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[Terenin]

*EDIT* Se latest post for progress. This treat is now back open for a more general sharing of themes to hold to to make games a bit more challenging or interesting in later play sessions.

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So I've beaten the game once so far, in all the months I've been playing it on and off, and while I'm now still knee-deep in my piracy run, enjoying that sweet sweet "Piracy: HARD" feeling, I've been thinking this idea over in my head for a while. I've been enjoying myself a lot, but I've never really devoted myself to any specific 'theme' for my fleets, it's always a mix. I like everything about the various ships and systems in this game so it's been hard to decide on any place to start, and I'm unsure where to do so even.

So I've a question for the more seasoned players here.

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What factions would be best suited to run a thematic game? Specifically, I wanted to limit myself to only one theme at a time, sticking to it as loyally as possible. The themes in question are as follows:

Carrier focus.
Missile barge focus.
Light-ships focus. (Frigates, gunboats, militarized civilian freighters etc.)
Medium-ships focus. (Destroyers, Cruisers, bigger freighters etc.)
Large-ships focus. (Everything above a cruiser, essentially.)
Gun-ship focus.

Keep in mind that Carriers can have the means to effectively fight themselves, but a battle-carrier that's more warship than carrier is hardly what I'd call a "carrier" myself. Also, by missile-barge I don't mean a ship with a few 1-shot torpedoes on it, I mean something that relies on missiles through the whole fight as close to 100% as possible, potential PD guns aside for instance. Tech-level for ships and weaponry is not a big deal to me, so long as the theme fits.

Any suggestions?

[SCC]

Carrier focus — "base game ships are supposed to be mixed and matched", Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering, Diable Avionics or Shadowyards Reconstruction Authority.
Missile boat focus — low-tech or DME. I think that Junk Pirates or extra pirate ships from Underworld could fit, but I'm too lazy to check.
Frigate, destroyer focus — high tech, Blackrock Driveyards, Sylphon, PACK (from Junk Pirates), Legacy of Arkgneisis.
Cruiser, capital ship focus — vanilla in general, Interstellar Imperium, SCY, SRA... Maybe Junk Pirates and DA, I haven't played them in quite some time.
Warship focus — generally, even carrier focused factions still have plenty of non-carrier ships. The same goes for phase ship factions.

[Serenitis]

Missile barge focus

Let me sing you the song of my people....

You can do a missile fleet with vanilla pretty well, especially if you build it around the Pilum.
Ship & Weapon pack also has some ships which can fill this role quite nicely.

One of the perks of using the Pilum is that you have a lot of OP 'left over' when fitting your ships, so you can multi-class them into aux. carriers, ECM boats, survey ships, heavy haulers etc. And in the case of some ships, you can do all of these simultaneously.
The only prerequisite for doing this really, is patience. Early on it can take a while to get enough launchers to create meaningful pressure. And regardless, Pila are not exactly the most spritely and dynamic things.
Just treat them like beams: The more you have, the more effective each one becomes.

[Recklessimpulse]

Mix and match may be vanilla intent but even in vanilla you don't need to. if you want purely  carriers I've envision a fleet of one Astral with a mix of daggers, the new dagger replacement, and maybe a longbow or two. The Rest of the fleet can be dovers still mostly bombers and longbows but spark can be added for variety. this should be able to hurt most(all?) threats.

[Flying Birdy]

Here's the theme I use.

I use Nex + console commands. I do a solo start with no faction, lowest tier of ships. Immediately after starting, I console command edit all relationships to -49. This makes it so that I can only access blackmarket, or freeports. I also removed the galatian stipend in the game files.

I have a personal rule of not allowing relationships to rise above -40. This way all factions are always inhospitable to me. I also don't join any factions at all. Early game is pretty challenging as its hard to get good ships through only black market. Late game insanely grindy and challenging, because everyone hates you and want to blow up your colony.

Extra challenge, do this with spacer start.

[Terenin]

If you want to play super-hardcore to the level of sadism that's on you, I'm not that fond of pain quite yet. I'd like more input on the topic at hand, if you wish to share, otherwise I thank you for the bump.

For the record I'm currently trying the carrier-focus with the Reclamation Authority's ship's... it's pretty interesting, in spite of issues with their speed, at least for the light carrier's I'm using so far. Thinking of trying overdriving them in spite of the impact on their carrier functionality, just to see if the mobility increase is worth the trade-off.

Some research on my own also reveals that of all the factions I've seen so far Blackrock seem to have the most missile-friendly hulls of all, virtually all their ships allow multiple missile weapon mounted. Unless I find more easily accessible low-tech hulls - the second best option so far for missiles - I think I'll go for them.

One thing at a time though.

[Schwartz]

Shieldless. Grab Ship & Weapon Pack for the Shield Bypass hullmod and use low-tech ships like Hound, Cerbebrus, Enforcer, Dominator, Venture, Mora, Onslaught. And fighters in a similar vein. Khopesh, Piranha, Talon, Warthog. The goal here being an overwhelming barrage of ballistics, flak, dumbfire missiles. It works quite well.. until it doesn't.

