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[Vanshilar]

For HVD vs Railgun, it should be pretty straightforward to put some Railguns on the medium ballistics and HVDs on the medium hybrids, and then do a side-by-side comparison of their total damage via the Detailed Combat Results mod.

From my 0.95.1a testing, on Eradicators (2 HVD, 1 Heavy Mauler, 4 Railguns, 4 Annihilators, 1 Breach, with BRF) vs double Ordos, the overall damage/flux ratio of the HVDs and Railguns ended up being pretty much the same, because the HVDs hit more often than the Railguns (the Railguns had a higher miss rate). So it didn't really matter in terms of converting your flux to their damage. However, each of the 2 nose Railguns only did about 43% of the damage of each HVD, since the HVDs had 1000 base range while the Railguns had 800 base range. So HVD was clearly better. (Each of the side Railguns only did around 61% of the damage of each of the nose Railguns, so the side Railguns clearly weren't used as much.)

It may be somewhat different since the Executor has different weapons to complement the HVDs/Railguns, but I expect the general gist to be pretty much similar, especially since the other weapons are also long range. Another side benefit of using HVDs is that the ship kills at a longer range, meaning less damage taken, meaning more of your flux goes into killing enemy ships instead of into defense. That'll help for long battles.

[Void Ganymede]

Eradicators have enough light mounts that you can start to cheese IPDAI + elite Point Defense. Low Tech artillery boats like this are actually pretty similar to Executor in setup: low flux dissipation, lots of mounts, weapon flux efficiency is the name of the game.

These Executors have HIL to keep enemy shields up and frag damage to remove hulls, which are big problems Low artyboats face. HVD hybrids to add a bit of EMP to the mix and sync up kinetic weapon ranges seems like a *really* good setup that probably won't be beat, regardless if Arbalest or Railgun.

[intrinsic_parity]

For HVD vs Railgun, it should be pretty straightforward to put some Railguns on the medium ballistics and HVDs on the medium hybrids, and then do a side-by-side comparison of their total damage via the Detailed Combat Results mod.

Are you saying to test them by having a split loadout on one same ship? Because that seems like a flawed testing methodology. The AI is going to behave differently due to the range mismatch. If the AI hangs back at 1000 range to use HVDs, that will obviously make railguns perform worse.

The question should really be if the AI and ship can make up for the range difference with speed/positioning, but the AI won't necessarily try to do that if it still has HVDs.

Obviously the single ship approach has the advantage of ensuring the general battle situation is consistent (so you don't have one ship chase after a frigate and do nothing, ruining the comparison), but IMO, it's better to achieve that by having multiple ships with each loadout, and by averaging over multiple battles, which should theoretically converge to a representative value with enough samples. Whereas testing a mixed loadout is introducing a bias to your results (due to AI behavior) that cannot be averaged out.

[Vanshilar]

Are you saying to test them by having a split loadout on one same ship? Because that seems like a flawed testing methodology. The AI is going to behave differently due to the range mismatch. If the AI hangs back at 1000 range to use HVDs, that will obviously make railguns perform worse.

Right, I forgot to mention, this is assuming Aggressive officers which will naturally try to head in to the range of the shortest-range weapon. I pretty much always use Aggressive officers so that's more or less an assumption for me.

Sure, I've also done it where I fight using weapon A, then reload and do the same fight again using weapon B, but then that's many multiples times the amount of work due to having to average the results of multiple battles since each individual battle can be very different. Thus far I haven't found a case where these two approaches end up giving different results, i.e. if testing side by side shows weapon A is better, then ships using weapon A will be better than ships using weapon B when I test using multiple battles against the same enemy. I'm sure it's possible to construct some edge scenario where this isn't the case but thus far, having tested both ways, it's pretty much always been this way.

[Draba]

The difference between 5x HVD which I used for the winning run and 5x Railgun is only 145 kinetic dps though. But a big issue with HVD is rate of fire.

It's a mix of high DPS, lower flux use and much better tracking.
Did try all arbalest, all railgun, and all HVD setups against the same fleet and HVD has a very consistent problem with being overwhelmed where the other 2 just smashes the enemy.
Executor needs all the flux dissipation and capacity it can get to keep it behaving as it should be. If it gets in a bad spot with flux it starts to use its weapons very poorly and spirals out of control from there.

