Assuming people are finding these results interesting. To be honest, Goumindong's fit, at the 20 DP price point looked reasonably good. 2 wins/2 losses, 1 close fight is pretty darn good when trying to compare balance. I suppose I should figure out if 0.95.1a officer skills were fixed with the AI tournament mod - haven't been paying much attention to the tournament scene lately.
That is about what I expected. Which would suggest that, especially if squalls and hurricanes are getting reduced in power, that the eagle doesn't terribly need a 10 speed boost, let alone a hangar bay and 15 OP.
Well, I tend to rear PD simply because AI likes to use Salamanders and the Eagle has fixed forward shields, but yeah I could go heavier on PD it's quite true.
I find that regular PD tend to be enough to deal with Salamanders. And while the burst PD isn't quite enough without an officer to deal with perfectly with Squalls (and won't deal with hurricanes at all) the lack of needing IPDAI in order to avoid decoy flares makes it effective enough against fighters that its still worthwhile to have.
An Ion Beam is useful on long range pressure Eagles because otherwise the AI can tank the hits on the armor. Going 2x HVD + 1x Mauler also does the same, but that is cutting into the kinetic budget a lot. The Ion Beam doesn't help the Eagle all that much because this configuration of Eagles lacks the ability to capitalize, but in terms of helping other ships and being a pain for the enemy, the Ion Beam lets them shut down enemy offense, flame out enemies through their shields from the front, etc. (It certainly helps the Eagle to catch smaller ships when they have no engines.) For pure kiting (IE HVD) Eagles, the EMP from the HVD's stacks with the Ion Beam to be more reliable in terms of shutting things down. The flux cost is only 200/second, so they aren't expensive - for the pure kiting build the ship doesn't need any skills/flux distributor/stabilized shields to be neutral so I'd even argue that 1 ion beam means the ship is undergunned for any crowded fight in terms of flux expenditure.
You do tend to end up shooting the front PD though too. So its not quite so under gunned unless you have a strong officer. And if you do you can swap things around as needed. Add a second Ion Beam or add more front PD. If you have a PD officer this gives you decent front PD without IPDAI. If you don't have a PD officer then IPDAI probably "solves" the issue as it works.
The other advantage of the Ion Beam is that it allows you to quickly disable a lot of the fast ships that don't have shields. They also stack exceptionally well on a lot of different ships.
edit: 3x HVD 3xGraviton is very good 1v1 in the sim because the AI just doesn't want to approach that raw shield pressure. When the sim was full "*** eagle" it was very hard to build a ship that could beat it in the AI simply because the raw shield pressure was simply absurd and even like... SO Heavy Armor Aurora would not be willing to just like... go and kill the damned thing.
I am not sure its going to be bad I just like... Don't want to run it. Also since i am running officers the range band of the ion beam and the HAC line up pretty well. 800 x 1.65 = 1320. And 1000 x 1.55 = 1550. But the Ion Beams are set like 100 range back so its only a 130 range difference and the HAC projectiles still have a bit of range falloff whereas the beams do not. Whereas the HVD would be hitting to 1650, outranging the ion/graviton by almost 200 due to the mounting differences not including falloff potential. Which just means the Ions/Gravitons may just end up not getting used.
I am willing to entertain it but the extra lead is just quite good.
Worth noting that 3x HVD provide 600 ion DPS too and better armor hit strength (138 vs 50) so its not like you want to armor tank against that setup. But its just also just 456 less hard kinetic pressure per second (actual because the Eagle will be significantly underfluxxed with three HVD)
