@Arcagnello
Thats really not right. In the order of your objections:
Point defense:
On the one hand, the ship has only a few vulcans: I've only invested a very little bit into PD in terms of OP. But it also has the pd skill (for the fighters), and Vulcans are good. What does this ship do in terms of point defense
in practice? It shoots down Salamanders during their orbit 95% of the time, because salamanders orbit within vulcan range of a capital. I just tested it against a set of enemies with 7 salamander launchers (with my main guns turned off and fighters set to engage a far target) and it got hit by salamanders 2 times, knocking out a single engine for a few seconds before the double repair speed got it back on: this included an AI Condor firing off a burst of 6 salamanders at once (none of those 6 in close order managed to hit, with no fighters around). And the reason I had to turn off the guns was because the guns are longer ranged than salamanders and I was having a hard time getting enough salamanders to fire at once to be a challenge to the PD.
Tougher missile enemies: it stops about 90% of an Onslaughts anni stream. It reliably shoots down reapers, for example fired by Enforcers at medium/close range. When facing the sim astral with dual squalls, flares from broadswords, and incoming atropos, it shoots down about half the squalls and atropos: definitely not perfect, but also pretty darn good for 24 OP's worth of small mount PD (and the ship takes 0 hits from the atropos on hull, so good enough!). The ship doesn't have an impenetrable PD screen, but it has decent PD for stopping medium missile threats, including salamanders and reapers, for low cost.
For anti fighter: with skill, the vulcans are 6000 dps vs fighters, plus the Mjolnir being 1000 dps and accurate enough to be hitting fighters at long range (and the Mk IX lands the occasional hit because of its spread and is surprisingly good at overloading daggers at range when they are massed, but its not really that great anti fighter). Granted there are a lot of misses vs fighters but believe me: fighters do not live long around this thing. When I fight the Omegas, in general the Legion underperforms because the Omegas have extraordinarily good anti fighter, but it got 45 fighter kills in the final mop up stage of one run (26 from the Mjolnir, the thing is deadly). Vs the sim Astral + all 3 condors + gemini in a combined missile/fighter stress test, with no allies to cover the rear like in a real battle: The only real threat is if it takes a bombing run to the rear, which in a real battle where the player gives orders and has more than 1 ship should never happen.
If I fill in the empty 2 vulcans with poor arcs but that do just barely reach forward, which I do have the OP to do, then the PD gets significantly better. I should probably do that, but honestly the current PD works well in most situations. When I do that, the ship shoots down 95%+ of an onslaughts anni stream and 90% of a 2x Squall stream.
Flux:
The ship firing its main guns is 1013 flux, then 200 shield flux, with 1095 dissipation. Point defense is 120 f/s and not usually firing. For a ship with 16.8k capacity this is perfectly fine. For the main guns with shields on, it would take 71 seconds to reach
half flux. Thats continuous fire, with no breaks for the guns to retrain, no enemy getting out of range, not swapping control from the active gun to a missile group (which the AI loves to do). That is plenty of time. If the ship is in its flux limited stage due to enemy fire with shields on, the duty cycle of the guns would be 89%, IE for every second that the guns spend not firing for whatever reason, the flux lowers by enough to support 10 seconds more firing: thats higher than big guns like this usually achieve due to target switching, turret rotation, and group changes. If the AI is in the 'shields down' part of its flux routine at high flux, the main guns are below dissipation, so it never needs to stop firing, and if it does stop firing its only for a few seconds.
Your statement that low tech ships should never have weapon flux higher than dissipation goes a long way to explaining why you think they are bad. Thats wrong for ships that can mount efficient guns: they can win the flux war even without missiles simply by fluxing out the enemy before fluxing themselves. I'm not advocating going totally crazy, and flux dissipation should usually be maxed because its very valuable, but sticking to flux neutrality is a waste of potential for any ship. Any time the ship has shields up, no soft flux, and weapons not firing is wasted dissipation, and the AI will do this a lot. Wasted dissipation is wasted potential. This ship actually has
too much dissipation in practice and will hit the hard flux stop more than I like. The build is a bit better when I shift 10 vents into caps, but I was pretty lazy when I set this up.
Fighter bays:
As I said in my post, the Talons were a budget pick from when I didn't have many fighters around (wasn't at my depot). That said, they are not terrible picks: replacing a single Talon by a Claw is a good move, but leaving 1 Talon wing in for HE missiles and 4 vulcans actually improves the combined wing's kill time over replacing it with something more expensive, and its cheap. This:
If Expanded Deck Crew takes up more OP than the fighter/bomber LPCs it supposedly supports, then it's not worth it.
