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Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: CanaldoVoid on June 04, 2021, 04:40:30 AM

Title: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 04, 2021, 04:40:30 AM
So I've played the game after a long break and I was pleased to see that armor was MUCH more impactful than it used to be, any cruiser level ships can take some heavy punishment when their shields go down.

That being said armor doesn't regenerate (unless they add some hullmod for that?) and all this does is buy time.

The one big reason why low tech ships often end up losing to high tex is flux, both efficiency and cap, and even the shields are often not as efficient as high tech ships either.

So instead of taking away their identity and making low tech ships have more flux how about this:

Make small slot PD weapons cost 0 OP (yes, zero)
Make some small slot weapons cost a little bit of OP, like 1 or 2 for stuff like raiguns.
Greatly decrease flux generation for small slot weapons, specially ballistics

The reasoning: Often low tech ships just want to get in your face and dish as much damage as possible, while high tech ships often have great range (specially the paragon) that would create an opposing playing style, the high tech wants to be as far away as possible so they can vent flux and tank stuff using their shields  while the low tech ones don't necessarily care about the shields, and often have access to charging turbo speed skills, if they can turn on a lot of extra firepower from small slot weapons without imposing too heavily on their OP and flux dissipation they should be MUCh deadlier in close ranges, than they currently are.

Besides, low tech ships are often best built sacrificing most of their weapon slots, does it matter if the dominator or the onslaught have so many slots? No, not at all, most people build exactly ZERO small weapons on them to save on both OP and flux, and that's one of the big reasons why they are so bad compared to high tech ships, if an onslaught really could pump out all the firepower it could bring into the fight then it would be a very scary ship, at least up close.

Tl.dr high tech ships still retain their status of great shields+long range+kiting while low tech ships become very dangerous reckless brawlers instead of just charging into their deaths due to lack of firepower and shields
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 04, 2021, 04:43:11 AM
Also, the reason why I said zero OP instead of 1 is because if I had to chose between adding a bunch of small mounts that can't scratch a hull and often don't even shoot at the enemy, or adding another hullmod by removing dozens of them instead I'd still take the hullmod, they are that bad

In fact frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 04, 2021, 05:18:54 AM
That being said armor doesn't regenerate (unless they add some hullmod for that?) and all this does is buy time.
Not in combat, but there's skills for it after combat, both on a fleet and individual officer level.

Also have you checked out the latest blog?
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=21820.0
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Grievous69 on June 04, 2021, 05:23:38 AM
Changing the cost of small PD guns to 0 OP basically removes any choice involved in making builds. Why would you ever leave mounts empty in that scenario? There's no trade-off.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 04, 2021, 04:13:58 PM
Changing the cost of small PD guns to 0 OP basically removes any choice involved in making builds. Why would you ever leave mounts empty in that scenario? There's no trade-off.
Quite the opposite, right now there is no choice, every small weapon is a pure negative on a ship, making them cost as much as they are worth (zero) will give you the choice between adding them, or not adding them to save more flux.

And believe me, the way they are now many ships will still chose not to take them.
The only exceptions are probably small railguns and anti matter blasters
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 04, 2021, 04:15:57 PM
That being said armor doesn't regenerate (unless they add some hullmod for that?) and all this does is buy time.
Not in combat, but there's skills for it after combat, both on a fleet and individual officer level.

Also have you checked out the latest blog?
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=21820.0
Thanks, it's a nice start, but it still doesn't change the fact that low tech loses in both offensive and defensive power, being more usable is just one aspect in which they are lacking.

An onslaught or dominator with all of it's weapon mounts is useless if they don't actually put any of them to use, and if they do they end up exploding even faster and getting even worse due to flux stats and OP costs

Even with this massive buff I still feel like high tech will still have the edge in combat most of the time, without it it's a nobrainer, low tech is only ever valuable if you use the broken/cheesy Derelic contingent skill.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Retry on June 04, 2021, 08:53:33 PM
Changing the cost of small PD guns to 0 OP basically removes any choice involved in making builds. Why would you ever leave mounts empty in that scenario? There's no trade-off.
Quite the opposite, right now there is no choice, every small weapon is a pure negative on a ship, making them cost as much as they are worth (zero) will give you the choice between adding them, or not adding them to save more flux.
Railguns and Needlers are very good small ballistic kinetics which pair well with HE missiles and low-ish end HE medium ballistics.  Vulcans are excellent cheap general PD weapons, it only needs a few to make a firing arc extremely resilient to missile threats without dedicating valuable Medium or Large slots to the task.  Light Mortars are already cheap and flux efficient HE guns you can just plop on when there's more mounts available than your flux or OP can feasibly support (Lasher, Mora).  LMGs & DLMGs are excellent compliments to ACGs in SO builds.
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while high tech ships often have great range (specially the paragon)
Mostly false.
High tech ships are reliant on energy weapons.  Their long-range options are the following:

Small
Tactical Laser: 1000 range, Soft flux, low damage, fairly poor efficiency for its size.  It's far easier to find threads with people saying it's too weak than it is to find people saying it's too strong, not used terribly frequently (sometimes for IPDAI shenanigans).
LR PD Laser: By technicality (800 range).  Soft flux, not suited to anti-ship roles due to poor hitting power.

Medium
Graviton Beam: 1000 range, Soft flux, kinetic but still low damage, fairly good flux efficiency (especially vs shields).  Like the Tactical Laser, it also tends to spawn the "This Gun Sucks" sort of thread.

Large
High Intensity Laser: 1000 range, Soft flux, lots of HE damage.  Nice vs armor and hull but needs help to get through shields
Tachyon Lance: 1000 range, Soft flux, lots of burst energy damage with an EMP component and arcing if target has high flux.  While good, it's not terribly high raw DPS and the arcing effect needs hard flux to work at all, so again, needs help to get through shields.

Important to note that energy (and High Tech as such) has no long-range hard flux options whatsoever.  By contrast, though Small Ballistics lack 1000-range hardflux guns in Vanilla (and thank god for that), 2 good hard flux Medium Ballistics at the 1000 range bracket in the form of HVDs and Heavy Maulers, 1 hard flux Large Ballistic that still holds the record of longest base range in the game (Gauss Cannon, 1200), and a smattering of 900-range hard flux Large Ballistics that outrange vanilla energy's hard flux options.

The only high-tech warship that can compete in the Range game is the Paragon, specifically due to its built-in Targeting Core Mod giving a +100% range bonus over DTC's +50% and ITU's +60%.  Without that hullmod the Paragon's just a big, annoying shield brick that any other cap specced for range can blow over (with time).

So no, high tech does not have a general range advantage over Lowtech or Midline, in fact the exact opposite is true.
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low tech ships are often best built sacrificing most of their weapon slots
Sort of covered in the first reply, but Lowtech (and often Midline) ships do not gain anything by sacrificing most of their weapon slots.  Very few even downsize their weapon slots, though it's not unheard of.  Most of the consistently best performing low-tech builds neither downsize mounts nor remove them entirely.

In fact, it's often high tech ships (and occasionally Midline) that benefit from forgoing mounts.  Energy PD is often ineffectual overall, often placed in poor positions and poor quality arcs, and expensive for its DP cost.  No point putting in 12 OP for rear PD lasers on your Medusa if they won't even stop a Salamander, might as well use your integrated Omni-shielding to stop them anyways and use the OP to bolster the rest of the ship.  Apogee is another high-tech ship that suffers from this problem, many of the turret mounts are of poor quality, so most of the best Apogee builds neglect those and double down on enhancing what the large energy hardpoint and the large missile slot can do.

Again, the reverse is more true than your initial claim.
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the high tech wants to be as far away as possible so they can vent flux and tank stuff using their shields
I can't very well benefit from the Energy Weapon Mastery skill if I'm as far away as possible, now can I?

Heck, I can't very well use my hard flux energy weapons at all if I'm as far away as possible, because as previously shown High Tech does not have a hard-flux range advantage.
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In fact frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.
The number of frigates which have had slot improvements in Star Sector patch 0.95 is 1.  0 if neglecting ships that have been rehauled into a completely different ship (which is to say, Hyperion).

The improvement Frigates received in 0.95 is slightly tied to improvements to some key small weapons (IR Pulse Laser, notably), and primarily tied to the reworked Skill system which enabled several strong frigate-specific (and CQC specific in the case of hightech & midline frigates) buffs to both raw firepower and PPT.  Hyperion was a complete rework, other than that mount changes had nothing to do with it (and didn't happen as you describe).
Quote
Make small slot PD weapons cost 0 OP (yes, zero)
Make some small slot weapons cost a little bit of OP, like 1 or 2 for stuff like raiguns.
Greatly decrease flux generation for small slot weapons, specially ballistics
Ah, right, the suggestion itself.

Considering the obvious that all ships are currently designed with certain factors in mind (notably: that weapons are not free), this would quite obviously break the shipbuilding portion of the game and require, at minimum, an Ordnance Point shift for every ship in the game (yes, all of them).

One of the more amusing ways it would break things is by making the downsizing of medium mounts with what used to be premium weaponry far more fashionable.  For a tangible example, the Railgun already makes the Arbalest Autocannon's life quite hard, and they're the same cost.  At 2 OP it's a blatant no brainer to take a Railgun over that, and with an extra flux efficiency buff for smalls like you've suggested they can also easily replace masses of not just low-end mediums or even high-end mediums with downsized Smalls, using OP saved to easily compensate the slight theoretical DPS and range losses through caps, vents, and a shipload of hullmods.



Anyways, most of what's being stated is flat-out incorrect, and these assumptions appear to be at least partially based on poor loadout designs.  I, and plenty of people more experienced in Star Sector than me, would be curious to see your designs over at General, so we can critique the ships and find out precisely why you believe small weapons are so, uh, bad.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Morgan Rue on June 04, 2021, 09:29:28 PM
Am just here to state that you are probably not putting Integrated Targeting Unit or Dedicated Targeting Core on your Cruisers and Capitals, CanaldoVoid. One of these range boost hullmods is essential for larger ships to function properly. This is perhaps why you feel outranged and outspeeded?

either that or your entire game consists of only Paragons somehow?

Would you mind posting some screenshots of the ship fits you use? The base game will take a screenshot when you press printscreen and put it in the Fractal Softworks\Starsector\screenshots folder
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 04, 2021, 10:37:15 PM
Changing the cost of small PD guns to 0 OP basically removes any choice involved in making builds. Why would you ever leave mounts empty in that scenario? There's no trade-off.
Quite the opposite, right now there is no choice, every small weapon is a pure negative on a ship, making them cost as much as they are worth (zero) will give you the choice between adding them, or not adding them to save more flux.
Railguns and Needlers are very good small ballistic kinetics which pair well with HE missiles and low-ish end HE medium ballistics.  Vulcans are excellent cheap general PD weapons, it only needs a few to make a firing arc extremely resilient to missile threats without dedicating valuable Medium or Large slots to the task.  Light Mortars are already cheap and flux efficient HE guns you can just plop on when there's more mounts available than your flux or OP can feasibly support (Lasher, Mora).  LMGs & DLMGs are excellent compliments to ACGs in SO builds.
Quote
while high tech ships often have great range (specially the paragon)
Mostly false.
High tech ships are reliant on energy weapons.  Their long-range options are the following:

Small
Tactical Laser: 1000 range, Soft flux, low damage, fairly poor efficiency for its size.  It's far easier to find threads with people saying it's too weak than it is to find people saying it's too strong, not used terribly frequently (sometimes for IPDAI shenanigans).
LR PD Laser: By technicality (800 range).  Soft flux, not suited to anti-ship roles due to poor hitting power.

Medium
Graviton Beam: 1000 range, Soft flux, kinetic but still low damage, fairly good flux efficiency (especially vs shields).  Like the Tactical Laser, it also tends to spawn the "This Gun Sucks" sort of thread.

Large
High Intensity Laser: 1000 range, Soft flux, lots of HE damage.  Nice vs armor and hull but needs help to get through shields
Tachyon Lance: 1000 range, Soft flux, lots of burst energy damage with an EMP component and arcing if target has high flux.  While good, it's not terribly high raw DPS and the arcing effect needs hard flux to work at all, so again, needs help to get through shields.

Important to note that energy (and High Tech as such) has no long-range hard flux options whatsoever.  By contrast, though Small Ballistics lack 1000-range hardflux guns in Vanilla (and thank god for that), 2 good hard flux Medium Ballistics at the 1000 range bracket in the form of HVDs and Heavy Maulers, 1 hard flux Large Ballistic that still holds the record of longest base range in the game (Gauss Cannon, 1200), and a smattering of 900-range hard flux Large Ballistics that outrange vanilla energy's hard flux options.

The only high-tech warship that can compete in the Range game is the Paragon, specifically due to its built-in Targeting Core Mod giving a +100% range bonus over DTC's +50% and ITU's +60%.  Without that hullmod the Paragon's just a big, annoying shield brick that any other cap specced for range can blow over (with time).

So no, high tech does not have a general range advantage over Lowtech or Midline, in fact the exact opposite is true.
Quote
low tech ships are often best built sacrificing most of their weapon slots
Sort of covered in the first reply, but Lowtech (and often Midline) ships do not gain anything by sacrificing most of their weapon slots.  Very few even downsize their weapon slots, though it's not unheard of.  Most of the consistently best performing low-tech builds neither downsize mounts nor remove them entirely.

In fact, it's often high tech ships (and occasionally Midline) that benefit from forgoing mounts.  Energy PD is often ineffectual overall, often placed in poor positions and poor quality arcs, and expensive for its DP cost.  No point putting in 12 OP for rear PD lasers on your Medusa if they won't even stop a Salamander, might as well use your integrated Omni-shielding to stop them anyways and use the OP to bolster the rest of the ship.  Apogee is another high-tech ship that suffers from this problem, many of the turret mounts are of poor quality, so most of the best Apogee builds neglect those and double down on enhancing what the large energy hardpoint and the large missile slot can do.

Again, the reverse is more true than your initial claim.
Quote
the high tech wants to be as far away as possible so they can vent flux and tank stuff using their shields
I can't very well benefit from the Energy Weapon Mastery skill if I'm as far away as possible, now can I?

Heck, I can't very well use my hard flux energy weapons at all if I'm as far away as possible, because as previously shown High Tech does not have a hard-flux range advantage.
Quote
In fact frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.
The number of frigates which have had slot improvements in Star Sector patch 0.95 is 1.  0 if neglecting ships that have been rehauled into a completely different ship (which is to say, Hyperion).

The improvement Frigates received in 0.95 is slightly tied to improvements to some key small weapons (IR Pulse Laser, notably), and primarily tied to the reworked Skill system which enabled several strong frigate-specific (and CQC specific in the case of hightech & midline frigates) buffs to both raw firepower and PPT.  Hyperion was a complete rework, other than that mount changes had nothing to do with it (and didn't happen as you describe).
Quote
Make small slot PD weapons cost 0 OP (yes, zero)
Make some small slot weapons cost a little bit of OP, like 1 or 2 for stuff like raiguns.
Greatly decrease flux generation for small slot weapons, specially ballistics
Ah, right, the suggestion itself.

Considering the obvious that all ships are currently designed with certain factors in mind (notably: that weapons are not free), this would quite obviously break the shipbuilding portion of the game and require, at minimum, an Ordnance Point shift for every ship in the game (yes, all of them).

