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Author Topic: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament  (Read 11728 times)

Thaago

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #30 on: December 09, 2020, 09:50:33 PM »

For those of you who don't know, cSynapse brought a shield bypass prometheus into his fights this round. And won.

...

: the crowd goes wild :
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RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #31 on: December 17, 2020, 08:00:04 AM »

Quick heads up, our next and penultimate stream will be happening in ~4 hours, featuring returning commentators Ony and Laharl, at https://twitch.tv/onychannel

Match list:
Hiruma Kai (AI) vs Citizen Joe (PE)
PrismaticFlux (VLT) vs SafariJohn (RU)
DeTess (DA) vs Deskup (FSU)
SCC (II) vs Hiruma Kai (AI)
Thaago (ORA) vs PrismaticFlux (VLT)
sad squidward (VHT) vs DeTess (DA)
SCC (II) vs DaddyPants (VHT)
Sl4v101 (II) vs Akitsushima (VLT)
Johan (FSU) vs Archaeon (SRA)
Sl4v101 (II) vs Johan (FSU)
sad squidward (VHT) vs Mortia (BDY)
Thaago (ORA) vs cSynapse (VLT)

Mortrag

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #32 on: December 17, 2020, 11:07:31 AM »

Match list:
Hiruma Kai (AI) vs Citizen Joe (PE)
PrismaticFlux (VLT) vs SafariJohn (RU)
DeTess (DA) vs Deskup (FSU)
SCC (II) vs Hiruma Kai (AI)
Thaago (ORA) vs PrismaticFlux (VLT)
sad squidward (VHT) vs DeTess (DA)
SCC (II) vs DaddyPants (VHT)
Sl4v101 (II) vs Akitsushima (VLT)
Johan (FSU) vs Archaeon (SRA)
Sl4v101 (II) vs Johan (FSU)
sad squidward (VHT) vs Mortia (BDY)
Thaago (ORA) vs cSynapse (VLT)

Ok, the last three matches will decide about three of four finalists. But why did you put SCC (II) vs. Daddy Pants (VHT) so high up? (Because that's where the fourth [or first] finalist will be announced.)
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RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #33 on: December 17, 2020, 04:52:43 PM »

Roughly, it was in expectations of competitiveness, based on individual chatter from the players and sentiment in the tournament chat. Group K in particular seemed like all three matches would be important in determining the eventual winner (which was sorta true in that the eventual winner won only two of their matches, though the difference in partials kept it from being as competitive).



Congratulations to our four finalists, who will be playing head-to-head matches against the others in one last round robin! Match list and current standings in the spoiler below:
Spoiler
DaddyPants (VHT) vs Sl4v101 (II)      
cSynapse (VLT) vs sad squidward (VHT)      
DaddyPants (VHT) vs sad squidward (VHT)      
Sl4v101 (II) vs cSynapse (VLT)      
Sl4v101 (II) vs sad squidward (VHT)      
DaddyPants (VHT) vs cSynapse (VLT)


[close]

I'm also excited to announce six additional exhibition matches that I've been promised will be interesting to watch, featuring... 13 (!?) ship pack/faction mods that weren't already present in the tournament!
Exhibitions:
Arkangelmark5 (FED) vs Microsoft Silverlight (VIC)
Alienspacekappa (SCY & KOT) vs JRG (ED & BOR)
Carroy (TAHL) vs Grievous69 (DA)
Hrothgar Heavenlight (RB) vs JRG (ICE)
AlexAtheos (SKR) vs Lightforger (KT)
AlexAtheos (XIV) vs Yui (LTA)

Catch it all on December 21 @ 20:30 UTC with Nemo and Aurica at https://www.twitch.tv/nemo_naemo/!

RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #35 on: December 28, 2020, 04:54:06 PM »

Alrighty, well I updated the OP after the tournament, but should reiterate: I hope everyone enjoyed the finals/exhibitions, and congratulations to the winners, etc.

The tournament VOD playlist is here for anyone checking the latest posts: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrlsSetXTCdhcd4Kagxb72w1wlap6BIH

Anyways, who's up for some unsolicited fleet opinions? spoilers ahead!



I have no idea how to order these, but I guess I'll do it by group and how far the players advanced. I also don't have the will and masochism necessary to provide images of each of the fleets, though I tried to describe them reasonably well, so if you want to follow along more closely you'll need to either check out the vods above, or download the respective AI Battles versions here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jk4k1368fnsx_ImPoukYP-WsNo8dFb93Ptwz-DJ_OmM/edit#gid=1347373921.

Please forgive the non-existent editing. Also if I didn't mention changes, either there weren't significant updates, or I did an oopsie and missed it.

Anyways...

Eliminated in Round 1
Spoiler
Carroy - ScalarTech Solutions
1x Shield Bypass Corset
4x Tress
6x Frill

Carroy always brings entertaining memes, and there’s nothing that better describes this Corset. It has 6 Lightning Guns (SWP), two large energies and zero PD as a Shield Bypass ship. They lucked out immensely by facing a trio of Shield Bypass Aegis Flak (SWP) Pandamoniums for which this ship may be the perfect counter. 50 Vents and 9 Caps is excessive for a Shield Bypass ship and I guess could be used for PD or something, but Carroy has the core stuff (like Expanded Magazines for the Lightning Guns) regardless.

The Tresses have 2x Pilums and ECM/Nav Relay, along with two fighter bays with ScalarTech heavy fighters. I guess this implies that Carroy was going for a heavy stand-off build, though I’d say the Nav Relays are a bit excessive and you could still do better with something like Expanded Deck Crews.

The Frills are quite standard, though very heavy on capacitors and somewhat lacking in dissipation. But Sabot Pods + ITU + Hardened Shields is basically a staple otherwise.

Round 1.5 Changes
Carroy ended up swapping the Shield Bypass Corset for a more standard shielded one, which I think was probably the right choice. 1000 armor and 12000 hull on a ship with a Plasma Burn-esque system is rather risky. Though I have to note that the Hardened Shields are worse than caps in this case.
[close]

Snowblind - Legacy of Arkgneisis
2x Alastair
9x Safety Overrides Taylor
7x Sherman

I don’t really know how to make LoA work, but there isn’t anything particularly objectionable about this fleet. All the ships are relatively light on PD, using only 1 OP small weapons. There’s a bit of a fleet mismatch with capital ships being matched with Safety Overrides destroyers, even if Alastairs are fairly fast as far as capitals go. The DP on the Shermans is also probably essentially wasted since there’s very little you can do with 4 DP frigates that fight at 700 range. I don’t like to put anything but Tactical Lasers, PD and maybe Flare Guns (SWP) on my distraction frigates.

Round 1.5 Changes
The non-Alastair portions of the fleet got swapped out for Gauss Burkes, which ended up being a very cool transition. I imagine it would crumble against more aggressive fleets, but it performed surprisingly effectively.
[close]

AlienSpaceKappa - Blackrock Driveyards
2x Kurmaraja
5x Goblin
4x Mantis
1x Antaeus
1x Stenos

Once again frigates are being used as a core source of damage in the fleet. It makes for a very difficult experience, even if the fleet wasn’t against the extreme missile spam seen in Deskup’s fleet. It’s even more unfortunate that the Kurmaraja system isn’t able to deal with Spike MRMs from what I understand.

Round 1.5 Changes
Most of the fleet was swapped out for a large number of Linked Gridfire Mantises. This ended up being a massive improvement to the fleet (probably because Gridfires are a little overtuned at the moment), even if it turned out to be unable to break through DaddyPant’s updated Beholder fleet.
[close]

Mino - Tiandong Heavy Industries
1x Xu
1x Qianzi
3x Shouren
1x Tuolu
4x Tianshui
1x Nanzhong
1x Wujun
1x Laohu

Poor Mino, getting placed in the death group with Tiandong, which I believe has a very difficult time in a PvP scenario. There’s some decent fundamentals knowledge showcased in the ships here, but there’s no way a fleet that isn’t heavily optimized can deal with the likes of DaddyPants and Deskup.
[close]

Lightforger - Xhan Empire
8x Safety Overrides Oiehou
6x Olkzan
2x Panrelkas

Unfortunately I don’t have much experience with Xhan Empire, but my initial impressions are that 90% of the time SO frigates perform quite poorly in tournaments. The AI doesn’t know how to be aggressive with them and they don’t really have the firepower to threaten larger ships even with the extra dissipation. That said, the Oiehous do have Damper Field, so they’re certainly not fragile and benefit a lot from the extra dissipation.

I also notice that the entire fleet has Hardened Shields, but in every case it results in lower EHP than simply adding capacitors (breakeven is at 3600/7200/10800/18000). The fleet is also somewhat lacking in kinetic weapons despite running High Intensity Lasers as its main damage source. I guess this is since Lightforger is fighting Low Tech and probably expected a very armor heavy lineup, so it’s not a major issue, but it could make future refits more difficult.

Round 1.5 Changes
Lightforger swapped out the Panrelkas and a large number of the Olkzans for two Shield Bypass Occuklops. At 2590 armor they’re absolute monsters and I think they ended up being a huge improvement to the fleet.
[close]

Sozzer - Legacy of Arkgneisis
1x Donovan
2x Macnamara
4x Lyon
1x Walsh

The Donovan was a new ship released just prior to the tournament beginning. Unfortunately, this meant it was a bit riddled with AI problems that hadn’t yet been massaged out of its design. The missiles on it not being Linked didn’t help matters either. That said, it’s hard to believe it could be a viable capital ship with 7500 base capacity - that’s worse than some of the destroyers we’ve seen.

I think Sozzer had the right idea with the standoff Macnamaras and Lyons, but unfortunately Slav’s fleet was a rushdown II fleet with linked Reapers and there’s really no way for this fleet to deal with that. Maybe better fighter coverage could have kept the enemy fleet at bay, but Rods measure poorly against Reapers.

