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General Discussion / Re: should we just nerf the Onslaught?
« on: March 24, 2024, 12:00:56 AM »At the moment, you can deter an NPC Conquest with a *** Dominator.
How the factions use the ships have little bearing on how well the player can use the ship in the player's fleet. Each faction has only a limited subset of the weapons, hullmods, etc. that the player can access.
The fact that you can make Conquests somewhat viable, you alone, and then everyone else is struggling. But the Onslaught is just universally good should explain to you what kind of balance situation we are in, at least based on community's viewing. I mean, even in your "Conquest is good, guys" video, you're still using an Onslaught as your main tanking capital ship, cause it's just that stupidly broken.
No. I only started using the Conquest about a year and a half ago; in fact it was CapnHector's Conquest Appreciation Thread that spurred me to really try it out. So I'm pretty late to the party in terms of figuring out how to use Conquests.
I use the Onslaught as the player-controlled flagship because it's fairly idiot-tolerant (it can handle some punishment for when I mess up, since I mess up quite often) and because I never learned how to pilot a broadside ship (Conquest), nor any of the other player favorites for flagships. Back when my flagship was a Medusa people also claimed that using Conquests only worked because I was using the Medusa too.
You keep saying the Onslaught is too good but have presented little evidence to support it, other than some vague "everyone knows".
ps. Also, did you measure the viability of the Conquest based on its ability to clear out Ordos as a DPS metric? As in what gives you the fastest resolution of combat??? That just sounds like you broke the game in multiple ways and then found like a strategy that sole winning grace is the fact that it kills enemies the fastest. But why would that matter if under all normal scenarios it's about killing an enemy at all?
Eh, we're discussing how ships perform in combat. The only victory condition in combat is to kill all the enemy ships (or cause them to retreat). How else would you measure their effectiveness in combat other than how good they are at killing enemy ships?
That's like saying Tempest is stronger than a Monitor, cause Tempest will kill Shepherds faster. I mean, you win either way...
Yes, if all you can choose from is a Tempest or a Monitor, it's better to have the Tempest, because it can actually kill something. When doing any sort of comparison, you need to have some sort of a specific, measurable metric by which to compare them over. There's no useful comparison if the result is "everything can do it".
This is also why it's better to have a sufficiently difficult enemy fleet to test against. The whole point is to have a test that can differentiate between different ships, weapons, etc., and thus the test can't be too easy to accomplish. There's little point to a participation trophy in comparisons.
Vanshilar, is the Conquest loadout from that video the one you use currently, or did you update it?
Not exactly but pretty close. Nowadays I'm testing different things out with the medium energy. IR Autolance looks good but trying out different things to see if they might be better.
I don't know how did you manage to misread that as "I don't know what you're talking about" - twice - but since apparently you did, let me clearly say it again:
If you were aware of it, then why did you say 1) you've never seen anyone else do it and 2) use it to support the claim that someone should be "extremely careful" about using it as a basis for balance changes? What is this extreme care that you think should be applied to this that doesn't need to be applied elsewhere?
Yes, achieving a local numerical superiority by using burst weapons in the initial stages of the fight is optimal and most effective, but very few fleets could do it in 0.96 and even less can in 0.97(against double+ Ordo)
Still wrong. When I mentioned testing over a dozen ships in 0.96a, including the Eagle, all of them used this strategy. So either the Eagle is some super duper overpowered ship or this strategy can be used a lot more readily than you claim. When I talked about using Manticores with Escort Package when 0.97a was released, it was using this strategy. You can even see in those attached screenshots how my fleet is surrounding the incoming enemy ships. It doesn't take some super duper secret fleet composition to make it work; I posted a video years ago of doing this using flagship Medusa and 22 LP Brawlers here:
Spoiler
(back then, with LP Brawlers costing 5 DP, or 4 DP with Support Doctrine, my fleet was 100 DP vs the enemy's 240 DP on the battlefield at once). I posted a video even earlier than that where 3 Odysseys, 3 Apogees, and 3 Hyperions naturally did this under complete AI control after I manually spread them out to capture objectives and get them into a line, i.e. after I spread them out, I gave no more commands and did not control any ships, so they were purely under AI control after that point:
Spoiler
Basically this can readily be done by a large number of fleets, using a large number of different playstyles and fleet philosophies. It's not even actually about burst damage per se, but that my ships can spread out in a wider line than the enemy fleet, but without spreading themselves so thin that enemy ships can get through. As long as that happens, then as my ships start killing the initial enemy fleet, then it thins them out enough where my entire fleet can concentrate its fire on a smaller number of enemy ships, since the rest of their DP are tied up in reinforcements (still advancing to the front lines).
