So, looking to give a more quantitative feel for how much DP the various cruisers under discussion should be worth, I tried them out against my double Ordos test fleet. (It's just 2 regular full Ordos fleets together, from a regular vanilla playthrough, with 4 Radiants, 14 Brilliants, and various other ships, closely matching the statistics for two average full Ordos fleets. I use this save as my standard double Ordos fleet for testing.) The setup was me piloting an Onslaught XIV, generally gunning for Radiants when they appear, and otherwise holding the center of the fleet. The cruisers were thus in charge of everything else, such as capturing objectives, taking out stragglers, etc. Since I'm aiming for the Radiants and thus tanking them (generally speaking), it takes the pressure off of the cruisers for that, but I'm very much dependent on them clearing out the trash near the Radiants as well as providing additional firepower on the Radiants so that it dies rather than running away. So they need to be good against Radiants too, just not necessarily tank-worthy.
The goal is to minimize the time it takes to complete the fight, without taking any losses. Generally that means very offensively-oriented builds, since you want to mulch through enemy ships quickly. I generally tried a number of different weapons for each ship, and then went with whatever seemed to work the best. All ships were identical in terms of officer skills and ship loadout; the "cloneship" command from the
Additional Search Commands mod is helpful for creating multiple copies of ships quickly to test.
All ships had aggressive officers (including modifying the settings for extra officers when needed). Officers were level 5, with 1 elite skill. I always took Combat Endurance and Target Analysis. (TA offers roughly a 10-15% increase in damage against Ordos fleets, so it's almost always worth taking.) The other 3 were based on what seems to be the most important, but were generally Ordnance Expertise, Gunnery Implants, Missile Spec, or Field Modulation. They also all had Converted Hangar with Xyphos because I like it, and thus no innate PD weapons (nor did I bother to close the engine gap with shields).
The results ended up being:
DP #deploy DP used Time TotDam DPSeach Ship
14 14 196 448 --- --- Falcon XIV, FM, GI, OE (elite), 2 HVD, 2 Phase Lance, 2 Tactical Laser
18 11 198 362 1039582 206.7 Apogee, MS (elite), GI, OE, Plasma Cannon, Squall, 2 IR Pulse Laser, Breach
18 11 198 --- --- --- Eagle XIV (new), FM, GI, OE (elite), 3 HVD, 3 Phase Lance, 3 Tactical Laser
20 10 200 330 1019617 231.5 Eradicator, MS, GI, OE (elite), 2 HVD, Heavy Mauler, 4 Railgun, 5 Annihilator
20 10 200 408 1028035 171.4 Fury, MS (elite), GI, OE, Heavy Blaster, Sabot, Prox, AM Blaster, IR Pulse Laser
20 10 200 271 970582 333.5 Gryphon, FM, MS (elite), GI, Squall, 2 Harpoon, 3 Breach, HVD
DP is the DP cost of the ship. (For the Eagle XIV, I chose a cost of 18; it would've been the same number of ships had it been 17 though so it doesn't matter).
#deploy is how many of those ships were deployed in addition to my flagship.
DP used is the total DP that those ships took up, other than my flagship.
Time is how long the battle took, based on Detailed Combat Results. The lower the time, the better, since it means the fleet was putting out more damage and killing enemy ships faster.
TotDam is the total shield + armor + hull damage that the entire fleet did during the fight. Since it's the same exact enemy fleet, a lower TotDam is better, meaning the enemy fleet wasn't able to flee and vent as much, but tended to die right away instead.
DPSeach is the average damage per second of each cruiser, basically taking the total damage, subtracting my flagship's damage, and then dividing by number of ships. Then, I divided that with the battle time minus 60 seconds (it takes about a minute for the fleets to start fighting each other), to get the average damage per second that each ship was doing throughout the battle.
Ship is brief summary of the ship, its officer skills, and its weapons.
The Gryphon was clear and away the winner. I think the meta for this current version of Starsector is basically missile spam; the AI doesn't really know how to handle missiles effectively, and the Gryphon's sheer volume of missiles with Missile Spec (+100% missile capacity, +50% missile fire rate, +10% missile damage) at long range (both Squall and Harpoon have 2500 range) means that the double Ordos can't put up any meaningful defense nor offense against the sheer volume of missiles flying around. This also means that the Gryphons don't have to worry much about defenses; the Gryphon fleet received less than 100k of damage the entire fight, whereas every other fleet absorbed more than 400k damage. It really comes down to Missile Spec, which boosts the Gryphon's damage output by roughly +65% (+50% fire rate, then another +10% damage on top of that), far more than any other skill for any other class of weapon. A Gryphon without Missile Spec is not nearly as dangerous, and the lower damage output means that it can't pressure other ships as hard, and thus it succumbs more easily since it's a glass cannon. So I think Missile Spec pretty clearly needs to be nerfed, or have its interaction with the Gryphon be nerfed in some way (other ships don't rely as much on missiles for damage).
The second place was the Eradicator. The HVD's put out the bulk of the anti-shield and anti-hull damage, while the Heavy Mauler did the bulk of the anti-armor. The Railguns meant that if targets got closer, they'd get hit with a lot more anti-shield. I chose Railgun over Light Needler for the somewhat better anti-hull -- hopefully if a target got that close then its shields were already down or close to it. The Annihilators blanketed the whole battlefield with missiles as well as doing some pretty good anti-armor and anti-hull damage. I purposely didn't take the elite version of Missile Spec for this so that the Annihilators would last longer (also to make the Eradicators a bit more defensive with OE elite). I'm not sure if it was necessary though.
Next up is the Apogee. The Squalls provided blanket suppression while the Plasma Cannon helped finish off targets.
