Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Amoebka]

(Did I get you with a flame-provoking title?)

Vigilance is a ship with a major identity crisis. It's likely intended to be a dedicated fleet support frigate, providing cheap missiles for compositions laking in them. However, it fails miserably in this role for a multitude of reasons.

Firstly, it lacks either the durability or the speed to survive late game battles. You need to keep it close to your big hitters to keep it safe from enemy frigates (and let it assist with missiles), but that's also where all the scary capital-grade firepower is. A single barage from something like an autopulse laser will just delete Vigilance outright. The ship is also utterly incapable of protecting itself against fighters, or even surviving them long enough to get help, which is mandatory for late-game frigates. And finally, Vigilance doesn't even have a good missile/DP ratio despite being a missile specialist. You are pretty much never going to use Vigilances over Gryphons or Falcons(P) when you want missile support. The cruisers have better missile/DP ratios while also being able to survive infinitely better.

So can it function in the early game at least? Hell no. It loses to just about any other frigate 1v1, and isn't fast enough to run away from them either. And fighters are going to demolish it even worse than in a late-game setting, because you likely don't have your own interceptors to even try and contest the Talon spam.

The ship demands constant babysitting, and doesn't provide much reward in return. It needs to either be able to survive better on its own, or have some unique benefit to make it situationally better than Gryphons (faster ammo regen for pilums/resonators? a missile HEF for laser missiles?).

[Null Ganymede]

Okay but if you use 2x neural linked ones as flagships you can hop between them to constantly reset the ship system. That lets you magdump 2x slow-reload medium launchers (Pilums/Hurricane MIRVs in vanilla, lot of MRM/LRM options in mods) almost as fast as they can fire!

... but you're right

[Jackundor]

Okay but if you use 2x neural linked ones as flagships you can hop between them to constantly reset the ship system. That lets you magdump 2x slow-reload medium launchers (Pilums/Hurricane MIRVs in vanilla, lot of MRM/LRM options in mods) almost as fast as they can fire!

... but you're right

>Vigilance
>Hurricane

[Igncom1]

If it can pop even a single enemy frigate with a harpoon pod then it basically has done all it needs to.

Not everything exactly need to be 'late game viable' and the Vigilance certainly isn't, but it does it's job as a missile carrier just fine.

If it was much better then giving it as reaper torpedo would make it into a fleet killer.

[Harmful Mechanic]

The Vigilance is not half-bad in a couple of niche roles;
- slap Safety Overrides, a Typhoon Reaper, and an HMG on it and it's a pretty decent suicide torpedo boat,
- slap an Ion Beam or HVD and a Sabot Pod into it and it's a good support ship,
- various boring Grav Beam/HVD and Harpoon/Breach fits that serve unremarkably in a frigate cloud.

I think it could probably use a different ship system, possibly Canister Flak or a similar PD substitute, but it's not a bad ship; just an ordinary one.

EDIT: Really, I think the ur-issue is that the progression curve of the game leaves you with almost no time running a large frigate cloud, which is where Vigilances are the most useful. And even then, a lot of other frigates are better picks simply because they can do what the Vigilance does *and* do other things. The Fleet Size By DP mod does help a bit with making 'wide' fleets of smaller, less high-end ships more viable, but not quite.

So, probably chalk this one up to needing a bunch of the issues around the ship fixed, too.

[Grievous69]

For 5 DP the Vigilance need either another mount somewhere so it can have PD with an actual gun OR a much better shield (wider arc, better efficiency). As it is right now it's very bad, it's the slowest most vulnerable frigate that doesn't even bring that much for 5 DP. The only niche there is for it is doing a challenge run forcing yourself to use them.

[Schwartz]

You mean it's not in the top 5 frigates so nobody uses it late-game. Fair enough. But that's the case for a ton of civvie and pirate hulls also. Vigilance is at least a straight combat frigate. I would take it over a Cerberus, Hound, Mudskipper II, Kite, Shepherd or Wayfarer.

A d-mod skilled player can also likely get good bang for his buck out of a swarm of these.

[Grievous69]

But that's not a fair comparison, you said it yourself it's a straight combat frigate. I'd take a Hammerhead over a Mule but that doesn't mean the Mule is a bad ship. Ask yourself if you'd rather have a Vigilance than a Wolf, Centurion, Lasher and so on. Can't believe people are non ironically defending this ship. I devoted a whole playthrough using ships I don't normally use and Vigilance was one of the clearest "don't even bother" cases. You either make a risky build that maybe does something, or a safe long range build that dies anyways to a fart.

