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1

General Discussion / Re: The Fearsome Buffalo Mk.II -- The King of the Early Game

« on: November 07, 2024, 06:10:53 PM »

Pilums do create space but you need Salamanders or Claws to rotate shields/disable engines, Broadswords or other kinetic damage to dump flares and raise flux, and maybe EMP weapons to shut down PD... Buffalo can't provide those alone, so Buffalo fleets are secretly extremely DP-efficient Harpoon fleets.

2

General Discussion / Re: How Armor/Hull Repair Works

« on: October 31, 2024, 07:05:47 PM »

Efficiency Overhauling low tech can raise supply cost! And I think combat has to end-end, with a loot screen or lack thereof. Just retreating then re-engaging doesn't trigger Field Repairs.

The fact that armor is based on a grid and some parts of the grid are more important than others also yields some weird effects (e.g. mostly-repaired nose with a hole right behind it.)

3

General Discussion / Re: What are your hillarious but ultimately inneffective builds?

« on: October 31, 2024, 02:28:53 AM »

Quad gauss Invictus stacks got thoroughly optimized for Ordo farming by CapnHector. Those builds might be worth looking through, though they're built for a very specific purpose and don't work as well alone.

4

General Discussion / Re: What are your hillarious but ultimately inneffective builds?

« on: October 19, 2024, 08:02:32 PM »

I tried 12x mining lasers and 2x mining pods on Colossus Mk3, with predictable results 

Ol' Colossus III is extremely well-buffed by skills and is technically a Cruiser. There should be some way to make it tick, though I've had *very* bad luck trying it in the past.

You can get burn 9 with industry skill and thus burn 20 with no OP investments. They're acceptable carriers if used with sturdy fighters, since the built-in penalty is less bad than Converted Hangars. 32 DP for a full 8 wings ain't bad, though you're wasting 4 officers on a very questionable craft.

The main problem is anything collapsing on them is Game Over.

3x Herons can do the interlocking PD grid thing. Maybe with Advanced Optics, ITU, and elite Point Defense the humble Mining Laser Colossi can finally cover each others flanks... The Heron beam thing doesn't really work because of their DPS, but because that many overlapping weapon arcs intimidate the enemy AI into submission.

5

General Discussion / Re: The Fearsome Buffalo Mk.II -- The King of the Early Game

« on: October 19, 2024, 07:33:02 PM »

I'm doing a civilian run (because I am scatterbrained and restart too often :p) and gave this one more shot, but I just can't recommend this as a general early game strategy:

The old Discord starting build focused on the Corvus starting system bounty as a hull source, but sourcing missiles requires running around in a burn 20 frigate until you get enough.

Modpacks that dilute markets with weapon diversity can hurt, though many mods have Harpoon-equivalents. Nowadays you can often also bar mission your way to manufacturing contracts pretty easily - get a stack of contacts somewhere dense like Westernesse or Samarra, roll for manufacturing whenever you drop by.

I find buying every Mercury I see is an easier start since you don't need to source a medium mount and get huge value out of doubles or singles. Dive deep into the red skills when starting to pick up EMR+ECCM, there's no need for burn speed or fleet skills early.

6

General Discussion / Re: Horrifically Unreasonable SO Double Ordos Fight in Under 3 Minutes

« on: October 08, 2024, 04:32:00 PM »

The officers are unionizing!!

Cool trick, and cool to see aggressive Harb pushing with its fleet. SO phase ships are fun!

7

General Discussion / Re: Star Fortresses, Experience Gains, and the Fastest Way to Level 15

« on: October 04, 2024, 09:51:36 PM »

Combat-only starts definitely aren't this fast. 1 hour! Very nice.

Although maybe there's some way to come close by going for a "big game hunting" flagship and bullying Hegemony cruisers and caps with exposed engines, retreating once enough DP's destroyed. Hmm...

8

General Discussion / Re: What are your hillarious but ultimately inneffective builds?

« on: October 03, 2024, 11:23:29 PM »

Salamanders keep coming up, so I'll add mine: phase anchor ships with salamanders reload at 6x speed as seen by other ships. I'm not really sure its worth the OP and/or missile/ballistic slots, but it is funny.

Does that make the Gremlin good?

