My current campaign Onslaught uses the modification that removes shields and adds armor instead, thoughts on whether that helps or hinders an Onslaught?
Yeah I've thought about taking shield shunt, because I rely on Proximity Charge Launchers to take care of big missiles anyway, and other stuff I'll just take on armor. But sometimes it's helpful to still have shields anyway, such as if you encounter Tachyon Lances or Plasma Cannons. So I prefer the flexibility that shields give me, so I don't use Shield Shunt on my flagship Onslaught, even though it's often recommended for Onslaughts.
That is an absolutely fascinating idea about the average armor grid size. It's just elegant. Since essentially you are replacing the sum of ships with n times the average ship. But is there some kind of a natural extension of this idea to an arbitrary fleet, any ideas?
Yeah I've already done that. Part of the reason for taking statistics on Ordos fleets is to know what the "average" fleet look like, and then design my fleet around that. This can be done with any fleet. You just need a large enough sample size.
Since it can be reasonably expected that big ships (i.e. Radiants) have a bigger perimeter to take more armor damage, I did a couple of runs where I deleted Radiants as soon as they appeared (via console), so that I'd only be looking at the ratio of armor damage to base armor rating for the smaller ships, i.e. non-Radiants. But the ratio only differed by around 5% compared to having the Radiants there. Basically, not much of a difference at all. I never got back to doing more testing to be more conclusive about it, but thus in practice, I don't worry about differences due to ship size.
I got curious after reading your post and decided to give your 1 Onslaught, 3 Conquest, 2 Gryphon ordo build a shot for the new update. Seems like the Squall nerf has sadly prevented it from being effective, I had no luck defeating a single ordo, let alone a double.
It works just fine in 0.96a. In fact I think it works better than Gryphon spam now, because the Ordos fleets in 0.96a are more dynamic, and Conquests can take more spot damage than Gryphons. Also, Conquests can switch targets a lot more rapidly than Gryphons, since Conquests have lots of guns while Gryphons use primarily missiles, i.e. Harpoons, to finish off targets, and they take some time to travel from target to target. Conquests can just turn the turrets or the ship around to switch to a new target. So Conquests can kill more small ships quickly than Gryphons.
Flagship Onslaught is the same as before, i.e. Needlers for anti-shield (with Ballistic Rangefinder), Proximity Charge Launchers for close-in major damage, also a Hephaestus as the center Large Ballistic to provide more anti-armor/hull. Flagship serves to run at the bulk of the enemy fleet to do a lot of a damage and soak up damage. Conquest is dual Squall/Mjolnir/HVD/Harpoon, with the Harpoons linked to the same weapon group as the Squalls. It also has a Devastator on the off-side. In 0.95.1a I also put in 4 Tac Lasers and a Graviton Beam for some extra damage, while in 0.96a I'm still experimenting with if the Graviton Beam or if the IR Autolance will be better. (I think ultimately the 5% extra damage from Graviton Beam will be more useful though.) Gryphons are Squall/Harpoons/Breaches all linked in one weapon group, with HVD. Gryphons max out flux capacity, the rest max out flux dissipation but also have a healthy amount of points into flux capacity. They all s-modded Armored Weapon Mounts and Advanced Turret Gyros, but that's really expensive on OP so I may end up removing one or both after testing (Gryphons will almost certainly get AWM removed for more flux capacity, while the others will probably keep AWM but may remove ATG.)
When I have time I'll post a video demonstrating it, but basically the Gryphons go to the sides. I have 2 Conquests with their guns facing the right, and 1 Conquest with its guns facing the left. So from left to right, the fleet is Gryphon - Conquest - Conquest - flagship Onslaught - Conquest - Gryphon. The fleet spreads out in a line for the initial wave, then once the initial enemy fleet dies, it gradually forms a U-shape around the incoming enemy ships, gradually ending up at the enemy spawn point at the top, generally around when the Radiants come in. The enemy fleet is concentrated in the middle and getting incoming fire from multiple directions, so they're basically unable to form any kind of strong offensive, so they basically get slaughtered from long range. Because the enemy fleet is trickling in in a line, the battle line is my whole 200-DP fleet against around 60-100 DP's worth of enemy ships at any given time after the initial enemy fleet, so that disparity in numbers is what makes it work. I suppose this is the "low-tech" way of doing things (i.e. outrange the enemy fleet so you can concentrate your fire on a few ships while their fire is spread out and they can't concentrate on any of your ships) and it seems to work really well.
