Hybrid Events
Hybrid events are a blend of two of the above event types -- usually faction and galaxy events. The first half (through noon ET on Saturday) will consist of one "phase" which is a single type before transitioning to another. There have been hybrids with skirmishes and expeditions in the past, although those are very rare.
When the first part of a hybrid is a faction, you'll be able to send shuttles even after the phase changes for extra VP as long as those shuttles are opened before Phase 1 is over. They must be used within 12 hours, or else they will expire. Many people refer to these as “overhangs” or “hang overs.”
As you can imagine, given that you can get 1025 VP per fully ramped recipe, the majority of scoring in a Hybrid faction/galaxy will come during the galaxy phase vs the shuttle phase. Don't sit on your laurels once the shuttle half is done unless you don't care about rank or only want to clear thresholds. Similarly, if it’s a hybrid galaxy/skirmish, most people will play the skirmish half only as the VP is easier to get and it’s faster.
Reruns/Flashbacks
Hybrid reruns/flashbacks are pretty fabulous in that the wiki will have all recipe information from the first run of the event. DB has historically not changed the recipes in repeat events, so it’s absolutely possible to go look up the event and get all of the recipes (therefore a farm list of exact quantities needed) that are going to be used once the event is announced.
Final Thoughts / How Is This Possible?
Like an away mission, you’ll choose 3 crew to run each mission, but having a deep bench is very important here.
Every event, there’s usually a post on some game-related venue (i.e. reddit or facebook or the forums) asking how it’s possible for people to have accumulated X score in X amount of time. There are a few things to consider here.
One, the game is over 4 years old, and some people have crew rosters that are simply inconceivable to a newer player. Like… own every card in the game and have them all immortal kind of rosters. Those people are always going to be able to do things that feel inconceivable.
Secondly, years and years of voyaging and prefarming will lead to some pretty absurd inventories. As of writing, I’ve got over 150k chrons and something stupid like 5,000 0* databases. I’m also probably never going to use either in an event because I don’t want to stay up for 3 days straight grinding away. But, it is what it is. I’m not alone in either.
Thirdly, at least with factions, money is king. People have been willing to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on autocompleting shuttles since the very first events, and boosts and rental tokens are just making it cheaper. Never underestimate how much dil someone is willing to drop to win an event.
As I mentioned at the outset, yes - bots, macros, and cheating do all exist in the game. It’s a sad reality, but it’s reality. Most of the eye-popping scores that people tend to question are not products of those things. (Instead, those are usually the folks hanging around the top 50 cutoff to avoid publicity, sometimes creeping their way into the top 10 or 15.)
If you play for long enough and play intelligently with your resources, anyone is capable of eye-popping scores. The real trick is learning how to choose your battles. Someone who is going to hit the 350k threshold in every galaxy event is inherently going to sacrifice their ability to make a huge run for a top rank in a galaxy event by bleeding out their resources.
Resources in the game are finite, even for the biggest wallets. A big part of playing the game is learning when to pick your time to grandstand in an event.
But, it’s possible for everyone to play smarter and not harder. We hope we’ve helped with that goal.