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Author Topic: Yet Another Endgame Fleet  (Read 4475 times)

Plantissue

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Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« on: December 11, 2019, 10:51:05 AM »

Fleet was built up from purely recovered ships. Version 0.9.1a. A wide variety of ships initially, but over time ended up chosing ships which were survivable and deal out a good amount of damage and could fight when outmatched in DP. Ships like Onslaught and Legion and Dominator and Mora were removed gradually. Doom can be assumed to be "flagship". The nice thing about Doom is that you can leave the Doom to go pilot another ship and when you come back, it is still there. Endgame tactics; concentrate firepower when appropriate, withdraw ships that need withdrawing, use personally piloted ship to exploit moments of opportunity. Initially games were played in 300 Battle size, but was changed near the end to 500 Battle size. Most of these ships have D-mods in the game but I restored each of them to show the fit.

This Conquest is a bit different to one I have posted in another thread as I must have written over or deleted a game save and I thought I had 4 but there is only 3. It has Heavy Burst laser instead of Graviton Beam. More useful against incoming missiles since AI Conquest fights at a funny angle. Not sure why I have all the other LR PD to be honest. I suspect it is due to beams looking nice and they provide a visual indication when observing the battlespace.
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A typical Eagle. I imagine most players will make an Eagle like this. There are three Eagles. One of them is XIV Eagle, but it shouldn't matter to the general build since XIV Eagle has more OP. One of them replaces the pair of Salamanders with Advance optics for greater range so the ballistic projectile fades around the same range as the beam, as opposed to the beams being just under the ballistic weapon range. Doesn't seem to make much difference in effectiveness to be honest, though I suppose the Ion Beam should theoretically be more likely catch out withdrawing ships.
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This Eagle fit was not used in the end fleet, but I thought to include it in as it is interesting to see the changes before reaching that point. This was attempt to create a higher DPS, more survivable Eagle, trading range and beams with PD and high DPS, to help finish off after retreating targets. These Eagles were gradually replaced by Conquests on a 2 for 1 basis. I am uncertain if a Mauler would be better than Heavy Mortar for DPS against high armour ships. Heavy Burst laser can possibly be replaced by Burst PD Laser especially since Heavy Burst Laser has a slight tendency to get into range and fire when unwanted. For some reason Heavy Needlers were extremely rare in my game, so I didn't use them despite being ideal. Their role was eventually taken by Conquests and Herons so I replaced them with the long range Eagles which can generally be left alone without using command points.
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I am not entirely sure why I have a single Falcon in the end fleet but there it is. Pretty typical Falcon I suspect. Basically a mini-Eagle but with worse weapon ratios. Possibly there to fill Deployment Point gaps.
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One of 2 Herons. I must have deleted a save as I thought I have more variants with Thunders and I thought I had a config with 1 Dagger and 2 Longbows. They came quite late into the fleet as I initially was trying a game without fighters, but then I realised I needed something that could quickly finish off ships. I realise that after posting, I forgot to restore the Heron before taking a picture but whatever. I normally leave them floating around on their own accord, directing an appropriate amount of them to fighter strike appropriate targets. Usually 2 is enough to be directed at for a capital. There's always a sad moment when you run out of command points and now you can't concentrate attacks. Oddly, they are vulnerable to fighters if for some reason the AI decides to harass a heron with fighters.
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A Doom. Spends most of it's time phased, mine striking ships and surrounding them with mines to prevent escape or outright destroying them.  Configuration is basically a reconfigured Strike autofit. 4 Sabot SRM, 2 Typhoon Reapers. I find that I have to carefully proportion the sabots and reapers, which can be tricky since generally you need more sabots than reapers. Sometimes reapers are fired on on shielded targets to increase the flux of the targets. Phasing means that you can reload the reapers faster than expected in "real time". The 2 Heavy Blasters are useful for fending off and finishing off ships at times. Can be replaced with Pulse Laser or Phase Lance I imagine. The 4 Burst PD Lasers might seem pointless, but are needed for deleting all sorts of missiles and fighters that would otherwise harrass you when unphased. The small energy mounts were initially left empty but were filled back up again due to this. Congratulations on whoever created the Strike autofit variant for the Doom. Though perhaps you can't go too wrong for weapons on a Doom. There's all sorts of combat "tricks" and skillful use to be done with the Doom. Not sure why I have reinforced Bulkheads instead of Hardened Subsystems or just more vents. I must have found myself in situations where the Doom lost a lot of HP.
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There's also a 2 Tempests, an Omen, and a smattering of phase ships that get cycled through when the Doom runs out of PPT. To be honest the non-phase ships frigates don't see much play. They are all pretty typically built I imagine. Afflictor has 2 Antimatter Blasters, 2 Light Assault Guns, 1 Ion Cannon. Shade has 2 Antimatter Blaster, 1 Ion Cannon. The second Shade also has 2 IR Pulse lasers added, not sure why. Harbinger has 3 Phase Lance and the other has 2 Heavy Blasters.
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Goumindong