Round 1.5 Changes
Sozzer swapped out an assortment of ships for an Alastair and a number of SO Reids. Probably an improvement to the fleet, but the Donnovan still remains extremely ineffective and it holds the fleet down.
[close]

Hrothgar Heavenlight - Mayasuran Navy
1x Javanicus
3x Patriot
4x Crow Shikra
3x Perryi
4x Tiburo

There’s not too much objectionable about this fleet. It’s fairly bog standard though, which doesn’t play to its favor in a blind first round. I’d say the Ion Pulsers on the Patriots and Perryi are basically wasted since they don’t have SO, even at 85 speed for a cruiser. Frigates should basically never be used in a major damage dealing role the way these Perryi and Tiburos are - even when they’re well designed, as seems to be the case, they can’t perform very well.

Round 1.5 Changes
The Javanicus and Patriots ended up being removed for a Sarissa and a number of Scaramouches. I can’t say I’m fond of Hrothgar’s decision here. Sure, wide Mayasura has worked before, but their best ships are invariably their capitals (especially with officers) and this fleet badly lacks damage.
[close]

Angelhood - Shadowyards Reconstruction Authority
1x Vardr
1x Eir
3x Kabaloi
5x Minarette
A very curious Barrago LRM spam fleet led by a full beams Vardr and a sacrificial Eir. It’s an interesting lineup, but there’s a very clear lack of DPS in this fleet, which makes dealing with something as beefy as a Javanicus very difficult.
[close]

Qihao56 - Vanilla High Tech
1x Astral
1x Whirlwind
1x Zenith
3x Apogee
2x Tempest

I don’t know how good the Astral is after its 0.9.5 nerfs, and unfortunately due to a bug the Sabots on the Longbows messed with the usual timing of the bombers, so this fleet was a bit handicapped from the start. That said, it seems to rely on some sort of team combination between the Whirlwind and the Astral, which is a bold thing to ask out of your AI. And the Tempests are running inefficient Hardened Shields. But I do see linked missiles, so that’s nice.

Round 1.5 Changes
Qihao ended up taking out the Apogees and Tempests to fill up on Beholders, as the other High Tech players did in Round 1. It’s a good update, but unfortunately the lineup then lacks enough punch to knock out a tenacious opponent like Johan’s FSU fleet.
[close]

Arkangelmark5 - ScalarTech Solutions
2x Hem
4x Cord Tress
1x Curl
11x Skirt

The Skirts are obviously the mainstay of the fleet, and they’re definitely among the best frigates in the tournament for the job. I also appreciate Arkangel’s attempts to deal with their lack of rear defense via Insulated Engine Assembly and Shield Conversion - Omni, though I don’t know how important this turned out to be with Terminator Core PD Lasers in the Plaid Drones. Certainly a decent fleet, though lacking a bit in longevity, which would later prove decisive against Johan.
[close]

Rubin - Sylphon RnD


2x Rakia
12x Catora
4x Catharsis Tilia

Truth be told I spent like 30 minutes making this fleet. While doing viability tests pre-tournament I saw some Rakias in action and while they weren’t exactly formidable they looked pretty cool so I decided I wanted to run some. You can tell I have no idea how they work because I put Hardened Subsystems thinking they were a phase ship, but they don’t even have the 3x time acceleration from phasing so there was no need for it.

The Catoras are a pretty standard cheap frigate whose sole goal is to not die. They have a frankly busted Damper Field-esque system, so the focus was on improving their armor and hull rather than their shields. Raphiels are a very good missile, but mostly I just wanted to showcase some Sylphon tech - I didn’t test performance with other weapons (I’d probably go with Reapers, though). The new IR Pulse Lasers feel quite nice as well, but they’re definitely not a main focus of the build. Finally I don’t really know what the Micro Nullspace Shunt hullmod does - I think it converts 150 soft flux into 37.5 hard flux per second. Probably very unnecessary on this ship.

Whenever I don’t know what fighters to grab, I just pick either the most expensive or the cheapest interceptor. Sylphon luckily only has one interceptor in the Catharsis, so decision-making for the Tilias was easy there. That said, it also turns out the Catharses are possibly busted, outperforming even other superfighters such as Shikomes. Lucky choice, I guess. And of course ECM Package because there’s not much other use for OP and I think it’s slightly more worthwhile than Expanded Deck Crew when using superfighters.
[close]

LightningJC - Outer Rim Alliance
1x Ascension
2x Beatitude
1x Elevation
4x Communion
6x Bliss
2x Sanctuary

A mishmash of ships with good fundamentals (ECM Package/EDC on carriers, maxing vents first, etc.). The individual ships are decently designed, but there’s nothing in it that looks like it can really carry the fleet in combat, aside from something lucky happening with fighter superiority, I guess.

Round 1.5 Changes
The Beatitudes got swapped out for Revelations, which I think are a marginal improvement, but it still feels like the fleet doesn’t have enough punch.
[close]

Grievous69 - Vanilla Low Tech
1x Onslaught
1x Liberator
1x Dominator
1x Mora
3x Enforcer
1x Lasher
4x Striker

A TPC-centric Onslaught - well it might work. I really don’t think you should ignore medium missiles in a tournament setting though (although in this case it wouldn’t have helped at all against Sad Squidward’s fleet anyhow). It’s got the core stuff needed for an Onslaught anyhow. Liberator looks fine though I don’t know why Arbalest Autocannons are ever used when Railguns exist, even at 8 OP. Double Mark IX Autocannons on a Dominator is a bit strange, as is the Resistant Flux Conduits on nearly all the ships - I guess this fleet was developed to be Omen proof, though that makes Harpoon spam with no Sabots rather confusing. Also missiles aren’t linked. :|

Round 1.5 Changes
The Mora got swapped out for a couple of Falx (SWP) Condors, which is probably for the best, but I don’t think the fleet has changed enough to make a significant difference.
[close]

AlexAtheos - Vanilla Midline
7x Hammerhead
5x Centurion
3x Heron
3x Harpoon Archer

A mostly classic VMT lineup, though the builds feel a little questionable to me. The Hammerheads have three hullmods--Armored Weapon Mounts, Automated Repair Unit, and Insulated Engine Assembly--that make it marginally more survivable, but don’t actually help it fight better. I can only assume that it’s meant as an anti-Omen/EMP build, but there are probably better ways to go about it.

The Centurions are okay, but usually double Ion Cannon is excessive and with the latest accuracy buffs Light Dual Autocannons might be even worse than the singular version. Plus no Contender Cannons just makes me sad.

The Herons are decent and pretty standard. As I’ve mentioned before it’s not clear anymore whether Expanded Deck Crew or ECM Package is superior for carriers, so they look decent enough. That said, you’ll lose uptime on the Targeting Feed on the Broadswords when the Heron sets the fighters to regroup after the Daggers fire.

Harpoon Archers are generally fine, but this fleet is very lacking in kinetic damage, so a lack of Sabots is a bit unfortunate. Worse, the missiles are set to Alternating. The Long Range Arbalest with Expanded Magazines is a nice touch, though - probably better than anything else mounted on that slot.

Round 1.5 Changes
Alex ended up switching it up for a tall set up with a Victory and Conquest, as well as a number of Pests. I don’t think swapping out the carriers was the right decision since the fleet now completely lacks fighters, but going taller was otherwise a good decision. Unfortunately, the missiles on the capitals are unlinked.
[close]

Libbmaster - Vanilla Midline
1x Frontal Conquest
2x Eagle
1x Thunder Heron
3x Sunder
7x Centurion
3x Vigilance

This fleet is a good meme. Or a really bad one, depending on how strongly you feel about abominable ship builds. For the record after seeing this I did try to see if a Frontal Conquest could work and I made one that could beat the default sim Conquest on Steady AI, but yeah there’s really no salvaging this. Also the other officers are on the Autopulse Sunders instead of the Eagles and Heron, which is an interesting choice. I do however appreciate the emphasis on maximizing vents and capacitors though, that’s a decent practice regardless of all the other decisions in this fleet.

Round 1.5 Changes
Libbmaster blessed us with four frontal Conquests. They’re still not very good, but I was still entertained.
[close]

JRG - Anvil Industries
1x Lucerne
1x Spider Kingdom
1x Silkworm Quiver
6x Starburst Sparrow
6x Flail

There’s no ship I love seeing more than a Shield Bypass (or otherwise shieldless) capital, and the Lucerne is possibly the best one in the game. I think the weapon choices are bit flux heavy for it (1600 weapon flux vs 2733 dissipation), and the ship should use more Vulcans and less Reliants/LMGs (and probably IPDAI), but it’s a decent enough loadout.

The Kingdom is symmetric, which is probably a bad idea for basically every broadside ship no matter how aesthetically pleasing it is. The ship is also heavily, heavily overfluxed at 1430 dissipation to 3036 weapon flux. On the bright side, the Starbursts on it are linked, though to guns in different weapon groups, so I’m not sure how this actually behaves in practice.

The Sparrows are very similar to Hiruma Kai’s, but are unfortunately using unlinked missiles.

Finally, the Flails are using Hardened Shields at 1900 capacity, which is very inefficient, but with Salamanders they seem like they’ll be decent distraction frigates. Not sure if they’re more worth having than more Sparrows (missiles are good in tournaments!), but it’s a neat choice.

Round 1.5 Changes
JRG sadly dropped the Lucerne, Quiver and Flails for two Silkworm Kingdoms which are still solid ships, but they are unfortunately still symmetric in design. He filled out the remaining DP with more Starburst Sparrows, which definitely weren’t bad, but as a result the fleet is quite lacking in longevity despite running three capitals.
[close]
[close]

Eliminated in Round 2
Spoiler
Detess - Diable Avionics
3x Shield Bypass Pandamonium

These are quite nice as far as Shield Bypass Pandas go, though the lack of Automated Repair Unit and Reinforced Flux Conduit would prove disastrous against Carroy’s EMP heavy fleet. It’s also heavy overfluxed even for a Shield Bypass ship at 1960 dissipation vs 3736 weapon flux, mostly a product of its medium weapons I think. Either way, I’d probably drop the frontal railguns and other non-PD small weapons. Good first attempt though!

Round 1.5 Changes
DeTess changed two of the Pandas from Aegis Flak variants to Uhlan Siege Laser version, I believe are much scarier to face. The ships are still heavily overfluxed, but at least it has serious burst potential now, so it’s less likely to run up on flux in the first place. DeTess also added Automated Repair Unit to these variants which I think is extremely important for Shield Bypass ships.

