Document

NEW PIRATE INITIATIVE GUIDE TO PVP & PVE

• PVP GUIDE: Intro to PVP, Evasion, Why PVP?, PVP Progression Phases, PVP Locations, Resources & Discords, , Offense, Tactics, Carrier Use
• PVP BUILDS Archetypes, Builds, Combat Engineering
• PVP TACTICS: Weapon use, maneuvers, special tactics
• PVE QUICKSTART: Traveling, couriering and powerplay, How to build ships, Farming engineering materials, How to build a DBX Jump ship, PVE Combat, Bounty Hunting, Wing Massacre Missions, Anti-Xeno
• PVE BUILDS: What kind of ships to build for various PVE jobs.
• FOOT: Farming Settlements, Recommended PVP Loadouts, Foot PVE Tactics, Foot PVP Tactics
• SPACE POLITICS: Squadrons, BGS & Powerplay

1. When you enter areas that are high-risk according to the Inara crime blotter (usually including Deciat and any active community goal systems where PVPers will congregate looking for targets).
2. Enter Galaxy Map and set a course for another star system immediately after entering a system.
3. Map the Plot Next System In Route keybind so you can hit it quickly along with your hyperspace key to high wake away.

1. Submit by throttling to 0. It will reduce the cooldown time before you can wake out.
2. Set your shield pips to 4, thrusters to 2. This will 2.5X your shield strength and help you boost away.
3. Boost constantly in a 180 turn or somewhat random direction and continue using lateral thrust to dodge a portion of incoming fire especially FSD reboot rockets which could knock you back to a cooldown period before your FSD can reboot and attempt an FSD jump.
4. Hit the Plot Next System in Route key to lock onto your high wake destination.
5. When your FSD is ready, aim at your destination system and hit your hyperspace bind to high wake out.
6. Immediately high wake again if you think they'll pursue your wake.
7. Find the nearest system or carrier and repair if you think you've sustained major shield module or hull damage.
8. Congrats, you survived and now you can do the same thing in the future and get better at it till you're in a position to fight and win!

• SURIVIVAL: You may need to try PVP to learn enough to stay alive!
• CHALLENGE: PVP ship and ground combat is fun and challenging in a way that keeps things interesting long after you've mastered the PVE aspect of the game. PVPers are still experimenting with new builds and tactics and testing their skills against each other after year after year of playing.
• SOCIALIZING: PVP combat is a communal activity that gives you lots of reasons to interact with other players. Open battle leads to role-playing and meeting new people, many of whom could become tomorrow's friends after gaining respect for one another as today's adversaries. Dueling leads to tournaments and mentoring as you find players who you learn from and seek to compete to better your skills. Wing fights lead to squadron teamwork and mentoring your wing mates and learning how to fight as a whole force against other squads' dynamic wing forces. This is the really complex multiple-rock-paper-scissors matchup mashup that makes for intensely challenging battles.
• GLORY: There's nothing quite as satisfying as surviving overwhelming odds, defeating a worthy adversary, turning back an incursion, or just proving something to yourself by overcoming the learning curve and becoming a better pilot. How else can you find out how good you are except by testing yourself against others? Record your battles, put them on Youtube, ask your friends for critiques, get better, post more glorious battles to come.

• SELF DEFENDERS: Even people not trying to seek PVP find PVP seeks them. Even PVPers have times when they're in non-PVP ship builds and vulnerable. But even someone trying to avoid PVP needs to learn at least PVP Evasion to escape attacks and interdictions until they're in a PVP ship and ready to fight.
• OUTLAWS: Pirates and mercs who defy the law and attack whomever they please for a variety of reasons. Outlaws do what they like and they like what they do and pride themselves on bending the knee to no one.
• LAWFULS: Law followers such as PVE bounty hunters who generally won't fight anyone who has a clean record for fear of getting punished with a bounty on themselves.
• LAW ENFORCERS: Law enforcement types who like to battle against outlaws. They pride themselves on standing up to outlaws who they consider gankers and beating them into submission.
• MERCENARIES: Some pilots work for whichever side pays or interests them at the time, switching between outlaw and lawful behavior over time.
• DUELISTS: Some competitive duelists are looking primarily for honorable challenge fights with agreed upon rules that emphasize high skill competition.
• GANKERS: Some people just want to watch the world burn! Gankers are motivated by the thrill of taking down anybody who leaves themselves open to being attacked, especially Twitch streamers and law enforcers. Sometimes they give a roleplaying reason for the attack like an Asp Scout Recall Program or a Save The Thargoids Campaign, but sometimes they shoot without warning and just make you flee for your life. These are less scary if you practice evasion tactics and learn how to get away more often than not.
• PIRATES: Combat ships preying on miners and traders to steal precious booty. What distinguishes them from gankers is their roleplay and their combat handicap caused by cargo-related modules.
• POWERPLAYERS: Some pilots focus on winning battles for their Powerplay or BGS group and do battle with the forces of competing Powers.