One of the more amusing ways it would break things is by making the downsizing of medium mounts with what used to be premium weaponry far more fashionable.  For a tangible example, the Railgun already makes the Arbalest Autocannon's life quite hard, and they're the same cost.  At 2 OP it's a blatant no brainer to take a Railgun over that, and with an extra flux efficiency buff for smalls like you've suggested they can also easily replace masses of not just low-end mediums or even high-end mediums with downsized Smalls, using OP saved to easily compensate the slight theoretical DPS and range losses through caps, vents, and a shipload of hullmods.



Anyways, most of what's being stated is flat-out incorrect, and these assumptions appear to be at least partially based on poor loadout designs.  I, and plenty of people more experienced in Star Sector than me, would be curious to see your designs over at General, so we can critique the ships and find out precisely why you believe small weapons are so, uh, bad.

Listing useless weapons as exceptions to the rule does not make a point at all

Being the best small PD is like winning the special olympics, all small PD is worthless and not worth the cost, it's often better to just take a crappy missile to your own shields than waste the flux trying to shoot them down, if you're going for PD go for a real one devastator cannons or just let fighters take care of missiles instead, dual flak works too, but small PD? Sorry, that's shooting yourself in the foot.

As for the weapon ranges: We can safely ignore small slots, as usual, graviton beams are some of the best weapons in the game, people just don't understand what exactly it's doing, while it's not the most flux efficient or menacing weapon in the game, it is one with a meaningful amount of shield damage+range, the AI will often feel threatened by it and move back and forth while never lowering their own shields and eventually overloading because they can't catch a break, also, you forgot another one of the best weapons in the game with 1k range: Ion beams, they can turn off half an enemy ship through shields while doing something similar to grav beams, not worth it to spam these but having one in most ships is well worth the slot.
As for the large slots you've already covered the tachyon lances AKA: Anything smaller than a capital ship gets instantly destroyed by the deathstar paragon so there's that, if you add hullmods then yeah, nothing will outrange these 3 weapons, and that's often all you'll need.
But if you must build hardflux there's always the plasma cannon too, it's not the longest range weapon in the game, but it's in the upper brackets and considering high tech is often more mobile, there are no instances in which you'll be getting shot with them and won't be shooting back anyway.

Meanwhile ballistics have only one true long range weapon and it's in the railgun family, small, medium and large, and while the large version can outrange everything, on paper, it doesn't have access to adv optics, long range anti armor is often a bad idea anyway, 90% of the time you'll be hitting a shield so you're better off just using the railguns instead to overload their shields before they can retreat (since they are far anyway it's not hard) and hitting the hull with sub optimal damage, low damage > no damage.

The needlers used to be really, really great, a long time ago, now they often overload your own ships just as fast as they overload the enemy shields, and since the AI is a bit smarter about shields they sometimes decide to just tank it with armor dealing no real damage while still overloading your own ships, bad weapons in general.

so if you don't count the railgun family, and if you count the energy weapon hullmod you'll often use if you want to use energy weapons then pretty much every ballistic weapon will be outranged by energy weapons, so your post was incorrect, in fact there is only one ship that really makes use of very long range ballistics and that's because it's hull is made of paper and the shield is even worse, and that's the Conquest, which isn't even a low tech ship.

As for the energy weapon mastery, yeah, it was a weird one, basically it only exists for the sake of anti matter blaster spammers, phase lances as well but they are often both present in the same kinds of ships, dooms and some small size ships that move around the battlefield like assassins, no big ship would require that mastery and gunnery implants is often the superior choice unless you're going to specialize heavily, it's similar to phase mastery, necessary for phase ships, useless for everything else.
Curiously both of them are often picked together.
Oh and heavy Blasters too, but again, it's a small ship thing, often SO'd hunters and if you're using such heavy flux weapons you're also going to leave a lot of slots empty or melt trying to shoot.

That being said, if you're wasting more flux than you're generating with bad weapons that spend most of the time shooting at non-issues like PD then I would assume your own designs are quite poor instead, have you even finished all the content of the new patch? (doritos ships, etc... No modding/cheating to increase battle sizes or cheesing the fight)?

PS: Thinking back of some of your assumptions it sounds like you've been playing the early game over and over again, with the way you can cheese the game with story points that early game part doesn't last more than a couple of hours, since you can salvage a real ship very, very early and never look back, or are you using meme fleets like frigate spams?
It would be weird to imagine anyone thinking that high tech is anything but a long range fighter unless they are doing meme or early game fleets.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Thaago on June 04, 2021, 11:54:57 PM
Quote
so if you don't count the railgun family, and if you count the energy weapon hullmod you'll often use if you want to use energy weapons then pretty much every ballistic weapon will be outranged by energy weapons, so your post was incorrect, in fact there is only one ship that really makes use of very long range ballistics and that's because it's hull is made of paper and the shield is even worse, and that's the Conquest, which isn't even a low tech ship.

But this just isn't true. For every size class (small, medium, large) ballistic weapons have standard options that are longer ranged than all energy weapons of the same size, with the exception of beams (soft flux). Smalls: every ballistic small mount gun other than PD is 600 or 700 range vs energy's 500 range IR PD. Medium: Even without the 1000 range HVD and Heavy mauler, ballistic has the heavy autocannon at 800, heavy needler at 750, and the heavy mortar at 700 vs pulse laser/heavy blaster at 600. At large, Mk IX's, Heaphestus, and Mjolnirs are at 900 (and gauss at 1200) while autopulse/plasma is at 700. The Storm Needler is deliberately a short ranged brawling weapon and it has 700 range, same as the energy large mounts. You mention the Plasma Cannon as being in the upper band, but most medium ballistics are longer ranged than it, and every single large except the Storm Needler is longer ranged. They get boosted up to 1400 (1505 with gunnery implants) on a Paragon thanks to its special hullmod. A normal capital with a 900 range generic large has 1440 (1575 with gunnery) range... even with its +100% range Paragons are slightly outranged by the "medium" range large ballistics, and high tech ships without that special hullmod are uniformly outranged. They do get speed to compensate (except for the Apogee, which while a strong defensive ship is easily kited to death by pretty much anything built for it): high tech is all about close range fighting, unless they are attempting to overwhelm with beams which works right up until it really doesn't.

Advanced Optics is good, but only works on beams. Not to say beam builds are bad (love me my Artillery Sunder as a specialized support ship), but there are definite disadvantages to go with the range (low DPS for all but HIL and soft flux so is hard countered by SO and very good shields (cough remnants/omegas)). Relying entirely on beams ends badly...

There are close range ballistic guns that are shorter ranged than energy weapons, but they tend to be used with specialized SO builds.

Small PD is also only flux expensive on energy ships: Vulcans cost 20 flux per second and have 500 frag DPS (less DPS in practice because of the spread), vs pd lasers with 75 flux per second and 75 energy dps. Vulcans are excellent PD, to the point where skilled Onslaughts, Dominators, or Enforcers can forgo flak entirely (at least in the arcs with vulcans) if they don't want to also protect other ships. Devastators, while excellent anti-fighter, are actually quite poor PD against missiles because of their long fire delay. Dual Flaks are excellent, but are very flux expensive: 152 fps, or roughly 3 frag damage (AoE) per flux. Regular flak is 50 dps, or 4 frag damage
 (AoE) per flux. Vulcans are 25 frag damage per flux in theory, less in practice due to misses.

Needlers are the most efficient anti-shield weapon in the game and have high alpha bursts(other than sabots, but thats another story) and in turn have very small armor/hull penetration. They are still very good, just specialized.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 08:07:57 AM

Small PD is also only flux expensive on energy ships: Vulcans cost 20 flux per second and have 500 frag DPS (less DPS in practice because of the spread), vs pd lasers with 75 flux per second and 75 energy dps. Vulcans are excellent PD, to the point where skilled Onslaughts, Dominators, or Enforcers can forgo flak entirely (at least in the arcs with vulcans) if they don't want to also protect other ships. Devastators, while excellent anti-fighter, are actually quite poor PD against missiles because of their long fire delay. Dual Flaks are excellent, but are very flux expensive: 152 fps, or roughly 3 frag damage (AoE) per flux. Regular flak is 50 dps, or 4 frag damage
 (AoE) per flux. Vulcans are 25 frag damage per flux in theory, less in practice due to misses.

Needlers are the most efficient anti-shield weapon in the game and have high alpha bursts(other than sabots, but thats another story) and in turn have very small armor/hull penetration. They are still very good, just specialized.
20 flux wasted is 20 flux wasted, then you add the OP wasted which you could have used to lower flux costs further with hardened shields, dissipation or stabilized shields and 20 turns out to be a lot higher, it's a waste 100% of the time.

Besides, like you mentioned, Starsector has fleet battles, not duels, the small PD "efficiency" is horribly ineficient since it 1: Can't protect other ships, 2: often shoots at low threat targets nonstop wasting way more flux than actual weapons and 3: more often than not the targets they end up shooting would have wasted less flux by hitting a shield.

As for high tech PD, know what's really efficient anti shield? reducing all damage to .4 flux or lower, high tech also doesn't need to care about PD 90% of the time, the difference is that they are better at it, besides, when things get dangerous a spray of locusts can often wipe out the screen, or a single doom laying mines, or a single onslaught with a careful officer and 3 devastator cannons taking out the brunt of missiles (not like it can handle the good guns like a conquest anyway) or a couple of modified destroyers with xyphos floating around them, or a couple of monitor escords drawing fire, or a couple of tempests, etc...
You get the idea, tl;dr of all the ways to handle bombers and missiles small PD is the worst of the worst, it doesn't matter how much damage it deals, if it costs more than zero it's a waste, even if it costs zero it's most likely a waste and many ships that don't intend to get right in the face of an enemy (to actually use the PD as an offensive weapon) will still end up not taking them.

The trick to this game is in the shields, the most energy efficient weapons in the entire game are still chumps compared to shields, specially high tech shields, even if you have a 1 to 1 damage ratio which few weapons have it will most likely get reduced to .4 or even less of that value, the less you shoot the more "damage" you deal in comparisson, any ship that is not flux neutral, or less, is dead weight, and since low tech ships often have even less flux than high tech, while having more mounts, they end up in this weird spot in which they could carry 2x the guns of a high tech ship and end up carrying either half the guns, or a bunch of worthless guns that are all bark and no bite.

Like teh aforementioned mortars, great flux efficiency, too bad they are bad against shields and also horrible against armor (you need high damage per shot against armor, not DPS)
In fact most energy weapons are usable, specially the beams, but even the other energy weapons are still great and are often regarded as the kings of burst damage, sure they spend more, but high tech also has more to spend. While most ballistics are a waste of time and flux, again, with the exception of very few like the gauss family and the mjolnir cannons that AFAIK only a single ship can realy use it without unequiping basically every other mount (conquest, not low tech) and needlers if you plan on using reckless officers intended to get destroyed in every hard fight nearly instantly acting as a single user longbow wing, which isn't very efficient either.

As for ship designs: Other than the monitor everything small and low tech tends to be horrible, the dominator is also horrible and can't handle half it's weapon mounts, often dealing more damage to itself than the enemy, the onslaught is quite a meme on reddit already because it was supposed to bring a bunch of firepower, but it just doesn't, and then it gets flanked and/or overloaded and dies.

In fact, so much for having "hard flux" when a single paragon with 4 tachyon lances can simply overload it in one or 2 salvos and then instantly take it out, it was quite (un)funny when I found another lvl 7 timid officer with gunnery, shield mastery, etc.. and as I was about to throw her out I remembered the paragon outranges everything in the game, so I let it pilot a paragon with unstable injectors, 4 tachyon, 2 gauss and grav beams and to my surprise it got so annoying, so annoying that in autopilot mode it could take on 2 onslaughts+1 paragon at the same time in simulation, the real challenge being the other paragon obviously, the moment my own would get far enough the onslaught would try try catch up to it by using F and then it would get blow up before it could get out of range again, pathetic. So I end up making a long range retreating fleet all around that timid paragon flagship and then there was no challenge left in the game. Can't lose if the enemy can't shoot back.

Anyway, I used to use needlers too, years ago when they were better, now they don't fit the game anymore, best remnant hunters I got are basic SO eagles with 2 Heavy Machineguns on fixed mounts (so they will act like actual weapons, not wasting time shooting random crap) 2 heavy blasters and the optional 2 burst lasers PD (if you plan on getting away from your own fleet), this guy can solo every remnant ship in the game besides a radiant and hunt down stragglers with ease, simply because at max damage output and with shields up it's still flux neutral, so ALL of it's flux gets directed to the shields instead of blowing itself up like low techs often do. And ofc, it's a midline ship AKA the better low techs.

Honestly, having armor doesn't cut it, if that's the only thing they have going for them then it's no wonder they are just bad.
Now, if they could carry a lot more firepower and actually make use of all of it's weapon mounts as suggested.... Then I could see low tech having a role in battle, you really wouldn't want to approach it.

Edit: Oh yeah, and sabots, just bring them and you'll never have to worry about hard or soft flux ever again, if they decide to take it all to their shields it's an instant overload, if they lower their shields then their ship gets basically turned off anyway, it's a win/win, there are no bad targets for sabots.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 08:12:01 AM
I do believe my feelings on your essay can be summed up by this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWYazmSXyBc
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Retry on June 05, 2021, 09:50:09 AM
I was going to respond with some huge point-by-point rebuttal of most of these points but I thought of a better idea.

OP, this thread has attracted a lot of attention from others within the community because of some (well, many) claims that are unorthodox.  Clearly you and I are talking over each other and neither of us is going to be convinced by the manner of words.

As such, I would like to invite you to a community PVP AI Tourney

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to create a fleet composition with given rules and restrictions, and these fleets get thrust against each other in the field of battle until a victorious side emerges.

Most players outfit their ships more closely to what I describe (as such: far more fitting of various small slots onto warships).  If Star Sector combat works far more closely to what you're saying, then your fleet compositions should have no issue defeating their fleet compositions.

If it's your fleet compositions that perform consistently well over the currently-known "conventional" community member compositions, I'll have no choice but to accept that your points are correct, such as that smalls are near-useless and high-tech ships are the true long-range doctrine, and that your suggestion of reducing all small weapons to 0-2 OP is valid.

Should you accept this invitation, you'll have considerable sway as the guest of honour on what precisely the ruleset and various restrictions on building ships and fleets will be, such that you feel that the Tournament experience is a fair one without "cheese" or "meme" compositions.

So, will you accept?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 09:52:11 AM
Oh Retry, that may have been the classiest comment ever posted on this forum in the past month. You make Ludd proud.

I'll be sure to cheer everyone on from the sidelines of this Tournament for sheer entertainment value, this looks too good to pass up  8)
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 10:14:26 AM
Two opinions enter, one opinion leaves!
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 10:18:42 AM
Two opinions enter, one opinion leaves!

