Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: goduranus on September 01, 2019, 06:13:37 AM
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It is my opinion that spamming with Spark Drovers is the fastest way to win battles in 0.91, and some people here and on reddit say they can do it faster with another setup. So let's have a competition!
If anyone wants to participate, post a saved gamed before you fight a large battle, then fight that said battle and try to win the fastest, and then post your time with 2-3 screenshots or a video recording. You can upload the save to google drive, and either I or another carrier spammer will text edit the save to swap your fleet with a carrier fleet, and try to beat the battle faster with carriers.
The non-carrier side can use any setup you want, except for pure carriers, up to the 30 ship limit. While whoever is testing for the carrier side will be limited to only carriers and civilian ships, up to the 30 ship limit. (The carrier side is not limited to Drovers, because with certain enemies like a large number of Onslaughts or Space Stations, mixing Drovers with Astrals will be faster than pure Drovers)
The enemy you fight should be at least one, or multiple large late game fleets with several capital ships. It could be a bounty target, a faction expedition, or an encounter in a high threat redacted system. It should be unmodded, because it's the stock game balance we are testing. (please no obvious gimmick battles like running down a lone freighter with your Safety Override phase ship, cuz that's not really a battle)
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Are we talking world-time or player-time? Because second strongly penalizes phase ships.
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Real world time, not really penalizing because phase ships are still moving and reloading at the normal speed relative to real world time when phased. It's real world hours we are spending when we play the game after all.
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Wouldn't this be easier to setup with a few mission files, and perhaps some variant files, rather than a save file?
You're basically asking someone who is interested in this to play to late game if they don't have a non-modded end game save on hand, plus all the usual RNG associated with getting the ships you want in the run, while the spark drovers are just getting edited in with no thought of how easy all those spark fighters are to obtain prior to end game. Are we counting real time from start of game to drover spark spam capable of taking an end game fleet versus start to end game capable non-drover non-spark fleet? Because nearly by definition, I can take end game bounty fleet by the time I can farm Sparks.
You say no mods, but is it OK for someone to use console commands mod or edit a save file on their end? What if its a mod game, but a vanilla fleet versus a fleet only using vanilla weapons in a modded game?
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Uploading a save is the easiest way for to submit a scenario, someone could just grab a save on hand, find an enemy and upload the save.
The person submitting can also text edit or use an editor to put his fleet into a fresh game.
This competition is on a battle for battle basis. I would also like to see a race to the endgame between carrier fleets vs a non-carrier fleet, achieved by the earliest game date. I still think carriers will win, because carriers don't really need Sparks or Officers to do well, but warships tend to require officers and very specific equipment or hull mod like Plasma Cannon or Hardened Shields. It's not hard to find Sparks, you can farm them in mid-threat systems, very easily if you take the salvage boosting industry skill.
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Oh no mods? ;D LOL
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I care less about time and more about efficiency. If a Spark Drover can take on fleets that are impossible or much harder with other (and especially more intuitive) fleet compositions, then I would want to use Spark Drover fleet unless my computer cannot handle so many fighters.
Before I used full Spark Drover spam against Remnants, I used a fleet of two battleships, two Dooms, an Astral, and about six Spark Drovers. The biggest ships had level 20 officers in them. I often beat single Ordos fleet, but often the battleships take damage. When I used Paragon and twenty Spark Drovers, they shredded a similar Ordos fleet. Paragon took minor damage and I lost two Drover to carelessness (but they were recovered). The Drover had no officers and no Fighter Doctrine from my character. If my computer did not slow down as much, it would be more efficient due to how cheap Drovers are compared to bigger ships, and most important, they did not need skills to wreck Remnants. Skills probably would make them better, but when unskilled Drover fleet could at least match a bigger fleet with officer skill power, that says something.
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Uploading a save is the easiest way for to submit a scenario, someone could just grab a save on hand, find an enemy and upload the save.
The person submitting can also text edit or use an editor to put his fleet into a fresh game.
