I mean dude what? That's impossible. You have got to knock it off with all these dumb super ships with the move speed of frigates.
Counting the Ziggurat, the Radiant and the Doom out, you can reliably off one
Dorito with just 90-100 Fleetpoints, even as low as 50-80 if you got ships that are more or less MEANT to fight it. It's a matter of both preparedness and execution that's going to become easy for you once you figure them out or are told by us what you should consider doing.
Most of what was important to say has already been written, so I'll just go over it a bit and not spam too much!
As it appears you are having trouble with the doritos, may i direct you to this thread: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20699.0
It contains a list of fleets that are to varying extents capable of beating them.
Some advice from my personal run-in with the doritos:
1: If you have the Ziggurat (and you should if you're at the point where challenging doritos) Use it. It can keep one of them all but permanently EMP'd and out of action, while you have your fleet take care of the other one.
2: If you have the automated ships skill, then a Radiant is extremely useful, as it's near enough the toughest, and hardest hitting ship in the game, while also having solid mobility (for a capital) I brought one with 3 D-mods into my fight, it survived the entire fight, while a pristine Paragon died before i could even kill one of the Doritos.
3: Expect losses, you're unlikely to beat the dorito twins without losing any ships, they are the current end-game "bossfight" as it were, only with a highly optimised and S-modded fleet are you going to stand a chance of coming out with no disabled ships.
4: You can bump up the battle size value in settings, this will let you deploy more stuff while you are still facing only 2 Doritos. It makes things notably easier.
5: Consider bringing a Doom, its mine system (especially when combined with systems expertise) can really confound the enemy AI, making them position their shield incorrectly, among other useful things.
1) Ziggurat does indeed more or less hardcounter the
Doritos, you can even go full tryhard and beat them both with just a player driven Ziggurat with every single buff and commander skill in the Persean Sector on it.
2)Radiant can reliably destroy a Dorito by itself, a Radiant with 2 Integrated Hullmods, 4 Sabot SRM pods/2Hammer Barrages, Shield shunt + all the armor skills and hullmods, 5 Dmods and Derelict Contingent probably is even able to beat
both of them at once, despite the fact
Crew Training + Reliability Engineering + Derelict Contingent plus at least 3-DMods actually allows you to field two Alpha Core Radiants over 41% combat readiness with the current 30 Automated Ship Points from the skill. If you want endgame to feel like a joke without turning god mode on or pilopting a ship yourself, a Radiant or two is your best bet.
3)What he said, word for word. You're not farming pirates. Losing most of your frigades and even some bigger ships is more or less a guarantee unless you tryhard with capital spam across a lot of reloads. It's not really an issue considering just "Reliability Engineering" boosts the ship recovery chance to 100%, making all your ships recoverable upon destruction without the use of a Story point. Reinforced Bulkheads does the same thing on ships without officers. Wolfpack tactics even eliminates the need of R.Bulkheads and Reliability Engineering since it makes all frigades with officers 100% recoverable after battle.
4)Despite being quite the
weaksauce casual approach, this is very viable. Even raising the battle Size from the stock 300 to the maximum vanilla value of 400 (resulting in 240 deployment points in story fights) results in a much easier fight.
5) Doom is incredible under player control, but what I found even better for the Dorito fights is a couple or more harbingers with officers, notably with the Elite Phase Mastery and Elite Target analysis skills. The fact
they can more or less stunlock a tesseract for 10 seconds straight each with System Disruption makes any fleet composition with enough burst damage able to defeat them. I would personally suggest equipping them with triple Ion Beams, Integrated Targeting Unit, Advanced Optics and Unstable injector aswell to make sure they still do their job while well away from the tesseracts. Triple Antimatter Blaster (or triple Ion Pulser for that matter) also works wonders.
I lost 2 entire fleets, millions of credits trying to feel these things out, laughed incredulously as even some nigh 60k "hp" capitals couldn't tank them for any appreciable amount of time, decided another several days of farming / searching for solutions was a waste of my precious time, and turned on godmode. This really underlined the incredible stupidity at play because it still took 5-10 minutes to kill them with literally x100 damage. Over in the thread I had to laugh because it's mostly just fleets that cheese the stupid "ai". It's not like I think Alex will change anything, it's more a public service announcement to anyone that stumbles across them randomly like I did: they're basically unkillable and will faceroll your fleet, so just turn on godmode and save your time for something more productive in life than something Alex is probably sipping player tears and laughing about.
