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[goduranus]

It is my opinion that spamming with Spark Drovers is the fastest way to win battles in 0.91, and some people here and on reddit say they can do it faster with another setup. So let's have a competition!

If anyone wants to participate, post a saved gamed before you fight a large battle, then fight that said battle and try to win the fastest, and then post your time with 2-3 screenshots or a video recording. You can upload the save to google drive, and either I or another carrier spammer will text edit the save to swap your fleet with a carrier fleet, and try to beat the battle faster with carriers.

The non-carrier side can use any setup you want, except for pure carriers, up to the 30 ship limit. While whoever is testing for the carrier side will be limited to only carriers and civilian ships, up to the 30 ship limit. (The carrier side is not limited to Drovers, because with certain enemies like a large number of Onslaughts or Space Stations, mixing Drovers with Astrals will be faster than pure Drovers)

The enemy you fight should be at least one, or multiple large late game fleets with several capital ships. It could be a bounty target, a faction expedition, or an encounter in a high threat redacted system. It should be unmodded, because it's the stock game balance we are testing.  (please no obvious gimmick battles like running down a lone freighter with your Safety Override phase ship, cuz that's not really a battle)

[TaLaR]

Are we talking world-time or player-time? Because second strongly penalizes phase ships.

[goduranus]

Real world time, not really penalizing because phase ships are still moving and reloading at the normal speed relative to real world time when phased. It's real world hours we are spending when we play the game after all.

[Hiruma Kai]

Wouldn't this be easier to setup with a few mission files, and perhaps some variant files, rather than a save file? 

You're basically asking someone who is interested in this to play to late game if they don't have a non-modded end game save on hand, plus all the usual RNG associated with getting the ships you want in the run, while the spark drovers are just getting edited in with no thought of how easy all those spark fighters are to obtain prior to end game.  Are we counting real time from start of game to drover spark spam capable of taking an end game fleet versus start to end game capable non-drover non-spark fleet?  Because nearly by definition,  I can take end game bounty fleet by the time I can farm Sparks.

You say no mods, but is it OK for someone to use console commands mod or edit a save file on their end?  What if its a mod game, but a vanilla fleet versus a fleet only using vanilla weapons in a modded game?

[goduranus]

Uploading a save is the easiest way for to submit a scenario, someone could just grab a save on hand, find an enemy and upload the save.

The person submitting can also text edit or use an editor to put his fleet into a fresh game.

This competition is on a battle for battle basis. I would also like to see a race to the endgame between carrier fleets vs a non-carrier fleet, achieved by the earliest game date. I still think carriers will win, because carriers don't really need Sparks or Officers to do well, but warships tend to require officers and very specific equipment or hull mod like Plasma Cannon or Hardened Shields. It's not hard to find Sparks, you can farm them in mid-threat systems, very easily if you take the salvage boosting industry skill.

[kenwth81]

Oh no mods?  LOL

[Megas]

I care less about time and more about efficiency.  If a Spark Drover can take on fleets that are impossible or much harder with other (and especially more intuitive) fleet compositions, then I would want to use Spark Drover fleet unless my computer cannot handle so many fighters.

Before I used full Spark Drover spam against Remnants, I used a fleet of two battleships, two Dooms, an Astral, and about six Spark Drovers.  The biggest ships had level 20 officers in them.  I often beat single Ordos fleet, but often the battleships take damage.  When I used Paragon and twenty Spark Drovers, they shredded a similar Ordos fleet.  Paragon took minor damage and I lost two Drover to carelessness (but they were recovered).  The Drover had no officers and no Fighter Doctrine from my character.  If my computer did not slow down as much, it would be more efficient due to how cheap Drovers are compared to bigger ships, and most important, they did not need skills to wreck Remnants.  Skills probably would make them better, but when unskilled Drover fleet could at least match a bigger fleet with officer skill power, that says something.

[Hiruma Kai]

Uploading a save is the easiest way for to submit a scenario, someone could just grab a save on hand, find an enemy and upload the save.