Funnily enough you could sub Pulse Laser for railgun in the hybrids I think if you can handle the flux, they have the same range due to EBC if you don't have BRF and almost same anti shield dps.

Tried 2 pulse lasers in front hoping it'd help with clearing frigates, got completely smashed with flux used on something that's not kinetic.
Also tried autpulse+ion pulsers, best not to talk about that

Autopulse with some heavy mauler support works very well, the AI just can't pace itself and always gets caught with high soft flux buildup.
From there it's the usual song and dance, firing weapons all over the place, wiggling around, slow inevitable destruction.

For HVD vs Railgun, it should be pretty straightforward to put some Railguns on the medium ballistics and HVDs on the medium hybrids, and then do a side-by-side comparison of their total damage via the Detailed Combat Results mod.

Right, I forgot to mention, this is assuming Aggressive officers which will naturally try to head in to the range of the shortest-range weapon. I pretty much always use Aggressive officers so that's more or less an assumption for me.

Going from aggressive to steady to cautious on executors reduced suicide rates to something like 10% of the original.
Battle goes from hopeless and frustrating to being about avoiding that 1 casualty.
Most of the time cautious does a good job of actually staying at range and focusing fire instead of blocking.

Doesn't matter what officer type you are using, you can only compare weapons by actually running the battles with each loadout.
(also, hybrids are wide arc turrets so whatever you put there will obviously look much better)

[Void Ganymede]

This thing's such a cool ship. Some tricks not useful vs remnants by themselves:

- There's an interesting emergent interaction with elite Helmsmanship. If you rely on Wasps or Xyphos for point defense and stack Mark IXs on all turrets, and maybe even use Systems Expertise, the ship spends lots of time out of range of anything. This triggers the agility boost from 0-flux, which stacked with elite Heavy Armor agility makes it surprisingly nimble and mobile! The Mark IX's bursty profile lines up well with limited time on target. You can kind of do the same with Gauss everywhere, but get far less Helmsmanship uptime.
- These make very decent carriers! A swarm of Thunders rolling up frigates and occasionally flaming out kiters is cool to watch. I should try Broadsword-Claw and Broadsword-Warthog mixes next.
- Squall MLRS would be ideal for kinetic pressure on Radiants, since they keep shooting during LIDAR. Trick is you need them for the final phase and will 100% run out if the swarm phase isn't violent enough.

[Genir]

Continued from https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27476.60

No PD/1 PD gun to fix AI behavior

The no PD approach is thanks to your reasoning about having efficient shields.

Wow I love these builds, it's actually perfect. The only thing to disagree with is ADF

Thanks! I really don't like dragging Oxes around, but I think I'll be swapping ADF for some combat mod in newer build iterations.

How does that setup get through frigates in time, especially without Hardened Subsystems and ion beams to flame them out?

There's no special sauce here. It just plows through everything, including frigates, fast enough that it doesn't need Hardened subsystems. From what I observed, frigates die mostly as kind of bycatch - they fly around the guns and suddenly explode. As for frigates that are smart enough not to loiter in front of the big guns, I have frigates of my own. Brawlers LP gun down small stuff very effectively. But as you can see from the attached battle raport, Executors do most of the damage. And they do it fast!

Nothing in the back always leads to some ion beams parking there for me

I have builtin Extended Shields just for that purpose. Plus Flak Cannon to deal with Salamanders, when the Executor feels too safe and drops shields when there are Scintillas around. I tried IR lasers, Heavy Machine Guns and even Heavy Autocannons in the back, but in the end it wasn't worth it.

Pilum catapult might be worth a try

I tried it, but it didn't do much in my opinion. Locust was better, especially for frigates. But in the end, I prefer to invest OP in non-missile stuff.

[Thaago]

What a curious mix of kinetics up front! Cool

[Genir]

What a curious mix of kinetics up front! Cool

And it's not random.

Needler is efficient and quickly drops shields. But adding more than one causes enemy to keep its shields up between bursts - and we want the shields down for HIL to do its job.

Autocannon has good DPS and because of constant stream of rounds keeps the enemy shield down. But Autocannons in hybrid slots underperforms because of poor range and accuracy.

Driver doesn't suffer the range and accurcay problem and it really snipes frigates! Also, for some reason, kiting enemies keep themselves outside Autocannon range, but feel safe in the Driver range. For their own detriment.