Enter the Thunderdome!
https://youtu.be/9yDL0AKUCKo (https://youtu.be/9yDL0AKUCKo)
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: SCC on June 05, 2021, 10:29:29 AM
1. Sacrificing mounts is specific to low-tech
My experience: Not really. Depending on the build, but it can happen to many ships. Scarab used to have its side mounts left open, until they were removed. Medusa rarely ever has a full PD completement, more often it has just 4 or 3 PD guns in the smalls. Apogee doesn't really need its smalls, and according to some people, not the mediums, either! Paragon can have most of its mounts filled (not the smalls though, lol), or it can sacrifice everything but 4 larges and 4 mediums to become a station smasher. For midline, Conquest is obvious and Eagle often gets its energy mediums downsized because of the focus on ballistics. And for low-tech ships that sometimes get mounts unfilled, Ons and Legion are also obvious (do you really need these smalls?), and until recently Ons was also downsized often, though HBI is supposed to remedy that. Dominator also sometimes drops its smalls, but it depends mostly on whether flaks get into the mediums or not. Low-tech isn't any more likely to drop mounts or undersize than other design types, though.

2. High-tech is good at kiting, beams are great.
My experience: beams are ok at bullying pirates, but beams on anything that isn't a Paragon or an Odyssey belongs in the trash. It takes impractical number of beams to overwhelm dissipation of bigger ships and other high tech ships, and especially the Remnants. High-tech ships with short ranged, hard flux weapons fare significantly better, than if they were to use beams. High-tech's advantage is the speed and shields, allowing them to get in, deal damage, then get out and vent, while other fast, allied ships come in to occupy the enemy's attention.
Ironically enough, it's midline that benefits the most from beams, because they can actually support it with hard flux at the range that beams have. Ion Beam and High Intensity Laser in particular are great for midline.

3. Frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.
My experience: Hyperion has significantly changed, yes, from 2 mediums and 4 smalls to 3 mediums, it was accompanied by significant stat buffs: its flux capacity increased by a factor of two and a half (from 3300 to 8000) and dissipation was nearly doubled (from 280 to 500). And additional damage boosts from skills no longer affect frigates. And Wolfpack Tactics buffs frigates specifically... Another frigate that has been buffed in 0.95 is Scarab and is one of the better frigates now. Do you know what mounts it has? 5 small energy ones and 2 small synergy ones. Tempest has 2 mediums, but it was good in 0.9.1 and it's still good now.

4. Ballistics don't have long ranges
My experience: while it's true only few ballistic weapons have ranges matching or exceeding range of beams, they more than make up for that with their hard flux options outranging energy hard flux options. You don't have to have the most range in the game, you can just have more range than your enemy.

5. Energy Weapon Mastery and Heavy Blasters are situational
My experience: What? EWM is one of the better skills for high-tech, because its range limitations and range at which high-tech will fight at optimal performance is the same. For Paragon and Odyssey EWM might be the worse choice, but for every other high-tech ship? It wants to get in and blast the enemy with Ion Pulsers and Heavy Blasters. Even just ~+15% damage against all targets is comparable to Target Analysis's variable damage bonus to some targets. Heavy Blaster is viable for all non-capital high-tech ships, because with s-mods and Flux Regulations, you can afford to fire them, and with them you can take sabots instead of other missiles, so breaking through shields isn't an issue, either. And no, I don't use SO or phase ships (except to demonstrate how broken DC and phase ships respectively are in my videos), I have not used it once in 0.95 or 0.9.1.

6. Ballistic weapons are worse
My experience: I think the most consistent detail of all Medusa and Paragon loadouts was putting ballistics in their universal mounts. It's because of their greater flux efficiency, range and damage to shields.


In conclusion, what I have to ask is: are we even playing the same game? I am being serious. While I also have found low-tech to be worse this version than high-tech, there's like one specific thing in common and almost everything else diametrically different.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Hiruma Kai on June 05, 2021, 10:46:16 AM
Needlers are the most efficient anti-shield weapon in the game and have high alpha bursts(other than sabots, but thats another story) and in turn have very small armor/hull penetration. They are still very good, just specialized.

I'm going to have to disagree Thaago.  Assuming we're looking at only efficiency (not range or burst), the most efficient anti-shield weapon honor goes to ballistic small PD.  Vulcans do 6.25 shield damage per flux.  Light Machine guns deal 16.4 shield damage per flux.  Dual light machine guns deal 16.64 shield damage per flux.

Light and heavy needers are a mere 2.5 shield damage per flux, and Storm needlers are 2.85.  Vulcans are over twice as efficient when in range.

This is why vulcans were an unholy terror back before minimum armor.  They won the shield flux war, they destroyed hull in seconds, and only if you have giant bricks of armor could you last even a little while.  5x Vulcan Lasher bursts to 5000 fragmentation damage per second with AFF.  That still eats through unskilled Onslaught armor in about 10 seconds worth of AFF time, and then finishes off hull 4 seconds later.

Now, Vulcans are merely really, really good once in range.

20 flux wasted is 20 flux wasted, then you add the OP wasted which you could have used to lower flux costs further with hardened shields, dissipation or stabilized shields and 20 turns out to be a lot higher, it's a waste 100% of the time.

Besides, like you mentioned, Starsector has fleet battles, not duels, the small PD "efficiency" is horribly ineficient since it 1: Can't protect other ships, 2: often shoots at low threat targets nonstop wasting way more flux than actual weapons and 3: more often than not the targets they end up shooting would have wasted less flux by hitting a shield.

1) Is only true some of the time.  In a crowded fight, its true you can't shoot left or right through your allies on the line, but often forward PD batteries on capitals will shoot down missiles aimed at retreating ships.  Similarly, a lasher on escort will shoot down salamanders against a Legion just fine by sitting behind it, or reapers from flanking frigates. 

I will admit fighter based and Paladin PD is superior in this regard, but it's a problem shared by all other non-missile weapons as well.  Do you not mount other weapons because they can't shoot through allied ships to focus fire on that flanking frigate?

2) That's true of all weapons.  Essentially all weapons miss.  Even beams can fire and not actually hit the target due to turning, or moving out of range as the beam extends - or in the case of Tachyon lances, because they are a burst beam effect. I've seen Gauss cannons and hellbores firing at frigates they cannot hit because they're too maneuverable and at long range.  I've seen bursts of Ion pulsars and needlers miss half their shots as the ship turns. I personally miss auto fired plasma cannon shots all the time when plasma burning on an Odyssey. Have you ever tried keeping track of total shots and misses, and damage dealt by each weapon type?  Accuracy and target selection affects them all, roughly equally for projectile weapons.  And beams sometimes can't even kill ships if they don't fire anything.

3) There's a big difference between hard and soft flux though.  Hard flux you have to drop shields.  Soft flux, you just stop firing as many weapons.  The spread accuracy of ballistic PD is one of the reasons why they are so ridiculously efficient compared to "actual" weapons. 

A harpoon deals 750 HE damage.  Say 1 in 10 vulcan shots hit it (which is generally an under estimate).  That means 3 seconds to shoot it down for 1 vulcan.  60 flux.  Compared to 375 shield damage.  Let's throw on hardened shields, a 0.6 shield efficient ship, and elite shield skill.  That drops the shield damage to 94.5.

You "take" 60 soft flux instead of 94.5 hard flux in the absolute best comparison case against harpoons.  If you happen to have IPDAI or an anti-missile skill, that drops to 40 soft flux.  And the vulcan shot efficiency goes way up the more missiles coming in at the same time.  A swarm of 10 harpoons against 6 forward vulcans on an Onslaught aren't getting through and the vulcans will have a better than 1 in 10 hit rate.

Plus, those 6 Vulcans double as offense when the Onslaught burn drives in to point blank range (at least on a player ship).  3000 fragmentation damage is still 750 shield damage.  Same amount from a single plasma cannon, but for a mere 120 flux/second instead of 825 flux/second.

If you're in a capital versus capital duel, piloting an Onslaught, and you dive in to point blank range, why wouldn't you want 6 vulcans in the smalls? Although I could see wanting dual light machine guns instead for triple plasma cannon equivalent shield damage for 1/16th the flux. You can turn off other less efficient weapons and still have capital tier shield punch.

As for high tech PD, know what's really efficient anti shield? reducing all damage to .4 flux or lower, high tech also doesn't need to care about PD 90% of the time, the difference is that they are better at it, besides, when things get dangerous a spray of locusts can often wipe out the screen, or a single doom laying mines, or a single onslaught with a careful officer and 3 devastator cannons taking out the brunt of missiles (not like it can handle the good guns like a conquest anyway) or a couple of modified destroyers with xyphos floating around them, or a couple of monitor escords drawing fire, or a couple of tempests, etc...

This is a list of alternatives, but there's no demonstration of exactly how superior and it what circumstances.  Do Doom mines invalidate 0.4 shields?  Does a spray of locusts make 3 devastator cannons pointless?  Fielding Xyphos make Tempests useless?  Just because there are multiple ways of handling a situation doesn't mean that a given solution doesn't work or needs to be buffed massively.  It's merely saying the game is rich enough to have multiple solutions.  Ships are different which is why it's interesting to deploy different strategies.  High tech has efficient shields.  Low tech has many ballistic mounts, and thus lead to two different solutions for the same problem.  Which I think is a good thing.

You get the idea, tl;dr of all the ways to handle bombers and missiles small PD is the worst of the worst, it doesn't matter how much damage it deals, if it costs more than zero it's a waste, even if it costs zero it's most likely a waste and many ships that don't intend to get right in the face of an enemy (to actually use the PD as an offensive weapon) will still end up not taking them.

That's a fair bit of hyperbole.  I mean clearly, if vulcans did 1 million damage for 20 flux and 4 OP, they'd be completely and utterly broken.  So at some point damage must matter.  As it is, with their current stats, they were arguably broken at some points in earlier versions of the game, such that weapons like them forced the introduction of an entirely new mechanic to take them down a peg.

Can you give us some kind of fleet wide effectiveness example (i.e. fleet A with small PD shot down X missiles and lost the fight, while fleet B removing the small PD ended up winning against identical missile heavy opposition) that we could run ourselves?

You have to understand, your play experience seems to be different from our play experience.  Simply saying X weapon is bad, which is counter to our personal play experience when we use them in our own setups, is not likely to convince us.

Edit: Retry apparently has an even better suggestion.

The trick to this game is in the shields, the most energy efficient weapons in the entire game are still chumps compared to shields, specially high tech shields, even if you have a 1 to 1 damage ratio which few weapons have it will most likely get reduced to .4 or even less of that value, the less you shoot the more "damage" you deal in comparisson, any ship that is not flux neutral, or less, is dead weight, and since low tech ships often have even less flux than high tech, while having more mounts, they end up in this weird spot in which they could carry 2x the guns of a high tech ship and end up carrying either half the guns, or a bunch of worthless guns that are all bark and no bite.

Wouldn't that analysis suggest you should be using vulcans and light machine guns over other weapons?  As noted earlier, vulcans deal 6.25 shield damage per 1 point of flux.  The absolute best shield in the game, 0.6*0.8*0.75*0.9 = 0.324 is still taking 2.025 shield damage per flux from an unskilled vulcan.  Except against a raised fortress shield, it is always a good flux trade to shoot vulcans into shields.  Even more so for light and dual light machine guns, which will do over 5 shield damage per flux.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Thaago on June 05, 2021, 10:55:54 AM
You're right Hiruma Kai, I'd forgotten about the machine gun lineup when thinking about efficiency - my mind was stuck on the longer ranged weapons!

I'm a big fan of vulcans on onslaughts and dominators (for all their other flaws) for the exact reasons you posted. They also make for decent anti-fighter weapons: not as good as some, but its just a cloud of damage for very little flux. I actually wonder a bit if I'm nerfing myself by taking target analysis instead of elite PD on these ships... sure target analysis' extra damage is very good, but 100 extra range is a qualitative change that might make up for it... thoughts for later testing I guess.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 11:05:55 AM
I was going to respond with some huge point-by-point rebuttal of most of these points but I thought of a better idea.

OP, this thread has attracted a lot of attention from others within the community because of some (well, many) claims that are unorthodox.  Clearly you and I are talking over each other and neither of us is going to be convinced by the manner of words.

As such, I would like to invite you to a community PVP AI Tourney

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to create a fleet composition with given rules and restrictions, and these fleets get thrust against each other in the field of battle until a victorious side emerges.

Most players outfit their ships more closely to what I describe (as such: far more fitting of various small slots onto warships).  If Star Sector combat works far more closely to what you're saying, then your fleet compositions should have no issue defeating their fleet compositions.

If it's your fleet compositions that perform consistently well over the currently-known "conventional" community member compositions, I'll have no choice but to accept that your points are correct, such as that smalls are near-useless and high-tech ships are the true long-range doctrine, and that your suggestion of reducing all small weapons to 0-2 OP is valid.

Should you accept this invitation, you'll have considerable sway as the guest of honour on what precisely the ruleset and various restrictions on building ships and fleets will be, such that you feel that the Tournament experience is a fair one without "cheese" or "meme" compositions.

So, will you accept?

And what would the point be? Fighting a ship made to counter another ship instead of making a ship that works against all the ships in a single player game?
A 4 tachyon paragon can't duel for crap unless it has a very specific timid officer trolling all over the map in a 1v1 (or 1v3) scenario, if I wanted to cheese to get fake results against ships you'd never encounter in the sector I'd probably abuse something like autopulse and/or heavy plasmas for a very specific scenario, instead of having a great centerpiece capital flagship capable of erasing anything below capital level in a single burst, and taking care of doom swarms (the fight before the Ziggurat, for example, was basically carried by the tachyon spam)

For a full meme tournament kind of shenanigans one could just abuse the broken Derelic contingent skill with meaingnless D mods on low tech ships instead and abuse not being able to take damage at all.

1. Sacrificing mounts is specific to low-tech
My experience: Not really. Depending on the build, but it can happen to many ships. Scarab used to have its side mounts left open, until they were removed. Medusa rarely ever has a full PD completement, more often it has just 4 or 3 PD guns in the smalls. Apogee doesn't really need its smalls, and according to some people, not the mediums, either! Paragon can have most of its mounts filled (not the smalls though, lol), or it can sacrifice everything but 4 larges and 4 mediums to become a station smasher. For midline, Conquest is obvious and Eagle often gets its energy mediums downsized because of the focus on ballistics. And for low-tech ships that sometimes get mounts unfilled, Ons and Legion are also obvious (do you really need these smalls?), and until recently Ons was also downsized often, though HBI is supposed to remedy that. Dominator also sometimes drops its smalls, but it depends mostly on whether flaks get into the mediums or not. Low-tech isn't any more likely to drop mounts or undersize than other design types, though.

2. High-tech is good at kiting, beams are great.
My experience: beams are ok at bullying pirates, but beams on anything that isn't a Paragon or an Odyssey belongs in the trash. It takes impractical number of beams to overwhelm dissipation of bigger ships and other high tech ships, and especially the Remnants. High-tech ships with short ranged, hard flux weapons fare significantly better, than if they were to use beams. High-tech's advantage is the speed and shields, allowing them to get in, deal damage, then get out and vent, while other fast, allied ships come in to occupy the enemy's attention.
Ironically enough, it's midline that benefits the most from beams, because they can actually support it with hard flux at the range that beams have. Ion Beam and High Intensity Laser in particular are great for midline.

3. Frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.
My experience: Hyperion has significantly changed, yes, from 2 mediums and 4 smalls to 3 mediums, it was accompanied by significant stat buffs: its flux capacity increased by a factor of two and a half (from 3300 to 8000) and dissipation was nearly doubled (from 280 to 500). And additional damage boosts from skills no longer affect frigates. And Wolfpack Tactics buffs frigates specifically... Another frigate that has been buffed in 0.95 is Scarab and is one of the better frigates now. Do you know what mounts it has? 5 small energy ones and 2 small synergy ones. Tempest has 2 mediums, but it was good in 0.9.1 and it's still good now.

4. Ballistics don't have long ranges
My experience: while it's true only few ballistic weapons have ranges matching or exceeding range of beams, they more than make up for that with their hard flux options outranging energy hard flux options. You don't have to have the most range in the game, you can just have more range than your enemy.

5. Energy Weapon Mastery and Heavy Blasters are situational
My experience: What? EWM is one of the better skills for high-tech, because its range limitations and range at which high-tech will fight at optimal performance is the same. For Paragon and Odyssey EWM might be the worse choice, but for every other high-tech ship? It wants to get in and blast the enemy with Ion Pulsers and Heavy Blasters. Even just ~+15% damage against all targets is comparable to Target Analysis's variable damage bonus to some targets. Heavy Blaster is viable for all non-capital high-tech ships, because with s-mods and Flux Regulations, you can afford to fire them, and with them you can take sabots instead of other missiles, so breaking through shields isn't an issue, either. And no, I don't use SO or phase ships (except to demonstrate how broken DC and phase ships respectively are in my videos), I have not used it once in 0.95 or 0.9.1.

6. Ballistic weapons are worse
My experience: I think the most consistent detail of all Medusa and Paragon loadouts was putting ballistics in their universal mounts. It's because of their greater flux efficiency, range and damage to shields.


In conclusion, what I have to ask is: are we even playing the same game? I am being serious. While I also have found low-tech to be worse this version than high-tech, there's like one specific thing in common and almost everything else diametrically different.

1: Never said it was specific to low tech, in fact I'm pretty sure I said small mounts in general are worthless with very few exceptions, namely anti matter blasters (energy) and railguns, the rest more often than not hurts you more than the enemy, in fact one of the great things about annihilator rockets is not their damage, which is rather bad, but the fact that it's a constant barrage of rockets that makes the enemy "take" a lot more flux damage by activating all it's PD against harmless rockets than they would if they'd just let them hit the shield, that being said I never said that was an issue exclusive to low tech ships either, many high tech ships also ignore small mounts, like the examples you've given, the great difference is that low tech tends to have even more mounts, and even less flux, which makes the issue far worse for them than high tech.

Besides, high tech has some nasty options for their lower mount size, a plasma cannon for instance is probably worth as much as 3 different weapon mounts in one, in both flux and damage, so you can really focus the role of a ship if it can handle such a monster, heavy blasters are no different for smaller ships, a ton of firepower in a single mount and, like you said, it makes the small mounts irrelevant in many cases.

2: Yeah, beams are bad in 1v1 duel scenarios, too bad this never happens, in a real fight the bad designs of the AI ships firing PDs all over the place against random crap tend to overload themselves by themselves, once that happens the tachyons will just eat through the remaining shield and hull at once, hegemony is specially guilty of this, the only exception being remnants and, again, not because of some crappy PD systems, but because their shields and flux dissipation, and mobility are just too great, so you either need to burst down their shilds all at once, or pressure them with hard flux.

Which just so happens to be accomplished by your own radiant fielding 3 plasma cannons 2 cyclone reapers and 4 M sabot missiles, not even other radiants can handle that kind of burst.

3:You guys mention these few ships as if they were proof that "not much changed for frigates" yet forget to mention that people complaining about frigates are ONLY complaining about them, when was the last time anyone mentioned the devastating firepower of a Lasher in any real endgame conflicts? Answer: Never.
Hyperion has a massive shield reduction and some actual firepower (and the flux to use it) now.
The scarab is scary yes, and you know why it's scary? 3x Anti matter blasters, the ones I specifically mentioned to work on hunter/phase kind of ships, the little fucker can use it's special skill which is not much different from a phase as it can just dodge anything and get anywhere, and blast away at a bigger ship's engines while the flux regenerates, again, not because of some no damage small mounts, antimatter blasters deal more burst than most non torpedo weapons in the game.

4: By hard flux options you're talking about the railgun family and mjolnirs (for the one ship that can use them effectivelly), like I mentioned, and if you decide to equip them on any other low tech ships along with pretty much anything else even @ max flux dissipation be prepared to self destruct before the enemy even has to overload your own shields.

5: I said it's situational, you said it's good, where's the contradiction? I never said it wasn't good, a doom, or any phase ship will want to take it, in fact it's mandatory that they take it, if a player would fly something like a scarab themselves, for some reason, they'd want to take it as well, any hunter ships would want to take that mastery, but hunter ships themselves are niche and if you take them against the real endgame challenges you're probably going to spend a lot of time repairing and recovering ships over and over again, hell I even got *** that one paragon died against the 2 doritos.
Edit: Another additional issue this brings up: Officer caps, who in their right mind would waste officers on small ships when the numbers are so limited? Even if it would be great for them, they often fly officerless anyway

6: Medusa used to be good, now it's just a worse version of the new and newly buffed small HT ships, as for paragon, yeah, I do use 2 railguns on the M slots with the timid officer I was about to discard and it was surprisingly good, but for a paragon that doesn't retreat nonstop you're probably better off just using something cheaper to trick the AI into not venting and eventually overloading themselves, like ion or grav beams since you can fire them across the screen.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 11:14:33 AM
Needlers are the most efficient anti-shield weapon in the game and have high alpha bursts(other than sabots, but thats another story) and in turn have very small armor/hull penetration. They are still very good, just specialized.

I'm going to have to disagree Thaago.  Assuming we're looking at only efficiency (not range or burst), the most efficient anti-shield weapon honor goes to ballistic small PD.  Vulcans do 6.25 shield damage per flux.  Light Machine guns deal 16.4 shield damage per flux.  Dual light machine guns deal 16.64 shield damage per flux.

Light and heavy needers are a mere 2.5 shield damage per flux, and Storm needlers are 2.85.  Vulcans are over twice as efficient when in range.

This is why vulcans were an unholy terror back before minimum armor.  They won the shield flux war, they destroyed hull in seconds, and only if you have giant bricks of armor could you last even a little while.  5x Vulcan Lasher bursts to 5000 fragmentation damage per second with AFF.  That still eats through unskilled Onslaught armor in about 10 seconds worth of AFF time, and then finishes off hull 4 seconds later.

Now, Vulcans are merely really, really good once in range.

20 flux wasted is 20 flux wasted, then you add the OP wasted which you could have used to lower flux costs further with hardened shields, dissipation or stabilized shields and 20 turns out to be a lot higher, it's a waste 100% of the time.

Besides, like you mentioned, Starsector has fleet battles, not duels, the small PD "efficiency" is horribly ineficient since it 1: Can't protect other ships, 2: often shoots at low threat targets nonstop wasting way more flux than actual weapons and 3: more often than not the targets they end up shooting would have wasted less flux by hitting a shield.

1) Is only true some of the time.  In a crowded fight, its true you can't shoot left or right through your allies on the line, but often forward PD batteries on capitals will shoot down missiles aimed at retreating ships.  Similarly, a lasher on escort will shoot down salamanders against a Legion just fine by sitting behind it, or reapers from flanking frigates. 

I will admit fighter based and Paladin PD is superior in this regard, but it's a problem shared by all other non-missile weapons as well.  Do you not mount other weapons because they can't shoot through allied ships to focus fire on that flanking frigate?

2) That's true of all weapons.  Essentially all weapons miss.  Even beams can fire and not actually hit the target due to turning, or moving out of range as the beam extends - or in the case of Tachyon lances, because they are a burst beam effect. I've seen Gauss cannons and hellbores firing at frigates they cannot hit because they're too maneuverable and at long range.  I've seen bursts of Ion pulsars and needlers miss half their shots as the ship turns. I personally miss auto fired plasma cannon shots all the time when plasma burning on an Odyssey. Have you ever tried keeping track of total shots and misses, and damage dealt by each weapon type?  Accuracy and target selection affects them all, roughly equally for projectile weapons.  And beams sometimes can't even kill ships if they don't fire anything.

3) There's a big difference between hard and soft flux though.  Hard flux you have to drop shields.  Soft flux, you just stop firing as many weapons.  The spread accuracy of ballistic PD is one of the reasons why they are so ridiculously efficient compared to "actual" weapons. 

A harpoon deals 750 HE damage.  Say 1 in 10 vulcan shots hit it (which is generally an under estimate).  That means 3 seconds to shoot it down for 1 vulcan.  60 flux.  Compared to 375 shield damage.  Let's throw on hardened shields, a 0.6 shield efficient ship, and elite shield skill.  That drops the shield damage to 94.5.

You "take" 60 soft flux instead of 94.5 hard flux in the absolute best comparison case against harpoons.  If you happen to have IPDAI or an anti-missile skill, that drops to 40 soft flux.  And the vulcan shot efficiency goes way up the more missiles coming in at the same time.  A swarm of 10 harpoons against 6 forward vulcans on an Onslaught aren't getting through and the vulcans will have a better than 1 in 10 hit rate.

Plus, those 6 Vulcans double as offense when the Onslaught burn drives in to point blank range (at least on a player ship).  3000 fragmentation damage is still 750 shield damage.  Same amount from a single plasma cannon, but for a mere 120 flux/second instead of 825 flux/second.

If you're in a capital versus capital duel, piloting an Onslaught, and you dive in to point blank range, why wouldn't you want 6 vulcans in the smalls? Although I could see wanting dual light machine guns instead for triple plasma cannon equivalent shield damage for 1/16th the flux. You can turn off other less efficient weapons and still have capital tier shield punch.

As for high tech PD, know what's really efficient anti shield? reducing all damage to .4 flux or lower, high tech also doesn't need to care about PD 90% of the time, the difference is that they are better at it, besides, when things get dangerous a spray of locusts can often wipe out the screen, or a single doom laying mines, or a single onslaught with a careful officer and 3 devastator cannons taking out the brunt of missiles (not like it can handle the good guns like a conquest anyway) or a couple of modified destroyers with xyphos floating around them, or a couple of monitor escords drawing fire, or a couple of tempests, etc...

This is a list of alternatives, but there's no demonstration of exactly how superior and it what circumstances.  Do Doom mines invalidate 0.4 shields?  Does a spray of locusts make 3 devastator cannons pointless?  Fielding Xyphos make Tempests useless?  Just because there are multiple ways of handling a situation doesn't mean that a given solution doesn't work or needs to be buffed massively.  It's merely saying the game is rich enough to have multiple solutions.  Ships are different which is why it's interesting to deploy different strategies.  High tech has efficient shields.  Low tech has many ballistic mounts, and thus lead to two different solutions for the same problem.  Which I think is a good thing.

You get the idea, tl;dr of all the ways to handle bombers and missiles small PD is the worst of the worst, it doesn't matter how much damage it deals, if it costs more than zero it's a waste, even if it costs zero it's most likely a waste and many ships that don't intend to get right in the face of an enemy (to actually use the PD as an offensive weapon) will still end up not taking them.

That's a fair bit of hyperbole.  I mean clearly, if vulcans did 1 million damage for 20 flux and 4 OP, they'd be completely and utterly broken.  So at some point damage must matter.  As it is, with their current stats, they were arguably broken at some points in earlier versions of the game, such that weapons like them forced the introduction of an entirely new mechanic to take them down a peg.

Can you give us some kind of fleet wide effectiveness example (i.e. fleet A with small PD shot down X missiles and lost the fight, while fleet B removing the small PD ended up winning against identical missile heavy opposition) that we could run ourselves?

You have to understand, your play experience seems to be different from our play experience.  Simply saying X weapon is bad, which is counter to our personal play experience when we use them in our own setups, is not likely to convince us.

Edit: Retry apparently has an even better suggestion.

The trick to this game is in the shields, the most energy efficient weapons in the entire game are still chumps compared to shields, specially high tech shields, even if you have a 1 to 1 damage ratio which few weapons have it will most likely get reduced to .4 or even less of that value, the less you shoot the more "damage" you deal in comparisson, any ship that is not flux neutral, or less, is dead weight, and since low tech ships often have even less flux than high tech, while having more mounts, they end up in this weird spot in which they could carry 2x the guns of a high tech ship and end up carrying either half the guns, or a bunch of worthless guns that are all bark and no bite.

Wouldn't that analysis suggest you should be using vulcans and light machine guns over other weapons?  As noted earlier, vulcans deal 6.25 shield damage per 1 point of flux.  The absolute best shield in the game, 0.6*0.8*0.75*0.9 = 0.324 is still taking 2.025 shield damage per flux from an unskilled vulcan.  Except against a raised fortress shield, it is always a good flux trade to shoot vulcans into shields.  Even more so for light and dual light machine guns, which will do over 5 shield damage per flux.

Your math can't be applied to a real scenario, in a real fight the enemy will be throwing more than just harpoons one at a time so you can disable them, in reality your PDs are all going to focus on the same targets, move around and spread shots wildly and hardly, if ever, turn off, even against targets doomed by your own xyphos, devastators, etc..

I mean, even the basic simulation onslaught shows this, a single locust, squall or annihilator pod will make all of it's bad PDs go crazy through the entire fight, never, ever turning off wasting a lot more than the best case scenario values, and a real fight has a lot more than those 3, there are harmless fighters, chaff, javelins, etc, loads of crap flying everywhere.

Another thing you've neglected is the actual cost of the weapon, you're doing the math in my kind of scenario, when PD costs zero, so it's a choice between taking a missile to the shield or shooting it down, which is what I'm trying to acomplish here, in a real scenario all of those over arching PDs that never stop firing in a real fight also cost OP which you could have used to further increase your flux cap, dissipation, or add another hullmod that further decreases your costs in some way, so the 20f you spend firing nonstop costs an extra tax in things you could not put in your own ship instead.

Here's something else to consider: How much flux is saved by firing a 200f/s ion beam on enemy ships nonstop and constantly turning off their big hitters?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: SCC on June 05, 2021, 11:28:42 AM
1: Never said it was specific to low tech, in fact I'm pretty sure I said small mounts in general are worthless with very few exceptions
Mmm, yeah, sorry. I got mislead by the topic title.

2: Yeah, beams are bad in 1v1 duel scenarios, too bad this never happens
And when have I said I mean duel scenarios? I have found it impractical in regular combat.

4: By hard flux options you're talking about the railgun family and mjolnirs (for the one ship that can use them effectivelly)
And also every other ballistic weapon, because regardless of their damage type, they all deal hard flux. While it's unfortunate Shield Modulation's elite effect decreases HE damage, it doesn't matter too much because you shouldn't be firing HE weapons at shields anyway (and because AI will often fire them anyway, so you need to skew towards kinetic damage), because you have kinetic weapons for that, that deal double damage to shields. And even if the damage that some weapons deal is subpar, it beats effective 0 damage that beams deal, unless they are spammed.

