Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Planet Search Overhaul (07/13/24)

Author Topic: Help! My Onslaught build is suddenly very lethal and I have no idea why?!  (Read 2629 times)

Sendrien

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 267
    • View Profile

I was just idly playing around with the concept of Expanded Mags on the Onslaught (to enhance the TPCs), and in order to get more value out of the S-Mod, I decided to replace the 3 forward facing mediums (2 Heavy Needlers and a Heavy Mortar) with 3 Thumpers. And suddenly, my Onslaught is laying waste to practically everything, even though the vast majority of all my weapons deal Fragmentation damage???

This makes no sense, can someone figure out why there was a huge jump in lethality by downgrading my weapons to Frag damage?

(Also, if you see any way to improve my build, I'm all ears  ;D)


Logged

Ad Astra

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 263
  • Are Reapers strawberry flavored?
    • View Profile

Hello there!
It's because the enemies are so busy trying to get a closer look at that triple thumper abomination to know what the *** is going, that they forget to fight back. Cheers!

On a more serious note, you have 3 energy weapons pointing towards the front, those deal with the shields and armor, sometimes the devastators might help with armor as well, and then you get the monstrous 4000DPS of those 3 thumpers combined, if at any point they get in front of an uncovered hull the opposing ship is toast.

I recommend you improve it by throwing it into a giant blue star so maybe I can sleep tonight.  ;D
Logged
You can park your spaceship anywhere you want if you get along with pirates

Sendrien

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 267
    • View Profile

I recommend you improve it by throwing it into a giant blue star so maybe I can sleep tonight.  ;D

See!? It's not just me, right? This ship looks absolutely terrible on paper. But when I field it, it's substantially better than it looks!  :o ;D
Logged

BaBosa

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 445
    • View Profile

Who are you fighting? You only have two railguns for kinetics which feels like it shouldn’t work against redacted. Also I’m more concerned by the use of Pluims instead of a proper missile than the thumpers. Frag weapons are really just energy weapons with bonus damage to hull.
Logged

Sendrien

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 267
    • View Profile

Who are you fighting? You only have two railguns for kinetics which feels like it shouldn’t work against redacted. Also I’m more concerned by the use of Pluims instead of a proper missile than the thumpers. Frag weapons are really just energy weapons with bonus damage to hull.

Haven't fought Redacted yet, but close! I'm actually using its performance against enemy Paragons as my measure of effectiveness, which is why I'm shocked that my switch to Thumpers actually decreased my kill time... It's very perplexing!
Logged

Ad Astra

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 263
  • Are Reapers strawberry flavored?
    • View Profile

See!? It's not just me, right? This ship looks absolutely terrible on paper. But when I field it, it's substantially better than it looks!  :o ;D

AI tends to be smart enough not to waste flux firing the wrong damage type into shields so using the thumper only when needed makes it a very decent weapon, the player can do the same. If firing the Thumper at shields or armor then you can look at this quote from the wiki:

"Do note that while Thumper sports a rather impressive flux/damage ratio of 0.3, against shields/armor this value becomes a rather unremarkable 1.2 once you include the fragmentation damage penalties."

Which all in all ain't that terrible anyways, as long as you're not brawling something with better flux. That compounded to the fact that the onslaught can carry more weapons than it can fire continuously makes it so that your previous configuration might have been too ordnance heavy, while now it sits in a better place flux/dissipation wise, also thumpers are OP cheap, that OP probably went into better flux.
Logged
You can park your spaceship anywhere you want if you get along with pirates

Thaago

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 7378
  • Harpoon Affectionado
    • View Profile

If you want to make it more deadly, my opinion would be:

1) Drop the railguns for dlacs, and put dlacs in the other small slots (they are overpowered right now)
2) Use proximity charges (also overepowered)
3) get rid of the dominators and substitute in anything else

Shield shunt builds aren't my cup of tea, but elite expanded magazine TPCs are really excellent!
Logged

eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 428
    • View Profile

"S-mod: Increases the ammo/charge regeneration rate for ballistic and energy weapons by 50%."

and

"S-mod: increases rate of fire of non-missile weapons by 10%. Note that this will also increase their flux use"

While you have charges for your Thumpers they are doing roughly 1466.3 frag DPS per Thumper. (1,333*1.1)
After that they drop to roughly 750 frag DPS per Thumper. (500*1.5)

The DPS doesn't decrease that much vs exposed hull even when the enemy had heavy armor. Vs shields it's 366.575 and 187.5 DPS respectively.

When you first engage A Paragon, it's dealing 1,099.725 shield damage a second, from just the Thumpers. Thanks to them being frag damage, a Paragon will not use its fortress shield against them.
Logged

Void Ganymede

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 135
    • View Profile

Signs of a very powerful ship:
- enough weapon slots to fit some high-damage frag weapons for cleanup duty (but only *after* you've got enough KE shield pressure and HE armor cracking)
- enough EMP to mobility kill and shut down enemy offense so flux doesn't have to be spent on shields and can be directed to offense
- synergistic ability to take space with every part of its loadout, whether that's an Atlas MkII spamming missiles and laying down Gauss fire across half the map, an SO cruiser absolutely dominating anything it gets close to, or (in this case) Pilum carpets working together with long range guns to make closing the distance or flanking this thing hard

People might talk about taking it to fight the Remnant, but, despite fighting Ordos being some people's favorite benchmark, most of the game isn't shield-heavy high tech ships with deadly weapons you *must* flux out or die to.
Logged

coldiceEVO

  • Lieutenant
  • **
  • Posts: 51
    • View Profile

It looks like a solid build. It maybe weak against emp
Logged