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« on: May 23, 2019, 03:22:50 PM »
I've attempted to use the glowtusk in combination with the HMC, here is what I've seen happening with Vapors:
- Very skittish, often refusing to get close enough to use either weapon even on isolated/weak targets (in particular I notice that when the enemy ship vents, the AI always backs off instead of pressing the attack), resulting in less offensive shield pressure than what the longer range recson V results in
- When they do get close enough, they tap and go without dealing much, if any damage
- The Glowtusk is used constantly against shields AND enemy ships are extremely good at raising shields at just the right time to deflect glowtusk shots
- The rare times the glowtusk hits armor/hull it's because the shield wasn't raised quickly enough or didn't manage to cover the area the glowtusk was aimed at, rather than because the AI can't afford to raise the shields due to high flux/disabled
- When the glowtusk does hit armor/hull it does good damage, but not amazing, and not good enough in contrast to how often it's blocked by shields or never fired by the skittish AI
- Probably one of the biggest problems: The glowtusk is extremely inaccurate when used by the AI and misses easily 50% of the shots fired due to travel time and possibly some sort of inertia inheritance from the vapors - they just completely whiff by entire ship-lengths.
I don't know if anything can (or should) be changed with the AI behaviour itself, but I will say that there's a few things a phase lance has as an advantage over a glowtusk:
- Similar range, effectively equivalent in practice
- Hits more reliably (only whiffs a lot when the flicker core is engaged mid-shot)
- Works well against shields/armor/hull
- AI doesn't like to raise shields to deflect phase lance shots, resulting in more hits on armor/hull and faster kills
- Higher alpha damage + high flux works better on the vapor because it can flicker core to safety and usually only spends a few seconds near any target regardless of its present flux level anyways
So with a Recson V + Phase Lance, what the Vapors do is skirmish at range, hitting with the Recson V on shields, and then move in close for a phase lance shot, which the opposing AI usually doesn't try to block with its shield, resulting in a lot of damage to the armor/hull (and very often an almost immediate kill on most other frigates).
While with an HMC + Glowtusk, the vapor flickers around tentatively out of range a lot doing nothing, then when it does move in, it exposes itself for much longer trying to whittle the shields down with the HMC, and either fires the glowtusk at the shields - usually maxing out its flux and forcing a disengagement - or simply doesn't fire the glowtusk at all and disengages. Half the time the glowtusk is fired it just misses completely. Without pressure from something else, it takes luck for this combo to actually kill anything.
I believe, at the very least, that the glowtusk needs a large projectile velocity buff - it is missing or being deflected by shields too often to rely on. An AI buff to get it using the glowtusk more effectively would be very nice: Less shooting at shields, and more flanking attemps (and being a little more aggressive in general, like engaging venting ships with a quick cheap shot instead of letting them go)
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I also tried using the Recson V + SRAB and that was just awful. The SRAB rarely makes it through point defenses and lacks the damage/flux stats to mitigate this weakness. Yes, you can saturate PD with micromissiles if that's what you like, but now you sacrifice higher quality missiles for PD saturation... just to get a very average gun to hit in the first place.
Or you could just swap out the average SRAB for an average anything-similar and enjoy dealing damage without worrying about PD at all and being free to use whatever missiles or torpedoes you prefer.
DA weapons feel very 'balanced' (or perhaps more aptly - 'overtuned'), but to the point that it's actually a detriment: Without extremely optimized loadouts most DA stuff just isn't competitive. You have very tight fitting options, not much flux to work with, and very average (or worse) survivability. The only good thing about the DA lineup is the huge maneuverability advantage they have with flicker cores (actually not that great on the middling destroyer/cruiser hulls as they're too slow/don't travel far enough for the flicker cores to help much), and the large number of flight decks (That I unironically find better filled with non-wanzers in spite of the wanzer bonus). In general as much as I like trying to use DA weapons on DA ships, it's usually more effective to use the common pool weapons instead.
Biggest weaknesses of DA ships are EMP weapons (absolutely annihilates the wanzers) in conjunction with mass strike craft that defeat the maneuverability advantage of the ships. Most DA ships have very weak PD options/mounts and get overwhelmed without their own strikecraft cover.
The best DA weapons in my experience have been the Recson V, Burchdel laser (ONLY if you have a huge amount of spare flux and it's better as an offensive anti-ship weapon than as point defense!), and Uhlan Siege gun. The worst have been Glowtusks, the EMP laser I can't remember the name of, and IBIS (you need like 5 IBIS clumped together to do ANYTHING, it's basically semi-usable on the group of 6 small mounts on the Maelstrom and nowhere else. The IBIS could cost 0 ordnance and I still wouldn't use it).
As an aside, is there somewhere I can these starsector tournaments? I'm willing to accept that I've just been using everything the wrong way and would love to see how things are working in more competitive environments.
