Don't most of your hands free(no flagship) Ordo farming fleets have SO cruisers? And these fleets fight several Ordo at a time, padding the battle length? Not to mention Ordo aren't exactly the most normal of enemy fleets?
Yes I did test out SO cruisers for Ordos fleets, and sometimes without using a flagship. This was mostly right after the last update. However, they weren't that effective (too slow at overall kill rate and/or died too easily), and never got to the point of farming (i.e. relying on them repeatedly to gain XP or cores) because they were simply too inconsistent. Also, they relied on Omega weapons; for example, the SO Apogees used Cryoblasters and AMSRMs. (Side factoid: For the SO Apogee, the Cryoblaster did about as much damage overall as the Plasma Cannon, but with less flux used and costs about half the OP. So it basically meant an extra 14 OP.) The fleets I test now are much better (i.e. much faster at killing Ordos fleets), and they don't use SO nor Omega weapons. They would obviously work much better if I assumed Omega weapons in my current testing. That's why I say SO isn't that effective, since I've tried building fleets for farming (able to handle Ordos fleets without dying in a time-efficient manner) with and without it.
I ended up deciding that no-flagship fighting just isn't worth it. Yes it's
doable, but you're at the mercy of an inconsistent and often incompetent AI, so the success rate was never that great. Plus it's not like I could really AFK it, since if I did, I would have no idea what went wrong on the (many) times when some ship died or whatever. So in practice I had to stay there to keep an eye on things anyway. At which point, I might as well as just pilot a flagship. It was interesting to put all 15 skill points into fleet skills and not have to worry about personal combat skills though, but in the end it was better to just have a human there directing combat. So most of my Ordos farming or testing (whether SO or not) is with a flagship.
Any argument based on modded content is worthless. Not that "Please balance the game around this one extremely niche self-imposed challenge that doesn't really have any practical purpose in the game" is a good argument in the first place.
Granted, SpeedUp is a mod, but I'm not aware of it actually changing any combat mechanics in a significant way, other than obviously running the fights faster. No idea what you mean by the second sentence, my point was that SO fights are much more intense while non-SO fights are much more sedate -- so much so that they could be sped up without loss of player effectiveness. It's a different playstyle which some players prefer.
What's with the trend of deflecting single arguments and saying "that could be said about anything". Like where are you trying to go with such conversation even...
Because those comments are devoid of substance. There's no fact or data or reason or logic being presented to persuade or in support of a position. It's just hurling empty perojatives without actually making a concrete point of contention. Nobody's going to say in response to "Puppies are cancer" "Oh that's a great point, you've changed my mind, yeah we really need to figure out what to do about puppies". If you can just substitute another noun in there and the sentence still makes sense, then chances are, there's not much substantive content in it.
And instead of asking multiple times where are the convincing arguments, you can look in this very thread where most people said getting 2x dissipation is dumb. Are players really that dependent on this hullmod where they can't see it getting changed? Hell you could still have an arcadey assassin fast playstyle, but maybe without braking the laws of the game. We're here trying to discuss a single hullmod that DOUBLES your firepower, and you can get every more crazy with skills and vents.
Safety Overrides doesn't really double your flux dissipation in practical terms, because it takes the place of OP that would otherwise go into vents. And analysis of the flux effects without considering its effect on weapon range and PPT is woefully incomplete, since that's a heavy cost attached to its benefit.
If you want the saddest example, look at Hyperion. A ship that's gimped without SO, and becomes a monster with it. For all you "uhm it's actually high risk" and "but but it doesn't work in harder fights", there are videos of a fleet of just SO Hyperions killing the hardest fight in vanilla game, where they player doesn't even pilot a ship, just gives commands. Now tell me again those same things from before and how it's healthy for the game.
Yes, the SO Hyperion, the poster child of SO. An extreme outlier (since you only pay frigate-level cost in OP to gain cruiser-level flux, and since its shipsystem needs either SO or elite Helmsmanship to take full advantage of -- almost always SO, and thus very much at a disadvantage without it), and even so, the videos show the Hyperions dying left and right. 3 of 14 ships dying against Doritos and 5 of 12 ships dying against the unique bounty is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
For the second video, not only did he have to retreat a Hyperion otherwise it would've died, but he completed it only by burning through the Hyperions' CR; one of them even got down to 13% CR by the end of battle, which was over 10 minutes long. I said directly that SO's main issue is that its benefit lasts too long, and that CR degradation takes too long to kick in since SO currently doesn't affect CR degradation, so it should also degrade CR by a factor of 3. You said faster CR decay wouldn't solve the issue. Yet you point to a video
which was possible only because SO does not affect CR degradation; the non-flagship Hyperions all had CR's between 13% and 51% at the end of battle, so all of them would have zeroed out in CR before the halfway point if SO affected CR degradation the way it does PPT. So the video actually
demonstrates my point that SO lasts too long and that it could be fixed by having it also affect CR decay, and directly
counters your claim that faster CR decay won't solve the issue.
