These are updated results of my testing of different cruisers to get a quantitative feel for the worth of their DP against a double Ordos fleet as a benchmark. To recap:
* The enemy is a standard double Ordos fleet. It's pretty close to the average statistics of 2 Ordos fleets (in terms of size and composition), fighting together. This is the same double Ordos fleet that I use for my testing.
* I pilot my flagship Onslaught XIV. It's packed with needlers (and BRF), with a Hephaestus as the center large and Devastators on the sides. The missiles are Proximity Charge Launchers. I aim for Radiants and generally center mass of the enemy fleet. Basically I burn drive into Radiants and unload the Prox on them, usually singing "Wrecking Ball" along the way. I let the other ships take care of the rest. I have CE, IM, TA, BM, MS, GI, and OE, all elite. I think most of the rest of the skills should be pretty self-evident.
* The cruisers in the fleet all have the same officer skills and ship build (weapons, hullmods, etc.). All ships have ITU, Solar Shielding, and Converted Hangar with Xyphos. All officers are aggressive. They all have CE and TA as officer skills. The rest just depends on whatever I can find to maximize overall average DPS and minimize total battle time for each of the ships. So it's a matter of trying out different builds and seeing what works the best to maximize DPS. The "cloneship" command from Additional Search Commands (
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=23024.0) works great for this. The chart below lists the other 3 skills the officers had, as well as any particular hullmods, although most hullmods should be readily obvious.
* No ships are allowed to die or retreat. If that happens then I basically reload and try again. So, only clean runs (no deaths nor retreats) are counted. So, the ships have to have enough defenses to absorb the enemy attacks without dying, yet do the maximum amount of overall DPS under that constraint.
* No Omega weapons were used. Some of these ships may benefit quite a bit from Omega weapons, which would change their DPS results.
The results are:
DP #deploy DP used Time DPStot DPSshi DPSarm DPShull DPS/DP config
14 14 196 351 142* 82* 20* 40* 10.2* Falcon XIV, FM, GI, OE (elite), 2 HVD, Phase Lance, Pulse Laser, 2 IR Pulse Laser, 2 Swarmer, HS
17 11 187 351 193* 121* 24* 49* 11.4* Eagle new, FM, GI, OE (elite), 3 HVD, 3 Phase Lance, 3 IR Pulse Laser, HS
17 11 187 353 193* 117* 23* 52* 11.4* Eagle XIV new, FM, GI, OE (elite), 3 HVD, 3 Phase Lance, 3 IR Pulse Laser, AO
17 11 187 304 227 128 34 65 13.4 Eradicator (P), MS, GI, OE (elite), 2 HVD, Heavy Mauler, 4 Railgun, 4 Annihilator, Breach, EMR, BRF
18 11 198 287 253* 138* 36* 79* 14.1* Apogee, Helms, MS (elite), GI, Squall, HIL, Swarmer, 4 Tac Lasers (2 on side mediums), EMR, ECCM, AO
20 10 200 284 290 158 46 87 14.5 Eradicator, BM, GI, OE (elite), 2 HVD, Heavy Mauler, 4 Railgun, 4 Annihilator, Breach, EMR, BRF
20 10 200 248 372 185 59 128 18.6 Gryphon, FM, MS (elite), GI, Squall, 2 Harpoon, 3 Breach, HVD, HS, ECCM
25 8 200 346 309* 194* 39* 76* 12.4* Champion, MS (elite), GI, OE, Squall, HIL, 2 HVD, 4 Tac Laser, EMR
25 8 200 364 261 147 37 77 10.4 Dominator XIV, BM, MS (elite), OE, Mjolnir, Mark9, HVD, Heavy Mauler, 3 Harpoon Pod, 3 Railgun, EMR
DP = the deployment points that they were set at for testing
#deploy = the number of ships deployed
DPused = total amount of DP of ships used (other than my flagship)
Time = total time it took to finish the battle, according to Detailed Combat Results; the lower the better
The rest take a bit more explanation. Detailed Combat Results currently has a bug with reporting beam damage, typically reporting it as usually more (though sometimes less) than the actual damage done. So any ships that have beams won't have accurate beam damage reported. However, I can estimate the damage since it's the same double Ordos fleet that I'm repeatedly fighting.
