Any suggestions for "Kill Civilians" / "Massacre Civilians" missions?

Flying Scorpion

Flying Scorpion
Getting back to the game and was thinking about doing these missions again. Last time I did these, I recall that they were annoying because you'd have to travel very far from one signal source to the next. If you had a mission to kill 30 civilians, you'd kill maybe 3 or 4 per signal source, then spend quite some time travelling to the next one.

Searching these forums, I saw that Gunner Bill used a mamba and was able to regularly take out 8 or 9 civilians per signal source. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...assacre-spec-ops-missions.594844/post-9658857

I also saw some people would bypass the lengthy travel time between signals by escaping to desktop, and loading back in again to re-spawn the most recent signal directly behind your ship, which is cheesy and immersion breaking, so I'm not super into that idea.

I also saw that some people would just hang out at nav beacons or other areas and kill mission targets there, although if my memory serves me correctly, I tried doing that too and I found myself waiting for long periods of time to reach 30 kills.

edit I just saw an old post on this forum from 8 years ago about how someone went to the target factions planetary settlement and they found many targets to complete their mission there. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/killing-civilians-for-fun-and-profit.317516/

Does anyone have any experience with these missions with any suggestions on running them? Should I just avoid them?
 
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xElijah

xElijah
well you answered your question pretty good yourself :D take mission, find system/settlement/nav beacon/harvest zone etc where those civs present and do your wetwork. Sometimes finding proper spot is fast and easy, sometimes 30-60 minutes needed, sometimes it's faster to follow signals...
 

Riverside

Riverside
I rarely do these missions unless I'm desperate for influence and the kill count is small, because they take quite a while. I go to the mission spawned USSs, just seems the least bad approach in the systems near me.

I do loads of kill pirate ones in my regulat CZ/Haz RES Corvette, but the kill civilian ones require a different approach; they need a fast ship with long range high dps (firepower) & shielding is not as important (apart from avoiding mines) & the Vette just isn't fast enough. My mission runner Python is barely fast enough and my usual frags don't do much damage.

I think the missions are probably intended to be done in an FDL with fixed weapons.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Flying Scorpion said:
Getting back to the game and was thinking about doing these missions again. Last time I did these, I recall that they were annoying because you'd have to travel very far from one signal source to the next. If you had a mission to kill 30 civilians, you'd kill maybe 3 or 4 per signal source, then spend quite some time travelling to the next one.

Searching these forums, I saw that Gunner Bill used a mamba and was able to regularly take out 8 or 9 civilians per signal source. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...assacre-spec-ops-missions.594844/post-9658857

I also saw some people would bypass the lengthy travel time between signals by escaping to desktop, and loading back in again to re-spawn the most recent signal directly behind your ship, which is cheesy and immersion breaking, so I'm not super into that idea.

I also saw that some people would just hang out at nav beacons or other areas and kill mission targets there, although if my memory serves me correctly, I tried doing that too and I found myself waiting for long periods of time to reach 30 kills.

edit I just saw an old post on this forum from 8 years ago about how someone went to the target factions planetary settlement and they found many targets to complete their mission there. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/killing-civilians-for-fun-and-profit.317516/

Does anyone have any experience with these missions with any suggestions on running them? Should I just avoid them?
Click to expand...
Yeah, just don't do them. They look worth it with their 50m pricetag, but ever since they just drop mines and run, it's too unworkable.

On distances between USS, you need to be careful what system you run the missions in, as USS spawn distances are entirely dependent on the size of the system.

If, from jump in, the furthest thing from the main star is 1,000ls away (the radius of the system from the star), the max distance you'll need to travel is up to 3,000ls or thereabouts (the diameter being 2000ls, plus some wriggle room for each)

If it's a binary system with 100k ls between jump in and furthest object, you'll be looking at over 200k ls between USS. The kicker being, the chance of getting something just 5,000ls or less is very, very low in a system that big.

The system i do pirate stacking in generates up to 10k ls, but that's usually quite fine as they'll usually respawn away from planets. If it drops you close to a gas giant though.... gg....
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
xKristina said:
well you answered your question pretty good yourself :D take mission, find system/settlement/nav beacon/harvest zone etc where those civs present and do your wetwork. Sometimes finding proper spot is fast and easy, sometimes 30-60 minutes needed, sometimes it's faster to follow signals...
Click to expand...
The challenge is that's way harder than you'd expect. Not many ships have the "civilian" template... so traders, security, bounty hunters, pirates, smugglers, miners, power security, military, search and rescue, none of these will count as civilians.

Additionally, they need to spawn for the correct faction. Combined with needing the right template, this means it's almost a 1 in 60 chance of getting the right ship. This makes going to non-uss locations completely unworkable... the only reason why you can do that for pirate stacking is that pirates are by contrast a little more common than most templates... and pirates always belong to the local anarchy faction (noting, I've nfi what happens if there's two anarchies in system), so that's a major randomiser that doesn't impact speed.

The USS are pretty much the only assured way to get these mission kills.
 

Flying Scorpion

Flying Scorpion
I figured I'd post a little update, I tried using a couple Mamba builds, similar to what Gunner Bill posted. It could be a skill issue but I found the Mamba to perform poorly compared to the FDL for these missions. While the Mamba has superior top speed in a straight line, and in theory that works well when chasing civilians who are also flying away in a straight line, not all civilians do that. Some of them switch directions and juke the Mamba.

The FDL build I used is just raw damage multicannons, with 2 of them engineered to do thermal damage. I'm going to try swapping 1 multicannon for a fragmentation cannon with drag drives to make it easier to just hold the target down and take them out; which will also keep the distance between targets shorter between engagements. One of the main issues with these missions is you'll chase one civilian down, blow it up, and then you have to turn around and burn for awhile to catch up to another civilian. Each second counts tremendously in these missions, for if you take too long, all of the civilians will warp out and you will lose out on potential progress for the mission.

I also tried hanging around the nav beacon. To my surprise, I was lucky and there were many mission targets there. For that strategy, I would probably just bring a federal corvette, because the civilian targets on the nav beacon don't go straight for a getaway, and they pop very fast.

I might try hanging around a planetary installation next time, and maybe I'll post an update here on how it goes.
 
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