You really only have 4 Capital ship options that are useful against the Doritos:
1) A full tank Paragon to just eat damage and not care. Give it an officer with Shield Modulation&Helsmsmanship and all the other important skills, then set it up with Hardened Shields, Solar Shielding, Front Shield conversion, Stabilized Shields, Resistant flux conduits and Unstable Injector (Doritos fight at very close range anyway, you'll want your Paragon(s?) to both keep up and retreat with a bit more ease). Weapons are up to you but I would suggest 4x Autopulse, 2x Ion Beam and the rest being point defence.
Tesseracts deal damage in
a very bursty manner, meaning that having a ship that can reasonably tank them, having them waste both their temporal shell and flux capacity trying to kill it basically skyrockets the safety of all other ships in your fleet. Just make sure the rest of your combat flotilla is not significantly faster than your Paragon(s?) or you'll find them to lag behind and not be useful.
2) A Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught more or less
humiliates both the Doritos and the Tesseract fight. Doritos have a lot of burst damage that can obliterate shields (and the Zig also has weapons that go through shields). I will not spam this thread with my
Horseshoe Crab pictures, just know you're going to find that build in the thread Amazingh linked and that you won't be disappointed.
3) An Odissey battlecruiser is one of the two most mobile capital ships in the entire vanilla game that already comes with ECCM installed and can field 3 Sabot SRM pods and one Hurricane MIRV. Stack enough of those in the Tesseract fight along with Harbingers and smaller, fast&durable ships (like Monitor and Hyperion, just to name the two most broken ones) and you'll cut them down really fast.
4) Double Gauss, Double Hurricane MIRV, Conquests are disgusting throughout the whole game if properly supported. Just remember to give them a Cautious Officer so that they don't get too close. Conquest is a much less tanky ship than the odissey but it more than makes it up with its disgusting amount of firepower. Have something else get the tesseract's attention and it will absolutely butcher them with overwhelming missile firepower,
especially if the officer on it has Elite Missile Specialization, not only giving the ship +100% missile ammunition (+200% with Expanded Missile racks) but doubling missile weapon reload time and fire rate when made Elite.They are the current most difficult endgame enemies that takes a lot of skill and resources to beat, but they aren't impossible.
I did them with a fairly unoptimized low tech roleplaying fleet (2 caps, several cruisers, many many destroyers) not using any of the 'cheese' options, and I know others have done them with mid, high, mixed, phase, etc fleets as well. I took a moderate bunch of losses, and when I replayed the fight to try different strategies sometimes I take a LOT of losses when I did something dumb, but its doable. In terms of 'tanking' them, my Onslaught with a D mod hull, so 16k Hp + armor + shields could reliably take the alpha strike from one of the cruisers (if I'm careful about the red balls of doom) and then return fire and kill it (praise the storm needler). One of the other strategies I found to be very successful was to send my Legion (regular) after the other one: under AI command and alone it doesn't kill it, but it does indefinitely stall it without taking appreciable damage, letting the rest of my fleet clean up the 'sub' ships from the first one before the second one pops open. Both cruisers together can kill a cap relatively quickly, but there are only 2 enemies so if that happens it means that I overextended something and goofed up bad.
Honestly speaking, that Phase Bounty Hunter fleet is probably stronger, especially considering the fact (I think) it also scales with your game's vanilla fleet size. There's also
two more story related fights after the Doritos which are much, much harder but I will not speak of them here, considering the fact OP might have not seen those yet.
Also, yes, Derelict Contingent XIV Onslaught is the epitome of filth in these fights, really. A normal one without DC is plenty strong but that skill more or less triples the effective HP of an already supremely tanky capital, making it nigh unkillable.
Just keep in mind that Tesseracts fight
at very close range while keeping their shield up meaning that (as Thaago points out by praising the Storm Needler, an amazing weapon which is only undone by its mediocre range) all kinetic weapons with very short effective range are going to be very useful in this fight.
