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[Amoebka]

Support Doctrine is overall a decent way to cheese the leveling process. What I did for the latest playthrough was rush to SD, hire 10 level 1 officers and never level them up, and do super-high multiplier battles to level both myself and the officers (derelict fleet bounties are perfect for this since gamma cores bloat their difficulty score). Assigning only one officer at a time allows them to soak up all XP and let the rest of the fleet get SD bonuses and carry. After all 10 officers had 810k XP I leveled them up to 6 instantly, and ended with a nice endgame fleet of 5 officered Eradicators, 6 officered Manticores, and 9 support doctrine Enforcers, all with 3 s-mods.

Enforcer is probably the absolute best vanilla ship to use with "pure" SD (no derelict ops). It benefits from all 3 skills nicely, has a crazy DP/OP ratio, and uses s-mods well.

[Megas]

One problem with that I've found is you are forced to waste a skill point on fighters in the leadership tree, since the leader skills become void you need 4 in the first branch. Since I'd rather not use fighters.

The Exp difference is pretty noticeable and I was wondering why I was leveling so damn fast this play. Exp demands going up while I was at the same time stacking more leaders making the gain rate slower, I had no clue it had such a big impact.

That is likely not a problem mainly because of Tempests (they lob their drones left and right, and probably want their drones back ASAP), and I usually want a carrier in my fleet if replace rate is fast enough.  I tend to avoid carriers because I have no Leadership (Combat/Tech/Industry 5) and Expanded Deck Crew alone is not quite good enough late.  Still, would be nice of there were more Leadership skills that did not rely on officers if Support Doctrine stays in its current form.  Wolfpack Tactics is a perfect candidate from going from officers to DP pool only.

[Vanshilar]

As someone who has tried early game Mercury spam extensively, it's not really worth it. The civilian tag affects ship AI, forcing it to act timid regardless of orders/doctrine, and it seems to be more conservative with missiles than usual, too (perhaps simply because it's rarely in range to use them). Your own player levels contribute so much to the XP formula, saving 1.5 DP ( Mercury over kite(A) ) isn't really relevant.

If ship limit wasn't a thing, maybe spamming Mercuries would be better. With 30 slots, there are better support missile boats.

Hmm in my experimentation, the (unofficered) Mercury ship AI does depend on your fleet doctrine; if I set them to cautious then they'll stay back a lot, but if I set them to aggressive they'll be much more willing to get to the front lines and fire their stuff. I used 2 Salamanders and 1 Antimatter SRM for each Mercury, and it seems to be fine.

The idea isn't to just use one of them, but to use a bunch of them, i.e. for 20 DP you can have 1 Gryphon or you can have 10 Mercuries and thus 30 small universal slots to play with. So you could have your usual fleet of ~220 DP but then supplement with 10 Mercuries for example. Granted in this case for XP purposes it'd only shave off 15 DP from your overall fleet DP (which is probably around 500 or so let's say) but at least it's still a bit, along with all those extra weapon slots.

I think in testing, the main problem I found is that each Mercury (naturally) isn't able to take out a [REDACTED] frigate on its own. So in pure AI fights (i.e. without the player controlling a ship nor actively giving commands to ships), without them, my fleet naturally starts moving toward the enemy spawn location as the fight progresses, but with them, my fleet and the enemy fleet naturally scatters out as the Mercuries lure [REDACTED] frigates away and they start backing off since they can't kill them on their own (unless they mass up). So the battlefield becomes more chaotic with frigates (both mine and theirs) all over the place, and cohesive battle lines never form, which makes the battle hard to conduct. Not sure if it means I just need to experiment with them more or something.

I just tried unarmed Afflictor-P for the system, but it would not Amp enemies unless I ordered it to escort an allied ship.  So, I put a tactical laser on Afflictor-P just so it can Amp enemies on its own.  So much for that idea to cheese civilian status for gain.

