Your description of Ziggurat is a bit confusing me; do you not know that motes can attack ships and EMP them through shields? It makes it the best dueler in the game, since if the other ship isn't shooting at you, you win flux war by walkover. It is a logistic nightmare, though, and merely a bigger Doom.As I've said, it has nothing on Radiant while costing almost twice as much, and it struggles against Paragon that also costs less. I've mentioned motes and that the AI doesn't seem to know what to do about them, but even if the player was to spam their system between an empty space and the enemy ship to deploy them as quckly as possible, keeping all of the systems disabled at all times looks like an impossible task. Meanwhile, one second of getting clipped by an EMP beam and all of your weapon systems are disabled for 30 seconds. I'd honestly rather have a Paragon, or, better yet, a player-controlled Radiant - even for the same deployment cost!
I'm surprised Fury is just B-tier. I would have easily put it in S-tier; not because it has amazing absolute stats, but because its stats for its DP are indeed brilliant. It's like having 2/3rds of an Aurora for half the price (that's 50% more Aurora per Fury than Aurora per Aurora!). You can make an endgame worthy fleet of just Furies.That was my entire reasoning... when rating Apogee in S-tier! ;)
Brawler wouldn't even be in S tier if it was 5 DP...
Ok ok this part is a mess so I'll stick everything in one sentence. What right does Wolf have to be so high up in A tier, while Scarab and Afflictor are in B tier, together with Vigilance?? I can't wrap my head around this no matter how hard I try.
Lasher being placed lower than a Wayfarer, alrighty then.
All in all this was pretty amazing for a first time player, I'd love to hear more thoughts in the future since you wrote everything in such high detail. And I'm sure this list will change once you play a bit more. Also next update will shake things up a bit balance wise so who knows for how long will this post stay relevant.
As I've said, it has nothing on Radiant while costing almost twice as much, and it struggles against Paragon that also costs less. I've mentioned motes and that the AI doesn't seem to know what to do about them, but even if the player was to spam their system between an empty space and the enemy ship to deploy them as quckly as possible, keeping all of the systems disabled at all times looks like an impossible task. Meanwhile, one second of getting clipped by an EMP beam and all of your weapon systems are disabled for 30 seconds. I'd honestly rather have a Paragon, or, better yet, a player-controlled Radiant - even for the same deployment cost!Talking about Ziggurat's balance is a bit tricky, since there's only one, so there's a decent chance player will be at the helm, if the ship's deployed at all.
Enforcer is a nice brick but it really doesn't deserve to be together with Hammerhead.I missed that! Yeah, it's weird Shrike (P) is lower on the list than regular Shrike. Previously, (P) was obviously better. Now it's about even, mainly because balance favours high-tech more now, so that small ballistic isn't such a crutch.
Shrike(P) being lower than a base Shrike is very surprising, since that ballistic slot means a lot to me. At worst I'd put them in the same tier, but I get how you're not happy with the ship's performance so I guess it makes sense.
Another disagreement: ziggurat is almost S tier in player hands with phase skillsZiggurat was possibly my most thoroughly tested ship, maybe second most thoroughly tested after Doom, since that's what I used 90% of my playtime overall. It almost feels too good as what the devblog called a "brawler phase ship" - almost, and then I look at what pain must I go through to still be unable to beat a Radiant without massive cheese AND good RNG on my side, and I just kinda want to keep it indefinitely stored in one of my colonies, where I can just print a literal Paragon zerg rush if I ever chose to walk an inefficient route in fleet composition. And "inefficient" is the name of the game when using Ziggurat, hence my point about it being an easy candidate for an A-tier if its deployment didn't cause me a very physical rectal pain every signle time.
I disagree about atlas MK II. You just have to spend so much OP to compensate for the burn/sensors/bad stats you don't have enough to actually outfit it properly, and the survivability is atrocious, it just dies against strong opponents. If it had 100 more OP, I could maybe see B tier or a weak A tier.A lot of people in and out of the forum already pointed it out, and, yes, I agree. As I rate ships on a variety of factors that are all relative to each other and to player's time spent, I've bloated Atlas's ranking based on its accessibility, perhaps, too much. But I refuse to change any informative value of the original post, even if I change my opinion - all of the edits are either my poor grammar or forum's formatting spontaneously imploding due to sheer quantity of it.
Oh, dude, the Lasher is a really decent little frigate! Safety Overrides, MGs and assault guns combine with the accelerate ammo feeder to make this thing a mean little piranha of a frigate. Even without that, it's still a fairly sturdy utility frigate. Lasher isn't as good as the Hi Tech kids, but of course this is compensated in campaign play by it being substantially cheaper and easier to obtain.
I love how people defending Shrikes put the most emphasis on "it's cheap". Well it's not cheap if it dies every second battle. There's not a single scenario where Shrike would be a better pick than a Scarab or Tempest, assuming one has access to all and enough money (it's not even that big of a difference).Just build better Shrikes. 8)
For Shrikes in particular, I don't think they deserve to be in C tier... they have good missiles (high missiles/DP ratio too) and decent guns as long as you don't use a heavy blaster! Heavy blaster on a Shrike is a trap! In cost, burn, and DP they are more "big frigates" than anything else in role, but they are very competent in that role.
It's similar to what I've said before in other threads, in a vacuum, the Shrike really isn't that bad but it's just competitive in the meta-game. I'd rather spend a few more DP for a "real" Destroyer or use a skill point to make my premier frigates better.Pretty much. I also don't think it's horrible but other options are much more reliable that as soon as I find an alternative, I ditch the Shrikes. The thing is, buffs for energy weapons helped ships that were struggling, and also made ships that were decent now very strong. Both Shrike and Wolf have more efficient assault options now but so does everything else.
...
