I should say, raw damage statistics are nowhere near a complete picture of effectiveness. They are not useless, but do not give the whole picture. I'm merely trying to point out the ways that those numbers can fail to reflect underlying effectiveness, or ways they can overrepresent certain aspects of ships that aren't necessarily that valuable.
Damage numbers aren't necessarily the only thing you need to know, but they're probably one of if not the most important measures of a ship's effectiveness. After all, the purpose of a fight is to reduce every enemy ship's hull to 0, and the way to do that is by doing damage. They're basically a primary metric of a ship's effectiveness.
I would argue hyperion has a ton of value purely in it's tendency to end up behind the enemy and not die while doing that, causing them to turn around and expose their vulnerable engines to the rest of the fleet.
Going behind battle lines is actually a terrible thing for the AI to do, since you're opening up new battle lines and taking damage in a situation where (by definition) the enemy wouldn't be shooting anyway, and you're diluting your own forces to do so. Now it's great for the Hyperion to help draw off some enemy forces to help your fleet concentrate its firepower on fewer remaining ships, but that's something that can be done by other frigates, and 15 DP for each Hyperion is a lot to dedicate toward that (since you're looking at the ratio between the DP of the ship that you're using to draw enemy ships away, and the DP of those enemy ships). Every DP that goes toward splitting up the enemy fleet means less DP toward actually killing the enemy fleet. So this points to having maybe 1-3 such ships, and keeping their total DP low, otherwise your fleet starts losing too much firepower for the splitting up to be worthwhile. The fact that the Hyperion is such an expensive ship at 15 DP means that it has to distract a lot more enemy ships than other frigates doing the same task to be worthwhile. It doesn't mean the Hyperion isn't useful, but it means it's very expensive for its task, and not something worth building your fleet around. Basically support, like having a few cargo ships, although in this case Hyperion(s) would be support in combat rather than campaign.
Additionally, this means it's very expensive to dedicate skill points toward frigate-boosting skills such as Wolfpack Tactics on a high-end fleet, when there are many other skills which help boost the whole fleet or your personal flagship instead. Furthermore, having Hyperions rely on SO means you're going to be burning through CR and thus a lot of supplies for this.
r.e. dmg/sec
It doesn't matter at all unless CR/PPT is a major factor costing you supplies. A strategy that kills everything in 20 seconds is not worse than a strategy that kills everything in 10 seconds.
That doesn't make sense. There's a reason why DPS is a very important metric in pretty much all combat games, Starsector included. All other things being equal, a strategy (or fleet setup, loadout, etc.) that kills the enemy fleet faster is better than one that kills the enemy fleet slower. The faster strategy means that it can churn through more enemy ships before CR/PPT becomes an issue -- or, alternatively, means that you could've committed fewer ships (saving supplies) and still have had CR/PPT not being an issue. It means you have more wiggle room, time-wise. Being able to kill enemy ships quickly is a
good thing.
The context of this is that you were claiming that a ship which kills enemy ships quickly may end up doing less overall damage than a ship which is trading blows back and forth, and I was pointing out that this is incorrect because it takes a lot of time for ships to back off, spend some time with shields up doing nothing, vent, re-enter combat, etc., during which time they're doing 0 damage. So if you look at the overall damage per unit time, a ship which is churning through enemy ships will end up with more overall damage dealt. Not quite sure why you're then claiming that damage/second is unimportant based on that.
Your fury is very heavy on efficient/anti-shield damage (double sabot, minipulser, ir pulse lasers), so it is not surprising at all that it is more effective against remnants that heavily incentivize shield damage with their super efficient shields.
Your claim was that the Hyperion could bypass shields due to TP, and therefore may do less overall damage because of it. Again, this conflates "per unit ship" versus "per unit time", but even aside from that, I was pointing out that this isn't what the numbers ended up showing. If the Hyperion were successfully bypassing shields, you would see it do an outsized portion of the overall hull damage. But I was pointing out that the Furies did a bigger proportion of the total hull damage than the Hyperions (even after accounting for 20 DP vs 15 DP). In other words, contrary to your claim, the Hyperions were actually
worse at hitting hull, even though the Furies only had a single Cryoblaster for anti-armor/hull, while the Hyperions had that plus a Heavy Blaster.