5: I said it's situational, you said it's good, where's the contradiction? I never said it wasn't good, a doom, or any phase ship will want to take it
Or every other high-tech ship that isn't Paragon or Odyssey, in fact, making GI situational to Odyssey and Paragon.

but hunter ships themselves are niche and if you take them against the real endgame challenges you're probably going to spend a lot of time repairing and recovering ships over and over again, hell I even got *** that one paragon died against the 2 doritos.
For the player, phase ships and Hyperion are definitely good picks. Doom for obvious reasons, but even a Hyperion is good enough to be doing about as much damage to hull as a Radiant, and considering a Radiant can dump sabots and reapers on enemies almost non-stop, I'd say that's pretty good.

6: Medusa used to be good, now it's just a worse version of the new and newly buffed small HT ships, as for paragon, yeah, I do use 2 railguns on the M slots with the timid officer I was about to discard and it was surprisingly good, but for a paragon that doesn't retreat nonstop you're probably better off just using something cheaper to trick the AI into not venting and eventually overloading themselves, like ion or grav beams since you can fire them across the screen.
Medusa is still good, just not as good as Fury, bu- wait, what? Your put a timid officer in your Paragon? What the hell?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 11:37:40 AM
1: Never said it was specific to low tech, in fact I'm pretty sure I said small mounts in general are worthless with very few exceptions
Mmm, yeah, sorry. I got mislead by the topic title.

2: Yeah, beams are bad in 1v1 duel scenarios, too bad this never happens
And when have I said I mean duel scenarios? I have found it impractical in regular combat.

4: By hard flux options you're talking about the railgun family and mjolnirs (for the one ship that can use them effectivelly)
And also every other ballistic weapon, because regardless of their damage type, they all deal hard flux. While it's unfortunate Shield Modulation's elite effect decreases HE damage, it doesn't matter too much because you shouldn't be firing HE weapons at shields anyway (and because AI will often fire them anyway, so you need to skew towards kinetic damage), because you have kinetic weapons for that, that deal double damage to shields. And even if the damage that some weapons deal is subpar, it beats effective 0 damage that beams deal, unless they are spammed.

5: I said it's situational, you said it's good, where's the contradiction? I never said it wasn't good, a doom, or any phase ship will want to take it
Or every other high-tech ship that isn't Paragon or Odyssey, in fact, making GI situational to Odyssey and Paragon.

but hunter ships themselves are niche and if you take them against the real endgame challenges you're probably going to spend a lot of time repairing and recovering ships over and over again, hell I even got *** that one paragon died against the 2 doritos.
For the player, phase ships and Hyperion are definitely good picks. Doom for obvious reasons, but even a Hyperion is good enough to be doing about as much damage to hull as a Radiant, and considering a Radiant can dump sabots and reapers on enemies almost non-stop, I'd say that's pretty good.

6: Medusa used to be good, now it's just a worse version of the new and newly buffed small HT ships, as for paragon, yeah, I do use 2 railguns on the M slots with the timid officer I was about to discard and it was surprisingly good, but for a paragon that doesn't retreat nonstop you're probably better off just using something cheaper to trick the AI into not venting and eventually overloading themselves, like ion or grav beams since you can fire them across the screen.
Medusa is still good, just not as good as Fury, bu- wait, what? Your put a timid officer in your Paragon? What the hell?

Yeah, I got a level 7 one, was about to toss her off the airlock, then I noticed she had gunnery, shield elite, ranged mastery, etc..

So I decided to give it a try, unstalble injectors, 4 tachyon, 2 gauss, don't remember if I used some ion or gravitons as well.

The thing is: Timid stays out of the range of every other ship, while a paragon, even with the unstable injector has more range than any other ship in the game.

The result was a very, very annoying kiting flagship that never dies, in simulation it can take 1 paragon and 2 onslaughts at the same time with minimal damage, it just keeps going backwards forever until some onslaught gets too far behind, charges with F and gets instantly blown up by tachyon.

Really works as a flagship for a ranged fleet, just tell everyone to follow it and it will lead them all into great trollage, it's silly but it works, surprisingly.

Good escorts for it are dooms with F mastery and often outfitted with javelins and salamanders (just to *** the enemy off with mines and a bunch of crap to make them waste flux on PD), conquests (gauss side+mjolnir side), carriers, a couple of monitors as usual and any other long range ships you can find.
PS: I tried it without unstable injector, they just catch up to the trollagon and it gets destroyed very quickly.

PS: This is really niche, but paragons themselves are not, the number of ships that use a specific loadout isn't as relevant as the number of fleets that use said ships, most fleets will never even field a single ship from those lists, while nearly every fleet from every player in the game will always had a paragon, and more would have odysseys if they could find them.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Retry on June 05, 2021, 11:44:10 AM
And what would the point be? Fighting a ship made to counter another ship instead of making a ship that works against all the ships in a single player game?
A 4 tachyon paragon can't duel for crap unless it has a very specific timid officer trolling all over the map in a 1v1 (or 1v3) scenario, if I wanted to cheese to get fake results against ships you'd never encounter in the sector I'd probably abuse something like autopulse and/or heavy plasmas for a very specific scenario, instead of having a great centerpiece capital flagship capable of erasing anything below capital level in a single burst, and taking care of doom swarms (the fight before the Ziggurat, for example, was basically carried by the tachyon spam)

For a full meme tournament kind of shenanigans one could just abuse the broken Derelic contingent skill with meaingnless D mods on low tech ships instead and abuse not being able to take damage at all.
The point of an AI Fleet Tournament would be to prove once and for all that you're correct and your massive text walls of theories work.  After all, if what you said is true, it should be demonstrably provable through some fair fights.

Think of it this way: This thread is a suggestion.  This thread is your suggestion.  The purpose of a suggestion is to convince people in charge that the suggestion is a worthwhile implementation.  Thus far, this suggestion has failed to convince the vast majority of the playerbase with its words despite the hefty character counts of the original and followup posts, and from what I've known of Alex (the primary Star Sector developer) it's also very unlikely to convince the people in charge.  As such, the probability that this suggestion is actually adopted currently sits near zero.  One way to improve this is to prove that your underlying claims on game balance are correct by putting them to the test: through a competitive tourney where your theories are put against conventional wisdom.

To reiterate the terms of the Tourney, as the guest of honor it would be you who would have input on the rules, guidelines and restrictions for the Tourney.  You'd be able to create the parameters of the compositions and fights to your whim, and as such you can specifically forbid stuff like Derelict Contingent cheese from being used at all.

Oh, and it's a fleet tourney; not a 1v1.  No need to have a Tachyon Lance Paragon solo on the field of battle.  As the guest of honor, you would have the ability to decree at what Deployment Point size each fleet should be.

The offer is still available.  You can still accept a front-row spot in a tourney, and you will have control over the parameters of the tournament, and the chance to prove indisputably that your perspective is the correct one. (and by extension, your suggestion is a worthwhile one)

This is a yes or no question.  So what is it?  Yes, or no?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 11:58:01 AM
And what would the point be? Fighting a ship made to counter another ship instead of making a ship that works against all the ships in a single player game?
A 4 tachyon paragon can't duel for crap unless it has a very specific timid officer trolling all over the map in a 1v1 (or 1v3) scenario, if I wanted to cheese to get fake results against ships you'd never encounter in the sector I'd probably abuse something like autopulse and/or heavy plasmas for a very specific scenario, instead of having a great centerpiece capital flagship capable of erasing anything below capital level in a single burst, and taking care of doom swarms (the fight before the Ziggurat, for example, was basically carried by the tachyon spam)

For a full meme tournament kind of shenanigans one could just abuse the broken Derelic contingent skill with meaingnless D mods on low tech ships instead and abuse not being able to take damage at all.
The point of an AI Fleet Tournament would be to prove once and for all that you're correct and your massive text walls of theories work.  After all, if what you said is true, it should be demonstrably provable through some fair fights.

Think of it this way: This thread is a suggestion.  This thread is your suggestion.  The purpose of a suggestion is to convince people in charge that the suggestion is a worthwhile implementation.  Thus far, this suggestion has failed to convince the vast majority of the playerbase with its words despite the hefty character counts of the original and followup posts, and from what I've known of Alex (the primary Star Sector developer) it's also very unlikely to convince the people in charge.  As such, the probability that this suggestion is actually adopted currently sits near zero.  One way to improve this is to prove that your underlying claims on game balance are correct by putting them to the test: through a competitive tourney where your theories are put against conventional wisdom.

To reiterate the terms of the Tourney, as the guest of honor it would be you who would have input on the rules, guidelines and restrictions for the Tourney.  You'd be able to create the parameters of the compositions and fights to your whim, and as such you can specifically forbid stuff like Derelict Contingent cheese from being used at all.

Oh, and it's a fleet tourney; not a 1v1.  No need to have a Tachyon Lance Paragon solo on the field of battle.  As the guest of honor, you would have the ability to decree at what Deployment Point size each fleet should be.

The offer is still available.  You can still accept a front-row spot in a tourney, and you will have control over the parameters of the tournament, and the chance to prove indisputably that your perspective is the correct one. (and by extension, your suggestion is a worthwhile one)

This is a yes or no question.  So what is it?  Yes, or no?

Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Retry on June 05, 2021, 12:06:57 PM
It's a Yes or No question, I require a Yes or No response.

One word.  Not a paragraph, not a sentence.

Yes or no?

Which is it?

Yes?

Or No?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 12:13:11 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Retry on June 05, 2021, 12:15:17 PM
One word.  Not a paragraph, not a sentence.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 12:16:30 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

But is it a yes or is it a no?
One word.  Not a paragraph, not a sentence.

I really want to see Thunderdome. Balancedome?
Balancedome!
Two balancing opinions enter, one balancing fact leaves...
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Ira on June 05, 2021, 12:40:55 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

He didnt make the initial statement. You want change based on what you experienced. There has not yet been a single soul that shares your point of view. He is giving you a chance to demonstrate and proove your point. In a setting where you can set the rules. If you dont take that chance your whole argument stands on your experiences alone, which, like i already said, nobody shares and is therefore irrelevant.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 12:49:55 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

He didnt make the initial statement. You want change based on what you experienced. There has not yet been a single soul that shares your point of view. He is giving you a chance to demonstrate and proove your point. In a setting where you can set the rules. If you dont take that chance your whole argument stands on your experiences alone, which, like i already said, nobody shares and is therefore irrelevant.
Argumentum ad populum.

I don't need a chance of anything, I just need to be right, the lack of arguments is showing.
And as I said, he has not posted any videos of his lashers beating remnants or tesseracts with small weapons yet.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 12:50:17 PM
Attacking others does not constitute defending your point, neither does speaking of unprovable experiences.

When asked if you would be willing to provide proof of your point, you have evaded answering at every point.

Why, then, should we take your suggestion seriously, when you are clearly not confident in the merit of it yourself?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 12:50:59 PM
Attacking others does not constitute defending your point, neither does speaking of unprovable experiences.

When asked if you would be willing to provide proof of your point, you have evaded answering at every point.

Why, then, should we take your suggestion seriously, when you are clearly not confident in the merit of it yourself?
I missed your argument(?)
Being right isn't reliant of your lack of arguments is it?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 12:55:16 PM
Attacking others does not constitute defending your point, neither does speaking of unprovable experiences.

When asked if you would be willing to provide proof of your point, you have evaded answering at every point.

Why, then, should we take your suggestion seriously, when you are clearly not confident in the merit of it yourself?
I missed your argument(?)
Being right isn't reliant of your lack of arguments is it?
Being right is entirely indiscernible without proof, and you time and time again fail to provide any proof. Back up your point that they are familiar, compete.

Show that your loadout designs are superior to the commonly-held-as-superior ones. Side by side comparisons, where the only variable is the (ships and) loadout. One with your strongest designs, and one with your nay-sayer's strongest designs.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Tartiflette on June 05, 2021, 12:56:07 PM
But he says he's right too, if only there was a way to test both your arguments to once and for all know which one is actually true...
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Ira on June 05, 2021, 01:01:45 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

He didnt make the initial statement. You want change based on what you experienced. There has not yet been a single soul that shares your point of view. He is giving you a chance to demonstrate and proove your point. In a setting where you can set the rules. If you dont take that chance your whole argument stands on your experiences alone, which, like i already said, nobody shares and is therefore irrelevant.
Argumentum ad populum.

I don't need a chance of anything, I just need to be right, the lack of arguments is showing.
And as I said, he has not posted any videos of his lashers beating remnants or tesseracts with small weapons yet.

Argumentum ad populum. Srsly? You provide no facts whatsoever ecept your own opinon and still have the audacity to lecture me about argumentative theorie. You have some balls I will give you that.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 01:08:59 PM
But he says he's right too, if only there was a way to test both your arguments to once and for all know which one is actually true...

Indeed. Having a practical showcase of both concepts pitt d against the same obstacles to see which one is indeed correct and the other one not so much would save everyone a lot of writing. In short:

Balancedome!
Two opinions enter, one fact leaves!
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 01:10:00 PM
Attacking others does not constitute defending your point, neither does speaking of unprovable experiences.

When asked if you would be willing to provide proof of your point, you have evaded answering at every point.

Why, then, should we take your suggestion seriously, when you are clearly not confident in the merit of it yourself?
I missed your argument(?)
Being right isn't reliant of your lack of arguments is it?
Being right is entirely indiscernible without proof, and you time and time again fail to provide any proof. Back up your point that they are familiar, compete.

Show that your loadout designs are superior to the commonly-held-as-superior ones. Side by side comparisons, where the only variable is the (ships and) loadout. One with your strongest designs, and one with your nay-sayer's strongest designs.

Already made my point, where is the video of you roaming around killing a few hundreds of remnants and tesseracts to prove yours?
After all you're arguing for "lalaland" nonsense, I'm arguing for things you meet inside the game, and ship behavior you can see by just loading up the game and clicking on simulation

Entertaining this nonsense would be similar to lowering oneself to the level of flat earthers to argue their "science", it's a well known fact that these weapons have underperformed for a long time, years even, and that the optimal way to build most ships is by simply not taking any of them most of the time, and that low tech ships, in general, are specially underperforming in the current patch, we're not backtracking that far back, otherwise we may as well start the discussion from the game's state before it was open to the public.

But if you disagree and want to waste time then I will allow you to make your point, go on a high danger system and kill a bunch of ordos with low techs and small mounts, I'll be waiting.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 01:14:11 PM
Attacking others does not constitute defending your point, neither does speaking of unprovable experiences.

When asked if you would be willing to provide proof of your point, you have evaded answering at every point.

Why, then, should we take your suggestion seriously, when you are clearly not confident in the merit of it yourself?
I missed your argument(?)
Being right isn't reliant of your lack of arguments is it?
Being right is entirely indiscernible without proof, and you time and time again fail to provide any proof. Back up your point that they are familiar, compete.

Show that your loadout designs are superior to the commonly-held-as-superior ones. Side by side comparisons, where the only variable is the (ships and) loadout. One with your strongest designs, and one with your nay-sayer's strongest designs.

Already made my point, where is the video of you roaming around killing a few hundreds of remnants and tesseracts to prove yours?
After all you're arguing for "lalaland" nonsense, I'm arguing for things you meet inside the game, and ship behavior you can see by just loading up the game and clicking on simulation

Entertaining this nonsense would be similar to lowering oneself to the level of flat earthers to argue their "science", it's a well known fact that these weapons have underperformed for a long time, years even, and that the optimal way to build most ships is by simply not taking any of them most of the time, and that low tech ships, in general, are specially underperforming in the current patch, we're not backtracking that far back, otherwise we may as well start the discussion from the game's state before it was open to the public.