Round 2 Changes
Still using Pandas, but now two of them are running Tachyon Lances (with the third using the Uhlan build from R1.5). It doesn’t exactly make the fleet much better against its opponents, but one can appreciate the consistency.

Round 2.5 Changes
DeTess’s final Panda variant adds Resistant Flux Conduits and Heavy Needlers to the Tachyon Lance build, removing the frontal railguns and a handful of the Ibis PD. I think this is the best Panda variant yet!
[close]

SCC - Interstellar Imperium
1x Elite Package Matriarch
8x Elite Package Interrex
7x Armor Package Basileus

Fairly well balanced as far as the fighters on the Matriarch go. I’d probably opt for 6x Vicarius, since imo they’re like a top 3 fighter in the tournament. That said, this Matriarch was designed more as a brawling capital as evidenced by the six Light Assault Guns it carries at the front. I actually hate LAGs and think they’re possibly the second worst weapon in vanilla after mining lasers, and the use of Ballista LRMs doesn’t really feel like it couples well with the the close range build of the Matriarch.

The Interrexes are very solid, being flux neutral with a staggering 20 capacitors and Hardened Shields for 14250 capacity at 0.9 efficiency. My only complaint is that the Reapers are unlinked (you can see Slav’s round 1 performance for a comparison of the effectiveness).

SCC linked the Sabots and Harpoons of his Basilei, which is doable due to a tournament bug not speed capping Sabots. It’s a very neat tech regardless. Railguns and Armor package, however, are probably not very useful for what is 100% a missile ship.

Round 1.5 Changes
The Elite Matriarch and some of the Interrexes were swapped out for a pair of Targeting Package Domini. It’s an interesting fit fully kitted out with 1000 range (2000 after bonuses) weapons, which is a little low on DPS, but against standoff opponents they’re quite scary.

Round 2 Changes
For round 2, the Domini were in turn replaced for a Targeting Package Caesar and some new Interrexes. The new Interrexes have Converted Hangar Flamens and Armor Package, but the missiles still aren’t linked, sadly.

Round 2.5 Changes
SCC had the unenviable task of facing both Hiruma Kai and DaddyPants at the same time, and with the former swapping back to a monstrous SO fleet there was little hope for him, unfortunately. Even besides that, I’m not sure there’s an Imperium Fleet within the budget constraints that is even able to reliably take down DaddyPants’ Vanilla High Tech fleet. But Armor Package Libritors, whose spinal guns shred SWP Beholder Ray Drones, were probably the closest bet. That plus a Targeting Package Caesar made for a solid attempt, even if it was essentially doomed to failure.
[close]

Deskup - Free Stars Union
13x Widow (9x Converted Hangar Talon versions)
3x Blackbird
2x Slicer

Not much to say about this fleet - it’s a very competently done missile spam fleet. I like the mix of Squalls and Locusts - it probably gave the fleet a much higher chance of winning against most High Tech fleets, though was preempted by DaddyPant’s decision to go Shield Bypass on his Paragon.

Round 2 Changes
Due to anti-spam rules, a number of the Widows had to be swapped out for two Apocylapse cruisers, which funny enough are nearly identical to Johan’s variant in the same round. I still don’t think they’re especially effective, sadly, but it should be noted that Deskup did his Round 2 refit before even seeing the Round 1.5 matches due to scheduling issues.

Round 2.5 Changes
Deskup’s final match was up against DeTess’ Panda fleet, so they made a bold and very fun decision to load two Shield Bypass Chimaeras with 5 Hellbores, 6 Maulers and a handful of LAGs. It’s a lovely build for the spectacle and was a lot of fun to watch, but really 15 OP could totally have been spared for Resistant Flux Conduits. :p
[close]

PrismaticFlux - Vanilla Low Tech
1x Niagara
4x Thunder Condor
2x Shield Bypass Onslaught
3x Gremlin
1x Challenger

PrismaticFlux’s fleet is the first one to really take advantage of fleet formations, with the Niagara front and center to anchor the fleet while the Shield Bypass Onslaughts pummel the sides. Thunders, while significantly nerfed in the latest patch notes, still prove to be very dangerous against opponents with poor interceptor coverage. Finally the Gremlins make for wonderful distractions in a way that only Phase frigates can accomplish. It’s a solid fleet.

If I were to optimize things, I’d say that the Onslaughts are relatively short on kinetic damage (there is indeed such a thing as too much PD!) with only a single Heavy Needler. On the Niagara, Thumpers are also just a bad weapon in my opinion. Finally the Challenger doesn’t really do anything with an HVD and would probably be better off as a timid ship with ECM Package/Nav Relay.

Round 1.5 Changes
PrismaticFlux ended up dropping the Condors and Gremlins for some Safety Overrides Enforcers, as well as moving the Onslaughts closer to the center. I can’t say I particularly like these decisions - giving up on fighters just leaves slow ships like Enforcers at the mercy of more dangerous ships like quad-Reaper Interrexes.

Round 2 Changes
In turn, the Enforcers and the Niagara were removed for more Gremlins and some SWP Vanguards with Mjolnir Cannons. I can’t say I’m especially fond of this decision - the fleet still doesn’t have fighters and outside of very specific Devastator builds to deal with missile spam I don’t find Vanguards to be very good ships. In my opinion, this fleet ended up going wider for little appreciable gain.

Round 2.5 Changes
Back to the original Round 1 configuration, which I think was probably the right decision.
[close]

SafariJohn - Roider Union
5x Pepperbox
2x Telamon
10x Safety Overrides Colossus Mk.II (R)

Grabbing the quick and easy 10% ECM Rating from the 5 Pepperboxes at 10 DP is excellent. The Telamons seem okay, but they’re somewhat relying on a 750 range kinetic weapon in the Pile Driver. For a 25 speed capital ship, the range disadvantage is very serious. The LAGs are also wasted OP, in my opinion. However, the most notable part of the fleet are the SO Colossus Mk.IIs, armed with nothing but a Hammer Barrage linked to a Standard Bomb Bay. I was very curious about these, so I tested them a little bit and I found them to be utterly ineffective, but SafariJohn claims that they performed better in testing, so I don’t know. He also had the misfortune of going up against Gremlins, which Hammer Barrages don’t handle very well.

Round 1.5 Changes
SafariJohn thankfully removed the Colossus Mk.IIs and took advantage of the modular fighter rules to throw in four Ranches (a ship with four fighter bays, two being modular). I like the transition, though the Ranches have Extreme Modifications, which are especially terrible for dedicated carriers, so I think that was a bit of a loadout mistake.

Round 2 Changes
SafariJohn swapped it up yet again with the removal of the Ranches for another pair of Telamons, totalling four of the extremely tanky capitals. I appreciate how tanky they manage to be with their 1800 armor armor modules, but there’s a distinct lack of DPS in this fleet that hurts it against the other extremely tanky or high DPS lineups in the group. The Pepperboxes also got swapped out for five ECM Package Cyclops, which I think is an alright sidegrade.

Round 2.5 Changes
The excess Telamons and nearly all the Cyclops were cut out for a handful of Onager destroyers and a pair of SO Gambit cruisers, as well as a large number of ECM Pepperboxes, as in round 1. The kinetic Spike Drivers on the Gambits look extremely dangerous, and I can’t help but wonder how dangerous a full SO Roider fleet would be. Unfortunately for SafariJohn, PrismaticFlux’s round 1 fleet doesn’t much rely on shields, and I don’t think the Onagers are fast or tanky enough to survive against Shield Bypass Onslaughts. Singular Annihilator Pods are also rarely effective in my experience.
[close]

Akitsushima - Vanilla Low Tech
2x Onslaught
1x Liberator
4x Thunder Condor
4x Gremlin

People complained about the Hardened Shields Onslaughts, but while I probably wouldn’t use that with Shield Bypass available it’s not a bad option by default. The dissipation to weapon flux ratio, on the other hand, is horrendous at 1100 dissipation to 2750 weapon flux. Heavy Mortars are surprisingly heavy on flux usage, and a Storm Needler isn’t cheap at all. Without even Flux Distributor to help out with the dissipation these Onslaughts would fail quite quickly. The frontal Railguns are certainly overkill as well.

It’s a similar situation with the Liberator, with 1000 dissipation against 1950 weapon flux. I really don’t think people should basically ever use LAGs, but especially on overfluxed ships. The mix of Mark IX Autocannons and Heavy Mortars is also, in my opinion, heavily inferior to a Hellbore + Heavy Needler combination.

I do however quite like the Thunder Condors and the Gremlins!

Round 2 Changes
The Liberator and a number of Condors were swapped out for a Shield Bypass Xyphos Legion and a Shield Bypass Xyphos Mora. I really don’t think this was a good idea, and the way the Legion was consistently more aggressive than the Onslaughts show the dangers of putting Shield Bypass on ships that aren’t specifically dedicated to front-lining.
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Johan - Free Stars Union
7x Blackbird
1x Chimaera
2x Scorch Mastodon
5x Slicer
2x Locust Converted Hanger Griffin Drone Widow

A non missile-heavy Free Stars Union fleet is interesting, though I’d still definitely link the missiles that remain in the fleet. It’s very much a “balanced”, rather standard fleet, and we all know how those usually fare in tournaments. I do like the Scorches, though from my tests they’re not really capable of carrying a fleet the way Catharses are.

Round 2 Changes
At some point the Mastodons and most of the Slicers were swapped out for some probably more effective Converted Hangar Talon Widows. The missiles on them are also linked, which is always nice to see. A Beam Apocylapse cruiser was also added to the fleet, but unfortunately I don’t think it made much impact in the end. Heavy Cruisers in general lack impact in these tournaments, unless they’re truly spectacular, which I don’t think applies to the Apocylapse.

