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[Draba]

Logistics is important. It's not that I think it's important, it's that it is important. You are pretending it's not.

Note that I specifically ignored that part at first, and later mentioned it's just my experience.
You say supplies were somehow important to me with absolute certainty.
No, if you just get a friggin hauler and don't get half the fleet shot to hell in bounties they genuinely aren't a big deal.
Cost is low compared to bounty payouts and you salvage a decent chunk even without skills, you actually have to throw away supplies or weapons after the easier battles.

On standard battlesize, against strong enemies Hyperion and Scarab constantly got into crit malfunction range for me (despite having every possible boost).
Don't think it's practical.

You clearly are doing it wrong then. If you were not just past the PPT but into crit malfunction range then you failed on a grand scale. Which makes think everything you are saying should be in question in regards to these specific skills.

Entirely possible, after checking a few loadouts removed SO from Scarabs since they feel better without it. That and the Hyperion suffer more than the rest from SO, and really don't need it to work.
Thankfully you are here to demonstrate, a video against a 400-ish radiant/brilliant ordo with 2 or more radiants would be nice (300 battlesize ofc, and not the useless paladin or HIL radiants).
Curious about a way to consistently kill them with SO Hyperion/Scarab mix, without losing ships or tanking CR on the entire fleet.

[Arcagnello]

SO frigades more or less assume you augment them with Wolfpack tactics, Reliability Engineering, Elite System Expertise and most likely have the Hardened Subsystems HUllmod integrated into the ship with a story point aswell.

That said, even with all these augments, SO Frigades very much function with a snowball effect.

The more you have in your fleet, the easier it will be for each one of them to do their job while the less of them you have compared to the rest of your combat flotilla and the more you'll have to cycle them in and out of combat in drawn out engagements.

As an example, a high tech fleet "just" using two Overridden Hyperions with officers and 6 Gamma Core Glimmers (speaking from personal experience here) will have a much easier time simply deploying half of the frigate force at a time and retreat it to replace it with the other half as the Combat readiness alerts start popping up.

Deploying all the 6 Glimmers first for the initial Buoy grab and swiftly retreating them to deploy the Two Hyperions once they get the PPT alert is a sound strategy, deploying 3 Glimmers and 1 Hyperion at a time also works and even makes sure you can immediately get an identical frigade out into battle as soon as one gets disabled.

[Draba]

As an example, a high tech fleet "just" using two Overridden Hyperions with officers and 6 Gamma Core Glimmers (speaking from personal experience here) will have a much easier time simply deploying half of the frigate force at a time and retreat it to replace it with the other half as the Combat readiness alerts start popping up.

Deploying all the 6 Glimmers first for the initial Buoy grab and swiftly retreating them to deploy the Two Hyperions once they get the PPT alert is a sound strategy, deploying 3 Glimmers and 1 Hyperion at a time also works and even makes sure you can immediately get an identical frigade out into battle as soon as one gets disabled.

They do get in each other's way quite a lot, and once they reach the top they wasted too much time blobbing on the reinforcements.
Partial deployment or letting enemies get away from the edge might work better.
Having all reckless officers would almost definitely work better but I do not have a save above all aggressive.

It certainly is possible to kill most fleets with SO Hpyerions/Scarabs, just seemed pointless to force since the non-SO ones do not struggle against the same enemies.
SO adds a stricter timer and didn't solve the main annoyance for me, some ships still manage to get themselves blown out of nowhere.

[Arcagnello]

As an example, a high tech fleet "just" using two Overridden Hyperions with officers and 6 Gamma Core Glimmers (speaking from personal experience here) will have a much easier time simply deploying half of the frigate force at a time and retreat it to replace it with the other half as the Combat readiness alerts start popping up.

Deploying all the 6 Glimmers first for the initial Buoy grab and swiftly retreating them to deploy the Two Hyperions once they get the PPT alert is a sound strategy, deploying 3 Glimmers and 1 Hyperion at a time also works and even makes sure you can immediately get an identical frigade out into battle as soon as one gets disabled.

