Whats your pirating method ? - help me stop murdering.

Pile_O_Gunz

Pile_O_Gunz
Hey all I've switched from trading to piracy and its alot more exciting, howevever I have sadly turned into a murderous rogue.

My initial approach was to fly in guns blazing and gun them down till the pinata, sorry trader drops the goods then jumps out. However i was too stingey to buy a cargo scanner so sometimes0 end up blowing em up thinking they are being stubborn. However even when they do drop the goods theres not much.
Theres too many fatalities with this technique and isn't very profitable.

My latest approach is to focus fire the cargo hatch it seems this technique has a greater yield however it takes alot longer to damage the hatch and when the loot drops the hauler doesn't try to escape instead insists on fighting I don't have enough time to scoop before security turns up so end up running away with nothing.

I read the pirate guide and it was interesting but too well-mannered for my liking: im not interested the carebears guide to piracy. If some scumlord interdicts me to get my bounty just as im trying to land at a station then I will blow his brains out with no remorse. However indiscriminate murder is bad for business as I get fines and cant rob them again the next day so I want to try avoid it.

What is your technique ? Do you use limpets or shoot the hatch ? Do you scoop whilst under fire from the trader ?
 

Rardain

Rardain
I'm not a Pirate, however, I have in the past raided NPC's using a combination of a Cargo Scanner (you really need to know what the target is carrying) and Hatch-breaker Limpets. Worked fine for me and the NPC ran without injury. You should also turn off 'report crimes against me' to reduce the chance of the Police turning up. That said, once your loot is floating around you should scoop it as quickly as possible.
 
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Commander Starcloak

Commander Starcloak
Hatch breaker limpets all the way. Powerplay is giving me my first taste of piracy through Undermining - you don't need a cargo scanner for that, you just have to target the right ships - but for actual piracy you'll need the cargo scanner.
 

Pile_O_Gunz

Pile_O_Gunz
NPCs at the moment. I got to get rid of the huge bount on me by changing my ways before I go online i think :p

Those Limpets sound like they might work Cypher if they can open the hatch then I can focus on damaging the trader enough to make him run giving me time to collect. Might try it.
 

CMDR Derrida

C
Pile_O_Gunz said:
NPCs at the moment. I got to get rid of the huge bount on me by changing my ways before I go online i think :p

Those Limpets sound like they might work Cypher if they can open the hatch then I can focus on damaging the trader enough to make him run giving me time to collect. Might try it.
Click to expand...

Paying your fines was so 1.2 - now everyone (but as Tolstoy might say, who wants to know about the ones who aren't) is wanted or hostile somewhere in the universe. I hated being the sort of two-faced character who paid his fines, now I just pray that whichever player kills me next has the common courtesy to warrant scan me first and collect all my hard earned fines and bounties :) :)
 

Conley

Conley
Personally i search the galaxy map to see where nice trade routes might be, go pull traders out of super cruise, scan them, if the got the goods i take down there shields, use limpets and scoop the loot. Sometimes i do this under fire if they can't harm me. If they can harm me, ill take down the weapons of the ship or something like that. It usually causes them to run away.

Im not a bounty hunter, or a soldier, so fighting to the death is rare. I run from the police like a thief. I have yet to pay off bounties or fines, but i don't focus on raising them high either. I find sneaking around to be a lot more fun, and when someone notices me, they notice my bounties, and it adds excitement.

This is my techniques for pve & pvp, although in pvp i have to quickly decide if im going to run or fight, flip flopping back and forth will get me killed. and with everything in ED be prepared to loose it all. i like seeing how long i can go, not how many risks i can take.
 

Pile_O_Gunz

Pile_O_Gunz
CMDR Derrida said:
Paying your fines was so 1.2 - now everyone (but as Tolstoy might say, who wants to know about the ones who aren't) is wanted or hostile somewhere in the universe. I hated being the sort of two-faced character who paid his fines, now I just pray that whichever player kills me next has the common courtesy to warrant scan me first and collect all my hard earned fines and bounties :) :)
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Haha I don't intend to pay them ! That would undo all work i'd done making a pathetic profit so far.
I will ignore them them untill they go away(whilst engaging in more piracy) and try reduce the rate in which i accrue more bounties against me :p
 
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Jordan Cobalt

Jordan Cobalt
You could also target the cargo hatch, just don't shoot it to 0%. It stops working after that.

Shooting the thrusters out could also help, it stops them from flailing around. Be aware when you do, the enemy will continue in the same direction and be unable to stop. It's best to do it when they are going slow and not turning.
 
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Drelthar

Drelthar
It would be nice to have a weapon that does no hull damage but can damage subsystems (maybe aside from the powerplant?)

Taking out more than one (even one on small ships) normally damages their hull so much they die before taking out the subsystems. I would love to be able to take out thrusters and weapons, but by the time I kill one of them, they normally have low hull.

There a trick to it beyond "get good"?
 
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KaizoMK

KaizoMK
Pile_O_Gunz said:
Hey all I've switched from trading to piracy and its alot more exciting, howevever I have sadly turned into a murderous rogue.