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #1 on: December 11, 2019, 01:16:57 PM »

Re: more DPS eagle

One thing to consider is that arbalests, while they have less DPS than railguns, are a lot more flux efficient and do better against armor. While they do cost an extra OP they will generally mean more effective DPS unless youre always under your flux usage.

Another thing to consider is that (at the moment, iirc theyre scheduled to be buffed) heavy burst lasers are worse than regular Busrt PD. So youre wasting some OP there.

If i were specifically fitting that eagle for the job i would

1) full Arbalests in the front. Ignore split damage theyre there only there to do shield damage

2) minor PD if any in the smalls

3) At least one Heavy Blaster or phase lance in the middle. The arbaleats are +100 range AND forward mounted of the HB/Phase Lance by about 100 so very few ships will be significantly shielded by the time you spike damage with the energy.

Phase lances and heavy Blasters despite not being as efficient on paper as Mortars are still good efficiency against armor and hull. Against 500 armor a HB does .347 dmg/Flux. A Heavy Mortar looks a lot better at .746 but that damage is spread all over the place.

4) no ion/graviton beams.

No joke a 3 arbalest/3 phase lance eagle is a serious killer.
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Arcagnello

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #2 on: December 11, 2019, 02:40:42 PM »

I'll just make a list of things to say since trying to form an organic respose would just be a mess  ;D

You know I actually gave up on the symmetrical gauss design on my current conquest and opted for one broadside, 4 pilums a gauss and a Mjolnir cannon (the rest is PD). I find the AI being very...undecided on wich broadside to use and it can screw the effectiveness of the ship. Mjolnirs are absolute DPS powerhouses but I decided to also give it gauss for much needed shield pressure, altough I may just revert to double Mjolnir since rails are really, really bad at hitting small targets with how agile and erratically moving the COnquest is under AI control.

I also can't bring myself to NOT buy ships I want. I guess what I get from salvage is never enough, I even restore ships I buy at great costs of credits just because the ship is rare and I do not want to part ways with it. I guess that would make for a great challenge campaign for me next time around.

Oh, I was gonna ask about why you did not use arbalests on the Eagle, now I know why. I did use eagles in my second campaign but I am 100% not using any kind of laser weapn that's not PD this time around so I had to pass. I was planning on trial running some crazy falcon builds just to see how far I could push the low tech feel but they could only work on 14th battlegroup variant, that I have not obtained the blueprint for it yet ç_ç

The Falcon is great. I used it on many interations but my favourite one is a fully symmetrical design with ITU, Hardened shields, double HVDs and double Graviton beams to apply shield pressure against high end enemies. I may get around committing sin to the symmetry gods and end up going for your setup, it actually looks like it IS capable of killing things by itself, unlike my version :P

I really like the heron, but I'm really trying to get combat-worthy carriers in this campaign since my main force is very mobile and can't hold a line very well, making it a sitting duck only relying on speed. I am actually surprised by your setup, I never put mixed bomber/fighters compositions on my carriers. I also tried to take a page from the Stormhawk expedition faction for a test run and it turns out the Heron is quite a disgusting suppressor if the only thing you put into the bays are Sabot spamming bombers. Triple Piranha is also...interesting.

One last thing: I just find myself completely eliminating all small frigades and actually using fast destroyers as their counterpart in late game. I just can't seem to keep anything smaller alive when facing enemies that can effectively kill them in less than 3 seconds with some focus fire. I'm impressed you still have the resolve to keep them  :o
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Tackywheat1

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #3 on: December 11, 2019, 03:20:10 PM »

I'm kinda confused on the Heavy burst lasers. Why?
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Thaago

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #4 on: December 11, 2019, 03:44:40 PM »

Well to be fair, if Heavy Burst Lasers performed how you'd expect from upsizing both the mount and OP of a burst pd laser, it wouldn't be a bad idea. Unfortunately it doesn't perform.

