The Art of the Escape: Surviving in Dark Orbit

Updated 5 January 2020

Below is a comprehensive guide on how to escape from other players. Players of all levels will learn something new within this post. Enjoy

Generators: It is difficult to match an UFE player in ability of shield, HP, or damage considering all the factors that can be stacked to increase either of these three. However, one can easily become UFE in Dark Orbit in terms of speed. The first thing all new players need right away are a full set of G3N-7900 speed generators. You can obtain a full set of these for little contest on the auction.

Promerium: Six of these ores will give you a full hour of boosted generators, and it takes less than a minute to send it to your ship via the skylab. Therefore, there is no excuse to not have boosted speed generators whenever you play. This in addition to using a fast ship, such as a Vengeance, will make you just as fast--if not faster, than the majority of UFE players.

Playing Dead: Shooting back at a pursuer will give them the satisfaction of a fight. Running to a portal gives them the satisfaction of a chase. Just sit there and give up if you have no chance of escape. When players cease to get any satisfaction out of you; they will realize they're just wasting their ammo and time and might just let you live.

Ship Diameter (mm) and the Time-to-Click Ratio: There are two factors to decide which ship is the best for surviving; you want both the smallest and the fastest ship combination possible. The Leonov is the best option for new players, because it has a 26 mm diameter and has a 504 maximum speed. Therefore, the Leonov is the hardest ship to click on, making it more difficult to enemies to lock onto you.

Source: http://www.bigpoint.com/darkorbit/board/threads/sc-the-hardest-ship-to-click-on.121175/
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Optimal Ships: The V-Lightning is optimal for surviving in Dark Orbit. The V-Lightning has an afterburner ability--it negates the effect of a slowdown mine, DCR, ice rocket, and negates the effects of an infection for the duration of the ability. This ability is a guaranteed escape from the majority of player encounters. You can easily obtain this ship through the assembly or in the auction.

NPC Abilities: Fly slightly outside a mordon or saboteur's firing range when a player is chasing you--and if you're lucky, then your pursuer will get DCR'd by the NPC while you make an escape.

Jump CPU II: The Jump CPU II will teleport you back to your x-1 map. If you're running to the corner of a map with no escape portal in sight, then you can use this anywhere (except pirate maps) after you've been out of a fight for a certain period of time. You can bid on these Jump CPUs with little contest in the auction to accumulate a life-time supply.

Maneuvering, Lag, & Fireworks: If you have mad clicking skills, you can juke-out whoever is following you by clicking in the opposite direction your pursuer is clicking on. Add in lag to the situation, and you can juke-out the majority of players in this game without using any abilities or special items. If you're one of the unlucky few who has the curse of no lag in this game, then don't feel bad, because you can easily create your own. If you have left-over fireworks from the annual New Years event, then equip the fireworks to your hotkeys, and quickly place one firework down while also pressing on the detonate key. When you're trying to out-maneuver your pursuer you can spam fireworks to create enough FPS lag to get away. In addition to this, if your pursuer also has their in-game sounds on, then they're in for a loud surprise that'll also scramble their brain--enjoy yourself.

Pilot Bio: You only need to get 6 pilot points to have the best pilot bio for surviving--and that cost under 70,000 Uridium and takes only two weeks worth of quests at the most. Place one skill in Ship Hull I, then the last five in Explosives. Explosives will increase the radius of your mine explosions by 25%. Shield Mechanics, Ship Hull I & II, Evasive Maneuvers, and Shield Engineering are all extremely important to have, but don't be tempted by the common belief that those are the best pilot skills to survive. If you've already got them, you're probably still wondering why that 25% extra shields and extra HP doesn't help in your encounter with stronger players, so go ahead and reset your bio right now. For new and even seasoned players, Explosives is far more important if you simply want to survive. Read below to find out why.

Slowdown Mines: You can buy 10 slowdown mines for 500 Uridium, the same cost as one EMP or DCR. This is a great deal, and its better than using an EMP, which doesn't even promise a clean escape from a UFE because they'll just re-lock you. When you're being chased, fly in a straight line and drop one slow mine. An alternative option is not moving, dropping a slow mine, wait one second, then run in the opposite direction of your pursuer. If enough distance is between you and your pursuer when you drop the mine, then either they'll hit the mine and be slowed, or they'll evade the mine thus creating more distance between the both of you. If you're being chased by a pack of players, then investing 5/5 Points in the Explosives skill would be even more useful, it'll only take one pursuer to hit that mine for the whole pack to be slowed from the 25%+ increased splash effect.

PIB Laser Ammo: I recommend only buying 100 rounds of this expensive ammo to begin. Be sure to only equip one laser gun to your running configuration, so that when you fire you'll literally only be using 1 shot of ammo per volley. When you fire on your pursuer with this ammo you will infect them with the green goo, thus slowing them.

Star Formation: If you have evasive maneuvers II, then buy the Star formation before you get any other formation, the extra 5% evasion bonus is far more useful than whatever extra shield or HP you get from using an alternative formation.

Wheel Formation: The wheel formation is the best formation to have if you want to simply survive in the maps. Don't be tempted into the gimmick that you necessarily need more shields to survive in Dark Orbit... Do not buy the Heart or Ring formation as your first formations, the extra shield and HP they give you is insignificant in an encounter with an UFE.