• ORGANIZED 1v1 DUELS or WING FIGHTS: Formal challenges usually conducted according to some mutually agreed upon rules. Start learning PVP by doing practice fights with organized duel rules. Try to challenge people near your skill level to see if you're getting better as well as people better than you to receive advice from. Many squadrons conduct internal practice duels to sharpen skills.
• ORGANIZED COMPETITION: Like organized duels but with more consistent rules and rankings of fighters established by the ladder or challenge mechanics of the competition. PVP Hub Discord is a good place to participate in competition. Many squadrons also conduct internal competitions to train their pilots.
• ORGANIC PVP: Players attack each other in Open to get fights and have fun and gain experience. This tends to be centered around Deciat and other popular Community Goal systems. Especially combat zone CGs, where you can expect to be attacked while you are battling the PVE conflict zone.
• GANKING: Ganking tends to be similar to organic PVP except that you don't care if the target is in a PVP ship ready to fight back. Ganking can be role-played as part of piracy, warfare, assassination or any manner of justification to make it more entertaining for all concerned. But don't hate the gankers if they don't role play! Learn how to evade and appreciate them for the chance to learn how to defend yourself. in all manner of ships.
• PIRACY: Combat ships preying on miners and traders, but you ask cargo ships to surrender cargo or die. Pirate builds have cargo holds, manifest scanners and hatch breaker and/or collector limpets to steal cargo with. Super fun to roleplay.
• WAR: When whole squads, coalitions and powerplay factions go to war, it escalates quite a bit. This sometimes leads to people pulling out wings of Cutters, builds and weapons that are not considered "sportsmanlike" in everyday organic or challenge duel fights.

• Attacking ships that aren't combat-ready is something the NPC pirates do constantly. It tests your readiness to defend yourself and force you to consider defensive strength of your non-PVP ships. Why would you accept that as part of the game but accuse players doing the same of doing something different?
• Anyone can learn the basic PVP Combat Evasion drill to prepare to high wake out of interdictions with high chance of success.
• Even new players being attacked for the first time learn from the experience and can take precautions to defend themselves and evade better after the learning experience of rebuying.
• Many PVPers can't find enough opponents ready and willing to fight them in duels.
• Duels wouldn't be very useful if you could never use the skills you develop in any way to influence the galaxy organically.
• Many PVPers offer to teach people they fight how to get better at PVP in the hopes of expanding the size of the PVP community.

• Assassins aren't exactly going to announce themselves like the Spanish Inquisition. Why would you expect someone who is hired to kill you to waste time giving away their intentions when they could get valuable seconds of damage on you while you remain unaware you are even being attacked?
• You accept numerous missions to assassinate, bounty hunt or massacre various groups and shoot them without saying a word. Would it surprise you if some of your enemies retaliated by sending someone after you? Would you expect them to write you an essay about it?
• If you consider how much heat you would be drawing to yourself by all your violent activities, having people come after you just to prove they could kill you and brag about it should be no surprise. This is a standard trope in bounty hunter and outlaw stories that up and comers want to prove themselves by taking out the big shots.
• Maybe you need to be the one to say something to encourage your attacker to explain themselves. Roleplay and see if they respond.
• Many people combat log when attacked so gankers get disgusted with this and tend to try to kill as quickly as possible before you can do so. Say something witty and they may speak back.
• You can bind your roleplay messages to hotkeys using driver software (see macros section) to have something witty to say ready to go without impairing your combat.

• CMDR: "Players" are CMDR-rank Pilots who own their own ships and are functionally immortal, respawning if they are killed minus some rebuy costs and inconvenience. They outrank "NPC" pilots who seem to be mere mortals.
• NPC: The "non-player" pilots are below CMDR rank and usually weaker and more predictable in their behavior.
• PVE: Player versus Environment. Player Pilots fighting against NPC pilots Usually much easier than fighting other CMDR-rank pilots. PVE is more about completing missions reliably and efficiently to maximize rewards for the time expended.
• PVP: PVP combat against fellow CMDR-rank Player Pilots is a risky affair. It is advised to begin engineering your ships to have a chance to survive PVP, and to maximize your engineering and practice to have a good chance of winning.

• Elite Dangerous Community Discord: The mixing pot of randoms playing Elite. There are some great and knowledgeable regulars and a lot of people who are misinformed, obnoxious or just toxic towards PVPers who don't do it the way they think it should be done. It is worth hanging out sometimes to meet people you get along with and splitting into wing channels or other Discords once you find those people. PVPers like Quidd and Jarvis J routinely show up there and show people how it is done and offer to explain things to new PVPers so if you see someone like that hanging out in EDC be respectful and learn from them or challenge them to fight you and give you a critique.
• Galactic Combat Initiative: GCI hosts PVP events and sharing of PVP knowledge. It is a good place to find knowledgeable people and discuss builds and strats.
• Elite PVP Hub: PVP Hub hosts Weird Wednesday fights at San Tu and a formal PVP League for FDL metalance competiton.
• Elite Combat Events: ECE hosts periodic PVP tournaments.

