Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

AI controlled and yes. Field Modulation(e), Target Analysis, Ballistic Mastery(e), Missile Specialization(e), Gunnery Implants, Ordnance Expertise(e). Basically I just put my Conquest pilot in it.

[CapnHector]

All right, so it seems the key is elite Missile Spec since I was unable to get the AI pilot to do that with Squall and non-elite Missile Spec, which my Conquest pilots have due to fighting double and triple Ordos where they must save missiles for the end. Then by the time I figured I must switch to elite I had switched to Locust.

I will try this build vs the Ordos next time I can. Although probably swap Hellbore for Mark IX/Heph and all the side PD for a pair of Xyphos to get free Ion Beams with the PD.

[smithney]

From my perspective of an armchair admiral, Atlas Mk. II is a ship that absolutely does work, but only after you've invested in it heavily. It's absolutely not a frontline cruiser in AI hands. As an artillery it gets outvalued by Gryphon and Heron.

In the end the ship feels like owning a vintage car: You feel like an absolute bad*ss for making it kick gum, as long as you don't care how much of your resources it's been chewing through. That said, it would make sense for it to get a logistics buff to put in on par with its cruiser peers, it's not gonna make NPC Pirates any more formidable after all.

[CapnHector]

Alright, more testing.

First of all, kudos to Mr. Master-Blaster, you are good at this game. I edited the build slightly to remove unnecessary extra PD and add Heavy Armor, and it won 2 fights out of 3 vs sim Assault Radiant, which is very impressive. Clearly Hellbore is the thing to put on this ship and I was sleeping on it due to its poor stats, but it is a perfect fit here due to its low flux profile.



However, with Shield Conversion - Front I am very concerned about how this would do in a fleet setting since Remnants will circle you. And I am also worried about how it will work if you run out of Squalls. And more caps is generally better than Hardened Shields unless you are maxed. And Militarized Subsystems is worse flux dissip than just adding vents or even a Flux Dissipator. And Xyphos is PD that works even when overloaded and I have generally found 2 PD guns on your enemy facing side + Xyphos is sufficient for PD in Remnant fights (as well as all other situations) and they will also clean up Remnant fighters, as well as suppress the Radiant if it warps in close, lowering its shields. Also, the main benefit of RFC is likely not getting your weapons disabled since Xyphos will take care of flankers, so we can switch it to AWM. So I changed the build a little.



Now this won 3 out of 3 vs the sim Assault Radiant under AI control, even taking very little damage (450 hull damage the first time, 20 hull damage, and no damage at all on the third run, pic related)



Next up: I am going to build a fleet of these and take them Ordo hunting, supported by Afflictor (P)s and Brawler (LP)s.

[Vanshilar]

Actually I think the Atlas2 should be using Gauss, since longer-range weapons work better with it since it's so slow. It needs the range since it's not maneuverable enough to dictate engagements.

Trying it out against double Ordos, I stuck 2 Gryphons on the flanks to grab objectives and to corral the enemy frigates (to make sure that none spill out past my line), then it's me in my flagship Onslaught along with 5 Atlas2's armed with dual Squall, a Gauss and a Mjolnir (to compare them), and nothing else. They had EMR, ITU, Militarized Subsystems, Auxiliary Thrusters, Solar Shielding, and ECCM, then max vents, then rest into capacitors. Officer skills were CE, TA, BM, MS (elite), and GI. Results are attached.

Note that this was 200 DP (Onslaught, 2 Gryphons, 5 Atlas2's), at battle size 400, against the double Ordos. Basically so that I could deploy the whole fleet at the beginning since I have BotB.

The Atlas2's pretty much matched the Gryphons in terms of DPS, which is pretty impressive since they're being compared to the Gryphon (although they're 24 DP instead of 20 DP). So they actually did more damage than the Champion, for example, even though the Champion costs 1 more DP. However, they took a bit of babysitting; the Gryphons did somewhat less damage because it was the Gryphons sent in to chase after frigates when they were threatening to get past my line, and the Atlas2's can't tank so I sometimes had to rush in to tank for them when they started taking damage. The Gauss and Mjolnir combo actually worked out pretty well; Gauss helped with anti-shield DPS at range, while Mjolnir did more armor and hull damage to make sure the enemy ships were finished off.

