The Emerald Circle

This first chapter in the Dark Orbit 101 series is about ship configurations, an important but often underlooked aspect of the game.

On the home page, there is a button called Equipment.  Here you can change your ship’s “configuration” – which is just a fancy way of saying you can set up your ship two different ways.

Most of us use what we call a “battle config” and a “speed config” – one designed for power (kill, kill, kill!), the other designed for speed (run away to fight another day!)

When you click the button that says “Configuration 1″ or “Configuration 2″, you are “defining” your ship: how you want it to be in each of those two modes.

For example, you may want to set up config 1 to be for power (“battle config”).  You may want to put all your lasers in your drones, two or three engines and lots of shields on your ship

Then, you may want to set up config 2 to be for speed.  For example, you may want to put all your shields in your drones, put engines into all the engine slots on your ship, and carry only enough lasers to fill the ship laser slots, so you have shields to cover your back while you run away fast from a fight you can’t win.

So using these examples, config 1 fights hard and protects decent, but is a bit slow, while config 2, protects really good, fights half-decent, but runs REAL fast – the run-from-the-fight config

You can set them up ANY way you want – those are just examples.  Design it how you want, to fit your style of play.

When you are in the game, the easiest way to switch between one configuration and the other is to simply hit the “C” key on your keyboard.  The really nifty thing is when you switch between configurations, you have full shields again, practically doubling the time you can stay alive!  Of course, that will only happen if you remembered to let your shields fully regenerate after the last time you died!

Anyway, say you are in the middle of a battle, and your shields are just about gone.  Hit the “C” key on your keyboard, and you have full shields again!  Your hitpoints stay the same, but that second set of shields may be enough to keep you alive for the rest of the fight – or to run away.

I use my “battle config” most of the time… but then when somebody bigger than me starts to attack me, I will quickly switch to my “speed config” and run away fast   This is especially usefull when being attacked by more than one enemy player.

IMPORTANT:  Remember whenever you are repairing your ship, you need to make sure you regenerate your shields on BOTH of your configurations after a nasty battle.  Just switch from one config to the other and make sure the shields are full.  If you don’t, you might find yourself later on with one full-shield config, and the other empty!  Could be painful!

On both configurations, you should always keep ALL of your laser slots full of the lasers, at least the MP1 (40,000 credit lasers) at all times.   As you earn uri, you can replace them one at a time with the LF3 (10,000 uri) lasers until you have all LF3 lasers.  Even the cheapest of lasers in a laser slot is better than empty!

Drones, as they gain experience, give an added boost to the sheilds and/or lasers, so no matter how you set up your configurations, you always want to put your BEST lasers and BEST shields in the drones.  They will be even better that way

A final note:  Don’t bother buying the 5,000 uri lasers – it’s better to use the MP1 lasers while you save your uri (or credits for bids) up for the LF3 (10,000 uri) lasers. After all, those are the lasers you will want eventually.  Better to use your precious uri for the 10k lasers than the 5k uri lasers.