Oh I'd love to see your fleet comp then, if you can take and hold objectives on enemy side of the map within first minute or so of combat.
Well it's not going to be within the first minute, since it takes roughly a minute for the two fleets to actually meet each other in the middle in the first place. But the key is to just note that the AI's behavior is that they will send the bulk of their fleet to only one objective at a time, while they'll only send token forces to capture the other ones, usually frigates. So you just need to send ships strong enough to displace their frigates temporarily while your main fleet bottlenecks their main fleet.
Off the top of my head, the fleet compositions I've used in 0.95.1a include:
Odyssey/Fury/Apogee/Hyperion: Various combinations of these ships, such as 2 Odysseys, 3 Furies, 3 Apogees, 2 Hyperions. A notable example is here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUj-ggxn5Jk (video from 0.95a), a 3 Odyssey, 3 Apogee, 3 Hyperion pure AI fleet, that on a lucky run could kill double Ordos on its own without any commands, after capturing the objectives and gathering the fleet up. This meant that all 15 skill points could go toward the fleet, and I didn't really have to do anything other than issue the occasional command (mostly just to corral the fleet back together). This family of fleet setups was what I first tried out in 0.95.1a. In all cases, if there were Hyperions, the Hyperions were sent to the objectives. If there weren't any (such as 2 Odyssey, 8 Apogee, etc.), then either some Apogees or Furies would grab the objectives.
Fury/Eradicator/Apogee/Hyperion/Shrike/Scarab/Brawler: Again, various combinations of some of these ships, generally all with SO. This was focusing more on having shifting front lines, rather than large tanks that the fleet centered around (note no capital ships). As with before, it would usually be the small ships going for the objectives first.
All-Hyperion fleet: This was frequently mentioned on the forums for a while. I tried it out, it was doable, but wasn't that great. The Hyperions, even with reckless officers, just kept running away unnecessarily, so their overall average DPS was pretty low, even if they had good burst DPS, resulting in long fights (which is made worse by their low PPT). I obviously just sent a Hyperion to each of the objectives.
Eagle/Scarab: This was with me in a Medusa. Like Hyperions above, this was doable, but wasn't that great. The Scarabs grabbed the objectives.
LP Brawlers with Champions or Eagle XIV's or Furies or Eradicators or Gryphons or Apogees or Falcon XIV's: This was with me in a Sunder, or Hammerhead, or Aurora, or LP Brawler, or eventually, Medusa using dual Cryoblasters, with various combinations of ships supporting the LP Brawlers. No officers, so this fleet relied on Support Doctrine. Eventually I settled on SO Falcon XIV's with Xyphos as being the most effective out of these on a per-DP basis for supporting the LP Brawlers. This was probably the easiest start I've ever played since the LP Brawlers could easily punch above their weight in the early game, and it was easy to gradually amass them to gradually scale up the enemies I fought by going to the various LP bases and either buying them or killing them. There were so many LP Brawlers that I could afford to send 2-3 to each objective. I also regularly fought Ordos under-DP'ed (i.e. my fleet only using 40-50% of battle size) since battles would actually finish faster that way -- the Brawlers would be waiting around at the enemy spawn point for new ships to spawn in if I had sized the battle size "correctly" at my fleet taking up 60%, so I made the battle size bigger than needed just so enemy ships would spawn in more quickly. I didn't need to capture the objectives, but this made it easier to corral the enemy fleet.
Ziggurat with LP Brawlers: Me piloting the Ziggurat using Omega weapons. Solo Ziggurat works but isn't that great, since you the player have to individually chase down every ship. Adding some LP Brawlers meant that I could have them fan out to either side, taking care of the trash while I concentrated on the big ships in the middle. The LP Brawlers went and grabbed the objectives while I went straight for the main enemy fleet, then I let them roam free, which meant that they would gradually head toward the enemy spawn point as I myself gradually headed there as I chewed through the main fleet and reinforcements. Doing it this way meant that the Ziggurat increased its own overall DPS by around 15% compared with soloing since it didn't have to turn nor overkill so much against minor targets, and could specialize against bigger ones.