[Schwartz]

If I only had Lashers otherwise, I would probably do Lashers and Vigilances. Wolf can do missiles, and Centurion is just better than all the others.

[smithney]

Yeah, I'd agree the lore blurb is basically describing an entirely different ship. It's a shame, 'cause the role of a squishy overgunned escort isn't occupied. I would probably slap a built-in ECCM to bring it on par with Omen if I wanted to make it viable. However, my senses tell me that there is probably a good reason why that hasn't happened already (do I hear SPAM?).

Instead, it could probably be optimized for small fleets like Harmful Mechanic suggested. Give it a PD substitute and force it into backline. There would be a lot of tuning to be done with its OP, but there's a fun glass cannon there at the end of the line. If this philosophy can work for Manticore, I don't see how it can't be applied to Vigilance.

[Harmful Mechanic]

Given the trendline of the ship's design (the turret change to a Hybrid slot especially), it seems to me like the best solution here is making the Vigilance low tech.

So, making the turret a Ballistic, and giving it Canister Flak wouldn't be out of line for that, along with a sprite refresh in low-tech brown and red. Then it would be a handy-dandy frigate counterpart to the Manticore, and midline could get a different med-slot frigate; something with a med Hybrid and a bunch of smalls, perhaps.

[Igncom1]

I mean make it more of a torpedo boat for sure but if you turn it into a low tech ship that can have a HVD then it's going to always focus more on that.

Honestly a Vigil with a pulse laser and harpoon pod can easily kill most frigates all on it's own, it just can't take a punch which I why I wouldn't use one once cruisers become common.

I personally don't see the issue, won't say no to a buff, but if everything is viable then fleet composition is pointless.

[Euphytose]

Yeah agreed, I never use this ship. I find it pretty terrible.

[smithney]

...but if everything is viable then fleet composition is pointless.

Sorry if I'm veering off-topic, but I can't leave this sentence uncontested. I'd argue the opposite: if everything is viable, then you are free to compose within the limits set by the rules without worrying about shooting yourself in the foot. The question is in what way is the element in question viable. I believe you were trying to say that once everything is viable, there's not enough variety to make composition interesting. That is a valid worry, but the causality is opposite: situations like this arise when the developer sacrifices variety for the sake of viability, which sometimes happens in multiplayer games. However, theoretically speaking, you can make a system where all elements are viable provided the circumstances. DOTA 2 is the first on my mind when it comes to multiplayer examples; I'd carefully suggest XCOM 2 as a singleplayer example, but there are probably better ones out there.

Now to make this post relate to Vigilance:

Given the trendline of the ship's design (the turret change to a Hybrid slot especially), it seems to me like the best solution here is making the Vigilance low tech.

I wouldn't necessarily go that far, lo-tech already has the Manticore and as you suggested in the previous post, frigate armadas don't generally happen in a regular playthrough (don't think that's necessarily a bad thing). I'd say there's something intriguing about a frigate-sized Gryphon, but I feel like the only way to not make it broken (spam, lovely spam...) is to double down on its glass cannon-ness. I don't see why midline couldn't sport one such frigate when the other options are all bulky.

[Igncom1]

...but if everything is viable then fleet composition is pointless.

Sorry if I'm veering off-topic, but I can't leave this sentence uncontested. I'd argue the opposite: if everything is viable, then you are free to compose within the limits set by the rules without worrying about shooting yourself in the foot. The question is in what way is the element in question viable. I believe you were trying to say that once everything is viable, there's not enough variety to make composition interesting. That is a valid worry, but the causality is opposite: situations like this arise when the developer sacrifices variety for the sake of viability, which sometimes happens in multiplayer games. However, theoretically speaking, you can make a system where all elements are viable provided the circumstances. DOTA 2 is the first on my mind when it comes to multiplayer examples; I'd carefully suggest XCOM 2 as a singleplayer example, but there are probably better ones out there.

Yeah more along with concerns that if we just buff everything until it's just plan old good, then you can just pick up every ship and use it for whatever with no real concern then we might as well be picking our favourite colour rather then a tool for a job. Which I feel the vigilance might become if it gets too buffed to compete with ships like the Tempest. (High tech frigates are almost like that in a way already, pick the sprite you like and you are done for 90% of the game.)

And Midline in particular, to me, feels like it should be the ships that are the most like tools for a job. Low and High techs can be more well rounded.