The complete guide to bounty hunting - Star Citizen 3.21

if you like 3D spaceship combat and making imaginary money then bounty hunting is the Star Citizen career for you this has consistently been one of the most profitable careers in the game for a while now and has remained that way while other things have occasionally spiked higher before getting nerfed and ironically going into space combat with your life on the line is actually one of the least risky ways to make money in the game since you don't need to put any gear or cargo on the line we'll go over how bounty hunting Works how to pick a load out for your ship and a few basic strategies for increasing your efficiency and pay let's get into it there are two main types of bounty hunting PVE and PVP first we'll talk about PVE bounties since that's what pays well there are six difficulty levels of PVE bounties ranging from very lowrisk Target bounties or vrts to extreme risk targets or erts the target for each difficulty level comes from a specific pool of ships but the wingman in the mission can come from that pool or an easier one you only need to kill the main target to get credit and get paid so you can leave the wingman alone if you want there's some examples of what the targets are at the different levels very high-risk targets or vrts are often The Sweet Spot for income versus time and risk for most ships you unlock bounties by completing a certification Mission which costs the fee to accept these searchs can appear anywhere in the entire system so if you don't want to travel to them you can abandon the mission and cycle through them until you get one that's close to you it doesn't lower your reputation at all but you lose the fee that you paid each time you abandon the mission as you do more bounties you get more reputation with the Bounty Hunter Guild faction every tier of reputation unlocks a new certification Mission and completing that mission unlocks the new tier of bounties for you at all planets in the star system you just need to complete an easy Bounty Hunter evaluation Mission with each specific security faction and then you'll be offered Bounties in that space up to the level of the bounty hunters Guild certification you've completed doing harder bounties increases your reputation faster so it's best to tackle the hardest bounties you can efficiently kill you can also share harder missions with people to split the reputation with them to power level people who are on Lower tiers of missions completing bounties offered by a security faction increases your reputation with that faction which gives you bonus payouts for those missions so if you do Bounties in Crusader space offered by Crusader security you raise your reputation with Crusader security once you get a couple tiers up you get 5% bonus payouts increasing by 5% per tier up to a maximum of 20% extra so this encourages you to stay in a single planetary system for bounty hunting unless you don't mind losing out on bonus payments earned through leveling up the reputation or you don't mind leveling up the reputation somewhere else as well there's another type of space combat Bounty offered in the Bounty Hunter Tab and that's the group bounties by North Rock Service Group these missions are a set of three bounties that you would have to complete in 45 minutes and they pay a bit more than three individual missions would a major draw for these bounties is that their targets will always have Quantum markers where single bouny sometimes will be hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest Quantum marker sure you can Quantum pass the Target and press U to power off your ship and try to land closer but that's never an issue with group bounties you unlock group bounties by taking the protm group warrant contract in Crusader space once you've unlocked medium risk targets or mrts with the Bounty Hunter Guild once you complete that you'll be offered group bounties and difficulty ranging from mrts to erts depending on what you've unlocked with the Bounty Hunter Guild the catch is that these are only offered in Crusader and Hurston space you can earn bonus payouts of 5 to 20% with the group bounties as well but that goes off your North Rock Service Group reputation and once you successfully complete one of these missions it's usually about 5 minutes until it's offered again so you'll typically do a few single Bounties in between or take time to repair and restock your Firepower the group bounties used to be tougher than the individual bounties but that changed in 3.20 now the group Bounty will have one target at the level of the group Bounty Mission but the other two can be lower level difficulty targets because of this I think group bounties are definitely the most effective way to make money via bounty hunting one thing to note is that group bounties don't raise your Bounty Hunter guild reputation as quickly as single bounties do so if you're still unlocking harder tiers of bounties you may want to hold off on groups until you've leveled up your rep there's also bounties offered that have a question mark in their difficulty level these missions are for ground Target bounties typically in underground bunkers and so they'll require you to fly to a location and get out of your ship for some FPS gameplay they're not too profitable for the time spent and people will typically do mercenary missions also known as bunkers if they want FPS since those missions pay a lot better lastly whenever you're doing any type of bounties remember to grab the mercenary contract Mission Call to Arms which gives you a bonus 500 Alfie per criminal that you kill this also has