Now with part 2! With bigger and badder enemies!---
Today, i'm going to talk about a pretty cool hullmod that i recently started to use,
Operations Center. I recently tried an
"admiral" campaign, exploiting the advantage of regenerating command points the hullmod offer, and pushing it as far as possible.
The campaign went well, even though the strategy was unfortunately showing its limits during end-game battles. Very large fights tends to be a race against the CR clock, killing enemies to gain the number advantage as soon as possible. With the number on your side, AI controlled ships behave more aggressively, and victory quickly follow. Having a strong flagship is a good way of killing enemies fast, unfortunately i wasn't directly flying my flagship in this situation, and even if i was, the expensive OPcenter would have severely limited the efficiency of my ship. On top of that, most of my skills were support based, making my admiral a poor combatant.
I needed to find a way to decrease the "Time To Kill" of my fleet. More than that, i wanted to find a solution that is better than a skill-boosted flagship of doom. And i found it.
Spoiler
"You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like." 10 Officers, 10 Capital ships. Combat endurance, Helmsmanship are the most important skills for my officers. Ordnance expertise, Gunnery Implants, Target Analysis, Evasive Action were mostly what i picked for the Odyssey. The Astrals, obviously have carrier skills. Here's what i tested them against :
Spoiler
The tenth son of the Dickerson dynasty, from the underworld mod. The closest thing there is to a final boss. There's a few things the Dickersons have for them. The first one is CR attrition, i needed to take down all those ships down before running out of CR. The second was dealing with encirclement tactics, the enemy can field many more ships than i can and they'll try to surround me. Thirdly, i need a way to stop 22 capital ships from rushing me. Here's the tools i used.
Spoiler
"All the world will be your enemy, O Prince with a Thousand Enemies. And if they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you."First of all, five Odyssey battlecruisers. Why the Odyssey? No amount of flux, shield efficiency, firepower or armor matters against such an absurd amount of opponents. Speed however, will ensure that the Odyssey won't be caught. Those five big guys have one purpose, pest control, their jobs is to rush in and destroy as many frigates/destroyers as possible during the first part of the battle. For this, DPS burst is favoured instead of armor penetration, which explain the Autopulse lasers. For the missiles, Sabots and Typhoons proved pretty good to crack open hardheaded destroyers and even cruisers. Claws are here to catch and immobilise a target, leaving them vulnerable, also not bad to buy some time for a caught Odyssey to run away. Also some dirt cheap mining lasers for PD duty, just in case. Once they're done with killing the small fries, they retreat to leave the place for the next ships.
"There is no "overkill". There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload.""Now that those pesky fast ships that threatened to surround me are gone, it's time to deal with the big ones. A bomber loaded Astral hurt like a truck and doesn't care about running out of ammunition. With 4 Tridents and 2 Longbows, the Astral can quickly and reliably bring heavy burst damage at a very long range, enough to scare even the biggest capital ships.
Now put those 5 Astral in a single control group, and order a Fighter strike order on whatever you want to die. That's 20 Sabots and 80 Atropos fired all at once, which can be reloaded. Definitely improved my fleet's TTK i guess.
The Tempest you can see below are just here to escort the Astrals, in case the Odysseys fails their jobs and couldn't destroyer enough ships. Nothing noteworthy about them, i was more interested in the Terminator drones than the frigates themselves. They were deployed but didn't actually fought.
"The greatest victory is that which requires no battle."What a frightening beast, isn't it? Disregard the ECCM package, for some reason i expected it to work on the whole fleet. The flagship had two jobs, capturing unguarded strategic points, and otherwise sleep on a corner of the map. Its sole purpose is to regenerate my command points. I could get OPcenter in an actual combat ship, but that would imply bringing it to the frontline, leaving it vulnerable to CR degradation, also taking precious deployment points that my combat officers could use better than me.
Now that i got everything i need, here's to the main battle ! I have enough points to deploy 4 Odysseys and the Hound. The Hound try to snatch one or two strategic points before retreating to the edge of the map, the Odyssey, all crewed by Aggressive and Reckless officers, tore through the Dickerson's vanguard.
The screenshot doesn't do it justice, the Odysseys are complete savage when it comes to destroy smaller ships. Even the big ones doesn't hold very long, especially when i order them to focus fire on a specific target. I avoided doing that though, not only i didn't needed to destroy the big ships but i preferred to hoard my CPs in case some of my Odyssey found themselves in tricky situations, which regularly happen given their reckless manoeuvres.
A single Odyssey can rip apart even 4 or 5 ships together, but more than that is asking for trouble. In those screenshot, i'm trying to spread my ships to prevent the enemies from surrounding me and herd the pirate armada into smaller, more vulnerable groups. Unfortunately, some mistakes were made.
I sadly lost of 3 of them like that. Fortunately for me, they still performed very admirably, destroying the majority of destroyers, and even some cruisers and capital ships. Time for them to retreat, and bring the rest of the fleet for the second phase. Five fully operation Astrals ready to rumble, without the risk of being surrounded (why i can deploy those five now, despite costing the same to deploy, but not five Odyssey at the beginning? Seems like i gained some additional deployment points during battle, but i don't know how).
I place the first fighter strike order on a Renegade battleship, and watched the firework.
I still have to place some waypoints here and there for my carriers, but overall the threat is minimal, and eventually the Dickerson's armada run out of capital ships.
Victory !
To conclude, let's say that OPcenter is a fun hullmod, and pretty strong too. Combining regenerating orders with the flexibility of carriers seems like the winning move of 0.8.