Flying around on 180dp mid-low tech plus Odyssey fleet stumping everyone, ~80 ECM rating, the biggest remnant ECM I saw was 108. The game becomes easier than in 0.9.1, just don't spam big and dp hungry ships and capture points to even dp points with the enemy.
Right, thank you, I appreciate having a specific number to work with.
Naturally-spawning Ordo fleets have about 21-28 ships, of which about a third are frigates. To hit 108 ECM before control points, you'd need 8+ officer frigates who rolled Gunnery Implants -- basically every single frigate in the fleet -- or two officer destroyers for each missing frigate.
Officer placement is pretty obviously
not fully random; larger ships are more likely to have officers and more likely to have alpha / beta cores, while frigates are more likely to have gamma cores or no officers at all; most fleets have 2-4 non-officer ships in total, but if even one of those missing ones is a frigate, you're gonna come up short. (This would mean that only about 10-20% of fleets even pass this stage at full randomness, and less since it isn't actually random.)
If skills are random, a draw-without-replacement probability for getting Gunnery Implants is ~57% for an 8-skill Alpha Core, ~42% for a 6-skill beta, and ~28% for a 4-skill Gamma. So even if you end up with all alpha core frigates, you're roughly looking at eight coin flips coming up in the AI's favor in a row. It has a probability of happening that is just slightly over one percent... if the frigates all had Alpha Cores.
I'm sure spending hours on finding a Very High importance contact and driving their internal bounty difficulty rating up to 10 can improve on these values a little more, but you'd have to actively go out of your way to do that, and eventually even a stupid-huge, all-alpha core fleet is going to be restricted by the battle size limit, especially if you play on the default setting of 300 instead of cranking it to 400. (Which hey, I do -- but changing a setting like that away from the default is kind of asking for problems.)
This is, bluntly, not a scenario worth balancing the game around. But as it happens, the player
does have the tools to do the same thing back -- it'll cost a lot of story points on ECM s-mods and hiring mercenary officers, but if you're chain-killing dozens of Ordo fleets, it's not like story points are going to be in scarce supply. It might be the only situation in the entire game where hiring and keeping mercs is actually worth it, but there you go. You still won't need an all-frigate fleet, or even a majority-frigate fleet. You'll just need to match the AI's ratio -- or not even, in fact, because Remnant ships don't pack ECM hullmods and you do.
All of which, of course, is just a distraction from what I was actually saying earlier: is winning the ECM war interesting? Is it good gameplay? Is it a complex or deep decision? No, of course not. Everything I've described is just "make this one number REAL big, bigger than the biggest unfair, post-game, easter egg enemy the game is potentially capable of spawning." There aren't real trade-offs here; just a huge resource sink.