This competition is on a battle for battle basis. I would also like to see a race to the endgame between carrier fleets vs a non-carrier fleet, achieved by the earliest game date. I still think carriers will win, because carriers don't really need Sparks or Officers to do well, but warships tend to require officers and very specific equipment or hull mod like Plasma Cannon or Hardened Shields. It's not hard to find Sparks, you can farm them in mid-threat systems, very easily if you take the salvage boosting industry skill.
Well, editing in a fleet into a fresh game certainly should make it go much faster. Still need to grind bounties to get them up, but that should go quick. I'll see if I can get a game in a reasonable position for this.
As for the race to end game, you'd need to put some thought into starting conditions. You'd probably want to provide a seed so everyone is on equal footing. Similarly, the start options should be the same - Wolf start, no tutorial, iron man? Can only use carriers in combat for the carrier restricted play through? What is the stopping point? There's a lot of variables to consider even in a vanilla only game.
For an easy start, I'm partial to MN-1234567890, as Duzahk has a really nice 3 colony world setup. Although perhaps you want something without close and easy colony worlds.
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Yeah I too think there needs to be some thoughts going into a full play to endgame run, standardization of the starting conditions and such.
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I say it every time fighter balance gets mentioned, but.....
Fighters being neither fun nor engaging to fight either with, or against, is a bigger issue than their current power level.
Fixing balance is largely just tweaking numbers, fixing gameplay requires a rethink of fundamentals.
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I only dislike fighters because 1) if I want to pilot a carrier, I must get the three personal fighter skills in Leadership and lock myself into two or three of the useful dedicated carriers and run away while fighters kill all, and 2) they slow my several year old computer more if there are too many, and player needs too many. Thankfully, next release will have skill re-spec.
If I can pilot a good warship and the rest of my fleet are carriers that melt the enemy better than anything else, then the only problem I have is my computer's frame rate. If I had a more powerful and modern computer that can handle fighter spam, I bet I would fully embrace carrier cheese.
Fighters are better pilums than pilums.
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I say it every time fighter balance gets mentioned, but.....
Fighters being neither fun nor engaging to fight either with, or against, is a bigger issue than their current power level.
Fixing balance is largely just tweaking numbers, fixing gameplay requires a rethink of fundamentals.
I dunno, sweeping enemy interceptors to make way for a longbow/trident bomber run my carriers have launched on a Legion can be engaging. Or taking into account the number of bombers that can come my way when flanking (or phase ships, or fast frigates). Its either numbers, turn fighter wings back into something closer to frigates than a weapon system, turn them closer into missiles, or remove them completely. And the last 3 options are very close to each other.
To be honest, I kind like having low survivability, but with really strong long range offense ships (i.e. carriers), as its different from just high defense, high offense line ships. A Heron feels very different from an Eagle. So I like having them to mix into fleets. Certainly my typical line up is half front line warships, half carriers, and then a fast response flagship that can get where its needed quickly.
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I would suggest my fleet, but of my vanilla fleet only one combat ship isn't technically a carrier (the paragon). The rest are Tempests, Odysseys, and Astrals. Not at all what you had in mind with drover spam+astrals, but a carrier is a carrier I guess.
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No other restrictions? Shouldn't the fleets need to match, either in cost or fleet deployment points or something? Otherwise what exactly are we comparing?
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No other restrictions? Shouldn't the fleets need to match, either in cost or fleet deployment points or something? Otherwise what exactly are we comparing?
Deployment points are handled by the game being unmodded. 500 is the max battle size unmodded. You are free to use a smaller fleet if you would prefer, but the same restrictions apply. There might be some wiggle room if you need some paragon weight to get deployment advantage, but the assumption is that you are personally making the most optimized (including in deployment advantage) fleet you can, and the carrier guy will be doing the same.
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Allright, just checking. This is an endgame speed test then, no other considerations.
I would honestly be more interested at different power breakpoints - how does carrier spam do with 5 carriers? 10? At what point does the power exceed what warships can do?