To compare, the two Gryphons averaged 34k damage each from their Squalls, and 40k damage each from their Harpoons (each had 2 Harpoons, so each Harpoon did 20k damage). For the Atlas2's, each averaged 49k Squall damage, 29k Gauss damage, and 23k Mjolnir damage. So the two Atlas2 Squalls together contributed around 1.5x of a Gryphon's Squall. This is probably because the Gryphon was in range more frequently than the Atlas2, which took time to move forward to another ship as each enemy ship died.

So the Atlas2 is basically an extreme glass cannon; if you use them with care, they can throw out a lot of damage due to dual Squalls and Gauss/Mjolnir. You have to set them up properly though to make it work, otherwise they die real fast.

[CapnHector]

Well, I took a fleet of these out vs one Ordo completely under AI control, using just Atlas MkII and frigates, and with just one order, Defend on one of the Atlas MkIIs, and it was a success. This is probably not at all optimal since you likely really should have a player controlled tank to protect your Atlas MkII and/or babysit them and use them as artillery pieces rather than main ships of the line like you said. But it even works well enough like this. I now think this actually a viable endgame ship once you learn how to build it.

I am not good enough to make a video, so here is a photo essay with some glorious Atlas MkII action.

Atlas Mk. II vs. Remnant Ordo

[close]

[Vanshilar]

So, testing this further, it looks like a good weapon loadout for Atlas2 is dual Squalls, dual Mjolnirs, dual Railguns. Squalls provide long-range anti-shield. Mjolnirs do bulk of the anti-armor and anti-hull. Railgun provides additional damage if an enemy ship gets close into range. A video of this in action can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKZrC84jyGU

Sorry for the quality, I have to video using my phone because my potato running the game is over a decade old and the game becomes even more of a slideshow when it's also trying to record the screen. But it should show the battle clearly enough.

Although the Atlas2 has medium ballistics on the sides, I find that trying to make it into a broadside ship is a bit of a trap. I tried putting HVD on the sides, but what happens is that this makes the Atlas2's advance toward the enemy diagonally, rather than advancing straight toward the enemy, and just turning to expose its broadsides. That's broadside ship AI behavior in Starsector, to approach diagonally. The problem is that the Atlas2 is so slow that this means it advances too slowly toward the enemy fleet, so the additional damage from HVD is canceled out by it being in range less often. So there was no net benefit. Whereas for a ship like the Conquest, it's fast enough that it'll stay in range of the enemy more often even though it's advancing diagonally.

Putting Railguns on the nose however did improve performance, helping it to do some additional damage when it got too close to enemy ships.

The run in the video wasn't particularly good, the Gryphons flubbed on killing some frigates so they spent more time chasing down frigates than usual, reducing the fleet's overall DPS and reducing the concentration of force against the main enemy fleet. I also made my share of mistakes, but it shows that the fleet setup is relatively tolerant of mistakes. This more or less shows how I typically run my tests and how to beat double Ordos: basically, spread my fleet out into a line, kill a bunch of enemy ships quickly during the initial wave, and then parlay that into setting up a U-shaped formation against the incoming ships, so that the incoming ships are met with overwhelming firepower and they can never mount an effective offense and just end up dying. That's the ideal formation that I generally try to get my ships into for these battles. If the enemy fleet breaks out of that and the battle devolves into a bunch of scattered fights, then I know something went wrong, unless I'm doing something like LP Brawlers or something (where a bunch of scattered fights is expected).

Although it might seem like the Atlas2's are overfluxed (970 vent compared with 175 shield upkeep and 1633 weapon flux), in practice their flux rarely got over 50% since they spent a lot of their time moving forward toward the next target rather than firing on ships. So I could probably put less OP into vents and more into capacity to help with them be more survivable.

