Farming for outfits

[thejasper]

I currently have a fleet of 80 Behemoths and 20 Kestrels (and 1 Bactrian as flag), All are equipped with Electron weapons and the Behemoths have 2 chameleon anti missiles. This works well for farming outfits. While upgrading the Kestrels to Shield Beetles seems viable, Deep Rivers seem useless. With a fleet this size any non beam weapon will destroy any enemy ship. Deep Rivers also have horrible engines and will get spread all over the map if explosions occur.

While it is possible to increase the size of my fleet, the game already slows down to such an extent with 101 ships I doubt this is a good idea. I'm already playing with caps on constantly. Farming without cargo ships is to tedious to contemplate.

Regular Korath are a cake like this. The other Korath factions are more difficult and ships die.

I've only started the Wanderer storyline, so no sunbeam turrets.

Ships without turrets are bad ships imho. But the latter ships have less and less turret space available. Also, the Bactrian remains the only ship with a viable crew complement to act as flag. This feels like a desing flaw to me. You can call it game balance, but since numbers trump anything thie balance is already lost. I could commit to a smaller fleet size, but why should I limit myself?

Other than Shield Beetles the Humans seem to have the best ships the game has to offer, if you don't want to destroy ships. For Cargo, onlye the Deep River can top the Behemoth. All other cargo vessels are laughably undersized. And having a small group of warships is just an optimization to reduce the possibilty of ship loss.

What are your thoughts on the best farming fleet?

[DC Zhor]

Originally posted by thejasper:

Deep Rivers seem useless.

I take exception to that.

No ship has a cargo hold larger than a Deep River, and by the endgame, if you really want cash, capturing is no longer enough from a time efficiency perspective, trading is.

Truth is, you don't need a farming fleet. You only need a cloaking device and a express ticket to Mesuket. The automata will do the rest.

[climbingeastofwinter]

A couple dozen Albatross with a mix of inhibitor cannons and sunbeams, imo. Disable and board the arfecta, and then you're done with farming right then and there. You really only need farming fleets for odd builds, once you're already at the point where you could beat any challenge the game has to offer, and want to do something like a human merchant fleet with korath / coalition teched up human ship escorts, or something.

[thejasper]

Originally posted by Erendelil Bakun:

Originally posted by thejasper:

Deep Rivers seem useless.

I take exception to that.

No ship has a cargo hold larger than a Deep River, and by the endgame, if you really want cash, capturing is no longer enough from a time efficiency perspective, trading is.

Truth is, you don't need a farming fleet. You only need a cloaking device and a express ticket to Mesuket. The automata will do the rest.

From a cash perspective, trading is best. But You can't get all outfits through trading. From a space/cash perspective I think the Hauler series are the best. And if you include fire power in that definitely. Big ships only have the advantage that they slow your computer down less and are less vulnerable. But If you could handle infinite ships, I wouldn't even buy Behemoths.

But perhaps by this point I am overthinking the game.

[DC Zhor]

I am not convinced that you can keep the whole merchant fleet alive - in human space that is - with how the pirates are supposed to spawn, if they are all human ships. Those are too frail. The Coalition ships have some interesting stats, particularly the Arach merchants, the Hai have too litle space, the Korath don't really have merchant ships, and the Remnant... apart from some ships in the Discord, only have heavy and light warships... and that surfing board. So to me the answer lies in a single ship.
Also if you don't like that ship because of its engine capacity... you can fit a full Lunar class coupled with a single Asteroid class steering and have reasonable speed (if empty). But the Behemoth is not much better and if your freighters are fighting with anything other than missiles, they are doing it wrong.

I love fast ships too - that is why I made my own engines for the game. But those are tier 3, so I don't equip them until much later in the game.

EDIT: Just for reference - I have 20k space available with my Deep River merchant fleet. And I can bring them to hostile space without worry that they'll die.

[climbingeastofwinter]

In the base game, I feel like there isn't much of a reason to build a merchant fleet, tbh. You can get most of the money you need simply from taking jobs, or capturing and selling ships. Anything after the korath raider farm really seems like overkill, since you pretty much have access to whatever you could possibly need at that point.

[DC Zhor]

Originally posted by climbingeastofwinter:

In the base game, I feel like there isn't much of a reason to build a merchant fleet, tbh. You can get most of the money you need simply from taking jobs, or capturing and selling ships. Anything after the korath raider farm really seems like overkill, since you pretty much have access to whatever you could possibly need at that point.

That depends. To get my Wanderer fleet I need almost a billion credits. Mainly because the Wanderers themselves have good outfits already, but almost all are quite expensive. And yeah, by the time you finish the two campaign modes for the FW, and do the other side campaigns, there isn't a whole lot left to do. But this game was made to be customizable, so playing it base constantly makes no sense in my mind. Unless you want to play and move on to another game.