But if you disagree and want to waste time then I will allow you to make your point, go on a high danger system and kill a bunch of ordos with low techs and small mounts, I'll be waiting.
You made you're point, but you've also done everything in your power to Deflect from proving said point.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 01:17:04 PM
Attacking others does not constitute defending your point, neither does speaking of unprovable experiences.

When asked if you would be willing to provide proof of your point, you have evaded answering at every point.

Why, then, should we take your suggestion seriously, when you are clearly not confident in the merit of it yourself?

I missed your argument(?)
Being right isn't reliant of your lack of arguments is it?
Being right is entirely indiscernible without proof, and you time and time again fail to provide any proof. Back up your point that they are familiar, compete.

Show that your loadout designs are superior to the commonly-held-as-superior ones. Side by side comparisons, where the only variable is the (ships and) loadout. One with your strongest designs, and one with your nay-sayer's strongest designs.

Already made my point, where is the video of you roaming around killing a few hundreds of remnants and tesseracts to prove yours?
After all you're arguing for "lalaland" nonsense, I'm arguing for things you meet inside the game, and ship behavior you can see by just loading up the game and clicking on simulation

Entertaining this nonsense would be similar to lowering oneself to the level of flat earthers to argue their "science", it's a well known fact that these weapons have underperformed for a long time, years even, and that the optimal way to build most ships is by simply not taking any of them most of the time, and that low tech ships, in general, are specially underperforming in the current patch, we're not backtracking that far back, otherwise we may as well start the discussion from the game's state before it was open to the public.

But if you disagree and want to waste time then I will allow you to make your point, go on a high danger system and kill a bunch of ordos with low techs and small mounts, I'll be waiting.
You made you're point, but you've also done everything in your power to Deflect from proving said point.


Sure did.

Feel free to call me when you can make a point too.
PS: I still don't see the video I allowed you to make to prove your ideas, where is it?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 01:21:44 PM
Quote
PS: I still don't see the video I allowed you to make to prove your ideas, where is it?
The burden of proof is not on me, for I wasn't the one to claim that no-one uses small mounts.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 01:27:51 PM
Quote
PS: I still don't see the video I allowed you to make to prove your ideas, where is it?
The burden of proof is not on me, for I wasn't the one to claim that no-one uses small mounts.
Evading I see, I knew you would.

After all you made the ludicrous claim that people would actually use small mounts and that is somehow advantageous, something we've known to be wrong for years, and specially true nowadays since the armor values have been buffed so much that they don't even tickle even HT ships.

But feel free to come back when you can back up your claims with the requested video.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Hiruma Kai on June 05, 2021, 01:31:52 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

How about a lowtech fleet that fills its smalls with weapons, which is the opening argument, as opposed to just Lashers, which no one has been arguing about in this discussion?

Here's a typical lowtech fleet fight for me against a Remnant fleet.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough officers for every ship, so the Lashers lack officers and thus perform worse than other ships in the fleet which have level 6 officers.  On the other hand, they've got reinforced bulkheads so its basically pocket change to restore them when they build up enough bad d-mods to warrant being fixed.

The ball is in your court to provide what a tuned long range high tech beam spam (Tachyon lances, graviton beams, etc) fleet will do in a similar situation.  Or perhaps explain why my victory was not a victory in this case?  Or are remnants not good enough and I need to show Tesseracts only?

[attachment deleted by admin]
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 05, 2021, 01:32:48 PM
Quote
PS: I still don't see the video I allowed you to make to prove your ideas, where is it?
The burden of proof is not on me, for I wasn't the one to claim that no-one uses small mounts.
After all you made the ludicrous claim that people would actually use small mounts and that is somehow advantageous, something we've known to be wrong for years, and specially true nowadays since the armor values have been buffed so much that they don't even tickle even HT ships.
Well now you're just flat out lying. Feel free to quote me saying that or *** off, kthnxbye.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 01:39:06 PM
Quote
PS: I still don't see the video I allowed you to make to prove your ideas, where is it?
The burden of proof is not on me, for I wasn't the one to claim that no-one uses small mounts.
Evading I see, I knew you would.

After all you made the ludicrous claim that people would actually use small mounts and that is somehow advantageous, something we've known to be wrong for years, and specially true nowadays since the armor values have been buffed so much that they don't even tickle even HT ships.

But feel free to come back when you can back up your claims with the requested video.

Err... I'm pretty sure Yunru is correct.
If you're the one putting out a polarizing statement along the lines of "small mounts may aswell not exist on my ships" then you would also be the one expected to follow it up with cold hard data to back you up.

I've had to write a whole essay to support my "low tech was EH but burn drive and 0.95 turned into ARGH", I'm writing a small Ludd forsaken book just to explain "[Redacted] strong, but also terribly balanced, here is how you win, sometimes, maybe".

If you are not going to back your thoughts, ideas and suggestions with some good old grounding, publicly available information and experimentation of your own, then no one else will do it for you and the whole concept you threw out will be ultimately dismissed regardless of it being right or wrong.

So much writing. The good old Balancedome would've resolved this with a quickness. Two opinions enter, one fact leaves.!
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 01:52:18 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

How about a lowtech fleet that fills its smalls with weapons, which is the opening argument, as opposed to just Lashers, which no one has been arguing about in this discussion?

Here's a typical lowtech fleet fight for me against a Remnant fleet.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough officers for every ship, so the Lashers lack officers and thus perform worse than other ships in the fleet which have level 6 officers.  On the other hand, they've got reinforced bulkheads so its basically pocket change to restore them when they build up enough bad d-mods to warrant being fixed.

The ball is in your court to provide what a tuned long range high tech beam spam (Tachyon lances, graviton beams, etc) fleet will do in a similar situation.  Or perhaps explain why my victory was not a victory in this case?  Or are remnants not good enough and I need to show Tesseracts only?

This looks really good, though I did not get to see what happen in the battle at all.
I mean, if what carries the entire fleet is the weapons I've been mentioning then what's the point?

In other words, was it all about the railguns? Sabots?
Did you win BECAUSE of small weapons or IN SPITE OF the small weapons?
Does it prove that low tech and small weapons are effective? Or that building in 3 hullmods gives you enough leeway that you don't really have to consider builds anymore as you can equip everything you want and then there are points left over you might as well place something @ random.

In other words, if you took out the small weapons would you win anyway? Or would it get even better as you'd overload less quickly?

But thumbs up to you for showing something interesting.

Edit: To move things along, I feel like this guy goes into detail of what's wrong with them @ the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOWITFSoe0
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: RustyCabbage on June 05, 2021, 02:40:49 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468654117363908632/850850945843724338/unknown.png)
(That's a 5 tach + 4 sabot Radiant, FYI.)

I wouldn't claim to be able to beat Tesseracts or multi-Ordo fights with just Lashers, but I don't really know what the point of this exercise is anyways. Consider yourself humored though.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 02:42:47 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468654117363908632/850850945843724338/unknown.png)
(That's a 5 tach + 4 sabot Radiant, FYI.)

I wouldn't claim to be able to beat Tesseracts or multi-Ordo fights with just Lashers, but I don't really know what the point of this exercise is anyways. Consider yourself humored though.

Ok now I'm curious, how did this work?!
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Hiruma Kai on June 05, 2021, 02:46:55 PM
This looks really good, though I did not get to see what happen in the battle at all.
I mean, if what carries the entire fleet is the weapons I've been mentioning then what's the point?

I'll point out you have provided less pictures and videos than I have in this thread.  I have not seen what happens in your fights either.  I don't have recording software, and generally am focused on flying my own ship too much to provide good overview of what every individual ship is doing.  AI tournaments are better for that kind of overall effectiveness comparison.  Simply because it also eliminates player piloting skill and tactics as variables.

Secondly, did you look at the damage breakdown?  Again, I note, the Lashers are unofficered, costing 24 DP out of 220 deployed (11%), while still dealing 10% of total damage the fleet dished out.  If small weapons were a negative, the ships which are lacking multiplicative skill bonuses such as 15% or 20% damage bonuses, -20% shield damage, bonus range and so forth would not be providing power in line with their cost.  I admit half of them get destroyed in this encounter, while they were up they dealt damage in line with their deployment costs (and one of the reasons I include them - they are effective).

One of them was also apparently a hero lasher, and dealt roughly 1/4th the damage of a 40 DP Onslaught (XIV) with a level 6 officer, packed with large and medium mounts.  As a side note, the (D) on the Onslaught is unreliable subsystems which isn't worth removing since it never hits peak performance time limits anyways - so it lets me save on supplies a little.

However, in the interests of testing, I suppose I could try to find a similar opponent and do a smalls, no smalls comparison.  I don't have a save prior to that fleet - that comes from a retired iron man run that got to point of farming Ordos.  Although again, if both are victorious, its not proving much either way.  Head to head comparisons of as strong as you can build fleets are going to be the best discriminator (with multiple fights to help deal with AI randomness).

However, my question to you is, why should I be doing the testing for you?  I personally don't mind things staying the way they are in terms of small not being 0 OP, so I don't really have much motivation to do the testing, when I already have personal experience I already trust.  It's your job to convince me my prior experience is wrong somehow.

So, what are your example fleets demonstrating your point?

Edit: Nice fleet Rusty. :)
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 03:12:20 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

How about a lowtech fleet that fills its smalls with weapons, which is the opening argument, as opposed to just Lashers, which no one has been arguing about in this discussion?

Here's a typical lowtech fleet fight for me against a Remnant fleet.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough officers for every ship, so the Lashers lack officers and thus perform worse than other ships in the fleet which have level 6 officers.  On the other hand, they've got reinforced bulkheads so its basically pocket change to restore them when they build up enough bad d-mods to warrant being fixed.

The ball is in your court to provide what a tuned long range high tech beam spam (Tachyon lances, graviton beams, etc) fleet will do in a similar situation.  Or perhaps explain why my victory was not a victory in this case?  Or are remnants not good enough and I need to show Tesseracts only?

This looks really good, though I did not get to see what happen in the battle at all.
I mean, if what carries the entire fleet is the weapons I've been mentioning then what's the point?

In other words, was it all about the railguns? Sabots?
Did you win BECAUSE of small weapons or IN SPITE OF the small weapons?
Does it prove that low tech and small weapons are effective? Or that building in 3 hullmods gives you enough leeway that you don't really have to consider builds anymore as you can equip everything you want and then there are points left over you might as well place something @ random.

In other words, if you took out the small weapons would you win anyway? Or would it get even better as you'd overload less quickly?

But thumbs up to you for showing something interesting.

Edit: To move things along, I feel like this guy goes into detail of what's wrong with them @ the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOWITFSoe0

Would this entire endgame capable fleet work better for you? Pardon the self quote.
Spoiler
Just popping back in to say I've managed to beat endgame (not completely, I'm not even attempting a particular special encounter) using low tech only and some mods.

I'm going to bed right now, just know you're (probably, maybe)  gonna like the Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught, which is aptly named "Horseshoe Crab"  ;D

(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwggzXF2JX-6wEeXUgxd6fZXegcGatWwemXg&s)

Edit: Good Morning! Here's the fleet!
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/DrkxYx0.png)
[close]
There are mod-ships from High Tech Expansion (that's where the Aggressor, the Onslaught on a diet comes from), The Asteroid Ship pack (Big 50DP Chungus asteroid battlecarrier named pebble is from there) and Underworld (Venom-X, the 10DP bootleg Scarab) but they're all actually using vanilla weapons. In order:

Horseshoe Crab (Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/rtYC1Jl.png)
[close]
Hullmods on the ship because the list is too damn long to fit on the screen:
1) (integrated) Heavy Armor
2) (Integrated) Reinforced Bulkheads
3) (Integrated) Integrated Targeting Unit
4) Solar Shielding
5) Armored Weapon Mounts
6) Integrated Point Defence AI
7) Automated Repair Unit
8) Shield Shunt
9) Flux Distributor
10) Insulated Engine Ass(embly)
11) Advanced Turret Gyros (for the Mk.9 Autocannons and the Railguns that also double as Point Defence)
12) Expanded magazines (for the TPCs)
This thing is actually magical. It's got every single possible bonus either increasing armor, reducing damage taken (across armor and hull), boosting up Hullpoints, flux dissipation and damage done to the enemy (aside from Energy Weapon mastery for the two TPCs).
Why do I have 3600 flux generated by weapons when the ship only gets 1524 flux dissipation?
To make sure the thing fully uses all its flux dissipation to shoot weapons even if it's only using a portion of them, It also has an aggressive enough officer, enough armor, hull hitpoints and residual armor. This Onslaught has around 175 Residual armor spread across 30.000 hull points, and that's before we even count the -35% (or was it 45%?) hull and armor damage taken thanks to officer skills and 100% CR.
Officer skills (swear to all that Ludd loves that he was already named Ahmed when I got him)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/D7EZjYH.png)
[close]
The only oopsie I made in setting it up was making Damage Control Elite instead of Target Analysis. The one thing missing is Reinforced Flux Conduits (I already have Shield shunt boosting EMP resistance, it felt useless) and Blast Doors, but who cares about losing crew members anyway when you can do this under AI control:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/Npas9Ol.png)
[close]
Or this (story spoilers):
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/Sir2q11.png)
[close]
And also that, without a single care in the world (more spoilers)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/WOKrpSN.png)
[close]
You can also just send it into a sea of remnants and it will hold on for minutes while the rest of your fleet is busy elsewhere and is virtually unkillable by frigades unless they either got Reapers able to get thru the absurd point defence or enough PPT to kill it before they suffer critical malfunctions or end up getting crumped.

Salamander To The Knee & Renegade (Pebble-class Asteroid Battlecarrier)
This ship got rebalanced while I was nearing the end of the campaign, so some skills are not optimal for it, anyway:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/5WB8FNV.png)
[close]
Commander skills:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/nddXfR5.png)
[close]
To quote myself, the Pebble is the already malformed offspring of a Paragon and a Legion that got abandoned at Umbra and got beaten up by pirates with a crowbar until it could be called one of their own. It's tanky, can carry 9 (13 if you really want to go full meme) Salamanders plus some good kinetics and can then follow up on fluxing out/immobilizing the target with bombers, in this case triple Khopesh. It works as well as you'd expect from a 50FP battlecarrier, tanking the world (story spoilers):
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/H7UYt1U.png)
[close]
and then hitting the world back twice as hard (more story spoilers):
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/nJCa8O5.png)
[close]


Chub B Gone & Ketomania (XIV Aggressor-class Artillery Battlecruiser)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/gZoHjYb.png)
[close]
Officer skills (they're quite suboptimal, I know)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/zi3Fssm.png)
[close]
This is quite the straighforward ship. It's an Onslaught trading most side facing weapons, armor and burn drive for improved mobility and Accellerated ammo feed, making it go around with a quickness and boosting all of its front facing weapons (aside from the TPCs) into one single target. It's quite great at buzzsawing singular ships while it's escorting either the Pebbles or the Onslaught. I don't have screenshots of this one doing work by itself but you've probably seen it in the combat screenshots above doing work while behind the other capitals

Venom-X Skirmish Frigade
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/OumSF76.png)
[close]
Officer skills:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/DkccACo.png)
[close]
This bad boy did not change from midgame, it's fast , survivable and packs a punch when it fights at close range. I could've seen an alternative variant of this thing using Elite Point Defence, Elite Ranged Specialization double Heavy Machineguns, an Ion Cannon and a Light Assault gun but I really liked the added durability of this one so I kept it.


