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General Discussion / The Fearsome Buffalo Mk.II -- The King of the Early Game
« on: September 21, 2024, 04:31:35 AM »
I've spent some time in the past several years documenting the combat balance of ships and player fleets with regards to endgame content, primarily using double Ordos as a measuring stick and punching bag. TL;DR - the most powerful player fleets spam missiles and long-range weapons (mostly ballistics), where a big part of the player fleet's effectiveness boils down to how many Squalls and Harpoons it has. This means Gryphons with Squall/Harpoons, Conquests with Squall/Locust/Harpoons/Mjolnirs/HVDs, and so forth, with a player-controlled flagship such as an Onslaught or an 8-Antimatter Blaster Doom taking out key enemy ships to keep the battle flowing smoothly. See for example my thread on beating double Ordos within 3 minutes, or a more alpha core-farming-friendly fleet from 0.96a, which still works just fine and is what I use for my "actual" playthroughs (with flagship Doom instead) since it can get the max of +500% XP bonus on double Ordos, so the XP gain is very high.
This thread is instead about the best ship for the player fleet at the opposite end of the spectrum, the early game. In the past, I previously discussed using LP Brawler spam early on, since they're relatively easy to get and getting free built-in Safety Overrides to boost their flux is very powerful. Generally speaking, LP Brawlers are one of the best exemplars of Safety Overrides ships since they pack a lot of firepower in a relatively small and cheap (DP-wise) package. They're still a good way to go about the early game, but it turns out that there are actually better ships to use for the early game.
Testing
For testing as a proxy enemy for the "early game", I used a d-modded pirate fleet from my playthrough. This pirate fleet is 77 DP which includes 2 Drams, so it's really 73 DP of combat ships. It's just a random pirate fleet that's raiding the system. Attached is the fleet composition.
Playing ability between players vary a lot more widely in the early game than in the endgame (where you can assume that the player has at least some understanding of how the game works), so I tested the player fleets without a player-controlled flagship, so it's basically fleets under AI control but with the player issuing commands. In this case, I'm in a Mudskipper just to observe fights, and to issue some commands when needed.
Also, in the endgame, you can assume that the player is using the maximum deployment amount of 240 DP (or for me, 200 DP when looking to maximize XP gain). But in the early game, the player's fleet size can vary widely. So, it's also useful to test ships at different amounts of fleet DP.
So with that in mind, the testing assumptions were a level 5 character, with no combat skills (since I'm not using a player-controlled flagship), but using Leadership skills including Support Doctrine. That's usually one of the best ways to start off a playthrough. The ships can use any non-Omega weapons and any hullmods. The player does not control a combat ship, although the player can issue commands to other ships. No s-mods were used. No officers (although the ships all get skills due to Support Doctrine). The fleet doctrine was set to Reckless.
In testing out different ships, it became evident pretty quick that once again, it really came down to the missiles that the fleet has. In the endgame, it basically boiled down to spamming Squalls and Harpoons (plus long-range weapons, usually ballistics such as Mjolnir and/or Hephaestus). The Squalls and long-range weapons were there to help soften up the enemy ships since they have good shields and offensive weapons. In the early game, no such concern is needed because the enemies are relatively weak. Thus, it becomes better to directly spam finisher weapons. In other words...mass Harpoons.
So the early game comes down to how many small missiles and medium missiles the ship can carry per point of DP, filling them all with Harpoons, and using Expanded Missile Racks and Missile Autoloader where appropriate, along with ECCM. For example, a Falcon (P) can carry 4 medium missiles and 2 small missiles for 20 DP. The AI typically doesn't fire Harpoons unless it thinks an enemy ship is vulnerable, so to get around this, the Harpoons (and often the other weapons) were put in the same weapon group as a PD weapon. This makes the AI not manually control it, but leave it on autofire (with autofire turned on), so that the Harpoons will fire as soon as any enemy ship gets within range.
Looking through the list of vanilla ships, the ship that has the greatest ratio of missiles per DP is...the Buffalo Mk.II. For just 4 DP, you get a medium missile and 3 small missiles. There's enough OP for Expanded Missile Racks, Missile Autoloader, ECCM, and Militarized Subsystems (to receive the Tactical Drills and Crew Training buffs) in addition to the missiles, and then some OP leftover afterward. So while a 20-DP Falcon (P) gives you 4 medium missiles and 2 small missiles, 20 DP's worth of Buffalo2's give you 5 medium missiles and 15 small missiles. In theory the Mercury can yield a better ratio, since it has 3 small universals for 2 DP, which is a potential 30 small missiles for 20 DP. However, in practice, one of the slots needs to be PD to link to the missiles to have them fire, so it just ends up being 20 small missiles for 20 DP.