I love buying every Mercury I see in the early game until there's 12+ Harpoon smalls backing my fleet at all times. With Salamanders they'd be 0.66 DP per small launcher vs a Gremlin's 0.5 DP/sl at peak cloak micro. But the Gremlin would probably burst fire better than 3x Mercuries, even with sub-optimal AI cloak micro. Also less ships to babysit and a non-trivial amount of anti-missile PD.

Salamanders and Broadswords make for an extremely useful backline if you've got any kind of bowling ball frontline ships.

9

General Discussion / Re: What are your hillarious but ultimately inneffective builds?

« on: September 30, 2024, 03:39:42 PM »

Pilum critical mass Condors. Critical mass Pilums are great but the Condors require way too much attention and babysitting to be worth it.

Neural linked dual Eradicator flagships. Infinite AAF is strong and on paper you have more flux-to-damage output than a player Radiant. In practice you get kited unless the rest of your fleet is loaded for making Salamanders and Claws actually connect on engines.

Kiting artillery shield bypass Legion flagship. Thoughtfully venting to zero flux boost rapid turns and Burn Drive around the entire map is loads of fun. You can easily solo the simulator. However, damage output and battlefield impact is bottlenecked by your damage output and for the skillpoint investment required it's not actually very high impact.

10

General Discussion / Re: The Fearsome Buffalo Mk.II -- The King of the Early Game

« on: September 30, 2024, 03:31:06 PM »

Early-game civilian-grade hulls also benefit massively from Industry.

Your combat prowess is offset by low speed and massive campaign map signature radius. 20 burn mitigates that, free Emergency Burn solves it. Oversized ships with High Resolution Sensors (Circe/Colossus are cruisers, Atlas MkII are capitals) are also helpful.

11

General Discussion / Re: Starsector as a horror game

« on: August 31, 2024, 07:54:08 PM »

The horror of Starsector is no matter your power, all you can do is destroy.

The core worlds are a guttering candle in an infinite darkness. Cope by colonizing an infinite zoo of AI-governed worlds if you must, but the prospect of humans thriving on the Domain's scale again is completely out of sight.

12

General Discussion / oh, it's literally a Star Fortress

« on: July 19, 2024, 11:44:47 PM »

Very cool. No sieges and resupply, but everything's automated so I guess those aren't a thing.

13

General Discussion / Re: Give [REDACTED] battlecruiser a try

« on: July 17, 2024, 09:43:48 PM »

If the rest of your fleet (i.e. a couple of bait Monitors) can spread and isolate the enemies AI Nova will chain 1v1s until everything's dead.

14

General Discussion / Re: Is Atlas OP?

« on: July 17, 2024, 02:33:15 AM »

"Meme fleet" is the dying scream of your exploding foes as the flood of mass-produced Mercury shuttles spews Macross levels of Harpoon MRM (Double).

The thing usually limiting monofleets is hull (and less so, weapon) acquisition. A fun thing you can do is rush to establish contacts from a chosen faction and regularly check for industry missions that'll mass-produce cheap hulls. Then you can build the gigafleet without needing half a million credits and 120++ days of build time. Colonization can be done for $50k credits and 5 Mudskippers, Heavy Industry's the real blocker.

Alternatively just stack Derelict Ops/Support Doctrine (in that order unless also building a carrier deathball) ships from an easily farmable faction (pirates, Diktat with phase, remnants sadly don't really work) with good bulk-purchased weapons.

15

General Discussion / Re: What are the most DP efficient ships in Vanilla ?

« on: July 03, 2024, 06:12:17 PM »

Getting the AI to pilot correctly is the hardest part of using this ship. On paper the stats look really good. But how the hell do you get the AI to do the right thing?

This is the best I got for an escort setup. Command it to follow a bowling ball capital ship that'll get stuck in good and hard, and it sims ~okay.

Way less lethal than a HIL-grav-grav escort Sunder, but way way way more survivable. 100% CR is needed to hit things at range and I wouldn't waste officers on it, so Support Doctrine it is. Needs to be overfluxed to full auto the guns, spreading them through groups for coverage is fun. Squeezing in Salamanders and maybe ECCM would be fun but abusing Phase Anchor to increase Salamander regen probably takes too much OP and discourages AI from getting in HVD range.