Giving Apogee IR pulses+plasma with no mobility boost.
The Apogee build I ended up with was using HIL. Despite the soft flux, the higher range won out. In fact measuring these builds by how quickly they can kill the same enemy fleet gives a quantitative measure of which loadout does better.
Not giving low tech at least 6/2 officers, despite there being more high impact skills picks for it(impact mitigation, ballistic mastery, polarized armor, ordnance expert).
All officers are assumed to have 5 skills with 1 elite. This is true for all ships. Sure, I could have all of them have 6/2, or 5/3 or 6/4, but then that assumes the player will take those particular skills (Officer Training and/or Cybernetic Augmentation). If people feel like taking those skills are common enough that they should be assumed when evaluating different ships, sure, I could do that for the next round of testing. But we're looking at differences between ships in effectiveness, and *all* ships would be improved if their officers had a 6th skill or more elite skills, not just low tech. It's not clear to me that Low Tech ships benefit more from a 6th skill than other ships.
No point in "formal testing" if the loadouts or the fleet setups are bad. Part of the game is finding interesting skill+fleet combos, not measuring how fast frigates kill a single hound if they can use nothing but vulcans in every slot.
Testing is based on the best loadout that I could find for that ship, defined as the loadout that can kill the enemy fleet in the lowest time, based on assumptions common to all ships. If you have a better loadout than what's presented, then feel free to suggest one.
If you try to set the Gryphon up like a "normal" ship it'll suck, the AI doesn't know it'll basically never run out.
Most people just don't know know you have to link the missiles for it to work.
So you're simultaneously claiming that it's obvious that Gryphons are overpowered and that most people don't know how to make it work. It's one or the other. If it's obvious, then people would know. If people don't know, then it's not obvious. You can't argue it both ways, especially when the people who go around claiming "oh it's obvious to everyone" are some of the more prolific posters on the forum yet never bothered to make a thread complaining about it.
Not starting a new game and hunting 8-10 officers every time I want to try a fleet composition for 1 battle so pasted the same to every Gryphon.
You have all the info needed and can try it yourself with degraded shields on every ship, result will be the same. Worst case you have to pay a bit of attention and actually try putting the officered ships in a separate group in the front.
The problem isn't that you edited the save in order to test fleets, the problem is that you edited it into a fleet which cannot be achieved in the campaign. It would be like editing your ships to all have 5 s-mods and then claiming that it showcases the extra s-mod of Best of the Best, or making a fleet of [REDACTED BROCCOLI] ships. For it to be relevant, it needs to be something that someone can actually do in the campaign.
And yes as I already posted, I did test Gryphons using DO, with random d-mods, and the results were basically about the same. You get slightly better kill times (~5%), but you pay for it by needing more officers which reduces your XP gain, so it basically cancels out.
The very same guy that started the whole "you can just spam Hyperions and full assualt" joke with his videos, uploaded a few more that removed all game mods that effected ship performance, and reduced his officers' level to 6, (it was at 7 due to mods). The result is he only barely won with three Hyperions being destroyed out of the 12 he sent. The battle required him to play fleet commander the entire time.
It's nowhere near as strong as people have made it out to be, and the addition of delicate machinery is absolutely overkill.
Yeah and thus far from personal experimentation and in the videos I've seen, Hyperions max out at somewhere around 200 DPS or less against Ordos. That puts it in around Eradicator/Champion territory, with the Apogee, Gryphon, Atlas2, and Conquest doing better, and the LP Brawler doing much better (and being the closest analogue). An
unofficered LP Brawler with SD did around half the damage of an
officered Hyperion, while only costing 1/3 as much -- and no officer was needed.
I certainly haven't seen threads complaining that the Champion etc. need to be nerfed, yet the Hyperion was always the poster child of getting nerfed or worse, indicative of SO needing to be changed. SO Hyperion certainly does well in the early to mid parts of the game, but it doesn't work as well as other options in the late game. That's why to me it's an example of lots of forum hubbub, yet lacking in actual effectiveness.
All right, I have more science.
Yup this is more or less the path that I went down when evaluating different ships and different loadouts, basically testing them against fairly difficult fleets (i.e. double Ordos ended up being my bar, though sometimes it was single Ordos) and seeing how they did via DCR. I use the same enemy test fleet though to remove any effects from the enemy fleets being different, since sometimes the fleet might be really easy or really hard depending on their size and/or weapons and that could skew the results. Obviously though the problem with this is that you're no longer advancing in your playthrough, it's purely fighting the same fleet over and over without accumulating more XP, SP, loot, etc. for it, just the combat results.
Note that DCR currently has a bug with reporting beam damage, which is inaccurate. It generally overstates beam damage but will sometimes understate it. As far as I can tell though non-beam i.e. projectile damage is pretty accurate, i.e. within 1% (probably rounding errors and such). Thus I discard the beam damage part of the results since they're (usually) inflated. So be careful about that with stuff like the IR Autolance. I keep meaning to post about it in the DCR thread but haven't yet.
So when I test loadouts that have beams, I look at the battle time (only works if you're testing against the same enemy fleet) and ignore the beam damage, or I'll just look at the contribution of just the non-beam weapons, and I can infer the beam damage based on other methods. (For example, I estimate a tac laser as doing about 1/3 of the damage of an HVD against hull, so I can look at the ship's HVD hull damage and infer that each tac laser did about 1/3 of that.)
Also, it's a bit debatable (even if the bug is fixed) if a point of beam damage on shields (i.e. soft flux) is "worth" the same as a point of projectile damage on shields (i.e. hard flux). Generally I'd just look at the armor/hull damage component for beams.
I'm surprised you're finding the HVD to not do as well. When I tested HVD vs HAC vs HN across multiple ships, such as in the
Eagle thread, the HVD was always clearly better. I tested both all-HVD and all-HAC etc. loadouts as well as a mix (i.e. say, 2 HVD + 1 HAC) to get a direct comparison of the damage, since the same weapons are being installed on the same ships. The results were always that the more HVD, the faster the battle finished, plus the HVD always did more damage than the other weapons when installed in a mixed configuration. Range is simply that important when looking at actual battle performance of weapons, which tends to get ignored in DPS comparisons. Not to mention, the farther away you can start hitting enemy ships, the less they're able to hit you, so you end up taking less damage -- so more of your flux goes toward killing the enemy fleet instead of absorbing enemy attacks.
However, I always made sure there was a clear anti-armor weapon with the HVD. The HVD is good at long-range anti-shield, and pretty decent at long-range anti-hull (due to its high hit strength), but it needs a good long-range anti-armor weapon to make it work. Otherwise the enemy ship would just back off once they got to high flux. So for example, when testing the Eradicator in 0.95.1a, 2 HVD's and 1 Heavy Mauler did better than 3 HVD's, even though the Eradicators already had Annihilators/Breach. So yeah I don't know if it's because there's no long-range anti-armor mixed in with the HVD so that it ends up not doing as well.