In the video, the Atlas2's averaged 423 DPS while the Gryphons averaged 427 DPS, so they did about the same amount of damage. However, I've had runs where the Atlas2's averaged about 500 DPS (while the Gryphons continued to do around 425 DPS or so) so the video didn't really show the Atlas2's at their highest potential. (A screenshot of such a run is attached; I took a lot of damage that run just because I had full flux and was gambling that I could vent in time when the final Radiants arrived, and I lost that gamble when they launched multiple Reapers at me in response. Oops. Lost around half of my hull right there.) For example in the video, one of the Atlas2's got rushed by the final Radiants and almost died because I was too far away and didn't burn drive forward enough, so it overloaded and wasn't doing damage for a while. So it comes down properly using the flagship to control the flow of battle, namely making sure the enemy is firing at you the tank instead of at the Atlas2's which are glass cannons.

A note on what I do as the flagship Onslaught: The Needlers are geared for more DPS at closer range. I burn drive into the enemy fleet at lot, drive up their flux, and then use the Proximity Charge Launchers against important targets and to get rid of clumps of enemy ships. Sometimes you'll see me selecting the Hephaestus, but not firing it, so that I can reduce my flux use when my ship is taking care of enemy shields. That helps conserve flux. You'll also see me burn drive and launching the PCL's, which allows me to yeet them farther away than their normal range. It takes a bit of experience but with practice, you can yeet them into ships a bit to either side as well, so those ships get a lot of incoming damage quickly, overloading and often killing them outright. You can see this at 13 minutes into the video (as well as a number of missed volleys during the fight, oops, so I can clearly improve on this technique).

If there is a nearly-dead ship next to an intact ship, then I'll sometimes target the intact ship, so my weapons, which are mostly anti-shield, will start firing on that ship, while my PCL's or Heph (whatever I'm manually controlling) will kill off the nearly-dead ship. This allows me to use the weapons more efficiently, plus if the intact ship's flux is successfully driven up and it lowers its shields, it'll take explosion damage when the nearly-dead ship next to it dies. You can see an example of this at 12 minutes into the video.

Anyway so yeah the Atlas2's can clearly do well as long as they're used with care. They need to be set up in a situation where they can deal a lot of damage at range and not have to worry much about enemy ships getting close, but if so, then they can be a big contributor in battles.

[CapnHector]

Good! Did you try Gauss Gauss? in the Conquest math thread (RIP) there was a 7% difference in favor of the best Mjolnir Mjolnir setup vs Remnants (Mjolnir-Mjolnir-Squall-Squall) over the best Gauss Gauss setup (Gauss-Gauss-Squall-Squall) but in the case of Atlas MkII it might be the case that the range advantage cancels out the damage advantage, especially if the Mjolnir's EMP is not relevant due to another ship tanking.

[Vanshilar]

Yes, it turns out, Gauss didn't work out so well after all, Mjolnir is better in this case. The reason is that Squalls and to a lesser extent Railguns already provide a lot of anti-shield, so you need more anti-armor and anti-hull. After the update, when Squalls get nerfed at anti-armor and anti-hull (while maintaining their anti-shield), Mjolnirs will do even better than Gauss when Squalls are around.

Doing a run with each of them, and looking at the ammo used, the Detailed Combat Results data for Gauss was:

Code

(SS9967)
weapon	total	shield	armor	hull	hits	fired	hitrate	relSquall
squall	239791	190985	13908	34899	1223	2930	0.4174	1
gauss	150971	93736	19183	38051	302	637	0.4741	0.669
railgun	46714	35256	4020	7438	887	1623	0.5465	0.511

And the Detailed Combat Results data for Mjolnir was:

Code

(SS10012)
weapon	total	shield	armor	hull	hits	fired	hitrate	relSquall
squall	238541	193588	12060	32894	1188	2880	0.4125	1
mjolnir	209589	81234	38152	90204	759	1416	0.5360	0.567
railgun	26526	16271	1724	8529	531	1031	0.5150	0.330

The Gauss fired 67% of the time relative to the Squall, while the Mjolnir fired 57% of the time. So yes the Gauss fired more often. But the Mjolnir's hit rate (shots hit / shots fired) was higher, so in the end, they were both putting shots on target at about the same rate (0.669*0.474 = 31.7% of the rate of Squalls fired for the Gauss, and 0.567*0.536 = 30.4% of the rate of Squalls fired for the Mjolnir). The Mjolnir has a higher hit rate because the Gauss has a one-second delay before it's fired ("chargeup" in weapon_data.csv), during which its turret is tracking at a rate of 3 degrees per second, while the Mjolnir has no delay and tracks at a rate of 25 degrees per second while firing anyway (and thus at 125 degrees per second before firing). So the Gauss is more likely to miss smaller, faster targets. A lot of the focus for Ordos fleets is on the Radiant, but it only makes up around 1/4 of the total hull (and around 1/4 of the effective shield hit points, i.e. flux capacity divided by shield efficiency). So while both had probably nearly 100% hit rate against Radiants, their hit rates differed a lot against other targets.

