The PVE to PVP Barrier

[FionnMacCumhaill]

Barriers to PVP

Something that seems to come up a fair bit in chat is getting into pvp and the difficulty in finding workable BPs that give you a chance in PVP. The workshop is filled with things that claim to be pvp but absolutely are not. There are BPs that were pvp worthy a long time ago or maybe worked in alpha 10 but are unworkable under CPU and/or the new thrust mechanics. One way to get around this is to joine a pvp mega alliance who will have a full set of working bluprints but not everyone wants to do this for various reasons. This is to give some basic BPs that can be modified or used. None are going to be top of the line examples but at least they are the right direction.

Zackey’s excellent (but in need of updating) guide is the best one I’ve seen for pvp concepts. Well worth a read:

Curation Hub

Welcome to the HWS PvP Community guide! This subsection of the forum is designed to give newer PVE players a chance in PvP. This post is designed for discussion and serves as the “hub” on the guide, if you would like to ask a question for one of our Curators to answer, please follow the link below: PvP Q&A To see changes to PvP by patches, head over to our patch-log thread PvP Patch-log If you want to jump right in, select a “XX Design” post from the list below (It’s suggested that you sta…

Generally PVP builds tend to want:
Thick armour, especially to the fore
Resistance to lag shots
Redundancy in systems
Bait to attract fire away from the cockpit and critical systems.
If you can fly it first person view, its not a pvp build

CVs

On HWS, Xeno builds are best. But a good design is more important than the block type. Here are a few builds on the workshop.

Steam Workshop::Seraphim Dark Inquisitor PvP

Scorpion seems to be an unsual builder in, unlike J Randall, Spanj and Xcal who are clearly PVE builders who sometimes think they are dabbling in pvp, Scorpion is a pvp builder trying to make pvp builds more aesthetically pleasing. Because, and let’s be honest here, most pvp builds are ugly. His interior design has come a long way, sadly we will need to undo his good work. He has two Alpha 11 builds; the cheap Legacy gunship which I find extremely underwhelming even for its cheapness and the Seraphim. The Seraphim, as it is, has too large a class size to be useful for HWS, but is very easy to bring down in class size in 5 minutes in creative (remove all the railings and walkways from hangar area, remove all curved or corridor blocks in the ship and replace with solid blocks, remove elevator on one side, remove all lights and med devices apart from the main one, remo all deco terminals). It has exposed thrusters which is not great, but at least there are plenty of thrusters spread about so it is not immediately crippled. I would strongly recommend moving the core further back as well as it has a tendency to be cored very easily early in an engagement with its current placement. You are aiming for under class 5. Here it is after 5 minutes in creative (I also removed sentry turrets and repair bay).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1980773459&searchtext=dirae
This one is very cheap and is somewhat durable from the front. Its flying turrets are illegal on HWS though so you need to change them. The easiest way is to connect them something like this:

Or just cut and paste turrets from another pvp build from any of the last few versions.

For some reason they also have every level of extender. Remove all except for the 4 tier 4 extenders. I also dislike the warpdrive placement a lot as if you are surprised from the rear you will be toast and unable to warp away. Still its cheap and can throw out some damage before it goes down. Seems a lot more thrown together than its predecessor but still an easy one to update. Has laser drills.

Steam Workshop::Laserdrake pvp Alpha 11 CPU T4 Pursuit Ship

This is one I built as a cheap ship to use on HWS or give to faction members and allies wanting to go into pvp space. It’s between the last two in cost but outperforms both in combat (Seraphim’s dispersed turrets would probably make it stronger against an experienced pilot though). It also has a yellow secondary cockpit of cowardliness. It has extraneous bits like the dragon’s front claws, the dragon head would be better replaced with something wider and you need to keep a careful eye on the fuel gauge (or add more fuel tanks). Has laser drills. Tested it a fair bit against pvp builds in purely static combats, its not actually been used in pvp yet. Buyer beware.

None of these CVs will win against a top-tier HWS pvp build one on one but at least they will put up a fight (destroy their fancy Xeno blocks) or give you time to flee. If you have friends with you the balance will change swiftly as 2v1 firepower is good. At the same time, experience counts

Turret targetting:
All your turrets should be targetting the same thing. The traditional setting would be turrets and mounted weapons (shoots both CVs and SVs if armed). If you are a pirate, warp drive of opponent is first priority. If you are fighting a CV, you might want to go just for turrets. Against just an SV, maybe just generators.

SVs

These are even harder to parse the workshop for than CVs. The number of “pvp” SVs with an open cockpit at the front behind glass is almost comical. This is one I built towards the end of the last season to use this season. Again, this is not going to be a cutting edge build but will do the job.