I guess you could call this a 'Mastery Epoch Purist' run.

[Terenin]

Altered the title of the tread to high-light what I want. I'm not asking for more themes to play, though it's not harmful to share those here, I'm asking specifically for any ideas as to what factions suit the listed themes best. Anything that don't help with that's effectively off topic

[Schwartz]

Some of these recs are interchangeable. You're limiting yourself pretty hard, as all factions have a range of ships for various uses and there are very few factions running with a single theme.

Carrier focus.
Play Shadowyards. They may not have the most carrier diversity, but they have fun carriers and fun fighters.
Diable Avionics also qualify here if you're into mecha, and they're quite powerful as well.

Missile barge focus.
I would pick Blackrock here not because missile loadouts are so prominent but because of Blackrock missile variety. They have lots and they're all good.

Light-ships focus. (Frigates, gunboats, militarized civilian freighters etc.)
This could be played as a mix of Underworld, Ship & Weapon Pack and vanilla Pirates. Go for Industry and get clunkers you can mix & match, repair and replace.

Medium-ships focus. (Destroyers, Cruisers, bigger freighters etc.)
Large-ships focus. (Everything above a cruiser, essentially.)
Basically whichever faction you want. Since I have not mentioned them yet but they're cool factions anyway, Dassault-Mikoyan and Outer Rim Alliance have very distinct styles and could fit this well. If they're ever made 0.9.1a compatible, there's also Tiandong.

Gun-ship focus.
Interstellar Imperium has a nice range of ships that are usually strong, a bit slow, very directional and artillery-focused.

[SapphireSage]

As I prefer to focus on carriers and fighters, I can tell you some factions that can possess some strong carrier groups.

Diable Avionics, although given your description of carriers may not fit your bill as they only have 2 dedicated carriers while having a lot of battle carriers. Their mechs are strong early in the fight but their high refit time and the extremely niche specializations of some wings limit their total power. Its likely that you would wind up using only a few types of their fighters.

Tyrador Safeguard Coalition I haven't played but are unique in that they have weapons that shoot drones in addition to having conventional fighters for their carriers. Combining the two means that you would be able to easily saturate the battle space with fighters and unmanned drone chaff.

Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering has a fairly high priority on fighters and comes with a very strong complement of dedicated carriers. Although I will warn that their fighters are rather overtuned and that the Harridans in particular are laughably OP on the level that I was to tackle a bounty involving a couple of Capital ships (among others) with 2 combat destroyers (Threshkova and Wanderer) and 3 d'Erlons loaded with Harridans. The Harridans are only weak to a ship with strong shields that have 360 coverage, otherwise they will easily shut down whatever they're shooting and take it down with little casualties and stack well especially with fighters that can quickly raise hard flux. (Also, the d'Erlon has really good logistics stats for a dedicated destroyer carrier).

[Terenin]

Thanks for the ideas so far. On my end the carrier-focus run goes on ever better, the SYS BrightWitch, Charybdis-class trike carrier was recently purchased as my new flagship, a step-up from my 10 Sargasso-class light carriers. I'm not terribly fond of the strike carrier concept, it's a tad to "warship" for my tastes, makes dedicated warships feel like they are missing something on their own, but it's doing the job well. Shadowyards ships are a tad slow, at least the carriers are, so it's not like the ship-mounted guns the the majority of damage anyway.

I've also found a new appreciation for raiding, and the fact you can raid the same target repeatedly while waiting for their ships to come back to the area. It's absolutely accelerated my credit-gains here without having to rely on mining, something I used to build up capital when doing the Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering run, the one so far where I've beat the game (I love their designs, so damn sweet) and it's been a very different experience. Hell I'm leaving the pirate locations closest to the Shadowyards homeland intact so I can come by and raid and pillage more targets, how's that for irony?

Speaking of irony I do think the light-ship focus will be a new piracy run, now that I realise you can repeatedly raid specific locations it might make that run more viable, help replace the trash-tier frigates I'll be losing over and over again D:

[Terenin]

Finished the Carrier-focused run, ended up doing one with Tri-Tachyon instead of the Shadowyards as I liked found the large number of possible carriers under the high-tech branch to be very appealing. Ofc, this does mean it was more of a "High-tech carriers" run than a universal one, but the point remains. Also, Astra and Eos Class carriers with Dagger bombers supported by drone fighters and near universal PD setups on the carriers makes for extremely potent firepower virtually unchallenged by enemy missiles/fighters. Those torpedo-volleys sure kill swiftly when several dozen of them are on their way to various targets and there is virtually no enemy PD (to busy with your drones and missiles) to stop them.

Speaking of missiles, that's gonna be the next focused run. By the looks of things Blackrock has an extremely liberal selection of ships with a multitude of missile hardpoints, so that's gonna be the faction of choice. I suspect this one's gonna go very differently for a variety of reasons...