the added bonus of sending any player criminals that you kill to [Music] jail there are also PVP bounties which you'll initially recognize via the certification Mission being called a suspect apprehension Mission afterwards you'll be able to recognize these missions since they won't have a difficulty designation like the PVE missions they'll show you the player name and they'll warn you in the mission text that this target is more Shifty and tricky than your typical Target any players that have a crime stat level of three or above inside monitored space will get these missions offered for them you can accept the mission and you'll get a Target marker showing you exactly where they are as long as they're within range of a com this is pretty unfair and will probably change in the future but for now that's how it works to get paid you have to chase down the Target and kill them hopefully before they log out in the future we may have to take targets alive and transport them back to stations and ships with holding cells but for now we're judge jury and executioner typically this path has a lot of downtime and isn't particularly profitable so only do this if you like PVP and want to be the space [Music] police if you want to maximize your income with bounty hunting you'll want to stick to a single location so that you work towards the 20% bonus payouts from reputation so where you decide to do your bounty hunting manners now you're not locking yourself out of other locations it's just about income efficiency you can always get up and go somewhere else if you're tired of the same place and start building your reputation somewhere else also keep in mind this has nothing to do with where you set your initial home location it's just about where you're setting your respawn and placing your combat ships and loadouts there's a few things to consider when picking a location like the number of bounty spawn points the atmospheric density of combat locations the quantum altitude for getting in and out of bounties the availability of group bounties proximity to ship shops other gameplay Loops in the area and and if you just like that location you'll typically want the lowest number of potential Bounty spawn points to minimize the amount of times you have to Quantum to a different planet or Moon which takes time AR Corp is best here with bounties only on its Two Moons followed by Crusader then Microtech and coming in last is huren with Bounty spawning on four moons on the planet itself for atmospheric density you typically want lower density so that you don't have as much drag from maneuvering your ship or getting to the Target and getting away and it's the same order as before AR cor wins with low drag on both of its moons followed by Crusader then Microtech and huren again in last with two low density moons a medium Moon and a high density Moon and planet and to top off the high density of the planets they also have a high Quantum altitude forcing you to fly around 10K to Quantum away from your bounties after you're done whereas moons are all only a couple thousand kilm to Quantum altitude making for fast getaways and like we mentioned before group bounties are the best way the bounty hunt and they're only available in Crusader and Hurston not AR Corp or Microtech as for convenience being close to shops to buy new ships and ship loadouts is nice and aror is the best for that with Astro Mar to buy ships Center Mass for ship weapons and dumpers Depot for ship components all the other locations are sort of in a three-way tie Microtech has a great selection of ship weapons and components at new babage and Port Trester hen has a great selection of actual ships at New Deal but only a selection of weapons at the Hurston store in lville and crusader sells all the Crusader ships and a good selection of weapons and components at orison the last two criteria about other gameplay Loops in the area and whether or not you like the location are really subjective based on what you like to do and where you like to do it maybe you're like me and you think Microtech is gorgeous so you want to do bunkers there to experience more of the planet but you also want variety so you're want to do bounty hunting somewhere else or maybe you want to do everything in one location it's up to you overall the best place to do bounty hunting for maximum efficiency is Crusader thanks to the availability of group bounties and a reasonable number of Spawn locations with no high density atmosphere or high altitude Quantum requirements but that said the correct answer is new Babbage because that's where Pico is so now that you know where you're going to be fighting let's talk about getting your ship set up for combat the default setups on most ships are pretty suboptimal so you can increase your effic a lot by changing up a few weapons or components in patch 3.14 Sig equalized the stats for most components and weapons within a given grade type and size so that they could balance the newly introduced capacitor gameplay with fewer variables we still haven't had the rebalance of components so there are fewer trade-offs to consider right now than there will be in the future that said let's get started I'm going to use the Fantastic DPS calculator at url. games to show the stats here and I recommend you play play around with it as well to get a feel for your options for Shields you just want to get gr a Shields since those will have the highest Shield HP and recharge rate the only difference across the shield types are the amount of distortion damage the shield can take before shutting down and it's Distortion recovery time but no NPC