Is not right. Partially, because
fighter bays have intrinsic value. Consider that converted hangar on a destroyer gives a badly D modded fighter at 1.5x cost + 10 OP, and last version this was
meta because it was worth it. The bay on a carrier by itself represents at least 10 OP, probably more like 15. This is already reflect in the OP count of the ship - carriers have less OP in part to account for their bays carrying intrinsic value. The actual 'value' of even this cheap set of interceptors (and again, its not a mistake to be using interceptors: those are the fleet role that I need for the current meta of strong frigates) is like 16+40 or 60 = 56 or 76 depending on the value of the bay. This also ties into your complaints that the OP on the ship are low. They are a bit on the low side, but only because like all carriers the OP has already been "spent" on the decks.
The other reason why the statement is wrong is because the relative OP value is inconsequential. This is seen by the fact that the OP cutoff you chose (equal OP) is completely arbitrary: it feels pretty and its nice and symmetric, but is an arbitrary number. All that matters is what the actual effect is, and the effect of the hullmod is that my stream of cheap interceptors almost never runs out, even in hard battles. With the hullmod, going from a
full fighter wipe to full rebuild leaves the ship at 91% replacement and it took 26 seconds from full wipe back to 100% replacement (fighters were back sooner and will be contributing before that, but this is total cycle time). Without the hullmod, it went down to 87% for a full rebuild and took a total of 31 seconds from destruction until the ship was back at 100% fighter replacement. These numbers have some error on them because getting all fighters to cleanly die at once is inconsistent, especially because of how fast Talons are rebuilt, but Expanded Deck Crew is a decent improvement that keeps the fighters coming, even if its weaker than past versions. Considering that fighter replacement rate loss is exponential (having lower rate makes fighters take longer makes the rate tick down even more), 10% less tickdown and 20% better recovery is worth it even for cheap fighters.
I'll also note that the only battle where the fighters don't contribute is against the Omegas because of their insane anti-fighter EMP arcs: everyone else, including high tech, the interceptors do their job of killing enemy frigates and phase ships.
On skills:
If the player is doing their job, the large enemies are in front of their capital ships and the only enemies that are behind are small ships that can be picked off by the player's small ships/fighters. Getting hit "up the rear" is a player failure. Onslaughts and Legions have excellent turret coverage and don't need to point directly at nimble targets (Dominators have it rough). Onslaught TPCs are nice but best at long range vs big targets: having an enemy be off the forward flank instead of directly ahead can be a
good thing because then they are exposed to more ballistic mounts. 10% speed bonus is a whopping 3 speed: not 0, but not very much. Helsmanship is a low value skill on both those ships for AI officers and nearly any other skill is better.
In your analysis, I think this:
Making choices translates into also sacrificing aspects of a ship.
is partially correct: OP spent on something that is not completely boosted means that those OP are not being spent to their full extent. But it doesn't mean ignoring those aspects completely: it means finding the right balance of skills and OP to spend. Going too far and completely dropping an aspect because its not boosted is a poor use of resources, because usually simply the option being there took an opportunity cost, and because boosting the other aspects runs into diminishing returns.
This is especially the case for your onslaught:
We can safely cut those 4 missile weapons since they're mostly going to be dead weight for what we want out of the shp anyway
If you have medium missile mounts, fill them! This is extremely poor ship design, especially on an Onslaught which has so much OP these days. They don't even need to be boosted if the build is gun focused, heck just slap 4 anni's in like the sim default and it will overwhelm PD at close range, or slap in 4 sabots and overload enemies that get too close! Not picking Missile Spec is a bad choice, but fine at least another skill boosts the guns. Using that as a justification for not filling the missiles is like saying: I get 100 value out of these things instead of 125 value, so its better to cut them to get 20 value somewhere else. Building for durability can be useful but
only because durability is a resource to be spent to kill things. If your ship has less killing power because of just... not filling flux free weapons... then that durability does one thing: drag out the PPT clock and make the lives of all the other ships harder.
For Paragons, leaving the missiles empty can be ok because small missile mounts are half as OP/missile count efficient as mediums when it comes to sabots/harpoons, and for torpedoes it comes with 5 times less ammo. But just sticking 4 reapers on them only costs 8 OP and usually pays for itself if even a single one hits. For the officer: Helsmanship is a dead skill. Other than that, fine.