Round 2.5 Changes
I believe the Apocylapse cruiser was replaced with a Rhea carrier fielding Rook Heavy Interceptors, as well as a couple more Blackbirds, and the Chimaera was probably refitted? It’s more a refinement/side grade than a drastic shift in fleet composition, and I think it’s an improvement, but it was certainly lacking in the PD needed to handle Slav’s fleet.
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Thaago - Outer Rim Alliance
1x SO Mirth
6x SO Sanctuary
2x SO HIL Elevation
6x SO Grace

Our first SO-centric fleet, and boy do ORA look scary with it. As broadside ships they already have monstrous dissipation, so doubling that makes these ships extremely dangerous. ORA’s other weakness, poor speed, is also handily dealt with by Safety Overrides. And of course, Thaago knows to link his missiles. This is a fleet that’s going to murder everything. I guess my minor nitpick is that I think Accelerated Shields or Shield Conversion - Front outperforms extended shields on omni-shielded ships (such as the Elevations), but you can’t argue with results.

Round 1.5 Changes
If I recall correctly, while the fleet composition didn’t change much this round, Thaago did add Hardened Subsystems to a handful of his ships, which proved very important when fighting against Arkangel’s kiting ScalarTech fleet. Solid design improvisations!

Round 2 Changes
A handful of the Graces were swapped out for a third SO Elevation, which were in the meantime all switched from HILs to Locusts. Once again a formidable SO fleet that I think was favored to reach the finals of the tournament.

Round 2.5 Changes
The Enlightenment salesman returns! Thaago had a very cool build specifically built for Cathedral cracking, fielding 6 linked reapers on the front! Along with the standard SO ORA core that carried him this far it had a decent shot. Sadly in the actual matches the Enlightenment wasn’t nearly aggressive enough, and against PrismaticFlux the distraction Gremlins proved crucial in stopping the ORA fleet from overrunning their opponent. All I can say is that the Enlightenment should have had Shield Bypass - the one true way to ensure your ships properly engage. :p
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Archaeon - Shadowyards Reconstruction Authority
1x Extreme Mods Mimir
2x Skinwalker Charybdis
5x HIL Converted Hangar Neriad Clade
4x Enlil

As I mentioned before, I don’t think the Extreme Modifications + Automated Repair Unit combination is any good now that the 4x repair rate bug was fixed, but I respect the attempt. The Mimir and Charies look decent enough to me, though I’m not an expert on Shadowyards weapons. HIL Clades seem like a nice decision knowing you’re going up against Low Tech eventually (and I guess also Sylphon lineups like my own). Still don’t like fragile close-range frigates like these Enlils, though, and they don’t meet the breakpoints to be using Hardened Shields.

Round 2 Changes
The Charybdi and Enlils were changed for Angelhood’s Vardr, a couple of Sargasso carriers and a pair of Shamash phase frigates. It’s slightly unrefined and probably overloaded on High Intensity Lasers, but the Shamashes are solid distraction frigates and the Vardr is a useful addition to the frontline for this fleet.
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Hiruma Kai - Anvil Industries
1x Spider Kingdom
10x SO Cielo
7x Starburst Sparrow

A solid SO fleet backed up by missiles, this fleet is a quintessential tournament fleet. Linked Starbursts on the Sparrows is good. The Cielos look decent as well, though they rely heavily on their fighters to defend their rear - I might’ve considered Shield Conversion - Front. The Kingdom also looks very good, though I’m not sure if the off-side HVD makes it liable to swapping sides, which would be very bad for the ship. In any case, I’m sure that this would have wiped out the majority of the other round 1 fleets in the tournament, but it had the misfortune of facing Sad Squidward’s fleet.

Round 1.5 Changes
Hiruma Kai removed the Sparrows and a Cielo for a second Kingdom and refitted both of them to run Cicada Bombers which synergize extremely well with the updated Reserve Deployment. A solid improvement to an already impressive fleet.

Round 2 Changes
Hiruma Kai ended up dropping the Cielos for some Morgensterns and SO Flails, which unfortunately I do not think are capable of cracking DaddyPant’s Paragon + Beholder fleet. One of the Kingdom’s was also refitted to use Silkworm bombers, but it was also converted into a symmetric design, which I also think was a rather poor decision. EDIT: whoops nope they were still the Cicada ones, very good! Still, if it was up against most of the other Round 2 competitors I’m fairly confident that it would have scored some big wins.

Round 2.5 Changes
Back to the Kingdom and Cielo combination from R1.5. It’s still a very formidable set up.
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CitizenJoe - Pearson Exotronics
1x Missile Kingston
10x Denmark (9x Converted Drone Hangars Xyphos, 1x SO)

The Kingston has a decent number of Synergy and Universal slots to make missile builds a viable option, though it does result in a ship that isn’t really able to do anything after they’ve been expended. If it were running Sabots or even just more kinetics and vents instead of Reapers, I think it could do a lot more work, though it still accomplished a decent amount in its matches. Also only the Hurricanes are linked, which is a bit strange.

Xyphos on the Denmarks is a nice touch, given that Converted Drone Hangars don’t have increased OP cost for fighters and due to a bug the Denmark’s system is rather unreliable. It might still be too expensive though - 30 total OP is quite hefty. More Harpoons makes this fleet very HE lopsided and I really think some Sabots are warranted here.

Round 1.5 Changes
Joe ended up altering the CH Denmarks to instead use Rhys Heavy Fighters and a Tornado Hornet Launcher (SWP). I don’t know too much about these fighters, but they do have Ion Cannons (High Delay), so they can’t be terrible. The Tornados are also probably a decent upgrade over the Harpoon Pods.

Round 2 Changes
Some of the Denmarks got forcibly swapped out due to the new anti-spam rule, so CitizenJoe went with a Serrano, a Kiruna and a Torens. The fits look decent enough (though once again there’s some inefficient Hardened Shields usage), but they don’t make the fleet into something it wasn’t previously. CitizenJoe also swapped the Kingston to a Shield Bypass HVD + Tachyon Lance build. It’s a nice build with linked Tornado Hornets as well, but HVD and Hornets are a bit lacking in the heavy strike needed to make Shield Bypass builds work, in my opinion.
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Mortia - Blackrock Driveyards
6x Dynastos
6x SPL Weavil
3x Krait & SPL Convergence

Mortia’s got a very cool SPL missile spam fleet that slowly wears down its opponents, with the Dynastos generally being able to use their strike missiles against their PD overwhelmed opponents, or the Kraits able to get close to deal heavy damage. I wouldn’t say there’s anything amiss in this fleet. Plus using the Dynastos system to murder the Pearson drones is a great match-up specific usage.

Round 1.5 Changes
Mortia swapped out the Weavils and Convergences for SPL Mantises and some Krait Typheuses. I think it’s the same general strategy of SPL spam, but probably with more optimized ships for it. Nice.

Round 2 Changes
The majority of the SPLs, particularly on the Dynastos and some of the Mantises were swapped out for Gridfire MRMs, which looked very solid in AlienSpaceKappa’s fleet (despite it being unable to penetrate the Beholder PD walls) - I think this was a solid decision. Unfortunately, it doesn’t leave many options for when Mortia would eventually have to face Sad Squidward’s fleet.

Round 2.5 Changes
Mortia doubled down on the missile spam with yet more Mantises and swapped out the Gridfire Dynastos for Sabot/Reaper ones. Unfortunately for him, Sad Squidward’s swap to Omens and more Beholders kind of leaves this strategy dead in the water.
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Finalists
Spoiler
Slav - Interstellar Imperium
1x Shield Bypass Targeting Package Caesar
9x Converted Hangar Flamen Interrex
8x Targeting Package Basileus

An extremely competent fleet that works right up to the rules limits with the Converted Hangar fighters. Linked missiles as well made for devastating effect in its matches. I’ve no complaints about this fleet.

Round 2 Changes
Between Round 1 and 2, Slav removed the Shield Bypass Caesar for some extremely potent Elite Package Ixons whose Apocalypse MRMs were absolutely devastating. It’s a cool switch that I don’t think we’ve seen in previous tournaments. Some of the Interrexes were also switched to Linked Sabots, which I imagine help shut down ships for the Ixons to do the heavy damage.

Round 2.5 Changes
Slav takes Interstellar Imperium’s missile spam capabilities to the limit with this fleet update, adding four Princeps carriers with all the essentials: Expanded Deck Crew, ECM Package, linked Tornado Hornets/small Sabots (along with the missile hullmods) and some Inferna bombers and Draconarius fighters. Just a very solid fit all around. Coupled with those are some quad-linked Targeting Package Basilei with Tornado Hornets, small Sabots and ECCM Package. It’s a stellar fleet all around, with enough missiles that it can even sometimes get through the CH Beholder spam the Vanilla High Tech players were fielding.

Round 3 Changes
From what I’ve heard (and personally tested), Interstellar Imperium had nearly no options that were able to deal with the Beholder fleets fielded by DaddyPants and Sad Squidward. That leaves picking a strategy that could hopefully pick up a lot of partial points and hope for a mix of scores in the final round. To that end, Slav went for a double Shield Bypass Elite Package Extreme Modifications (+ARU) Caesar core backed by some Princeps, Targeting Package Basilei and Elite Package Carrums (whose active flare system becomes a missile). It’s very bold and very cool to see, but I have a feeling that it didn’t really win in testing either. The lack of significant PD on the Caesars also makes it very vulnerable to cSynapse’s Cathedrals, and four heavy Pulse Lasers as the shield-breaking core of the fleet probably causes it to suffer against Solar Shielding, which most of the participants in the finals would probably be running. It might be a bit heretical, but I’d actually consider leaving the large missile mounts empty, given they struggle to break through Beholders regardless, and attach some hullmods like Solar Shielding.
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cSynapse - Vanilla Low Tech
3x Shield Bypass Extreme Modifications Onslaught
10x Heavy Armor Lasher
2x Converted Hangar Mining Pod Enforcers

I like Light Needlers as much as the next person, but I don’t know if downsizing the mediums on an Onslaught is the appropriate place to put them. In general these Onslaughts save a lot of OP by downsizing medium ballistics and missile slots, but that excess OP goes into… LAGs. Interesting decision given all of cSynapse’s opponents are high tech adjacent. Some of the hullmods are probably a bit questionable too, like Advanced Turret Gyros.

