Instead post your own lashers somehow beating tesseracts and remnants, like actual enemies you'd find in the game instead of a fake scenario that is not part of the game.
How about a lowtech fleet that fills its smalls with weapons, which is the opening argument, as opposed to just Lashers, which no one has been arguing about in this discussion?
Here's a typical lowtech fleet fight for me against a Remnant fleet. Unfortunately, I don't have enough officers for every ship, so the Lashers lack officers and thus perform worse than other ships in the fleet which have level 6 officers. On the other hand, they've got reinforced bulkheads so its basically pocket change to restore them when they build up enough bad d-mods to warrant being fixed.
The ball is in your court to provide what a tuned long range high tech beam spam (Tachyon lances, graviton beams, etc) fleet will do in a similar situation. Or perhaps explain why my victory was not a victory in this case? Or are remnants not good enough and I need to show Tesseracts only?
This looks really good, though I did not get to see what happen in the battle at all.
I mean, if what carries the entire fleet is the weapons I've been mentioning then what's the point?
In other words, was it all about the railguns? Sabots?
Did you win BECAUSE of small weapons or IN SPITE OF the small weapons?
Does it prove that low tech and small weapons are effective? Or that building in 3 hullmods gives you enough leeway that you don't really have to consider builds anymore as you can equip everything you want and then there are points left over you might as well place something @ random.
In other words, if you took out the small weapons would you win anyway? Or would it get even better as you'd overload less quickly?
But thumbs up to you for showing something interesting.
Edit: To move things along, I feel like this guy goes into detail of what's wrong with them @ the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOWITFSoe0
Would this entire endgame capable fleet work better for you? Pardon the self quote.
Spoiler
Just popping back in to say I've managed to beat endgame (not completely, I'm not even attempting a particular special encounter) using low tech only and some mods.
I'm going to bed right now, just know you're (probably, maybe) gonna like the Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught, which is aptly named "Horseshoe Crab"
Edit: Good Morning! Here's the fleet!
There are mod-ships from High Tech Expansion (that's where the Aggressor, the Onslaught on a diet comes from), The Asteroid Ship pack (Big 50DP Chungus asteroid battlecarrier named pebble is from there) and Underworld (Venom-X, the 10DP bootleg Scarab) but they're all actually using vanilla weapons. In order:
Horseshoe Crab (Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught)
Hullmods on the ship because the list is too damn long to fit on the screen:
1) (integrated) Heavy Armor
2) (Integrated) Reinforced Bulkheads
3) (Integrated) Integrated Targeting Unit
4) Solar Shielding
5) Armored Weapon Mounts
6) Integrated Point Defence AI
7) Automated Repair Unit
Shield Shunt
9) Flux Distributor
10) Insulated Engine Ass(embly)
11) Advanced Turret Gyros (for the Mk.9 Autocannons and the Railguns that also double as Point Defence)
12) Expanded magazines (for the TPCs)
This thing is actually magical. It's got every single possible bonus either increasing armor, reducing damage taken (across armor and hull), boosting up Hullpoints, flux dissipation and damage done to the enemy (aside from Energy Weapon mastery for the two TPCs).
Why do I have 3600 flux generated by weapons when the ship only gets 1524 flux dissipation?
To make sure the thing fully uses all its flux dissipation to shoot weapons even if it's only using a portion of them, It also has an aggressive enough officer, enough armor, hull hitpoints and residual armor. This Onslaught has around 175 Residual armor spread across 30.000 hull points, and that's before we even count the -35% (or was it 45%?) hull and armor damage taken thanks to officer skills and 100% CR.
Officer skills (swear to all that Ludd loves that he was already named Ahmed when I got him)
The only oopsie I made in setting it up was making Damage Control Elite instead of Target Analysis. The one thing missing is Reinforced Flux Conduits (I already have Shield shunt boosting EMP resistance, it felt useless) and Blast Doors, but who cares about losing crew members anyway when you can do this under AI control:
Or this (story spoilers):
And also that, without a single care in the world (more spoilers)
You can also just send it into a sea of remnants and it will hold on for minutes while the rest of your fleet is busy elsewhere and is virtually unkillable by frigades unless they either got Reapers able to get thru the absurd point defence or enough PPT to kill it before they suffer critical malfunctions or end up getting crumped.