One might wonder about the Buffalo2's durability due to its lack of shields. Well, with enough missiles, the enemy fleet won't be doing much damage to your ships anyway. Against double Ordos, my fleet typically received around 50-150k damage for roughly 1000k damage dealt. Against the pirate fleet, a Buffalo2 fleet takes below 4k damage for around 95k damage dealt. And realistically, if the player is controlling a flagship, the player can always just move in front to tank some damage. In practice though it's not really needed very often, and obviously wasn't a part of the testing.
As before, for testing, multiple runs of each fleet configuration were run, with the best completion time for each fleet configuration recorded. The goal is to minimize battle completion time as reported by the Detailed Combat Results mod. That mod also helps diagnose a lot of other combat statistics about how ships perform in battle, to help you understand what actually happens in battle, so I highly recommend it. For most of the ships, I also tested how the completion time changes if more or fewer of them were used. The data for some of them are below:
This can be plotted, with the x-axis being the amount of DP of the fleet (i.e. "what you put in"), and the y-axis being how long the battle takes (i.e. "what you get out"). The lower the DP (toward the left) the better, and the lower the time (toward the bottom) the better. The graph of this plot is attached.
The ship loadouts leading to the best completion times were:
Buffalo2: Harpoon Pod, 3 Harpoons, 3 Mining Lasers, Tactical Laser on the hardpoint, all linked together in the same weapon group, with Militarized Subsystems, ECCM, EMR, and MA, 0 cap, 1 vent
Falcon (P): 4 Harpoon Pods, 2 Harpoons, IR Pulse Laser, Mining Laser, all linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, MA, and ITU, 2 cap, 0 vent
SO Hyperion: 2 Heavy Blasters, 1 Assault Chaingun, each in their own weapon group, with Safety Overrides and Stabilized Shields, 3 cap, 10 vent
LP Brawler: 2 Assault Chainguns in one group, 2 Light Dual Autocannons in another group, with Hardened Shields, 10 cap, 5 vent
Manticore: Hephaestus, 2 Harpoon Pods, Light Needler (nose), 2 Mining Lasers, all linked together in the same weapon group, with EMR, ECCM, and ITU, 0 cap, 12 vent (a similar build using Mjolnir worked just as well)
Venture: 2 Harpoon Pods, 2 Harpoons, LMG, all linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, Militarized Subsystems, MA, and Unstable Injector, 0 cap, 2 vent
Venture (for 4 Venture run): 2 Harpoon Pods, 2 Harpoon (Double)'s, HVD, IRAL, LMG, all linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, Militarized Subsystems, and MA, 0 cap, 0 vent
Vigilance: Harpoon Pod, Heavy Burst Laser, both linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, Unstable Injector, and Stabilized Shields, 5 cap, 0 vent (although I didn't really try out which other PD weapons might work better)
As you can see, the Buffalo2 did significantly better than all other ships. Taking a player fleet size of 60 DP, 15 Buffalo2's beat the pirate fleet in 34 seconds, while 3 Falcon (P)'s took 48 seconds, 5 Manticores took 59 seconds, 10 LP Brawlers took 80 seconds, and I didn't do 4 Hyperions but 5 Hyperions (75 DP) took 97 seconds. It takes around 15 seconds (in the smaller battle map) for the two fleets to start engaging each other. Taking this into account, at 60 DP, the Buffalo2's were roughly 3 times faster than LP Brawlers, and somewhere over 4 times faster than SO Hyperions, when using the same amount of DP. Alternately, 9 Buffalo2's (36 DP) were able to kill the fleet in the same time as 11 SO Hyperions (165 DP), or over 4 times as much DP. That's how strong missile spam is in the early game.
Since the LP Brawler is among the best Safety Overrides ships by DP, the curve for the LP Brawler represents about the best that can be achieved with just about any ship using Safety Overrides. So any ship below or to the left of the LP Brawler's curve represents a ship that can outperform just about any Safety Overrides ship at killing early d-modded pirates, i.e. the early game.