Steam Workshop::Black Hermit PVP SV Alpha 11 CPU T4

It was built to be under 3000 blocks (due to season 10 limits) and checkerboard hardened steel and carbon (before carbon became worthless). This is pure hardened steel but the yaw suffered in the change I find it fine but hair-trigger pilots may want more. 3000 blocks is no longer the limit so I will be rebuilding and replacing things like wing parts which were included to keep block count down. If you are using this for PVE POIs I would suggest swapping the dumbfire rockets’ position with the homing rockets’ as dumbfire are more useful for pois and the 1 block of height makes a big difference when sniping from craters on Protoz. The ship has a warp drive which is generally NOT the done thing for pvp, particularly against CVs in space. Normally a pvp ship just gets a drive chucked on the back when warping temporarily. Removing warp drive would also free up CPU. I included it as I expected to use it for commodity trading (before supergate changes) and I still find it handy when scouting in a system. Only two fuel tanks so watch the fuel gauge (sadly true of many of my builds).

Note there are two SV paths, the other one is to use an ultralight craft which is much smaller, cheaper, harder to hit and relies on shield and evasion rather than armour.

HVs

Can’t help here yet, not found one or built one for Alpha 11 yet.

PVP cockpits on SVs and HVs

Closed cockpits are the standard as they give protection against lagshots. They are also placed deep inside the ship.Exiting the cockpit actually puts you inside the armour and you usually walk backwards through your ship to exit. Counter-intuitive, slightly immersion breaking but effective. Make sure the SV or HV is level before exiting cockpit so you don’t get hung up on a block. In space, make sure your jetpack is on before exiting cockpit.If you do get stuck get back in the cockpit (switching to 3rd person might help) or at worst press the tilde key and type detach. Once you get used to it you won’t have problems. If in PVEI tend to strap a cokpit on top and an armour locker on the back as most pois will not even come close to getting through your shield.

Going to PVP in a cheap ship

Words often spoken, and sound advice, are “don’t take to pvp what you aren’t prepared to lose”. For mining this is easy- take the cheapest workshop starter or warp sled of your own devising, throw 6 laser drills on it and go mining. Tier 2 or less is disposable. If you encounter a pirate you will be dead in seconds. You could also build a slightly tougher tier 2 ship with decoys to give you a chance to warp to safely or time to type CB:gohome Or maybe you will just have wasted resources on a slightly more expensive ship

Getting Killed in pvp

Its going to happen, its fine, really.

There are three kinds of pilots that will kill you

1. They kill you, take everything you have then repeatedly kill you on spawn to inflate their kill count… This apparently no longer works for repeat kills
2. They kill you, take your stuff but give you a ship to get back to pve
3. They kill you, return your stuff and give you a nice ship to take back to pve

Type 1) is the rarest thankfully and most pirates are in fact good eggs. Against type 1 you have two defences:

1. Don’t respawn immediately, go do something else instead. Log in later spawn a ship and go somewhere (probably to a nearby planet it get fuel if you have not got OCD7
2. Make use of the cb:sethome:ID command at your home base and use CB:gohome immediately after death. This way is better.

[FionnMacCumhaill]

SV Autoweapon Script

One other difference between PVP is that some make use of an autohotkey script which cycles and fires every weapon on your SV in quick succession. While some weapons will quickly run out of ammo it makes your initial salvos devastating. If you are as bad with an SV as me it makes them potentially devastating and somewhat devastating to the terrain. Not sure if Rex will be ok with me sharing this, but below is a script to use with autohotkey for an SV with 5 weapon sets (F8 to switch script on and off). Big shout out to Sirlagsalot for sharing bits of his script on global. I had to add delays between each weapon to get it to work on my PC, but with this you can devastate terrain like Fionn.

AutoHotkey.ahk.zip (496 Bytes)

Edit: I discussed posting this with Dq, but if it is against community standards please delete.

[RexXxuS]

Thanks for sharing your experience, knowledge and tips with the community!

@FionnMacCumhaill

Not sure if Rex will be ok with me sharing this

Makro scripts are allowed, because there is nothing Eleon or I can do against them anyways.
Once Empyrion reaches an ESL level, we might rethink it again, until then: knowledge always wins.

---

Thinking more about this Barrier… what is your opinion about an insurance feature?
No matter if Garage ships or your own player ships.

You lost in PvP and feel the inner rage that all your work is gone, maybe you even forgot to blueprint your ship before.
Would it be cool if you then can call HWS Connect and get your latest ship restored at your home for

• ingame credits
• and/or HWS Reputation Points
• and/or real money as Patreon/Support Package?

The container content inside the ship is gone of course but I think what causes the biggest emotions is if your Lego structure got destroyed and you need to grind again for it.

[Chaotic]

I do not like the idea of HWS Insurance that can replace anything for an amount of credits/ rep, or stick it behind a paywall.
Now that I’ve had a little more time to wake up and figure out what to say, removing the resource sink, along with the satisfaction of knowing you just took more than someone’s resources… you took their time. You took something from them that regardless of what they do they can’t get back.