This isn't exclusive to Fury vs Hyperion, as if it's just because Furies were overpowered. Testing AI-controlled Odyssey vs Apogee vs Hyperion shows the same trend -- the Hyperions will underperform in terms of overall damage,
and underperform in terms of proportion of the hull damage dealt relative to its DP, compared with the other ships. The Hyperions only did 10% of the overall damage and 11% of the hull damage, even though it's 19% of the DP. Screenshot attached.
The testing setup is as follows:
1. Take the desired fleet, in this case, 3 Odysseys (Cryoblaster/HIL on large energies, Hurricane on large synergy, Sabots on medium missiles, Xyphos/Longbow), 3 SO Apogees (Cryoblaster on large energy, Hurricane on large missile), and 3 SO Hyperions (Cryoblaster/Heavy Blaster/Ion Pulser), and attack a test fleet, in this case a 2-Ordos, 7-Radiant fleet.
2. Start off by grabbing objectives to get the full fleet deployed.
3. Gather the fleet together on the player side of the map.
4. Once the fleet is gathered together, set the fleet on Full Assault mode. (Note this cancels any previous player inputs.)
5. From here on out, no more player commands are given for the rest of combat. The player fleet is under complete AI control and is free to roam on their own, without any player guidance, until the battle completes. The player is merely a spectator once Full Assault mode is switched on.
It was done in 0.95a, but I don't think the results will change appreciably in 0.95.1a.
The main issue with Hyperions (and frigates in general, this is not unique to Hyperions) is that it tries to stay out of combat too often. (All officers were set to aggressive for all of my ships.) Even when it does decide to teleport in to fight, it'll take some shots briefly, then teleport out again, even though it's at low flux. It seems like by and large the Hyperions will say "welp looks like the enemy fleet is too dangerous, I'll just stay away until I see an opening" and wait for some other ship to create an opening (i.e. attack a ship and weaken it first) before coming in. (In RPG games, I think this is known as "kill-stealing", heh.) The biggest times where the Hyperions would commit to battle were 1) at the beginning, where there are a lot of isolated frigates to hunt down, and 2) at the end, when the whole fleet is concentrating their fire on the last few remaining Radiants. During most of the fight, the Hyperions would only go in sporadically, and jump out at the first sign of danger, letting the rest of the fleet do the bulk of the damage.
This is the opposite of what the Hyperion
should do, especially since with SO it can teleport out to safety at will, so what it
should do is jump in, shoot and absorb damage until it's at say 90% flux, then teleport out and let its flux dissipate, then rinse and repeat. But realistically the AI doesn't really "know" that it's commanding a Hyperion, and fighting against an enemy Hyperion doing this would be really annoying. So a lot of that potential is wasted.
Generally this seems to be the behavior of frigates, where they'll wait until there's an opening, or until there's a critical mass of them, before going in to fight -- they'll stay away until they feel there's enough to dogpile on a target, or until some other ship makes the first move. This is great for self-preservation for most frigates since they're generally pretty squishy, but it doesn't work out well for the Hyperion, who has the stats of a cruiser and should bully enemy ships around like it. But again that would make the Hyperion very, very annoying to fight against.
I think if you could somehow add up all the damage that was either fired at the hyperion and missed, or not fired at all because the ship was distracted by the hyperion, it would be a very large number, perhaps larger than the furies total damage tanked.
I highly, highly doubt it. The Hyperions simply aren't near the front lines often enough for that to happen.
r.e. the 2-Ordos test fleets as benchmark
I don't think a computer benchmark test is a fair comparison. At the end of the day, every computational task boils down to a bunch of basic operations/computations that need to be executed, and processors are measured by the number of computations per second they can do. On the other hand, different fights in starsector reward different types of damage, and different strategies unequally, so being able to deal damage quickly/efficiently in one fight doesn't necessarily translate perfectly to another.
Sure, at some level it's just some sort of basic operations/computations. Nowadays though processors aren't benchmarked directly by computations per second, but by how long it takes to complete representative tasks (or alternately, number of frames per second, which boils down to the same thing).