A concern with missiles, especially Harpoons, is that they can run out pretty quickly. So the missile-based ships were tested to see how few there could be before running out. The Venture runs out at "just over" 4 Ventures; if the player uses 4 Ventures, then the final ship (usually the Condor) has to be taken out by whatever non-missile weapons it has, while if the player uses 5 Ventures, they can beat the pirate fleet easily. The Falcon (P) requires 3 of them; 2 is not enough. I'm not sure exactly how many the Vigilance needs, but somewhere between 12 and 15. For the Buffalo2, it can just barely kill the pirate fleet with 8, but having 9 or 10 is a lot safer.
So for this pirate test fleet of 73 DP (excluding the 2 Drams), you need a minimum of 8 Buffalo2's (32 DP), or around 15 Vigilances (75 DP), or 3 Falcon (P)'s (60 DP), or 5 Ventures (70 DP), to not run out of Harpoons. Most notably, the Buffalo2 can comfortably kill a d-modded pirate fleet over twice its size in DP, while the others can only handle a fleet that's roughly their size or smaller. While a non-missile fleet can probably handle a fleet that's larger, you pay for it by the far greater time they need to win as they slowly plink down each enemy ship. The time needed to win increases dramatically the more you try to "shortman" the fight; the graphs are basically rectangular hyperbolas. Also, in practical use, the player-controlled flagship can make the fleet's missiles much more effective, by taking out shields and/or focusing their fire on key ships. While 8 Buffalo2's by themselves took 53 seconds to kill the pirate fleet, adding in a player-controlled Wolf dropped the time down to 37 seconds, increasing the fleet's DPS by nearly 50%.
The Venture and Vigilance deserve special mention. For most missile ships, the rate of Harpoon Pod fire is limited to 4 every 9 seconds, so adding more ships does mean a faster completion time. However, these two ships have Fast Missile Racks, which means they will unload their Harpoons very quickly. So they tend to be more "all or nothing". 5 Ventures is all you need to kill this pirate test fleet, so using 5 or 10 didn't make much difference in the completion time because the additional missiles mean a denser wave of Harpoons but they're still limited by travel time, etc. The Vigilance is very similar.
Similarly, yes, in many runs the Venture fleet actually took no damage at all, since there was so much Harpoon spam at the very beginning (due to Fast Missile Racks) that enemy ships did zero damage to the player fleet for the entire battle. The Buffalo2 fleets also took very little damage on occasion (the fleet took just 34 damage in one of the 15-Buffalo2 runs), although usually at least a couple of missiles got through causing some damage.
Campaign Playthrough
Alright, so that's how well the Buffalo2 performs in combat, what about how easy is it to acquire in the early stages of the campaign? You need to consider the feasibility of not just getting multiples of the ship itself, but also finding Harpoon Pods and Harpoons for it, as well as the EMR, MA, and ECCM hullmods. To try it out, I played it through in vanilla version 0.97a-RC11, using the Wolf start. (Some light spoilers ahead.)
Initially, I did a playthrough without any trading (I don't bother picking up stuff in markets to sell elsewhere, although I did use markets to sell extra loot if I had it). I started by going to Tetra where there's a guaranteed Hammerhead and Buffalo2 (using an SP). Then I went to get the Alpha cache, which in this playthrough has 2 AMSRMs as well as a Resonator, all the while checking markets for the hullmods, Harpoons, and Buffalo2's, and fighting some pirates whenever I saw them. For the sake of trying this out, I didn't put any s-mods on my ships (to see how they perform without s-mods), although normally they would have a couple here and there. A basic log of that playthrough is:
Mar 19, level 1: Got Missile Autoloader
Mar 27, level 1: Got Expanded Missile Racks
Jun 2, level 2: Got ECCM
Jun 23, level 2: Got Alpha cache, using a Wolf and 3 Buffalo2's, took 24 seconds
Jul 10, level 4: Got my 7th Buffalo2
Aug 3, level 4: Got my 10th Buffalo2
So it took around 5 months to get 10 Buffalo2's, as well as the necessary hullmods, and this also included the Harpoons. I felt like this was too "easy" since I did some spysat etc. missions for easy money (although that's how I'd typically begin a playthrough, for some easy money and also to give a reason to visit different markets), so I redid it again but this time, without doing missions for the easy money. A basic log of this second playthrough is:
Apr 26, level 2: Got both EMR and MA
May 7, level 3: Got a Falcon (P)
May 18, level 4: Got ECCM
May 31, level 4: Got Alpha cache, using a Wolf and 4 Buffalo2's, took 23 seconds
Jun 21, level 5: Got my 7th Buffalo2
Jul 12, level 5: Did a 153k-credit Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty, 116 DP, which included an Executor and a Falcon, using my flagship Wolf, a Falcon (P), a Hammerhead, and 7 Buffalo2's, so 63 DP, took 66 seconds
Aug 7, level 6: Got my 10th Buffalo2
So again it took around 5 months to pick up 10 Buffalo2's, even without doing missions for extra income. It turns out that Buffalo2's are pretty plentiful in markets, and so are Harpoons. The necessary hullmods were pretty easy to get as well. Hence, it's pretty easy to build up this fleet. It's actually easier than building a fleet of LP Brawlers because there are many more markets which can sell Buffalo2's, plus they're much cheaper (and you may not have to repair them if you're lucky).
