How to deal with a Heliarch Punisher?

[Warfoki]

So, for context, I picked up the pursuit drill mission in Coalition space, got it done after some annoyance, and I immediately got offered the combat drill follow-up mission. And I'm supposed to disable a gimped Heliarch Punisher (it doesn't have missiles). I outrange it, so I spent about 15 minutes kiting it, but nothing I throw at it does ANY damage, AT ALL.

I have a captured Palavret, mostly with it's standard weapons, since those are better than what I can buy. Namely:

1 Banisher Grav-Turret
4 Shunt-Strike Turret
1 Warder Anti-Missile
2 Firelight Missile Bank (I kept this in hopes of finding more ammo, but I probably should just sell it, the 10 missiles I have aren't gonna do much, and apperently this is yet enother weapon nobody sells)

Since I have only two jump drives, my only other ship is a Dreadnought, with a completely changed out gear, since I always remove missiles from AI controlled ships, as they just blow up valuable capture targets. Needless to say, nothing on that ship does any damage either (it has particle cannons and plasma turrets).

Like, I'm undergeared, clearly, but that's the main reason I'm in coalition space to begin with: to get access to the Enforcer Confrontation Gear, so that I can actually go to Hai sector and reliably take over Korath ships. I did take over this Palavret with nerve gas and a Dreadnought, but that was... dicey. I lucked out with a 0.8% success chance, after the remnant planetary defense force disabled it for for me, not exactly a repeatable scenario.

As is, I feel completelly stuck. I can't continue the human questline, because the given 6 ships get easily annihilated by the Pug, can't take over Korath ships to get a better fleet, because I don't have good enough hand-to-hand weapons for it, and now it seems I got stuck on the way of gettign better hand-to-hand weapons too. I'd love to buy better stuff, sitting pretty on 200 mil credits, but nobody's selling... So... what now?

[fgnt]

The Punisher in that mission is a Scrappy variant, meaning it has only Bombardment Turrets/Guns for weaponry (900 range on both versions). The total DPS should be somewhere around ~2500 for shield damage, and a bit more for hull damage.
It has a total shield regen of 552, and hull repair rate of 252.

However, the Punisher is also pretty slow, lacks any form of anti-missile defense, and is at fairly high heat.

My most recent win against it relied on its lack of AM. I used a Cruiser with 6 Typhoon Torpedo Launchers, and stocked on about 300 Typhoon torps. If you don't have Typhoons available, you can use regular Torpedoes, though might need a bit more of them.
The Cruiser had speed values of 597 max speed, 245 accel, and 85 turning. That was more than enough to comfortably outrun the Punisher.
I simply ran laps around it while continuously firing from out of its range, eventually it was whittled down.

[Warfoki]

Right, so it has more regen than I had for DPS, makes sense. Those Shunt-Strike Turrets have low DPS, but they bypass shields and have this corrosion effect that leaves damage over time. So usually I melt away the hull. But when the hull has more regen than the corrosion DoT the turrets apply, ofc I'm not getting anywhere. Guess I have to completelly switch my loadout to fit as many torpedoes as possible....

[Timerlane]

I haven't tried since the last update, but Flamethrowers are/were super-cheesy against the it, but you still have to overpower those shields. I successfully used a Dreadnought with Plasma Turrets and Flamethrowers, and while shutting the Punisher down wasn't too hard, that shield regen is pretty monstrous to try to beat with human-tech.

[71]

In my couple of times going up against the mission Punisher, I beat it not because of amazing DPS or range, but because I made it overheat using Korath heat weapons. It's seems really weak to overheating in my experience.

You can typically get Fire-Lance guns off of Korath fighters and Blaze-Pike turrets come on maybe a quarter of Palavrets (not the Remnant mission spawned ones though sadly). With enough heat damage the enemy ship just shuts down and there's no regen or weapons fire you need to contend with, so you're free just use it as a punching bag until it's properly disabled. You could also use Free World flamethrowers or plasmas if you want to stick to human tech, but I don't have much experience with those.

If you wanted to cheese it, you could also bring in multiple ships from human space (or elsewhere) by uninstalling the 2nd ship's jump drive in Coalition space and bringing it back to human space to be installed on additional ships. Once a ship is in Coalition space, it really only needs a hyperdrive.

You can also buy a bunch of cheap coalition ships outfitted with basic human weapons that overwhelms the one Punisher and protects the ships you actually care about. The Punisher can really only target a single ship at a time.