Venture - Yeah, it's never going to be the best brawler. Its killing power on its own is pretty poor at the best of times. But it is an absolutely insane brick. You can absolutely make it into a cheaply-deployed unkillable anchor with armour-per-section comparable to or even exceeding an Onslaught (keep in mind that while it may have a lower base value, it's spread over a smaller area, so it can reach some NASTY values), and it'll eat an ungodly amount of fire without breaking a sweat.
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snip
Unfortunately thats not how armor works. Each cell in the armor grid gets 1/15 of the rated armor value, and then the damage from each hit is spread out over neighbors and nearest neighbors at a 2:1 ratio which sums to 15, so damage has to deal with the full rated value. This means that physically larger ships have more total armor, though of course only 1 section needs to fail for a ship to take hull damage and die.
Shrike - In AI hands, a bit too suicidal to be ideal, for sure. But with an experienced player [...]I think this is part of the disagreements. Really, any such guide "should" be broken down with separate ratings for player and AI control. Otherwise you get person A saying ship X is terrible (because it is, in AI hands) and person B saying ship X is great (because it is, in player hands), and them largely taking past each other because they are both assuming the other person uses said ship in the same manner they do.
Really, any such guide "should" be broken down with separate ratings for player and AI control. Otherwise you get person A saying ship X is terrible (because it is, in AI hands) and person B saying ship X is great (because it is, in player hands), and them largely taking past each other because they are both assuming the other person uses said ship in the same manner they do.Sounds good, doesn't work. You have to be realistic about time I spend on these, which was already a lot. These were meant to be biased, and to be fun to dismantle - anything more in-depth would've probably costed me twice as long to prepare and write, while only being half as fun for the reader.
Intro:Harbinger: Whereas Doom is a ship that has great strategic value in the hands of a competent player, Harbinger is a ship that is completely busted by design, no matter which hands we are talking about.
- Hyperion? In S-TIER?! Are you out of your mind?! That pile of garbage is B-tier at most. Yes, it has impressive, destroyer-grade flux stats and weapon mounts, but almost the logistics of a freaking capital ship, the most pathetic peak performance time in the game, and on top of it all, is made out of paper. Its ship system is pretty useless now for anything else than quickly closing the distance, and/or instantly putting itself in a dangerous spot where it cannot easily escape from and it dies. I don't see any practical use for it. The amount of nerfing this ship has received between the updates is absolutely comical.
Nice list! Agree about most of that stuff, although some things have baffled me.
- Hyperion? In S-TIER?! Are you out of your mind?! That pile of garbage is B-tier at most. Yes, it has impressive, destroyer-grade flux stats and weapon mounts, but almost the logistics of a freaking capital ship, the most pathetic peak performance time in the game, and on top of it all, is made out of paper. Its ship system is pretty useless now for anything else than quickly closing the distance, and/or instantly putting itself in a dangerous spot where it cannot easily escape from and it dies. I don't see any practical use for it. The amount of nerfing this ship has received between the updates is absolutely comical.
- Scarab is not a B-tier. That thing kills stuff faster than the Tempest, and with its ship system it can keep up the pace with the latter. The logistical difference between the ships is negligible (in fact, they both cost the same amount of DP to deploy).
- Hyperion? In S-TIER?! Are you out of your mind?! That pile of garbage is B-tier at most. Yes, it has impressive, destroyer-grade flux stats and weapon mounts, but almost the logistics of a freaking capital ship, the most pathetic peak performance time in the game, and on top of it all, is made out of paper. Its ship system is pretty useless now for anything else than quickly closing the distance, and/or instantly putting itself in a dangerous spot where it cannot easily escape from and it dies. I don't see any practical use for it. The amount of nerfing this ship has received between the updates is absolutely comical.
Hyperion is absolutely A tier, possibly S when you stack all the relevant skills on top of it. If you put SO on it, it can use its teleport at will. With shield upgrades/skills and can take a surprising amount of damage and getting behind bigger ships to unload Heavy Blasters or Ion Pulsers is just too easy. Personally, I put a Heavy MG in the universal slot to bring down shields but you can do a lot with that mount. I like it without SO but getting out of situations is trickier because of the need for 0-flux boost to teleport. Other than that, it’s ridiculously good and easily worth the DP cost.
I beg your pardon? Do you actually used Hyperion? I know many players got repelled by x2 maintenance and ppt, i was one of them. But Hyperion really worth that much, it's a cruiser punch in a frigate body. With wolfpack and skilled officer it rips space and time on the battlefield. Clearly it's an SSS+ tier and 100% pick in frigate tactics, and it even good choice for admiral without red skills because how convenient piloting it is. PPT boosted like crazy also with said officers and wolfpack, and with reliable subsystems.
Scarab also sss+ tier just because 18 no cooldown sabots build exist.
Nope, It's not a cruiser punch in a frigate body lol. It's a destroyer punch with a survivability of a kite, a cost of (almost) a battlecruiser, cosplaying as a frigate, bundled with a gimmick system.
Being able to teleport behind enemy ship and blast it with ion pulsers sounds amazing, until you realize low tech ships aren't the only enemies, and omni shields exist. And if you REALLY want to do that, just go grab a Harbinger. That one doesn't even have to get behind the opponent to disable it.
There is nothing this frigate can do which another ship in the game cannot already do for a fraction of the cost (and can be deployed more than once). The fact that it needs officers and specific character skills to function just adds insult to the injury, and only proves my point.
Pretty much the only things Hyperion has going for are the teleporter (which gets more and more crippled with every update, and - again - right now is most useful for jumping right into a spot where Hyperion will die the quickest), and its flux stats, which indeed, are VERY impressive, but are still nowhere near a justification for its absolutely monstrous costs.
It's a definition of impracticality. It's kinda like a Hummer in real life - it's pretty, it's loud, expensive, burns a TON of fuel and unless you're going to use it to tow a freight locomotive, you really would rather drive any common city car for every day routine.