The SD deserter bounty was pretty interesting, because my testing was primarily against a pirate fleet, so I didn't know how the fleet would fare against a non-pirate (i.e. better) fleet. But it turns out that it didn't have much trouble at all. The enemy fleet was 116 DP compared with my fleet at 63 DP (of combat ships), so it was almost double my size in DP, a lot of it due to an Executor which had 2 HILs, 2 Locusts, 5 Heavy Autocannons, 2 Phase Lances, and an assortment of PD. The enemy fleet did a total of 16,494 damage to my fleet, mostly taken by my flagship Wolf and the Hammerhead on our shields (which is why the Hammerhead didn't do that much damage, it was busy tanking -- not intentionally, but that's how it ended up), while my fleet did 155,800 damage. The Hammerhead and I had most of the anti-shield weapons, while the Buffalo2's and the Falcon (P) had the Harpoon spam, although the Falcon (P) had the Resonator, so we focused on taking down shields and let the Buffalo2's do their work with the Harpoon spam. So the fight actually ended up being straightforward, completing in 66 seconds, and netting me 317,784 XP (including the bonus from SP usage) since I had a +106% XP bonus on it. A screenshot of the DCR results for the fight is attached.
Later on, the player encounters much more difficult enemies, where Harpoon spam alone may not suffice, or where the enemy fleets become so big that Harpoons don't last long enough, or become so dangerous that the player's ships need to have better defenses to survive. For the early game though the Buffalo2 reigns supreme as the best ship to get for the player's early fleet.
This thread is instead about the best ship for the player fleet at the opposite end of the spectrum, the early game. In the past, I previously discussed using LP Brawler spam early on, since they're relatively easy to get and getting free built-in Safety Overrides to boost their flux is very powerful. Generally speaking, LP Brawlers are one of the best exemplars of Safety Overrides ships since they pack a lot of firepower in a relatively small and cheap (DP-wise) package. They're still a good way to go about the early game, but it turns out that there are actually better ships to use for the early game.
Testing
For testing as a proxy enemy for the "early game", I used a d-modded pirate fleet from my playthrough. This pirate fleet is 77 DP which includes 2 Drams, so it's really 73 DP of combat ships. It's just a random pirate fleet that's raiding the system. Attached is the fleet composition.
Playing ability between players vary a lot more widely in the early game than in the endgame (where you can assume that the player has at least some understanding of how the game works), so I tested the player fleets without a player-controlled flagship, so it's basically fleets under AI control but with the player issuing commands. In this case, I'm in a Mudskipper just to observe fights, and to issue some commands when needed.
Also, in the endgame, you can assume that the player is using the maximum deployment amount of 240 DP (or for me, 200 DP when looking to maximize XP gain). But in the early game, the player's fleet size can vary widely. So, it's also useful to test ships at different amounts of fleet DP.
So with that in mind, the testing assumptions were a level 5 character, with no combat skills (since I'm not using a player-controlled flagship), but using Leadership skills including Support Doctrine. That's usually one of the best ways to start off a playthrough. The ships can use any non-Omega weapons and any hullmods. The player does not control a combat ship, although the player can issue commands to other ships. No s-mods were used. No officers (although the ships all get skills due to Support Doctrine). The fleet doctrine was set to Reckless.
In testing out different ships, it became evident pretty quick that once again, it really came down to the missiles that the fleet has. In the endgame, it basically boiled down to spamming Squalls and Harpoons (plus long-range weapons, usually ballistics such as Mjolnir and/or Hephaestus). The Squalls and long-range weapons were there to help soften up the enemy ships since they have good shields and offensive weapons. In the early game, no such concern is needed because the enemies are relatively weak. Thus, it becomes better to directly spam finisher weapons. In other words...mass Harpoons.
