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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: The Frigate Bias  (Read 27253 times)

Locklave

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #180 on: May 25, 2021, 04:04:01 PM »

I was out of line, apologies garter_snake.
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ElPresidente

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #181 on: May 26, 2021, 01:48:51 AM »

I wouldn't consider the names of "frigates" "Capital ships" and so on to have any meaning in this game, or even real life lol, beyond cool sounding titles that are vaguely applied.

Frigates used to be the some of the biggest ships in the fleet behind ships of the line (of battle).... now look at em!

The name is not important, the role is.
In this context, frigate refers to small, cheap warships - you can call it escort, destroyer, gunboat, whatever. Troughout history they have always been applied to roles that are best for their attributes (speed, mobility, small size, cost) - patrol, escort, pickets.

If you look at WW2, for example, destroyers were never a core of any force, they were always support. The cases in which they directly engaged enemy fleets without backup by bigger capital ships are rare and usually the result of circumstances or desperation.
« Last Edit: May 26, 2021, 01:52:24 AM by ElPresidente »
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Vanshilar

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #182 on: May 26, 2021, 04:18:46 AM »

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?

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ElPresidente

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #183 on: May 26, 2021, 04:29:40 AM »

Remove the fleet limit to players can REALLY swarm with frigates.

But frigates don't need to be more powerful. They are NOT and SHOULD NOT be there for unsupported offense. A full frigate fleet SHOULD be butchered by a normal fleet. The ONLY time a frigate should be able to take out a capital is by swarming or attacking while it's distracted by another capital (basically torpedo runs). Their job is to control space - to zip around, harass supply lines, take out support ships, capture points. In other words, to be annoying as F***.

I know frigates are the prototypical hero ship, but those hero ships are usually doing side mission and stealthy stuff, not attacking capitals. In in a few rare cases wherey they do (and win), it's either terrible writing or some ancient super-tech asspull that saves them.

Some are basically asking for a handgun to as useful in a military engagement as a assault rifle.
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Megas

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #184 on: May 26, 2021, 04:39:47 AM »

The hero ship in this release is (or should be) the Ziggurat.  Very powerful and unique.  Once the player gets his hands on it, it practically becomes his signature ship (whether or not the player actually uses it).  Too bad it is a huge hangar queen.

Ziggurat is Starsector's Vindicator (from Star Control 2).
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Badger

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #185 on: May 26, 2021, 04:50:47 AM »

It's more productive to say "it doesn't work out and here are my reasons why".

I just did, and also previously in the thread.

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.

There is a both a conceptual and balance issue with a hullmod doubling flux dissipation. For the former it doesn't make sense that 'overriding safeties' should accomplish anything like this. Gameplay-wise it is an overpowering (and overpowered) effect.

Yes it's a new role - a run up and smash things with your overpowered hullmod role  ;).

Sunder v Legion is not really a good example for the claim that flux dissipation varies unpredictably in relation to ship classes / size. One is a (missile-heavy) carrier, the other is a specialist ship specifically built to be a glass cannon and leverage an oversized, flux-hungry energy mount. On the whole, bigger ship bigger power.

Most fights are trivial (and many can be rendered so by SO). Having to swap out for some minor end-game content doesn't really affect the dynamic afaics, particularly because it takes no particular insight to do so.

More supplies is kind of moot given the extremely low difficulty of the economic side of the game. I play with Ruthless Sector (very good) and even then I couldn't care less about maintenance outside the very early game. That's not a combat drawback.

Re PPT as I argued previously it doesn't seem very interesting because while it lasts there is no drawback to having SO active and the ship is overpowered during this period, and it's quite easy to know when it's not going to last or when to switch out SO ships. It's just personal preference, I like ships to behave somewhat predictably i.e. within a reasonable range for the kind of ship they are, and then you can differentiate with interesting modifications, without having the option to suddenly change the ship into one much stronger without any kind of real explanation of why this can be done and (for me) undermining the game's careful and interesting balance with weapons, flux capacity etc.

Re range - again, as mentioned previously, range limitations on SO is kind of a joke since what you want to be doing with a SO ship is get right in the enemies' face anyway.
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SCC

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #186 on: May 26, 2021, 08:10:38 AM »

The punching bag was the sim Onslaught. No officer, no skills, etc., resulting in shield efficiency of 1.0.
Yeah, this is exactly the reason why I test against it, if I want to get shield damage numbers without shield efficiency affecting them.