I've never been an Arbalest fan in general just because of their slow shot speed and low accuracy. For an Eagle, if I can find them I'd use 2 Heavy Needlers on the front rather than 3 Arbalests. Costs 6 more OP, but also does higher damage (500 vs 450), has better accuracy, longer range, and much better alpha. It also only costs 2 slots, so you can do something with the third slot. That does start to eat into OP though, and burst weapons like Heavy Needlers and Phase Lances love their ship to have decent caps.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #5 on: December 11, 2019, 04:51:51 PM »

I always have issues with phase lance and AI, it fires them straight away into low flux shields and then spends the next 30 seconds fluxed out running for its life until it vents and takes a bunch of damage. Maybe I need more caps, but I never feel like I have OP to spare.
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Plantissue

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #6 on: December 12, 2019, 06:51:09 AM »

A lot of attention onto the one ship build that isn't in the fleet at the end.

Arbalest vs Railgun.  Arbalest is 150 DPS and Railgun is 167. For 8 OP and 120 Flux/sec for Arbalest and 7 OP and 150 Flux/sec. An Arbalest converted to Railgun DPS would be 8.9 OP with 133 Flux/Sec. A difference of 16.7 flux is woth 1.67 of OP in vents. So an Arbalest doing the dps of a Railgun is worth 7.22 OP. Since the Railgun has higher DPS anyways, might as well have the railgun instead of Arbalest.

It works out the other way too. If the Railgun was converted to Arbalest dps, in order to have the same flux efficiency it is worth 7.8 OP.

Simply put, the railgun has slightly better flux efficiency if you take OP into account.

Arbalest has a slower projectile and not is not as accurate, which might be fine against cruisers and capitals, but without all the beams, there still needs to be something reasonable against frigates. So railgun wins out again. Conversely Arbalest does higher amount of damage against armour/hull, so Arbalest does have its advantages. In any case they are fairly similar but railgun wins out in terms secondary characteristics and of fluxing shields.

As I wrote in the opening post, I would had preferred Heavy Needlers, but back when I was making the fleet I didn't have enough of them (just checked I have 5, but that's at the end). Though now I realise that weapons are always recovered, thanks to whom wrote that, I am showing the ship builds as they were, not as they were idealised. Individual weapon's damage/flux isn't that important if compared with if you are happy with the flux capacity and dissapitation of the ship. I also suppose theoretically, that if I don't care too much about flux efficiency and more of DPS, I could had used Heavy Autocannon, though I might have to shift the OP around, maybe remove the Salamanders or the hardened shield or caps, but that would change the balance of dps and survivability.

Heavy Burst Lasers were chosen over small since heavy burst can hold more charges. You seem to be considering them as direct damage dealers. As I said they are PD mounts to replace the 5 beams against fighters and missiles. Which don't matter if the AI fires at ships in range. Which was why I was considering burst PD instead for their smaller range so their shots will not be wasted and be used on missiles.

The burst lasers seem a bit funny in their damage. It's hard to tell, but the numbers in their description seem inaccurate.
Ion beams are great, though the AI fires it unneccessarily. Being able to disable engines when the other ship is trying to withdraw is a change in situation.

Phase Eagle Lance works badly as AI controlled ships.

Arcagnello, it's easy to not buy the ships you want, when you have played with every ship before. This was an experiment to see if it was possible to continuously do purely personal bounties one after the other without buying ships. (Answer is no, or not reliably, if you exclude the 40-50k bounties. Bounty scale up +40DP at a point when you might have 80 DP. You might win that fight, but you wouldn't win the next unless you got lucky recovery rolls.) That said occasionally I see someone had built a ship in a useful novel way or with an interesting idea.

Heron fighter bay choice is best not thought of as a mixed bomber/fighter composition, but as mixed bomber/flare dropper as a role. The broadsides themselves do very little actual fighter business. Since the fleet was intially built up from 300 battlesize, the ships and their loadouts are generalists since the smaller the battlesize, the less ships you have that are able to specialise.

« Last Edit: December 13, 2019, 06:38:31 AM by Plantissue »
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bobucles

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Re: Yet Another Endgame Fleet
« Reply #7 on: December 12, 2019, 07:36:23 AM »

I tried a phase lance Eagle and immediately regretted it. Like its name suggests, the weapon is really made to take advantage of phase ship qualities. Phase ships love the high burst high cooldown guns because they can sit out the cooldown with their cloak. Flux efficiency also largely doesn't matter because phase ships get 3x flux cooling during their accelerated cloak power. Pop up, blast, cloak and recover. It brings out the phase lance's full potential.

Normal ship AI treaks phase lances like standard guns, which they really aren't. They're hit+run strike weapons at best, you run serious risk of overload using them as typical guns.