Help with selecting an escort ship

I suppose it depends on how you prefer to protect. You could go for a large signature ship to scare off attackers or, you could use a small signature ship and use the ship your protecting as bait. Personally, I’m a preventative is better than a cure person. In my experience, if your detected last, your attacked last. That means it will turn into a race to kill the attacking ship before they kill your “not built for combat” buddy who’s trying to get from A to B. Is it worth the risk?

Yeah, I’m looking at it more like the u-boats and merchant convoys of WW2…

If the u-boat (pirate etc) sees a lone ship (cargo ship etc and no escort because said escort is stealthed as far as SC equivalents go) the attack is pretty much guaranteed.

if a u-boat were to see a corvette in the merchant convoy, the prospect of victory becomes uncertain and the options look closer to…
-stay hidden and avoid the danger.
-attack the corvette first and hope for the best.
-try and sink one of the merchant ships in a single shot and chicken out.

As a merchant ship I like the 33% chance of getting shot at much more than 100% if I were to have no visible escort.

I totally see your point that sneaky flying may allow you to kill off attackers, but at what cost. Your charge will be getting riddled with bullets while you are sneaking around.

Looking back at my days of Archeage and naval merchant runs there were 4 tactics you could rely on:
-plan your run on a time of day when no one else around. This maybe hard with SC on release as they say we will be all on a single shard.

-be very sneaky/stealthy if you are undergunned. To me, using stealthy escort fighters doesn’t mesh with this strategy unless the cargo ship is also stealthy. Once a superior force finds you, it’s all over. In SC I think we may be able to employ this, but your own scanning range would be the most important bit. See them before they see you and skirt around them. stealthy escort fighters would be a plus, but the cargo ship should also be using stealth components.

-Be very fast. In Archeage it was possible for merchant ships to be quite fast and they could outrun pirates. Maybe we will see a super fast millenium falcon cargo ship but I’m not holding my breath as that smells like borderline broken gameplay for SC. Also note if this becomes a thing, said millenium Falcon won’t be needing an escort since all they’d be doing is eating dust.

-My dick is bigger than your dick tactic. Plain and simple intimidation. If the bad guys think the risk is too great, they won’t touch you. This can be a game of poker sometimes but considering how organized ADI plans to become, I imagine the intimidating presence will be a regular tactic for trade runs. Best to avoid combat when doing them as repairs and lost ships/cargo cut into profit.

Both on ArcheAge and a suuuuuper old game called Silk Road Online (among many others), I always followed the “Stealth” and “Speed” tactics as you laid out there. But that’s probably the the most fundamental way of laying out the basic and well tried/best tested methods of doing trade and security runs from each side of the spectrum, passive to aggressive.

The great thing about SC is there are a lot of possibilities and opportunities.

By default, after QT I always AFB full speed and cut off my engines and lights. Then I just cruise into ATM.

In one scenario, I had to evade missiles right after a QT jump. QT cooldown was still up, so I just ran around until I could jump again. I picked a random point around the planet, jumped and took the long route :slight_smile:

There are a lot of scenarios to plan for. I definitely see a good opportunity to create guidelines to increase the chance of a successful cargo run.