Best weapon combo for fighting pirates solo

[Ender Wiggun]

Hi, I started playing Starmade a couple of days ago and i've already lost two ships to pirates. the first time was understandable because i only had a small ship with a few cannons. The second time I had a fairly large ship with a damage beam and damage beam slave and 12x2 DB modules and enough power regen to have full power after the 10 second beam cooldown (or reload). with this ship I went and shot at a pirate station but when i looked at my radar the pirate ships around it weren't moving so i kept shooting and suddenly after about 2-3 minutes of shooting and the pirates not moving, i'm dead... I think this is because the server may have been down, or is there another reason?

anyway, on to my main question: is it possible to take out a pirate station solo? if so what are the best weapon combos to use? and how do i know what the optimal amount of shields/shield recharger to put on my ship is?

thanks!

 

[Megacrafter127]

Yes it is possible to solo a pirate station.
I recommend missile-missile combos, if you don't use too many docked turrets. Otherwise missile-beam or missile-pulse.
As for shields: 15k shield/s shield regeneration is enough to withstand a single constantly firing standard AI isanth indefinetly. As for shield capacity, 100k sound good enough.

 

[CaptainTaz]

Yes it is possible to solo a pirate station.
I recommend missile-missile combos, if you don't use too many docked turrets. Otherwise missile-beam or missile-pulse.
As for shields: 15k shield/s shield regeneration is enough to withstand a single constantly firing standard AI isanth indefinetly. As for shield capacity, 100k sound good enough.

Actually, docked turrets aren't affected as long as the turrets are on your ship.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Swarms are the best weapon if you are flying solo fighting pirates, just don't use them near shops or trade guild stations.

Several of the pirate stations are quite tough so you won't be able to solo them in anything small. The best you can do is disarm their turrets. You also have to be careful using swarms around stations as if any of your missiles target it while you are fighting the reinforcements you could become overwhelmed by shear numbers. I've had this happen before so I had to fire up old jump drive and flee.

I recommend never even going near Alpha unless you really know what you are doing, it's the only one that fires tracking missiles.

 

[jstenholt]

Also a lot of servers from upon swarms, as they can cause a decent amount of lag. My personal recommendation is to have enough shields to tank whatever pirates you have on your server, that is first and foremost. Use missile beam combos to drop shields in large chunks, but make sure you have another weapon to keep the shields from recharging too much. Once shields are down, keep laying on the missiles and consider using a pulse missile to really nuke the hell out of your target.

 

[Ender Wiggun]

Sorry, I don't know what swarms are... Are they the missile-missile combo? I'm not playing on a server at the moment since i just started playing but i've tried the missile-missile combo and find it a bit annoying since it doesn't go where you aim... I know its supposed to be heat seeking but i assumed it would go to the nearest heat source not a random one, i may still use it though.

Also what would be a good secondary weapon with a short cooldown? Beambeam? Beammissile? Missilecannon?
And is it possible to reduce the cooldown(reload) time of a weapon? From videos i've seen on youtube it seems like it is.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Sorry, I don't know what swarms are... Are they the missile-missile combo? I'm not playing on a server at the moment since i just started playing but i've tried the missile-missile combo and find it a bit annoying since it doesn't go where you aim... I know its supposed to be heat seeking but i assumed it would go to the nearest heat source not a random one, i may still use it though.

Also what would be a good secondary weapon with a short cooldown? Beambeam? Beammissile? Missilecannon?
And is it possible to reduce the cooldown(reload) time of a weapon? From videos i've seen on youtube it seems like it is.

Slaving a cannon computer will reduce your cool down time. I usually use lock on missiles (missile:beam) or sniper cannons (cannon:beam) as secondary because of their high damage and longer cool down nature means I can focus more time on my primary. I typically will hold down the mouse and tap 2-1 and it will fire my big guns without much loss in time firing my auto cannons. Of course lock on missiles will take some time to acquire a lock so you will not be firing at that time. So heat seekers (missile:missile) work great in that role. Sure they don't always attack what you want them too but they do work.

 

[Panpiper]

Missile/beam (sniper missiles) are absolutely fabulous weapons to put on turrets. The turret AI will do the slow process of getting lock on and firing, and the fact that they are tracking missiles means that they do not suffer from the usually atrocious accuracy of AIs. Swarm/heatseeker missiles (missile/missile) are fantastic in the correct circumstances, though not necessarily better than a well constructed ship with plenty of missile/beam turrets. Swarm missiles can also ruin your day if you accidentally hit the firing button at an inappropriate moment or try to fight anything with friendlies nearby.

I have gotten quite pirate happy. My favorite thing to do is to find a pirate station, clear it of it's turrets without destroying it and take out the pirates that show up to defend it. I harvest the pirate hulks for their blocks, and then take a pot shot at the station so it summons more defenders. Rinse and repeat. As Sven said, using heatseekers around pirate stations can result in a lot more pirates than you might be prepared for. If you use heatseekers in this context, move rapidly away from the station after the first pirates show up, so you don't get too many more showing up before you are finished with the first wave.

To get the pirate station to summon more pirate ship defenders after you've killed and salvaged the first bunch, you will want some sort of non-missile system on your ship. A coring gun is useful for this and other things. I personally use a cannon/cannon/punch weapon for this, though others profess beams are better for a coring gun. My current goto ship has a 3x3 array of such weapons doing 675 damage per shot per cannon, ten times a second (in addition to an obscene number of missiles). That punches large and deep holes in things, but that is 'far' more than you need to get a station to summon defenders.

 

[Ender Wiggun]

it took me about 3 days and i had to use commands to give myself a few credits but i finally made a ship that destroys the hell you of those pirates!

the two top ones are cannon-cannon with punch through effect, the bottom ones are two missile-missile and two missile-beam.

the missile-beam is a one hit kill and has a range of about 5000m which is amazing! the missile-missile is great because it pretty much took out all the stations turrets it 2 shots and the cannon-cannon is really fun to shoot and if i'm within about 500m i can take a pirate out in about 10-15s (in easy anyway).

 

[sgallaty]

I just built my first ship that was capable of dealing with pirates. It was basically a corvette class vessel, the smallest of the capital ships.

class: corvette
mass : 330
blocks : 3300

two jump drives, a main travelling drive and a back up drive.
4 self-powered beam/cannon turrets
2 self-powered missile/beam turrets

defenses :
6k shields
~40% shield resist from ion effect

the ship itself has no primary weapons, it's entirely dependent on turrets.

With this ship I was able to hold my own against a wave of pirates. Nothing smaller than this was able to hold out.

With this ship up against 4+ pirates I sometimes would have to jump out when shields dropped, but I knew it was coming before it happened.