Essay: Slaves and Profiting from their use.

Slaves are one of the most versatile tools in the game! They can fight, run supplies, make money while you're off somewhere else, and much more. The best thing, however, is that they never demand a portion of your DG loot or any cut of the profits!! Of course, there are drawbacks: their intense stupidity and their knack for developing bugs and running off... but they still are worth it.

General

I personally used slaves and drones to do DGs all the time and I found it very lucrative; I couldn't find buyers for a quarter of my loot! The key to doing it properly and sucessfully is knowing the limits of your slaves and keeping them alive. Another thing is that, if you can manage it, use low tech equipment to minimize the gear glue tech you would have to use to keep it all in when they inevitably die. Lastly, fighting slaves are generally not for anyone without Slave Mastery and they work best with Slave Tweaking.

Note: Crazy Glue skill works for slaves in same manner as MF, Sniper, etc.

Specifics

Low level fighting slaves would be something like wingships with lasers or mag cannons. Mid-level could be many things--Basils were my favorite in this category--although many other possibilities exist depending on how much cash you have. A rich player might go as far as a well-augmented Mzungu Liquid (upwards of 1 billion just for the ship.) High level slaves would be tech 16 Wardens. Most players have Remote Control 16, due to higher skill levels requiring the Mad Scientist commod drop. Now that the Mad Scientist has been killed maybe some will go for shrimps.

Personal

I have two Wardens for use as slaves with 3 Ares Augmenters on each one. They get a lot of shield regeneration and energy regeneration as well as an extremely fast firing rate. This ship's 650 hull has enough space for all 6 weapons it can wield.

The hardware on them is probably outdated by now, but I have an Open Heart Laser (Note to Seers, use Transmyocardial Revascularization Laser instead), Liposuction, Mzungu Trading Defense, Death Warmed Over, and Rackhamer's Bigger Pulse on them. Before slaves were able to drop stuff on death, I had Catapults on them as well. As for shields and chargers, I used the reliable Give and Take on each with a Cowboy charger. The last important bit of equipment would be an Obsidian Ionizer for energy.

In Action

The slaves would use their entire arsenal against Big Greens and Forgones, MTD's against Ice Picks, DWO's against Reavers, Lipo's and OH's against Rosmaries and Slumberchromes, and RBP's against Coppers when I ventured in there (kicked some butt too!). The slaves are usually intelligent enough to use the most effective weapon against a foe. Each slave could tank 3-5 mediumly augged BG's, 3-4 Forgones, or 2-3 Picks. With about 15k sheilds, they lived for quite a while unless seriously outnumbered or going up against uber-augmented AI. If the two slaves co-operated, they could kill just about anything. Unfortunately, they would sometimes take different targets or get separated so that one was always out of range. To correct this I would set them to "stay close".

Being a Drone master as well, these slaves complimented my drones nearly perfectly. After laying my drones, the slaves would often take most of the aggro and the drones would help the slaves kill their targets.

Conclusion

How does this help you?

Answer: How can getting more DPS NOT help you? Well, it doesn't help you if you aren't careful in making your slaves and in their operation. If you get used to how they work, they can help immensely and allow you to do many things you wouldn't have dared to do before, like lucrative DGs that drop lots of loot, being able to explore Warp 3 carefully.... and so on and so forth. Drone Masters using slaves can solo many DG's that most people say to bring a healer along (unless you are are very skilled) and can explore to the ends of the universe.

--Zekk