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[Voyager I]

Paragon is the strongest capital.  360 firepower and Fortress Shield makes it very hard to kill, and it can solo the entire simulator fleet.  Its only weakness is slow speed (no mobility system).  If the enemy retreats, you will not catch him.  When Tachyon Lances had 2500+ range, Paragon could fry fleeing ships with beams, but now Paragon is just a tanky chainsaw.

Onslaught has the firepower, and it can burn drive to a point ahead of it quickly.  Much of its firepower is focused forward - great for killing things in front of it, but not as much when ships flank you.  It lacks the defenses to solo a huge simulator fleet.

Conquest cannot go toe-to-toe with battleships and/or hordes of smaller ships.  It needs to kite things that outgun it.

Odyssey can focus some nasty capital-grade firepower at times, but it is not very fast and it is squishy.  It too is incapable of soloing a gigantic fleet due to lacking speed, defenses, and overwhelming firepower.

I've killed the entire simulator fleet with an Onslaught myself, and I'm not even particularly good at the game.  Just go shamelessly overboard on Dual Flak (I ran it in literally every medium mount save for the two central slots) and you are almost entirely immune to missiles and torpedoes, which are the only things that seriously threaten an up-armored Onslaught (most AI ships don't carry high-impact explosive turrets, and the ones that do won't live long enough to use them).  For direct firepower, just stuff Mjolnirs in all your large slots since they're currently a massively powerful, acceptably flux-efficient kill-everything gun with a good projectile.


RE:  Matador'ing the Onslaught in a Conquest; it's 100% necessary to win the matchup and the AI doesn't know how to do it, but assuming you are constantly playing around the Burn Drive (which you should be) the Onslaught doesn't have a great answer to the situation.

[Megas]

unfortunately paragon fails the most important test, it's boring

when you can basically just turn on autofire every group, stand still and kill everything while half-heartedly activating your system every now and then you're not even playing the game anymore

I do not think Paragon is boring.  In fact, I have a lot of fun with it because it is overpowered!  If it is so easy that you can push the win button, even better.

I've killed the entire simulator fleet with an Onslaught myself, and I'm not even particularly good at the game.  Just go shamelessly overboard on Dual Flak (I ran it in literally every medium mount save for the two central slots) and you are almost entirely immune to missiles and torpedoes, which are the only things that seriously threaten an up-armored Onslaught (most AI ships don't carry high-impact explosive turrets, and the ones that do won't live long enough to use them).  For direct firepower, just stuff Mjolnirs in all your large slots since they're currently a massively powerful, acceptably flux-efficient kill-everything gun with a good projectile.

Might need to try that.  I usually get killed by getting surrounded by too many ships and unable to kill everything.  Burn drive gets me out of trouble once, then the swarm catches up, and I am sunk.  A thing I have not tried yet is back my Onslaught into a corner so that it cannot be flanked, and ships will be forced to engage no more than 45 degrees to its side.

[Thaago]

You can build the Paragon to be more interesting by putting on weapons that draw much more flux than it has dissipation. In that case the 'game' comes from managing weapon groups, the fortress shied (which can be used similarly to a phase cloak to regain soft flux at the cost of hard), and venting timing. (Also: Augmented Engines).

As a nice side effect, it becomes a heck of a lot more deadly at the same time.

Personally I'm just waiting for the super secret TT only Paragon with a special paint job that, instead of the Fortress Shield, has a special ship system in the central hole that distorts space and pulls other ships in. No need to chase them if you make them come to you...

[Voyager I]

unfortunately paragon fails the most important test, it's boring

when you can basically just turn on autofire every group, stand still and kill everything while half-heartedly activating your system every now and then you're not even playing the game anymore

I do not think Paragon is boring.  In fact, I have a lot of fun with it because it is overpowered!  If it is so easy that you can push the win button, even better.

I've killed the entire simulator fleet with an Onslaught myself, and I'm not even particularly good at the game.  Just go shamelessly overboard on Dual Flak (I ran it in literally every medium mount save for the two central slots) and you are almost entirely immune to missiles and torpedoes, which are the only things that seriously threaten an up-armored Onslaught (most AI ships don't carry high-impact explosive turrets, and the ones that do won't live long enough to use them).  For direct firepower, just stuff Mjolnirs in all your large slots since they're currently a massively powerful, acceptably flux-efficient kill-everything gun with a good projectile.

Might need to try that.  I usually get killed by getting surrounded by too many ships and unable to kill everything.  Burn drive gets me out of trouble once, then the swarm catches up, and I am sunk.  A thing I have not tried yet is back my Onslaught into a corner so that it cannot be flanked, and ships will be forced to engage no more than 45 degrees to its side.

I didn't go so far as cheesing corners, but my solution was just to perpetually back up and let the hailstorm of Mjolnir projectile kill everything before it could flank around me (in particular, AI frigates don't really seem to understand just how enormous the threat range is on 900 SU guns mounted on a capital ship with an ITU and an officer with gunnery implants and don't go wide enough to survive trying to get around me).  As you've experienced, Burn Drive is very much an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" kind of solution since it probably means you just put the whole enemy fleet behind you.

In particular, going hilariously overboard on Flak also means that getting caught at maximum flux by a bombing run isn't a death sentence.  The flak launchers run light enough on flux that they will continue to function even when maxed out will clear out an arbitrary number of incoming projectiles, meaning you don't have to risk an overload to absorb a torpedo run and can instead keep holding off the bombs until you get a safe moment to combat vent.

[Megas]

My stock Onslaught uses Mjolnir, Maulers, three Dual Flak, Vulcan, and some sort of missiles.  It can kill endgame fleets, but when I try the simulator rush, there are so many ships and fighter wings that enough of them flank the Onslaught.  (The AI is good at a flanking from afar and coming in at all directions.)  Burn drive is not so much out of frying pan and into the fire, just once burn drive ends, the swarm catches up again and I am back to getting swarmed and picked off.

It just sounds like I need to remove most of the Maulers and use more Dual Flak instead.

The change to assault chaingun probably helps.  I remember Hounds blasting my Onslaught past flak range before, but they cannot do that anymore.