Granted, in Starsector, every single fight is unique. If you take any enemy fleet, and say add a frigate to it, I guarantee you the "optimal" fleet (whether you're measuring by minimum time needed to kill the fleet, or minimum DP needed, or whatever other metric), will be slightly different. Maybe the extra frigate means your fleet would be better served by something faster, or maybe the extra frigate has some missiles in which case it would've better had one of your ships had a bit more PD, or whatever. There is no single fleet that is going to be optimal (i.e. better than every other possible fleet) across many enemy fleets, much less across the spectrum of possible enemy fleets in Starsector, from the initial pirate D-modded frigate to Star Fortresses and Remnant fleets. So saying results from one test setup may not "necessarily translate perfectly to another" is a bit disingenuous.
I doubt anyone here is looking for "what is a fleet setup that is optimal for this one particular fight" nor "what is a fleet setup that is optimal for every possible fight" which doesn't exist. Rather, people are looking for "what is a fleet setup that is generally good across a wide range of fights" in Starsector. This thread is about evaluating the different ships, after all.
So you can certainly say "well, a 2-Ordos fleet isn't really representative of the fights that you'll encounter in Starsector". Sure. You can come up with your own set of 10, 20, 30, or however many different kind of fights that you think would be representative of fights in Starsector, and test out different fleets against those benchmarks to find what you feel is the "optimal" fleet in some sense, or the "optimal" ships to use. However, I don't have that kind of time. I prefer to test against one test fight, where I know that if my fleet does well against that test fight, it will do well against the vast majority of content in Starsector.
That's the purpose of using a 2-Ordos fleet as a test benchmark. If a fleet can do well against it, the fleet will almost certainly do well against pretty much everything else in Starsector, except for possibly some very specific fights. (I haven't gotten a chance to try this fleet against hypershunts yet nor the scripted phase fleet, for the simple reason that they were already over before I made this fleet.) It will do well against Star Fortresses. It will do well against regular faction fleets. It will do well against single Ordos fleets, the purpose of doing a 2-Ordos fleet (and sometimes a 3-Ordos fleet) is to stress test the fleet against difficult odds.
This is not the case if almost any other fleet were used as a test benchmark. The fight needs to be appropriately difficult, otherwise it loses its discriminating power between good and bad fleets (ships, loadouts, etc.). If you optimize your fleet against a faction fleet, there's no guarantee that it will do well against another faction's fleet, and it will almost likely fare horribly against Ordos fleets. It may or may not work well against stations.
So you're free go about making your recommendations on what ships are good or bad without accounting for how they would fare against Remnants. But that's going to lead people toward fleet setups which may do well initially, then get slaughtered when they venture away from the Core or against harder faction fleets, pretty much the definition of "newbie trap". I prefer to make recommendations based on how the ships fare against difficult fights, knowing that if they do well in those fights, they will almost certainly do well against easier fights.
This is basically the longer explanation for when I said earlier that a 2-Ordos is used as a test benchmark because I know a fleet that can defeat it can "punch down" against easier fleets, but if I use an easier fleet as a benchmark, it's hard to know if my fleet and the ships therein can "punch up" against more difficult fights. That's why the 2-Ordos fleet is relevant as a test benchmark.
IMO, any strategy that can beat all of the challenges in the game is pretty much indistinguishable from the others. Even differences in supply cost or money are pretty much irrelevant by the end of the game.
I'm not quite sure where you're going with this statement. My whole purpose for using a 2-Ordos fleet as a benchmark is that if my fleet can beat it, my fleet can beat almost every other fleet in the game (except for a couple of very specific fights) -- yet you say it's not a good benchmark, and then say this.
And if strategies that can beat the challenges are "pretty much indistinguishable from the others", well, why bother with comparisons? All comparisons need to be comparing against
something, i.e. there is some sort of performance metric or figure of merit that's used to evaluate the value of different alternatives. Thus far you've said that supplies don't matter (i.e. it doesn't matter that the Hyperion, due to SO, uses up a lot of CR and thus needs a lot of supplies to recover afterward), DPS doesn't matter, how quickly a strategy kills doesn't matter, combat statistics don't matter, or at it least it mattered before when you yourself justified the Hyperion based on the combat statistics mod, but now that I can put up better stats using other ships, now maybe the damage stats from the mod aren't really that representative of effectiveness, or something. Then what's the purpose of a comparison when thus far you've said that pretty much everything used as a basis for comparison doesn't matter?
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