I more or less butchered the Doritos with 180FP without manually controlling any ship and only lost (and then recovered) some Venom-Xs and a Pebble because I was dumb and did double avoid orders on the Doritos at one point in the fight. Some battle screenshots that were not shown above:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/uIAJaCU.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/5LlCKDL.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/3J413sD.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/WWcg1ie.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/06pgR3K.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/fctRjf4.png)
[close]
End of combat:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/9gX5hfD.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/TlES23Z.png)
[close]
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/WLBTrh8.png)
[close]
Combat Data:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/TWKObxh.png)
[close]


There we go, I'm sorry for all the spoiler tages, as usual. Have a good one out there!

[close]
It would not be unfair to state that more than half the total damage comes from small and medium weapons. Even the Onslaught has 6 IPDAI, advanced turret gyros Railguns to absolutely ruin the day of anything with a shield in front of it. The mod asteroid battlecarriers also have light machineguns everywhere, with target analysis, elite point defence, ITU and gunnery impants, meaning they engage at around 600 units of range and can drive off everything with a shield in combination with HVDs and the Mk.9 autocannon. Agrressor is a HVD spam machine that gets all the damage bonuses plus systems expertise to make it oump out that glorious Accellerated AMmo Feed faster. The Venom Xs are basically the smallest superfrigate that can mount two medium weapons with temporal shell.

As for the video, let me put in a few comments as I watch it...
Painfully clickbait thumbnail -1
Says PD lasers are good while driving a Fury that's not using front shields. -1
Understands what AM blasters are good for +1
Comprehends the strenghts of Light Needler and Railgun +1
Understands what Sabots and Harpoons are for +1
Calls the single Reaper Launcher the best small missile weapon -1
Does not even get 3 minutes into the video and he's already asking for likes and subscriptions -1
Deploys Ion Beam appproriately +1
Disregards the fact the HVD has the highest damage per shot of every medium ballistic weapon -1
Understands you need more kinetic than HE +1
Does not cover weapons like the Heavy Autocannon, the Arbalest or the Heavy machinegun -1
Understands he's not perfect +3
Does not mention the fact Plasma is the best energy weapon to build hard flux in a prolonged engagement -1
Does not even recognize the existance of the High INtensity Laser, probably the best bang for your buck large energy weapon to eat through armor -1
Forgets to mention the Hephaestus has small ballistic weapon levels of damage per shot, making it actually subpar against enemies with high enough armor/residual armor, and neither does he mention the fact it's 480 flux per second for it too -1
Does not mention the high damage per shot of the Mk.9 autocannon making it one of the best weapons to also damage hull on heavily armored targets
Plays a Conquest with both broadsides and no point defence to speak of -1
Is knowledgeable about the Mjolnir +1
Has evidently not played enough 0.95 yet to know the Gauss is not the best kid in the block when it comes to kinetic weapons anymore -1
Does not even mention the Hellbore as the best armor tearing flaming plasma familiy car ballistic weapon launcher in the game -3
Is correct on the Hurricane +1
Does not seem to mention the massive impact officer skills have on missile weapons in 0.95, which skewers his judgement -1
Is almost correct on the Locust, exept for the fact it may aswell just not exist against ships with passable residual armor and that it has way worse actual damage against ships than any other large missile weapon, even against hull -1
Does not even mention both Hammer Barrage and Squalls -4
Is correct on Daggers, Longbows and Cobras +1
Somehow comes to the conclusion Flash Bombers are "nice" -1
Does not even mention Khopesh, Trident, Piranha, Thunders or Xyphos -4
Ah, I see where you got this "no small weapons" idea from I suggest you to hang around the forum and find out why that's wrong -2
He has not even mentioned the Rift Lance -1

Final Score: He has not played enough of the game yet to make any sort of comprehensible weapon tier list and call it a guide. You can probably find more information regarding weapon selection here on the forum in half the time it takes to watch his video. No offense, he seems fun, but don't take all he says as gospel, well don't take any opinionated theory as gospel...ever really and that includes me aswell.

Read enough of what everyone writes, combine it with your personal experience and you will eventually reach your own solid conclusions. "Small Weapons Bad" is not one of them.


Edit: That's a great low tech fleet by the way Hiruma Kai!
Now, swap those high tech bomber LPCs for low tech ones and Ludd will be proud  ;)







Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 05, 2021, 03:35:07 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.

How about a lowtech fleet that fills its smalls with weapons, which is the opening argument, as opposed to just Lashers, which no one has been arguing about in this discussion?

Here's a typical lowtech fleet fight for me against a Remnant fleet.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough officers for every ship, so the Lashers lack officers and thus perform worse than other ships in the fleet which have level 6 officers.  On the other hand, they've got reinforced bulkheads so its basically pocket change to restore them when they build up enough bad d-mods to warrant being fixed.

The ball is in your court to provide what a tuned long range high tech beam spam (Tachyon lances, graviton beams, etc) fleet will do in a similar situation.  Or perhaps explain why my victory was not a victory in this case?  Or are remnants not good enough and I need to show Tesseracts only?

This looks really good, though I did not get to see what happen in the battle at all.
I mean, if what carries the entire fleet is the weapons I've been mentioning then what's the point?

In other words, was it all about the railguns? Sabots?
Did you win BECAUSE of small weapons or IN SPITE OF the small weapons?
Does it prove that low tech and small weapons are effective? Or that building in 3 hullmods gives you enough leeway that you don't really have to consider builds anymore as you can equip everything you want and then there are points left over you might as well place something @ random.

In other words, if you took out the small weapons would you win anyway? Or would it get even better as you'd overload less quickly?

But thumbs up to you for showing something interesting.

Edit: To move things along, I feel like this guy goes into detail of what's wrong with them @ the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOWITFSoe0

Would this entire endgame capable fleet work better for you? Pardon the self quote.
Spoiler
Just popping back in to say I've managed to beat endgame (not completely, I'm not even attempting a particular special encounter) using low tech only and some mods.

I'm going to bed right now, just know you're (probably, maybe)  gonna like the Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught, which is aptly named "Horseshoe Crab"  ;D

(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwggzXF2JX-6wEeXUgxd6fZXegcGatWwemXg&s)

Edit: Good Morning! Here's the fleet!
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/DrkxYx0.png)
[close]
There are mod-ships from High Tech Expansion (that's where the Aggressor, the Onslaught on a diet comes from), The Asteroid Ship pack (Big 50DP Chungus asteroid battlecarrier named pebble is from there) and Underworld (Venom-X, the 10DP bootleg Scarab) but they're all actually using vanilla weapons. In order:

Horseshoe Crab (Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/rtYC1Jl.png)
[close]
Hullmods on the ship because the list is too damn long to fit on the screen:
1) (integrated) Heavy Armor
2) (Integrated) Reinforced Bulkheads
3) (Integrated) Integrated Targeting Unit
4) Solar Shielding
5) Armored Weapon Mounts
6) Integrated Point Defence AI
7) Automated Repair Unit
8) Shield Shunt
9) Flux Distributor
10) Insulated Engine Ass(embly)
11) Advanced Turret Gyros (for the Mk.9 Autocannons and the Railguns that also double as Point Defence)
12) Expanded magazines (for the TPCs)
This thing is actually magical. It's got every single possible bonus either increasing armor, reducing damage taken (across armor and hull), boosting up Hullpoints, flux dissipation and damage done to the enemy (aside from Energy Weapon mastery for the two TPCs).
Why do I have 3600 flux generated by weapons when the ship only gets 1524 flux dissipation?
To make sure the thing fully uses all its flux dissipation to shoot weapons even if it's only using a portion of them, It also has an aggressive enough officer, enough armor, hull hitpoints and residual armor. This Onslaught has around 175 Residual armor spread across 30.000 hull points, and that's before we even count the -35% (or was it 45%?) hull and armor damage taken thanks to officer skills and 100% CR.
Officer skills (swear to all that Ludd loves that he was already named Ahmed when I got him)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/D7EZjYH.png)
[close]
The only oopsie I made in setting it up was making Damage Control Elite instead of Target Analysis. The one thing missing is Reinforced Flux Conduits (I already have Shield shunt boosting EMP resistance, it felt useless) and Blast Doors, but who cares about losing crew members anyway when you can do this under AI control:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/Npas9Ol.png)
[close]
Or this (story spoilers):
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/Sir2q11.png)
[close]
And also that, without a single care in the world (more spoilers)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/WOKrpSN.png)
[close]
You can also just send it into a sea of remnants and it will hold on for minutes while the rest of your fleet is busy elsewhere and is virtually unkillable by frigades unless they either got Reapers able to get thru the absurd point defence or enough PPT to kill it before they suffer critical malfunctions or end up getting crumped.

Salamander To The Knee & Renegade (Pebble-class Asteroid Battlecarrier)
This ship got rebalanced while I was nearing the end of the campaign, so some skills are not optimal for it, anyway:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/5WB8FNV.png)
[close]
Commander skills:
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/nddXfR5.png)
[close]
To quote myself, the Pebble is the already malformed offspring of a Paragon and a Legion that got abandoned at Umbra and got beaten up by pirates with a crowbar until it could be called one of their own. It's tanky, can carry 9 (13 if you really want to go full meme) Salamanders plus some good kinetics and can then follow up on fluxing out/immobilizing the target with bombers, in this case triple Khopesh. It works as well as you'd expect from a 50FP battlecarrier, tanking the world (story spoilers):
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/H7UYt1U.png)
[close]
and then hitting the world back twice as hard (more story spoilers):
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/nJCa8O5.png)
[close]


Chub B Gone & Ketomania (XIV Aggressor-class Artillery Battlecruiser)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/gZoHjYb.png)
[close]
Officer skills (they're quite suboptimal, I know)
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/zi3Fssm.png)
[close]
This is quite the straighforward ship. It's an Onslaught trading most side facing weapons, armor and burn drive for improved mobility and Accellerated ammo feed, making it go around with a quickness and boosting all of its front facing weapons (aside from the TPCs) into one single target. It's quite great at buzzsawing singular ships while it's escorting either the Pebbles or the Onslaught. I don't have screenshots of this one doing work by itself but you've probably seen it in the combat screenshots above doing work while behind the other capitals

Venom-X Skirmish Frigade
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(https://i.imgur.com/OumSF76.png)
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Officer skills:
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(https://i.imgur.com/DkccACo.png)
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This bad boy did not change from midgame, it's fast , survivable and packs a punch when it fights at close range. I could've seen an alternative variant of this thing using Elite Point Defence, Elite Ranged Specialization double Heavy Machineguns, an Ion Cannon and a Light Assault gun but I really liked the added durability of this one so I kept it.


I more or less butchered the Doritos with 180FP without manually controlling any ship and only lost (and then recovered) some Venom-Xs and a Pebble because I was dumb and did double avoid orders on the Doritos at one point in the fight. Some battle screenshots that were not shown above:
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(https://i.imgur.com/uIAJaCU.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/5LlCKDL.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/3J413sD.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/WWcg1ie.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/06pgR3K.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/fctRjf4.png)
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End of combat:
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(https://i.imgur.com/9gX5hfD.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/TlES23Z.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/WLBTrh8.png)
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Combat Data:
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(https://i.imgur.com/TWKObxh.png)
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There we go, I'm sorry for all the spoiler tages, as usual. Have a good one out there!

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It would not be unfair to state that more than half the total damage comes from small and medium weapons. Even the Onslaught has 6 IPDAI, advanced turret gyros Railguns to absolutely ruin the day of anything with a shield in front of it. The mod asteroid battlecarriers also have light machineguns everywhere, with target analysis, elite point defence, ITU and gunnery impants, meaning they engage at around 600 units of range and can drive off everything with a shield in combination with HVDs and the Mk.9 autocannon. Agrressor is a HVD spam machine that gets all the damage bonuses plus systems expertise to make it oump out that glorious Accellerated AMmo Feed faster. The Venom Xs are basically the smallest superfrigate that can mount two medium weapons with temporal shell.

As for the video, let me put in a few comments as I watch it...
Painfully clickbait thumbnail -1
Says PD lasers are good while driving a Fury that's not using front shields. -1
Understands what AM blasters are good for +1
Comprehends the strenghts of Light Needler and Railgun +1
Understands what Sabots and Harpoons are for +1
Calls the single Reaper Launcher the best small missile weapon -1
Does not even get 3 minutes into the video and he's already asking for likes and subscriptions -1
Deploys Ion Beam appproriately +1
Disregards the fact the HVD has the highest damage per shot of every medium ballistic weapon -1
Understands you need more kinetic than HE +1
Does not cover weapons like the Heavy Autocannon, the Arbalest or the Heavy machinegun -1
Understands he's not perfect +3
Does not mention the fact Plasma is the best energy weapon to build hard flux in a prolonged engagement -1
Does not even recognize the existance of the High INtensity Laser, probably the best bang for your buck large energy weapon to eat through armor -1
Forgets to mention the Hephaestus has small ballistic weapon levels of damage per shot, making it actually subpar against enemies with high enough armor/residual armor, and neither does he mention the fact it's 480 flux per second for it too -1
Does not mention the high damage per shot of the Mk.9 autocannon making it one of the best weapons to also damage hull on heavily armored targets
Plays a Conquest with both broadsides and no point defence to speak of -1
Is knowledgeable about the Mjolnir +1
Has evidently not played enough 0.95 yet to know the Gauss is not the best kid in the block when it comes to kinetic weapons anymore -1
Does not even mention the Hellbore as the best armor tearing flaming plasma familiy car ballistic weapon launcher in the game -3
Is correct on the Hurricane +1
Does not seem to mention the massive impact officer skills have on missile weapons in 0.95, which skewers his judgement -1
Is almost correct on the Locust, exept for the fact it may aswell just not exist against ships with passable residual armor and that it has way worse actual damage against ships than any other large missile weapon, even against hull -1
Does not even mention both Hammer Barrage and Squalls -4
Is correct on Daggers, Longbows and Cobras +1
Somehow comes to the conclusion Flash Bombers are "nice" -1
Does not even mention Khopesh, Trident, Piranha, Thunders or Xyphos -4
Ah, I see where you got this "no small weapons" idea from I suggest you to hang around the forum and find out why that's wrong -2
He has not even mentioned the Rift Lance -1

Final Score: He has not played enough of the game yet to make any sort of comprehensible weapon tier list and call it a guide. You can probably find more information regarding weapon selection here on the forum in half the time it takes to watch his video. No offense, he seems fun, but don't take all he says as gospel, well don't take any opinionated theory as gospel...ever really and that includes me aswell.

Read enough of what everyone writes, combine it with your personal experience and you will eventually reach your own solid conclusions. "Small Weapons Bad" is not one of them.


Edit: That's a great low tech fleet by the way Hiruma Kai!
Now, swap those high tech bomber LPCs for low tech ones and Ludd will be proud  ;)

No need, I've read plenty, in fact it would seem that a small bubble I didn't know existed seem to think otherwise on this forum.

