I've been playing PC since the beginning, but since the other half has been monopolizing the PC for MMOs lately, I thought I'd give the PS4 version a try. It's been nice to start from the beginning again, though it shocked me how much time I apparently spent learning stuff the first time around, I got to the credit/ship-progression point that had taken me nearly a year over a weekend. (My rankings are still low, though; I've just learned what's lucrative and what's not, and I don't mess around or make stupid and deadly errors as much.) I'm pleased to see Mobius is active there—I've actually talked to more players on PS4 than I ever have on PC—the newness, I suspect; still, it's nice.
Anyway, I thought I'd try at piggybacking the haulage community goal with missions—in the past I've found that, if you can make a triangle route with a commodity being delivered and intertwined factions so that you never have to leave that route and can stack missions, you can just hack away at your CG level while making a good amount of lucre on the side, accelerating as your reputation with those local factions increase, and the mission stacking makes play a bit more interesting than pure trucking, between the "we need it NOW, can you get from jump point to pad in 3 minutes?" and "hey, go over to that other system and drop the cargo on a planet instead of the outpost you're about to dock with" interruptions.
And, of course... the hostile NPCs. Here's where I am utterly confused. I know with my Vive and Voice Attack and HOTAS I have much greater control and situational awareness in combat; so that's at least part of why I decided to go the trading route starting over this time on the PS4.
But I never deleted my old builds from Coriolis (and have now ported them over to new Coriolis). I went with the same build that worked quite well for me a year or so ago pre-Engineers (since, as yet, I don't have any Engineers unlocked on PS4): https://eddp.co/u/aMityy7T
What I used to do is stack missions and trade commodities on a route and just deal with the interdictions—sometimes multiple ones, back-to-back—until there got to be too many of them. Once you get to 6 or 7 hostiles tailing you, you can actually get into a cycle of continuous interdiction when you slow to come into port, as you have the first one recovered and interdicting you again by the time you escape the last one. (I know some advise you can deal with this faster by submitting, but when you're low-waking out in a T-6, this isn't true, at least if you're good at the minigame—especially in the T-6 with its rapid yaw that lets you home in on the escape vector easily.)
Even with such near-continuous interdiction, you can usually still get into port. With each interdiction evaded your supercruise velocity is slowing, so you're almost certainly slow enough for a safe drop, you just need to get within 1 Mm of port—but the interdiction escape vectors are generally leading you away from your destination. However, you can make it by throttling up to 100% even into the < 5 s ETA "loop of shame" zone, once you're so close to the station that you can't overshoot it at any speed provided you're quick on the drop button. (I believe, but won't swear to it, that you can even do this during an interdiction provided your blue minigame pips outstrip the hostile's red pips enough that he can't complete interdiction by the time you drop.) I would do that sometimes when I'd gotten one of those speedrun bonuses in my comms, or the particular NPC's interdicting me were fearsome.
Then, an NPC (or sometimes, more than one) pops out by the station, shoots at you in the no-fire zone, and before it has any chance to do more than ding you gets killed by the station's weapons. Unfortunately, it doesn't count as a kill for mission-bonus purposes, and the NPC so killed will continually respawn until the mission is handed in, unlike when you, the player, kill the NPC in combat. (Is this a bug or a game balancing issue to prevent too much mission stacking? I don't know. This also seems to be true if you evade in normal space long enough for police to come along and destroy the hostile; at least if you didn't get in a hit, it just respawns.)
So, here's how I dealt with it a year or so ago on PC: once I got too many hostiles to deal with by minigaming, I would submit to the interdiction of a "Competent" or below NPC, lock target, wait until they were just within firing range and directly on my six o'clock and in-plane with my ship's horizontal, set pips to SYS and WEP, drop mines and chaff, set pips now to ENG and WEP, and boost, dropping as many more mines as I could while I boosted, and then if I started to lose him, pips out of ENG and into SYS just enough to let him catch up again, rinse and repeat. Usually no more than three such rounds were required for my mines to destroy the guy, usually without my Lakon taking a scratch.
I got quite good at it, to the point where bounties became a lucrative part of the runs as well, and to where I rose two or three levels of combat rating without ever doing "real combat". A bit after that, I got interested in things other than trading, so I haven't used a T-6 or mines since. But I felt like I had a handle on using mines on mission-hostile NPC's with low enough combat rating.
But now... on PS4, this tactic seems to have utterly failed me. The NPC's swoop over or below the line of mines every single time—at this point, in seven confrontations, I've seen exactly one mine detonation. And so, I've tried to let them get closer to give them less chance to evade, and closer, and closer—and then they've killed me. (That one hit I got, it was immediately followed by a rebuy.) And I'm only submitting to "(Mostly) Harmless" and "Novice" NPC's (I thought maybe the "Competent" ones I used to handle this way were now too much on post-2.2 Elite Dangerous, with the AI buff I've heard about).
I've tried regular rather than biweave shields (I used biweave before because usually what happened was I'd take a few hits right before boosting, then be in the clear, and biweaves would regenerate before the NPC got close again, so it was just a way to get in more rounds of mine-laying without waits for my shields to replenish). I've tried another shield booster instead of the PDC. I've tried outfitting two regular mine launchers, and I've tried outfitting one regular and one shock. I was thinking about a turreted gun of some sort, but my understanding of how turret autofiring works means that I won't shoot the guy behind me unless one of my mines touches him (maybe that's not true—but even so, the turreted weapons available for a small hardpoint don't seem like they're going to do much for me). I've fiddled with my technique and watched and re-watched Vindicator Jones' combat tips video on mines.
Yet—every single time I've tried to submit and mine, rather than evade, it ends up with me rebuying—five times now, meaning my effective profit is getting close to zero.
And—after you rebuy, if you don't abandon the mission, that same NPC will just be coming at you again!
So... what the hell am I doing wrong? I know FD made NPC's smarter, but have they made them so smart that mines are simply useless ordnance now until I can engineer them? If so, is there another option in terms of T-6 defensive weaponry, or is my only choice to just stack fewer missions to the point where I can evade every interdiction?
If this just doesn't make sense to you at all and you need to see what I'm doing, let me know, I can stomach a couple more rebuys in the name of uploading video. It's always possible this is just a PS4 oddity—I'm not in a position in my PC game right now to return to civilized space to try it there to find out.
I'm growing more than a bit frustrated here, I'd appreciate any suggestions.