If I add up the ship stats for every ship in the double Ordos fleet, there is a total of 422k flux capacity, 28k armor, and 289k hull. From 21 battles for which no beams were used (other than Xyphos, which is minor at <5% of the total even though it's likely inflated, but for which I subtracted out), the average total damage dealt by my fleet (including flagship) was 591k+-60k shields, 143k+-9k armor, and 295k+-7k hull. Armor and hull were fairly consistent, but shields had a correlation with the total time, with the best-fit curve being 1067*time + 219k, meaning that every second of combat meant an additional 1067 shield damage was dealt to finish off the fleet. This has an r^2 value of 0.84, and brings the standard deviation down to +-24k. So overall the error is around +-4% for shield damage, +-6% for armor damage, and +-2% for hull damage, when using this estimate.
For ships using beams, this estimated damage (based on battle time) was used to estimate the overall damage. For those ships, the DPS numbers have an * next to them to denote that they are estimates. For the others, their reported damage from Detailed Combat Results (minus Xyphos damage) was used directly.
From there, I subtracted the damage that the flagship did in that battle. (The flagship only uses projectiles, which do not have the beam bug, and thus its damage output is known.) I then assumed that it took 60 seconds for the ships to start fighting, so I took the remaining damage, divided by (battle time - 60), then divided by the number of ships, and that produces the DPStot, DPSshi, DPSarm, and DPShull numbers. That 60 seconds is just an educated guess and I may change it in the future, but for now at least it'll be uniform across all ships tested.
"Eagle new" and "Eagle XIV new" refers to the upcoming flux stats being upgraded to 700 base flux, which were used for this test. It does *not* include the speed change to 60, which was published after I did my testing, so the Eagles still had base speed 50 here.
The DPS/DP column is the DPStot divided by the DP of the ship as used in testing. Looking through the numbers, it's suggestive to divide the DPStot by 12.5, resulting in:
DP DPStot /12.5 Ship
14 142* 11.4* Falcon XIV
17 193* 15.4* Eagle new
17 193* 15.4* Eagle XIV new
17 227 18.2 Eradicator (P)
18 253* 20.2* Apogee
20 290 23.2 Eradicator
20 372 29.7 Gryphon
25 309* 24.8* Champion
25 261 20.9 Dominator XIV
What we can see is that for the most part,
if we take the ships' DPS calculated in this way and then divide by 12.5, the results are actually remarkably close to Alex's upcoming DP values for many ships. The Champion is better than the Eradicator, which is better than the Apogee, which is better than the Eradicator (P), all at a pretty close ratio to their upcoming DP values. From this, the Apogee's change to 20 DP is pretty well-deserved, as is the Eradicator's change to 22 DP and the Eradicator (P)'s change to 18 DP.
The Gryphon does far better than its 20 DP cost. The Dominator XIV did worse than its 25 DP though, and the Eagles and Falcon also did somewhat worse.
As part of the testing, to count how many times each weapon was fired, I set the ammo for most ballistic and energy weapons to 6000 (would basically never run out). Then, after the battle was nearly over, when the last Radiant had a sliver of hull left, I would use console commands to "god all" (thereby keeping it alive) as well as "traitor" that ship to be on my side so that the combat doesn't end. Then, I would transfer command to each ship and screenshot their remaining ammo. In this way I could count how often each weapon was fired, and then compare it with the hits recorded in Detailed Combat Results to calculate the hit rate (hits on enemy ships divided by number of shots fired) of each weapon. The drawback is that for those runs, the total battle time wasn't accurate since I was spending time shuttling between ships. So on any given run, I could get accurate weapon hit rates, or accurate battle time, but not both.
Now taking each ship in turn, for people who are looking for a base setup for Ordos-farming fleets or looking at how I tested each ship to arrive at the ship setups used above:
Testing the
Champion showed that weapon range has a huge effect on how often a weapon is used. It's obvious that longer-ranged weapons are used more often than shorter-ranged weapons, but when I was testing the Champion, I tested the weapons specifically for weapon range vs use rate (how often they were fired) and the dependence turned out to be huge. For example, for one of my earlier tests with Squall (no ECCM), Plasma Cannon, and 2 HVD's, the total results for the 8 Champions were:
weapon total shield armor hull hits fired hitrate
squall 332162 280699 15884 35578 1583 3640 0.435
HVD 195176 147014 12175 35988 1032 1428 0.723
plasma 117689 32752 25847 59090 325 408 0.797
Based on the Squall's fire rate of 92.3 shots per minute (due to Missile Spec elite), the HVD's fire rate of 60 shots per minute (since each Champion had 2 of them), and the Plasma Cannon's fire rate of 90 shots per minute, each Squall was firing for roughly 4.93 minutes (2500 range), each HVD for 2.98 minutes (1550 range), and each Plasma Cannon for roughly 0.57 minutes (1085 range). In other words, the HVD fired roughly 60% of the time of the Squall, and the Plasma Cannon fired roughly 19% of the time of the HVD. That's a huge dependence on weapon range.
