Choose My Adventure: Defending our backyard in Elite Dangerous for powerplay profits

This past weekend was another brief but extremely worthwhile run through Elite: Dangerous as my best friend Britarnya and I took up the chosen task of engaging in the powerplay system. This would be my first time really engaging with the whole thing since having unlocked the effective rank progression aspect, so I was pretty excited to get started.

Incidentally, Brit was excited to show me her favored way of ranking up in powerplay: flying around our established home system to interdict and take down enemies affiliated with rival factions. Particularly if they were targets affiliated with Aisling Duval. Or as we like to call her, Space Princess.

Now you’d be forgiven for believing we’re just diametrically opposed to this particular powerplay NPC purely because we aligned with someone that one could describe as the Maleficent to Duval’s Snow White, but that’s not entirely the case. We fell on backing Zemina Torval for a few reasons: She holds sway on the system we call home, she offers up some juicy benefits for mining (which is one of my favorite activities), and it just felt like everyone was siding with the pretty pretty princess. Our contrarian instincts demanded we do no less than punch her fans in their mouths.

So that’s basically what we set out to do together. The two of us climbed aboard our favored combat vessels, launched from the space station we’re calling our base of operations, and entered supercruise to patrol our home grounds to find enemies of our faction head.

Considering we play on a large PvE private server, I know this would be a purely PvE affair; it’s effectively like the bounty hunting runs I’ve done with my Porg Squadron, only this time instead of arriving to the nav beacon of our star and scanning ships to see whether they were flagged as criminals or not, we basically patrolled the space around our home, locking on to targets to see if they were aligned with enemy factions. Target spawns worked pretty similarly to bounty hunting runs too; they were all randomly generated kinds and numbers of ships.

All of this is to say that while much of this activity was like what I’ve done before, it was still fun. I enjoy bounty hunting in a wing with my family. It’s one of those things we like to do together when we want to play this game, especially my husband, who always hungers for internet spaceship kills.

Once more Brit was the point of the spear since she was the one who had the ability to interdict targets. Basically I flew close behind her while she sniffed for foes, then waited until she pulled them out of supercruise into local space for us to shoot down. Again, routine, but since we play as a unit in this way in pretty much every game, Elite or otherwise, it felt good.

That’s not to suggest that I didn’t learn anything new. I actually was able to discover a little bit more about ship combat along the way. See, the role I tend to fall in to when we’re flying in a wing is fire support. I don’t really care about getting the killing blow; I’m just here to contribute damage how I can, and my Alliance Chieftain has a loadout that’s really good at popping shields and softening hull enough for my family to take the enemy down. But during our flights, I learned about component targeting for the first actual time and got to put it into practice.

Nine times out of 10 when we fight PvE enemies, they will duel to the death, but sometimes they’ll suddenly have a fit of self-preservation and attempt to jump away before they turn into a fireball. So to counteract that, we try to target the frame shift drive that allows that to happen, making sure our enemies stay right with us and not escape. Sometimes we also target their engines or power plant in order to cause them to literally sit dead in the water. It’s not a strategy that I was using prior to this point, but since it was just the two of us, we couldn’t simply use force of arms to burn our enemies down before they left.

I’m not particularly sure that I was doing too much damage to components as we fought, but I was at least learning about how it’s done and asking questions as we went along, which Brit very patiently answered. And, again, I’m fire support. Even targeting a component appeared to be contributing to overall damage.

All through our flights, we were earning merits for petty much every part of this self-made mission, which is the currency that both counts towards overall rank and gets me into weekly leaderboard ratings that cycle every week. It’s effectively weeklies and a battle pass system, only you don’t have to pay money to get things. By the end of our flights, I was in the top 75% for my power, which will net me an easy 2.5 million credits by the time the next in-game week begins.

Now I’m not going to claim that how we were doing things is the most efficient way to go; in fact I’d go so far to say it’s probably the most inefficient method. But honestly I’m just delighted that this powerplay system – a layer of the game that has felt completely out of my reach and esoteric for years – is rewarding enough that I now feel it’s worthwhile without feeling forced into doing the weekly assignments that are dished out. Sure, I could dig in harder if I wanted to, but the fact that things I’m doing that I find fun gets me some of that powerplay progress is great.

Honestly, this entire month has only strengthened my adoration for Elite: Dangerous. I will once more openly admit that I feel this effusive about this game purely because I have a great little family group I play with and will always point out that this game can feel very hard to get in to without a guiding hand. But I also have always felt like there are a lot of guiding hands out there, be it guides or videos or resources. And if August’s Vanguards update works the way we think it will, then we’ll establish Porg Squadron as a way to help folks like myself out. We’ll even likely fly the MOP colors.

While I’ll certainly be flying in E:D again and again, as far as this run is concerned, we’re moving forward. So that means it’s time to determine the world we’ll be plotting a course for to fill out the month of July. Let’s get going, friends.

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Polling will wrap up once again at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, July 4th. Just in time for me to stay inside and hide within whatever place we aim ourselves in to next. Until then, happy flying out there if you are playing E:D.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.