They do get in each other's way quite a lot, and once they reach the top they wasted too much time blobbing on the reinforcements.
Partial deployment or letting enemies get away from the edge might work better.
Having all reckless officers would almost definitely work better but I do not have a save above all aggressive.

It certainly is possible to kill most fleets with SO Hpyerions/Scarabs, just seemed pointless to force since the non-SO ones do not struggle against the same enemies.
SO adds a stricter timer and didn't solve the main annoyance for me, some ships still manage to get themselves blown out of nowhere.

I tend to solve the "grouping" issue with both reckless Officers and "Engage" orders on most of the enemy ships to equally spread my fleet around and not have them get in eachother's way. I've got enough command points (due to Wolfpack tactics massively boosting Command Point recovery speed) to easily switch the engage orders into "Eliminate" ones against isolated enemies too.

I find SO frigades to be a lot more survivable with a reckless officer, as they tend to only briefly retreat when their flux is very high/they start taking hull damage and the extra speed usually ensures they're not "caught with their flux pants down". It's also a good idea to put "Avoid" orders on some particularly annoying ships sometimes so that SO frigades will operate out of their range and focus on enemies outside it.

I can tell you from experience that a ship of yours still won't engage an enemy you have an "engage" order on if there's an enemy ship near it with the "Avoid" one. It very much seems like a Global order that overrides the other one if they clash.

[Drazan]

This discussion got extremly siderailed.
It started as a post saying that frigates are too strong, and went -> hyperion too strong-> high tech is too strong -> low tech is too weak -> high tech is too strong -> SO is too strong

I think we should focus on one thing we should all agree on, and that is a FRIGATE. SHALL. NOT. 1v1. A. CAPTIAL.
Perhaps not even a cruiser.
t really is a good thing that they are usefull on the battlefiled now, but this is far too much. Frigates are for capturing comand points and harassing enemy, not to kill everything. Wrecking stuff is cruiser and capital business.

[Locklave]

It started as a post saying that frigates are too strong, and went -> hyperion too strong-> high tech is too strong -> low tech is too weak -> high tech is too strong -> SO is too strong

Everything you listed is 100% on topic, even if people disagree about why specifically.

- SO is a major factor
- Low/Midline Frigates need a carve out to not be included in this power problem
- Low tech specifically is underpowered even with the frigate buffs and nerfs to fix the High tech need to not make the low tech frigates worse

I think we should focus on one thing we should all agree on, and that is a FRIGATE. SHALL. NOT. 1v1. A. CAPTIAL.
Perhaps not even a cruiser.
t really is a good thing that they are usefull on the battlefiled now, but this is far too much. Frigates are for capturing comand points and harassing enemy, not to kill everything. Wrecking stuff is cruiser and capital business.

I will state that you are correct and that shouldn't be happening at all. But it is clearly not just a general frigate problem, because they can't all do it.

[Igncom1]

I mean what is a torpedo frigate supposed to be good for if it can't torpedo a capital ship

I mean, it is ok for some ships to the worse then others but perhaps not to this degree?

I suppose at least it's a breath of fresh air from when frigates used to be utterly useless.

[Arcagnello]

AH, Locklave (named you Draba for some reason, sorry  ) and Igncom1 beat me to making a similar response. It's all connected really


Something as simple as "stopping frigades from being so good" does carry a lot of unexpected nuance with it.

Take Safety Overrides as an example, it got an easy Duct Tape Fix which prevented it from being Integrated into ships, but that did not stop High Tech (and Midline to a degree) Frigades (Scarab, Wolf, Glimmer, Hyperion...), Destroyers (Fury, Medusa, Hammerhead, Fulgent...) and Cruisers (Aurora, Champion, Brilliant...) from abusing it anyway since most of them had higher-than-average Ordinance Points for their own respective class in the first place.

What it did do on the other hand was pushing a lot of Low Tech ships that instead had very low OP into either irrelevancy, heavily cutting on their SO variants (and requiring 2, even 3 other integrated hullmods to make everything fit) or attempting to stay useful without the hullmod entirely.

