Keep in mind, frigates were buffed because they weren't usable for offense in 0.9.1a late game. And fighters could be spammed agains the AI and it couldn't do anything. If you want to avoid another overcompensation, I feel people need to be very clear on what situations they would like to see be balanced against each other.
Yeah that's the main issue I'm having with this thread. People making all sorts of claims but not really giving specifics (i.e. test situations that they feel justify their position). Or the numbers given are cherry-picked and one-sided, i.e. showing the strongest of one side vs the weakest of another, which will of course lead to lopsided results without really illuminating the situation nor the context. For example, a heavy blaster shot (500 damage) could do as much as 2100 vs shields under the right conditions (+10% from CR, +20% vs capital ship, +10% weapon drills, +20% wolfpack, +30% energy weapon mastery, +50% high energy focus, then all that vs a Conquest (shield eff 1.4) with 0% CR and degraded shields for a shield eff of 1.75), or as little as 117 (-10% firing ship at low CR, 0.6 base shields, -10% from CR, -20% shield modulation, -25% hardened shields, -20% solar shielding)...or really, down to 11.7 if you consider fortress shields. So damage dealt can be increased to as much as 420% or decreased to as low as 23.3%, a range of 18x from the smallest possible to the greatest possible (180x if you consider fortress shields) for the same shot. (Note that 420% * 23.3% = ~98%, so actually, possible damage augmentation almost exactly matches possible damage reduction.) Picking either extreme isn't really going to be relevant for normal play.
For me it's fairly simple. If you want to claim something is overpowered, then you justify it by showing that it does significantly better than other fleet compositions/loadouts against the toughest fights in the game, at a lower cost (i.e. least DP used for example). To me those would be the Tesseract fight, the Tesseract bounty, multiple Ordos fleets, and Star Fortresses. For me personally the most relevant one is tackling multiple Ordos fleets, since the others are essentially one-offs whereas farming for alpha cores is something my fleet will spend a lot of time doing repeatedly in any given playthrough -- so it's the fight that's the most important to optimize against. Right now my Ordos "test fleet" (just a random fleet that I saved before the encounter, that I use now to try out different fleets) consists of 4 Radiants (including one with 5 tachyons) and 7 Brilliants, totaling 368 FP.
Claims about fleet effectiveness against almost any other fight (pirate fleets, faction fleets, etc.) are more or less irrelevant since those fights are going to be easier and thus by definition can be done with more types (i.e. not-as-good) of fleets. Sure the player might feel good using those fleets to kill pirates, but pirates are more or less designed to be stomped on by whatever the player has in the first place -- so they're not a good measure of what's overpowered (i.e. what is too strong).
Thus for example when I say Doom is overpowered, the justification is that I can pilot a Doom solo to single-handedly defeat the Tesseract fights, and as the flagship with 6 spoilery small missiles and 2 spoilery medium frag hybrids, it two-shots Brilliants (with mines to redirect their shields in the opposite direction), which makes the Ordos fleet pretty easy to defeat. I haven't found any other ship that can defeat those fights as easily.
Against the Ordos test fleet, the frigates even when using Wolfpack don't contribute as much as other fleet compositions (using Medusas, Furies, Champions, Auroras, Radiants, or any combination of those) that I've tested, so I don't see why Wolfpack makes frigates too strong. Frigates without SO are simply too weak, and with SO simply don't last long enough and start suffering from CR (which ends up increasing the overall supply to recover). So I'm not really seeing the argument for why frigates are supposed to be overpowered.
Not really. People often put a lot of thought and effort into things that don't turn out and you don't need to understand every aspect of the reasoning to evaluate the effects, though that often helps.
Perhaps but calling it "arbitrary and senseless" is what I'm talking about. It is
not arbitrary and it is
not senseless, and calling it such doesn't drive the discussion forward (doesn't raise any points to persuade nor refute). It's more productive to say "it doesn't work out and here are my reasons why".
In this case I understand the idea behind SO fine - let ships do something powerful and cool while balancing with time and fitting limitations. The issue is it's too powerful and undermines ship classes and roles, doesn't make any sense from a conceptual standpoint (suddenly having power capabilities exceeding that of larger ship classes from 'overridden safeties'), and the drawbacks are uninteresting in that they either don't come into play at all or it's a no-brainer to approximate optimal usage.
It changes ship classes/roles, but doesn't undermine them -- it's effectively a new role. An SO Aurora does not play the same as a non-SO Aurora. Conceptually there's no reason why the next class up needs to have more than double the power capabilities (i.e. why SO can't mean a ship has more power than the next class up); in fact a Sunder (destroyer) has 500 base dissipation, the same as a Legion (capital), even though the Legion is two sizes up. So there is plenty of variation in power capabilities even before SO. Not sure how you can say the drawbacks don't come into play at all or are no-brainers; other than trivial fights, running out of PPT is always a concern, forcing the player to take more risk and be more aggressive (and means switching out of SO once the lack of PPT means more supplies needed to recover), and the short weapon range means the player has to create opportunities and gauge potential enemy fire a lot more effectively.