Huh, I reckon a 5 Sabot SRM Pod Legion with Target Analysis, Missile Specialization, Expanded Missile racks and ECCM does very well in this fight, but
I have not tried that yet so take this with a pinch of Volturian salt. Speaking of Sabots...
In my vanilla playthrough I fought one with the Zig while my fleet (Paragon + a bunch of Furys and a couple brawlers / lashers) kept the other busy chewing up several of the sacrificial cruisers.
Current playthrough I threw some very, very silly modded ships at them (SKR Nova + Plagueships, S-Modded) and the Tesseracts died with no losses on my part, but it's entirely possible to clear the hypershunt in Vanilla with no loses by either soloing it with Doom/Zig and skills or just one very angry monitor and several one very angry monitor and several Furys.
Edit: I want a hyperlink, not an embed. Preview is lying to me.
Furies are only worth 15DP but they can bring high mobility (especially if overridden) and most importantly
Two Sabot SRM pods plus a Heavy Blaster and two Ion Cannons with them. Have enough of them and they'll just run over the Doritos with a sea of Kinetic/EMP missiles, very good sustained EMP damage and high damage per shot energy fire.
I don't have any issue with the difficulty of the fight, but I hate how it comes with no indication. I know people here love screaming [REDACTED] like it's the funniest word in the universe, but for a game that's "supposed to be played ironman", obscuring difficulty indicators, disallowing hull inspection AND having a surprise split mechanic is just bullcrap. If the player can't reload, they should have the ability to know how difficult the fight is before they take it. I'm a cautious player, so I waited all the way to super late-game and steamrolled them, which was no fun at all. Wiping and grinding credits for 4 hours would have been even less fun, though.
In all fairness, the Hypershunt is the only
almost alien megastructure in the game and
is one of the only two fights in the entire campaign where the game does not allow you to see detailed information of the enemy you're about to face, not to mention the "something new" spiel that goes on before the fight.If that does not scream
"Warning! Endgame content ahead, consider retreating if you don't want your **** pushed back into you" I don't really know what would.
This game is similar to Roguelikes in a way, altough done in a much less sadistic manner. You're supposed to take losses and learn from your mistakes. Litterally
nothing in 0.95 can not be replaced, considering you even get XIV Legion blueprints from the storyteller now.
Does it hurt? Yes. Does it make you rage, possibly become saltier than the Dead Sea? Yes, I went through that too. Does this make the moment you overcome it all even more satisfying?
Oh, Ludd forgive me, Yes. it definetly does. Doritos really aren't a big deal, even if you fight them blind,
especially considering they're legit endgame content and you
should both have pretty much infinite money and a fleet only made of Smodded, officered ships. Coming into that fight with anything less than that is more or less underestimating the game at your own risk.
Hypershunt could use some warning beacons.
I'm not talking about saying "this thing is dangerous". That much is obvious. I'm talking about an actual difficulty indicator, which estimates how difficult the fight will be for your current fleet.
Except for unique enemies like tesseracts such an estimation would be impossible to get right, so the player should be allowed to see their stats and decide for themselves.
Alternatively, change the guards on the alpha site cache from fulgents to omega destroyers, so players can get a warning on the splitting aspect of the fight beforehand. (and point players towards that one instead of leaving it as a manual-only thing)
I respectfully disagree with both of you on this one, the reason for it lying beyond my
blatant gaming masochismThe only reason warranting the presence of a Warning beacon is that someone actually was there once, got absolutely curbstomped and had the sensible idea to put a warning for everyone else. This applies to entire sectors with [Redacted] activity, Alpha Site and even some lore planets, like the one with the Beholder Station orbiting around it.
It does not make sense for one being near the hypershunt. You're supposedly the first spacer to find it, and I doubt a warning beacon could
even be installed near the Hypershunt witht he Doritos guarding it and a Blue Giant frying the crap out of everything (but the shypershunt) around it. The
implicit danger of the whole Hypershunt and its
inherent narrative setup are more than enough.
I do like the idea of the Hidden Cache in the Alpha Site "system" being guarded by Dextral Shards (I think that's what the first splits of the Doritos are called like). It would be a
tasteful foreshadowing of sorts.