Salamander To The Knee & Renegade (Pebble-class Asteroid Battlecarrier)
This ship got rebalanced while I was nearing the end of the campaign, so some skills are not optimal for it, anyway:
Commander skills:
To quote myself, the Pebble is the already malformed offspring of a Paragon and a Legion that got abandoned at Umbra and got beaten up by pirates with a crowbar until it could be called one of their own. It's tanky, can carry 9 (13 if you really want to go full meme) Salamanders plus some good kinetics and can then follow up on fluxing out/immobilizing the target with bombers, in this case triple Khopesh. It works as well as you'd expect from a 50FP battlecarrier, tanking the world (story spoilers):
and then hitting the world back twice as hard (more story spoilers):
Chub B Gone & Ketomania (XIV Aggressor-class Artillery Battlecruiser)
Officer skills (they're quite suboptimal, I know)
This is quite the straighforward ship. It's an Onslaught trading most side facing weapons, armor and burn drive for improved mobility and Accellerated ammo feed, making it go around with a quickness and boosting all of its front facing weapons (aside from the TPCs) into one single target. It's quite great at buzzsawing singular ships while it's escorting either the Pebbles or the Onslaught. I don't have screenshots of this one doing work by itself but you've probably seen it in the combat screenshots above doing work while behind the other capitals
Venom-X Skirmish Frigade
Officer skills:
This bad boy did not change from midgame, it's fast , survivable and packs a punch when it fights at close range. I could've seen an alternative variant of this thing using Elite Point Defence, Elite Ranged Specialization double Heavy Machineguns, an Ion Cannon and a Light Assault gun but I really liked the added durability of this one so I kept it.
I more or less butchered the Doritos with 180FP without manually controlling any ship and only lost (and then recovered) some Venom-Xs and a Pebble because I was dumb and did double avoid orders on the Doritos at one point in the fight. Some battle screenshots that were not shown above:
End of combat:
Combat Data:
There we go, I'm sorry for all the spoiler tages, as usual. Have a good one out there!
It would not be unfair to state that more than half the total damage comes from small and medium weapons. Even the Onslaught has 6 IPDAI, advanced turret gyros Railguns to absolutely ruin the day of anything with a shield in front of it. The mod asteroid battlecarriers also have light machineguns everywhere, with target analysis, elite point defence, ITU and gunnery impants, meaning they engage at around 600 units of range and can drive off everything with a shield in combination with HVDs and the Mk.9 autocannon. Agrressor is a HVD spam machine that gets all the damage bonuses plus systems expertise to make it oump out that glorious Accellerated AMmo Feed faster. The Venom Xs are basically the smallest superfrigate that can mount two medium weapons with temporal shell.
As for the video, let me put in a few comments as I watch it...
Painfully clickbait thumbnail -1
Says PD lasers are good while driving a Fury that's not using front shields. -1
Understands what AM blasters are good for +1
Comprehends the strenghts of Light Needler and Railgun +1
Understands what Sabots and Harpoons are for +1
Calls the single Reaper Launcher the best small missile weapon -1
Does not even get 3 minutes into the video and he's already asking for likes and subscriptions -1
Deploys Ion Beam appproriately +1
Disregards the fact the HVD has the highest damage per shot of every medium ballistic weapon -1
Understands you need more kinetic than HE +1
Does not cover weapons like the Heavy Autocannon, the Arbalest or the Heavy machinegun -1
Understands he's not perfect +3
Does not mention the fact Plasma is the best energy weapon to build hard flux in a prolonged engagement -1
Does not even recognize the existance of the High INtensity Laser, probably the best bang for your buck large energy weapon to eat through armor -1
Forgets to mention the Hephaestus has small ballistic weapon levels of damage per shot, making it actually subpar against enemies with high enough armor/residual armor, and neither does he mention the fact it's 480 flux per second for it too -1
Does not mention the high damage per shot of the Mk.9 autocannon making it one of the best weapons to also damage hull on heavily armored targets
Plays a Conquest with both broadsides and no point defence to speak of -1
Is knowledgeable about the Mjolnir +1
Has evidently not played enough 0.95 yet to know the Gauss is not the best kid in the block when it comes to kinetic weapons anymore -1
Does not even mention the Hellbore as
the best armor tearing flaming plasma familiy car ballistic weapon launcher in the game -3
Is correct on the Hurricane +1
Does not seem to mention the massive impact officer skills have on missile weapons in 0.95, which skewers his judgement -1
Is almost correct on the Locust, exept for the fact it may aswell just not exist against ships with passable residual armor and that it has way worse actual damage against ships than any other large missile weapon, even against hull -1
Does not even mention both Hammer Barrage and Squalls -4
Is correct on Daggers, Longbows and Cobras +1
Somehow comes to the conclusion Flash Bombers are "nice" -1
Does not even mention Khopesh, Trident, Piranha, Thunders or Xyphos -4
Ah, I see where you got this "no small weapons" idea from I suggest you to hang around the forum and find out why that's wrong -2
He has not even mentioned the Rift Lance -1
Final Score: He has not played enough of the game yet to make any sort of comprehensible weapon tier list and call it a guide. You can probably find more information regarding weapon selection here on the forum in half the time it takes to watch his video. No offense, he seems fun, but don't take all he says as gospel, well don't take any opinionated theory as gospel...ever really and that includes me aswell.
Read enough of what everyone writes, combine it with your personal experience and you will eventually reach your own solid conclusions. "Small Weapons Bad" is not one of them.
Edit: That's a great low tech fleet by the way Hiruma Kai!Now, swap those high tech bomber LPCs for low tech ones and Ludd will be proud