The Lashers are also a good reminder that Contender Cannons exist, and they were an option for everyone! Why are people using Light Assault Guns? Anyways, Flare Guns are surprisingly good and I guess if you’re able to outgun your opponent as Accelerated Ammo Feeder ships usually do, they’re a cheap and effective choice. cSynapse does seem to like piling on the hullmods over capacitors and PD, which isn’t what I would do, but isn’t particularly objectionable.

Mining Pods are honestly so much worse than Talons (even with the Mining Laser buff) that I struggle to see why anyone needs to save 3 OP that badly. Otherwise, a mix of Long Range Arbalests (TADA) and Heavy Maulers makes for an okay support Enforcer, though such builds are rarely useful in tournament settings. Also the two side reapers are unlinked, which is unfortunate.

Round 1.5 Changes
cSynapse dropped one of the Onslaughts as well as the frigates and Destroyers for a Cathedral and a number of Shepherds. I do like the shift to an even taller strategy, and the Cathedral, particularly with officers, is one of the strongest ships in the Low Tech arsenal (a large part of it is probably in the way it messes with the enemy AI, but still). I can’t comment too much on the individual fit - it’s generally not stuff I would run on a Cathedral, but it seems serviceable.

Round 2 Changes
Beware: AI troubles ahead. cSynapse added a second Cathedral with a heavy Longbow component and a ton of Heavy Machine Guns, presumably to try to eventually deal with Thaago’s SO ORA fleet. It’s a solid addition, and due to the AI having aggressiveness problems and its powerful Mine Strike system, two Cathedrals is significantly more difficult to handle than just one. They also memed it up with a classy Shield Bypass Prometheus, which are shockingly tanky for a 10 DP option. Shield Bypass also makes enemy ships more willing to fire (waste) their Harpoons and Sabots on an otherwise worthless target, so this was a sweet addition (though I think it didn’t end up being necessary in their fights).

Round 2.5 Changes
cSynapse refits yet another Cathedral to going heavy on Salamanders and most interestingly, uses a variant that uses ballistics in the frontal Large Composite slot. I don’t know if this was just future proofing for potential future fights against the Beholder fleets, but it’s certainly an interesting decision. I’m told the Mining Pods placed on it ended being potentially hazardous since splash damage from them getting hit by Reapers could damage the modules - so once again I’d say Talons would have been superior, but it’s still a decent and unique fit.

Round 3 Changes
The Prometheus is removed for some distraction SO Drams. While the meme is great, they could have actually had significant contributions if they were fitted with ECM Package at the very least. The final Cathedral refit uses a curious Heavy Needler + LAG oriented build with nearly no missiles (not a bad idea against Beholders). It still uses Mining Pods instead of more effective fighters (seriously, Talons can mess up with Tachyon Lance targeting so much), and I’ve said elsewhere how I feel about LAGs. I’m not sure how well Cathedrals can do against Paragons in general, though the attempt has the right idea. I think a Hellbore or two are definitely necessary in the front, however, both to deal with Shield Bypass shenanigans and to dissuade nearby ships from venting.
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DaddyPants - Vanilla High Tech
1x Shield Bypass Paragon
11x Beholder (9x Converted Hangar Longbow versions)
5x Mercury

As always, DaddyPants provides a very strong core fleet that would ultimately closely resemble his final fleet. I think the Paragon is heavily overfluxed despite the Shield Bypass, and actually somewhat lacking in PD, but overall it’s solid. He was also still experimenting with the Automated Repair Unit + Extreme Modifications combination, which I think in general doesn’t work well but might be usable on Beholders. I don’t think CH Longbows are very good compared to cheap interceptors though. Finally the Mercuries are essentially wasted DP that probably could have used an ECM Package or something. Still, not a bad fleet at all.

Round 1.5 Changes
DaddyPants ended up swapping the fighters on the Beholders from Longbows to, in my opinion, far more dangerous Talons. The added PD and distraction makes Beholders even more ridiculous to face. The Mercuries were also removed for yet another Beholder.

Round 2 Changes
Anti-spam rules forced the removal of three of the beholders, which were instead changed to three Afflictors and three Salamander Mercuries. The Shield Bypass Paragon was also swapped to a more standard shielded one. This is kind of the platonic ideal of a High Tech fleet, and understandably DaddyPants didn’t end up shifting much from this configuration for the rest of the tournament.

Round 3 Changes
While the composition didn’t change heavily for the final round, DaddyPants did opt to set his entire fleet to reckless which, particularly in the case of the Beholders, I think was a mistake. His fleet is very capable of beating Sad Squidward’s but if a significant amount of the fleet gets sniped early on it becomes exceedingly difficult. Still, before submissions it was definitely “the fleet to beat.”
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Sad Squidward - Vanilla High Tech
18x Beholder

Sometimes you host a tournament and realize part-way through submissions that you forgot something absolutely critical. In this case, there was no anti-spam rule present for the first round, meaning stuff like this monster mono-fleet of 18 Beholders was available for Sad Squidward to crush their group with. Linked Harpoons and Sabots with Hardened Shields and max caps, these are pretty darn close to ideal. The only thing I’d do is take half of the Beholders and slap some Converted Hangars on them - either Thunders to deal with Shield Bypass ships or some sort of bomber to deal with capital ships.

Round 1.5 Changes
Sad squidward swapped away from the Beholder spam for some neat High Tech toys - SO Apogees and SWP Revenants (soon to be called Nightwalkers). The SO Apogees interestingly ignore the use of the Large Missile Slot, but they are extremely tanky and synergize very well with the Beholders. The Revenants went with a full missile build which I can’t imagine being very good, but it worked out very well so what do I know. :V

Round 2 Changes
Revenants out, Converted Hangar Wasp Shrikes and TADA Cassicus ships in - Sad Squidward continues to take advantage of the huge variety in VHT’s roster. Converted Hangar Wasps, Active Flare Launchers and the newly buffed Paladin PD Laser on the Cassicus would prove to be extremely helpful against Deskup’s missile spam fleet, as well as preparing for Mortia’s in the post-refit stage. Just some very solid designs all around.

Round 2.5 Changes
Shrikes and the Cassicus were removed to re-max on Beholders and Omens--surprisingly the first time that they are introduced in this tournament. This fleet is damn scary, and the Omens provide the most solid counter to DeTess’ Shield Bypass Pandas and Mortia’s missile-based Blackrock fleet. Sad squidward even made some modifications on the typical Thaago/Vayra Omen rendition, removing Resistant Flux Conduits and Hardened Subsystems for Shield Conversion - Front (for more reliable AI) and Flux Coil Adjunct (to squeeze out just a little more EHP). I’d probably typically still use Hardened Subsystems over the latter, but given that this fleet is using SO Apogees the extra PPT wouldn’t be that helpful anyways. All around very solid once again.

Round 3 Changes
Sad Squidward heads the fleet with two quinntessential Shield Bypass Paragon loadouts. Literally everything the ship might want is in there, and they’re placed on opposing ends of the fleet for even greater effectiveness. Really, the only thing that stops this from overrunning everyone in the finals (even more so than it actually did) is that Squidward was limited to one-skill officers from the start. Give them Evasive Action or Targeting Analysis on top of the Impact Mitigation they already have and I don’t think anyone would have had a chance.

The three Beholders are still the same solid ones from Round 1, though I think even now a few Talons would have improved the fleet further (you’re fighting Tachyon Lances!). I do however love the decision to run five Omens over three more Beholders - they’re better distraction, the EMP they provide is nuts, and they confer a solid 10% ECM/Nav Relay bonus that other fleets essentially need in order to have an even chance against the Paragons, so pre-empting that is very solid.

Truly a tournament winning fleet.
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I guess a TL;DR of the most salient points/mistakes:
  • Check when it's efficient to be using Hardened Shields. They're better than caps when you have over 3600/7200/10800/18000 capacity.
  • Link your damned missiles.
  • Don't neglect fighter coverage.
  • Light Assault Guns are awful :V

RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #36 on: December 28, 2020, 08:05:44 PM »

Tournament follow-up post #2: some discussions on tournament details.

A brief look at some of the tournament decisions and stuff. I had a longer post planned out but I'm sure no one wants to read 15 pages of me whinging talking about my thoughts during the tournament and I quickly lost the stomach to write it anyhow.

In any case, hopefully this will be useful for future Starsector tournament/event organizers - there seemed to be a lot of people interested in trying to host things themselves in the future.

There isn't really a specific order for this stuff, but you can follow along with the tournament rules here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ebaIwNlMZWVG31b2BOLHpd5qpOK033J1mCLMZv0s7fE/edit?usp=sharing



Tournament Length: 5 weeks, 7 streams, 84 battles
  • I believe 5 weeks is pretty close to the upper limit as far as the organizer, player and viewer attention spans can be maintained.
  • Depending on the availability of the streamers, 2 or even 3 streamers per week should be doable, as long as players aren’t forced to do adjustments more than once a week.

Average stream length: ~2h15m to 2h30m, 12 matches per stream, 16 fleets per stream
  • This is a pretty decent length, but actually a bit shorter than previous tournaments.
  • Streams could probably be safely extended to feature 15 matches without too much trouble.
  • There was a lot of sentiment indicating a desire for Bo2/Bo3 matches, which would extend stream time due to additional matches, but a lot of time is spent looking over fleets as well, and that wouldn’t be increased from doing Bo2/Bo3s.

Format: Round Robin, groups of 4, best of 1 matches, first match is blind
  • Overall pretty good and some more design decisions were needed by the players
  • Some players got screwed over by the order of their matches - I’m not sure how balanced this ended up being overall, but something to consider
  • Not very robust to players dropping out - since every group size should ideally be the same for balance reasons
  • Might be too susceptible to cheese. Not sure how to deal with that besides having iron-tight rules.
  • Groups of 4 are decent, requiring 6 matches per group. Groups of 5 would be better in that every stream a player could be facing two players (instead of once one opponent and once two opponents), but they have many more matches involved (10 per group)
  • Bo1s aren’t very representative of fleet quality, so consider Bo2 or Bo3 alternatives. I prefer the former with partial points for more consistent stream lengths and using partial points (which imo were a positive) in a Bo3 format involves either rescaling scores to the number of matches or having 3 matches every time, both being a bit of a headache.
  • Lots of players had problems with the blind first match. One possible solution is to have half the fleet be revealed prior to the first match, allowing for some surprise, but still giving players an idea of what they’re be working against. Other organizers will probably have their own variations on how to approach this. Having this early deadline would also help with people dropping out due to being unable to figure out the AI Battles file management.

