Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[DaLagga]

you missed entire point of thread.

when you have access to all ships at same time, there are NO REASONS to pick inferior ships at all.
there are absolutely no reasons to use drums when you can have phaetons.
no reasons to use buffalo when you have tarsus
no reason to use prometheus or atlast as long as you not hit fleet size limit, because there are no tradeoffs, they strictly inferior compared to smaller ships.

Again, I disagree.  It depends on what point in the game you are at and what it is you are going for.  A Dram is not straight up inferior to a Prometheus or vice versa because it depends on your fleet composition, point in the game, and goals.  If you're late in the game and want a large battle fleet, the Prometheus is clearly the better option because it gives you 2.5k fuel and only eats up 1 ship slot.  If you're very early in the game, the Dram is probably better.  If you're just out exploring with a modest fleet, the Phaeton might be the best option.  It just depends on what you are doing but it's simply wrong to say that a Prometheus or Atlas are inferior considering just how many smaller ships you need to equal their carrying capacity. 

[Baxter]

The prometheus and Atlas are absolutely inferior options, particularly because I can much more easily attain good d-mods for the colossus or phaeton due to its availability to bring down its supply cost to a fraction of base. The fact that I don't need to take militarized subsystems or augmented engines also means I can throw on things like expanded fuel/cargo, survey scanners, high resolution sensors, or whatever else that might be useful.
Currently in the game, taking the bigger+slower ships results in a compounding issue of higher fuel and supply consumption and slower speed, which means you'll probably want to take tug boats which also consume a fair amount of fuel and supplies, only the latter of which can be mitigated.

If the prometheus and atlas are going to be slow then they need some benefit other than just fleet size limit, particularly when that's an arbitrary limit I can just edit a text file to get past,

[DatonKallandor]

Just so it's clear, Speed does not influence fuel consumption - that is entirely based on distance travelled, regardless of burn speed. Having a slower fleet does not increase fuel consumption.

[RawCode]

Atlas 50% less efficient then basic options, it's just typo, 200 is 50% less then 300.

Issue with burn speed is:
If you want to get burn 8 with prometheus, you need hullmods or tugs, tugs consume additional supplies and fuel.

Just flying around with burn 6 result in getting anywhere significantly slower, this does not cost additional fuel directly, but it do cost additional supplies, as traveling goes slower.

At same time, getting burn 9 with phaetons is "free" and you can install expanded fuel tanks and efficiency overhaul for ever better cost per unit of cargo results.

[intrinsic_parity]

Prometheus is for when you want to drag 4 capitals across the sector to a remnant system. The fleet caps mean drams literally can't do that. If you want to use a fleet of 20ish ships with capital, you need prometheus to have any decent fuel range and space to salvage more ships, and you also probably could care less about supplies in the late game so efficiency doesn't matter anymore. They are two ships for two different parts of the game, they never are competing for the same spots in my fleet. Choosing the exact moment to transition is the only question, and that's mostly a question of when do you want to sacrifice burn speed for fleet size and strength.

[RawCode]

kay, after 4 capitals you have 26 fleet points left...

4 capitals and 26 phaetons (drum is strictly inferior to phaeton) can perfectly travel around just fine.

[Retry]

Atlas 50% less efficient then basic options, it's just typo, 200 is 50% less then 300.

No.
You're clearly taking the cargo ship's total cargo capacity and dividing them by their maintenance rate (supplies/month) and calling that number significant in determining the ship's value, with larger numbers being more valuable.  If the ship's cargo bay was purely made of supplies, the number would be reflective of the number of months that ship could fly around before it ran out of supplies.  So a larger number is clearly better.

By your own numbers and your own criteria, (which can be verified via wiki or in-game)

Buffalo is 100
Tarsus is 100
Colossus is 150
Atlas is 200

200>150, and 200>100

Conclusion: By your own criteria of measuring efficiency, Atlas is the most efficient of the Cargo Hauling options.  Not least.

[Thaago]

kay, after 4 capitals you have 26 fleet points left...

4 capitals and 26 phaetons (drum is strictly inferior to phaeton) can perfectly travel around just fine.

Now you are just being a pain for the sake of contrariness.

[ChaseBears]

drams are just straight up better than phaetons

theyre better armed and much faster with the same efficiencies and more OP budget


also really have a hard time justifying destroyer freighters

shepherds are decent in every way, and then i go straight for the Colossus which carries 3x as much as a destroyer

[Torch]

Maintenance efficiency is an extremely poor metric for comparing freighters of all things. Fuel efficiency is waaay more important, and is what I use to judge the best haulers for my fleet. 1 Atlas and 1 Prometheus are enough to supply a mid-size fleet for exploring pretty much the entire sector, and that's before the cargo expansion hullmods.

[TaLaR]

In the end unless you change 30 ship limit in config you are forced to use larger ships, even if Drams for fuel and Buffalos for cargo would have been perfect otherwise.
I just prefer to set it to more reasonable value of 60 though (high enough that I can forget about ship limit).

[intrinsic_parity]

kay, after 4 capitals you have 26 fleet points left...

4 capitals and 26 phaetons (drum is strictly inferior to phaeton) can perfectly travel around just fine.

Prometheus is for when you want to drag 4 capitals across the sector to a remnant system. The fleet caps mean drams literally can't do that. If you want to use a fleet of 20ish ships with capital...

Literally the next sentence established what anyone who has played the late game knows, that end game fleets typically have 20+ ships with multiple capitals consuming hundreds of fuel per light year. You typically have 10 or fewer fleet slots available for logistics ships and you also want fleet slots available for salvaging new ships and cargo haulers. In this case you have 3-4 slots at most available for fuel tankers.

Think about it this way, there are 4 factors that IMO affect which tanker you will buy:
price, supply efficiency, fleet slot efficiency and burn speed.

For the beginning of the game, drams are cheap and fast meaning you can actually afford them and have more money left over for combat ships, and you can run away from all the threats in the game easily. These are your main concerns in the early game.

In the mid game, phaetons are more supply efficient, and more fleet slot efficient than the dram which are the new major concerns in the mid game. Supplies are a very large concern in the middle of the game when you don't really have an income, and fleet slot efficiency starts to be important as you are expanding your fleet with lots of destroyers and some cruisers, approaching the fleet cap. Burn speed is still important to avoid the largest fleets but less important now.

In the late game, supplies, price and burn are all totally irrelevant. You have insane amounts of money from colonies so you can buy however many supplies you want and however many ships you want, and there are no threats outside of stations so burn speed is just convenience. The only real concern is fleet slot efficiency. At this point in the game, you likely have 2 or 3 full fleets of additional ships sitting in storage. You want to bring large fleets to deal with stations and raids and that means you are left with a small number of slots to supply a large number of fuel intensive ships. Prometheus is the only choice in the situation.

[RawCode]

it's only choice solely for arbitrary fleet size limit of 30 ships and lack of any automated logistics.
you run industry that much stronger then industry of local factions, that were in sector for ages, but unable to issue fetch quest for someone else.