I tried out Afflictor-P and it does fine with going forward and Amping enemies, at least under full assault with the fleet doctrine set to reckless. I think the issue though is that it does back off often; it seems to need another ship nearby that's capable of actually attacking, for it to be willing to go in and Amp. Otherwise it just backs off a lot and (like with Mercuries) just leads to a more chaotic battlefield as the ships scatter. Oh well.

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So, I took a look in the actual code for the XP bonus (it can be found in \com\fs\starfarer\api\impl\campaign\FleetEncounterContext.java as computeBattleDifficulty()), and there are a couple more things to add to what I posted above.

The first is that d-mods add a 90% multiplier per d-mod to that ship's DP count for the purposes of the XP bonus, and this is multiplicative for each d-mod. (On the other hand, s-mods have no effect on the XP bonus, so go ahead and max them out.) This means that a ship with 5 d-mods only count for 0.9^5 ~ 59% of its DP. This is without limit (a ship with 8 d-mods would count for 0.9^8 ~ 43% of its DP for example) and seems to apply to civilian ships as well. Rejoice all ye Derelict Operations users, for those people who use both Support Doctrine and Derelict Operations.

The second is that for enemy fleets, the XP bonus calculation is a bit different. Officers are worth twice as much compared with for the player. In other words, for the player, a level 4 officer (gamma) was worth 22.5 DP, a level 6 officer (beta) was worth 30 DP, and a level 8 officer (alpha) was worth 37.5 DP, but for the enemy fleet, those officers are worth 45 DP, 60 DP, and 75 DP, respectively. So for [REDACTED] fleets, close to 75% of the XP bonus will actually be coming from all the cores that they have, even if those cores are on frigates or whatever; a Lumen with a beta core on it would actually be worth more, in terms of the XP bonus, than an unofficered Radiant. So in terms of XP gain, it's better to look for fleets with lots of officers, instead of large (in terms of ship counts or sizes) fleets. The actual ships in the enemy fleet only end up being a small fraction of the XP bonus.

(As a side note, if you try to estimate an enemy fleet's DP count for the XP bonus, note that the formula multiplies the enemy fleet's total DP for the XP bonus by 0.67.)

[Amoebka]

So in terms of XP gain, it's better to look for fleets with lots of officers, instead of large (in terms of ship counts or sizes) fleets. The actual ships in the enemy fleet only end up being a small fraction of the XP bonus.

Well, no? You've looked at the XP multiplier, but there's still XP itself, which depends on ship sizes. A mercenary fleet with 10 shades/afflictors will have a huge multiplier because of the level 7 officers, but the number being multiplied is pitiful to begin with, because it's just 10 frigates.

What you really want is fleets with large but weak ships and lots of low-level officers. So either high-end pirate bounties with atlas spam, or derelict fleets with full gamma cores in ramparts.

[Vanshilar]

Well, no? You've looked at the XP multiplier, but there's still XP itself, which depends on ship sizes. A mercenary fleet with 10 shades/afflictors will have a huge multiplier because of the level 7 officers, but the number being multiplied is pitiful to begin with, because it's just 10 frigates.

Well obviously if you're looking to maximize the quantity A * B, then you want both A and B to be large, one doesn't work without the other since they multiply together. But in terms of ships vs officers, it's the officers that contribute the bulk of the XP.

I limited the discussion to the XP bonus multiplier because I hadn't looked at the XP itself. But it turns out you want officers for that too. The way the base XP works is this:

For each ship, take its fleet points (from the "fleet pts" column in ship_data.csv), and multiply it by:
600 if no officer
900 if level 4 officer (gamma)
1100 if level 6 officer (beta)
1300 if level 8 officer (alpha)
1500 if level 10 officer (omega)

So an alpha core will slightly more than double the base XP for that ship (from 600 to 1300). The number of d-mods on the ship doesn't matter (or at least, up to 5 d-mods anyway, I didn't test beyond that), nor weapons nor anything else that I'm aware of. I have no idea if civilian affects it the same way it affects the XP bonus multiplier. You take this product, and then round down (truncate) to the closest 500. Sum this up for every ship in the fleet.