You seem to be operating under an assumption that since you figured out the best possible fleet composition/build in the game(which I believe to be true) everyone should logically follow suit and use it - or at least something similar - but that's just not how it works.
No, I don't know if this is the best possible fleet composition/build. All I can say is that it was one of the best ones I tested in 0.96a, and that it performs even better now in 0.97a. It's entirely possible that other fleet compositions have improved even more in 0.97a. It's also entirely possible that there are other fleet compositions which are better that I never tried.
Putting aside that most players are, well, bad at the game and never get into the nitty gritty minutae of mechanics and stats and will never be even remotely as good as you, even the players who ARE good at the game would rather figure out their own thing rather than copy someone else's solution.
No, that's assuming that 1) I'm good at playing the game and 2) good strategies are somehow uniquely and wholly different from each other.
First, I do a lot of analysis, i.e. looking through the numbers, figuring out correlations, understanding and modeling how combat works, etc., which is a very different skillset than playing the game, i.e. controlling the flagship, intuiting/predicting what is about to occur, understanding commands, giving the correct commands at the correct times to the other ships, etc. It's the difference between an airplane designer and a pilot. You can see that I make plenty of mistakes in all of my videos (except the AI-controlled one obviously), not the least of which is that at the beginning of my 5 Ordos fight, I took multiple hits to my armor within a minute of the initial clash and started taking hull damage from there. Thus I had to do the rest of the fight without most of my armor, and thus I had to play a lot more defensively. That's a bad use of the Onslaught, but I didn't want to bother to redo it. The fight could easily have been several minutes faster if I had my armor, since the [REDACTED] are much more aggressive toward vulnerable ships, and less aggressive (i.e. less likely to commit to an assault and more likely to just sit back and take damage until they die) against pristine ships. So a lot of my fleet compositions are built around being relatively fault-tolerant because the player himself makes plenty of mistakes. The completion times that I post are in spite of all these mistakes; a more competent player could easily post better times.
Second, there is nothing particularly unique about military concepts like outflanking the enemy, local concentration of force, etc. These are simply good principles to follow in any combat game, or military combat in general, and have been around since long before you or I were born. The specific implementation may vary from game to game and different players may use different ways to go about them (in this case, different ships, different weapons, etc.), but those principles are pretty time-tested. Players who are good at the game would figure out how to use them to the maximum, rather than avoid them to not "copy someone else's solution". That makes little sense; if someone else already figured out a good solution, why would you bother using a solution that is inferior? If someone says "maxing out your flux is a good idea", do you then say "actually now that you said it, I'm going to do something completely different, because I don't want to copy someone else's solution"? Rejecting good advice for the sake of being different is a bad way to go through life.
Finally:
I don't know how did you manage to misread that as
you're probably just getting too much noise from your flagship to even notice.
You've been doing the same one thing for years and apparently can't comprehend that most other people don't.
You seem to be operating under an assumption that
You keep making up stuff about my state of mind which 1) I have never said, 2) are untrue, and 3) have little relationship with any of the points I'm making, while avoiding addressing any of the points that I do make. This is not only ad hominem but is classic straw man. Please address the points actually being made instead of making things up about other posters.
Conquest's main issue is being broadside. AI doesn't "crabwalk" nearly enough to use broadside efficiently.
Yeah, that's one of the limitations of the Conquest. IIRC Alex has said broadside ships don't move directly toward their target, they move diagonally toward their target instead, even though this means they take longer to get within weapon range of their target. A better AI would go straight for their target, turning as needed so that the weapons face the target, since the ships can turn in any direction independent of their direction of travel. As a result I order them a bit "further in" toward the middle than where I want them to go. For example, for a "left-facing" Conquest (broadside layout where the weapons are on the left), I'll order them to go more to the left than where I actually want them to go, knowing that they'll drift to the right.
For this reason I'm also experimenting with sticking a shorter range weapon on them, say a Pulse Laser, purely to encourage them to move closer more. But obviously if they get too close then they'll take more damage to shields which is bad, so it's a bit of a balancing act.
You know what, it would be interesting for people to post their capital builds so we could actually compare their damage outputs.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been doing, comparing the best possible builds against a static test fleet (double Ordos). I in the player-controlled flagship Onslaught to serve as the main lightning rod running into the middle of the enemy fleet (i.e. I'm in the center controlling the flow of battle, tanking when needed, picking the best target to kill, etc.), with a Gryphon on either side taking care of any flankers (so that whichever ship I'm testing does not get their DPS reduced by having to chase down strays, that DPS hit goes to the Gryphons instead). So this way the ship I'm testing is basically spending most their time shooting at the enemy, with some amount of tanking. That's the basis for my opinion on the damage capabilities of the different ships.