What kind of build is needed for an HCZ? I completed a MCZ today and very happy about it. My mamba's shields didn't even go down and the spec ops were amazingly tough with phasing weapons. I'm just sad I didn't get a nice payout. Come on, not even half a million credits for an MCZ?
I went in with my 'wing assassination' PVE beam conda which is about 3K of bi-weaves and 3K of HRPs. Everything is an efficient beam apart from a C4 corrosive multicannon and small FC rail to stop Cutters that shield-bank. The Captain was an interesting new thing for me and I'm not convinced it would be easy without an FC rail because that guy seemed to have way too many SCBs to not be cheating and I almost didn't snipe the powerplant in time once I'd dropped the shields.
Elite these days is all about mining until your eyes bleed and obscenely expensive toys for the top 4% who can afford a fleet carrier.
The rest of us will have to wait until Spacelegs gets released. Probably about another year, then we'll have to pay for it.
Gotta admit, payouts for combat in this game are embarassing. It's the only activity in game with any risk whatsoever and the risk-reward ratio is so f***ed up it's like the devs are intentionally trying to stop people doing any combat - despite the fact that the only thing that really costs money is building a weapons platform.
VO mining is still 50-100M/hour.
Trititum trading is still 200M/hour.
Meanwhile, ALD bounty-hunting in a pristine-reserved HAZREZ in a system that's ALD-infulenced with ALD at galactic rank 3 or better and my ALD rank at 2 or better and using a KWS on every target can net me maybe 50M/hour at best. The amount of conditions in that last sentence required to get just 50M/hour is ridiculous, and that's a
good hour where plenty of high-value wanted ships are spawning, which is NOT the norm.
My other go-to used to be to pick up about 5 wing assassination missions from a system that I've maxed reputation with and combined with elite combat rank for the mission reward multiplier. A good session of say 5 Wing assassinations and a few drop-in pirate assassinations used to be something I could do in an hour (that was the time window for the assassinations anyway) and 50M for all that work required some luck with the mission boards, so again - NOT the norm.
When you can load up a T-9 with Tritium and sell it for 30M profit a single 3-minute hop away, that still makes an hour of exceptionally lucky, best-case, combat with fully-maxed out ranks and reputations a complete joke because it can't even compare to 10 minutes of 'trading' which - thanks to docking computers and supercruise assist can now be done almost non-interactively making it an easy
billion whilst watching an afternoon of netflix.
As far as I'm concerned Elite is as good as dead at the moment, and as it's taken them two years to produce a whizz bang, all bells and whistles, pile of hype that turned out to be a space port with a FSD for their favoured friends, then I've little faith in the future.
I could buy two fleet carriers with my current assets, but I'm simply not interested, so no fleet carriers for me. I fail to see the point in them and other than a way to throw away several billion (with the added upkeep) they just seem like a total failure of an idea.
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