Tips and Tricks: How to be Dangerous.

[Wyld Karde]

Given that the documentation for the game is at best godawful and in some places already outdated, I figured it might be a good idea to have a thread where we can each share our wisdom of the game. Anything from basic 'how to' stuff to 'that one weird trick system security hates', whatever you've picked up and think your fellow commanders might find useful, slap it here.

So here's a few odds and ends from me to you in no particular order:

By far and away the best way to make money in terms of cr/hour is through trade. If you have a smaller cargo hold (sub-100 ton), trade rares over long distance hauls. The picture attached to this post is my personal preferred trade run. If your hold is over 100 tons you'll probably do better hauling commodities provided you can match high supply to high demand. Thrudd's Trading Tool is very useful for finding good commodity trades, just bear in mind that as it's manually updated by players there's always going to be stuff missing. Don't be afraid to make your own notes on where buys and sells what. Routes are also prone to player manipulation, if multiple players are bulk buying gold from a particular refinery then the supply will go down, the price will go up and your profit margin will narrow. Always be prepared to go find a new route if your current one starts to dry up.

Bounty hunting; if you're looking to get paid to shoot npcs then skip Unidentified Signal Sources. Most of the random encounters won't have pirates and you'll spend a lot of time looking for one that does. Hit up the local nav beacon and resource extraction sites. Plenty of folks with a nice juicy wanted status that you can shoot for fun and profit. If you're flying in a wing, the new Strong Signal Sources are apparently more exciting than the Unidentified type, with wings of pirates, ambushes and traps all waiting to challenge your team. Oh yes, and a Kill Warrant Scanner will quickly pay for itself provided you remember to use it.

Ship upgrades; when selling one ship to get another, you only get about 90% of the component value. Sell everything you can and downgrade everything you can't to the cheapest available to get most of your money back, as selling components in the outfitting screen returns 100% of the value.

There's a few to get us started. Let's see what the rest of you have.

[Raveen]

Re the Kill Warrant Scanner

If you have a mix of thermic and and kinetic weapons for shields and hulls respectively then set up two sets of fire groups.

FG 1 = Thermic Weapons and KWS

FG 2 = Thermic and Kinetic Weapons (on different fire buttons of course)

With this system it quickly becomes second nature to scan whilst stripping shields before the kill. You still have to be wary of Sidewinders and Eagles who tend to pop at the slightest provocation.

[id3nt1ty]

Cool, I hadn't thought about scanning AND shooting. Normally I scan first just to see if it's worth it.

[Wyld Karde]

Sometimes you have to scan first. In my experience, Eagles and Sidewinders tend to explode before the scan is complete. >:D

[Adept]

Personally I have my K-scanner and gimabled multicannon in the same fire group. Not on the same trigger though. I definitely want to be able to scan without shooting. The multicannon is there to secure the kill if I'm late to the situation (say system security is ganging up on a criminal).

[Andon]

With the update and increase to bounty prices, you can possibly make a decent bit just by shooting things.

As for exploration, there is this image but it hasn't been updated for the latest price increases

[Andon]

Just did a rare trade run with Wyld - Lucian onionhead from Tanmark to Lave+Co. A little over half a million in profit from the Tanmark Tea and Onionhead at Lave, giving us each 33.8k trade vouchers. Free money! Then the Wings decided to not work (Wouldn't synch us up), and we made our own ways back. Made about 400k profit from the Lave+Co items. I made sure to grab some more Onionhead before I logged off. Currently you can get 35(!) of it.

[Raveen]

Combat: Target the power plant. Particularly on big ships you can kill the ship with 30-40 hull left. Anacondas are particularly juicy in this respect.

[Andon]

Cobras, Vipers and the like don't pop amy easier with it. Asps are a little easier. Pythons and Anacondas are great with it.

It works even better with gimballed weapons. I am running a Vulture with two Class 2 Gimballed Beam Lasers (which shoot nearly forever!) and they're like scalpel beams. Even being undersized for the mounts, I am having no problems killing big npcs.

[Wyld Karde]

Travelling: If you've got a long haul ahead of you, say a warzone 200 ly from your location, and you're in something with a short jump range like the Viper or Vulture, strip your ship down and sell it, then buy a cheap Hauler and fit an A rated FSD. You'll get to your destination very quickly and with minimal costs as the Hauler's cheap enough that the 10% loss on selling the ship back at the other end is peanuts. Then buy a new combat craft of your choice at the other end. Remember, high population, wealthy stations of industrial and high-tech economies are best for finding high end ships and components.

[Andon]

If you are using shield boosters and your shields go down, turn off the boosters and they'll come back online quicker.

[Adept]

If you are using shield boosters and your shields go down, turn off the boosters and they'll come back online quicker.

Huh... how come?

[Andon]

well, to put it in a different perspective: While they are on, your shields recharge slower than normal.

[Adept]

Where did you learn this? Is there a source you could link to, or is this your own observation? How much slower?

[Andon]

Wiki page says similar: http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Shield_Booster User comments also state similar.

I saw it at some official Elite page, but I can't find it right now.

I haven't done tests on time taken to recharge shields, but I feel like it's in line with the amount of boost they apply. So, for an A-grade one, it'd be 20% longer.

And you'll be happy to know this isn't an exploit for magic shields. When your shields recharge and you turn it back on, you can see the shield ring levels drop. So you don't go from 50% shields with this off to 50% shields with this on - You'd go from 5/10 shields with it off, to 5/12 with it on (Numbers just pulled out of my ass)