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[TheLaughingDead]

As per the title. I keep finding my later-game fleets gravitating towards cruisers, capitals, and oddly enough, frigates. Destroyers all seem too squishy but also too slow to live through fights frigates can often survive. I do find the Medusa's survivability to be decent, the teleport and decent shields help a lot, especially with a SysEx and Field Mod officer, but to be fair that officer could help a ship triple the DP survive and also make that DP thrive in a way I haven't found a destroyer able to do (even with Wolfpack Tactics). Tips? Tricks? Zany builds?!

[CapnHector]

Mind if I share a build in video form?

Enforcer monofleet vs 3 Remnant Ordos

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[Arghy]

Shrikes are solid and the 14th enforcers can be made pretty fun but beware they're mostly there to absorb damage while other ships capitalize. Enforcers are wonky as hell because they can't handle a full medium weapon build so feel free to stick small weapons in the slot. Manticores can also be really nice in a fleet because the large slots can be super specialized and they work great as a team. The sunder is another great support destroyer because it's large energy slot can mount a wide variety but on it's own it struggles.

Big fleet battles are all about combined arms and small ships will get singled out and destroyed so expect high attrition rates but enforcers backing up aggressive cruisers or manticores acting as support turrets can really let you punch above your weight class. My current build is MK II ventures pooping out large missiles at insane rates while my cadre of direct fire support ships hopefully mop up before the missiles run out. My team of 4 heavy needler 14th enforcers can turn the tide of a battle by using the needlers alpha to overload most shields or at least drive back ships.

Just be sure to pick an element and lean into it, if you're going with a long range endurance kiting build then don't stick some short ranged ships in there that will get slaughtered alone haha. A team of shrikes and wolfs with graviton/ion beams can quickly overwhelm bigger ships and their range will buy them a ton of survivability. Enforcers with torpedoes and kinetics can make short work of larger ships and their inherent armor with some structure buffs can make them beastly to kill.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

Tips? Tricks? Zany builds?!

There aren't any precisely for the reasons you mentioned. Too slow to cap objectives or run away, not enough firepower/tank to trade flux. The two exceptions are Medusa(mobility) and Sunder(1200+200 base range and a large energy mount)

[CapnHector]

More like figuring out how to build them is just harder. But the Enforcer for example has 5 medium ballistics, 4 missiles, and enough OP for a hangar on top, all for 9 DP and getting +10% damage vs larger ships too from WPT, so can't be all bad (unless you use some of those mounts for flak I guess, then you get bad survivability and no firepower instead of just bad survivability).

There's definitely strong potential here, that 3 Ordo Enforcer fleet I'm thinking can probably do 5 Ordo just like a capital fleet and unlike a frigate fleet if there's some way to fit in Hardened Subsystems. Can't imagine Manticore LP being a terrible ship either but have never found the blueprint for it.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

Enforcer has 5 medium ballistics but barely enough flux to fire 3 of them. I mean if it actually had 5 functional medium ballistics it would be better than the Eradicator...

[CapnHector]

I mean check out the video. With an officer it's only a little overfluxed even with 3x HVD 2x Mauler. Without officer it's 300 flux short, these numbers ofc are without flux distributor which you can also put in if you want, the ship has an absolute ton of spare OP. It's fine to overflux it, treat it like an artillery piece, it's not supposed to be able to tank and return fire, rather you bring several and their overwhelming firepower will also be your main defense (that or a tanking playership for a more usual fleet comp). They are low tech ships so they are allowed to vent to keep firing.

Edit: having said that knowing what I do now, it might actually be optimal to put 1 Vulcan so you can link 4 mediums with it to force true autofire and venting on the AI though.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

"Only a little overfluxed" by 194 with an officer, by 352 without. At the cost of dumping almost everything into vents and therefore almost no shield tank(7 OP in caps) No, you don't have a ton of spare OP, you cannot armor tank in a destroyer because they simply don't have enough armor, you have literally the entire Leadership skill line(!), you spam the hell out of Talons managing to lose over 600 crew in one fight as a result and despite it all you lost what - 6 of the Eradicators? Over 20% of your fleet?