 

[Draba]

There's no special sauce here. It just plows through everything, including frigates, fast enough that it doesn't need Hardened subsystems. From what I observed, frigates die mostly as kind of bycatch - they fly around the guns and suddenly explode. As for frigates that are smart enough not to loiter in front of the big guns, I have frigates of my own. Brawlers LP gun down small stuff very effectively. But as you can see from the attached battle raport, Executors do most of the damage. And they do it fast!

Oh, having frigates completely changes things.
Certainly makes more sense to have a "normal" fleet than to cheese derelict breakpoints.
Looked around a bit and average full strength Ordo is apparently a bit over 300 DP, that explains the rest of the difference (1500-1600 can be a "normal" battle, 2000+ is lots of frustration where main enemy is PPT).

Nothing in the back always leads to some ion beams parking there for me

I have builtin Extended Shields just for that purpose. Plus Flak Cannon to deal with Salamanders, when the Executor feels too safe and drops shields when there are Scintillas around. I tried IR lasers, Heavy Machine Guns and even Heavy Autocannons in the back, but in the end it wasn't worth it.

Yeah, Executor chews through frigates very fast but sooner or later a group of beams forms on at least 1 side and dealing with that wastes too much PPT.
Need frigates and smaller pulls, duh.

[Thaago]

What a curious mix of kinetics up front! Cool

And it's not random.

Needler is efficient and quickly drops shields. But adding more than one causes enemy to keep its shields up between bursts - and we want the shields down for HIL to do its job.

Autocannon has good DPS and because of constant stream of rounds keeps the enemy shield down. But Autocannons in hybrid slots underperforms because of poor range and accuracy.

Driver doesn't suffer the range and accurcay problem and it really snipes frigates! Also, for some reason, kiting enemies keep themselves outside Autocannon range, but feel safe in the Driver range. For their own detriment.

Makes sense! It's always satisfying to see how the presence of one weapon system (HIL) can make other weapon systems (or combos of weapons!) shine.

What's also interesting to me is just how much of this ship's flux is dedicated to non-hard-flux HE, and yet it still works so well against Remnants with their famously-tough shields. I don't suppose you tested Autopulse lasers + S Mod expanded magazines (which would also help the autolances)? I admit I haven't played with the Executor yet but that's kicking around in my brain.

[TauCetiRedGuard]

I don't suppose you tested Autopulse lasers + S Mod expanded magazines (which would also help the autolances)? I admit I haven't played with the Executor yet but that's kicking around in my brain.

I will admit that my testing with Autopulse on Executor has been significantly less optimised compared to the builds posted here but I've found it to have a worse overall performance compared to HIL. On paper the Autopluse trades 200 base range for triple the burst dps in energy damage which would help against shields, but because you do it in 150 damage shots compared to the effective 1000 dps against armour that HIL has your overall ability to kill ships is significantly lower especially cruisers and capitals. Additionally the mounts being so offset from one another results in the AI often having difficulty keeping both on target and missing a fair portion of its shots.

[Draba]

I don't suppose you tested Autopulse lasers + S Mod expanded magazines (which would also help the autolances)? I admit I haven't played with the Executor yet but that's kicking around in my brain.

It's fun: the charges being stored solves the problem with hardpoint downtime, coherer helps autopulse and burst PD also benefits from mags.
With energy focus active it gets through enemies much faster than HIL, blink and a Nova is gone.

HIL is just much more reliable when swarmed, high soft buildup from the autopulse burst makes even Executors drop fast.

Autopulse with some heavy mauler support works very well, the AI just can't pace itself and always gets caught with high soft flux buildup.
From there it's the usual song and dance, firing weapons all over the place, wiggling around, slow inevitable destruction.

I will admit that my testing with Autopulse on Executor has been significantly less optimised compared to the builds posted here but I've found it to have a worse overall performance compared to HIL.

Get heavy maulers at least in the front 3, after a few HE shots landed autopulse+autolances have so much raw damage it borks even Apex/Radiant hull.
Yeah, overall it feels weaker than HIL because a dead ship does 0 damage.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

I don't think Executor can handle extra 250 flux from S-modded Expanded Magazines.

[Draba]

I don't think Executor can handle extra 250 flux from S-modded Expanded Magazines.

It can, drop officer aggression level and make sure you have lots of caps.
Mags are great for autolances anyway, building them in is always good IMO.
Problem is with an environment where at least some Executors will always be swarmed, need kinetic spam for that to keep sustained pressure up.