Hence, I'd place it at B rank at most.
you are running your hyperions with SO and officers right? The fact that it needs skills to function isn't a very big deal since the chances you end up in the leadership path is already really high right now.It is a big deal for those who do not or cannot take Leadership because they ran out of skill points.
Well that means you do not have played enough yet or always played wrong with Hyperion.
Yes, the whole reason why I'm posting this is how many times I've been coming back to this frigate, and every single time the game kept reminding me how it's absolutely not worth it to touch it with a 10 meter stick.
Nope, It's not a cruiser punch in a frigate body lol. It's a destroyer punch with a survivability of a kite, a cost of (almost) a battlecruiser, cosplaying as a frigate, bundled with a gimmick system.A kite? You here being hyperbolizing on ill state. Hyperion is unsinkable, literally. It got monstrous flux stats and impenetrable shield.
There is nothing this frigate can do which another ship in the game cannot already do for a fraction of the cost (and can be deployed more than once). The fact that it needs officers and specific character skills to function just adds insult to the injury, and only proves my point.There's nothing that proves your point. Hyperion is unique ship which can travel entire battle map within couple of jumps. In a fights where forces are separate across the map it's priceless. It's a frigate and got battleAI as a frigate, it take harassing turns, it seeks vulnerabilities, it swarms in pair of other frigates. I got all proof of that in a video format loaded on youtube.
Pretty much the only things Hyperion has going for are the teleporter (which gets more and more crippled with every update, and - again - right now is most useful for jumping right into a spot where Hyperion will die the quickest), and its flux stats, which indeed, are VERY impressive, but are still nowhere near a justification for its absolutely monstrous costs.
It's a definition of impracticality. It's kinda like a Hummer in real life - it's pretty, it's loud, expensive, burns a TON of fuel and unless you're going to use it to tow a freight locomotive, you really would rather drive any common city car for every day routine.Yes, it's a hummer, but not in real life, it's a hummer in post-apocaliptic world there you can't care less about gasoline and parking spots.
Hence, I'd place it at B rank at most.It's an S and nothing you can do about it.
Well that means you do not have played enough yet or always played wrong with Hyperion.The "it aint tru, u just bad at gaym" is so far the most childish argument I saw in defense of this ship.
A kite? You here being hyperbolizing on ill state. Hyperion is unsinkable, literally. It got monstrous flux stats and impenetrable shield.I am still baffled with just where are you pulling those bizarre statements from. No, it is not unsinkable, literally. Its shield is nowhere near impenetrable cause *cough*destroyergradefluxstats*cough*, and as soon as it goes down (or - heaven forbid - AI overloads), the only thing standing between it and death is paper armor and 2.5k hull integrity.
There's nothing that proves your point. Hyperion is unique ship which can travel entire battle map within couple of jumps. In a fights where forces are separate across the map it's priceless. It's a frigate and got battleAI as a frigate, it take harassing turns, it seeks vulnerabilities, it swarms in pair of other frigates. I got all proof of that in a video format loaded on youtube.There is nothing you're doing to disprove my perfectly valid point either. Aside from teleporting (which in practice just means a lot of speed) nothing of what you're described other ships aren't doing already. Why would I choose a super-fast, stupidly expensive ship, if I can field a much stronger ship, which is slower, but still fast enough to reach the objective point before the enemy, AND doesn't have a whole baggage of other issues with it?
What cost are you talking right now? 15 DP? FITHTEEN DEPLOYMENT POINTS? Is this TOO much to handle?? A cost of a destroyer? Please do not mention 30 supplies, it's irrelevant in a battle and doesn't even much in a game economy. You can pay this even at the beginning of the game and feel no poverty.Yes it is? Because for just one more DP, I can field two Tempests/Scarabs, which I can send to two opposite goals at the same time (which they will also get to quite fast) and will stay in battle for a lot longer. On top of that, 40 bloody CR per deployment. Hope you don't have to fight more than a single battle in quick succession, cause unless you're min-maxing for high CR, a single deployment already dips the Hyperion into yellow CR and malfunctions.
Yes, it's a hummer, but not in real life, it's a hummer in post-apocaliptic world there you can't care less about gasoline and parking spots.Until you realize all gas stations are defunct and every drop of gasoline is now worth its weight in gold ;)
It's an S and nothing you can do about it.Oh, but of course I can - I can back up my claims with arguments from the previous post, which you failed to do much about, besides yelling and childish meme'ing, with a bit of argumentum ad hominem.
you are running your hyperions with SO and officers right? The fact that it needs skills to function isn't a very big deal since the chances you end up in the leadership path is already really high right now.It is a big deal for those who do not or cannot take Leadership because they ran out of skill points.
I tried to use Hyperion, but without Leadership skills, it was not worth it because SO is needed for classic Hyperion use (of teleport spam and all guns blazing), but without the bonuses from Wolfpack Tactics it lacked PPT. Also, non-SO Hyperion was a pain to use because it could not support three medium elite guns well (not enough dissipation, so the universal needs to be a missile, or the mounts undergunned) and ship needs to drop shields to get out (even with elite Helmsmanship) and take damage.
So yes, Hyperion is only good with specific skills. If player does not or cannot get them, do not bother with Hyperion. This is unlike previous releases when Hyperion was usable out-of-the-box.
Bottom line: Hyperion might even be great in specific circumstances, but if it requires a specific set of skills to be usable to begin with, then it should be reflected in its rank, which in this case would definitely be way lower than an S.There are two ways of thinking about things here: considering maximum power of a ship when optimized, vs considering average power of a ship over a bunch of different conditions. Neither is necessarily wrong, they are just different ways of thinking about things.