Gryphons with LP Brawlers as support: I started by trying a monofleet of officered Gryphons, but found it sort of lacking. Having the Gryphons grab the objectives meant that it diluted the middle main fleet too much, especially early on before my reinforcements arrive. So the first way I tried was putting in some unofficered LP Brawlers (with Support Doctrine), to capture the objectives and allow the Gryphons to concentrate their fire on the main fleet. 10 officered Gryphons and 10 unofficered LP Brawlers. On a per-DP basis, the LP Brawlers did around as much damage as the Gryphons -- even though the Gryphons were officered while the LP Brawlers weren't (though they had Support Doctrine to help).
Gryphon with Legion XIV or Legion or Onslaught XIV flagship: I then piloted a Legion XIV or Legion or Onslaught XIV as the flagship, along with 10 officered Gryphons. Because I was helping to chew up the main enemy fleet, this freed up some Gryphons to grab the objectives. This is a case where the base Legion is noticeably better than the Legion XIV, because the base Legion could fit 5 Proximity Charge Launchers to completely annihilate the Radiants whenever they showed up (by using its burn drive to yeet the Prox en masse into the Radiants), along with its fighters, etc. I eventually settled on the Onslaught XIV though because even though it only had 4 instead of 5 medium missile slots, it had more ballistic weaponry and I didn't have to deal with pressing Z to toggle fighter engage/regroup.
Conquests with Onslaught XIV flagship: In looking at the Conquest to make use of my data on ballistic weapons (and to test them further), I started off with using Conquests with me piloting an Onslaught XIV in the middle. Two of the Conquests would grab the objectives. Unfortunately, this meant that (with BotB) it was me and 2 Conquests holding off the main fleet until reinforcements came, which was sometimes a bit risky, leading to...
Conquests with Medusa (me) and Gryphon as support: 5 officered Conquests as the main damage-dealers, while an officered Gryphon and me piloting a Medusa would grab objectives and do general support (mostly chasing down stragglers). This is the current fleet setup I'm playing around with to look at the Conquest in detail in support of the
Conquest Appreciation Thread and now,
Optimizing the Conquest threads, and it's a monster. The 4 initial Conquests are more than enough to handle their main fleet while the Gryphon and I grab the objectives and deal with any trash that spills over the sides, and then once the 5th Conquest shows up, I just sit back and let them fight for the most part (to collect the data; around 90% of the total damage is dealt by the Conquests for my data). They have no trouble going through double Ordos with me sitting back after grabbing objectives, so this fleet could most likely handle triple Ordos as well if I wanted it to (especially if I actually bothered to get into the thick of things instead of staying back). Except there's no reason to since I'm already running up near the XP cap against double Ordos; if I wanted to I could probably push the XP bonus to over +750% with this fleet, but the XP bonus is capped at +500% so there's really no need.
There are probably others that I've forgotten about. At any rate, most of these fleet setups fought Ordos fleets at around +400% XP bonus or higher, and all of them had a way to grab objectives early to deploy the whole fleet and then stay alive to not have to worry about DP after that. Although usually grabbing the objectives is what allows me to encircle the enemy fleet in the first place so the enemy fleet never really got a chance to get the objectives back after I grabbed them, so it didn't really matter.
(Side note: As I mentioned before, this is why I haven't really bothered to play with content mods in over a year, not because I don't want to, but because once I started getting into the game, I could see that there were far more possible effective fleet builds in the vanilla game than I have time to try. For example, for Gryphon spam with Onslaught XIV flagship, I actually tried out using different weapons as well as different fleet setups: 10 Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs triple Ordos, 6 Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs double Ordos, and 10 unofficered Gryphons with Onslaught XIV vs single Ordos, using Support Doctrine and Derelict Operations. Each of these play very differently even though they're ostensibly the same fleet configuration. And I haven't even gotten into other fleet configurations like carrier spam (Heron? Mora? Condor? I'm sure each of those play differently, not to mention all the possible fighter arrangements), automated ships, fleet centered around Eradicators, etc.)
Grabbing them at first is the easy part. Holding (more than one of) them is the hard part, especially when fast ships (frigates) run out of PPT and are forced to retreat (if they do not die first). If some of my ships die or run out of PPT and need to retreat, and the enemy takes a point, I cannot reinforce, and the fight is likely decided for the enemy.
There's no need to hold them unless your ships die. If your ships are dying, that's the problem to solve first, not whether or not you can hold objectives for the whole fight. If your ships are running out of PPT, then that's an issue with trying to fight a fleet that's too large for your fleet (too many ships to churn through), or killing them too slowly. (Exception is if you're using SO in which case, well, you take the CR penalty as part of the deal if the fleet is too big.)