The difference here is that with the Squalls already doing the bulk of the anti-shield damage from afar, the Mjolnirs tended to finish off targets quickly, while the Gauss didn't. That can be seen in how often the Railguns fired; they fired around 51% of the time relative to Squalls when using Gauss, while they fired only 33% of the time relative to Squalls when using Mjolnirs, indicating that fewer enemy ships closed to Railgun range (which in this case, with ITU, BM, and GI, means 700 * 1.85 = 1295 range) when using the Mjolnirs. That can also be seen in that my fleet as a whole took less damage when using Mjolnirs than when using Gauss (and over 1/3 of that was from my flagship charging in, heh); enemy ships simply got into range to fire their weapons a smaller percentage of the time, so the Mjolnirs were better at eliminating targets at range before they could close in.

Now the obvious question might then be, if Mjolnirs were doing more armor and hull damage, then where did that damage go when Gauss was used? The answer is that the flagship Onslaught (me) and the 2 Gryphons ended up doing more of the armor and hull damage with Gauss. So the share of the damage was redistributed among the other ships when the Atlas2 effectively over-specialized at anti-shield by using Gauss. That's less efficient than having it being able to do all types of damage by itself (since I'm not everywhere, nor the Gryphons), leading to a slower rate of kills.

[paramecium]

So, testing this further, it looks like a good weapon loadout for Atlas2 is dual Squalls, dual Mjolnirs, dual Railguns. Squalls provide long-range anti-shield. Mjolnirs do bulk of the anti-armor and anti-hull. Railgun provides additional damage if an enemy ship gets close into range. A video of this in action can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKZrC84jyGU

Sorry for the quality, I have to video using my phone because my potato running the game is over a decade old and the game becomes even more of a slideshow when it's also trying to record the screen. But it should show the battle clearly enough.

Although the Atlas2 has medium ballistics on the sides, I find that trying to make it into a broadside ship is a bit of a trap. I tried putting HVD on the sides, but what happens is that this makes the Atlas2's advance toward the enemy diagonally, rather than advancing straight toward the enemy, and just turning to expose its broadsides. That's broadside ship AI behavior in Starsector, to approach diagonally. The problem is that the Atlas2 is so slow that this means it advances too slowly toward the enemy fleet, so the additional damage from HVD is canceled out by it being in range less often. So there was no net benefit. Whereas for a ship like the Conquest, it's fast enough that it'll stay in range of the enemy more often even though it's advancing diagonally.

Putting Railguns on the nose however did improve performance, helping it to do some additional damage when it got too close to enemy ships.

The run in the video wasn't particularly good, the Gryphons flubbed on killing some frigates so they spent more time chasing down frigates than usual, reducing the fleet's overall DPS and reducing the concentration of force against the main enemy fleet. I also made my share of mistakes, but it shows that the fleet setup is relatively tolerant of mistakes. This more or less shows how I typically run my tests and how to beat double Ordos: basically, spread my fleet out into a line, kill a bunch of enemy ships quickly during the initial wave, and then parlay that into setting up a U-shaped formation against the incoming ships, so that the incoming ships are met with overwhelming firepower and they can never mount an effective offense and just end up dying. That's the ideal formation that I generally try to get my ships into for these battles. If the enemy fleet breaks out of that and the battle devolves into a bunch of scattered fights, then I know something went wrong, unless I'm doing something like LP Brawlers or something (where a bunch of scattered fights is expected).

Although it might seem like the Atlas2's are overfluxed (970 vent compared with 175 shield upkeep and 1633 weapon flux), in practice their flux rarely got over 50% since they spent a lot of their time moving forward toward the next target rather than firing on ships. So I could probably put less OP into vents and more into capacity to help with them be more survivable.