An interesting consequence of the Hyperion costing 40% per deployment is that it costs very little supplies to start ticking down CR during a fight. Ticking a whole 40% only costs 15! For comparison ticking down 40% on a Lasher costs 16. So while the PPT with SO may be short, its actually very economical to just run the thing straight into malfunction territory. For this reason the most valuable hyperion skill is a skill that I get on every officer no matter what anyways: Reliability Engineering. The PPT increase may only be half as much, but the -25% to tickdown rate is huge, especially when combined with hardened subsystems.I put Reliability Engineering on all of my officers (and my character for that matter), but for a different primary reason: Guaranteed recovery without the need to shove Reinforced Bulkheads on the ship. Runner up is +15% to max CR, which is good for everything, but really nice when piloting Ziggurat, and almost mandatory for Radiant. The extra PPT and slower CR decay is nice too, I like them more than Damage Control's bonuses.
What cost are you talking right now? 15 DP? FITHTEEN DEPLOYMENT POINTS? Is this TOO much to handle?? A cost of a destroyer? Please do not mention 30 supplies, it's irrelevant in a battle and doesn't even much in a game economy. You can pay this even at the beginning of the game and feel no poverty.
Yes it is? Because for just one more DP, I can field two Tempests/Scarabs, which I can send to two opposite goals at the same time (which they will also get to quite fast) and will stay in battle for a lot longer. On top of that, 40 bloody CR per deployment. Hope you don't have to fight more than a single battle in quick succession, cause unless you're min-maxing for high CR, a single deployment already dips the Hyperion into yellow CR and malfunctions.Look, I've provided screenshot, video and a meme to assure my dominance. And you still not inpressed, huh? Well, that just means we are in I'm right you're wrong situation.
And 30 supplies is not irrelevant, unless you're only playing missions and not touching the campaign. Of course you can pay this, but when there are ships being able to do the same job more efficiently (and do NOT rely on a pile of specific skills to do that), it's just not worth it.
I feel like with phase ships, they need a suite of skills to make them very powerful, while Hyperion just needs a good build.
Without skills, Doom is good and worth the 35 DP, just as deadly as last release. With skills (specifically elite Helmsmanship, elite Phase Mastery, and Systems Expertise), Doom is too powerful.
Without skills, Harbinger is merely an easier-to-use AMB Afflictor that costs 20 DP instead of 8 DP. With skills (same as Doom), it can brawl from near medium range with Phase Lances; basically a poor-man's Doom that cannot handle fighters.
However...
Ziggurat needs skills (elite Helmsmanship and Phase Mastery) just for QoL in using it. Without skills, Ziggurat is slow as molasses and not fun to use. It is like Hyperion in that way.
Also, unskilled fighters die to 30% rate after about a minute or so of fighting late game enemies, making them even more similar to missiles, but without the control and burst. Thus, carriers need skills to be worth using, maybe. Without skills, fighters are about as weak as they were in the 0.7 releases, and carriers are overshadowed by conventional warships, let alone phase ships.
Look, I've provided screenshot, video and a meme to assure my dominance. And you still not inpressed, huh? Well, that just means we are in I'm right you're wrong situation.2 scarabs with one of them having an officer is still better bang for the buck in my opinion, so it being "fundamentally wrong" is just your view. Not every playthrough is a frigate swarm of 20 scarabs, you know.
I'm agree that scarab is stronger, but telling that you can field two Scarabs instead of one Hyperion is just fundamentally wrong and the reason why is officer cap. You cannot fill all dp with officered scarabs so it just needed to be implemented with higher dp ships.
So as I said, I'm right you're wrong.
An interesting consequence of the Hyperion costing 40% per deployment is that it costs very little supplies to start ticking down CR during a fight. Ticking a whole 40% only costs 15! For comparison ticking down 40% on a Lasher costs 16. So while the PPT with SO may be short, its actually very economical to just run the thing straight into malfunction territory. For this reason the most valuable hyperion skill is a skill that I get on every officer no matter what anyways: Reliability Engineering. The PPT increase may only be half as much, but the -25% to tickdown rate is huge, especially when combined with hardened subsystems.
I feel like with phase ships, they need a suite of skills to make them very powerful, while Hyperion just needs a good build.
Without skills, Doom is good and worth the 35 DP, just as deadly as last release. With skills (specifically elite Helmsmanship, elite Phase Mastery, and Systems Expertise), Doom is too powerful.
Without skills, Harbinger is merely an easier-to-use AMB Afflictor that costs 20 DP instead of 8 DP. With skills (same as Doom), it can brawl from near medium range with Phase Lances; basically a poor-man's Doom that cannot handle fighters.
However...
Ziggurat needs skills (elite Helmsmanship and Phase Mastery) just for QoL in using it. Without skills, Ziggurat is slow as molasses and not fun to use. It is like Hyperion in that way.
Also, unskilled fighters die to 30% rate after about a minute or so of fighting late game enemies, making them even more similar to missiles, but without the control and burst. Thus, carriers need skills to be worth using, maybe. Without skills, fighters are about as weak as they were in the 0.7 releases, and carriers are overshadowed by conventional warships, let alone phase ships.
Honestly, skills in the current version make the Doom even more OP than it ever was against fighters and carriers. As if "press F to delete all fighters now" wasn't bad enough, there are now skills with significant boost to phase ships, where as carriers not only rely on their skills to function (where as phase ships are still usable and deadly without them), but their boosts are somewhat weak compared to those of phase ships.Without skills, player might as well not field any carriers against any serious late-game fight because the fighters will get mulched by the enemy fleet of whatever in about a minute. Stuck at 30% rate might as well be out of ammo. Expanded Deck Crew is mandatory, but with its weak bonuses, it alone is not enough to save unskilled fighters, and carriers get replaced by conventional warships or phase ships in my fleet.
You might as well not even field any carriers now if there's a Doom in the opposing fleet, unless you're minmaxed against it.
