Strategy: The Privateer's Need for a Loki

Strategy: The Privateer’s Need for a Loki

By Matthias Brod

Judging from the title you just might think that a Privateer needs a Loki almost as much as he needs a hostile crystal 150ly web covering his territory. In this article I plan to prove to you that a Loki in Privateer hands can be a deadly weapon against hostile cloaking races. Or didn’t you always want to rob that DarkWing that your “friendly neighbor” was using to get all of your defenseless planets? I will try to show you how you can do just that and this of course works equally good for any cloaking ship however, as you may have already guessed, it will not work quite as well with cloaking ships owned either by Feds or Lizards. Fed and Lizard ships are immune to the effects of Loki’s, but hey in planets any coin has two sides, doesn’t it?

OK enough introductory babble let’s get to business.

The general idea is that you need to see your enemy before you can tow him to a Wolf Pack. My concept bases on the idea that you wait on one of your planets, likely to be attacked by a cloaking ship. You will probably loose this planet but if you get e.g. a DarkWing in return this loss will probably be well covered. Let us then continue the next round when you have already lost your planet. What you have there now is one of your cloaking MBR’s and a non-cloaked DarkWing (from now on I will continue with the DarkWing example, but it might well be any other cloaking ship), and a planet which both ships are orbiting. If you would now try to rob the DarkWing it would just cloak before you could rob it, since cloak comes before rob in the mission order. What you will do is lock a tow beam on the DarkWing and tow it out. The nice thing is that you are allowed to tow cloaked ships (whether this is good or bad is another question not to be answered here). So you are towing the DarkWing out; but where to, you will ask yourself. And of course the Wolf Pack comes to mind. But then again we have the problem that you just cant rob those ships which are cloaked. And this is just the moment where we get back to the title; of course we need the Loki now. The problem is that if the Loki was waiting there none of your ships would be able to cloak and although you would get the DarkWing uncloaked it would just attack all your ships waiting there and most likely kill them too. This assumes that the Birdmen player is not a complete idiot who forgets to set his primary enemy to Privateer. So what to do?

Think fuel! Think no (!) fuel! Have you got it yet? If so congratulations if not then don’t worry I will tell you. Ok here we go. The Loki is waiting with 0 (zero) fuel on board. It can’t be attacked by the DarkWing for exactly that reason. It will also not de-cloak anything, for the same reason. So what we have got is a ship that towed the DarkWing out (which has most likely been shot into pieces by the towed DarkWing), the cloaked (!) DarkWing which we do not see, the fuel-less Loki and of course the wolf pack containing at least one cloaked MBR. It will stay that way until the next round.

Now we transfer fuel to the Loki and set our cloaked MBR to Rob and to be on the save side (DarkWing has a fuel load of 290 the MBR can rob only 284) will we also set the Loki to rob. Next round the Loki will de-cloak the DarkWing, the MBR and the Loki will rob the de-cloaked DarkWing and we end up with an uncloaked fuelless DarkWing and a MBR & a Loki. With no fuel the DarkWing can not cloak (I know it can cloak without using fuel but it cant cloak without any fuel!) and is ready to be tow-captured next round. Voila you have got yourself a DarkWing and a very angry Birdmen to go along with that, what else do you want?

There are of course a few things you should be aware of. Try to tow out the DarkWing to an area where no other hostile ship will be able to cloak rendezvous with it, because this follow up could spoil the whole party. Also make sure that the tower and the MBR which is going to rob the DarkWing end up at the same position or you will make a big fool of yourself. If you stick to these things you should be able to successfully rob any cloaking ship.

Good luck fellow Pirate!!!