Look man, I like what you're doing because it's cool to see how far you can push a fleet, but you are pushing them only along one specific axis. For example I'd love to see how this fleet would do against a Star Fotress, the Doritos or even a 300k Tri-Tachyon bouty with a few Dooms.

[itBeABruhMoment]

Mind if I share a build in video form?

You lost a quarter of you're fleet. Wouldn't call that a good outcome.

[CapnHector]

Look man, I like what you're doing because it's cool to see how far you can push a fleet, but you are pushing them only along one specific axis. For example I'd love to see how this fleet would do against a Star Fotress, the Doritos or even a 300k Tri-Tachyon bouty with a few Dooms.

Can do next time I have game time! Which is the challenge you are most interested in

>losses
Can't worry about a few eggs when you're making this kind of an omelette. One thing that I think is almost literally impossible is making a 3 Ordo destroyer fleet that loses no ships. They are not that tough and you can't run in these fights when the enemy has fast frigate spam too. In non challenge gameplay you should bring Onslaughts to hold the frontline and let these provide supporting artillery fire.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

Medusa with two railgun, phase lance, and ir autolance, has been serving me well. Build it for range, and make sure it has system expertise and it will never die.

[coldiceEVO]

As escorts and xyphos carrier. Destoryer has the PPT, stat and speed to stay with bigger ship and lean enough in DP. And range build and CH build are less affected by dmod and further reduces logistics

[BigBrainEnergy]

medusa

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I think medusas have a shot at 3 ordos with no losses. This build served me pretty well so maybe with a little tweaking it could pull it off. You probably wouldn't even need hardened subsystems because they're more than fast enough to retreat mid-battle.

[Sandor057]

Mind if I share a build in video form?

Enforcer monofleet vs 3 Remnant Ordos

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Heh, Hector bullying the Remnants again.

To be frank I don't think destroyers are in a good spot for late game. I'd say taking 2-3 Enforcers or beam Sunders for supporting fire or converted hangars should be more than sufficient. You're better off leaving the slugging matches for Cruisers and Capitals. The only destroyers you may actually need for late game are the Phantoms for raids. Alternatively I could imagine some kind of a Gamma Core SO spam Fulgent fleet build with all kinds of hyper-agressive fun. Then again Phantoms and Flugents are not midline/low-tech, so yeah, Enforcers or Sunders.

[CapnHector]

Alright so I did all of Lawrence's challenges just for fun. Here are the results:
- 1. Vs Culann Starforge and Tri-Tachyon ships to total 1000 DP: took out the station, killed most of the fleet, died with 8 enemy ships remaining (I admit I was totally disconnected from the gameplay this fight, I was like they are only human what could they possibly do to my fleet, but it turns out the Enforcer fleet is significantly weaker than my 5 Ordo fleets I am used to by now). I intended this to be the Star Fortress fight but upon killing it I realized it is a battlestation.
- 2. Vs 2 Tesseracts and some extra Omega because it's hard to spawn exactly 2 Tesseracts with Console Commands: Won but lost 10 Enforcers. It's actually impressive how much trouble these things can be for slow poorly shielded destroyers. Also it turns out some of them started fleeing when they lost and they weren't initially hostile when spawned with Console Commands.
- 3. Vs Kazeron Star Fortress and 300 FP Tri-Tachyon fleet which I guess is kind of like a Tri-Tachyon elite bounty because it has 2 capitals and 3 Dooms: Won, lost 9 Enforcers

So, in summary, it turns out humans can be semi-threatening to weak fleets. Seriously though these were actually pretty fun challenges. When the 3000 or whatever DP of Hegemony I spawned to test it failed to do anything to 4 of the 5-Ordo Enforcers I had given up on fighting humans but it turns out Dooms are pretty interesting opponents. Clearly the Enforcer fleet was also making a lot more assumptions about the enemy fleet than the Executor fleet because performance was not great vs humans.

I don't think Enforcer monofleets really do wins without losses, but note that if you were to run this as an Ordo farming fleet it doesn't really care about a few D-mods and the profits will easily cover restoration or even just buying new ships.

I made 1 change to the layout for these fights, namely linked the Breaches with the medium guns, which you generally should do for shorter fights, multi-Ordos are an exception.

Videos (not publishing these because they're just the basic random fights)