As for Doom mining fighters, since fighters are effectively missiles and vice-versa, I have no problems with mines spawning directly on top of them for the instant kill. As far as I am concerned, mines are effectively anti-missile for that use.I think the whole mindset of "fighters = missiles" is heavily oversimplifying that aspect of the game, but regardless, I hold that Doom, or any ship for that matter, should not be a direct hard counter to all carriers like it is now.
Changing from fighters-as-ships to fighters-as-missiles has caused worse problems than those it fixed.I disagree. Before the fighters-as-weapons change, there was practically zero point to piloting carriers, which were nothing but anemic watered-down warships acting as a repair point for drones which you don't even have any direct control over. I can say with 100% certainty that back then I never even bothered with carriers or fighters. They were just boring.
I disagree. Before the fighters-as-weapons change, there was practically zero point to piloting carriers, which were nothing but anemic watered-down warships acting as a repair point for drones which you don't even have any direct control over. I can say with 100% certainty that back then I never even bothered with carriers or fighters. They were just boring.Carriers were fine until 0.7a, when officers were added, then warships with skilled officers were so much stronger than fighters that carriers had no point. Fighters could be commanded like ships, and even deployed without any carriers on the field.
IIRC according to one of Alex's old blog posts, the change was supposed to give player a fun interaction with fighters and incentivize piloting carriers, which in my opinion it achieved without a doubt.Alex failed miserably, except maybe the first 0.8a release with overpowered Talons cost 0 OP and with only Expanded Deck Crew (another post-0.8a abomination) sucking OP out of the carriers. (Of course, that had double burst PD Sparks and killer 3x3 Warthogs too...) Disappointing too, since the new system seemed very promising on paper, and the problems only became apparent after I played with the fighters that were not overpowered and/or (after the Talon nerf) after I sacrificed all weapons and sent strong fighters at enemies and noticed they were more effective than a carrier with guns and weaker fighters. If I pilot a dedicated carrier today, all I can do is run away from everything, which is boring. Piloting a carrier with enough guns to defend itself or bully smaller ships in a brawl is more fun that running away from everything, which along with superior fighter control are why I consider pre-0.8a carriers/fighters superior to what we have today.
Non-hybrid carriers nearly completely rely on their fighters for firepower, and mine spam shuts it down at pretty much zero cost to Doom, rendering the carriers useless (especially at 30% replacement rate). Notice that there isn't any other interaction like that between ships within the entire game. Imagine if there was something that could easily and permanently shut down warships and their weapons.This would have been less of a problem for carriers before 0.8a, when they could have enough OP to support a viable weapons package (and with much better control of their fighters). They would be like Legion today (which barely has enough OP for few main guns plus ITU). Heron back during 0.65 would have been super Wolf with fighters, probably close to modern Fury except with fighters instead of Plasma Burn. (And Venture, back when it was good, would have been like a Mora/Vigilance hybrid.) Of course, if full warship has a problem, a semi-warship carrier might have it too.
Cheaper fighters OP wise could really help with the current situation.Only partly. Expanded Deck Crew is another OP hog (kind of like Expanded Missile Racks for missile users), and a carrier that wants a viable weapons package also needs ITU (and wants Expanded Missile Racks too if mounting missiles). Legion is lucky, it has the mounts and OP to do both viably. Legion14 has the option for missiles instead of fighters. The other dedicated carriers do not have the OP (or in Condor/Mora's case, lack of good mounts) to support guns after they spend all the OP they need for their fighters and deck.
Treating fighters as missiles or vice versa sounds like a good way to not get good use out of either... they are entirely different weapon systems, with different strengths, weaknesses, and ability to be commanded from the tactical map.I treat them that way because of the way they preformed in battle, not the other way around.
(since Ziggurat and Radiant are huge hangar queens, and I need backup ships to pilot after one fight).
Wait, Radiant as Hangar Queen? No way man, Radiant is one of the most broken vanilla capitals to exist, and is literally the sole reason why anyone chooses Automated Ships skill(and evidently you chose it, because you cannot obtain Radiants or any automated ships otherwise). A Radiant with a good loadout can solo a lot of things, including:Radiant is a hangar queen because with only Reliability Engineering boosting its CR, Radiant with alpha core only has 45% max CR. After one round of fighting, it is in yellow malfunction territory. It takes few days to recover enough CR back out of malfunction levels, and I consider Efficiency Overhaul mandatory on Radiant just to get out of the yellow faster. Same deal with Hyperion without bonus max CR. Ziggurat takes hangar queening up to eleven (and it is not all that good for its cost without the same skills that make Doom overpowered).
Fighters would be a lot more fun to command and less like missiles if they would just stay on the target/mission you gave them until recalled.Also, fighters used to capture points on the map, and fighters could be commanded to explore the map covered by fog-of-war and look for hidden enemies. They cannot do any of that ever since 0.8a. Also, fighters have an annoying leash because they are effectively missiles now (they used to have unlimited range, and carrier need not be deployed if rebuilding in mid-battle was not necessary), and we cannot have long-range combat in a game designed for gundams beating each other over their heads with glowing metal sticks.
Want to dump missiles on a pesky frigate while your bombers are in the middle of a run? Can't do that. Targeting the frigate will *** your bombing run.
Want to have your fighters fly around harassing things while you attack a ship? Can't do that. Targeting the ship will bring all your fighters running.
Also for what it's worth, I don't really care too much about optimizing against ordos, I get bored way before that point. The optimal strat is probably to solo everything in a doom or chain afflictors, but I find that tedious and uninteresting.In 0.95, OwR (Ordos with Radiants) are a huge spike of difficulty over even 300k+ bounties or equivalent that anything that can handle OwR will totally destroy anything in the core worlds. Even fleets that can steamroll human NPC fleets flawlessly and reliably can struggle against OwR. Thus, if player wants to farm OwR, having a fleet that can crush them is useful. With my fleet and skill selection (I had Combat, Tech, and Industry at 5/5/5), I could only do it by chaining Dooms. (Without Spec. Mods., Doom flagship was not overpowered enough to murder OwR as cleanly and efficiently as SCC did.)