The person submitting can also text edit or use an editor to put his fleet into a fresh game.

This competition is on a battle for battle basis. I would also like to see a race to the endgame between carrier fleets vs a non-carrier fleet, achieved by the earliest game date. I still think carriers will win, because carriers don't really need Sparks or Officers to do well, but warships tend to require officers and very specific equipment or hull mod like Plasma Cannon or Hardened Shields. It's not hard to find Sparks, you can farm them in mid-threat systems, very easily if you take the salvage boosting industry skill.

Well, editing in a fleet into a fresh game certainly should make it go much faster.  Still need to grind bounties to get them up, but that should go quick.  I'll see if I  can get a game in a reasonable position for this.

As for the race to end game, you'd need to put some thought into starting conditions.  You'd probably want to provide a seed so everyone is on equal footing.  Similarly, the start options should be the same - Wolf start, no tutorial, iron man?  Can only use carriers in combat for the carrier restricted play through?  What is the stopping point? There's a lot of variables to consider even in a vanilla only game.

For an easy start, I'm partial to MN-1234567890, as Duzahk has a really nice 3 colony world setup.  Although perhaps you want something without close and easy colony worlds.

[goduranus]

Yeah I too think there needs to be some thoughts going into a full play to endgame run, standardization of the starting conditions and such.

[TJJ]

I say it every time fighter balance gets mentioned, but.....
Fighters being neither fun nor engaging to fight either with, or against, is a bigger issue than their current power level.

Fixing balance is largely just tweaking numbers, fixing gameplay requires a rethink of fundamentals.

[Megas]

I only dislike fighters because 1) if I want to pilot a carrier, I must get the three personal fighter skills in Leadership and lock myself into two or three of the useful dedicated carriers and run away while fighters kill all, and 2) they slow my several year old computer more if there are too many, and player needs too many.  Thankfully, next release will have skill re-spec.

If I can pilot a good warship and the rest of my fleet are carriers that melt the enemy better than anything else, then the only problem I have is my computer's frame rate.  If I had a more powerful and modern computer that can handle fighter spam, I bet I would fully embrace carrier cheese.

Fighters are better pilums than pilums.

[Hiruma Kai]

I say it every time fighter balance gets mentioned, but.....
Fighters being neither fun nor engaging to fight either with, or against, is a bigger issue than their current power level.

Fixing balance is largely just tweaking numbers, fixing gameplay requires a rethink of fundamentals.

I dunno, sweeping enemy interceptors to make way for a longbow/trident bomber run my carriers have launched on a Legion can be engaging.  Or taking into account the number of bombers that can come my way when flanking (or phase ships, or fast frigates).  Its either numbers, turn fighter wings back into something closer to frigates than a weapon system, turn them closer into missiles, or remove them completely.  And the last 3 options are very close to each other.

To be honest, I kind like having low survivability, but with really strong long range offense ships (i.e. carriers), as its different from just high defense, high offense line ships.  A Heron feels very different from an Eagle.  So I like having them to mix into fleets.  Certainly my typical line up is half front line warships, half carriers, and then a fast response flagship that can get where its needed quickly.

[sotanaht]

I would suggest my fleet, but of my vanilla fleet only one combat ship isn't technically a carrier (the paragon).  The rest are Tempests, Odysseys, and Astrals.  Not at all what you had in mind with drover spam+astrals, but a carrier is a carrier I guess.

[Thaago]

No other restrictions? Shouldn't the fleets need to match, either in cost or fleet deployment points or something? Otherwise what exactly are we comparing?

[sotanaht]

No other restrictions? Shouldn't the fleets need to match, either in cost or fleet deployment points or something? Otherwise what exactly are we comparing?

Deployment points are handled by the game being unmodded.  500 is the max battle size unmodded.  You are free to use a smaller fleet if you would prefer, but the same restrictions apply.  There might be some wiggle room if you need some paragon weight to get deployment advantage, but the assumption is that you are personally making the most optimized (including in deployment advantage) fleet you can, and the carrier guy will be doing the same.