Note that the base XP depends on the ship's FP ("fleet pts" in ship_data.csv), while the XP bonus multiplier depends on the ship's deployment points, or DP ("supplies/rec" in ship_data.csv). These two can be quite different; for example, a Lumen's FP is 8 while its DP is 4, while a Radiant's FP is 30 while its DP is 60.

Looking at the base XP for some [REDACTED] fleets, the inclusion of officers increases the base XP by around 80-90% (compared with if the ships had no officers, i.e. if the FP were multiplied by the base of 600). In other words they'll nearly but not quite double the base XP for those fleets. But in terms of the XP bonus multiplier, the officer's contribution is about 3x that of the ships' total DP.

So overall, for endgame fleets, the enemy officers will be contributing around 70-75% of the overall XP that you get from killing the fleet.

[Null Ganymede]

Support Doctrine is overall a decent way to cheese the leveling process. What I did for the latest playthrough was rush to SD, hire 10 level 1 officers and never level them up, and do super-high multiplier battles to level both myself and the officers (derelict fleet bounties are perfect for this since gamma cores bloat their difficulty score). Assigning only one officer at a time allows them to soak up all XP and let the rest of the fleet get SD bonuses and carry.

This is cool. It's an alternative path to the usual iterative flagship upgrade start that eventually transitions to upgrading a fleet around it.

Farming officer fleets is especially good if you've got an "assassin" type flagship, like a phase ship or something.

[Vanshilar]

So playing around with Support Doctrine a bit, it leads to a fun fleet setup that maximizes XP gain.

Basically, you want your fleet to be as small as possible, yet as effective per DP as possible. Probably means no officers, since they cost 30 DP each in terms of the XP bonus. (Although if you put them on large ships maybe the ship's added effectiveness can outweigh their cost.)

Playing around with different ships, the one that I found is the most effective on a per-DP basis is...the Brawler (LP). This guy has SO built-in, and AAF as its shipsystem. It has 2 medium ballistics for a heavy machine gun (anti-shield) and an assault chaingun (anti-armor/hull). I put regular light machine guns on the 2 small universals on the sides. All the machine guns also double as PD. Best of all, this is only 5 DP, or 4 with Support Doctrine. Very low DP yet it can put out a lot of damage with this setup, especially since it has AAF.

So, best I've found is to give it Hardened Shields, Hardened Subsystems, and Heavy Armor as its built-ins, then Extended Shields and Solar Shielding, then max caps (+15), then remaining into vent (+2). On 7 of them, I have Nav Relay as a built-in instead of Hardened Shields, to make sure my fleet gets the full +20% speed bonus (+6% from myself), so those 7 basically lose 5 OP so they have 12 caps and 0 vents instead.

For the flagship, you can probably use a bunch of different ones, whatever floats your boat, but I went along with non-SO Hyperion with 2 cryoblasters and a heavy machine gun. You can probably do SO if you don't mind the extra supplies it would need for recovery. I was going for minimum fleet DP but since the player can be much more effective than the AI (probably a 2x to 3x multiplier on the ship's DP in terms of effectiveness), it's arguably better for the flagship to be a better, more expensive ship.

So in terms of the fleet setup, it ends up being 1 Hyperion and...26 Brawlers (LP). This works out to 15 + 26*4 = 119 DP total, so I set the battle size down to 200. Sure, the enemy fleet is bottlenecked into fewer ships, but that's because my own fleet is so small and the player fleet is limited to 30 ships. (Might be fun to set the limit to 60 ships though, in which case it'd be 1 Hyperion for 15 DP and 56 Brawlers (LP) for 224 DP, or 239 DP total.) No officers are used in order to minimize my fleet's effective DP to maximize the XP bonus.