So the early game comes down to how many small missiles and medium missiles the ship can carry per point of DP, filling them all with Harpoons, and using Expanded Missile Racks and Missile Autoloader where appropriate, along with ECCM. For example, a Falcon (P) can carry 4 medium missiles and 2 small missiles for 20 DP. The AI typically doesn't fire Harpoons unless it thinks an enemy ship is vulnerable, so to get around this, the Harpoons (and often the other weapons) were put in the same weapon group as a PD weapon. This makes the AI not manually control it, but leave it on autofire (with autofire turned on), so that the Harpoons will fire as soon as any enemy ship gets within range.
Looking through the list of vanilla ships, the ship that has the greatest ratio of missiles per DP is...the Buffalo Mk.II. For just 4 DP, you get a medium missile and 3 small missiles. There's enough OP for Expanded Missile Racks, Missile Autoloader, ECCM, and Militarized Subsystems (to receive the Tactical Drills and Crew Training buffs) in addition to the missiles, and then some OP leftover afterward. So while a 20-DP Falcon (P) gives you 4 medium missiles and 2 small missiles, 20 DP's worth of Buffalo2's give you 5 medium missiles and 15 small missiles. In theory the Mercury can yield a better ratio, since it has 3 small universals for 2 DP, which is a potential 30 small missiles for 20 DP. However, in practice, one of the slots needs to be PD to link to the missiles to have them fire, so it just ends up being 20 small missiles for 20 DP.
One might wonder about the Buffalo2's durability due to its lack of shields. Well, with enough missiles, the enemy fleet won't be doing much damage to your ships anyway. Against double Ordos, my fleet typically received around 50-150k damage for roughly 1000k damage dealt. Against the pirate fleet, a Buffalo2 fleet takes below 4k damage for around 95k damage dealt. And realistically, if the player is controlling a flagship, the player can always just move in front to tank some damage. In practice though it's not really needed very often, and obviously wasn't a part of the testing.
As before, for testing, multiple runs of each fleet configuration were run, with the best completion time for each fleet configuration recorded. The goal is to minimize battle completion time as reported by the Detailed Combat Results mod. That mod also helps diagnose a lot of other combat statistics about how ships perform in battle, to help you understand what actually happens in battle, so I highly recommend it. For most of the ships, I also tested how the completion time changes if more or fewer of them were used. The data for some of them are below:
Code
# ships ship totalDP time dam taken
8 buff2 32 53 2861
9 buff2 36 48 2454
10 buff2 40 43 1003
15 buff2 60 34 2197
20 buff2 80 36 1807
3 fal.p 60 48 7264
4 fal.p 80 39 1507
5 fal.p 100 32 2109
5 hyper 75 97 42316
10 hyper 150 54 34117
11 hyper 165 48 28005
10 LP braw 60 80 48636
15 LP braw 90 65 42373
20 LP braw 120 55 38427
5 manti 60 59 3293
10 manti 120 41 2919
4 venture 56 73 1245
5 venture 70 43 0
8 venture 112 42 0
10 venture 140 41 0
15 vigil 75 34 910
This can be plotted, with the x-axis being the amount of DP of the fleet (i.e. "what you put in"), and the y-axis being how long the battle takes (i.e. "what you get out"). The lower the DP (toward the left) the better, and the lower the time (toward the bottom) the better. The graph of this plot is attached.
