Spoiler: Hunted by marauders

[genusv2]

I've got a fleet of about 40 bounty hunters after me (mixture of leviathans, falcons, bounders, quicksilvers, etc), who travel in two seperate groups - my offensive fleet comprises of a Hurricane with Korath weaponary, a standard Derecho, and 3 Shield Beetles. How many more ships do i need to be able to fight the 40 within an acceptable danger margin without cheesing with swarm tactics
ALSO what is an alternative flagship option to the Bactrian

[Grathagis]

I manage it with one Kestrel. Use long range weapons and fly backwards at great speed, and pick them off one by one.

[hellminister]

As for alternative for flagship option, if you want to loot ship, the deepriver has the biggest cargo, and if you want to capture, well the bactrian is the best... and if you want a good rounded between loot and capture.... the bactrian...

Personally, for a flagship that's what i look for since escort covers the combat abilities

[Zarinthal]

You don;t necessarily need more ships if they are set up right. If you have enough to buy 20 falcons and refit them in The Deep, do that or go get more SB or anything else. 5-8 hurricanes would probably do it. Or, with what you already have, just get engines on all ships that are faster than enemy engines, use follow command, drift just outside enemy range with your "bubble" of ships and try to maneuver to lure them off the fleet one or two at a time. It can take a few minutes to succeed, let alone potential retries, but it can be done. Better shielding is better, wanderer weapons. don't forget to watch and adjust your number of anti-missile turrets, it can make a big difference. try to get enough cooling for long battles, sustained attack, one target at a time. If you have a bactrian flagship, strip it down for speed and bunks, no weapons, capture enemy ships if you can and use them against the enemy , landing mid battle to repair and rehire crew. Jumping around can help take big shortcuts to get ahead of a chasing fleet and land, but be careful splitting up your fleet to do that, it can get weird, try to keep everyone together. This game can suddenly present what looks like a no win scenario, especially with those bounty hunter fleets. That's why the save system is nice, backtrack a couple of steps to solve a puzzle from a different angle, but also sometimes easily getting in too far for it to always bail you out. That's where a habit of manually saving can come in handy, just name it something useful in shorthand text haha

[Amazinite]

Bounty hunters are out looking for easy cash. If they die, then they won't exactly be able to claim a cut of the bounty on your head. Therefore, they'll run away if you put up a good fight.
(Destroy one of the ships in a Marauder fleet and the rest will disappear after your next landing. If you do have about 40 ships after you though, that's multiple fleets worth of ship you need to scare off.)

[DroopingPuppy]

Honestly, How it is possible? All bounty hunter fleets I have encountered were only have less than a dozen of ships or slightly more than that. I don't think that encounter such a larger force seems good but I want to see at least once, for bounty hunters are usually nothing more than a joke and is hardly adds meaningful portion to the pirates on each sectors.

[genusv2]

I think it's because I've sporadically jumped around with my jump drive in a way that the bounty fleet is always several systems behind, and done this for such a long time until the first time in a while I stuck around in a human system for long enough that all of them caught up.

[climbingeastofwinter]

The game is only really sorta balanced for a brief window of time once you upgrade out of your starting ship and into something that can survive jumping around standard space without instantly exploding when you run into heavy rocket / torpedo boats.

When you're rocking Wanderer/Korath/Hai tech and facing endless large fleets, you're just going to have to suck up losses.

If losing ships really bothers you, just save and reload frequently. The feature is there for exactly that reason imo.

[DroopingPuppy]

Auto save is also handy as well; Auto save on the dock saves my ships in the most times.

[Zarinthal]

Originally posted by climbingeastofwinter:

The game is only really sorta balanced for a brief window of time once you upgrade out of your starting ship and into something that can survive jumping around standard space without instantly exploding when you run into heavy rocket / torpedo boats.

When you're rocking Wanderer/Korath/Hai tech and facing endless large fleets, you're just going to have to suck up losses.

If losing ships really bothers you, just save and reload frequently. The feature is there for exactly that reason imo.

OH wow, is that what it's like for most people? Weird

[climbingeastofwinter]

Originally posted by Zarinthal:

OH wow, is that what it's like for most people? Weird

No. Most people don't play the game, and those that do and comment are few enough to remember.

This is a good game for what it is, good work is being done on it, and the framework is fairly flexible as long as you're working within the bounds of what I imagine were the design goals.

That said, there is a significant chance of instant death at most stages of the game. This isn't something conditional on skill or choice, it's a natural consequence of the game design.

[Zarinthal]

Originally posted by climbingeastofwinter:

Originally posted by Zarinthal:

OH wow, is that what it's like for most people? Weird

No. Most people don't play the game, and those that do and comment are few enough to remember.

This is a good game for what it is, good work is being done on it, and the framework is fairly flexible as long as you're working within the bounds of what I imagine were the design goals.

That said, there is a significant chance of instant death at most stages of the game. This isn't something conditional on skill or choice, it's a natural consequence of the game design.

I've done some permadeath runs, theyre pretty short lol. I'm not saying it's a perfect game either, but you made it sound like you have to go back and buy new ships a lot, but I farm cash and ships while working or listening to junk on youtube. Maybe it's time for another permadeath run. Too bad they won;t put my steam broadcast on the store page....

[genusv2]

Originally posted by Zarinthal:

Originally posted by climbingeastofwinter:

No. Most people don't play the game, and those that do and comment are few enough to remember.

This is a good game for what it is, good work is being done on it, and the framework is fairly flexible as long as you're working within the bounds of what I imagine were the design goals.

That said, there is a significant chance of instant death at most stages of the game. This isn't something conditional on skill or choice, it's a natural consequence of the game design.

I've done some permadeath runs, theyre pretty short lol. I'm not saying it's a perfect game either, but you made it sound like you have to go back and buy new ships a lot, but I farm cash and ships while working or listening to junk on youtube. Maybe it's time for another permadeath run. Too bad they won;t put my steam broadcast on the store page....

I was unintentionally doing permadeath runs until half a year when i realised there's a save load function

[climbingeastofwinter]

Ironman is possible*, oftentimes the game will just deal you a crap hand somewhere along the way though, and your ship will explode and that'll be that.

Getting back to the original topic.. if the 40 ships are all human ships, you might be able to take them out with something like an osprey or falcon with excellent engines, a few heavy rocket launchers (with many heavy rocket racks for spare ammo), and strafing / rocket spam techniques. Leviathan or Bactrian may work too, but superior mobility is a must generally speaking -- and if the enemy has large amounts of secondary weapons, you'll probably some AMS to deal with that. Pick them off one at a time and take your time recovering from each fight and eventually you'll be able to work your way through them.

The key, of course, is having the firepower to overpower the shields of any one ship and kill it, the mobility to separate them from their fleet one at a time, and the durability / recovery to survive the process.

Outside of charted space, there may be other ships you could find that would serve well as flagships, but Leviathan, Falcon, Bactrian are all fine. Mule can be pretty good as well, so can the Osprey.

If you don't want to use swarm tactics, try a mobility setup. Particle cannons in particular can be good, as they impart a decent amount of impulse on the target ships. You can literally push an enemy ship away from its allies with enough particle guns trained on it, and with strong enough engines stay out of reach of any pursuers while you take your target down.