Tips for Combat

Find someone you consider to be a good combat pilot and multicrew with them.
So that way you can see what they do.
Watch their pip management. When they use fa off etc
 
So lots of great advice on this thread, but you only need to follow zeke’s two laws of combat

1.) be fast
2.) stay away from the pointy end
;)
 
Vulture with PAs is a very fine ship indeed... due to the nature of PAs, you only fire every now and again, so with an eye on pips all the time, you can maximise your evasion (don't get hit), while lining up shots. be patient - takes a loooong time to get used to pas, timing your shots etc... With the biweave, go low draw - or your little distro will get overwhelmed often. put 2 chafs on. Make one PA dispersal, and put one on each trigger, so you can alternate fire when using few pips in wep, or fire both when you have plenty of capacity in wep. I use lightweight G5 Reactive armour (great resists) and a size 1 thermal HRP to balance resits. keeps things quick. with 3 pips in eng, you can permaboost and avoid most fire, and as the vulture is so damn nimble, you don't need to FAOff as much, but as others say, FAOff is entirely possible with HOTAS (and aiming fixed most certainlyextremely doable - I'm a better aim on horas that KB+M). use those up/down thrusters and strafe thrusters all the time - they are great on a vulture. and keep moving those pips around. With a big ship like an anaconda, you want to orbit it, while piling on the shots. for little eagles/sideys they will take you forever to kill initially with two PAs... so, get in close and shot timing is everything. You can one-shot them. take your time, get the shot, pop!.. If they get really annoying, in PvE, just stop - they will come to you in a near straight line - so you can shoot at 500m or so before they bank away. Don't do that vs a player ;)
 
So I've bought a Vulture and nearly completed a run-around of the Engineers.
Running low on some materials, so I've not quite finished yet.

https://s.orbis.zone/CfKNnaVg
The Fuel Scoop will get replaced with another HRP on site.

Any thoughts?

Hull is wasted on a vulture because it shouldn't be losing shields to begin with. I recommend a single 5B SCB and the rest can be anything else, but unless you want to hull tank, more than a single additional HRP as a backup in case your shields go down is a waste. As soon as the missles come flying, your modules are going to be shot out, and with no Module reinforcement packages nor point defense to take them out, that extra health is going to go to waste when it could have been used for another SCB or two. Also, your powerplant is unnecessarily overcharged. By turning off your fuel scoop and your cargo hatch, you have enough power with overcharged-1. Furthermore, engines are significantly more important than anything else for engineering when it comes to combat since AI have the advantage with near perfect flying and quite literally responding to your inputs because they do cheat. Get Dirty Drives 3 with Drag Drives ASAP. From a personal perspective, I find that shield boosters are wasted on a vulture because it's so evasive that the power draw from them isn't worth it, when you could have a single SCB with a heat sink.

Personally I don't recommend PAs or fixed for learning how to fight. Sometimes, depending on your hotas, it's really not ideal (my thrustmaster X has a nasty delay so I can't aim fixed well). You spend more time trying to line up a small target than focusing on evading and firing. Going with full fixed, especially ultra capacitor heavy PAs with a vulture is asking for a bad time if you have no basis for combat because it tests everything at once: evasion, weapon precision, pip management, and positioning against your enemy. Go gimballed weapons, go full evasive. Hone your evasive skills first before focusing on fixed. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and while the vulture is tanky enough that it has enough leeway to absorb blows while focusing fixed fire, it'll be much harder to fly precisely when you're trying to aim precisely. After a time, you might want to swap one of the gimballed weapons to fixed so you have a mixed loadout on your vulture.

My preferred loadout for a vulture would be a large fixed overcharged frag with a burst or beam laser to kill shields. You can kite from a distance to kill shields, but if you want to actually destroy their hull in a reasonable time, you're going to have to learn how to get point blank to your enemy from the side and out of their gun targets in order to wreck their hull.
 
Last edited:
Hull is wasted on a vulture because it shouldn't be losing shields to begin with. I recommend a single 5B SCB and the rest can be anything else, but unless you want to hull tank, more than a single additional HRP as a backup in case your shields go down is a waste. As soon as the missles come flying, your modules are going to be shot out, and with no Module reinforcement packages nor point defense to take them out, that extra health is going to go to waste when it could have been used for another SCB or two. Also, your powerplant is unnecessarily overcharged. By turning off your fuel scoop and your cargo hatch, you have enough power with overcharged-1. Furthermore, engines are significantly more important than anything else for engineering when it comes to combat since AI have the advantage with near perfect flying and quite literally responding to your inputs because they do cheat. Get Dirty Drives 3 with Drag Drives ASAP.

Personally I don't recommend PAs or fixed for learning how to fight. Sometimes, depending on your hotas, it's really not ideal (my thrustmaster X has a nasty delay so I can't aim fixed well). You spend more time trying to line up a small target than focusing on evading and firing. Going with full fixed, especially ultra capacitor heavy PAs with a vulture is asking for a bad time if you have no basis for combat because it tests everything at once: evasion, weapon precision, pip management, and positioning against your enemy. Go gimballed weapons, go full evasive. Hone your evasive skills first before focusing on fixed. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and while the vulture is tanky enough that it has enough leeway to absorb blows while focusing fixed fire, it'll be much harder to fly precisely when you're trying to aim precisely. After a time, you might want to swap one of the gimballed weapons to fixed so you have a mixed loadout on your vulture.