RexXxuS, you seem to want more of an RP/Money sink, but the only resource sink there is right now, at least that I’ve found, is throwing ships at each other. CVs cost less now, due to less redundancy and whatnot, but my combat CV still costs far more resources than I go out and gather. That is a resource sink. Keeping 5-10 HV’s/SV’s in my blueprint factory is a resource sink. If I can just magically pay some change and a rep or two to get my CV back, that’s adding many more resources into the game than necessary. That removes the need to buy Xeno from people.

Back on topic, there are a few of these points that I disagree with.

HV Building is still a bit of an issue this season for me, but TAW has helped a good bit with a tank of theirs I have captured and reworked for my use cases. A good tank will have many blocks between you and the front, some form of lagshot protection on all sides of the cockpit, and a bait turret. (normally plasma)

A bit of a hotter topic, combat logging. I will always spawn someone a ship to go home in unless I know that they have the means of getting home themselves. (A member of a rival faction who is likely to gank me when I get out of my CV) I have designs currently that are made for nothing other than spawning in when someone logs after I recycle their ship. It will sit there and kill them, and although I don’t get a kill for it, I do get some satisfaction that I just took RP from them, a hard commodity to get ahold of this season. If they keep respawning close by, someone is coming to get the kill and send them back to starter. You always have the option to fresh start, and pirates are not required to be nice. This idea of spawnkilling to inflate kill count is false. RexXxuS/Jascha has made it to where if you kill someone more than once in a 5 (not entirely sure what the timer is) minute interval, you don’t get any kills on the killboard or kills for RP from it.

Great post, other than telling people to combat log. That will get someone spawn killed, at least from me. Call it what you want, but combat logging is the lowest of low. Worse than some of the “exploits” I’ve seen people get banned for. @FionnMacCumhaill

[Politary]

Good post for the most part. But teaching noobs how to combat log? Really?

[Creepy]

@FionnMacCumhaill

but if you are a PVE player in a wee cheap ship getting mauled by someone’s monstrous CV, it is an option.

No, seriously, this is bad. He stays, he has at least a good chance to get out of the sector. He combatlogs, than there will be (as Chaotic said) a Structure with turrets wait for him.

[FionnMacCumhaill]

Fair enough mate, seems that section is causing the most grief so I will remove it. Wasn’t aware a timer had been implemented, that is a fine thing. I think the the sheer amount of information a newbie has to process means they don’t always know sethome and gohome. I’ll remove that section and hope everyone plays well with new players.

Rex, back when I was a noob, in my CV made of hangar doors, the loss of a ship was inconsequential, its the loss of what you carry. I agree with Chaotic about the materials resource sink. This season Xeno trading is very useful for the servers and there is probably only a very small niche of players who have the resources for pvp but can only spawn one CV and have no faction mates with pockets to help them.

Entering pvp space tends to be for three reasons:

1. Veterans to whom it is normal
2. Mining (and most know not to bring too much)
3. Better POIs- this one is where you want new players to enter pvp to visit the cool POIs, but by its nature they are carrying a lot more stuff with them. A ship can be easily replaced, all your epic weapons, all the loot from POIs you just got etc. is the biggest loss. This is probably the smallest group though and it would be nice if it was better. I’m not sure if adding simple pda missions like “Find a Himaya pyramid- reward nXP and 50K credits” would help. I think a mission to “find a teleporter monolith” would be a very good idea as almost every new player I’ve encountered the last two seasons doesn’t really know about them. I know, they are in the guide but…

[sclossin]

Thumbs up Chaotic. I like the nood and dig at TAW. Thanks! As always the number of hours spent in game learning and doing are not given enough credit. The best way to learn PVP is to do PVP. The best way to learn how to build is to build and make improvements to your builds. Sometime you have to take a death. Learn from it. Set you homes and cb:sethome. Yes it sucks, but we have all faced it. There is nothing wrong in joining a faction and learning. Most everyone in the bigger factions are good people. Yes even my ingame enemies! Out of game we would go have a beer. If I did not hate them so much ingame. If you combat log all bets are off. Take your death. In most cases you will come out of it in better shape. If you want to go out to PVP listen to the players that PVP. Not the one that sit in PVE. Some factions are in it for the RP from your 1 time death. They don’t care about your resources. Ask around and find a faction that fits your play style. Or Talk with Bob from NON in the HWS discord lobby most days.

[TacoIsland]

Building a 11.x HV is not easy I admit, and retrofitting an HV that was our main tank in HWS 5.x was no easy feat itself, but it can be done. Those that PvP have the best PvP ships because they tried, and learned from each encounter their strengths and weaknesses in their design decisions. No workshop ship(t)s are going to remotely compare to the PvP vessels because those are for vanilla Empyrion, aka boring single player \ boring PvE multiplayer servers. I can guarantee that ANY PvP CV on the workshop would not stand a chance against a lot of POIs on HWS, let alone one of our true combat CVs.

To those that want to venture into PvP, do yourself a favor, find a design you like and modify it (heavily), to have a much redundancy and protection possible while maintaining CPU compliance. Anything that doubles as a “does this also” is probably not going to do well.