The thing about the Radiant neural interface build, is it is usually a late game build that only feels powerful after several key things come together. It is a synergistic combination, where the individual pieces don't really stand all that well on their own. Which rules out some potential variety.
I admit, it is fun to pilot a Radiant, but I'm not convinced that is as strong as other late game synergistic fleets and skill selections. There's also a bias towards the fact it makes the player's issues easier, and it is very clear to the player the advantages you are getting. Determining what benefits the AI is getting takes a bit more effort and digging, and a lot of watching the AI fight (and thus not piloting yourself).
The player can quicky dart in, eliminate a target, and then skim away to safety and vent, which is very obvious. But if the rest of your fleet doesn't actually provide a safety bubble for you to skim back into, things get really dicey really quick. A fleet pushing out or being pushed back can sometimes just be a 15-20% stat swing one way or the other. The ability of your fleet to make that safe space can be somewhat compromised when you put so many points into just the flagship.
I also sometimes make mistakes in it, either overextend in it and then don't quite have the distance to get away, or mis-guess where the skimmer is going to put me. (Quality of life side note, it'd be cool if pressing down the ship ability key created a ghost image of where the skimmer would go, and then on release, actually skimmed there - it'd let the player adjust vector a bit or wait until a slightly better time, rather than skimming in place due to bad vector and positioning).
If it goes down, that generally is it for that fight, and time for a fighting withdrawal and pull another Radiant out of storage back home. There's very little resiliency to the build if you mess up, unlike a more traditional fleet build, where transferring to another ship is much easier and brings along all your capabilities. The rules are quite finicky, so you need another neural link ship to X transfer to, in order to theoretically jump to another Radiant, which means even more penalties to the overall fleet since you're going over 240 DP significantly, at least 62 DP if not more if your neural linked ship is not DP cheap.
Consider, that in order to get the full effect you need to:
1) Be level 13 in order to actually make the Radiant worth it in human hands. Otherwise, you are better off with some kind of triple s-mod Paragon or an Onslaught with fleet buffs.
2) Find and defeat an Ordo containing a Radiant with at least the Automated Ship Skill picked at the time. Essentially, you may need to be at the point where you are farming Ordos in order to get a Radiant (or do a specific quest chain and then get lucky in salvage against a Radiant with minimal support).
So it really is a late game thing, so you need to compare against optimal late game fleets.
So is the combo really stronger than some other fully built synergistic builds? Support Doctrine + Derelict Operations? Best of the Best + Hull Restoration?
Consider for the moment, you can have 1 player piloted Radiant with Systems Expertise + Neural Link + Automated ships, that is down 50 OP (so 270 out of 320) and has at most 2 s-mods, although admittedly sitting at 70% or 85% CR at the start depending on final 2 skill choices at level 15.
Now consider a Best of the Best + Automated Ships + Hull Restoration build utilizing three integrated Gamma Core Radiants, each with triple s-mods benefiting from Systems Expertise, Missile Specialization (which the player one can't really use), Combat Endurance and one more of elite skill of your choice. Thats like a swing of 75 OP for each ship, plus 50% more missiles. They'll be sitting at 48% CR each, so basically the same as 70% in terms of raw bonuses). And then you get to back them up with 60 DP of human level 6 officer + 4 elite skill ships. You can even stick the player in an Afflictor and just support the Radiants with well-timed entropy amplifiers or antimatter blaster shots (still can have 2 tech combat skills and 2 industry combat skills, plus triple S-mod, plus 15% CR from Hull restoration).
Or how about a no flagship fleet with Support Doctrine + Automated Ships + Derelict Operation fleet utilizing six unofficered Radiants with 4 to 5 d-mods each sitting at 50-57% CR each, with some spare DP to spend on human ships. The player can have 50% more Radiants on the field at a time than the Remnants can. Admittedly without alpha cores, but still that's a giant pile of large and medium missile mounts (12 and 24) with expanded missile racks and ECCM on a chassis that is tougher than a Gryphon or Pegasus.
I feel like I need to do some fleet testing with synergistic skill pick Radiant fleets.
