Holy **** what is that

[color=#6666ff]Anyone else encountered these nasties yet?[/color]

Just fought an infested Tackety outside the Nature Reserve. Pretty scary, but not all that hard to kill when there was only one. The spread on the projectiles means that it has a tendency to miss if you’re not up close, so a cautious strategy of keeping your distance with a pair of Jerusalems is very effective. That said, the cautious strategy does cost fuel and supplies, and lead to a good amount of heat generation via dodging, so fighting more than one of them, or fighting one alongside anything else, would be a tricky proposition (indeed, fighting more than one of anything is a tricky proposition - I’ve managed to just barely beat two Reach Marauders, but it wasn’t easy). When you add in that dodging one shot could lead you straight into one or two of the shots fired by the other, the prospect of fighting multiple Guest-infests becomes rather terrifying. Luckily I haven’t run into more than one of them, so I was able to kill it and survive, even though a bad dodge ran me into two of its projectiles at once and nearly (but not quite) killed me.

The rewards for beating it were very nice, I failed on exploring and lost some crew but still made back enough money to pay for the fuel, supplies, hull etc. I spent fighting it. Overall, very well done. It’s threatening enough that I wouldn’t want to fight it with low anything, but it’s definitely possible to beat it by careful dodging and good weapon choice.

Personally i’ve found that my favourite strategy in combat is to get some distance and cut the engines, just stay still and let the heat go down. Use strafe to dodge any bullets thrown at you - you can do it without being on the move in any other way

Once heat is low enough to resume attacking, use a brassraven to fire short bursts. I typically do 3 round bursts to aquire a target. If they happen to be staying still, or caught in a slow turn, unload everything.
If you can manage to not miss, a full heat salvo from the brassraven is a kill on just about anything in the game.

Personally i’ve found that my favourite strategy in combat is to get some distance and cut the engines, just stay still and let the heat go down. Use strafe to dodge any bullets thrown at you - you can do it without being on the move in any other way

Once heat is low enough to resume attacking, use a brassraven to fire short bursts. I typically do 3 round bursts to aquire a target. If they happen to be staying still, or caught in a slow turn, unload everything.
If you can manage to not miss, a full heat salvo from the brassraven is a kill on just about anything in the game.[/quote]
Brassraven has incredibly good burst damage, but the issue is that it has one of the worst heat/damage ratios in the game. When I tried it, which was a couple patches ago so it may have been updated, you’re basically dead if you don’t kill with that one burst. If you’re fighting, say, two Reach Marauders, and you burst one of them down, you’re going to be unable to move for a bit and you’ll have a hard time firing more than a shot or two without hitting 100 heat again and getting stopped in your tracks and taking damage. Especially since strafing generates heat.

Honestly, I think the most effective way to fight is just extreme aggression. Outmaneuver them, plant your guns firmly into their side, and shoot until they die. Two salvos from a double Jerusalem setup is enough to kill most enemies, in my experience, and you don’t generate heat trying to dodge. The risk, if there are multiple enemies, is that you might take a hit from the one you’re not killing, but if you get it off fast enough you can probably avoid that, and at least you’re not getting shot at by the one you’re killing.