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I can say that five Spark Drovers do not mean very much in my battleship and Doom fleet. It is probably a critical mass thing. Not enough, and you waste your time. Exceed critical mass and you steamroll everything.
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I only dislike fighters because 1) if I want to pilot a carrier, I must get the three personal fighter skills in Leadership and lock myself into two or three of the useful dedicated carriers and run away while fighters kill all, and 2) they slow my several year old computer more if there are too many, and player needs too many.
I dislike them because you have so limited control over your carrier/fighters.
And because you can spam them endlessly (but not missiles, something that would be smaller and cheaper to fabricate).
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There is 100% no way that a carrier fleet out performs a battleship fleet player piloted.
1 Odyssey piloted by the player
X dooms piloted by steady AI officers up to your deployment limit.
Y tempests/omens to fill in the deployment difference between your cap and your normal fleet. (Ideally also piloted by officers)
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The issue isn't carrier spam, its Sparks.
Sparks do multiple things that, in critical mass, make them absolutely broken.
A) They have shields. Now, five sparks having shields doesn't matter because they get bursted down, but when you have 50 sparks, it gives every Spark a chance to breath, which allows them to regen shields... which essentially makes them unkillable, unlike most other fighters that run on armor + hull values instead.
B) They have Burst PD, which is THE best anti fighter and missle defense... with 5, not so bad, with 50 Sparks, this translates to disabling all enemy ships of two of the most effective weapons the AI can throw at you. Pilliums, Reaper, Astropos, Bombers; all of them are disabled by the swarm of Sparks.
C) Burst PD, unlike normal PD, is actually effective at both defense (point defense) AND offense. Which means when you let Sparks control the battlefield, they are like a swarm of bee's. Burst PD on 5 Sparks isn't too bad as it never really breaks shields, but 50 sparks spamming down a single target is like 10 frigates firing at your ships simultaneously every few seconds. That wipes out almost everything in the game except Ordos. But when you get 100, or even 200 sparks? Its essentially game over for everything you fight; even Radiants have trouble against this, and they have some of the best PD for a Capital.
D) Finally, they cost NO CREW. This means even if you suffer losses, there is no downsized to this strategy, unlike Talon + Broadsword spam, which is good but has heavy attrition costs after the battle is over.
All of this coupled together makes Sparks very good at early game, very good mid game, balanced for late game, but ONLY in limited numbers. Once you hit critical mass levels (200 sparks, which is 20 drovers) then its essentially game over. You have won; nothing can stop you. Bonus points if you have 10 level 20 carrier officers and put them on 10 of the drovers.
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There is 100% no way that a carrier fleet out performs a battleship fleet player piloted.
1 Odyssey piloted by the player
X dooms piloted by steady AI officers up to your deployment limit.
Y tempests/omens to fill in the deployment difference between your cap and your normal fleet. (Ideally also piloted by officers)
Would this work against double or higher Ordos fleet, especially with less than 300 DP? goduranus has that video showing Drovers wiping out four Ordos fleets in a single encounter.
Maybe Drover spam is not the fastest way in terms of playing time, especially if player gets more slowdown. However, a slow-acting fleet that wins is faster than a fast-acting fleet that crashes and burns against a wall.
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There is 100% no way that a carrier fleet out performs a battleship fleet player piloted.
1 Odyssey piloted by the player
X dooms piloted by steady AI officers up to your deployment limit.
Y tempests/omens to fill in the deployment difference between your cap and your normal fleet. (Ideally also piloted by officers)
Would this work against double or higher Ordos fleet, especially with less than 300 DP? goduranus has that video showing Drovers wiping out four Ordos fleets in a single encounter.
Maybe Drover spam is not the fastest way in terms of playing time, especially if player gets more slowdown. However, a slow-acting fleet that wins is faster than a fast-acting fleet that crashes and burns against a wall.
