I feel like something running 2x Mark IX, 5x Harpoons, and some Longbows should be a somewhat higher DPS but closer range build that should work about as well.
The main issue with running conventional builds like this is that the legion AI is pretty terrible. It needs to be aggro because of it's bad stats but the AI is too passive. Hence the only build that plays nice with the AI is something that keeps it out of trouble. You could run harpoons instead of pilums if you wanted though.
I typically have my Legions and Legion XIV escort another direct fire capital, like an Onslaught, Paragon or Radiant. This keeps small fry off the back of the direct fire capital, and keeps the Legion somewhat back from the front line, while allowing the Harpoons and fighters to fly over the escorted capital. That generally keeps both capitals out of trouble I find. But I need to do some testing tests to be able to make a sensible statement.
Just full assault doesn't really simulate reckless AI. Full assault + eliminate is still a bit shy of a reckless captain but it's close enough for some rudimentary testing.
That's a fair point, full assault is more akin to aggressive perhaps. And SO ships really want to be Reckless.
With full assault + eliminate the hammerhead literally tanked the salamanders and kept flying forward and basically oneshot the condor. The champion had a much tougher fight. It got bullied really hard for a bit but that ended when the fighters desynced and the champion just ran the carriers down. SO ships as hunter ships are a bad matchup for carriers, so not being good against the fighters is not as big of an issue.
I guess my point was these ships do have bad matchups. They may be optimized, but that's mostly towards killing larger and slower ships. When I think of the term optimal without qualification, I tend to think capable of taking on any situation that might occur in the vanilla game. Fighter heavy fights don't happen that often in vanilla, but they can be some of the more challenging ones when they do.
Certainly, a fight that might want heavier rear point defense is the custom campaign mission Doom fleet with all those mines, as well as losing engines to phase ships getting behind the champions.
Although I do know for a fact the double Tesseract fight will wipe a fleet of those SO Hammerheads and SO Champions as presented. Just booted up a test game with Command Console, ran the fight with 8 Champions, 4 Hammerheads, 10 level 6 reckless officers and a level 15 character (Combat 5, Leadership 7, Tech 3, no s-mods, but 2 elite skills per officer), and was a total loss under autopilot and no fleet commands given.
Simply changing the Champions to use Locust instead of Hammer Barrages and switching out for a long range ITU Hammerheads with some long-range point defenses resulted in a win, with only the loss of the unofficered Hammerhead in the first few moments, as well as the autopiloted player character Champion. Identical officers and main character.
That strikes me as a potentially large swing in effectiveness in a vanilla fight some players may care about.
Now I admit that this was without s-mods, but arguably said changes will boost both fleets about equally. Same goes for human piloting and fleet commands.
At the end of the day, there's quite a number of configurations that can take on Tesseract fights and Ordos. At the point you can beat them cleanly, I'd personally rather shore up my weaknesses rather than double down on what the ship is already good at. Minimize my weaknesses in addition to maximizing my strengths, as opposed to optimizing along only a particular concept (maximum forward DPS for killing capitals). I'm not saying the ship builds are bad, but I feel more nuance in communicating what one expects them to be able to do and what they don't expect them to be able to do is needed other than simply saying they are "optimal".
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