17 Draconis was THE place for Fed ranking pre-nerf.
Load up on Massacre missions for the Federation faction pretty much permanently at war there and take home a new Corvette by the weekend.
Those were the days....
Now, we must trudge on, .5% at a time or .25% at a time, over the course of a year, just they way they want it. Because it's what they think "progression" is.
Yeah. Pretty much. I estimated that a mission takes about 10-30 minutes, and let's say that you don't stack (or more accurately, you can't much anymore), and it takes on average 3 missions for 1% rank upgrade, and in my case I'm 10 ranks away to get to Admiral, That's 10*100*3 missions. = 3000 missions, That's between 30,000 minutes and 90,000 minutes, and then you have the Navy mission between each rank which sometimes can take a day or two to even find!. So let's say 2 hours per Navy mission (20 hours) + (average) 60,000 minutes for missions = 1020 hours!
If you play 1 hour a day, that's 3 years. (please check my math that I didn't do something wrong)
So the only way is to stack a lot, and try to find quick missions, like station-planet in the same system and such. So if I can stack 3 missions, do each mission in 10 minutes, and play 3 hours a day, then I can do it in 60 days (no life, no job, no family, a lot of luck, and minimal interdictions).
But I haven't accounted for the wait time before the mission board is repopulated with the proper missions or even if they show up because of the system being in war or famine and such.
Even with the Quince exploit, it took me a good 3 weeks of lot of play to get to Duke. I don't think these "exploits" are really exploits at all, but fairly reasonable. Few people play more than a couple of weeks on a game. Some people play a game like this for months and even years, with some periods of hiatus, but with the new nerfs, I believe fewer beginners will find it enjoyable or entertaining to spend the next coming years of full time game playing to just get a bigger ship.
In the end, it's more cost/risk efficient to use the Asp X or Python for most things anyway.
So I'm giving up on ever getting a Corvette...
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I think rank-locking those ships as a way to induce scarcity wasn't a great idea to begin with. A cutter or corvette is a starship the size of a city block, in real life it would have a crew of a couple dozen people minimum. Those ships should have been how FDev introduced multicrew, in fact it should not be possible to fly one of them without a few friends on board. That would have been a realistic way to induce scarcity, and a much better incentive than adding extra pips to your power distro.
Good points.
And perhaps increase the ranking speed while playing in multicrew. In other words, tie the big ship to multicrew missions and ranking somehow.
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Yep, grind mechanics will be the death of this game. If FDev wants to slow down progression for whatever reason, they're going to have to figure out a way to do it in a way that can't be sped up with grinding, because if that's an option people are going to do it. The only time I'd advise grinding is if you're almost at the point where you'd have gotten something playing normally, might as well do a sprint and get it today rather than tomorrow. But we've all read about people grinding for a week straight to get something, and then being bitter because what they got wasn't worth all the work they put into it. That is definitely doing it wrong.
Very true.
I finally got the Cutter. I love it. So beautiful. Equipped for battle and even engineered a bit... but, right now I'm in my Asp X doing some other missions in some far off system because it's more interesting.
But the Cutter will be useful this summer when my older boys come back from college and we'll do some damage in multi-crew!
