In Powerplay, at Rating 5 with Arissa Lavigny-Duval, you get a 100% bounty payout bonus in controlled or exploited systems. I heard a rumor that this also applied to on-foot Combat Bonds, so I decided to investigate. I said goodbye to Li Yong-Rui, plotted a course for Kamadhenu, and joined the Empire. Then, I loaded up my Type-9, and one 750 ton shipment at a time, delivered 10,000 reinforcement supplies for the empress, making sure to pick targets that actually made sense to reinforce.
This took a long time and about hundred million credits. Having gone through the process, I can say that the Powerplay interface needs another design pass. There's a lot of room for improvement.
After my deliveries were done, I waited for the weekly Powerplay tick on Thursday, confirmed I was now indeed at Rating 5, and traveled to the nearest High-Intensity Ground Conflict Zone in Lavigny-Duval space.
I spent a bit of time doing HIGCZs until I had about 100,000,000 in Combat Bonds. A little over an hour of fighting to recoup my monetary investment into this investigation. The bonds I was collecting on the ground seemed to be the same as before, which was a bit of a letdown. I had expected to see higher numbers.
However, when I went to collect my bonds, I was pleasantly surprised to see the payout was indeed doubled. Normally I average about 60 to 70 million credits per hour; with this, I am now looking at 120 to 140 million per hour, with zero risk. This makes HIGCZs a HIGHLY lucrative way to make money, provided you're able to achieve and maintain Rating 5 with Arissa Lavigny-Duval.
So, to summarize:
- Reach Powerplay Rating 5 with a Power that offers +100% bounty payouts
- Do HIGCZs
- Get double payouts in that Power's space