enemies carry Distortion and it's not meta in PvP either so I just recommend getting the grade a civilian Shields since they're cheapest for power plants and coolers these offer no additional benefits in combat Beyond whether or not you have enough you never need to change coolers and almost every ship has a good enough default power plant the only ships where you want to upgrade your power plant are ones where they have a single stealth or competition power plant by default since those may not provide enough power with Cannon based loadouts some notable ones are the Hornet ghost the hurricane the prowler and even The Nomad for Quantum drives it depends on the size of the drive for ships with size one drives you can either go for the atlas or Voyage drives which are the fastest drives that will get most ships across the verse on a single tank or you can go for military drives like the vk0 which will enable you to spool up your Quantum drive faster to get out of combat quickly after killing your main target some ships have extended Quantum tanks and can fit slightly faster civilian drives as well but for the most part these three drives I just mentioned will work just fine I prefer military drives for faster escapes since anytime I'm traveling across the system I'll use a ship with a faster size 2 drive for size 2 and three Quantum drives on larger ships you'll basically always want a military grade Drive these ships all have enough Quantum fuel so that you won't need to make pit stops to travel anywhere and the military drives get you across the verse quickest the grade A XL1 and TS2 drives are the best but even a grade C Military Drive is fine so I wouldn't spend the money to upgrade if my ship came with a military drive by [Music] default so now let's dive into the different types of ship weapons the too long didn't read of this is that in almost all cases you'll want a ship fitted with a full Laser cannon or laser repeater Loadout I maintain a Google doc that links my preferred loadouts for All Ships so check that out if you want recommendations for a specific ship at size four and Below cannons are better for larger slower moving targets since they have slower projectile speed of 700 m/s repeaters are better against smaller faster moving targets with double the projectile speed of cannons at 1400 m/s at size 5 and above both cannons and repeaters have 700 m/ second projectile speed since this size of weapon is intended for use against larger targets so the repeaters just have a faster fire rate with lower Alpha and lower DPS and that's it you can skip ahead and out of missiles if you don't care about the specifics but for those of you that love getting into the details and customizing your ship let's start with Ballistics ballistic weapons do a type of damage called physical damage which has the unique property of penetrating through Shields when your target Shields are are full 70% of your ballistic damage goes right through the Shields and hits the hull whereas The Shield absorbs the other 30% the penetration amount increases steadily from 70 to 100% as the shields drop from Full to zero now while this seems really good almost every ship in the game has between 50 and 60% physical damage resistance on the hole so the amount that gets through the shield is cut down by half or more because of this your actual DPS ends up being lackluster and when you add in the fact that ballistics have a very limited ammo pool it makes them a rough choice in most situations while it's true this freeze up capacitor to go to other systems it's still almost never worth it except in Niche builds most ballistic cannons and Scatter guns have only a single minute's worth of ammo whereas ballistic repeaters and smaller gatlings have only 16 seconds worth of ammo the 80 series gatlings break the mold here being Gatling guns with a high fire rate but slower 700 m/s Canon projectile speed fortunately the larger size 5 and 7 gatlings come with a lot more ammo as well having 2 and 3 minutes of ammo respectively and this extra ammo is Justified because the gatlings have a short spool up time and they need to track their target over time to do their DPS compared to other cannons which only need to line up the target momentarily and fire a high alpha damage shot to land a lot of damage in an instant all ballistic cannons size three and below are the same except the mass drivers which have a slightly lower DPS in exchange for higher Alpha damage there's also a size 4 Ballistic Cannon called the c78 which is unique in that it has very low DPS on paper but it has the property of having explosive damage that deals Splash within an area in the past this used to be very effective at disabling ships but it's currently very underpowered so you'll want to go with the deadbolt or the 84b [Music] instead laser cannons and repeaters are your bread and butter when it comes to ship combat below size five cannons have half the projectile speed of repeaters and only 1225 M range versus the 1540 M range of repeaters so they've got to do more DPS to make up for that right well sort of while the guns are actually firing same siiz laser cannons and repeaters below size five do about the same damage but where the Cannons pull ahead is that they're about two times as capacitor efficient meaning they'll be able to fire for about twice as long as repeaters of the same size with the same capacitor this means they spend more time firing and less time recharging so they end up doing more sustained DPS over time than repeaters since this DPS Advantage for cannons is created by capacitor efficiency the larger and more powerful a ship's