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[CapnHector]

Good news to all fans of antimatter and antimatter accessories

-not a single Gigacannon or Antimatter Blaster... I feel cheated.

Alright this one is for you. I managed to clear 5 Ordos (and big ones, 2054 DP) with 5 Gigacannon Executors. 4 Drams were there also. No Omega weapons this time, either. Glory to Askonia and the Diktat.




“High-ranking naval officers on Ultradyne Askonia Combine board of directors rammed through large-scale AM projector weapon development despite objection of engineering lead. Project allegedly initiated at personal behest of so-called Executor [traitor Andrada]. HEGINT assets report test firing displays dramatic power output but weapon system integration projected to reduce enemy warfighting capability in fleet action due to doctrinal inefficacy. Recommend no sabotage operation.”
                                      – classified report to the High Hegemon

"The Gigacannon might be a pretty decent weapon on, say, the Sunder-class destroyer. The Diktat’s capital ship is a slow battleship, though, and this weapon’s lack of range or sustained damage makes it nearly useless there."
- Alex

Well, so much for that. ...please don't nerf it though.



Thanks for this build go to
- Genir, for build inspiration and the trick to bypass AI flux management (the Pulse Lasers are linked with Flak)
- Draba, for sticking to your guns about Pilums. After trying them I am now a Pilum believer. They can do what fighters do, but without losing Replacement Rate. So when you don't have other missiles to mount they are definitely worth. They are about 10x better if you have room for ECCM though.


Update: I was able to defeat 5 Ordos using 5 Executors using Hiruma Kai's stratagem of retreating mid-battle to preserve CR. Here is the video. That was 2111 DP of Ordos vs 235 DP of Executors (250 without Derelict Operations). For anyone wondering I also gained 44 964 000 experience from this fight.



For details, see below at https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27329.msg404053#msg404053. Original post follows.

Dear AM fuel aficionados and faithful Diktat party members. This is a video about a defeat. However, it was a glorious defeat; only 4 Remnant ships remained of the Ordos we took on, and the Mistral in particular destroyed 454 OP worth of Remnant vessels by itself. For Askonia and the Lion of Sindria!

As you have seen I have spent some time fighting the AI Remnant menace, and I try to do it with realistic fleets. My personal best is 3 Ordos with 6 Pegasus so far. However, by 4 Ordos, missiles will run out. Analyzing the DCR results for Pegasus, I realized that the Executor can take this a step further. The missiles do represent a significant but by no means all of the ship's damage output. By the genius of the Supreme Executor, we have a ship that can brawl down 4 Ordos... possibly, with a better commander than I am, and a lot of luck.



Here is my combat video. I am playing at 3x combat speed from settings. There are no content mods, only Hexshields and Faster engine rendering, as well as DCR and the dependencies for these. All ships fight under AI control.

Ship build. There are two builds here. The variant with Resonator MRM is better, but I only found 4 this game. So, the Sundowner and Mistral are the Resonator MRM variant, while the other Executors are the Locust variant. All officers are identical.

My fleet

[close]

Me

[close]

Detailed combat results output:



In my previous posts I have written a battle report, but now I have a video. So I will do a writeup in the form of PAQ (Potentially asked questions) instead.

Writeup

Q: Do you really need 59546 fuel capacity for this fleet?
A: It is a Sindrian fleet.

Q: Why is there a Ziggurat with no weapons except 1 hammer?
A: I needed fleet points to make 4 Ordos engage my fleet. There's a mercy mechanic in the game that would normally make them not attack a fleet this small.

Q: Why a monofleet? Why not more ships?
A: I try to make strong fleets of one or mostly one ships at a reasonable cost to showcase one ship I am interested in. This would probably be significantly better with other ships to support it. Alternatively you could probably grind any amount of Ordos to dust with a fleet of 30 Executors.

Q: Why is Executor best for this and not Paragon?
A: The Executor has a system that boosts damage, missiles, and plenty of long range ballistic firepower. Also, you get the same shield efficiency for 47 DP only. I have done multi-Ordos with Paragon way back, but I'm not at all convinced it can do 4 with normal settings at 60 DP.

Q: I thought the Executor is 50 DP.
A: Thanks to the genius of the Lion of Sindria, it costs 47 DP if you take Derelict Operations, letting you deploy 5 rather than 4 at 240 DP.