In the video, the Atlas2's averaged 423 DPS while the Gryphons averaged 427 DPS, so they did about the same amount of damage. However, I've had runs where the Atlas2's averaged about 500 DPS (while the Gryphons continued to do around 425 DPS or so) so the video didn't really show the Atlas2's at their highest potential. (A screenshot of such a run is attached; I took a lot of damage that run just because I had full flux and was gambling that I could vent in time when the final Radiants arrived, and I lost that gamble when they launched multiple Reapers at me in response. Oops. Lost around half of my hull right there.) For example in the video, one of the Atlas2's got rushed by the final Radiants and almost died because I was too far away and didn't burn drive forward enough, so it overloaded and wasn't doing damage for a while. So it comes down properly using the flagship to control the flow of battle, namely making sure the enemy is firing at you the tank instead of at the Atlas2's which are glass cannons.

A note on what I do as the flagship Onslaught: The Needlers are geared for more DPS at closer range. I burn drive into the enemy fleet at lot, drive up their flux, and then use the Proximity Charge Launchers against important targets and to get rid of clumps of enemy ships. Sometimes you'll see me selecting the Hephaestus, but not firing it, so that I can reduce my flux use when my ship is taking care of enemy shields. That helps conserve flux. You'll also see me burn drive and launching the PCL's, which allows me to yeet them farther away than their normal range. It takes a bit of experience but with practice, you can yeet them into ships a bit to either side as well, so those ships get a lot of incoming damage quickly, overloading and often killing them outright. You can see this at 13 minutes into the video (as well as a number of missed volleys during the fight, oops, so I can clearly improve on this technique).

If there is a nearly-dead ship next to an intact ship, then I'll sometimes target the intact ship, so my weapons, which are mostly anti-shield, will start firing on that ship, while my PCL's or Heph (whatever I'm manually controlling) will kill off the nearly-dead ship. This allows me to use the weapons more efficiently, plus if the intact ship's flux is successfully driven up and it lowers its shields, it'll take explosion damage when the nearly-dead ship next to it dies. You can see an example of this at 12 minutes into the video.

Anyway so yeah the Atlas2's can clearly do well as long as they're used with care. They need to be set up in a situation where they can deal a lot of damage at range and not have to worry much about enemy ships getting close, but if so, then they can be a big contributor in battles.

did you tried to do four light needler with dual hellbore? I think that is more in line with the accelerated ammo feeder system, and maybe a officer with system expertise, so for every 7.5s there will be 7s it will have 1200 kinetic DPS and 1000 explosive DPS.

[Vanshilar]

did you tried to do four light needler with dual hellbore? I think that is more in line with the accelerated ammo feeder system, and maybe a officer with system expertise, so for every 7.5s there will be 7s it will have 1200 kinetic DPS and 1000 explosive DPS.

4 Light Needlers and dual Hellbores won't work that well. The Light Needlers are going to be relatively short-ranged compared with the other weapons (Squall and whatever Large Ballistics you use), so they won't be used that much. In my Squall/Mjolnir/Railgun test, the Railguns were firing only around 33% of the time relative to the Squalls, so the Squalls and the Mjolnirs were basically killing off the targets 67% of the time before they even got within range of the Railguns. Generally speaking I find Railguns to be more effective than Light Needlers; against a standard Ordos, once armor (and shields) are gone, Light Needlers will be doing around 56 DPS to hull, while Railguns will be doing around 91 DPS to hull, or 62% more DPS, at a point when you're trying to maximize DPS (finish off a target before they get away).

Hellbores are good at penetrating armor but that's it -- they're terrible at finishing off targets because of their low DPS, and they miss a lot because of their low projectile speed. Once the armor is gone, even the Mark IX Autocannon will finish off targets faster than Hellbores against Ordos. So in nearly all situations, it's better to use Hephaestus or Mjolnir than Hellbore, and generally speaking the Mjolnir will do better than the Hephaestus because it is a lot better against shields. The times when you need a dedicated armor-breaker simply isn't that high in the overall scheme of things when you look at the entire battle.