capacitor is the less of a difference cannons will make in the DPS you can see this most clearly in ships like the Redeemer or a fully gimbaled constellation or Corsair since those large capacitors gives you so many repeater shots you either don't need to recharge your G guns or you recharge them really quickly bringing the repeater sustained DPS closer to the Canon sustained DPS but that really changes once the ship fits size five guns at size 5 and above laser cannons and repeaters all have the slower 700 m/s projectile speed and 2.8k range but they have vastly different DPS size 5 laser cannons do about 70% more DPS than size 5 laser repeaters and the only downside is that they have a lower fire rate because of this I'd always recommend using size five laser cannons over laser repeaters if you can land the shots all laser repeaters within a given size have the same DPS stats so you can just use whichever one you want the caveat here is I wouldn't recommend using size one attritions because they generate a bit more heat and can overheat in longer fights and upgrading your ship's coolers won't solve that problem because the bottleneck is the throughput to the weapon Hardo right now Neutron repeaters are the same as laser repeaters so they're no different other than having a different laser color for laser cannons there are some minor differences from size one through size three you'll want the FL Series of cannons since they have the same DPS stats as all the others but they have no weapon spread making their shots more accurate for size 4 you want the m6a since in certain situations it can provide more DPS than other size 4 cannons this depends on which ship you're using what the load out of the ship is and whether the m6a can pull more capacitor or not but there's no downside to using it so it's an easy way to sometimes have Edge for size five all laser cannons have the same DPS stats I just recommend avoiding the light strikes since they have only a fifth of the component HP of the other cannons and that's important since the enemies like ramming us there are also laser scatter guns which are most similar to cannons due to their slower 800 m/ second projectile speed but their tiny 400 m range makes them a tough sell especially since their DPS isn't particularly good the pyrro burst laser scattergun used to be like the c78 made ballistic Gatling and that it had explosive area damage but it's currently not effective the other type of energy damage is Distortion damage Distortion weapons do less DPS than their laser counterparts to the enemy Shields and they do zero DPS to the enemy Hull but what they can do is accumulate Distortion damage on enemy ship components until they shut down once an enemy's component has shut down they can't use that until the Distortion shutdown cool down is over which is often very long time the problem with this is that right now there isn't much need to shut down enemies since we always want to kill them and to actually shut down the components you need to land your damage near where the component is located after the shields are down which can be really tricky especially against smaller enemies or enemies with infinite size two front Shields since those infinite Shields also block Distortion damage the EMP system that's on the Aventure warlock Vanguard Sentinel Scorpius andaris and Hawk also does distortion damage but in an area around your ship this will hit friendlies as well as enemies so be careful of that and speaking of electronic warfare remember that you don't need a Quantum dampener or snare like you get on the scorpus andaris cdy blue or mantis for PVE bounty hunting since your enemy will never Quantum away that's only something you need for PVP like piracy or hunting a criminal gimbals are components that you can attach on weapon hardpoints to give that hardpoint the ability to auto aim to a certain extent some ships have hard points that are forced to be gimbaled like the bottom guns on the constellation Andromeda any turrets that are on ships are also capable of gimballing by default and don't need gimbals attached to them for that functionality the downside of adding gimbals to a hardpoint is that it decreases the size of that weapon on that hardpoint by one so if you have a size five hardpoint and attach a size five gimbal to it now you can only attach a size 4 gun to that gimbal size one hard points break that rule and they add size one one gimbals which then add size one gun since you can't go smaller than that decreasing the size of your guns decreases the Firepower a bit but it's a small penalty unless you're going from size 5 to four gimbals enable you to either Auto gimal or manually gimbal Your Guns by pressing G to toggle gimbal modes Auto gimbal will create a dotted circle around your Crosshair and if your targeting reticule is within that Circle your ship's guns will automatically try to track that Target this is the mode people typically use when they say they're using gimbals Target G will let you manually move the guns around without pitching and yawing the ship but I don't ever use this mode because I've already got my hands full controlling the ship but this could be useful in the future if co-pilots could use Target gimbals while the pilot controls the ship ultimately the decision of whether to gimbal or not is up to you do you feel like you hit more shots with gimbals then use them do you prefer not having to wait for the gimbals to track your target then go fixed it's worth noting that even if you have gimbals fitted you can toggle your gimbal mode to fixed and use the guns without the gimal activated anytime you