For Conquest, this is a decent officer, mainly because its actually using the missile slots and not taking helmsmanship.
Onto the builds: These are all bad builds.
#1: Armored weapon mounts without turret gyros on Mk iXs means that the guns will have trouble tracking. The ship is
massively undergunned (700 flux main guns for 1000 dissipation (no skills) to 1100 dissipation (T4L) or even 1200 with T5L?), at least cut the vents by like 30 if having so few guns. 4 Mining Pods: complete waste, even talons would be better because 4 talons will distract and hunt frigates. With only kinetics and no mixed main battery, enemy ships will be able to effectively shield flicker, especially as Mk IXs are bursty: thats poor. At least this has 5 boosted harpoons, but with only a steady officer it will often not be in range, and with no pressure for the enemy to keep their shields up and overload, or to disable enemy PD, they will have to get through the enemies PD (possible with 5, but not ideal). I'd rank this build as worse than AI auto-fill builds by a significant margin.
#2: Gives up 2 missile mounts is bad, but might be worth it to make an impenetrable PD screen. But then that gets ruined by swapping vulcans to lmgs, so this is mostly just neutering the ship for no reason. Its still massively undergunned and only has a single damage type, which will lead to the enemy lowering their shield and not being punished. Torpedoes as the only source of anti armor is not good enough, especially without sabots to force an overload. 4x Broadswords is not bad, but is not good either. Too slow to catch frigates, no emp or anti-armor to deal with cruisers, low sustained DPS on testing because of their flux, they will be moderately effective anti shield support for other ships and can deal with the slower destroyers given enough time, but not particularly effective on their own. Adding a claw wing or 2 would make it much better by letting it lockdown, though thats not enough to save the build. This build is a little bit better than the previous one but still pretty bad. About the level of a medium AI auto-build, but I've seen much better auto-builds.
#3: This is almost a decent build for a reckless specialist. 2 Hellbores for main guns is again massively undergunned, with low DPS. Its even
less flux than the ship has base dissipation, with T4L. The enemy also will shield flicked against pure HE, and the guns will not be able to hit nimble enemies. But at least the guns themeslves are solid: Hellbores are efficient and will strip armor of big targets. Dlmgs have 300 range: boosted by ITU enough to shoot at remnant/omega frigates, maybe destroyers only, and they are significantly inferior to vulcans for PD. But the Hellbores can't hit those targets consistently, so even that is mostly wasted. This build relies completely on the reckless officer burn driving in for them to be useful: that happens, but its a gamble and might overextend the ship. 5x Sabots is a good set of missiles, but its almost overkill vs a lot of enemies and lack of on demand followup from other HE missiles is a problem. The hellbores will strip armor, but have poor anti-hull DPS. The Khopesh are solid bombers, and if they are flying in to an overload will do a lot of damage. But if by bad luck they get shot down, then the ship is in trouble. I can see this build sort of working, simply because sabots are good and khopesh are good, but it could be so much better. If its relying on burning in close to the enemy, put a storm needler on! At 600 flux for main guns it would still be badly undergunned, but at least it would have some DPS.
I don't mean to be too aggressive here, but I can see why you think the legion is bad: these are all bad builds that manage to amplify its weaknesses and squander its strengths. They are all trying to specialize too hard and end up just crippling themselves.
Building a legion is as simple as following the normal rules of building ships without doing anything fancy. Have a mixed main battery of Kinetic + something that does anti armor/hull. Fill the missile slots, again a mix is best. Have at least some PD, if only to pick off stray harpoons/fighters/pilums. Pick a role for the fighters and adjust the gun budget to match: Interceptors, heavy fighters, or bombers all work, but make sure the package is effective at shutting down or killing ships (all broadswords is not). If going bombers, either use less expensive main battery and remove vents, or don't take any QOL hullmods. If using fighters or interceptors, more budget goes to the guns. If not using harpoons, ECCM can be sacrificed (sabots and Reapers are still pretty good without), though thats not ideal.
Do that, and its a solid hybrid ship: enough guns to comfortably win against any cruiser and hold off capitals. Enough fighters to comfortably kill destroyers/frigates OR have a decent bomber strike vs capitals, depending on focus. A very good missile set that can get numerous kills and be specialized vs different enemy types.
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Topic: Is Burn Drive (along with 0.95) the worst thing that ever happened to Low Tech? (Read 13353 times)