Sure, but there is a difference between hyper-optimizing against them to maximize story point gain vs. finding something that works well enough to farm some AI cores. I was able to beat them cleanly 1 or 2 at a time, and didn't feel the need to optimize any further. Hyperion was good enough to be in that fleet. That's all I'm saying.Also for what it's worth, I don't really care too much about optimizing against ordos, I get bored way before that point. The optimal strat is probably to solo everything in a doom or chain afflictors, but I find that tedious and uninteresting.In 0.95, OwR (Ordos with Radiants) are a huge spike of difficulty over even 300k+ bounties or equivalent that anything that can handle OwR will totally destroy anything in the core worlds. Even fleets that can steamroll human NPC fleets flawlessly and reliably can struggle against OwR. Thus, if player wants to farm OwR, having a fleet that can crush them is useful. With my fleet and skill selection (I had Combat, Tech, and Industry at 5/5/5), I could only do it by chaining Dooms. (Without Spec. Mods., Doom flagship was not overpowered enough to murder OwR as cleanly and efficiently as SCC did.)
Sure, but there is a difference between hyper-optimizing against them to maximize story point gain vs. finding something that works well enough to farm some AI cores. I was able to beat them cleanly 1 or 2 at a time, and didn't feel the need to optimize any further. Hyperion was good enough to be in that fleet. That's all I'm saying.I tried the same myself (of comfortably killing Ordos with Radiants for cores), but without complete success. Radiant and phase fleet did not work well enough against strong Ordos if I deployed them as a fleet. Best case, my fleet kills one Ordos (out of several nearby), but then Radiant and Ziggurat are in the red or yellow and I need to wait days to get out of the yellow, and I have only my fleet of Dooms left for the next several Ordos breathing down my fleet's neck. Worst case, too many ships die (because enemy Radiants are overpowered and AI cannot cheese with phase ships like player can). With the Doom fleet, I resorted to a chain of Doom flagships fighting solo to minimize costs and casualties (similar to killing classic Hegemony System Defense Fleet with 25 DP worth of chained frigate flagships in 0.6 releases for no Leadership builds.)
Ziggurat for station busting? That's a role?Is Ziggurat any good against stations? When I try to send motes to a station module, it almost always targets its center (instead of the module I tried to target) instead and the motes get wasted. Makes it too hard to zap modules and Ziggurat is almost a sitting duck against the battlestation.
Sure, but there is a difference between hyper-optimizing against them to maximize story point gain vs. finding something that works well enough to farm some AI cores. I was able to beat them cleanly 1 or 2 at a time, and didn't feel the need to optimize any further. Hyperion was good enough to be in that fleet. That's all I'm saying.One more thing. I tried a fleet similar to what I used in 0.9.1, with capitals and carriers (and mostly capital spam), but they got wiped. They could kill human fleets without much problem, but hit a wall as soon as they met top Ordos fleets (unlike in 0.9.1). Ordos with Radiants are such a huge spike compared to 0.9.1.
I don't think raw damage dealt and damage taken statistics are really a good representation of effectiveness for a number of reasons:
Granted there are other roles a ship might have...but the Hyperion isn't really doing any of them here.I would argue hyperion has a ton of value purely in it's tendency to end up behind the enemy and not die while doing that, causing them to turn around and expose their vulnerable engines to the rest of the fleet. It also causes enemy ships to spend lots of time pointing in useless directions (not shooting or shooting ineffectively) as they try to turn and chase it. Even if it did no damage, it would be worth quite a bit IMO. For me, that's half the value of the (AI) hyperion. IMO, hyperion does not need to do as much damage/DP as other ships to be worthwhile. I also value its ability to instantly capture control points on the enemy side of the battlefield giving extra DP at the start of battles (very significant against remnants), and it's ability to efficiently hunt and kill small ships that would otherwise be a major distraction for the rest of the fleet. Usually my hyperion kills 2-3 frigates before any of my other ships have fired a shot, although perhaps only 1-2 remnant frigates. That leaves my core ships (like furies) free to deal damage to the big slow ships without worrying about flanks or getting distracted.
Since you used cryoblaster/heavy blaster/ion pulser, I tried that instead (SO, extended/hardened/solar/stabilized shields, hardened subsystems, reckless officer with TA, SE, RE, SM, elite EWM). In theory it should do more hull damage than the Fury because the Fury is using cryoblaster, 2 sabot pods, minipulser, IR pulse laser, and Xyphos, so the only thing that is anti-hull is the cryoblaster, whereas the Hyperion also has heavy blaster. However, the results were still that the Fury did 50% more hull damage than the Hyperion (117,597 to 78,230), as well as 51% more overall damage (334,366 to 222,152). So the Hyperion improved, but not much.Your fury is very heavy on efficient/anti-shield damage (double sabot, minipulser, ir pulse lasers), so it is not surprising at all that it is more effective against remnants that heavily incentivize shield damage with their super efficient shields. Also, in my previous comments, I clearly agreed with you that fury is better because it is currently overpowered. In fact, if you adjust the fury to 22 DP like I suggested, the hull damage/DP is almost identical to the hyperion in your test LOL. Not to mention all the other value the hyperion has that I mentioned earlier.
the conquest is more of a brawler and the oddissey is more of a sniper
the conquest is more of a brawler and the oddissey is more of a sniper
I'm sorry but what.
Conquest is a sniper, with 2x Gauss and 2x Hurricane you can outrange near enough everything, and have the speed to keep your distance.
It has atrocious shields, and is very squishy once the shield goes down, so brawling is not a good idea at all.