I think it can be said uncontroversially that it wasn't Alex's intent for me to fly my eagle heavy cruiser with the speed of a frigate (190 with UI and the jets on!) and nearly 2000 flux dissipation. I mean, I've got problems, but getting into, and fighting at, close range in my eagle ain't one of em.
I disagree. Seeing as how people have been able to do this for a long time without Alex seeing fit to change it, I'd say Alex intends for this to be a possible build choice. 190 with jets on means 140 without jets, and you've given up a big chunk of OP, weapon range severely limited past 450 units, plus 15% weapon range reduction on top of that. Those are pretty severe drawbacks on top of the PPT, but if the player wants to do this, I don't think he sees it as a problem.
What I meant to say write is that Safety Overrides Frigades using an officer and wolfpack tactics (plus al the thingmagigs and thinkabobs) can reliably get close to or even suprass the Peak Performance Time of Overridden Destroyers and Cruisers. The Glimmer is one of the most infamous Frigades able to do this since Automated Ships have a rather high PPT in the first place 
That's more a matter of the PPT ranges inherently overlapping between the different ship sizes. Sure larger ship sizes generally means longer PPT but there's a lot of variation within each ship size. Frigate PPT varies from 120-360 seconds, destroyer PPT varies from 240-420 seconds, cruiser PPT varies from 360-540 seconds, and capital PPT varies from 600-720 seconds. So yes a high-PPT frigate lasts longer than a shorter-PPT destroyer. It has nothing to do with SO though. An Enforcer destroyer (420 seconds) also lasts longer than a Heron cruiser (360 seconds). Wolfpack does make frigate PPT more like destroyer PPT.
Tempest can. 2 posts above you saying the same thing. I'll post it below. edit: That is a cruiser below but w/e same point.
Yup, can confirm watching an AI controlled tempest with all its bonuses just fly up and gun down a conquest head to head is silly. Sure its a non-officered, D mod conquest with a mediocre build, and I'm going down the leadership 9 Tech 5 route, but thats some serious powerup on the frigate!
That's against a non-officer d-mod Conquest, hardly the stuff of nightmares. So you're basically taking the very strongest of one ship and pitting it against the weakest of another. This is not a strong support for "frigates are overpowered because frigates can defeat capitals 1 vs 1" because while technically true (i.e. it is possible to construct such a case), it will never occur nor be relevant in any non-trivial fights, and as such isn't a situation that balance decisions should be centered around. (To wit: you can also have a frigate kill an Atlas but no one is going to say that justifies the position either.)
The other time you used this argument in this thread was back on page 5:
I guess we're pretending that there isn't a video in this thread of a High tech frigate killing the king of Low Tech. Are we pretending the enforcer would do better in that fight? Maybe try it against a Dominator? Either High and to a lesser extent midline are OP or the low tech is grossly UP.
I know I'm beating a dead horse to death here but a ship being able to kill the sim Onslaught has nothing to do with if it's high tech or not. The only thing that matters is whether or not the ship is fast enough to get to the Onslaught's rear. If it is, then that's where the AI will go and then it's a slow (or not so slow) death for the Onslaught. To wit, I attached a screenshot of a Pather Lasher under AI control (autopilot) killing the sim Onslaught.
If you look at the upper right of the screenshot, you'll see that it's...under version 0.9.1a! Yes that's right, ships could do this even before the update, and it has nothing to do with Wolfpack Tactics, or the new Target Analysis, or Energy Weapon Mastery, or whatever other changes the update brought that supposedly made frigates overpowered. But I don't recall many "frigates are overpowered they kill capitals too easily" complaints back in 0.9.1a. (Side note: The reapers were a disappointment, 2 got shot down by PD, 1 hit shields and barely did any damage to the Onslaught, and only 1 actually hit successfully. The majority of the damage was from the light assault guns. And yeah if you look closely you'll see that I didn't even bother to take off the malfunctions d-mod from the Lasher.)
Low tech, Midline, High tech max level ya. All were no issue. I didn't say a max level Nexus, just that they didn't have issues with ones I came across.
Are you saying that your frigate fleet can handle star fortresses? Under AI control i.e. without input from the player? On a whim I took 8 Hyperions up against Coatl's battlestation (i.e. level 2), and with or without SO, they only took out 1 of the PD bastions before dying. Meanwhile 2 stock Paragons or 3 stock Onslaughts ("stock" meaning I addship'ed them and made no modifications beyond adding officers), i.e. the same amount of DP, were each able to kill the battlestation. So the Hyperions did worse than an equivalent amount of Paragons or Onslaughts and neither of those capitals were "purpose-built" for the task. And you're saying that your frigates can handle star fortresses (i.e. Chicomoztoc), with the mines and so forth? And you previously said the fleet could handle anything that you ran into (which presumably includes Ordos fleets, and presumably also under AI control). What fleet composition and loadouts are you using?
