legion-mission inspired NPCing is now going towards the dark aperture key...gonna take a while to get there...

Dark aperture key really isnt that helpful unless you either have little income, or a pretty sizable ship.

Not saying don't do it, but weigh out the value. It only reduces the mineral sales tariff from 20% to 10%.

Yeah, but I no longer have to run 2001+ scan if I don't want to, I can get rid of 1000 scan in my normal build. Not that I'm likely to right now since I'm doing a lot of hacking to be able to rank Bainar, but the option is now available. It'd be a while anyway; CTPs are going to base upgrade and the second mission will require 4,000 of them.

Savage!