Interesting. What is the general recommendation for pips and thruster micromanagement?
Usually I tend to put most pips to SYS and WEP, and then just go to 50% throttle to keep in the blue. Probably not the best strategy.
Pre-planning isn't the best strategy. Pips work best the more dynamically you are able to allocate them as needed. It's at once a simple and complex thing that can be continually improved upon.
If you're being shot or about to collide with something, you want pips in SYS. In a hybrid ship with a high draw shield gen, you also want to prevent sys from bottoming out while shield rebuild, without wasting pips in SYS by allocating them there while the cap is already near full while your shields are down.
If you need to move (which is all the time) you want pips in ENG; the anaconda in particular depends more on ENG pips than the blue zone for rotational performance. Keeping ENG topped up so you can boost when advantageous is also important.
The need for WEP pips is fairly obvious, but knowing when to prioritize offense over defense is not. Trigger discipline and careful management of weapon groups can significantly increase the economy of WEP.
It's fine to have a fallback setting (2-4-0 or 4-2-0 for example) that one uses in absence of specific needs, but a large part of being effective in combat is anticipating where they will be most useful and being able to move them around as required.
I recommend playing with an unengineered smaller ship, or an SLF...anything agile, but unforgiving, with a poor distributor that forces good pip management. The skills you develop will carry over to any ship. Indeed, I try to spend a bit of time in an unengineered Viper III whenever I haven't played in a while, so my rustiness isn't masked by some G5 Engineered monstrosity that allows me to indulge too heavily in whatever bad habits I'm prone to.
You should check out some of the videos from the more competitive PvP scene for examples of pip management. The ships and scenarios may or may not be representative, and most of these players are using basic pip macros, but the timing is something the better players all have down really well.
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