Yes, this is a Conquest thread. (And an Odyssey thread, but people don't argue about that one as much despite the many similarities.
) I'd like to ask the people who swear by them:
How do you use them?The thing that's kept me away from the battle-cruisers - aside from simple incompetence at the high-speed-low-drag-dash-in-dash-out style of gameplay - is that I can't manage to keep either of them alive against our old frenemy The Sim Onslaught. Now, I'm the
first one to say that "1v1 The Sim Onslaught" is a
far from a universal benchmark for any ship as 1v1 is
not how Starsector is played; and such 1v1s - against a ship explicitly designed to favor offensive firepower (and maneuver!) at the cost of needing escorts - tells you very little about how a ship will perform in a
fleet fight. However, for capships this is a bit different. The player is (almost) always the most potent force on the field, between human intellect and superior in-game skills, and most players who want to maximize that impact will either go for the bag-and-drag style of gameplay (Doom stans being the classic example here) or they'll opt to direct the biggest guns themselves, which is what I do, from a Paragon or Onslaught. And in either case I view my job as dealing with the opposing capital ships; as that's the "central mass" of the fight; by destroying the hostiles capships I destroy the bulk of their firepower and the rest of the battle is pretty much mop-up, with my AI cruisers able to handle themselves after that. Therefore the inability to deal with either a sim Onslaught or Paragon with either battlecruiser is a bit
worrisome. Either battlecruiser can and will be just fine if they can flank; get in close to the side of those ships; the trouble is that they simply get
vaporized before they can close in, even with their ship systems, and kiting doesn't work since Burn Drive is faster and Paragon outranges YOU.
I suspect, however, I'm thinking about battlecruisers wrong - they're not just the capital version of a Fury or Aurora; they're not meant to zip in, blast away, then zip out. Which is good, because the Onslaught is now very good at that. Interruptible burn drive has been one of the single best improvements to Starsector ever made; even with all the recent (and badly needed) lowtech/Onslaught buffs, the old burn drive still seriously hampered the ship overall. An awful lot of the time in Starsector combat is complicated by Line-Of-Sight; either a drifting wreck, one of your own allies who planted himself in front of you, or a fluxed-out Falcon(P) slipping away behind a wall of brick-tank Mules. Interruptible burn drive allows short burns to maneuver around those obstacles to gain LOS, as well as allowing one to pull to
just within range without YOLO'ing into a gaggle of escorts that then set upon you like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat. Combine this with the Onslaught's oft-lamented flux stats and you get a ship that's actually better at the "dash-in, dash-out with burst damage" dynamic than the Conquest is (at the cost of not being able to dash out and having to rely on heavy armor for that; the system is still overall an offensively oriented one, which matches the hull design and intent perfectly.)
So what
is the Conquest and Odyssey good at? Well, they have weak defenses, but a massive pool of flux and are fairly speedy, which seems to imply that they're meant to circle a fight and just blast cruisers and escorts out of the way with continuous bombardment rather than high burst damage, as well as put fire on hostile capships when your own cruisers are ready to press their attack. This is a big part of the stand-and-fight capital gameplay too; cruisers and destroyers are
not ignoreable threats on the battlefield and oftentimes I find it just as important to use my capship's DPS to run off (or outright delete) hostile escorts so my final assault doesn't turn into the aforementioned cruiser dogpile (or at least push them back enough that my own cruisers are close enough to cover my tail once I do press my attack.)
In other words, the battlecruisers aren't supposed to fight alone any more than an Onslaught is, making their 1v1 sim performance just as irrelevant as the classic "Sim Onslaught vs. flanking frigate" genre of youtube video. But since that play-style is the polar opposite of mine I'm having real trouble getting into the mindset of it and seeing how it works in actual gameplay.
So I ask you, Conquest and Odyssey stans -
how do you use these ships in your typical battles in the campaign? What kind of fleet comp do you utilize to back it up? How do you maneuver your ships when you first launch into a battle - do you have some escort you, or do you slap down a "Defend" waypoint and circle around the main fight, and have your cruisers charge up the enemy's rear if they turn to address the threat you pose from behind them? There's clearly plenty of people who swear by them, so there has to be a way to use them right, and I'd like to try these out for a change.