We risk these hypothetical "pinpoint rebalances" aimed at frigades to have the same amount of unwanted effects. There's a high risk of nerfing something with the purpose of pushing a specific ship from "broken" down to "overperforming" that also ends up dragging ships which used to be "situational" down to "useless".

[Drazan]

Everything you listed is 100% on topic, even if people disagree about why specifically.

Yeah, yeah its all connected to some degree I agree. Comparing tech levels, and the role of safety override definitely have place in this discussion, but the arguents sometimes strayed too far from the original post.

I mean what is a torpedo frigate supposed to be good for if it can't torpedo a capital ship

I mean, it is ok for some ships to the worse then others but perhaps not to this degree?

I suppose at least it's a breath of fresh air from when frigates used to be utterly useless.

A torpedo frigate shall be good aganist capitals, just not in a 1v1 fight.
I agree that it wasn't good when frigtes were totally useless lategame, but i dont think that this is better.

[Drazan]

I think the problem is that the overpowered frigates have too shields and good flux stats (especially with SO). This is what allows them to stay close enough to a capital ship to destroy it. Scarab, tempest, and hyperion should have worse shields, and worse flux stats. So if they get tto close to capital level weapons, they have no chance to survive.
SO perhaps should give a flat increase to dissipation, depending on hull size. You pay OP depending on hull size, so the bonus you get should be the same.

[Lucky33]

Let me help you to get back on the rails.

Frigates are noticeably better in 0.95 because build-in hull mods exist now. And it has the most effect with the high-tech ones because energy weapons were balanced by the OPs needed to vent all the flux they generated. That's no longer the case since there are alot of spare OP now. But low-tech needs it to mount weapons and thus leaving high-tech in the leaders.

[Warnoise]

Currently speed>>>>anything else.

The game now is all about speed. You have fast ships with decent shield? GG enjoy your easy mode.

Even the AI behaves way better when piloting a fast ship. That's easy to observe when fighting remnants.

Currently the balance is in a very bad position. I have a feeling that it reached a point where changing numbers can't fix it anymore.

Frigates feeling strong is due to the speed meta the game is promoting now. Why have a dominator when you can have a bunch of scarabs which not only can tank better thanks to their shield+speed, they also can dish out some nice sustained energy damage to harrass and disable strong enemy ships. Who needs an Onslaught when you can an army  tempests or TT brawlers which can swarm anything and destroy it?

The worst part is, the skills Alex introduces made things even worse. They pushed the meta even more towards speed.

There is simply no counterplay against speed and that imo should change if we want a more balanced game.

PS: Energy weapons are also more powerful than kinetics weapons.

[SCC]

Currently the balance is in a very bad position. I have a feeling that it reached a point where changing numbers can't fix it anymore.

Changing numbers is how we got here, so I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

I wonder if there have been any AI changes that affect mainly fast ships or swarming behaviour.

[Hiruma Kai]

I think we should focus on one thing we should all agree on, and that is a FRIGATE. SHALL. NOT. 1v1. A. CAPTIAL.

I disagree with this statement. 

Especially if if that frigate is player piloted with s-mods and skills, and the capital is AI run with a terrible default fit and no skills.  If I can solo an entire 10 capital/10 cruiser/10 destroyer-frigate intel fleet in a single capital (Odyssey), more than a ratio of 14 in DP, I don't see why a player frigate shouldn't be able to overcome a 5 DP ratio (8 vs 40).

The fact is, many capitals are explicitly designed not to work well when isolated.  In a fleet line up or with an escort or two, they work much, much better.

For example, when I used Onslaughts in 0.9.1a as line holders, I always gave each a cruiser carrier escort which seemed to up their killing and survival efficiency a lot.  In 0.95a, I've been using a pair of Luddic Path restored Lashers, a Mora, or a Legion XIV.

[intrinsic_parity]

Yeah many capitals are pretty trivial to 1v1 with any moderately maneuverable ship because they are susceptible to flanking. I would more take issue with a frigate that can beat a capital from the front/in a slug fest. Frigates should be squishier and have less firepower, but I think that is already pretty universally true.