My initial approach was to fly in guns blazing and gun them down till the pinata, sorry trader drops the goods then jumps out. However i was too stingey to buy a cargo scanner so sometimes0 end up blowing em up thinking they are being stubborn. However even when they do drop the goods theres not much.
Theres too many fatalities with this technique and isn't very profitable.

My latest approach is to focus fire the cargo hatch it seems this technique has a greater yield however it takes alot longer to damage the hatch and when the loot drops the hauler doesn't try to escape instead insists on fighting I don't have enough time to scoop before security turns up so end up running away with nothing.

I read the pirate guide and it was interesting but too well-mannered for my liking: im not interested the carebears guide to piracy. If some scumlord interdicts me to get my bounty just as im trying to land at a station then I will blow his brains out with no remorse. However indiscriminate murder is bad for business as I get fines and cant rob them again the next day so I want to try avoid it.

What is your technique ? Do you use limpets or shoot the hatch ? Do you scoop whilst under fire from the trader ?
Click to expand...

As a bounty hunter, I moonlighted as a pirate so I could initiate without getting a bounty (shots fired don't better on a wanted ship.) I mostly just sold whatever was worth finding, and let the goods pour out before killing off the bounty. Occasionally I'd go after the fellow advertising his tech in space (I hate that guy.)

So same as you, except I don't mind killing them.
 

Mr_Blastman

Mr_Blastman
Pile_O_Gunz said:
NPCs at the moment. I got to get rid of the huge bount on me by changing my ways before I go online i think :p

Those Limpets sound like they might work Cypher if they can open the hatch then I can focus on damaging the trader enough to make him run giving me time to collect. Might try it.
Click to expand...

NPCs are a waste of time. Pirate humans. It is the only way to go.

Oh, and DO NOT go in guns blazing on a human. Get a cargo scanner. Real pirates scan cargo and talk first. Only start shooting after scan and they run. It is always better to get cargo than kill the trader. This is not "carebear" method. This is professional piracy, not murder.

Hope they fix the 20 ton cargo limit nerf, too.
 

OlFart

O
Assuming we are speaking of robbing NPCs here: piracy is sadly lacking for a number of reasons and it's been getting worse lately (again) so yea...

Cargo scanner is a must. No point attacking anything that isn't carrying something worth stealing. Getting to the cargo itself, there's 2 reliable ways. In a small nimble ship it's easy enough to slowly damage the hatch a few % at the time and watch the cargo spill, especially with gimballed lasers. In a clumsier ship, hatch breakers work well enough. As for scooping... well, you are basically stuck doing it on manual; robbing a ship that's moving inevitably spreads the cargo over a massive volume, so collector drones are virtually useless, unless you can fit a 7B (2.4km range) in there, and no... not many ships can pull that off. Just to make matters worse, NPCs often carry weird cargos like 12 tons of palladium, 30 tons of hydrogen fuel, and 50 tons of toxic waste - good luck getting drones to pick the important cargo out of that mix.

Police response times are very short and seem to get shorter the longer you stay in the area, and these days they tend to send a wing of four ships at you. In the past it used to be three, and you could kill one without getting more reinforcements. Now, engaging the cops will trigger more reinforcements just about immediately, so the situation is a bit ridiculous. Even in a heavily shielded Python it is game over when the cops show up. After one of the later patches, you will even be attacked by cops in anarchy systems, which makes basically no sense at all, and means that there's really nowhere you can pirate a trader in peace.

In the early game you can make a fair profit, assuming you are a decent pilot, but even then it's still not good enough to compete with trading and bounty hunting. In the later game it just gets sillier and sillier as profits from piracy don't scale well, or at all. A bigger ship barely helps at all as you still have to run away when the cops show, and there isn't really any equipment that helps with piracy that scales up with ship size.

Add on top of that the fact that every interdiction will damage your ship, and paying for all that damage really becomes a problem when your income is pretty sad in the first place.

The most effective way to steal cargo is unfortunately not to behave like a pirate, but instead to behave like a bounty-hunter (or more specifically, a smuggler-hunter) as cops will not jump in to assist a wanted ship if you attack it.

I don't think anyone working at FD has actually really tried to make a living as a pirate, or the situation wouldn't be as it is. There's a number of fixes that could be done very easily, and improve a pirate's quality of life:
- Make sure NPCs don't carry a mix of valuable and worthless cargo. Most players carry a single cargo, and why should NPCs act differently?
- Increase the police response time.
- Remove the police reinforcements or increase their response time as well.
- Increase the cargo canister decay timer.
- Make cargo scanners work in super cruise.
- Decrease the interdiction damage.
- Make one of the collector controllers a "pirate version": very high range and very high drone speed, but extremely short lifetime.

If you want a bit of fun, piracy can be an option. In a hauler, adder, cobra, etc, it's pretty entertaining, and since your ship is nimble and your cargo hold small you can get away with it before the cops mangle you. Just don't expect it to scale and work effectively in the later game; it doesn't and it won't.
 

John Smallberries

J
If you have the space, collector limpets will very quickly pick up drifting cargo...not just metals...of course if any of you pirate scum worked for a living, you would know that xD
 
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