I've had heat issues with the Vulture previously, so I wanted to avoid SCBs.
I thought the point of BiWeaves was that they come back quickly, making SCBs less important?

I've got DD5 pinned, so Felicity is my last stop to get the experimental.
DDs will chew past 100% power when I apply it, no?
 
Last edited:
Biweaves do come back rather quickly, but I personally like an SCB on shield based ships as a back up in the event you bite off more than you can chew. It is a good mindset to keep SCBs as the emergency button rather than something you actively use to tank however. Given that the vulture is of a weaker hull (and considering it's often fighting larger ships with heavier armor piercing, nullifying it's decent hull hardness value rather quickly), I build mine with purely shields in general. Biweaves are excellent for longevity in a HAZRES or CZ however, where you have opportunities to disengage from a fight.
 
npcs come in variuos loadouts. check them before pulling the trigger
npcs from wing missions, for example, will chew hull faster than modules
just got away with 43% hull, but lowest modules were life support and cargo hatch - in 50`s, the rest 80-95%
vulture stats
kcEkYDl.jpg

edit.. and most of module damage came from my mistake not deploying a heatsink with scb
 
Last edited:
If you think learning how to dock, plotting a course and land is sufficient for flying in Open you must play a different game then. Unless you avoid any human encounters which of course is entirely possible in Open but has nothing to do with combat anymore.

Open is fine now with the new crime and punishment update. Just dont sign upto powerplay(as its PVP focused) and stay away from community goals in anarchy systems and open is fine.

Dont let the scare mongering keep you from enjoying all the delights open bring to combat and gameplay in general.
 
PvP outfittng is an entirely different thing - I'll pass.
If I ever get interested in that, I'll head to the San Tu PvP School.

You see this is entirely whats wrong with peoples perception of open. Just because you select open does not mean you have to fight cmdrs and never fight NPCs and must have a PVP build.

You can have a PVE build in open, almost everyone including the PVPers have a PVE build on 99% of the time.
You do not have to shoot CMDRs in open.
The San Tu gang is organised PVP and not the type of PVP you will find in the other 4 billions systems available to you in open.
 
Open is fine now with the new crime and punishment update. Just dont sign upto powerplay(as its PVP focused) and stay away from community goals in anarchy systems and open is fine.

Dont let the scare mongering keep you from enjoying all the delights open bring to combat and gameplay in general.

He's been given tips. The rest is going to require a lot of practice. I suggest doing it around res sites where big rocks come into play as well. CQC is also an option but for the particular ship build, he'd have to get accustomed to how it handles.

I don't think Open provides more of that than any other mode.
 
Last edited:
So I found a nice High Res with a station right next to it in LHS 317.
RNG gave me smaller nippy ships as targets on my first run out.

My accuracy sucks, but I came away with a small haul of bounties before my ammo ran out.
Nothing came close to bringing my shields down.

No heat issues which is my usual downfall with combat builds - so this is the ship for me to stick with.
Encouraging start - it's now just on me to fly better and pick my shots.
Note to self - use your boosts.

We'll see how I get on when RNG feeds me some bigger prey.
 
.
Of course if someone can't swim it's good advice throwing im into the ocean first. /i


Well, if you want to swim in the ocean, as a former life guard and long distance ocean swimmer, this is actually true.

Nothing scarier than a beginner adult who has only been in a pool!
They panic when the smallest wave comes.

I've seen a grown adult panic and almost drown in barely chest deep water, 15 ft from the shore.
That person inhaled enough water so he was coughing up bloody foam (Salt water draws out fluid/blood from the lungs, fresh does the opposite and dilutes the blood) all because he'd never been in the ocean before and panicked.

Kids swim pretty naturally on the other hand...
 
So I found a nice High Res with a station right next to it in LHS 317.
Encouraging start - it's now just on me to fly better and pick my shots.
.

Your using fixed weaps for this PVE build? You cant miss with gimbled which is what you'd have on a PVE build... maybe a fixed railgun with cascade but the rest you'd have gimbled.
 
PvP outfittng is an entirely different thing - I'll pass.
If I ever get interested in that, I'll head to the San Tu PvP School.


Nope.
Don't believe the people who only do one aspect!
That doesn't make sense does it?

You will be able to "get away with things" in pve that you can't in pvp, so in that regard it's different.
But a pvp ship works just fine in pve.
Sustained engagements in PVP are more difficult than in pve, same goes for single opponents.
You can build pvp ships for either.

A pvp ship will generally just walk all over npcs, so that might be the problem in the end.
But might as well learn how to do it right from the get go.
Unlearning bad habits takes longer than learning them.

Why learn how to fly and build in a weaker manner?

Look at what you wrote in yur OP:

I've got to 25% Master by largely picking when to get interdicted and facetanking inferior opposition.


I'd like some suggestions about what ships, builds, and tactics to use to get better.


Don't you want to step it up now?
That was the impression I got.
 
Consider that if my pvp build can put out enough dps to take down another pvp ship, you think a few Hazres npcs are going to fare better?

Just think in terms of total hit points and dps.
 
Back
Top Bottom