Yes it works and it is faster, but it is not without losses. It is magnitudes faster if you do 4-5 huge ordo fleets in succession and that is also lossless. Fighting the whole 100 at once is at least 5 minutes faster for me with some losses, but I am not built to give ship advantage nor specifically against ordo
Edit: to maybe go a bit deeper - the remnant capital ship negates the biggest advantage the odyssey has. It cannot disengage against it so if anywhere on the battlefield an odyssey becomes high flux and there is one of those there it can die to it. It will never happen if you have the deployment advantage numerically wise. but if you are in a 200 to 300 battle it will. After all the remnant capital is basically a paragon in firepower, onslaught in armor and so on and an odyssey in speed.
Dooms are also not that great against big ordo fleets cause the bombs just melt and the capital ship seems to be allowed to port onto the bombs without dmg.
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Picking off Ordos one by one is more optimal. Any good endgame fleet can do that. But a fleet (like optimized Spark Drover fleet) that can chew up and spit out four or so Ordos at the same time in one encounter without too much difficulty is impressive. (Meaning such an overpowered fleet does not need to bother separating Ordos.)
The fleet I use can pick off one Ordos at a time without much difficulty. Two is doable, but hard without taking losses. Three is not doable with the fleet I use without too many losses.
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My experience is similar with fighting multiple ordos with conventional fleets, 3 is the point where numerical disadvantage prevents me from deploying enough ships to cleanly win the initial battle. It makes some sense that spark drover spam wouldn't have the problem as much, but I doubt my computer can really handle that many fighters.
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Picking off Ordos one by one is more optimal. Any good endgame fleet can do that. But a fleet (like optimized Spark Drover fleet) that can chew up and spit out four or so Ordos at the same time in one encounter without too much difficulty is impressive. (Meaning such an overpowered fleet does not need to bother separating Ordos.)
The fleet I use can pick off one Ordos at a time without much difficulty. Two is doable, but hard without taking losses. Three is not doable with the fleet I use without too many losses.
You are missing the point though - this is about speed in realtime Doing it one by one isn't a problem for the contest. You can even bring a station if you so see fit.
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Is there a point in trying to compete against a hands off carrier fleet in terms of real time? If you don't pilot anything personally, you can just put it on 2-3 time multiplier with 'speed up' mod.
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The issue isn't carrier spam, its Sparks.
Sparks do multiple things that, in critical mass, make them absolutely broken.
A) They have shields. Now, five sparks having shields doesn't matter because they get bursted down, but when you have 50 sparks, it gives every Spark a chance to breath, which allows them to regen shields... which essentially makes them unkillable, unlike most other fighters that run on armor + hull values instead.
B) They have Burst PD, which is THE best anti fighter and missle defense... with 5, not so bad, with 50 Sparks, this translates to disabling all enemy ships of two of the most effective weapons the AI can throw at you. Pilliums, Reaper, Astropos, Bombers; all of them are disabled by the swarm of Sparks.
C) Burst PD, unlike normal PD, is actually effective at both defense (point defense) AND offense. Which means when you let Sparks control the battlefield, they are like a swarm of bee's. Burst PD on 5 Sparks isn't too bad as it never really breaks shields, but 50 sparks spamming down a single target is like 10 frigates firing at your ships simultaneously every few seconds. That wipes out almost everything in the game except Ordos. But when you get 100, or even 200 sparks? Its essentially game over for everything you fight; even Radiants have trouble against this, and they have some of the best PD for a Capital.
All of this coupled together makes Sparks very good at early game, very good mid game, balanced for late game, but ONLY in limited numbers. Once you hit critical mass levels (200 sparks, which is 20 drovers) then its essentially game over. You have won; nothing can stop you. Bonus points if you have 10 level 20 carrier officers and put them on 10 of the drovers.