Then it was the Fury. To be honest, I could probably get a better time with it, this run was just me testing out the various weapons (hence the variety of weapons used), so it could probably be somewhat better, but probably won't be wildly better. I'd estimate probably 10-20% higher DPS with the right weapons.
Then it was the Falcon XIV. It was a bit of a tough fight since they didn't have the punch, so I had to give orders constantly to have them attack and keep them in line. Also, inevitably, some Falcon or another would end up straying to the enemy spawn point, even when commanded to defend the center of the map, and thus die when the final Radiants started coming in. So this took a number of tries but was able to eventually do it. It's possible that I simply don't have a good build for it (using HVD + phase lance + tac lasers), so if anyone wants to suggest a better build, I'm open to it. I don't have a DPS value here because it seems like Detailed Combat Results has a bug in reporting beam damage, but it was probably around 110 or 120 based on how long the battle took and knowing how much damage my flagship did.
Last is the Eagle XIV. This was with the updated value of 18 DP (it didn't matter if it was 17 or 18 DP, it would've been the same number of ships on the field), and with the updated base dissipation of 700. I used 3 HVD, 3 Phase Lance, and 3 Tactical Laser. In sim this combination looked pretty good, and was easily better than Falcon XIV with the same weapons when testing against several Ordos ships in sim. However, in the actual fight, I tried about a dozen times but could never pull off a win without taking any losses. The Eagle couldn't finish off targets quickly enough often enough before they ran away, so eventually too many enemy ships would pile up. It would also take forever to chase stragglers. I tried the fleet using Unstable Injector (hoping the additional speed will help it chase down stragglers more effectively and back off faster when needed), and also tried the fleet using Advanced Optics (hoping the additional range would help it finish off targets before they got away), but neither worked.
Also, a lot of the back Eagles would stay back, happily sniping away at long range instead of closing in to use their Phase Lances, while the forward Eagles were busy getting pummeled by enemy ships. This despite aggressive officers which is supposed to mean that the ship will close in to the shortest weapon range. I suspect it's because the AI is overly afraid of enemy missiles, so that the back ships, since they're already far away, will choose to stay away, while the forward ships, having already committed to combat and thus not able to run away from the missiles anyway, will choose to stay forward. Whatever the reason, this was true regardless of ship (except for the Gryphon since it fired way more missiles than the enemy so it didn't have to deal with this), just that for the Eagle, it got so bad that the fleet kept falling apart.
Again, maybe I didn't use the right weapons with the Eagle XIV (or the Falcon XIV), since I don't have much experience with them, so if anyone thinks they can come up with a better build, I can try it out. But the Eagle even with the cheaper cost and improved dissipation doesn't seem to work well compared with other ships. Perhaps the new IR Autolance will work well with it, depending on its stats. Or whatever other new weapons Alex might have in store.
Looking at the battle time and the ship DPS, the Gryphon clearly needs to be adjusted, whether the ship itself or the Missile Spec skill. The Eradicator should probably be several DP higher than the Apogee, so if the Apogee is 20, then the Eradicator should probably be 22 or 23. (I haven't run the Champion yet so I don't know how it'll compare with the Eradicator yet.) The Fury can improve somewhat but realistically I think it'd just approach the Apogee at best, not surpass it, so it looks like it should be either at the Apogee's cost or possibly slightly cheaper. (The Apogee is a really good tank which means it can dish out a lot of damage before it needs to back off.) The Falcon did significantly less DPS but as a light cruiser, it can't really take much punishment, so it spent more of its time backing off and venting relative to the other ships, thus resulting in its lower overall DPS, so it's probably fine where it is.
For the Eagle, though, I don't really have a good idea of where it should be placed, simply because I'm not able to finish a battle with it without taking losses.
@Vanshilar, Thanks for doing those tests - I'm really surprised the tac lasers did so much damage! I suppose stacking the stacking range extenders end up giving them a big reach to poke things.
Did you find that the Xyphos were a big contributor? I ask because they are very OP expensive and the new support fighter looks like its going to be incredible at anti-missile.
So it turns out (sigh) Detailed Combat Results seems to have a bug with reporting beam damage. Sometimes it under-reports and sometimes it over-reports, but generally it over-reports the damage done by beams. This can be seen easily in sim, particular multiple beams firing at once (say, a Phase Lance burst). So those numbers were wrong. So yeah, the Tactical Lasers and Phase Lances were probably not anywhere near as effective as the numbers suggest. The Phase Lance burst certainly works though, and is fun to watch, but it's hard to tell how much damage the beams are actually doing. I'll have to post in the mod thread when I have time.
The Xyphos don't really contribute much damage, I just like using them in place of PD on my ships, and it also means I can ignore other stuff that I'd usually put defensively (such as Extended Shields to close off the engine gap for shields), as well as give EMP capability -- which helps a lot, especially toward the end when it's Brilliants and Radiants so that there are multiple Ion Beams on them. Also, I tend to pilot my flagship rather recklessly, so it's nice to have a forest of Ion Beams and PD to duck behind whenever I overextend myself. So they're expensive but I find that they're usually worth it, but yeah, it makes fitting ships more difficult. It's possible that my ships would do more damage without them, I don't know, but then it's also hard to quantify how much the Ion Beams contribute in terms of disabling weapons on enemy ships so that my ships don't have to absorb as much damage. I've tried it both ways and feel like Xyphos is the "safer" option, i.e. AI die less with it than without it (so I don't have to worry about my fleet as much), but that's just personal feeling.
The new support fighter...if it's the autocannon one, I'm actually thinking of trying it out with the base Legion in the next update. The base Legion is actually better at yeeting Prox charges than the Onslaught, but the fighters were finicky to time right. Having a bunch of fighters nearby for anti-shield and PD complements the anti-armor and anti-hull capability of the Prox pretty well. It certainly looks attractive as a budget Xyphos especially for the anti-shield.
