Tip #3 - Important Missions

After every 16 missions you complete, you'll be called on by a nearby agent to complete an important storyline mission in service to your chosen faction. These missions are as important as they sound, giving a bonus to your faction standing on completion. Since high faction standing unlocks the agents of every corp in an entire faction, these rare opportunities to gain it are important to take. The storyline agent that requests your help is always the closest one belonging to your faction. So if you can find a storyline agent for the corp you're interested in gaining standings with, you can just run your 16th mission nearby and you should be called to that agent for your important assignment.

Another interesting part of important missions is that they can give absolutely massive bonuses to corp standings with the storyline agent's corp. The resulting increase in corp standing will help you rapidly unlock higher level and quality agents for that corp. The boost depends on the mission type you've been assigned and its level. Courier missions tend to give a small boost while the biggest increases (which can be over a whopping 40%!) come from important level 4 combat missions. The level of the important mission selected is equal to the level of the 16th mission you run, so make sure it's the highest mission level you have access to.

Tip #4: Loot and Salvaging

A portion of the income from combat missions comes in the form of salvage and loot from the NPC wrecks. When you get to level 4 missions, this portion becomes quite large due to the battleship NPCs dropping battleship sized loot and plenty of salvage components. Loot has historically been sold or reprocessed into minerals for sale but items that refine into a lot of minerals will take up a lot of cargo space. This makes looting difficult during the mission, a problem which is further compounded by the fact that both tractor beams and salvagers fit in valuable high slots that most mission-running ships need for weapons.

There are three main schools of thought on looting and salvaging in missions and it's up to you to decide which is best for you. The first method is to ignore loot and salvage entirely, instead blitzing through the missions to gain bounties, standings and loyalty points as fast as possible. The second is to use a ship which naturally has high slots free like a marauder or drone ships like the Dominix and Ishtar that don't rely on high slots for the bulk of their damage. You can then fit a few tractors and salvagers to help clean up the mission while running it. The third method is very popular but not always cost-effective on time. Rather than salvaging during the mission, you can set up a specialised salvaging ship and return after the mission is complete to loot and salvage the wrecks. Destroyers and cruisers are perfect for this job, having plenty of high slots and high maximum speeds. If you do this, remember to bookmark at least one wreck in each stage of the mission as once it's handed in, the deadspace complex disappears and the wrecks are left floating in space.