Q: What is that officer build? Where are all the damage skills?
A: When you fight 4 Ordos up close you will eventually just take a random Reaper shot in the back not once, but several times. If you do not have these skills that will often be the end of the ship. Hull tanking with a strong shield and hull HP regeneration is extremely good; the ship can live with a sliver of HP remaining, and recover back to fighting form. These ships have up to 47600 effective hull HP which takes even the Remnants a while; in fact, as you see in the video, it happens that a ship gets swarmed, takes serious damage, and goes on to keep fighting anyway. By contrast the ship doesn't have problems dealing enough damage even without Ballistic Mastery or EWM or Missile Spec.

Q: Why ARU and not RFC / Extended shields / Point Defense etc.
A: It counters the side-effects of Sindrian engineering and also it turns out it is cheaper and easier just to repair things with this hullmod than try to block EMP and Salamanders. You even get 33% Overload Duration Reduction.

Q: Why not point defense though?
A: PD is a scam I would rather just they take it on the shields when they have .37 efficiency. Not that any point defense that isn't Devastators or PCL even really works vs Remnants even if I put it in.

Q: Why IR autolance?
A: It is the fighter killer and destroyer of hulls, with very good flux efficiency too.

Q: Why Locust and not Squall?
A: It, and ATG, are to counter the smaller Remnant ships. This ship generally has no trouble with the larger ones and can deal with them without Squall.

Q: Arbalest?
A: .75 efficiency and 8 OP.

Q: What are these effortposts?
A: I like to make fun builds and I like to share them and discuss them, and I love this game, it just never gets old for me.

Q: Why not Gryphons?
A: I'm aware that they can do this too, but don't enjoy the action.

Q: Why kites?
A: They are fast, cheap, and equipped with only salamanders they are highly survivable objective grabbers, although can only EMP other ships. I sent them to the side of the map, then when I saw the enemy frigates were coming for my fleet, sent them to capture objectives.

[close]

Maybe I can win this fight some day, let me know if you have any ideas how to do it better. So far I'm pretty satisfied I got this far, was pretty fun figuring it out. For now, hope I brought something fun and new to your day.

[Hiruma Kai]

About the only suggestion I can make, if this were an ironman campaign fight you had to win as opposed to a showcase, would be to retreat once PPT was low or ran out, and re-engage at 85% CR.  The ~20% swing in damage taken, damage dealt, and speed in going from 97% CR to 40% and below I'm sure was doing you no favors at the end.  It's won't reset your missiles, but it will reset Combat Endurance hull healing as far as I understand, and I think trigger Field Repairs.

[CapnHector]

About the only suggestion I can make, if this were an ironman campaign fight you had to win as opposed to a showcase, would be to retreat once PPT was low or ran out, and re-engage at 85% CR.  The ~20% swing in damage taken, damage dealt, and speed in going from 97% CR to 40% and below I'm sure was doing you no favors at the end.  It's won't reset your missiles, but it will reset Combat Endurance hull healing as far as I understand, and I think trigger Field Repairs.

Oh, that's a good one! I think that would actually have potentially won the combat, although of course it would break up the single battle which is less satisfying. Still. Thanks!

Frankly you know the combat is too long when you have a capital with Hardened Subsystems and Combat Endurance and PPT still runs out.

[Alex]

I have to try this build at some point, haha, wow! It's neat to see Damage Control get some time in the sun, and to see the IR Autolance putting in work.

[Tranquility]

Super interesting to see that having only one D-Mod for DO is enough to let you deploy 5 Executors. Truly, Andrada's showing his strategic brilliance here through his own glorious modifications (jokes aside, LG ships make great candidates for DO fleets, since the effects of Special Modifications are relatively minor compared to, say, Faulty Power Grids. Plus, you can acquire these while farming for Gigacannons and Kinetic Blasters.).

If possible, have you considered converting the front shield into an omni-shield for the Executors? It'll end up with less flux cap, sure, but it might allow the Executors to more effectively shield-flicker against torpedoes and other strike weapons. Other than that, the Executor fleet seems very solid to me; splendid work using them to their best capability!

[CapnHector]

With Hiruma Kai's stratagem I was able to defeat 5 Ordos with 5 Executors (and 4 Luddic Path Kite scouts).