EMP/Cloak and DCR Rockets: The EMP, DCR, and Cloak items all cost 500 U. in the shop, and using them in any combination is fairly self-explanatory. Using any combination of the three is not a cost-effective method at surviving either--so I won't bother discussing them.​

I hope some of you have learned something new. Please share with your buddies who are considering quitting the game, and even to your clan. If you are fluent in another language then please consider translating and posting this into a non-English Dark Orbit forum. If anything new comes to my mind, or if my grammar is off, then I'll edit the post further.

 

Good guide, the interactions with the lags sound interesting.

Selfish trick: you can use EMP and/or run into a cloud of other players. Perhaps your chasing hunter will choose another, weaker target.

 

A very nice line of instructions/ guides for our newer players to be more competitive / survivable, Wirwerdenniesosein.
I like seeing veteran players sharing experience insight instead of sarcasm

 

Enjoyed reading this post . TY

 

Bump

Edited the post for an easier read, and added several new ideas.

 

Repairs at the base are free now. Just saying

 

Excellent Guide! i like how you included the use of JUMP Cpu in order to escape imminent death since jumping on a portal takes a good 3 seconds of your time before you are safe, not to mention 3 seconds is already enough to kill you if whoever is hunting hits hard as 100,000 laser damage or more, not to mention if its a cyborg and could use singularity II the moment they lock on your target.

I don't think that ship size will matter once a player you know isn't exactly using their mouse to click on you if you know what i mean, but its still useful against other fair playing players out there.

Mines work at some occasion but unnecessarily flawed, the moment you click or use a mine it takes atleast a second or 2 before it registers and activates once a ship is close enough in its proximity to trigger it, not to mention if the ship who's hunting you is just a few clicks away and it won't matter, probably will work if you don't see their ship on your screen and they are following you on a straight line which is a logical way of actually chasing down on someone, i do suggest that they don't swerve or fake the direction they are going to just to lay down the mine because they might get caught in the trigger as well.

I don't recommend them to buy mines at all, every mines and rockets you've mentioned is free to get at most events especially on halloween and on christmas day, emp mines and other variants of mines can be obtained through opening booty boxes, that will be the best way to obtain those mines and not waste uridium where they need it most, by getting booty keys upon completing a zeta gate, you are being efficient and reasonable upon your decisions on where to spend uridium.

PIB Laser ammo is unnecessary, you are trying to escape and not trying to lose 1 other configuration in order to accommodate the possibility of infecting your pursuer, this is very inefficient as you can use your other config to tank some other npcs and gives you the ability to survive even further for the first few hits you will take on your pursuer, depending on how much damage they deal to you.

All in all its a good guide, hope the newbies would read this instead of ranting in chat how they are killed so many times and just quits.

 

Nice write-up. Thanks.

I have a question however (several in fact, but for now this will be enough). What is "a full set" of those G3N-7900 speed generators?

As a side note, I believe these were upgraded to G3N-7910, if I am not mistaken I already have a few of those.

 

It's a rare ability in fact (judging from my own forum experience).*



*I was of course talking in general terms. I am too novice in DarkOrbit to have much forum experience here at all.

 

He ment the speed generators which give out 10 base speed per generator

 

As far as i know, there is no such thing as a G3N-7910

G3N-7900 (the one that costs 2k Uridium or can be obtained trough the auction) ist the best Speed-Generator in the Game.

Also to mention:
A "Full Set" is refers to having the maximum amount of Generators a Ship can have.

A "Full Set" therefore can be everything between 1-20 Speed and 1-40 Shield Generators, depending on the ship you are using.

But I mostly refere to the amount of generators a cita can hold, when using the term "full set".

Spoiler: Example

For a Phoenix a full set of speed generators would be 1, because the phoenix can only have 1 generator in its ship, and speed generators can't be installed in drones.

For a Goliath a full set of speed generators would be 15 (16 when using cyborg or surgeon).
A full set of shield however would be 35-36 [15 (16 if cyborg/Surgeon) in your ship and 20 in your drones]

For a Cita a full set of speed would be 20 and shield would be 40.

Given that the Cita is the ship which can have the most amount of generators I take it as a "full set" reference. Beause when u have 20 Speed Gen's and 40 Shield Gen's you can equip every ship with full Gen's no matter the type.

 

I know what speed generators he meant.

I asked what "a full set" is.

 

OK, so a full set is a variable. Regarding the 7900 generators, I was under the wrong impression, just a confusion.

Additional question - is it advisable to have that many speed or shield generators? I mean, more than a few - upto 20 or 40. Isn't this just a waste of whatever can be wasted there?

 

original Post good read thanks

 

Sometimes it can be helpful, especially for a Citadel with draw-fire. In general you don't need more than 20 and even that may be too much for a fast config (considering you might want to add some lasers there).

 

Getting 20 Speed generators is a must, if u use a Cita, given the citadel has 20 gen-slots.


As far as the shield goes, i would say the 36 to get max shield on a goliath (and cyborg) are enough, you dont really need all 40 Shield generators.
But the only times where you would need that amount of shield is on base defense and in clan fights, so if u cont really participate in those activities, 20 Shield-Generators (to fill your drones) are more than enough.

 

A lot of complicated answers you got . A full set means all generator slot of whatever ship you use filled with speed gen.

 

Sitting doesn't always work. I've been destroyed numerous times by an MMO on my earth vessel or a an EIC while in my VRU vessel.