• Quitting in PVP combat is called combat logging and is considered exploiting with force quitting or just unacceptable cowardice if you wait for the 15 second timer. Never fly without rebuy and take the rebuy if you got yourself into a situation where someone can kill you.
• People will add you to a combat logger black list and post YouTube videos of you clogging if they catch you doing it.
• Mistakes happen due to game instancing glitches and you should record your own gameplay with Shadowplay or OBS to defend yourself if you get accused of clogging or to catch cloggers and expose them yourself.

• FDEV indicates that it is against their EULA for "the "the use of automated scripts, programs or services offered outside of the game to generate a player advantage".
• That does not prohibit using VoiceAttack speech recognition or simple macros to automate things the game makes clunky using your driver software, but anything beyond pressing some buttons quickly that gets into doing multiple steps enters into cheating/botting territory.
• If you're using a Voice Attack style macro to do things quickly that are slow to do in game due to clunky game design (such as launching fighter, adjusting pips or requesting docking) or to do things easily that are difficult to do with certain controllers (like sending chat messages in VR), FDEV don't have a problem with it as they actively promote Voice Attack for this purpose.
• There is a large Anti-Botting Coalition of squadrons against the use of bots to influence BGS/Powerplay politics for good reason. You should make sure your squadrons discuss preventing cheating/botting and sign onto the petition.

• No Premium/Standard Munitions (exception: UnrealJay)
• No breaking the game TOS
• No combat logging (menu log/task kill/throwing PC out the window)
• No heals/concordant
• No SLFs
• No waking and coming back
• No crimes
• No returning to fights after game disconnect or crash when the fight is already underway
• Fights are in medium ships only unless all participants decide on a different format together

• Don't straight-line away during a wing fight
• Don't use seekers/packhounds
• Try to avoid using basic synth, try and learn better aim and ammo management instead
• Silent Running is pretty broken with the current heat settup in the game, organizing fights without SR is a good way to make them more fun
• Fight to the death
• Please be timely in getting ready for fights
• Try to organize fights as fairly as possible

• COMMUNITY GOALS: New CG systems are usually popular hotspots with tons of players trying to complete the tasks making great targets for organic, ganking and pirate fights. With combat CGs, the conflict zone or resource zone nearest the star tends to be the most player active.
• GANKING: Deciat and other beginner engineering spots are popular locations for gankers. Be careful if you're there whoever you are. Newbs are targets for gankers, and gankers are targets for law enforcers looking to kill gankers and defend newbs. Good place to fight if you don't have Shinrarta access till you get Elite rank.
• ORGANIC: Shinrarta Dezhra is the main home system for most Elite ranked players so this is a good place to find organic and organized duel 1v1 fights.
• POWERPLAY & RANK GRIND SPOTS: Farm grind systems and powerplay hubs like Cubeo on Wednesday nights before powerplay cycle can sometimes be fight spots.
• SAN TU ORGANIZED FIGHTS: Many PVP Hub Discord pilots use San Tu as the hub for organized fights in or above the asteroid belt.

• You will probably lose many many early fights learning and rebuying.
• Never fly without at least 3 rebuys!
• Plan to bank up a lot of rebuy money to comfortably handle losing dozens of times without worrying about rebuy money.
• Ask people on Discord to 1v1 you and give you advice if they see room for improvement.
• Read Remlok Industries' Elite Combat Guide as this guide uses similar terminology which is in wide use in the PVE and PVP communities.

• Gankers often use large wings to alpha strike foes before they can run away.
• Dropping too many pilots into an organic fight can scare away the enemy and result in no fight at all.
• The more even the number and size class of ships, the more you'll learn from the challenge and the more likely the enemy are to stick around to the death.

• For example: if you are in a Corvette and come up against a bunch of torpedo and mine boats harassing you, you can quickly swap shield tanks for something better suited to killing the ships they're throwing at you.
• Remlok Industries' Carrier Guide is a great and detailed explanation of exactly how carriers work.

• Make it a priority to farm money to save up about 6 billion to buy a carrier.
• Equip it for refuel, repair, rearm so you can use those.
• Add outfitting and shipyard at minimum to make it useful to your friends who need to transfer their ships and modules to it for traveling with you.

• Commodity Market: You want this to be able to buy and sell commodities at prices from 5% to 1000% of normal.
• A market allows you to transfer funds to others by asking them to buy at 5% and sell at 1000% repeatedly while you set the buy/sell prices till you give them the intended amount.


• Outfitter Package: Exploration ships. Use to equip newbs with their first ship. It can also be used to fill it with cargo racks initially for a repeated money transfer via commodity market price swinging.
• Outfitter Package: Propulsion: Use to equip newbs' first ship with A rated frame shift drive.
• Outfitter Package: Cargo Racks: Important for equipping someone for money transfers if they don't have a high cargo capacity ship with them.
• Cartographics: A penalty on selling carto data is better than losing it all when you need to unload data before combat.


• Redemption: A penalty on selling bounties is better than losing it all when you need to avoid repeating yourself.

• Here's a couple PVP videos to show what PVP is like.
• You can click time codes to the points the fights start and end.

• EDTutorials.com NATO PVP Guide
• How to build a PVP ship
• How to PVP by MegaTurnip
• Remlok's PVP Guide