Lots of fighters have shields. Spark shields aren't even particularly good, and they can easily get 1-shot by large weapons. Burst PD are also only the best small energy pd. Ballistic or medium+ energy PD outperforms them easily. Flack cannons and the like can (in numbers) create a wall that absolutely no missiles can bypass and will kill fighters en-mass (critical mass of AOE damage cannot be defeated by sheer numbers). Actually, I think that if you wanted to test for this builds weakness, you should try fighting a Hegemony fleet. Tons of Ballistic PD and high armor on their dominators and onslaughts should give them enough advantage to slow down your assault compared to a more specialized fleet.
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Is there a point in trying to compete against a hands off carrier fleet in terms of real time? If you don't pilot anything personally, you can just put it on 2-3 time multiplier with 'speed up' mod.
Yeah finding the mixed fleet that is quicker and does it hands off.
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Is there a point in trying to compete against a hands off carrier fleet in terms of real time? If you don't pilot anything personally, you can just put it on 2-3 time multiplier with 'speed up' mod.
Cause combat is fun and you enjoy piloting yourself. So AFKing in 280 DP of drovers might get boring?
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Is there a point in trying to compete against a hands off carrier fleet in terms of real time? If you don't pilot anything personally, you can just put it on 2-3 time multiplier with 'speed up' mod.
Cause combat is fun and you enjoy piloting yourself. So AFKing in 280 DP of drovers might get boring?
I'm not disputing that combat is fun. But if you just want to optimize 'time spent' metric - AFKing in Drovers is clearly the way to go.
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Is there a point in trying to compete against a hands off carrier fleet in terms of real time? If you don't pilot anything personally, you can just put it on 2-3 time multiplier with 'speed up' mod.
Cause combat is fun and you enjoy piloting yourself. So AFKing in 280 DP of drovers might get boring?
Drovers benefit greatly from being managed from the tactical map, Afking won't cut it against some of the stronger enemies. Gotta use waypoints to set their formation and give orders to focus fire when there are particularly threatening enemies on the field.
I find that they do best when put into an arrow formation, and as enemies start breaking through I have to set new waypoints to keep the formation in roughly the same shape while backing off.
When fighting several battleships at once the formation fiddling can get quite intense.
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Is there a point in trying to compete against a hands off carrier fleet in terms of real time? If you don't pilot anything personally, you can just put it on 2-3 time multiplier with 'speed up' mod.
Cause combat is fun and you enjoy piloting yourself. So AFKing in 280 DP of drovers might get boring?
Drovers benefit greatly from being managed from the tactical map, Afking won't cut it against some of the stronger enemies. Gotta use waypoints to set their formation and give orders to focus fire when there are particularly threatening enemies on the field.
I find that they do best when put into an arrow formation, and as enemies start breaking through I have to set new waypoints to keep the formation in roughly the same shape while backing off.
When fighting several battleships at once the formation fiddling can get quite intense.
Warships by contrast respond very poorly to orders. If you order them to move to a waypoint, they will not stop whatever they are currently doing, only when they've finished fighting their current target and everything else in their path will they go there, even if the waypoint was intended as a retreat point. If you order them to eliminate an enemy they will, completely ignoring every other enemy in the area and getting killed, yet still failing to close distance and fully take advantage of their guns. If you order them to escort, they attempt to remain fully fixed in escort position even after engaging the enemy, neither avoiding attacks nor moving in to shoot. All in all, giving them orders at all usually does more harm than good.
Eliminate can be used to reasonable effect if you want them to move somewhere, or to actually engage a solo enemy. Telling a warship to eliminate an enemy near something you want them to rescue works, though it carries a very high risk to the warship you issue the order to. Otherwise your only option for useful orders once combat begins is retreat at full speed, which can still be canceled before the warship reaches the map edge and actually leaves battle.
Escort is the order that I would most like to see worked on. Instead of being fixed into position, they should be given a looser leash and allowed to engage nearby enemies at will as long as they don't travel too far, with special priority given to engaging whatever enemy is targeted by, or targeting their escort target.
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If 280 DP of Drovers can win fleets that exist when a mixed fleet cannot, then I would consider that a problem. Whether it is faster or not isn't as much a problem unless the difference is large.