Odyssey is a flanker, with 2x Plasma, 3x Sabot Pod and Hurricane you have monstrous close range damage, and mobility on par with some cruisers, allowing you to flank around and annihilate more or less anything smaller than you very quickly.
While beams have long range and Advanced Optics to boost that even further, they are not a good option for sniper builds, as soft flux damage means they are only really useful when massed to ridiculous levels or when used against ships much smaller than you.
Even if you got the names the wrong way around, the Odyssey can't really work as a brawler. Its shield is only moderately efficient and it has paper thin armour, so it dies very quickly in close range frontal engagements against similarly sized vessels.
despitebeing able to do that.... uhm, gauss cannons on their own arent acutally that usefull..., and neither are long rage hurricanes..If you were just deploying the conquest solo then sure, enemies can just vent away the worst of the flux, but you deploy it as part of a fleet where the long range kinetic pressure lets other ships do work.
They both need either Hardened Shields or maximum caps to shield tank adequately.I'd say by doing this you're to quote to phrase: "Polishing a turd"
I'd say by doing this you're to quote to phrase: "Polishing a turd"No, it is "making its defense good enough so that it wins the flux war instead of losing it" and/or "turning it from a battlecruiser to a fast battleship" by being able to absorb some hits while it blows the crap out of the enemy with overwhelming firepower. Basically, outgun the enemy first, and Conquest has the flux stats to do it, even with mediocre shields.
Conquest in particular, as the shields on it are so bad that even with HS (which is gonna be nerfed in 0.95a1 making this strat even less viable) its shield is inefficient enough to not really be something you want to "tank" with imo.
They both need either Hardened Shields or maximum caps to shield tank adequately.I'd say by doing this you're to quote to phrase: "Polishing a turd"
Conquest in particular, as the shields on it are so bad that even with HS (which is gonna be nerfed in 0.95a1 making this strat even less viable) its shield is inefficient enough to not really be something you want to "tank" with imo.
you can make ANYTHING work in starsector, thats not the point... my point was, capitals were mainly built to fill a specific role, instead of all being just "flag ships"
I should say, raw damage statistics are nowhere near a complete picture of effectiveness. They are not useless, but do not give the whole picture. I'm merely trying to point out the ways that those numbers can fail to reflect underlying effectiveness, or ways they can overrepresent certain aspects of ships that aren't necessarily that valuable.
I would argue hyperion has a ton of value purely in it's tendency to end up behind the enemy and not die while doing that, causing them to turn around and expose their vulnerable engines to the rest of the fleet.
r.e. dmg/sec
It doesn't matter at all unless CR/PPT is a major factor costing you supplies. A strategy that kills everything in 20 seconds is not worse than a strategy that kills everything in 10 seconds.
Your fury is very heavy on efficient/anti-shield damage (double sabot, minipulser, ir pulse lasers), so it is not surprising at all that it is more effective against remnants that heavily incentivize shield damage with their super efficient shields.
I think if you could somehow add up all the damage that was either fired at the hyperion and missed, or not fired at all because the ship was distracted by the hyperion, it would be a very large number, perhaps larger than the furies total damage tanked.
r.e. the 2-Ordos test fleets as benchmark
I don't think a computer benchmark test is a fair comparison. At the end of the day, every computational task boils down to a bunch of basic operations/computations that need to be executed, and processors are measured by the number of computations per second they can do. On the other hand, different fights in starsector reward different types of damage, and different strategies unequally, so being able to deal damage quickly/efficiently in one fight doesn't necessarily translate perfectly to another.
IMO, any strategy that can beat all of the challenges in the game is pretty much indistinguishable from the others. Even differences in supply cost or money are pretty much irrelevant by the end of the game.
The last reply in this thread is more than two months old, and a significant number of the ships and weapons used in the original examples got rebalanced in the last patch.... Why do you still want to argue about things that aren't even in the game in the state that generated the initial discussion????
Well... I still would argue that no metric represents performance on its own, and there are tons of way to get value that don't reflect in the particular damage metrics you've chosen. I still would argue that Hyperion is uniquely able to safely TP behind enemies to distract them without putting itself in danger (like other ships would be on such extreme flanks), and I also would still claim that there's no point in arguing about which of two strategies are better, if both strategies can achieve all the same things and the only differences are incremental changes in time or supplies....
Also, you fury strat should be at the least 33% worse, since the Fury's DP got nerfed by 33%.... not to mention, that the cryoblaster and xyphos also got nerfed. I imagine it still works, but I don't think it's anywhere close to as 'optimal' now as you were saying it was then.
Hyperion got railed by AI changes. The AI is very over-cautious with it now, and I'm also pretty sure the changes to wolfpack (%ppt vs flat PPT) hurt SO builds quite a bit. As a player ship, it still seems decent but the PPT is still a bigger issue now IMO, and other stuff has gotten quite a bit better while it's fallen off.
Fury was already set to 20 DP instead of 15 DP for the purposes of comparisonNo, DP was not changed for previous testing. I merely pointed out that the damage metrics for the ships that I was seeing (in my inexact testing) were very similar per DP if you arbitrarily changed the DP values when analyzing. That does not translate to actually adjusting the DP and testing. I did not adjust the DP values of furies, test them against multiple ordos and present results.
If anything I find the Hyperion more willing to stick around longer in 0.95.1a than before, which is an improvement. Previously as I stated above, the main issue with the Hyperion is that it'll teleport away unnecessarily at low flux, and it'll stay away from the fight hanging out at 0 flux unnecessarily as well. Now it'll actually let its flux ride up a bit before teleporting out which is a good thing.I have directly observed (via damage metrics) that my AI hyperions with the same loadouts consistently do less damage this patch than they did previously (something like .5-.66 times the damage based on my very non-scientific observations) , so I have no idea what you think improved, but it has not improved for me, and in fact has worsened enough that I no longer use AI hyperions much.