We defeated, in total, 2111 DP of Remnants fielding only 235 DP of Executors and up to 4 DP of Kites per fight. The best performing Executor, Sundowner, destroyed 484 DP of Remnants.

I believe this conclusively proves Philip Andrada is the greatest military strategist to have ever lived, despite detractors. In fact I have decided to switch allegiances and apply for Diktat party membership. Long live the Lion.

The main change I made to the build was that since I could now remove Hardened Subsystems from the build, I could switch to HVDs. I put the rest of the freed OP into capacitors on the Locust variant, while for the Resonator MRM I was now confident enough in the level of flux capacity that I decided to S-mod in Expanded Magazines to boost the IR Autolance. Also, I boosted the Ziggurat's fleet points to 400 from 40 in ships.csv because otherwise 5 Remnant Ordos wouldn't engage me even with this fleet due to the game's mercy mechanic.

The combat video is added to the OP.

Here are the builds and detailed combat results:






Detailed damage output for every ship is at video's end. Second attempt at this using this build if you're wondering, by the way. The original Arbalest build got to the Radiants but couldn't go the distance.

If possible, have you considered converting the front shield into an omni-shield for the Executors? It'll end up with less flux cap, sure, but it might allow the Executors to more effectively shield-flicker against torpedoes and other strike weapons.

I didn't end up trying this, since I prioritized moving to HVDs. Something like 20 flux capacitors significantly improves performance for this ship. Could be worth a try though. However, the exposed engine is not as significant of a risk as it might seem in this build, with these skills and hullmods. There are moments in the video where the engine is disabled by a barrage of Salamanders only to be back up a second later due to Damage Control and ARU. In fact the greatest risk is running out of flux, having to drop shields and taking a barrage which the ships can stand for an impressive amount of time, but not forever.

[Grievous69]

I reckon these would be less successful if HIL had old 1.0 efficiency (not saying the weapon is op) since Executors have just enough flux to make them work now.

[CapnHector]

I reckon these would be less successful if HIL had old 1.0 efficiency (not saying the weapon is op) since Executors have just enough flux to make them work now.

It would certainly be worse! But you had it right in the other thread about Large Energies and smaller Ballistics being good. In a way the Executor gets best of both worlds (Andrada is a genius) because they get Large Energies and Medium Ballistics which, despite usually not being that exciting, have the advantage that HVDs range match the HIL at 1000 so it's a perfect match for long range firepower. The HIL meanwhile is basically a Hephaestus except 0.8 efficiency, hits instantly and perfect accuracy, 2x hit strength too, definitely would take it over a Large Ballistic slot there since this ship couldn't handle the Mjolnir and the HE options would be worse.

[Grievous69]

Huh? That combo was always considered great. Look at Champion when it just came out, people were yelling broken even before the patch dropped. Only other ship that I know of that has access to a large energy + ballistics is Prometheus MkII and that's kinda a clunky ship. Champion is a smaller version of that but more elegant. Now I'm wondering how a fleet of champions would fare against your Ordo testing. The problem is just the sheer number of Champions that would probably block each other's line of fire.

[CapnHector]

Yeah, I meant it's a good swap from missile to Large Energy and either Alex did it on purpose or Alex meant the Executor to display Diktat bone-headedness by swapping missiles for energy on a ship with bad flux stats and joke's on him. Probably he knew though since Executor standard variant has HIL.

I've heard Champion is good for Ordos in general, but I don't think it's 5 Ordo capable. The important part here is ships being individually very strong because you can see the kind of swarming action that happens here, they need to be able to take immense amounts of damage and survive. Also, it would need to retreat 3-4 times to have the PPT unless you put Hardened Subsystems on it, which seems like kind of a lot. The retreat part is particularly sketchy, you can see on especially my second retreat I am carefully organizing a fighting retreat so no one ship gets swarmed too bad. The final ship still takes a lot of damage on its rear but the Executor as built here can handle it. (If I didn't have Damage Control and built in Automated Repair Unit it would actually have died there due to its engines failing when it started boosting away). Also, there's the fact that you get less guns. IR Autolance does a lot of burst damage and a ton of work here, and Executor has the mounts to spare for a separate hull damage weapon.