In 0.95.1a I could usually order Full Assault once the initial enemy fleet is killed, and then just let the fleet naturally move toward the enemy spawn point. In 0.96a the battle lines are too dynamic (you get Brilliants and Novae zooming in) and so I have to be more careful and wait longer before ordering Full Assault, but I'll still order it generally by the time the Apexes start showing up. The damage output is roughly the same, although as I figure out how to optimize the fleet better for 0.96a it may well improve.
I've attached some screenshots of this from a battle in 0.95.1a to show the rough formation of how the fight ends up being. All this will be more clear once I make a video for 0.96a about it. But you can see how the enemy fleet is basically just trickling in in a line (see the combat radar on the lower right), and they sort of ball up so they just come in, take damage, and die without being able to do much damage. Again, this doesn't work as well in 0.96a because the enemy ships are much faster (Brilliants and Novae randomly zooming in, disrupting the steady battle lines), but the same concept still works.
The Squall nerf has hurt the missile's finishing power a lot. Loss of hull damage is immensely significant for Squall spam fleets and they no longer work, I replayed my old Conquest Ordo farming fleet and it no longer worked at all, replicating your experience. Try replacing it with Locust, which has worked for me for the Pegasus.
Actually the Squall nerf only really hits fleets that purely depended on Squall spam, but ships like Gryphons (Harpoons) and Conquests (Mjolnirs) have plenty of finishers that it didn't really affect it much.
For the flagship Onslaught/3 Conquest (no beams)/2 Gryphon fleet, in 0.95.1a the damage output of the Conquests against my test double Ordos fleet was:
weapon total shield armor hull
squall 202199 168227 9382 24590
mjolnir 133820 60432 26730 46658
HVD 53616 38245 2609 12763
harpoon 59783 20572 10841 28371
For 0.96a with a somewhat updated build (Conquests using Armored Weapon Mounts and Advanced Turret Gyros), the damage output of the Conquests against a new double Ordos fleet was:
weapon total shield armor hull
squall 189742 177941 4059 7744
mjolnir 161420 62789 38039 60591
HVD 71141 48664 3981 18494
harpoon 53436 17111 8741 27586
The Squalls used to do 19% of the armor damage and 22% of the hull damage, and now it does 7% of the armor damage and 7% of the hull damage. So yes its armor and hull damage is now greatly reduced (cut to roughly 1/3 of its 0.95.1a damage output). But looking at it another way, the Conquests were already getting 80% of its armor and hull damage from other weapons in the first place, so this just means that the other weapons now do 93% of the armor and hull damage instead.
So a "diversified" weapons fleet like this wasn't affected much by the change. That doesn't mean that the Squall nerf wasn't effective, though. It just means that players can no longer rely on the Squall as a one-stop shop for all their anti-shield/armor/hull needs, which is a good change. But this fleet never relied on it for more than anti-shield and disrupting the enemy fleet anyway, so it didn't change much. (Notice that none of my Squall fleets relied on Squalls for anti-armor/hull; they always had Mjolnirs or Harpoons or something else for anti-armor/hull, and I treated the Squall as an opener to drive up enemy flux and disrupting enemy lines before they close into gun range. That's why I preferred Mjolnirs over Gauss, etc.)
For something like a Venture Mk 2 fleet, if there's not enough finishers, it might be worth trying half the Ventures with Squalls and the other half with Locusts or Hurricanes (whichever does better), or something along those lines. The Medium Ballistic slot has pretty good anti-shield in the HVD, so not sure about where the finishers would come from.
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