The AAF system basically multiplies the damage outputs of all ballistic weapons pretty equally, except in cases of 1) running up against Starsector's inherent limit of firing at 20 shots per second (reached by the Vulcan Cannon, for example), 2) Ammo-based burst weapons where the limiting factor is how quickly the ammo recharges rather than how quickly it can be fired, and 3) possibly how burst weapons are handled because I haven't really tested how it affects burst weapons. So in terms of choosing between ballistic weapons, it doesn't really affect the comparison.

Systems Expertise may or may not work that well with AAF in this case. It amounts to a ~6-7% increase in the ship's overall damage output, and that's assuming that the ship is firing constantly. In this case, the main bottleneck is the travel time from enemy ship to enemy ship, where SE wouldn't really help. So to put in SE you'd have to get rid of something else. (For testing purposes, I assume officers are level 5, and 1 of those skills are elite. Obviously in your own fleet setup officers can have up to 6 skills and up to 4 of them can be elite.) CE, TA, BM, and MS (elite) are obviously better than SE here, so the only one that SE might be better than is GI. I find range to be a lot more useful than is usually considered on the forums so I doubt SE will end up better than GI here. If your officers have a 6th skill, sure, SE would probably be the next one to choose.

[Candesce]

The Light Needlers are going to be relatively short-ranged compared with the other weapons (Squall and whatever Large Ballistics you use),

You could mod in Ballistic Rangefinder.

I wouldn't recommend it, the Atlas II has limited OP as it is, but that does put the smalls at 900 range.

That said, mixing the absolutely worst anti-armor and anti-hull weapons in the game with the easiest HE gun to shield flicker against is perhaps not the most brilliant plan ever.

[MrTwister]

I'm only using a mix of hightech + midline and eating those for breakfast.

But yeah, it can put some dakka out, I'll give them that. Best to erase them with bomber squads, which is what they are really weak against.

[Lortus]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9w-IGS7K1lg

Luckily it seems I just made a video about just this topic. Atlas Mk2 suffers from running out of missiles, low flux, and not being able to brawl but most of all the awful maneuverability. The maneuverability is so bad that they will be unable to stop themselves getting to a battle line and crash into the enemy fleet. You can work around all of these with officers though, which can make Atlas Mk2s kinda ok. The maneuverability is also what makes using the side slots bad.

The video abuses Monitors and Glimmers, but the same result can be gotten with other OP frigates like Omens instead of Monitors. I also tried it with pure pirate fleet but it only beats about 600 dp of remnants. Atlas Mk2s want something that can tank for them. Without Glimmers idk if you can get 1000 DP. Maybe with good rng getting easy ordos.

As for builds, I think that this weapon loadout is the absolute best for Atlas Mk2s with officers. I tested a lot of stuff but this performed best. I still think the hullmods can be optimized though. For use without officers, 2 vulcans, 1 Gauss, 1 Devastator, and 2 Squalls/1 Squall 1 Hurricane should be best. ITU and EMR. Maneuvering Jets if you have the op. Gauss for the AI to keep range, not for it to actually use it. Deva for some defense, and Squall to actually do the damage.

[Daynen]

FINALLY, people are starting to appreciate the "big girl" of starsector!  The Atlas mk II is such an underappreciated beauty; only TRUE men of culture fall in love with her.

I like to run two mjolnirs with two vulcans on the forward point defense turrets, plus a locust or two.  Ignore the side mounts; Vanshilar is correct in that they are a trap.  Use the locusts liberally to wipe fighter screens and ward off frigates so you can focus on killing anything at least destroyer sized.  Work on the flux dissipation, take all the maneuverability you can get, get as much free OP out of your S-mods as possible and learn to position properly in fights so you can make your move.  It takes patience, but unloading with two ammo fed mjolnirs creates an absolutely withering barrage of fire.  I also prefer to set the mjolnirs to alternating; this makes the gaps between shots even smaller, making it a little more reliable against faster targets.  If your fleet's not set up to support you properly yet, you can substitute two hephaestus guns for slightly lower flux buildup in exchange for much better suppressive fire, though you then obviously suffer against shields.  Speaking of shields, no ship will teach you to master the art of the omni shield like the Atlas II because it needs it to survive.  Set your guns to autofire and focus on flying defensively.  Don't overcommit, screen your flanks and when you see your opening, MAKE SOMETHING DIE.

You do have to earn what the Atlas II has to offer, which is a lot.  To me, that's part of the charm.