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.
Could you send it to me? Thanks.

the flagship with 6 spoilery small missiles and 2 spoilery medium frag hybrids
You don't even need omega weapons. 4 AMB, 2 Ion Pulser Doom is probably enough to defeat everything in the game.

Radiants
I'll give you that Radiant isn't as busted as DC or phase ships, but it's still a step above all non-DC, non-phase ship fleets.

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.
I have done some quick tests. Against simulator Conquest, Glimmer feels a lot stronger now.
Heavy Blaster, 2 IR Pulses, 2 Sabot Racks loadout: In 0.9.1 on its own, with many skills and my piloting, it wasn't really a threat on its own to the Conquest. In 0.95, I was able to flux it out fairly easily, with the best run getting it down to 50% hull.
Ion Pulser (which got buffed in 0.95), 1 Anti-Matter Blaster, 1 IR Pulse, 2 Sabot Racks: In 0.9.1, while I can disable the Conquest's weapons, I cannot deal any permanent damage to it. In 0.95, I was able to destroy it while using 4 of 12 sabots, so I probably could do it again once or twice.

Lucky33

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #187 on: May 26, 2021, 09:04:34 AM »

Stop bullying ancient Onslaughts.

Use this for actual combat testing:



For calculation purposes there is a Practice Targets mod.
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garter_snake

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #188 on: May 26, 2021, 09:44:26 AM »

I think I got flamed but the post got edited out lmao

Anyway, yeah, post your station killing frigate fleet.  If it's generalist/easily obtainable stuff I'll eat crow, but if it's a bunch of sp buffed tempests/hyperions you have to treasure hunt the hulls for, captained by a bunch of officers you have to treasure hunt the natures for(though I guess mentoring is a thing now, which I didn't realize before today), then I think your midgame efficiency argument falls on its face vs just grabbing an onslaught and pulling it out of storage anytime you need to crack a pirate spawn.

Frankly I don't see how you're killing t3 at all.  They throw out a shitton of fire.
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SCC

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #189 on: May 26, 2021, 10:04:03 AM »

Tempests are very easy to get. Just check Tri-Tachyon, League or Independent colonies. It's easy enough that I don't get Tempests early only because I choose to willingly not to buy them, not because I can't.

Arcagnello

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #190 on: May 26, 2021, 10:50:14 AM »

...Why does that Radiant have 4 Gravitons in SYnergy slots that could very well fit harpoons or sabots? Even 4 Ion BEams would be a better investment....
Wait, why does it have no PD and uses the 5 Cheapest to fire large energy weapons where it could very well use 5 Tach Lances as a starting option anyway?
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Locklave

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #191 on: May 26, 2021, 01:46:22 PM »

Tempests are very easy to get. Just check Tri-Tachyon, League or Independent colonies. It's easy enough that I don't get Tempests early only because I choose to willingly not to buy them, not because I can't.

Omens too, pretty common, gotta have that anti fighter/missiles tank frigate that disables everything in sight constantly. They don't even need captains.
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Lucky33

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #192 on: May 26, 2021, 02:44:38 PM »

...Why does that Radiant have 4 Gravitons in SYnergy slots that could very well fit harpoons or sabots? Even 4 Ion BEams would be a better investment....
Wait, why does it have no PD and uses the 5 Cheapest to fire large energy weapons where it could very well use 5 Tach Lances as a starting option anyway?

Sabots on the un-officered ship create bad reflex (8 sec interval between shots instead of 4) - not good for training purposes. Harpoons will not fire unless you are close to overload or Radiant already close to death. 800 instantaneous, sustained and very long range dps against shields is pretty decent. But I do replace them from time to time with the Ion Pulsers. However disproportion in range is noticeable and it is useful mostly for the SO tests.

It has kill zone in the frontal arc just as Onslaught. Destroys all incoming missiles/fighters. Autopulse Laser is the most burstiest weapon for the Large Energy apart from the Omega arsenal. 33750 hardflux energy damage (from x5) in 4,5 sec.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #193 on: May 26, 2021, 02:53:54 PM »

I would probably prefer 4x am blaster in the forward small slots over 4x grav beams. Or 2x am blaster and 2x Ion pulser.
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Lucky33

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Re: The Frigate Bias
« Reply #194 on: May 26, 2021, 03:18:33 PM »

AMB's have the same problem as Ion Pulsers. Good only for SO training. In normal one you simply keep the range open.
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