Now, this was initial testing data, and it doesn't account for that 1) 5 of the 8 Squalls used up their whole ammo (so they would've been firing for longer if they had more ammo) and 2) the HVD fired at fighters while the others didn't, thus somewhat inflating its use rate relative to the others. But the Plasma Cannon's low use rate meant that even though its on-paper DPS is over 5 times greater (750 DPS at 500 hit strength compared with the HVD's 137.5 DPS at 275 kinetic hit strength), each Plasma Cannon only did around 20% more damage than each HVD, because its range (700 base range) was so much less than the HVD's range (1000 base range). So you basically spend 231% of the OP to do 121% of the DPS. Not an efficient trade.
So the Champion ended up using HIL with 4 tac lasers (presumably firing as often as the HVD's, instead of only around 1/5 of the time with the Plasma Cannon), and the results were immediate. The battle times went from around 400 seconds down to mid-300's; the final one posted above was 346 seconds. The data was:
weapon total shield armor hull hits
squall 317271 275767 9609 31896 1294
HVD 165082 127446 5327 32309 693
HIL+tac 225542* 41007* 73827* 110707*
For HIL+tac, the data is estimated since they are beam weapons (and thus the asterisks). But it's obvious that they contributed a lot more than the Plasma Cannon, almost double. In this particular run, neither ECCM nor Advanced Optics were used. I also tried several different combinations, i.e. with ECCM but with only 2 tac lasers, etc., but they all felt about the same in terms of effectiveness (even though ECCM meant quite a bit more Squall damage). So any of them were roughly equally viable. The highest DPS score was with this combination though. I would say if you need more OP, use fewer tac lasers. They were clearly less efficient on a damage/OP basis compared with the others.
The
Apogee was an obvious beneficiary of this analysis. The Plasma Cannon and 2 IR Pulse Lasers were replaced with HIL and 4 Tactical Lasers (2 of them on the side mediums, just because I had extra OP left), along with Advanced Optics. When the Apogees used Plasma Cannon + 2 IR Pulse Lasers, the results were:
weapon total shield armor hull hits
squall 437794 350244 23419 64130 2116
plasma 190251 58907 40556 90790 569
IRpulse 24700 14181 2862 7657 1169
breach 6614 744 4576 1293 67
When the Apogees used HIL + tac lasers (with Advanced Optics), the results were:
weapon total shield armor hull hits
squall 365422 305232 15259 44929 1628
swarmer 4218 2194 1148 876 91
HIL+tac 262361* 37657* 72951* 151755*
In both cases the Squalls had ECCM and Missile Spec (elite). The beams did noticeably more armor and hull damage compared with Plasma Cannon + IR Pulse Lasers, on account of their range. With Advanced Optics, ITU, and Gunnery Implants, their range was 1750 compared with the Plasma Cannon's 1085 and the IR Pulse Laser's 775. The long range also meant that the Apogee didn't have to take as much damage and could focus fire on ships more, and hence their DPS was much better. (The previous Plasma Apogee fleet took a total of 416k damage from the Ordos fleet. The HIL Apogee fleet took a total of 336k damage.) I was worried that their only source of hard flux was Squalls (with a tiny bit from Swarmers), but they were able to overwhelm shields and kill ships just fine. Squall + HIL Apogee turned out to be a really strong ship setup against Ordos fleets.
The Apogee didn't really need Ordnance Expertise (in fact I put 0 points into vent), so I put in Helmsmanship instead, which made it faster and also more maneuverable (since its main weapons are on hardpoints). Also, for some reason Swarmers seem to work well with it, better than Breach even though Breach typically did more damage. I suspect it's because Swarmers would primarily be helping to clear fighters/ships that got close to the Apogee, and hence it wouldn't need to turn around as much, but that's just speculation. Regardless, the best runs were while using Swarmers instead of Breaches for whatever reason.
