Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.- common English phraseOf all the ships in the sector, my favourite has to be the unassuming Buffalo Mk.II. Nothing quite captures the romance of being a scrappy space scavenger like sending a herd of flying dumpsters into battle, bristling with piecemeal weaponry, secure in their consummate disposability. I'm not joking when I say I've gotten more use out of the Buffalo, by number of combat deployments, than any other ship.
Why, though? What does the Buffalo have to offer? It punches well below its weight in nearly every metric, but in two, it shines. First, ubiquity: if you can't find one, you're not looking. And second, its ratio of OP to deployment cost (OPDC) is through the roof.
Data taken from ship_data.csv and recreated
here.
For a 4-point pittance, you get to field (at least) 70 OP worth of payload, on a body teeming with weapon mounts and just big enough for a converted hangar. Among combat ships, nothing really comes close. The Valkyrie transport has an OPDC that's nominally better (18.33 to Buffalo's 17.5) but lacks meaningful weapon mounts and, more importantly, is a rare find. Other high-OPDC ships are generally frigates whose utility drops off heavily after the early game. Not so with the Buffalo - its cost is so convenient, I carry a couple with my endgame fleet to fill the gaps between capital ships. More on that later.
Part of the Buffalo's utility is its interaction with the D-mod system. It cares less about D-mods than perhaps any other ship, and with Safety Procedures and Field Repairs maxed out (something I was going to do anyway), the D-mods cross over into upside territory. A 7-D-mod Buffalo hull with both skills maxed costs just 1 supply a month and 1 supply to recover from battle (or 8 supplies if it dies), even with Increased Maintenance. In a similar vein, scavenged Buffalo can usually be jury-rigged and deployed in the field with whatever spare weapons and fighter LPCs you have kicking around your inventory. (It's a good platform for those single-shot Atropos and Sabot.) I've found that other derelicts often have enough gaps in their weapons coverage that, when combined with crippling D-mods, it just isn't worth the supply to deploy them in battle before at least a tune-up in port.
The question remains, what DOES the Buffalo do? The short answer is it fields a fighter and a pilum. For a more in-depth look, this is what I default to:
1x Broadsword/Spark (Thunder in the early game)
1x Pilum
1x Salamander
1-2x any guided missile
1x LR PD, Tactical laser or similar
2x LMG/vulcan
Converted hangar, reinforced bulkheads, makeshift shield generator, hardened subsystems/blast doors
There are other builds (like more missile-focused ones) but bang-for-buck this one can't be beat. The shield generator is the only part I'd consider unorthodox, but having even a garbage-tier shield on an otherwise defenseless ship increases its survivability immensely. (I think the AI controls it more carefully.) Blast doors get a nod over hardened subsystems in the early game, when battles end faster and crews are smaller. You could run both mods (or more expensive fighters) and cut weapons, too. The PD gets less useful as your fleet gets bigger.
On that subject, the Buffalo doesn't drop off in usefulness as the game progresses the way most frigates and other small destroyers do. If anything, it becomes less vulnerable, as it can hide in the shadow of your cruisers/capitals and use a follow order to stay reined in. Its value as a carrier does dip a little, but being able to sneak in an extra fighter squad or two with deployment points that would otherwise go to waste is still worth a couple slots in my fleet. (The pilums also get more valuable lategame.) Conversely, in the early-mid game (pre-cruiser) the Buffalo is at its most vulnerable, but also its most valuable as a fighter platform. This is time when I really spam them and will carry around 7 or more at a time.
The two biggest problems with the Buffalo are as follows. First, the AI tends to pilot the thing as though it were a real destroyer, even when kitted for backline carrier duty. This can be mitigated by giving your Buffalo escort orders on your bigger ships as mentioned above - or, early game, giving your Buffalo an escort of its own. The other problem is crew, which is the resource used least efficiently by the Buffalo (it can't even carry its own full crew complement by itself). If you're not prepared to eat some crew losses you may end up understaffed after a few Buffalo deaths. However, if you're running any number of other dedicated carriers, you should be prepared for that already, and have the extra crew capacity to be able to do it.
In conclusion, the Buffalo Mk.II exemplifies Starsector as a whole. It rewards improvisation during long, skin-of-your-teeth expeditions, then stands up to rigorous optimization and stat crunching back at base. It's the perfect meeting of rugged space-junkyard aesthetic and ruthless min-max economy. It is a dutiful if unglamorous role-player, a staple grain of the post-Domain diet, like the salvage spacer himself.
"Buffalo buffalo buffalolololololololo."