want this can be useful if your server has gone to poop since the gimbal targeting is tied to server performance the last weapon system that we need to cover is missiles from size 1 through four they're called missiles and from size five and above they're called Torpedoes the distinction is primarily to signify that there's a larger jump in damage from size five onwards whereas from size 1 through 4 missiles have more similar damage the gameplay for missiles and torps is the same so I'm I'm just going to refer to them all as missiles from here on out for Simplicity like ballistics missiles currently do fully physical damage meaning they penetrate through Shields making them very useful as an opener to a fight before engaging with your guns I always try to get two full green circles locked before firing my missiles to get a stronger lock on the Target and increase my chance of the missiles hitting there are a few properties of missiles that determine their performance the actual damage amount minimum and maximum locking range the arm time which says how long it it takes for the green missile bar to fill up the lock time which says how long it takes for the first green ring to lock on the target the speed which is the maximum speed of the missile the ignite time which says how long it takes for the missile to explode once it's in range of the target the explosion radius which says how large that explosion is going to be and locking type which determines which signature of the target ship the missile is going to use to track its Target there's also a differentiation of missiles between an impact type of missile which is intended to hit its Target to do damage and a proximity missile which only needs to explode close to its Target to do its damage as for the Locking types the three different signatures that missiles can track are the IR signature which depends on the ship's heat the EM signature which depends on the ship's electromagnetic emissions given off by systems like power plants and Shields and the cross-section signature which depends on the ship's size and shape currently decoys AKA flares are the only counter measures you'll need against all missile types but in the future that should change change to tracking specific countermeasures this gets further Complicated by the fact that these signatures are all Dynamic they're constantly changing in combat as your enemy is moving around and using various systems the speed and direction of your enemy is also a factor and whether or not they fire off countermeasures in time so because of how many factors are involved it's almost impossible to be consistent when comparing missile performance that said over hundreds of Bounties in 3.20 I've really liked the performance of the size 1 IR missile and the size two and three cross-section Strike Force Tempest and arrestor missiles these missiles have pretty solid hit rates for me when fired from around 4 to 5K distance while traveling around SCM speeds the cross-section missiles have a really good locking performance and a great hit rate whereas the arrow IR missile can be a little finicky to lock but has a reasonable hit rate with high damage if it hits I haven't liked em missiles in this patch because they often have dumb fired for me even when I've had a full lock for torpedo the cross-section torps that come default on the harbinger and Gladiator can't be changed and the only other ships that can fit torps are the Hammerhead and the Aries so for those I'd go with the IR Valkyries for size 9 torps on the eclipse and Retaliator I've had excellent performance with the IR typhoon torps with these I just lock and fire the torps from anywhere between 12 and 5K away and they almost always hit against heavy Fighters and larger targets they can have finicky locking since they are IR missiles but I like their performance a lot more than the cross-section and EM torps that lock more consistently but have a much worse hit rate for me there have been some big changes to bounty hunting and Chip combat in 3.20 the biggest change is the addition of almost every ship in the game across the different tiers of difficulty making medium Fighters much more viable at the VRT level of difficulty since not all Targets in the group bounties will be ultra tanky unfortunately we've also got some bugs like major Shield holes that allow enemy laser damage to ignore your Shields and directly hit your Hull you've still got the infinite size two front Shield bug as well so that's also fun but at least it's less of a problem now that it used to be with the addition of more ships to the Bounty pool one thing I'm not going to mention right now is combat service assistance beacons even though they're a fantastic way to make money via spaceship combat and that's because technically they're not under the bounty hunting tab since they're beacons but mostly because they're extremely inconsist assistant I rarely see beacons worth doing at the times that I play and for every person who tells me they get them all the time I get someone else telling me they don't I just wish Sig would update their spawn rate to make it a more consistent gameplay option so that's all I've got for this bounty hunting video folks if you've got any questions or comments please let me know you can find me in the comments on Twitch or in my Discord so come by and say hi links are in the description and as always thanks for watching folks I hope you've liked this video Che [Music] years

Channel: WingZeroType

Views: 54,529

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Id: KKfU58y0WY0

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023