For the
Eradicator, looking at their ammo use after combat showed that they actually didn't need both Missile Spec and Expanded Missile Racks; they only needed one or the other. (They would need both against triple Ordos though.) So I could opt for more OP or a different skill. I chose to replace Missile Spec with Ballistic Mastery for more weapon range and weapon damage. Additionally, testing with various small missile combinations showed that 1 Breach and 4 Annihilators tended to work well (2 Breaches and 3 Annihilators also worked well). This increased their DPS to around 278 each. I then tried removing Front Shields and putting in Ballistic Rangefinder instead, to increase Railgun range. This increased their DPS to around 292 each. The damage results were:
weapon total shield armor hull hits count
HVD 265217 169479 15963 79776 1210 2
railgun 199983 148204 11471 40307 3348 4
h.maul 103364 17944 42677 42744 713 1
anni 64035 17955 20286 25793 547 4
breach 17981 824 11667 5491 189 1
If we assume roughly similar hit rates, the railguns were firing only roughly 42% of the time compared with the HVDs or heavy maulers. Without BRF, they fired around 30% of the time compared with HVD. Again, range has a significant effect on how often the weapon gets used. So for the Eradicator, BRF is actually pretty worthwhile.
For the
Eradicator (P), I used pretty much the same build. Even though they didn't have AAF, the burn drive meant that they could go from hot spot to hot spot fairly well, as well as chase down stragglers quickly. So they actually worked fairly well.
For the
Dominator (XIV), it underperformed, and was a bit difficult to manage. The main reason is that like the Champion, there were fewer of them to start with (due to their higher DP cost), but unlike the Champion, they couldn't really guarantee kills on small ships that well. So the line of ships tended to be fairly "leaky" and frigates would get by them more frequently, which meant 25 DP spent chasing after frigates to keep the line cohesive instead of helping with the main battle line, and thus reducing their average DPS. This test really showed their weakness in being unmaneuverable.
For the
Gryphon, no changes were made, the improvement in DPS is just from running it a couple more times (the previous results were based on just one run for the Gryphon, while the others were the best of multiple runs). The Gryphon fleet took very little damage (118k), so I can probably take out Field Modulation and put in something like Helmsmanhip to make it more effective, but I didn't bother. The damage results were:
weapon total shield armor hull hits count
squall 253808 205403 9320 39085 1115 1
harpoon 297736 81806 47583 168347 568 2
breach 93306 20350 51285 21669 1108 3
HVD 54103 40540 1909 11655 248 1
The Squalls did around 8.5% of the armor damage and around 16% of the hull damage, with the bulk of the hull damage coming from the Harpoons (and the Breaches did a surprising amount of armor damage). Based on this, I doubt the update's change to the Squall (reducing its damage to armor and hull) will affect the Gryphon's effectiveness in any meaningful way; it'll likely retain its ability to vastly outdamage other ships on a per-DP basis.
Having said that, I think the change to the Squall were more to prevent it from being a "one-stop shop" as a weapon, and force the player to put in other weapons for anti-armor and anti-hull, which is exactly what this build does (since Harpoons and Breaches provide anti-armor and anti-hull, and HVD also provides some anti-hull). Thus this build won't really be affected much by that change.
Unlike many other fleets, this fleet is also capable of triple Ordos fleets without running out of missile ammo, and there's no real reason to go for quadruple Ordos since the fleet is already at +500% XP bonus at triple Ordos anyway. It can also dismantle stations pretty easily. So Onslaught XIV flagship + Gryphon spam is overall one of the most powerful fleets I've found for 0.95.1a.
For the
Falcon (XIV), after trying different combinations of Pulse Lasers, Phase Lances, etc., the best combination I was able to find was 2 HVD, 2 IR Pulse Lasers, a Pulse Laser, a Phase Lance, and 2 Swarmers. The biggest issue is that it has the firepower of a destroyer, so it couldn't really do that much damage before being pushed back due to flux. So it tended to run in and out a lot but not do as much permanent damage (i.e. to armor or hull) compared with the other ships. And thus, its overall DPS was fairly low. Multiple setups were tried, including different combinations of Heavy Blaster, Phase Lance, Pulse Laser, and Ion Pulser, as well as IR Pulse Laser, Antimatter Blaster, Swarmers, Breach, Annihilators, etc.
Next, for the main purpose of this thread, the
Eagle XIV. I don't buy the reasoning that it's meant to be a line holder and thus it's just there to soften up targets for other ships to kill. To do so would mean relying on other ships in the vicinity, in a game where each AI does their own thing and they don't understand the concept of a formation. Also, the Eagle isn't a cheap ship (even after its DP gets changed). Saying that it needs some other nearby ship to finish off targets is basically just adding to its effective DP cost.