(As a side note, I'm not sure if the guy was fighting full Ordos fleets from an undamaged Nexus or from a damaged Nexus, and I'm not sure if that makes a difference. The average full Ordos fleet from an undamaged Nexus runs around 386 DP or so, and averages around 42% alphas, but the fleet looks like it had a lot of gammas in there. 1131 DP would've been 3 smaller-than-average full Ordos fleets, and would have averaged 5 Radiants, but he collected 5 Ordos fleets and a Fragment and only got 3 Radiants with a lot of frigates. Hyperions obviously excel at chasing down frigates.)
2)Maximum range is traded for more flux (both instantaneously and over the course of the fight) and speed.
I'll expand on this more but I'll touch on this briefly. The way Combat Endurance and Hardened Subsystems work is that they multiply the rate of CR decay by 0.75. This means that if you have one or the other, the rate of CR decay goes from 1% every 4 seconds to 1% every 4/0.75 = 5.333 seconds. If you have both, then the rate of CR decay goes to 1% every 4/0.75/0.75 = 7.111 seconds. This can be checked in the simulator. So going from 100% CR to 40% CR actually takes 60*7.111 = 427 seconds. Yeah, over 7 minutes before having to worry about malfunctions, even after PPT wears out (which gives another minute or two even for low PPT ships like the Hyperion).
So even though SO's description makes it sound like the ship is in fighting form for only 1/3 of the time, in reality for the Hyperion (which with Wolfpack, CE, and Crew Training would have a base of 300 seconds), it goes from non-SO of 300 + 427 = 727 seconds, to SO of 100 + 427 = 527 seconds, to get from start to 40% CR. So you really only lose about 28% of the usable time. And then it doesn't really cost anything to stick around after that, as long as the Hyperion doesn't die (since its CR will zero out after that anyway, since it costs 40% per deployment which isn't taken away until after combat).
The main drawback of SO is its weapon range reduction. That cannot be separated from its flux dissipation bonus in its analysis. The weapon range reduction means that there is a period of time when the ship is closing in, where the ship will be taking damage from enemy ships but not dealing any damage in return (other than missiles). This means the ship will be starting its combat with some hard flux, or armor/hull damage. The hard flux basically means less flux available to use. So SO effectively means higher flux dissipation, but smaller flux capacity.
That smaller flux capacity isn't going to matter much against early fleets, but becomes critical against endgame fleets which do a lot of damage quickly. Hence SO falls off in effectiveness later on anyway, which is why I don't think it needs any fundamental changes (other than stuff like change to CR decay).
I can illustrate this by a screenshot from one of my Ordos test fights. In this case I'm in my flagship Onslaught XIV, and the fleet is Champion spam with Squalls, HVDs, and HILs (and tac lasers). The Squalls have a range of 2500. The others have a range of 1550 (they have ITU and GI, but no AO). For reference, the smaller yellow weapon half-circle around my ship is the 1000-range Proximity Charge Launchers, and the purple weapon arc are my Light Needlers with BRF, which makes their base range 900, so with ITU and GI, makes their range 1575.
The Brilliants have different weapons with different ranges, of course, but let's say they do a lot of damage at 700 base range (i.e. Autopulse and Plasma range, along with Heavy Needler), or a range of 1085.
So in this case, from a range of 2500 to a range of 1550, the Brilliants take Squall spam. From a range of 1550 to 1085, the Brilliants take Squall spam and HVD spam (plus HIL + tac lasers if their shields go down). For the most part (unless they have Tachyons or HVD), they don't really start doing damage until they close in to 1085 range. Also, since they're streaming in while my fleet is already set up in a U-formation around the spawn, my fleet can focus fire on them.
Thus from the screenshot, it's obvious that only the forward 3 Brilliants are actually dealing damage to my fleet, while the bulk of my fleet can be dealing damage to them. This matches my observation previously regarding Conquest spam using long range weapons -- the weapon range means that I'm only dealing with about 1/3 of their fleet, while I'm able to make use of the bulk of my weapons. That's what makes these types of fleets so successful; using the longer-range HIL on the Champion was
much better than the Plasma Cannon, even though the Plasma Cannon has higher DPS on paper and does hard flux.
For SO, the situation is reversed. My fleet's weapon range is basically half of the Proximity Charge Launcher's range. As I close in, then, my fleet would be subjected to the bulk of the enemy fleet's fire.
If they all went in together then they could spread out the damage, but that never happens in practice. So I end up with some ships more in front, taking a lot of fire, then having to back off to dissipate flux, then other ships in front, etc., which dilutes my fleet's fighting strength. At any given point, there are a number of ships backing off for flux. Thus, even though in principle there's a lot of flux available to use on each ship, in practice a lot of that goes into absorbing damage and not dealing damage to enemy ships.
So I've found that long range builds work much better than SO builds when it comes to fighting harder battles. The ships don't take as much damage, so they can stay at the front lines longer and more of their flux goes into killing enemy ships.
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