Fleet Limits: 180 DP, 18 ships, 9 modular fighters, no limit for built-in fighters
  • 10 DP/ship is still a solid standard, though I really do want to experiment with higher values, like the originally pitched 180 DP/15 ships
  • Modular fighter limits can be a bit of an issue since some factions rely on them heavily and some factions do not
  • Built-in fighters definitely need to be limited, since most of the outlier ships that were found tended to have them. I think something like each built-in fighter counting as half a fighter should be sufficient
  • 180 DP made for some decent fights and a good variety of wide and tall fleets, but if lower variance and emphasizing smart fleet design are bigger goals, then smaller battles might be desirable

Refit rules: 120 DP (2/3 of the total) can be swapped per refit period, officer ship, personality and skills can be reassigned, number of officers and number of skills can not
  • Re: increased refit budget - from what I heard this was a very popular adjustment and I think it allowed for a lot of interesting shifts in the player’s lineups. Imo this should be closer to the standard for PvP tournaments.
  • Officer adjustment rules are still rather strange. It’s good that people aren’t completely locked down (aside from the number of officers / their number of skills), but going too far means that players can avoid consequences for their allocations, and shifting fleet designs becomes way more of a random guess. Note this also has to be balanced with the organizer’s ability to check for consistency.

Fighter blacklist rules: Vanilla has access to all techs, some factions get access to vanilla techs, some factions have fighters blacklisted
  • Honestly an absolute mess. Vanilla having only one tech level is insufficient in general, but some mods don’t have adequate fighter role coverage either, and it’s not always clear which fighters need to be banned. E.g. the SRA Shikome should not have been a banned fighter
  • More nuanced fighter limits are probably a good idea, like extra limits for superfighters over a certain OP
  • Or: shared equipment pools (especially with a RR groups format)

Equipment/Weapons: GCAI banned, all factions get access to Vanilla/SWP weapons
  • I still don’t know if GCAI deserves to be banned, or what touchups it needs to be considered tournament safe
  • Pretty confident that giving everyone vanilla weapons is the right idea. It’s way too much of a hassle to determine if a faction has similar role weapons and stuff.
  • Giving every faction SWP weapons was probably a mistake, since some factions are balanced around not having 1 OP weapons (looking at ORA here), but having it only available to Vanilla makes an already strong set of factions even stronger
  • Also, giving SWP weapons to everyone means that sometimes the actual faction weapons don’t get used at all

Scheduling, Inscriptions, Submissions
  • Announcing inscription times ahead of time was a very good decision
  • Having two inscription times to accommodate for different time zones / schedules was also very good (thanks Astraltor!). The first set of inscriptions literally filled up in 13 minutes.
  • Too much time between end of inscriptions and start of tournament (3 weeks or something?)
  • Still, having a decent chunk of time before the start of the tournament is very good - there was a period of like a week before the tournament where literally every day a new problem popped up
  • There should always be at least a 1 day gap between the end of submissions and the start of the stream, if possible
  • The “pick your top 3 factions to play” inscription rule was way more controversial than I thought it would be. Some people really, really want to only play one faction. I don’t know if I marketed this poorly or what, but it was sheer luck that we had a decent distribution (though SCY was still left in the cold) of factions.
  • I don’t know how to balance between wanting everyone interested as a player being able to play and having a player waitlist for the inevitable dropouts. Lacking substitute players can be a serious issue
  • The current submission rules are already probably too complicated, even with step-by-step guides and tools available.

Battle Settings
  • Small maps are better for action and streamability, but have higher risk of causing border avoidance AI issues
  • Having more than one “row” of objectives can cause serious AI issues if they aren’t running aggressive/reckless personalities
  • Avoid too many Sensor Jammers - getting players to use ECM Package in their fleets is a good design decision
  • Time out at 420 seconds seems fairly good, could probably have a second one around 600 seconds for even more drastic effects
  • Pre-tournament testing can do a lot to discover any issues with the battlespace size and objective locations

Partial Scores
  • Good/interesting in theory, but in practice it didn’t have much effect
  • Alternative scoring formulas:
    sqrt(losses): helps fleets the most when they’ve eliminated 25% of the opposing fleet. Still simple, but rather uneven boosts
    -losses^2 + 2*losses: helps fleets the most when they’ve eliminated 50% of the opposing fleet, with a symmetric drop in either direction. But obviously, it’s not very viewer friendly
  • Necessary conditions:
    “formula” being a monotonic increasing function from 0 to 1 (killing more enemies is always better)
    “formula - losses” is non-negative from 0 to 1 (only increases scores)

Bingo, audience votes, achievements, etc.
  • People seemed to enjoy it, but I guess the question is whether or not the organizers found the work involved to be worth it. I was happy with it, but I’d ask Aurica/TheKart about how they felt
  • Would be nice to have some way to better tie it into the tournament, rather than being a separate thing.

Officer skills
  • I think officer skill allocation budgets were generally very cool, and there was a lot of variety in how people ended up using their officer skills
    2 skill limit per ship is probably for the best, because each skill is such a monumental gain (and they scale beyond linearly for each additional skill). Higher limits would further incentivise capitals/tall builds, possibly too much

No mid-tournament balance patches
  • Probably the most controversial decision. I think overall it was for the best, but it’s not at all an easy choice.
  • Some modders are willing to do mid-tournament balance patches, but some are not, and suddenly deciding which faction to play involves that in the decision making (bad)
  • Balancing between allowing people to find outliers and not be punished for it and not having the results of a tournament being foretold basically as soon as fleets are revealed
  • Some players got screwed by having bugged ships
  • Easiest solution in my opinion is once again shared hull/equipment pools (within groups)
  • Keep in mind that no matter how much testing is done, the only reasonable way to tell if a faction/ship is unbalanced for tournaments is to run a tournament.

Anti-spam rules
  • No tournament is complete without one
  • Soft caps are much better than hard caps, obviously
  • Should avoid hampering too many strategies (e.g. keeping triple Panda fleet)
  • If you have to add rules mid tournament, make sure they have the potential to affect everyone (i.e. aren’t targeted towards specific players)

Exhibition matches
  • I think they were very fun and a nice way to showcase other factions that didn’t end up in the tournament
  • Should probably have a smaller battle size to limit the variance, however

Some other comments
  • A pre-tournament poll for rules and interest was very helpful
  • Have basic details ready when looking for streamers
  • Release an updated AI Battles as early as possible
  • Have tools, guides, etc. available to make jumping in as a new participant as easy as possible
  • Pre-tournament faction viability testing was helpful for catching factions that were clearly too strong, but quite bad at finding outliers - you have to do a deep dive in order to achieve that
  • As an organizer, don’t use “probably” statements
  • Have a policy for everything, and stick by them :V
  • When problems show up, you have to solve them quickly and unambiguously
  • Better to stick with problems that come up with a tournament’s original design than to over-correct
  • To reiterate: there’s no fair way to do mid-tournament balance changes (at least not under the current style of faction tournaments)
  • No more solo tournament organizers, please.



We've had many, many discussions in the Discord over the past few weeks, so I probably missed some stuff, but hopefully that covers the majority of the noteworthy decisions in this tournament.

I think after this, I'll have one more post about balance thoughts (including the current 0.95 patch notes) and then I'll be set to put this tournament behind me :p

Tartiflette

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #37 on: December 28, 2020, 11:20:39 PM »

Some personal thoughts.

From my (lengthy) experience organizing tournaments, more than one round per week is a big no-no. Thaago tried it, it was hectic and very hard on the participants to find the hours needed to test their fleets every 3 days. A few of the larger tournaments, or those using b03, had their rounds split in two 2.5h streams (because nobody want to watch 5h of ships blowing up non stop), but that's still 1 round per week. There is no way around it: a lot of people can only work on their fleets on the weekends.

5 weeks is actually far from the limit as long as the rounds follow each-other at a constant pace. What felt long was that the early matches had more than a week between events, and the irregular schedule interfered with hype and expectations. A "Wednesday Night Fireworks" type of scheduling is much better suited to retain audience and players attention over longer period of times.

There are many solutions to the blind first round, some of them from previous tournaments: Exhibition round 0, "sensor profile" of the enemy  fleets (how many ships of each size) a week in advance after which you can change your loadouts only... And some other we talked about that might be used later for a fun twist.

I think consistent fleets sizes are better rather than runaway fleet bloating like the early tournaments, but I would like to go back to much smaller fleets someday, where every choice count and spam is less efficient because of the reduced number of ships. 90FP average, maybe 70 would be a good target for a tight, fast paced tournament with a LOT of participants.

Faction specific rules beyond blacklists is a big no-no for me too since then you can get held responsible for why a faction is performing well or not. That includes the use of weapons and fighters. That choice should be in line with how the faction mod has been designed to work. I also still think vanilla "factions" having access to a limited set of fighters is fair. There are terrific wings for each tech levels, and while it limits their versatility, vanilla consistently wins those tournaments anyway so they evidently can survive that limitation.

Partial scoring wasn't that impactful in part due to some runaway winners that had no defeat until the last round, and also due to the single matches: b03 might have seen much tighter scores at the top. In any case, it's more suited to a global round-robin or swiss system rather than the separate groups.

I think officers were almost invisible but that's mainly due to a limitation of the game. For future tournaments I could see having a system like this: every round you get 4 points that can either be assigned as new skills to your existing officers, or be used to add new officers.