It would only be 200 DP if the map size stayed at 500 (or player took BotB). But since it did not and max size went to 400 instead, it went down to 160 DP for non-BotB builds.
No, it
starts at 160 DP or 200 DP, but your fleet should be running at 240 DP for the majority of the battle. It just means that the beginning of the battle now has an extra step of grabbing the objectives, then after that it's a 240 DP vs 240 DP fight.
I would have preferred old ship stacking because at least bringing a big fleet had a point even if I could not deploy all the ships. Now, bringing a big war fleet is pointless and very unsatisfying (if I did not build for solo Ziggurat) because the player has the shonen elite doing all the fighting while his cheerleading ships sit on the sidelines.
This makes no sense. Because of upkeep, skills DP cap, XP bonus, along with other factors, the player is now incentivized to bring along only what's necessary and to deploy it all (except logistics ships), whereas in the past the player was incentivized to bring along a bunch of deadweight just to bulk up the fleet for that 300-to-200 deployment ratio. And you're complaining that the
current system is the one that encourages having ships sit on the sidelines?
Ordos used to not break officer limits, but now they do. The toughest recurring ones have cores for all ships, with more than half of them having alpha cores.
That's actually one of the
best features of the current system, because officers give so much more XP compared with how much more difficult the fight becomes. Enemy officers slightly less than doubles the base XP of the fleet, and slightly more than quadruples the XP bonus, so each current Ordos fleet gives around
eight times more overall XP than if the fleet had no cores at all. So you get 4 million XP instead of 500k XP per Ordos fleet because of the cores. Granted without cores they'd be much easier to fight, but you'd have to fight 8 times as many (or stack that many more fleets together, etc.). A big part of why leveling is so much faster now is that enemy fleets, in particular Ordos fleets, give so much more XP now, and a big part of that is the overstocking of officers. (Another reason is that SP use basically doubles XP gain.)
And the biggest problem of relying on the same overpowered fleet over and over again is if player wants to change his fleet, he needs to fire his officers and waste a lot of time training new ones to fit his new ships and lose a bunch of story points that were spent to elite skills on officers without refund. (This is one reason I go for solo Ziggurat because I do not need to waste a lot of time and story points with officers, plus no need for Leadership.)
I don't like the officer training mechanic myself (I feel like the player should be able to directly select the skill they want the officer to learn, not choose from a list; I just directly save scum until I get the skills I wanted), but the loss of SP for new officers is minor. 8 officers each with an elite skill means 8 SP which you get back after around 2-3 Ordos fleets. (Could be two fights vs single Ordos fleets or a single fight vs double Ordos fleet.) You'll easily rack up several hundred SP throughout the course of each playthrough. Limiting yourself to soloing to "not lose story points when you fire officers" is entirely a self-imposed problem, especially if you end up getting more SP from the officers making your fleet more effective than without them.
Essentially, battle tactics come down to force concentration at any one time. If the enemy has 240 DP to your 200 DP on the field, but only 160 DP of the enemy fleet is engaging your 200 DP fleet while 80 DP is in transit, you have the local advantage. You just need to kill fast enough that you've killed half of the 160 DP in the time it takes the 80 DP to reinforce. A highly mobile player ship can also distract large portions of the enemy fleet at a huge DP ratio (say a Medusa versus a Radiant and some Brilliants), and giving your AI officer ships the local advantage as well.
Basically this. What's important is the local concentration of force. When your main fleet collides with their main fleet, you want to kill some of their smaller ships right away, then work your way toward bigger ships, to establish local force superiority and to start their line of reinforcements before they get the chance to do the same to you. Once you have your kill zone established, then the goal is to kill the enemy ships as fast as they're arriving at the front lines, so they never get a chance to build up enough of a force to threaten your ships. My 10 Gryphon with Onslaught XIV flagship fleet (at 240 DP) can beat a triple Ordos at 600 battle size (360 DP) relatively easily in this way, and could probably get up to around 700-800 battle size if I really tried. It just comes down to keeping their fleet scattered and always having to bring in reinforcements, while keeping my fleet in a coherent whole to focus my fleet's firepower on their ships.