[BigBrainEnergy]

The executor being strong shouldn't be too surprising, it is basically 2 champions stapled together. It trades a little speed (only 10, surprisingly) for an extra medium ballistic, more ppt, and better shields, all of which turn out to be really good for this type of challenge.

I believe originally Alex planned for it to have FMR but changed it to HEF in the end, so the initial skepticism was warranted.

[BaBosa]

It has a lot worse dissipation though. I made the same comparison before and that was the main downside.

[Jihell Tharsis]

t's neat to see Damage Control get some time in the sun

Damage Control is awesome on big ships, and the combo with elite Combat Endurance is really nice.
On CapnHector Executors this translates to 47k effective hull hp (if the ship doesn't get bursted and ends up using all off combat endurance regen). Not even accounting for elite DC occasionally reducing a torpedo damage!

My math for EHP, in case I screwed up my logic:
>>> # Hull EHP = (hull points + combat endurance regen) * 1 / ( 1 - DC damage reduction)
>>> def hull_ehp(hull_hp):
...     return (hull_hp + .5*hull_hp) * 1 / ( 1 - .25)
...
>>> hull_ehp(23700)
47400.0

In fact I have decided to switch allegiances and apply for Diktat party membership. Long live the Lion.

Noooooooo! The babbles and trinkets of Moloch are leading you astray, repent, repent!

[CapnHector]

Count me among the Executor skeptics. In fact when .96 landed I opined it is probably worse than the Pegasus. Look how well that played out. It turns my original builds were just bad though. This ship is very unforgiving if you build it poorly. (Well, and the Pegasus got nerfed. But even without the nerf it would run out of missiles in this combat)

Oh, by the way, this ship is made by welding together an Eradicator and two Apogees. You can kind of see it in the hull shape. However, for some reason they only keep the energy grid of the Eradicator... well, it gets a slight boost - Eradicator has 400, Executor 500 base dissipation. That is the big challenge to work with when building this ship.

In fact I have decided to switch allegiances and apply for Diktat party membership. Long live the Lion.

Noooooooo! The babbles and trinkets of Moloch are leading you astray, repent, repent!

"The weak fear the spiritual potency of the killing machine. The strong instinctually recognize its beauty."   
^{- Quotations from the Supreme Executor}

The Lion is my savior now.

[Arcagnello]

Huh? That combo was always considered great. Look at Champion when it just came out, people were yelling broken even before the patch dropped. Only other ship that I know of that has access to a large energy + ballistics is Prometheus MkII and that's kinda a clunky ship. Champion is a smaller version of that but more elegant. Now I'm wondering how a fleet of champions would fare against your Ordo testing. The problem is just the sheer number of Champions that would probably block each other's line of fire.

Part of the reason why Brilliant is very good is that it's got two medium synergy hardpoints, 1 large energy turret and 2 medium energy turrets, meaning it can also cosplay as a "mini Executor" with 2HVDs, 1 HIL and two IR Autolances, altough the Fearless AI is really bad for it as we've discussed in that other thread.

Still, Executor actually GAINS weapons (where it matters) compared to two Brilliants since it's got 2 large Energies, 5 medium ballistics, two Large Missiles and two small energies (not gonna count the ass weapons, no), while two theoretical Brilliants stapled togheder have 4 medium ballistics, 2 large energies, 2 medium energies, 2 medium synergies and 4 small energies.

Essentially, Executor has better usable firepower per DP than the second best [redacted] ship and, unlike it, can get to 100% CR without giving up on having multiple of them, can run Derelict Contingent and is not forced to get into Hull Restoration (for the extra +15% CR with 3 Smods), without even mentioning the fact that its Capital Ship status gives it more range by itself, without even mentioning special hullmods built in or the fact it's got more armor and hull to tank with.

All of this is traded for 10 less top speed (kek), inability to get a 360° shield (still gets 0.6 base efficiency,lmao) and a lower base flux dissipation per DP, which is the only real meh part about the ship that can easily be overcome with good weapon loadouts and not looking at Ion Beams or Tach lances or Heavy Needlers.

It's a better Paragon. One that actually leverages its own advantages and is not an immovable brick.

The ship might need a DP increase pronto. I'm somewhat flabbergasted the ship was not introduced at 60DP to begin with.

P.S: very impressive loadouts by the way, downgrding to 3 Arbalests and 2 HVDs was the optimal choice!