I also think having an iron-clad "no mid-tournament patch" would be a mistake because sometimes, patches are not meant to nerf a cheesy strategy, but to save one that is hampered by a fixable AI issue.
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SCC

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #38 on: December 29, 2020, 08:38:31 AM »

If that makes it any better, I didn't go with Vicariuses, because I did not trust carrier AI to use fighters to defend itself, instead of attacking unrelated ships. And LAGs were there not to ship at other ships, but to shoot at fighters. Similar deal with Basileuses: railguns to shoot at fighters and maybe some flankers, while armour package is to make them a bit more survivable, they have more missiles than they know what to do with anyway.

RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #39 on: December 29, 2020, 02:38:00 PM »

Some personal thoughts.
a) yep, agreed entirely.

b) That's a good point - I guess lots of league/circuit styles could work well beyond 5 weeks. Some of the burnout on my end is probably more related to doing tournament-related work since like early October?

c) Yep! I look forward to whatever people (including you) do in the future, just gotta emphasize actually addressing it.

d) I'm not completely sure that spam is much less effective at lower DPs. Six SO Hammerheads will still easily stomp a Paragon, for example, but yeah I would like to see how fights work out with smaller fleets - it'd be something good to test out in some quick one day events, I think (it'd be great if we had way more of those)

e) I agree with this and don't think I advocated for anything faction-specific beyond blacklists - maybe the super-fighters ruling, but if it were something like 20+ OP fighters being limited that still affects over half the factions if I recall correctly. Some fighters do remain a bit out of line (BRDY Vespa, probably the SRD Catharsis too) and I think there is room for some nuanced adjudication on them. For weapon rulings, stuff like the 10th tournament's "no similar roles" rule felt much more arbitrary to me than simply giving everyone vanilla weapons and letting the players decide for themselves because there were no clear criteria for what counted as a similar role weapon. Finally vanilla does have a lot of solid fighters, but when stratified by tech level there some clear roles missing, particularly for midline (they already borrow the Khopesh from low tech, but without SWP they lack a proper anti-missile interceptor and in general lack a cheap 0-6 OP option entirely). My main point is that it's still in a weird position whichever way you do it and I'm not totally convinced about which way is better even still. Fighters remain a serious pain to balance around.

f) While I agree with having more than a single match (ignoring the scheduling constraints), to be fair, I don't think you can simultaneously have runaway winners while also getting tighter scores in a Bo3 format, at least not with any consistency, which would be my main hope for a partial points system. Definitely it would work better with larger groups and stuff though (not sure how it fits in a Swiss system? It's still winners vs. winners all the way to the top, isn't it?). The main issues are things like Thaago's 0.06 points against cSynapse not accurately representing the coinflip nature of the matchup, so I guess maybe an alternative consideration is to take into account hull loss (but probably having it be like half as effective for partial points as actually killing a ship) as well.

g) Do you mean officers were invisible in effectiveness, or invisible UI wise? :P I found the officers had a very noticeable effect, especially in the final fleet compositions where we saw a lot of level 2 officers against level 1 officers. You can see things like a Caesar 1v1ing a Paragon, which is only possible due to the skill disparity. There is definitely room for things like more/better officers as the tournament progresses though.

h) It's probably true that I should have allowed bug fixes, but you also have the problem where some bug fixes are also bundled with balance changes, so what do you do then? Playing it by ear is a real pain either way. I'd probably allow more edge cases to sneak past next time, but it's still something to be very cautious about.

Thanks for the thoughts, Tart.



If that makes it any better, I didn't go with Vicariuses, because I did not trust carrier AI to use fighters to defend itself, instead of attacking unrelated ships. And LAGs were there not to ship at other ships, but to shoot at fighters. Similar deal with Basileuses: railguns to shoot at fighters and maybe some flankers, while armour package is to make them a bit more survivable, they have more missiles than they know what to do with anyway.
I sort of see your point about the Vicariuses, but you have bombers on the Matriarch anyways, so it's not going to be escorting ever and it would only be defending if the carrier was set to Regroup, which probably still happens if you run the elite fighters.

LAGs for anti-fighter makes sense, I guess - it's definitely the one role they're sort of okay at, but I still hate them if you have enough weapon slots that you don't need a dedicated anti-fighter weapon (vs. e.g a Condor). Definitely a reasonable point for the Basileuses, but I'd argue you can accomplish much more with a simple Tactical Laser - it's safer, better vs most fighters, messes with enemy shields, etc. and until you're facing Beholder spam I don't think there's such a thing as too many missiles, heh.

Thaago

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #40 on: December 29, 2020, 02:38:48 PM »

This tournament went well! A few random thoughts:

Partial scoring wasn't critical but it did break a few ties in an unambiguous way, which I consider a good thing, especially in round robin/swiss/group format where ties in the number of wins are common. I'm fairly neutral as to the exact formula - using square roots would have swapped the outcome of one group I believe, but whether thats good or bad really depends on the intended criteria to advance.

I strongly believe all factions should have access to base game weapons, and am neutral/negative on all having access to having SWP. SWP weapons were a moderate boost to ORA in my opinion: without miniblasters I wouldn't have been able to afford any point defense/light guns on a few designs because of the OP costs of SO, and I would have faced the asymmetric loadout penalty to maneuverability.

I am souring quite a bit on 'vanilla' factions having access to mods (SWP+TADA). I think its disingenuous that there is the constant refrain of 'vanilla always win' when the vast majority of those fleets are relying on ships/strategies from those mods (mainly SWP) rather than the base game, and the major outliers of vanilla balance have been addressed by Alex/Rubin's balance changes. If SWP "always wins", shouldn't it be banned as an imbalanced faction just like DME was? There's lots of talk about how SO should be further adjusted in order to make it fair, and while I don't disagree that it needs tweaks, I'll point out that shield bypass was far more consequential to the tournament than SO was.

Anyhow, thanks for organizing this tournament! I had a great time and feel it went pretty smoothly.
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RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #41 on: December 29, 2020, 06:30:42 PM »

I am souring quite a bit on 'vanilla' factions having access to mods (SWP+TADA). I think its disingenuous that there is the constant refrain of 'vanilla always win' when the vast majority of those fleets are relying on ships/strategies from those mods (mainly SWP) rather than the base game, and the major outliers of vanilla balance have been addressed by Alex/Rubin's balance changes. If SWP "always wins", shouldn't it be banned as an imbalanced faction just like DME was? There's lots of talk about how SO should be further adjusted in order to make it fair, and while I don't disagree that it needs tweaks, I'll point out that shield bypass was far more consequential to the tournament than SO was.
I'll note that my winning Midline fleet in the 10th didn't actually use much SWP/TADA material, so it's not always the case that they're the source of vanilla's strength. I also have a feeling that High Tech would have done very well even without Beholders (Low Tech probably wouldn't be able to handle your ORA fleet without the Cathedrals).

DR's also of the opinion that SWP might not be tournament-safe (though I can't 100% tell if he's being tongue-in-cheek about it or not :p). Anyways I wouldn't say anything in the mod is broken or particularly overpowered to the extent some other mods are - the rules just hadn't caught up to their capabilities for this tournament (more aggressive soft anti-spam and limiting giant modular ships, for example). We'd need to feature SWP as its own faction to be sure of it, I think.

Also I expect the upcoming Shield Shunts to be much more balanced than Shield Bypass, which probably won't be used in future events due to vanilla taking over it.

Tartiflette

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #42 on: December 29, 2020, 11:11:10 PM »

There's lots of talk about how SO should be further adjusted in order to make it fair, and while I don't disagree that it needs tweaks, I'll point out that shield bypass was far more consequential to the tournament than SO was.
I skipped over Shield Bypass because vanilla will supersede it with its own version in 0.95 so that point is moot. As for SWP, well the winning fleet did so using mostly vanilla stuff in the end, and the issue with Beholders was mostly caused by a lack of anti-spam rule.

d) I'm not completely sure that spam is much less effective at lower DPs. Six SO Hammerheads will still easily stomp a Paragon, for example, but yeah I would like to see how fights work out with smaller fleets - it'd be something good to test out in some quick one day events, I think (it'd be great if we had way more of those)
Well, with 70DP you can either spam beholders, or bring a Paragon, but not both. A smaller DP average makes it harder to have a fleet that both relies on spam and has some backbone.

Quote
g) Do you mean officers were invisible in effectiveness, or invisible UI wise? :P I found the officers had a very noticeable effect, especially in the final fleet compositions where we saw a lot of level 2 officers against level 1 officers. You can see things like a Caesar 1v1ing a Paragon, which is only possible due to the skill disparity. There is definitely room for things like more/better officers as the tournament progresses though.
I meant that officers were generally glossed over because the only thing visible about them is a silly portrait. It's hard for people that aren't looking at the files to know who did what with their officers and how consequential they were in the battles.
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RustyCabbage

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #43 on: December 30, 2020, 12:05:16 PM »

d) I'm not completely sure that spam is much less effective at lower DPs. Six SO Hammerheads will still easily stomp a Paragon, for example, but yeah I would like to see how fights work out with smaller fleets - it'd be something good to test out in some quick one day events, I think (it'd be great if we had way more of those)
Well, with 70DP you can either spam beholders, or bring a Paragon, but not both. A smaller DP average makes it harder to have a fleet that both relies on spam and has some backbone.

Quote
g) Do you mean officers were invisible in effectiveness, or invisible UI wise? :P I found the officers had a very noticeable effect, especially in the final fleet compositions where we saw a lot of level 2 officers against level 1 officers. You can see things like a Caesar 1v1ing a Paragon, which is only possible due to the skill disparity. There is definitely room for things like more/better officers as the tournament progresses though.
I meant that officers were generally glossed over because the only thing visible about them is a silly portrait. It's hard for people that aren't looking at the files to know who did what with their officers and how consequential they were in the battles.
Ah, gotcha. I had a mildly different--more overt--idea of ship spam, I guess.

And for sure, it'd be really nice if we had some sort of way of making their effects more apparent. It'd be a ton of work, but some sort of toggle-able overlay that casters could flick on or off in the battle screen seems technically doable and would be really cool.



