Venture is a joke
It's not a top-of-the-line warship but it's tanky as hell and seems to act as a pretty solid anvil to the hammer of my eradicators. Even with the pretty subpar loadouts I've been using up to now I've won a lot of fights I really shouldn't have building my fleet around the anchor of a couple ventures built for defense and support.
According to luddic_church.faction here are your weapon options in-faction. (snip)
That's a lot more in-depth than I generally get with my theorycrafting but damned good information all the same. Thank you sir!
Low tech frigates in general are a lost cause beyond early game especially without elite ballistic weapons.
When you say luddic run, does that include luddic path ships? The venture mkII has the speed you need to charge in and then they can face tank damage.
Right. I'll probably just clear the frigates out of my fleet once I have bigger ships with which to replace them, then.
I toyed with picking up some Pather ships early on but decided I want to stick with just Church hulls this time 'round. I'll embrace my inner space terrorist in a future run.
If you look at luddic church fleets you'll see they used converted hangars on just about everything
Good to know that's still part of faction doctrine for them. I know it was before the last update but wasn't sure if the new ships had changed that. Time to pick up those fighter/carrier leadership skills I've been debating.
I realize it's not exactly in vogue right now and that it's more of a Luddic Path than a Luddic Church build, but Safety Overrides will solve a lot of mobility issues for the Eradicator
I'm not generally a huge fan of SO builds. I don't like the range and PPT reductions and, frankly, I just don't generally play aggressively enough to make that work for me. Which isn't to say they can't be
damned effective, just not my style.
Another potential option for solving mobility issues is to load up your missile slots with Salamanders. It's probably not ideal since it's a lot of burst damage to give up and the small Salamanders are fairly expensive in OP as small missiles go (then again, they also don't benefit from Missile Autoloader or Expanded Missile Racks, and small Salamanders will usually be cheaper than other small missiles plus either of those hull mods), but on the other hand an Eradicator probably doesn't really need additional burst damage while punching down even if it is only armed with mortars and autocannons and you probably don't need to use every missile slot on every Eradicator for Salamanders to gain a mobility advantage.
That may well be worth looking into. I generally have a fair few salamanders in play already as that's what I load my ventures with (as noted above, I build 'em for defense and support anchorage), so I've been building my eradicators for ballistic damage + missile finishers once the enemy ship is overloaded. Whole point o' posting this thread was to get ideas and shake things up, though.
Thanks for the feedback, folks. Hopefully I can use it to good effect.