The ship loadouts leading to the best completion times were:
Buffalo2: Harpoon Pod, 3 Harpoons, 3 Mining Lasers, Tactical Laser on the hardpoint, all linked together in the same weapon group, with Militarized Subsystems, ECCM, EMR, and MA, 0 cap, 1 vent
Falcon (P): 4 Harpoon Pods, 2 Harpoons, IR Pulse Laser, Mining Laser, all linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, MA, and ITU, 2 cap, 0 vent
SO Hyperion: 2 Heavy Blasters, 1 Assault Chaingun, each in their own weapon group, with Safety Overrides and Stabilized Shields, 3 cap, 10 vent
LP Brawler: 2 Assault Chainguns in one group, 2 Light Dual Autocannons in another group, with Hardened Shields, 10 cap, 5 vent
Manticore: Hephaestus, 2 Harpoon Pods, Light Needler (nose), 2 Mining Lasers, all linked together in the same weapon group, with EMR, ECCM, and ITU, 0 cap, 12 vent (a similar build using Mjolnir worked just as well)
Venture: 2 Harpoon Pods, 2 Harpoons, LMG, all linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, Militarized Subsystems, MA, and Unstable Injector, 0 cap, 2 vent
Venture (for 4 Venture run): 2 Harpoon Pods, 2 Harpoon (Double)'s, HVD, IRAL, LMG, all linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, Militarized Subsystems, and MA, 0 cap, 0 vent
Vigilance: Harpoon Pod, Heavy Burst Laser, both linked together in the same weapon group, with ECCM, EMR, Unstable Injector, and Stabilized Shields, 5 cap, 0 vent (although I didn't really try out which other PD weapons might work better)
As you can see, the Buffalo2 did significantly better than all other ships. Taking a player fleet size of 60 DP, 15 Buffalo2's beat the pirate fleet in 34 seconds, while 3 Falcon (P)'s took 48 seconds, 5 Manticores took 59 seconds, 10 LP Brawlers took 80 seconds, and I didn't do 4 Hyperions but 5 Hyperions (75 DP) took 97 seconds. It takes around 15 seconds (in the smaller battle map) for the two fleets to start engaging each other. Taking this into account, at 60 DP, the Buffalo2's were roughly 3 times faster than LP Brawlers, and somewhere over 4 times faster than SO Hyperions, when using the same amount of DP. Alternately, 9 Buffalo2's (36 DP) were able to kill the fleet in the same time as 11 SO Hyperions (165 DP), or over 4 times as much DP. That's how strong missile spam is in the early game.
Since the LP Brawler is among the best Safety Overrides ships by DP, the curve for the LP Brawler represents about the best that can be achieved with just about any ship using Safety Overrides. So any ship below or to the left of the LP Brawler's curve represents a ship that can outperform just about any Safety Overrides ship at killing early d-modded pirates, i.e. the early game.
A concern with missiles, especially Harpoons, is that they can run out pretty quickly. So the missile-based ships were tested to see how few there could be before running out. The Venture runs out at "just over" 4 Ventures; if the player uses 4 Ventures, then the final ship (usually the Condor) has to be taken out by whatever non-missile weapons it has, while if the player uses 5 Ventures, they can beat the pirate fleet easily. The Falcon (P) requires 3 of them; 2 is not enough. I'm not sure exactly how many the Vigilance needs, but somewhere between 12 and 15. For the Buffalo2, it can just barely kill the pirate fleet with 8, but having 9 or 10 is a lot safer.
So for this pirate test fleet of 73 DP (excluding the 2 Drams), you need a minimum of 8 Buffalo2's (32 DP), or around 15 Vigilances (75 DP), or 3 Falcon (P)'s (60 DP), or 5 Ventures (70 DP), to not run out of Harpoons. Most notably, the Buffalo2 can comfortably kill a d-modded pirate fleet over twice its size in DP, while the others can only handle a fleet that's roughly their size or smaller. While a non-missile fleet can probably handle a fleet that's larger, you pay for it by the far greater time they need to win as they slowly plink down each enemy ship. The time needed to win increases dramatically the more you try to "shortman" the fight; the graphs are basically rectangular hyperbolas. Also, in practical use, the player-controlled flagship can make the fleet's missiles much more effective, by taking out shields and/or focusing their fire on key ships. While 8 Buffalo2's by themselves took 53 seconds to kill the pirate fleet, adding in a player-controlled Wolf dropped the time down to 37 seconds, increasing the fleet's DPS by nearly 50%.
The Venture and Vigilance deserve special mention. For most missile ships, the rate of Harpoon Pod fire is limited to 4 every 9 seconds, so adding more ships does mean a faster completion time. However, these two ships have Fast Missile Racks, which means they will unload their Harpoons very quickly. So they tend to be more "all or nothing". 5 Ventures is all you need to kill this pirate test fleet, so using 5 or 10 didn't make much difference in the completion time because the additional missiles mean a denser wave of Harpoons but they're still limited by travel time, etc. The Vigilance is very similar.
Similarly, yes, in many runs the Venture fleet actually took no damage at all, since there was so much Harpoon spam at the very beginning (due to Fast Missile Racks) that enemy ships did zero damage to the player fleet for the entire battle. The Buffalo2 fleets also took very little damage on occasion (the fleet took just 34 damage in one of the 15-Buffalo2 runs), although usually at least a couple of missiles got through causing some damage.
