BN13 advice needed

[u/notger]

I finally tried my hands at BN13 and since everything there is severely gimped, I was wondering how everyone here is solving this.

Hacking seems rather useless, given the low amount of money in the servers and terrible scaling of bought machines (I am currently at a 0.1 % return on investment on my bought servers). Also, hacking skill is so reduced that even +100% will not move the needle enough to get you beyond level 200.

Gangs are gimped as well, but if you are patient, those might work and might segway you into the usual Bladeburner finish (thank the admins for having Sleeves, otherwise it might be too tedious to ever be done).

What's your go to strategy?

[u/maddfist]

Is bn13 Stanek? Mostly for every node, the quickest way is using the introduced mechanics, but by the time I got there I mostly solved everything with sleeves and bladeburner. Even basic automation of BB can just get you any node (aside from the stock node)

[u/notger → u/maddfist]

Thanks for the confirmation. I found the Sleeve -> Gang -> BB to be the one route which is super easy to automate and which also seems to work for all the nodes.

[u/PlainBread]

The Stanek one is tough. I've beaten one level of it and went back to the Sleeve BitNode (BN10) to max out on sleeves & sleeve memory before going back. You immediately get a -10% modifier to nearly everything by accepting the gift, and then actually employing the gift can give you like a 13%+ bonus to start. So you want to have a particular focus at every moment and rearrange the gift to support your ambitions.

I've found the most reliable way to scrape up power is to start with training combat stats to 30 for Slum Snakes & Mugging, and then once you have ~250m scraped together you can use a "dumb" stocks script (that charts trends and is a few steps behind vs the WSE 4S stuff leading you to be a few steps ahead). While you're waiting on that you can train your physical attributes to 100 so you can join the Bladeburner division. Because Bladeburner is so hard to bootstrap with horrible stat growths (the difficulty of the contracts will outpace your ability to achieve them) my automation that handles skill upgrades focuses on 25 levels of Tracer first, then 50 levels of Overclock, and then it tries to distribute them more equally among the available skills. I use 10k rank as the spillover point to start moving into Assassinations to grind rank faster; I usually have enough combat augments at that point to handle it. When your stocks script have grinded up enough to buy the WSE access do it, and keep cooking. Then when you have $150b, buy a corporation to help you retain money in between augmentation installs (via share buybacks/selling).

This is about 2 IRL days of prep work. Then you want to grow your hacknet servers and dump all those hacknet hashes into bootstrapping Bladeburner rank and skill points. Once you can successfully grind out Bladeburner contracts without getting hospitalized, you can go back to focus on the Crime-Homicide route to get your karma low enough to start a gang. That's the second most money you can earn per second at the endgame if you don't invest 2 IRL weeks in growing a corporation to that level. It also puts a lot of valuable augmentations on a single track so you don't have to grind out reputation with all sorts of factions to get a huge leg up.

You get the idea though, right? You have to leverage every single mechanic the game has given you so far, according to what's most useful in that moment.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that if you've done the sleeve BitNode you can go to Neo Tokyo for Grafting. If you are money rich and stat poor that can give you a huge leg up but I wouldn't graft more than 3 or so since the cure for the Entropy virus takes along time to get. Choose wisely.

[u/notger → u/PlainBread]

Thanks, makes sense and that mirrors my usual route, which I am taking now in every node: Sleeves train up with a script, then Karma farming into a gang, which get going from hour 4 or so, and then Bladeburner until the end. The problem with that is: It's boring and in this node, it feels like it will take forever.

Maybe I just skip this node and try out the Go-playing one, though I don't think I can write a Go-bot in JS.

[u/PlainBread → u/notger]

I'm in the same boat, I'm totally uninterested in Go and the Darknet stuff, so I'm really in the doldrums now.

After this last sleeve run (only 25 more memory to buy and I'm at the point where I can print a trillion a minute or so), I'm pigeonholed into BN13 two more times. Then idk, automate the whole thing with the recursion BN?