My fleet's effective DP for the XP bonus ends up being:

63.75 for player character
15 for Hyperion
130 for 26 Brawlers (LP) (note that they still count as full DP for the XP bonus, even though they get the Support Doctrine discount for deployment)
2.5 for Atlas
1.5 for 2 Salvage Rigs
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212.75 total

The fun thing about this fleet is, if you catch a big enough Ordos fleet, you only need a single Ordos fleet to give you the full 500% bonus. So no need to overextend yourself by gathering up multiple fleets and doing really long fights. For the test fight, it was short enough that my non-SO Hyperion had 17 seconds remaining on its PPT, although most of the Brawlers did use up some of their CR.

The Brawlers (LP) do end up with a small shield gap of 30 degrees, but because they're so small and they're maneuvering, that gap is really hard to hit. Since they're so fast, they can quickly back off when they overload and some other Brawler (LP) will take their place, so it's basically a big swarm of little ships picking away at the enemy fleet. Since the player is much better than the AI at finishing off ships, I used dual cryoblasters on my Hyperion (no other Omega weapons were used in the fleet), while the Brawlers are in general more anti-shield. But the assault chainguns do their job really well. I also focused more on the larger ships, since the Brawlers (LP) are more likely to have trouble with larger ships. They don't have any trouble with [REDACTED] frigates nor destroyers, although they sometimes had trouble with swarms of fighters.

Attached are screenshots of the test fleet used for the 500% XP and the combat results. No ships were lost. This single fleet gave me 4.89 mil XP (half of it from bonus XP).

[attachment deleted by admin]

[OmegaMan]

I'm running support doctrine in my first play through on the new patch. For almost the entire game I've fielded a Destroyer/ frigate wing of 3-4 Scarabs, Two Omens, Two Tempests and two Medusas.  I have officers on my cruisers but the frigates and the scarabs especially do a LOT of work.   I have been piloting a Fury for the early and mid game and recently upgraded to an Odyssey (2x HIL plus full range mods) , and 75% of fights I just bring in my Oddesey. plus Frigates + Medusas and maybe a few Condors.   The small ships will die every now and then but they are cheap to replace.   

Against an average pirate fleet I recover MORE supplies than CR and damage recovery takes so it's very efficient.    Against larger forces I will add in my officered ships,  (Doom, Fury, Champion, Gryphon, pirate Cruiser[name?], Mora, plus 2-3 Sunder/hammerhead). and 4-5 Condors (Longbow + Atropos/Flash bombers) round out my combat forces.   I've taken out Ordos with Remnant battleships with almost no losses.     

I'm still looking for a Legion XIV Battlecruiser to add to my fleet... And eventually will add some more Oddessys. I've just now reached the endgame, got 4 colonies running and turning a 150K month profit,  but for 30+ hours I was barely scraping by trying to get my colonies going.   

One thing I don't quite see any need for is fighter screens...   Fighters really aren't ever a threat to IMHO with the range on Tac lasers + HIL there is a 2300 Su no fly zone.   If the AI was better at sending them all at once when I am high flux maybe it would work, but they always go out early and get zapped fast.     It doesn't help that they fly in a straight line with no evasion attempts...   Frigates will dodge anything so not sure why fighters/bombers don't try., I feel like it would help their survivability.

[Salter]

Ive found support doctrine works well on ships you dont want to have officers on but want to keep around. Mostly Omen's or Monitor's given how they dont have a whole lot in the way for offense but still benefit from some of the officer stuff like Helmanship or Combat Endurance. Since neither have the weapon mounts to warrant having officers, neither will rarely get shot down given their defensive profiles.

Still pretty good if you dont grab drones. Let you fill out your ranks with fire support ships and whatnot.

[Megas]

Lately, I have been testing small ship wide fleets (to see if Vanguard is worse than other frigates, or test HSA loadouts) led by Ziggurat.  Many of the ships have no officers, and I wished I had Support Doctrine for effectively level 3 officers for more than half of my fleet, and to either deploy few more ships, or not and get some of my bonuses from skills back (for too big fleet).

So far, I had some casualties (though some of the frigates had level 5 officers on them).