Change to Wolfpack's PPT bonus just means a 20-second difference for the Hyperion, in a fight that lasts for roughly 5 minutes. You were the one saying the time doesn't matter anyway so this shouldn't be an issue.As to the wolfpack PPT change, 20s is literally 20% of SO hyperions PPT (100s now with the change). Hyperions do not last 5 minutes, they need to do tons of damage very fast to get enough value to justify their use. They were able to do that last patch, but no longer do that in my experience. The fact that you think 20s is irrelevant indicates to me that you may not have actually experimented much with SO hyperions.
You keep repeating the same assertions without supporting them nor addressing the points in any way. I've already addressed all of these earlier.All you did was make your own unfounded assertions about how going behind enemy lines is bad (with no actual evidence, just theory crafting), when I have direct personal experience that it works very well... At the end of the day, I don't really care if you don't agree with me. I value my personal experience and testing over your theory crafting.
I really can't comprehend how you can sit here and argue that nothing has changed and previous results are valid..... the fleets you are testing against are not even the same (new skills change AI core performance, radiant DP nerf etc.), the officers you were using are not the same (skill changes), there were relevant hullmod adjustments (hardened shield nerf), relevant weapon adjustments, relevant ship adjustments etc. Many of the changes do affect all of the ships tested, but that doesn't mean they affected them all to the same extent... When you change the parameters of a scenario, you have to re-test, you can't just claim that everything is the same with no evidence. Based on my experimentation on the patch so far, many things play very differently, and I have no reason to believe this would not also play differently.
That does not translate to actually adjusting the DP and testing. I did not adjust the DP values of furies, test them against multiple ordos and present results.
If anything I find the Hyperion more willing to stick around longer in 0.95.1a than before, which is an improvement. Previously as I stated above, the main issue with the Hyperion is that it'll teleport away unnecessarily at low flux, and it'll stay away from the fight hanging out at 0 flux unnecessarily as well. Now it'll actually let its flux ride up a bit before teleporting out which is a good thing.I have directly observed (via damage metrics) that my AI hyperions with the same loadouts consistently do less damage this patch than they did previously (something like .5-.66 times the damage based on my very non-scientific observations) , so I have no idea what you think improved, but it has not improved for me, and in fact has worsened enough that I no longer use AI hyperions much.
Both of us have just been spouting off massive amounts of theoretical arguments with zero actual evidence (videos, extensive sim testing etc.) on either side, so it's hilarious that you accuse me of not presenting any evidence as if you haven't been doing it the entire time.
It's obvious you're going to keep arguing every point I make forever so I'm going to stop responding after this.
- Hyperion? In S-TIER?! Are you out of your mind?! That pile of garbage is B-tier at most. Yes, it has impressive, destroyer-grade flux stats and weapon mounts, but almost the logistics of a freaking capital ship, the most pathetic peak performance time in the game, and on top of it all, is made out of paper. Its ship system is pretty useless now for anything else than quickly closing the distance, and/or instantly putting itself in a dangerous spot where it cannot easily escape from and it dies. I don't see any practical use for it. The amount of nerfing this ship has received between the updates is absolutely comical.
Hyperion is absolutely A tier, possibly S when you stack all the relevant skills on top of it. If you put SO on it, it can use its teleport at will. With shield upgrades/skills and can take a surprising amount of damage and getting behind bigger ships to unload Heavy Blasters or Ion Pulsers is just too easy. Personally, I put a Heavy MG in the universal slot to bring down shields but you can do a lot with that mount. I like it without SO but getting out of situations is trickier because of the need for 0-flux boost to teleport. Other than that, it’s ridiculously good and easily worth the DP cost.
SO on a ship which already has the lowest PPT in the game and a tremendous CR per deployment cost? I'm surprised that thing doesn't start falling apart before it even gets to shoot at anything...I beg your pardon? Do you actually used Hyperion? I know many players got repelled by x2 maintenance and ppt, i was one of them. But Hyperion really worth that much, it's a cruiser punch in a frigate body. With wolfpack and skilled officer it rips space and time on the battlefield. Clearly it's an SSS+ tier and 100% pick in frigate tactics, and it even good choice for admiral without red skills because how convenient piloting it is. PPT boosted like crazy also with said officers and wolfpack, and with reliable subsystems.
Scarab also sss+ tier just because 18 no cooldown sabots build exist.
Yes, the whole reason why I'm posting this is how many times I've been coming back to this frigate, and every single time the game kept reminding me how it's absolutely not worth it to touch it with a 10 meter stick.
Nope, It's not a cruiser punch in a frigate body lol. It's a destroyer punch with a survivability of a kite, a cost of (almost) a battlecruiser, cosplaying as a frigate, bundled with a gimmick system.
Being able to teleport behind enemy ship and blast it with ion pulsers sounds amazing, until you realize low tech ships aren't the only enemies, and omni shields exist. And if you REALLY want to do that, just go grab a Harbinger. That one doesn't even have to get behind the opponent to disable it.
There is nothing this frigate can do which another ship in the game cannot already do for a fraction of the cost (and can be deployed more than once). The fact that it needs officers and specific character skills to function just adds insult to the injury, and only proves my point.
Pretty much the only things Hyperion has going for are the teleporter (which gets more and more crippled with every update, and - again - right now is most useful for jumping right into a spot where Hyperion will die the quickest), and its flux stats, which indeed, are VERY impressive, but are still nowhere near a justification for its absolutely monstrous costs.
It's a definition of impracticality. It's kinda like a Hummer in real life - it's pretty, it's loud, expensive, burns a TON of fuel and unless you're going to use it to tow a freight locomotive, you really would rather drive any common city car for every day routine.
Hence, I'd place it at B rank at most.
Two things I want to notify readers about.