That being said if that fleet just beat the crap out of the remnants head on then I won't nitpick fleet sizes or anything else, I'll concede to cabbage that he's probably right and that my idea of a fix, while I still believe would be better for most of the ships most people like to fly, it would probably create a broken imbalance in the lower tier of the game, it's not worth it to solve one issue while creating another just as bad.

That being said~
It's not unheard of for certain ships to have different OP costs for different weapons, like the Conquest.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 03:52:03 PM
You'll know you've read enough things on the forum when you realize you will never read enough things on the forum and that someone else in it will always know something more than you do at all times.

You can probably ask me for overall Overridden ship setup heresy, more or less how to properly set up every single Remnant ship for what you want them to do and how many overridden Glimmers it takes to break endgame entirely, but most of what I know about Low Tech probably pales in comparisons to people which normally play it above High tech like Thaago just to name one chap. You won't be able to call yourself a habitual forum dweller until Thaago suggests putting Harpoons on some of your ship setups. This is a reliable method, promise.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Drazan on June 05, 2021, 04:01:27 PM
You won't be able to call yourself a habitual forum dweller until Thaago suggests putting Haproons on some of your ship setups. This is a reliable method, promise.

On the Dorito tournament stream he was more exited about ships putting sabbots linked with ballistic/energy weapons. So maybe his fixation changes over time :D
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 04:07:05 PM
You won't be able to call yourself a habitual forum dweller until Thaago suggests putting Haproons on some of your ship setups. This is a reliable method, promise.

On the Dorito tournament stream he was more exited about ships putting sabbots linked with ballistic/energy weapons. So maybe his fixation changes over time :D

My bet is that he was blinded by the absolute glory that was Griphons blasting the Doritos away with Harpoons/Hurricanes to talk lucidly bout anything else  ;)
More things about the torunament, which I watched in its entirety but forgot to comment on it in the forum afterwards:
Conquest and Odissey Master Race.
That one time the Dorito did a double Onslaught kill with the Rift Lance was just orgasmic.
Point Defence Dorito is BEST dorito
Never underestimate the power of a distraction frigate
Why does nobody link missile weapons togheder
Shame nobody used Rocket Gryphons
Monitors are the best unofficered frigate in the game for the Dorito fights
Champion is great, the builds for it not entirely so
You can see how little low tech gets used without either Safety Overrides, Integrated Hullmods or Officers to make them come into their own

Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Thaago on June 05, 2021, 04:12:09 PM
Hahahaha well I wanted to see if anyone was using burst missile tricks! Considering the hardest part of omega fights is the first part before they burst and their are only 2 targets...

But seriously people, put missiles on your ships! You're killing me! :D

Tournament was really interesting! I was kind of shocked that the capitals that did best was really the double storm needler conquest. It makes sense in hindsight (massive kinetic firepower, the enemy rushed in close anyways so range is less important, maneuvering jets to keep the target in arc), but I would have thought they were too fragile without officers to stand up to omega weapons.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 04:16:03 PM
Hahahaha well I wanted to see if anyone was using burst missile tricks! Considering the hardest part of omega fights is the first part before they burst and their are only 2 targets...

But seriously people, put missiles on your ships! You're killing me! :D

Tournament was really interesting! I was kind of shocked that the capitals that did best was really the double storm needler conquest. It makes sense in hindsight (massive kinetic firepower, the enemy rushed in close anyways so range is less important, maneuvering jets to keep the target in arc), but I would have thought they were too fragile without officers to stand up to omega weapons.

I've found two tactics mostly work:
1)Have enough firepower and the mobility to use it and no drawback you have will matter. The more burst damage to overload the enemy with and then nuke it with strike damage the better.
2)Have enough tanking power with enough guaranteed hard flux damage behind it with ways to punish retreating targets and they won't be able to do anything to you

Anything inbetween will either be too squishy and die before scoring enough hits or suffer a slow painful grind against a set of ships with infinite CR and the best shields/mobility in the game. Any sufficiently competent fleet will likely win but the two ways I listed above tend to do so with minimal to no losses.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: RustyCabbage on June 05, 2021, 04:20:26 PM
Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468654117363908632/850850945843724338/unknown.png)
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(That's a 5 tach + 4 sabot Radiant, FYI.)

I wouldn't claim to be able to beat Tesseracts or multi-Ordo fights with just Lashers, but I don't really know what the point of this exercise is anyways. Consider yourself humored though.

Ok now I'm curious, how did this work?!
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468654117363908632/850875446396583987/unknown.png)
22 of these Lashers.

Yes, they're SO frigates, but it's a 2-1 DP disadvantage; I'm not a miracle worker. :p
If it was a 120-150 DP sub-Ordo, especially with a few fewer Brilliants and no Scintilla then non-SO Lashers still work even against a Radiant, though.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Hiruma Kai on June 05, 2021, 04:32:35 PM
Yes, they're SO frigates, but it's a 2-1 DP disadvantage; I'm not a miracle worker. :p
If it was a 120-150 DP sub-Ordo, especially with a few fewer Brilliants and no Scintilla then non-SO Lashers still work even against a Radiant, though.

Hmm. 2646 shield damage per second with AFF up seems solid for a 4 DP frigate without an officer. :)

To say nothing of the 264 sabots (possibly more with officer skills?).
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Arcagnello on June 05, 2021, 04:39:43 PM
I'm almost sure you could beat bigger ordos and possibly even the Doritos with 3-4 Officered Grypons spamming as many Harpoons and Hurricanes possible in addition to those Lashers. Optimally with ECCM and an officer with Elite Missile Spec, Elite Target Analysys and Systems Expertise. Bonus points if they also have Nav Package boosting Nav Rating up to 20% by themselves without needing Coordinated Manouvers. I'm pretty sure the ECCM'ed up harpoons delete the [Hyper Redacted] fighters aswell. A timid officer plus an HVD may help said Gryphons stay somewhat away from the enemy but that obviously won't work all that well against Doritos. Putting Heavy and Light Machineguns everywhere for shield damage and drive them away when Doritos are not getting distracted by the Lashers might work better.

They will do massive extra damage to bigger ships and a setup like that gives the Gryphons +800% limited missile ammo with half the reload time between salvos. It would also make the need of those light mortars redundant :)
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Morgan Rue on June 05, 2021, 06:42:29 PM
CanaldoVoid, I think your doctrine is just really unusual and not used by most players. You kite hard with stacked beam weapons yes? This sort of style is going to be really effective against Low Tech ships, which are lacking in dissipation and will not be able to catch faster ships with longer range. This is probably part of why you feel the way you do. It's a cool doctrine though, and it's neat to see all the ways people play the game.

I usually fit a lot of LRPD Lasers or PD Lasers on my ships, as they are fairly flux efficient and are usually good to shoot at enemies in addition to shooting down fighters and missiles. LRPD Lasers can also be used to provide point defense for allied ships as well, which is quite helpful.

I usually won't fit stuff like Single or Dual Autocannons on ships, but this is more because their ranges do not match up with the larger weapon ranges rather than the weapons themselves being ineffective. I generally like Light Machine Guns a lot though, and personally prefer them to Vulcans because of their longer reach and ability to pressure shields extremely well at close ranges. I usually don't use much ballistic PD outside of Flak Cannons though. Light Mortars are notably extremely efficient HE weapons and can be very effective on a number of ships. Fitting a Hammerhead with two Light Mortars and two medium kinetic weapons can be quite effective.

I've not killed any real late game enemies recently, at least not with vanilla stuff, but there was that time I faced down a few small groups of Remnants with just Hounds and won without any losses. Lots of hull and armor damage though.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: CanaldoVoid on June 06, 2021, 08:25:55 AM
CanaldoVoid, I think your doctrine is just really unusual and not used by most players. You kite hard with stacked beam weapons yes? This sort of style is going to be really effective against Low Tech ships, which are lacking in dissipation and will not be able to catch faster ships with longer range. This is probably part of why you feel the way you do. It's a cool doctrine though, and it's neat to see all the ways people play the game.

I usually fit a lot of LRPD Lasers or PD Lasers on my ships, as they are fairly flux efficient and are usually good to shoot at enemies in addition to shooting down fighters and missiles. LRPD Lasers can also be used to provide point defense for allied ships as well, which is quite helpful.

I usually won't fit stuff like Single or Dual Autocannons on ships, but this is more because their ranges do not match up with the larger weapon ranges rather than the weapons themselves being ineffective. I generally like Light Machine Guns a lot though, and personally prefer them to Vulcans because of their longer reach and ability to pressure shields extremely well at close ranges. I usually don't use much ballistic PD outside of Flak Cannons though. Light Mortars are notably extremely efficient HE weapons and can be very effective on a number of ships. Fitting a Hammerhead with two Light Mortars and two medium kinetic weapons can be quite effective.

I've not killed any real late game enemies recently, at least not with vanilla stuff, but there was that time I faced down a few small groups of Remnants with just Hounds and won without any losses. Lots of hull and armor damage though.

I see, that would make sense, it's just weird that the few posters I've been seeing in the same topics all over the forum seem to use this same playing style which seems to be completely different from every reddit post, discussion, every social media, every fb group, every discord group and every gameplay video/let's play series I've ever seen about Starsector.

But out of curiosity, I was reading Rusty's guide to AI friendly ships and I couldn't help but to notice his onslaught design is basically identical to mine, save for a few differences (IE: I don't downsize the dev cannons as I want it covering the entire fleet as a nuking PD platform that basically takes care of everyone else) but the rest is basically the same, long range railguns matching it's own natural weapon's range, possibly a helbore (heph sucks), 3 annihilators to make the enemy's PD go nutts wasting tons of flux and..... Nearly every, or just every small slot empty.

It's like I've been arguing defending a point that's just common sense all this time when guides are doing exactly what I'm pointing out to be a problem, possibly for the same exact reasons.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 06, 2021, 09:26:05 AM
Well that's the problem: Reddit's a cancer :P

I'm also fairly sure the unofficial official Starsector discord would probably disagree too, as they draw their memberbase mostly from this forum.

And I don't think anyone's said full smalls is totally superior. Indeed, that was not the point being (originally) argued: It was that full smalls is too strong to be free.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: StrikeEcho on June 06, 2021, 09:35:00 AM
Quote
But out of curiosity, I was reading Rusty's guide to AI friendly ships and I couldn't help but to notice his onslaught design is basically identical to mine, save for a few differences (IE: I don't downsize the dev cannons as I want it covering the entire fleet as a nuking PD platform that basically takes care of everyone else) but the rest is basically the same, long range railguns matching it's own natural weapon's range, possibly a helbore (heph sucks), 3 annihilators to make the enemy's PD go nutts wasting tons of flux and..... Nearly every, or just every small slot empty.

Dude, did you not see IPDAI as the reason why there were so few PD? Plus other than flak, vulcans were the only PD weapons on that build?
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Retry on June 06, 2021, 12:10:15 PM
I don't see the point in blaming the subreddit; while they've got some frequently odd builds and inadvisable takes, the vast majority of (non-meme) builds posted there do not forego the small mounts as the OP describes.  A cursory look through the subreddit clearly shows that.

Neither did the linked YT video claim that small's are pointless.  In fact, the guy had neutral to positive things to say about the majority of the small weapons in their respective sections, including the Vulcan and Light Needler.  He even had more positive things to say about the LAG than I'd ever be willing to claim.

Neither did the unofficial Discord server (linked in the Forums) agree with the OP's perspective, the primary "dwelling" of most of our mod author, tournament managers, spaders, streamers, and other Star Sector community members.  The Discord reaction to this suggestion was universally negative, but at least there's been several memes that's been generated from this thread alone.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: RustyCabbage on June 06, 2021, 01:12:20 PM
CanaldoVoid, I think your doctrine is just really unusual and not used by most players. You kite hard with stacked beam weapons yes? This sort of style is going to be really effective against Low Tech ships, which are lacking in dissipation and will not be able to catch faster ships with longer range. This is probably part of why you feel the way you do. It's a cool doctrine though, and it's neat to see all the ways people play the game.

I usually fit a lot of LRPD Lasers or PD Lasers on my ships, as they are fairly flux efficient and are usually good to shoot at enemies in addition to shooting down fighters and missiles. LRPD Lasers can also be used to provide point defense for allied ships as well, which is quite helpful.

I usually won't fit stuff like Single or Dual Autocannons on ships, but this is more because their ranges do not match up with the larger weapon ranges rather than the weapons themselves being ineffective. I generally like Light Machine Guns a lot though, and personally prefer them to Vulcans because of their longer reach and ability to pressure shields extremely well at close ranges. I usually don't use much ballistic PD outside of Flak Cannons though. Light Mortars are notably extremely efficient HE weapons and can be very effective on a number of ships. Fitting a Hammerhead with two Light Mortars and two medium kinetic weapons can be quite effective.

I've not killed any real late game enemies recently, at least not with vanilla stuff, but there was that time I faced down a few small groups of Remnants with just Hounds and won without any losses. Lots of hull and armor damage though.

I see, that would make sense, it's just weird that the few posters I've been seeing in the same topics all over the forum seem to use this same playing style which seems to be completely different from every reddit post, discussion, every social media, every fb group, every discord group and every gameplay video/let's play series I've ever seen about Starsector.

But out of curiosity, I was reading Rusty's guide to AI friendly ships and I couldn't help but to notice his onslaught design is basically identical to mine, save for a few differences (IE: I don't downsize the dev cannons as I want it covering the entire fleet as a nuking PD platform that basically takes care of everyone else) but the rest is basically the same, long range railguns matching it's own natural weapon's range, possibly a helbore (heph sucks), 3 annihilators to make the enemy's PD go nutts wasting tons of flux and..... Nearly every, or just every small slot empty.

It's like I've been arguing defending a point that's just common sense all this time when guides are doing exactly what I'm pointing out to be a problem, possibly for the same exact reasons.
(her)

Some notes for that Onslaught build:
a) it was designed in a skill-less 0.9.1a scenario. The equivalent in 0.95a has 30-60 more OP thanks to s-mods.
b) even for 0.9.1a it's slightly outdated and I started playing around with using IPDAI small weapons in the rear to better handle flanking ships
c) the increased ease of obtaining the Point Defense skill in 0.95a significantly improves Vulcan spam and this build would probably not look the same in light of that.
d) other players sometimes differ with me on this but the main drawback to using small non-PD weapons in these slots is a lack of range matching. This is less of an issue on smaller ships and hence small weapons are more prevalent there.
e) Annihilators that hit have a much higher flux cost than Annihilators that are stopped by PD, so you have it a bit backwards there.

Anyhow, small weapons are good enough on the ships that regularly use them that I don't see much onus for changes as drastic as those you're suggesting. Alex has been giving them minor touch-ups recently which I tend to agree with however, so I suppose it's not a wholly irredeemable opinion.
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: ElPresidente on June 07, 2021, 12:21:57 AM
COUNTER-PROPOSAL:

Higher EMP resistance
Faster engine and weapon repairs
Lower supply usage
Title: Re: Possible buff to Low Tech Ships idea
Post by: Yunru on June 07, 2021, 12:36:49 AM
I prefer "armour and hull slowly regenerates to 25%" with a side helping of "after battle, repairs up to 25% (before other repairs)."