[Warfoki]

Well, after multiple tries, I think I'll give up on this. Flamethrowers are next to impossible to keep on target without being blown up, because of their very short range. The Korath ship I have has only 2 secondary slots, and two launchers are not enough. Cruisers... impossible to obtain. License is unbuyable, and I already progressed past the civil war conflict, so they are no longer hostile. Well, this means I'm offcially permastuck. Can't beat the Pug with the 6 escorts I have, don't have the hand-to-hand weapons to capture more jump drives, and can't get the better hand-to-hand weapons because I can't progress in the coalition enough. Yay.

[fgnt]

You could just grind some jobs to obtain more credits for more warships. If you want to capture ships quick just go to the Kraz system and pick up bounty jobs. Because of the location the bounty targets are easy to find, as they're always within 1-3 jumps from the source system.

[Lou Gascoun]

You could try to go to Mirak or Atik (reachable with hyperdrive) northeast of syndicate space, Korath ships with jump drives are frequent there and the pirates help you fight, if you can dodge them.
You could also try Kor Ak Mari, east of Sheratan, it's jump drive only and uninhabited. With a little luck you can disable one of the palavrets that frequently spawn there.
Last thing, you don't need to do the punisher mission to be able to buy a Kimek Spire, which is a very good ship to capture even palavrets, with the right hand to hand.

[Warfoki]

I uninstalled the game since then. I took off the jump drive from my second ship, to do a switcheroo with hyperdrives, and bring my whole old fleet over, hoping that the combined firepower will be enough. I got distracted with some sidequests in the meanwhile, and at some point, I lost the second drive. Probably double clicked "sell all" at a trader, and sold all outfits too, not just normal trade stuff. Either way, the last manual save that still had the extra jump drive was some 10 hours earlier. This completely killed my mood to play the game. I'll probably try out Starsector or reinstall Star Valor or something for now, and start over like a year or two down the line. And that time, minmaxing all the exploits I can find on wikis and forums. ♥♥♥♥ going in blind, if this is how that goes.

[Death Approaches]

your save game is a text file, we won't shame you for tweaking a loadout because it started to feel so grind-y you got frustrated and quit playing altogether. Just use a light touch; since you can make a fleet that can wipe all life from every sector doesn't mean you should - you'll have the opposite experience, and quit from boredom. It's supposed to be challenging and fun, not anger-inducing and more effort to play a computer game than your day job.

[log233when]

Originally posted by Timerlane:

I haven't tried since the last update, but Flamethrowers are/were super-cheesy against the it, but you still have to overpower those shields. I successfully used a Dreadnought with Plasma Turrets and Flamethrowers, and while shutting the Punisher down wasn't too hard, that shield regen is pretty monstrous to try to beat with human-tech.

you don't even need to overpower the shield. The effectiveness of heat damage is only halved when the target's shield is fully up compared to fully down (50% sheld means 75% heat damage). I have successively disabled and captured a Pug Arfecta using 6 Shield Beetles each armed with 6 flamethrowers in addition to a few "normal" ships to do the shield/hull damage.

Originally posted by Warfoki:

So, for context, I picked up the pursuit drill mission in Coalition space, got it done after some annoyance, and I immediately got offered the combat drill follow-up mission. And I'm supposed to disable a gimped Heliarch Punisher (it doesn't have missiles). I outrange it, so I spent about 15 minutes kiting it, but nothing I throw at it does ANY damage, AT ALL.

I have a captured Palavret, mostly with it's standard weapons, since those are better than what I can buy. Namely:

1 Banisher Grav-Turret
4 Shunt-Strike T I'd love to buy better stuff, sitting pretty on 200 mil credits, but nobody's selling... So... what now?

Buy a bunch of shield beetles in hai space or albatrosses in remnant space

[Timerlane]

Originally posted by log233when:

Originally posted by Timerlane:

I haven't tried since the last update, but Flamethrowers are/were super-cheesy against the it, but you still have to overpower those shields. I successfully used a Dreadnought with Plasma Turrets and Flamethrowers, and while shutting the Punisher down wasn't too hard, that shield regen is pretty monstrous to try to beat with human-tech.

you don't even need to overpower the shield. The effectiveness of heat damage is only halved when the target's shield is fully up compared to fully down (50% sheld means 75% heat damage). I have successively disabled and captured a Pug Arfecta using 6 Shield Beetles each armed with 6 flamethrowers in addition to a few "normal" ships to do the shield/hull damage.

To be fair, I wanted to treat it as a proper 1v1 'duel', as the storyline seemingly set it up to be. And in retrospect, I suppose it's really more the boosted hull regen modules vs the low hull-damage Plasma Turrets that really made it feel like actually-'winning' took forever.