Did try all arbalest, all railgun, and all HVD setups against the same fleet and HVD has a very consistent problem with being overwhelmed where the other 2 just smashes the enemy.
I'm seeing the complete opposite. Tried my flagship Onslaught with 4 Executors with 2 HIL, Squall, Locust, Graviton Beam, and 3 IR Autolance, then putting in 5 of the weapon being tested, against double Ordos, using Derelict Operations so there could be 4 LP Brawlers as support. 5 HVD did 161k total damage, 5 Arbalest did 101k total damage, and 5 Railguns did total 85k damage. Not only that, the HVD Executors only took 28k damage in return, while the Arbalest Executors took 56k damage and the Railgun Executors took 98k damage. So the HVD Executors not only did more damage, but they also took less damage from the double Ordos fleet.
It shouldn't be that hard to see why. The other weapons are soft flux, meaning unless the Executor is overwhelming enemy flux via soft flux, the Executor won't break through enemy shields until hard flux takes over. With HVD, the Executor can start piling up the hard flux at 1000 * 1.85 (capital ITU, BM, GI) = 1850 range. With Arbalest or Railgun, the Executor needs to wait until the enemy gets within 700 * 1.85 = 1295 range. The HVD has an extra 555 range during which it's doing damage while the enemy ship closes in, while the Arbalest/Railgun are doing nothing. The Arbalest and Railgun simply don't have enough DPS to overcome the damage advantage that the HVD gets while they're waiting for the enemy ship to get close.
Executor needs all the flux dissipation and capacity it can get to keep it behaving as it should be. If it gets in a bad spot with flux it starts to use its weapons very poorly and spirals out of control from there.
The other problem is that with shorter range weapons, you're allowing the enemy ship to do hard flux to you. If you can kill ships from farther away, then you don't need to worry as much about your ships getting into a bad spot because your ships' flux will stay consistently low. It's when you let enemy ships start pooling up around you that your fleet runs into trouble.
Going from aggressive to steady to cautious on executors reduced suicide rates to something like 10% of the original.
Battle goes from hopeless and frustrating to being about avoiding that 1 casualty.
Most of the time cautious does a good job of actually staying at range and focusing fire instead of blocking.
Tried 5 Arbalests using cautious officers instead of aggressive officers, the fight ended up taking 20 seconds longer, and the Executors took 88k damage instead of 56k damage. The Arbalests did do 106k total damage which is a bit more, but that's because the fight overall took longer; their rate of damage output actually decreased. So it decreased their damage output and increased the damage they had to absorb, because they sat back more often (making front line ships take more damage) instead of committing to the fight. Not worth it.
Doesn't matter what officer type you are using, you can only compare weapons by actually running the battles with each loadout.
(also, hybrids are wide arc turrets so whatever you put there will obviously look much better)
No. While running a battle with your target loadout is "where the rubber meets the road" and what really counts, comparing weapons side by side gives a lot of insight into how well they perform relative to each other, such as hit rates (how often each shot hits a target), weapon uptime (how often a weapon is being used), and derivative metrics such as overall DPS (how much damage per second a weapon contributes throughout the course of a battle), flux used (how much flux a weapon uses throughout the battle), flux efficiency (how much damage a weapon does per point of flux), and so forth. All the on-paper DPS in the world won't matter if the weapon is too short-ranged to be used often, otherwise most builds would be full of Vulcans, so this is helpful especially when looking at weapons of different ranges.
The problem with running battles with one weapon, then with another weapon, is that there are many other factors that affect these metrics; how well they perform varies significantly from run to run, since how each battle plays out is different, even if it's the same player fleet against the same enemy test fleet. So while it's more accurate "in theory", "in practice" you need so many runs with each weapon to eliminate the other factors statistically that it's too impractical. Testing weapons side-by-side guarantees that they're being compared under identical conditions and removes the other factors from consideration.
Yes, the hybrids are turrets while the ballistics are hardpoints. Generally, when I'm doing side-by-side testing, I'll often put the weapon slots right next to each other (separated by 4 pixels just so I can still select between them on the refit screen), with identical firing arcs, in the same weapon group (to ensure that the AI will either turn all on or all off), and mount type "hidden" to prevent them from getting disabled (which would affect weapon uptime comparisons). In this case, for the Executor, I put 4 weapon mounts around where the hybrids are in this manner, facing forward with a 130-degree firing arc, replacing the 2 medium hybrids and 3 hardpoints. Testing the different weapons against my double Ordos test fleet:
Weapon Dam1 Dam2
HVD 182086
Arb 81738
HVD/Arb 101851 31438
Arb/Rai 60527 47397
It's interesting to note that 4 turrets
roughly matches the total damage of 2 turrets and 3 hardpoints for the Executor, implying that each hardpoint fires around 2/3 of the time of each turret. As you can see, the damage goes as HVD >> Arbalest > Railgun, which matches the results when I ran 5 of each above. I've yet to have any side-by-side weapon comparison not match the results of running just one or just the other. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I've never had it happen thus far in all my testing.
I was testing a 3x Pegasus fleet the other day(which failed) and noticed that enemy ships will vent in front of a 2x Squall 2x Locust but not in front of a 2x Squall 2x Hydra, presumably because the latter is technically anti-armor. Given that Hydra has 2500 range that's a pretty big "area of effect".
Yeah, when I tested Legions, one of the reason why I stuck a Heavy Mauler in the midst of 4 HVDs was that at least in sim, if the Heavy Mauler was there, then the enemy ship wouldn't vent, whereas it would if it was 5 HVD's. I don't want the enemy to vent since then I'd have to run up its flux again, so I hope that it also prevents (or at least attempts to) the enemy AI from venting in fleet-on-fleet combat. Similarly, I've also heard that if you have an open small missile slot, you can stick a Harpoon in it, but never fire it during combat, to prevent enemy ships in your vicinity from venting. Only works near the player flagship since the AI would just use up that Harpoon and remove its deterrent effect. Not sure if it actually works or if it was patched at some point, but just throwing it out there.
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Topic: Destroying 5 Ordos with 5 Gigacannon Executors (The Dream Battle: Revengeance) (Read 18502 times)