Anyways, some last thoughts about tournament balance. Since the 0.95 patch notes thread is closed now I guess I'll throw in thoughts about them in here as well, given we've had more time to experiment / see them in action:

Tournament-specific changes
Sabot (all types):
EMP damage/shot reduced to 100 (was: 400)
No longer has an on-hit effect
BUG: max speed increased to 5000

I think the EMP damage reduction and taking off the on-hit effect is in a decent spot - sometimes the AI will even flicker against the Sabots without suffering catastrophic EMP damage. That said, I’m not sure how this compares to e.g. removing the EMP damage entirely. The max speed bug changes their effectiveness in an interesting way, being harder to shoot down but also capable of linking with other, longer ranged missiles. While in the 10th tournament it was considered a desirable change, overall I think it has too many externalities to keep.

Converted Hangar: may only be placed on ships with 7 or higher DP.

I don’t think this actually had any meaningful effect. It’s a rule that’s sort of bypassed by the hard fighter limits.
That said, with the nerf to Expanded Deck Crew in 0.95, I think Converted Hangar destroyers are probably going to noticeably outperform dedicated carriers in future events. The downsides simply aren’t significant enough - I’d consider adding a minor nerf to replacement time, but any changes also have to consider destroyers that already have a built-in fighter, which proved to be the most notable outliers in the tournament.

Safety Overrides: now reduces max CR by 20% in addition to its usual effects

I’m not against having the timer be the primary opponent of a SO fleet, but this change didn’t really have the desired effect of making SO fleets more risky (or perhaps it did, but that shouldn’t be the terminal goal). I think the main problem with Safety Overrides is that it’s disproportionately effective with high dissipation ships. They can have extreme amounts of dissipation to work with just from their base dissipation and thus eschew vents for capacitors, which coupled with their generally excellent shields makes them a bit too much. I have a couple guesses for why this didn’t really manifest in earlier events:
Assault Chainguns got significantly nerfed in the 0.95 notes, hurting ballistic SO builds which soaked up a lot of the discussion around SO ships
With the buffs to IR Pulse Lasers and especially Ion Pulsers, SO ships now have reasonable low-flux alternatives to the absurd flux requirements of the Heavy Blaster, so vents are much less necessary.
In any case, my proposed change would be to reduce the increased base dissipation to 1.5x while keeping the 2x dissipation from additional vents which keeps the hullmod usable on lower dissipation ships. I’d also probably lower the speed boost to 30/20/10, since SO destroyers are a bit too fast in my opinion, but I’m not as sure about that.

Fortress Shield: now has a 1.5 second cooldown upon deactivation

I personally don’t think this had much effect when it comes to nerfing shielded Paragons - I’m pretty sure most participants didn’t even notice it, given that it continues to be a suggestion after I brought up the idea of nerfing Paragons even further. :V Still, it doesn’t hurt.

Mine Strike:
Now has 3 max charges.
Chargedown increased to 0.5 (was: 0.25)

Dooms didn’t end up actually being used in the tournament, so perhaps this was a bit of an overnerf, though the Mine Strike ability could be pretty monstrous in testing, especially if multiple Dooms were used in a single fleet. I guess I’d shift the max charges up to 4?

Omen:
DP increased to 6 (was: 5)
Shield efficiency to 0.7 (was: 0.6)

I was worried I had overnerfed the Omen with putting their shield efficiency to 0.7, but thankfully Sad Squidward still used them to great effect in their fleet, so I’m pretty happy with these changes.
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Official Patch Notes
I think Brawlers should not have had their DP cost increased to 6, which puts them sort of in a premiere frigate classification that they frankly don’t deserve. They didn’t see play in the tournament though, so this is just a personal opinion.

The Onslaught changes are mostly great! The ship feels like a real menace to face now, and there’s proper incentive to not downsize the side larges with Heavy Ballistics Integration. I think the TPCs are possibly a bit too strong at 0.6 efficiency (imo they belong somewhere closer to 0.7), but I’ve seen decent arguments for keeping it where it is.

Enforcers surprisingly didn’t see much use despite their significant buffs. Their low dissipation makes them remain poor gun ships, and the nerf to Assault Chainguns hurts their usual viable build as an SO ship, but they’ll probably still have a decent niche in the future as a tanky escort.

The nerf to Recall Device was pretty huge for the Astral - it didn’t seem anywhere near as dangerous as it used to be, and the extra 20 OP it got doesn’t help it nearly as much as it was hurt. Honestly, while a nerf is probably a good thing this seems a bit overboard. I quite liked the 3 charges with a 20-30 second recharge that was used in the 10th tournament - allowing the ship to keep its burst potential at the start of battles but still limiting its effectiveness in the long term.

I think the changes to the Drover (DP to 15) and Reserve Deployment (cooldown to 60, replacement rate reduction) effectively kill it, though the implementation of RD doesn’t quite match what was stated in the patch notes. RD has been decently reined in, so paying 7.5 DP per fighter bay for a destroyer carrier seems a bit absurd (especially when Herons and Moras only cost 6.67 per fighter bay). A 60 second cooldown is also much too long in my opinion, especially if the prospect of player piloting an RD ship is taken into account. I don’t think any other ship system in the game has a cooldown even close to that.

Light Needlers/Railguns feel really good with both at 8 OP - having the former at 7 seemed a little strange to me, so I’m glad they got shifted back up. I think Light Dual Autocannons are in a pretty bad place in comparison since they didn’t receive the accuracy bonus the singular version did. (The patch notes imply they were meant to be buffed with their OP dropping to 5 from 6, but the release version of 0.9.1a already has them at 5 OP…)

The IR Pulse Laser efficiency improving to 0.8 feels pretty great! Whereas before I would almost never use them, I’m finding they’re making their way into my builds here and there. The medium slot Pulse Lasers do feel like they’re being left in the dark in comparison however, especially with Ion Pulsers suddenly actually being more efficient (1.0 vs 1.1).

I appreciate the efficiency improvements to Heavy Burst Lasers, and that we weren’t able to see how important the automatic ignoring of flares will end up being, but in my opinion they still seem to be a pretty bad spot, simply because they don’t do enough damage to hit some key missile HP breakpoints (e.g. 147 damage while Harpoons have 150 HP). Even a minor increase in damage would go a long way to making them worth using in rather important medium energy slots.

The Paladin PD System meanwhile, saw a lot of good use after the buffs, even without the scripted 100 fragmentation damage explosions. I expect it to see a lot more use in 0.95, which is great!

I really like the Ion Pulser efficiency improvements (unlike some other players I could never justify them at 1.33 efficiency), but as mentioned above they seem to completely outclass Pulse Lasers at this point. I’m also not sure they need the increased EMP damage, but I guess I’m not complaining.

I don’t think Warthogs need their engagement range reduced to 2000, but otherwise their changes seem nice. I’m still not sure they’ll see much use, but any improvement for them is a good thing.

Mining Laser improvements are also great. They’re still pitifully ineffective as PD, but they’re no longer strictly worse than an empty weapon slot.
As mentioned above, while the Expanded Deck Crew nerfs are awesome for making carriers less excessive, in the absence of any Converted Hangar adjustments I feel like carriers (especially ones running interceptors/fighters instead of bombers) will be outclassed by CH combat destroyers next patch.

From looking at the Onslaught and other heavily armored modded capital ships, the general impression some of us in the Discord have gotten is it seems like the +500 armor bonus from Heavy Armor is bringing these capital ships dangerously close to having too much armor to reasonably take down. I don’t have any problems with the current Heavy Armor numbers, but it’s something to watch out for in the future, and for any modders trying to figure out how much armor their ships should have.

I thought the bugfix to Solar Shielding to affect shields was going to kill high tech, but while it was a good refit adjustment some players made to their fleets it wasn’t nearly as decisive a change as I thought it would be, so that’s nice.

(Everything I didn’t comment on I still like or at least am neutral towards.)
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Modded Content
I kept track of the modded content that players/viewers were griping about. The full list is posted in the Discord, but the key takeaways for modders/tournament organizers to pay close attention to would be:
  • Ships with built-in fighters usually didn’t have them appropriately accounted for in their DP costs. The Tempest, for example, has excellent built-in fighters with its Terminator Drones, but its requisite 8 DP cost prevents it from being excessive in tournaments. Not so much with a lot of the 10 DP destroyers we saw in this tournament.
  • Fast harpoon variants - missiles with long range, decent to high speed and good tracking. In testing, one should also consider how these missiles perform with ECCM Package; some of these missiles seemed okay without the hull mod, but became too much when used in conjunction.
  • Missile ships. Frigates with multiple medium missile slots (though I personally didn’t think this was much of a problem), destroyers with large missiles slots (probably much more problematic since they are often able to easily run stuff like Converted Hangars at the same time). Basically any ship with 4 front-facing small missiles has the potential to be problematic, though this is certainly a more tournament-specific problem.
Of course, balance in tournaments and balance in campaign are two separate things, so YMMV.
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In general, the tournament PvP meta revolves around three strategies:
  • Missile spam
  • Safety Overrides fleets
  • Shield Bypass capital ships

We made some efforts to nerf SO fleets with the changes, and in my opinion the changes weren’t quite aggressive enough. Shield Bypass remains stubbornly effective, especially with the introduction of Impact Mitigation and other officer skills to tournaments, but I expect that as we transition to Shield Shunts (which will probably be less effective - the extra dissipation from Shield Bypass helps a lot!) they’ll be less of an issue. I don’t know what should be done about missile spam - the main reason it didn’t dominate the tournament was because Beholders hard counter them (and with two Medium Synergy slots, Beholders could themselves be considered a quasi-missile spam ship). I don’t think we’re quite at the point where we need to consider limiting them or banning EMR/ECCM, but imo it deserves more discussion.

(Also to any moderators: feel free to unpin this topic whenever you get the chance, and thanks to Alex for pinning it in the first place!)

Tartiflette

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Re: 11th Starsector Fleet Building Tournament
« Reply #44 on: December 30, 2020, 11:43:52 PM »

Hmm.

....

Hmmmmmmmmm...

You know, thinking about it there is a possibility to make officers actually a really cool visible thing. I could have the mission detect if there is an officer on a ship and add a hullmod that does nothing but to provide a tooltip window to display their portrait, their name, their skills names icons and levels, maybe even a breakdown of the effective stat changes to make the officer role really apparent while going over the fleets.
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