Hm...
I do however remember someone (Hiruma Kai? pairedeciseaux?) pitting 6 Condors vs 5 Drovers (or 12v10) with the former winning. Would 8 Geminis beat 6 Drovers the same way? - I'm guessing not, but I should run it to see. And then would 10 Gemini beat 9 Condors? Flak helps a lot, I suppose.
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18804.0
Ah, I was thinking of
this post, but yeah that thread sums it up much better.
I have a conspiracy theory that the person who starts these tier list posts intentionally makes one that's, well let's just say "weird" so it gets more responses since others want to give out their "right" opinions. This is the 3rd one and in every one OP made a very questionable tier list. Now obviously tier lists in this game aren't nowhere near as important or tell you much in any way since there's too many variables. I mean it's just a simple ship tier list and you can see everybody has their own logic by which they sort the tiers (which is imo dumb, you should be ideally making it the same way as OP to avoid confusion). Someone here made one with 3 tiers... like what? You can't tell anything from that, I'd argue you'd need at least 6 tiers to easily put ships into their own place.
I thought of posting my own one here since I already made it for the last thread but now I see it needs some changes. And I honestly can't even think in the current vanilla since the whole tournament used the balance changes from the patch notes. So I'd be making changes only to make the list completely irrelevant in whatever time the update drops.
Note to those who'll still put their tier lists here: Specify if your list assumes all ships piloted by AI, player or just the average. Ignoring campaign elements is kinda weird since the whole point of the list is to give a picture how each ship is useful in the actual game. I mean RustyCabbage put the Mule and Shepherd in D tier, that's crazy (yes I know it only assumes combat).
As you say, tier lists are pretty unhelpful in general since you're mapping a high dimensional data point (how "good" a ship is) into a single line. For me, the only way to make it somewhat useful is to be very specific about what the output represents.
Like, what does this tier list tell you?
This is roughly a list about how much I value ships in campaign. It tells you that I like to smuggle (Mule P), I like fast burn speeds (Falcon jumps up two tiers, most capitals drop drastically), I don't like unnecessary costs (capitals drop, low tech drops 'cuz of fuel usage), etc. It doesn't address how I don't prioritize bounties much or exploration early, or that by the time I use capitals I'm usually in the post-scarcity phase of the game anyway, and if I don't mention it, whether or not these ratings change if I'm more inclined to personally pilot the ship, etc. Sure. Now how do you map it to your own experience? Well, you don't, because everyone's playing the campaign their own way. At least with the other tier list, someone like Thaago can argue that Geminis outperform Condors in combat (whether or not this is true, I dunno still, but we have some common ground to work with).
Hence why I find it hard to comment on other people's tier lists, Generally, I have little idea what criteria people are using to categorize the ships so by default, I'm going to view it as a scale for "how much do I like this ship?" Which can be neat, but it's probably not going to change my mind on anything.