Campaign Playthrough
Alright, so that's how well the Buffalo2 performs in combat, what about how easy is it to acquire in the early stages of the campaign? You need to consider the feasibility of not just getting multiples of the ship itself, but also finding Harpoon Pods and Harpoons for it, as well as the EMR, MA, and ECCM hullmods. To try it out, I played it through in vanilla version 0.97a-RC11, using the Wolf start. (Some light spoilers ahead.)
Initially, I did a playthrough without any trading (I don't bother picking up stuff in markets to sell elsewhere, although I did use markets to sell extra loot if I had it). I started by going to Tetra where there's a guaranteed Hammerhead and Buffalo2 (using an SP). Then I went to get the Alpha cache, which in this playthrough has 2 AMSRMs as well as a Resonator, all the while checking markets for the hullmods, Harpoons, and Buffalo2's, and fighting some pirates whenever I saw them. For the sake of trying this out, I didn't put any s-mods on my ships (to see how they perform without s-mods), although normally they would have a couple here and there. A basic log of that playthrough is:
Mar 19, level 1: Got Missile Autoloader
Mar 27, level 1: Got Expanded Missile Racks
Jun 2, level 2: Got ECCM
Jun 23, level 2: Got Alpha cache, using a Wolf and 3 Buffalo2's, took 24 seconds
Jul 10, level 4: Got my 7th Buffalo2
Aug 3, level 4: Got my 10th Buffalo2
So it took around 5 months to get 10 Buffalo2's, as well as the necessary hullmods, and this also included the Harpoons. I felt like this was too "easy" since I did some spysat etc. missions for easy money (although that's how I'd typically begin a playthrough, for some easy money and also to give a reason to visit different markets), so I redid it again but this time, without doing missions for the easy money. A basic log of this second playthrough is:
Apr 26, level 2: Got both EMR and MA
May 7, level 3: Got a Falcon (P)
May 18, level 4: Got ECCM
May 31, level 4: Got Alpha cache, using a Wolf and 4 Buffalo2's, took 23 seconds
Jun 21, level 5: Got my 7th Buffalo2
Jul 12, level 5: Did a 153k-credit Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty, 116 DP, which included an Executor and a Falcon, using my flagship Wolf, a Falcon (P), a Hammerhead, and 7 Buffalo2's, so 63 DP, took 66 seconds
Aug 7, level 6: Got my 10th Buffalo2
So again it took around 5 months to pick up 10 Buffalo2's, even without doing missions for extra income. It turns out that Buffalo2's are pretty plentiful in markets, and so are Harpoons. The necessary hullmods were pretty easy to get as well. Hence, it's pretty easy to build up this fleet. It's actually easier than building a fleet of LP Brawlers because there are many more markets which can sell Buffalo2's, plus they're much cheaper (and you may not have to repair them if you're lucky).
The SD deserter bounty was pretty interesting, because my testing was primarily against a pirate fleet, so I didn't know how the fleet would fare against a non-pirate (i.e. better) fleet. But it turns out that it didn't have much trouble at all. The enemy fleet was 116 DP compared with my fleet at 63 DP (of combat ships), so it was almost double my size in DP, a lot of it due to an Executor which had 2 HILs, 2 Locusts, 5 Heavy Autocannons, 2 Phase Lances, and an assortment of PD. The enemy fleet did a total of 16,494 damage to my fleet, mostly taken by my flagship Wolf and the Hammerhead on our shields (which is why the Hammerhead didn't do that much damage, it was busy tanking -- not intentionally, but that's how it ended up), while my fleet did 155,800 damage. The Hammerhead and I had most of the anti-shield weapons, while the Buffalo2's and the Falcon (P) had the Harpoon spam, although the Falcon (P) had the Resonator, so we focused on taking down shields and let the Buffalo2's do their work with the Harpoon spam. So the fight actually ended up being straightforward, completing in 66 seconds, and netting me 317,784 XP (including the bonus from SP usage) since I had a +106% XP bonus on it. A screenshot of the DCR results for the fight is attached.
Later on, the player encounters much more difficult enemies, where Harpoon spam alone may not suffice, or where the enemy fleets become so big that Harpoons don't last long enough, or become so dangerous that the player's ships need to have better defenses to survive. For the early game though the Buffalo2 reigns supreme as the best ship to get for the player's early fleet.
