I am sorry if this has already been asked, but I trying to decide how best to fit out my NPCs for hunting while maintaining my credits as a noob. I was wondering if anyone would care to make some suggestions for fitouts. No restricted or expensive suggestions please. I am going to set up a squad (or 2) of rifle men, but would love to hear suggestions for melee combat NPCs as well. Thanks

Might I ask what is your estimated price range for those 12/24 equipments?

Normally, I would suggest CPAs + ELGs, if that is not expensive for you.

They do a lot of damage from 0-4, and you normally maximize attack vs defense knowing the range of the bandit weapons.

Thing is most valuable creatures can attack you from that range...

So, any budget and hunting specifics you might have, will help us to help you. ;)

I realize different equipment will work best depending on the situation/enemy. I have about 5 mil to try hire and outfit myself and my team so multiple setups is not very likely until I can amass more resources. I really just want suggestions on a good starter set up

A 'good' starter setup is a pile of hide armor and SE-14s, because they all come from the NPC shop and are readily accessible/cheap.

You could also send your riflemen on patrol so they level up and you can then increase their strength to improve their HP so they get toughened up. And while waiting, you can hunt with other cheaper NPCs, like criminals. I like using the criminals because I don't feel so guilty if they die. But you really want to swap out injured low HP NPCs, else you end up losing them and the items they carry.

On your first day or so of hunting I would recommend that you use some K-4 security droids. These can be bought at an NPC shop, they are cheap and you can have 24 in one squad. Using the droids is a cheap way to get to grips with hunting and it will help you to avoid losing your NPC's and your 5mil investment in fitouts on the first day.

If your budget is 5mil, I would suggest that you try and pick up some kinetic or battle armour, some A295's and some Relby's.

This fitout will cover you for range 0-8 and is efficient and economical. Whilst not the most powerful rifle, you can keep all of your NPC's safe from creature harm if you sit at range 8 and use your A295's. If you are more ambitious the relby's will serve you well between ranges 0-4, particularly if you can afford to go dual wielding with two per NPC.

You will also want to equip yourself with some macro binoculars and some healing sticks, if your budget will stretch to it.

If your budget reduces, go with the suggestion from Jeavon to use hide armour, though I would try and find some better hand weapons if you want to avoid multiple NPC casualties. If your budget increases go with Vonar's suggestions.

If you are hunting with multiple squads on Derra, it would help you to pick up some sensor packs and macro binoculars for your squads so that you can increase your combined perception and mobility.

If none of this makes any sense, feel free to drop me a DM as I am always happy to help.

Get races with useful combat stats, especially dodge, dex, or strength. High race multiplier helps too. I love Abyssins, some people love Hutts or Noghri, and Togorians are good too. If you hire them yourself you pay less, and even if you can't get access to the race homeworlds, you can hire a bunch and pick and choose the good races out of the lot.

The stats matter a lot more than the armour. Armour is a sufficiently small difference that you can just buy the NPC shop hide armour or something. Ideally you will want to avoid them getting hit at all, so armour should be inconsequential at this stage.

For weapons, ELGs are definitely great, but anything with at least a range of 4 is good for training purposes, so you might want to shop around and see what you can find at least 12 of. If you avoid bandits and focus on creatures, make sure you check the creature herd you are targeting has a weapon range less than 4, and stand out of their range to attack. Some creatures (like nerfs) have no attack at all so they're great to train NPCs on. Melee troopers can use ranged weapons too, so that's also an option for training them up. Just always remember to check creature range and stay out of it, while staying within your weapon range. Don't bother with bandits since they tend to have a broad range of weapons and checking them all manually is a lot more time consuming and boring than just moving on and locating a new creature herd.

(Sidenote on weapons: if your goal is to level your NPCs, don't have them dual wield. Use only a single weapon. The offhand weapon will always have a hit penalty, meaning it has a much higher chance of missing, meaning your NPCs take an XP reduction for their missed attacks. You can put proper gear on them later on. For leveling purposes, a single Relby is better than 2 Relbys, for example.)

Combat training like this is always significantly faster than patrolling your NPCs, but there's no reason not to have as many squads as possible patrolling at the same time as you take a squad out in combat to maximise XP gain across all your NPCs. You can also have friends set squads patrolling for you if they haven't already used up all their squad space. :p (Infantry Command skill is good for this and will increase the number of squads you can patrol)

Stay away from Derra. Other players can kill your NPCs there. Just hunt on some of the Darkness controlled planets in the galaxy, or on a planet your faction controls where you and your NPCs will be safe.

How you equip your NPC's depend entirely on what you are hunting and whether or not you are willing to take a few hits. If you wish to avoid taking damage completely then hunting creatures will be the safest as they have no variance in attack ranges. My recommendation is to hunt creatures and sell whatever trophies you find to the npc Marketplace as they are a good source of credits. That and they have a chance to drop eggs which still sell fairly well which you can hatch and sell to players, not the npc Marketplace.

Since you do not have a large credit reservoir I would also recommend avoiding bandits until you can afford to lose npc's and equipment. For weapons the Bowcaster is a good weapon as it has a range of 3-7, solid damage and is affordable. Make sure to buy a pair of macro-binoculars as has been mentioned several times already.

For hunting grounds as Syn mentioned Darkness owned worlds are always a good decision. Such as Malastare, Af'El, Huk or any other planets work quite well. As for hunting if you attack while out of the enemies attack range they cannot damage you which is the most convenient way early on when you have few credits. As for character and npc skills you can get by with 3 Dexterity and 3 Projectile Weapons for offense. At least in my experience from previous character incarnations.

Creature List
Projectile Weapon List