So the challenge then is to make a loadout where the ship is self-contained, i.e. so that it can absorb attacks, take out shields, and then take out armor and hull before the target gets away. The shields is the easy part, just put on triple HVD, which is nice because it also does decent hull damage. Beyond that, I tried out a bunch of different weapons. As multiple posters have already mentioned, its problem is that the energy weapons lack the range to back up the ballistics. In fact, when I tried testing different medium energy weapons with 1700 base flux (i.e. so presumably the ship doesn't have flux issues and the weapons have the flux to fire whenever anything is in range), with them all stacked in the center (to remove issues with firing arcs), the result was:
weapon total shield armor hull hits count
HVD 378324 306352 20062 51911 1827 3
h.blast 137929 54904 31642 51382 447 1
pulse.l 63016 34078 8294 20639 1275 1
ion.pul 40690 21149 6692 12848 1045 1
Assuming they had roughly equal hit rates (hits on enemy ships divided by number of shots fired), then the medium energy weapons fired only roughly 35% of the time compared with each HVD. And this is more or less assuming they're not constrained by flux. It's easy enough to go into the sim, put each weapon in their own weapon group, and watch the AI toggle the weapons on and off as the flux level rises -- in which case they'll be used even less.
After trying out a lot of different weapon setups, eventually I settled on using 3 Phase Lances to burst the target. The idea is that as the target closes in, the Eagle is already hitting it with HVD so it already has some flux buildup. Meanwhile, the Eagle stays at low flux because the only weapons firing are its HVD's. Then the Eagle hits it with Phase Lances, which bursts through and hopefully does armor and hull damage too. At this point, the Eagle will start building up flux, but the target should already be at high flux and is taking hull damage. Then the Eagle finishes it off as it backs away.
One thing I found interesting from testing is that Phase Lances overall do roughly 40% more armor and hull damage than Heavy Blasters (although Heavy Blasters undoubtedly do more shield damage). This is because the AI seems to turn off Heavy Blaster from autofire at a lower flux percentage, while Phase Lances are not turned off as quickly. Also, Ion Pulsers generally did around 2/3 of the overall damage of Pulse Lasers, so from a pure damage standpoint, Pulse Lasers are better than Ion Pulsers. (But then it depends on how much you value the EMP damage of Ion Pulsers, as well as its burst capability.) This is in terms of AI of course; the player is able to make much better use of Ion Pulsers compared with the AI.
The IR Pulse Lasers are there to provide additional hard flux in case the target got close, for troublesome targets such as Brilliants and Radiants. I also tried Tactical Lasers on the small energies, which almost certainly did more damage than IR Pulse Lasers (since they're presumably used 100% of the time instead of a small percentage of the time), but Phase Lances + IR Pulse Lasers did better than Pulse Lasers/Heavy Blasters + Tactical Lasers.
For the Eagle XIV, I tried Advanced Optics as well as Hardened Shields. Without AO, the Phase Lances fired around 50% as often as HVD's (which is already higher than the "theoretical max" for Pulse Laser / Heavy Blaster / Ion Pulser). With AO, they fired roughly 70% as often, since they had extra range. This helped them reach a bit farther to hit targets, but also made them overflux more. Ultimately the run that had the highest DPS though was with AO, though Hardened Shields would be a bit safer.
Interestingly, for the base
Eagle, it was able to do around the same amount of overall DPS, even though it was basically working with 8% less flux stats. I suspect that it was because it was slightly faster so it could chase down frigates more quickly, and thus the line didn't get diluted as much. But there really wasn't much difference between the two. For its fastest run, the hullmod was actually Hardened Shields instead of Advanced Optics.
So overall I feel like a lot of the DP changes are pretty much on the mark. However, the Falcon, Eagle, and Dominator performed relatively poorly in these benchmark tests. For the Falcon, it's easy to see why -- the Falcon simply doesn't have enough firepower for endgame content to have it be the backbone of a fleet, relative to other cruisers. For the Dominator, it's simply so unmaneuverable with a higher DP cost (thus, fewer can be deployed), that frigates will slip by that need to be chased down, decreasing its overall DPS.
For the Eagle though, it's still quite a bit lackluster even after the 700 base flux change. Perhaps it'll be better when I test it at 60 base speed; or perhaps the new weapons and hullmods coming down the pipeline will benefit it more than the other ships (and thus its performance will increase relative to others). Or maybe there's some way to make them more effective that I haven't thought of. Anyone who feels they can come up with a better build for any of these ships is free to suggest it.