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[Zumberge]

Silly idea: What if skills in non-Combat trees (i.e. Leadership, Technology, Industry) had smaller, related flagship bonuses, such that you still get a benefit to piloting your own ship, but less so than picking pure Combat with an equivalent amount of skill points?  As in, with 10 to 15 non-Combat skills you'd be on par with an officer with 5 combat skills?  It's based off of what I've seen in team-based games with choices of perks that either entirely benefit you, or only give you a little bit but give your team more, and if you wanted a lore explanation I suppose it would involve the captain applying what they know to their ship first-hand with Protagonist Power making it just a little bit better.

It's not a perfect solution right out of the box and feels like it's making things a bit complex, but the rough idea is there.

_{(Really hope nobody said something like this in the thread 'cause I just skimmed it.  Apologies in advance if it's redundant.)}

[Hiruma Kai]

Right up until your fleet hits a 1,000,000 credit pure carrier bounty. You lack PD, and despite how powerful the monitor is, it's not going to be able to save your Medusas from fighter spam.

That was my fleet, not kenwth81's, so I think you may be confusing posters.  Although, I admit I'm also a bit confused.  A player piloted Doom is more than capable of neutralizing the entire first wave of carrier spam fleet by itself.  All it needs to do is fly forward of the rest of the fleet, attract the first wave, and then put mines in their path.  The AoE is quite big, and the HE damage will basically kill any fighter in 2 hits (shielded ones can go into overload on the 1st).

The only real means you have of dealing with fighters is your flagship, and the Omens. Omens are poor PD even with officers due to their short range and poor hull and armor, and you can't be everywhere.

I mean, that is why I picked the Doom to go with that fleet.  To eliminate the Tesseract fighters quickly and cleanly.  Now Medusa with Heavy Blasters and Ion Pulsars will kill a fighter wing around them, but it isn't nearly as fast as I'd like against Tesseracts.  Monitors can also do some damage to fighters, but when they are tanking direct fire ships, they don't do fire their Flak cannons much.  Against a fighter/bomber swarm though, they tend to fire at least intermittently, because the swarm doesn't do anywhere near enough damage to raise their flux up.  A single Monitor can comfortably tank an Astral's worth of fighters and bombers.  I have more Monitors than any customized fleet is going to have Astrals.

I admit Omens don't armor or hull tank, but that is made up by their shield tanking capability.  Those particular omens had 6325 flux capacity and 0.43 damage ratio.  That shield tanks better than some low tech capitals.  So I use Omens as general purpose survivors, with their 14,500 effective damage capacity shields.  They happen to be good at disabling enemy ships as they surround the enemy.  Their ability to disable some missiles and fighters is just bonus.  I used them instead of another Medusa was just for more bodies on the field, so as to leverage Support Doctrine a bit more (i.e hit 27 ships).

Essentially it boils down to the fact I had 25 ships on the field (220 DP deployed).  It could go as high as 27 if I can bother to issue orders after the first minute.  That is more ships than in the entire enemy fleet (which it can't deploy all at once in any case).  And they are all fast and even the weakest shield tank is roughly on par with a mid-line cruiser.  I don't really need to worry about them dying too much, so I just need to have them pair off 1 by 1, and then gang up on the left overs, and then snowball.

Admittedly, in iron man campaign games, if I'm even the least bit concerned about losing ships, I will deploy solo without the rest of my fleet (usually in a Doom, Odyssey, or Radiant plus Afflictor neural link), forcing the enemy to focus on me, effectively being "everywhere" that matters, thin the ranks a bit (kill off fighter waves, destroy the initial frigate and destroyer waves), and then deploy the fleet with massive numerical superiority, while also catching their fleet on my side of the map.

The Tesseract Ordo you fought was an easy one, it lacked carriers, and it lacked a Radiant. Had it had either, you would have sustained serious losses, and had it had both, you probably would have lost or nearly lost.

It was the Tesseract Ordo I had available in a save already.  I unfortunately didn't have a harder one handy.

Do you happen to have a save with a harder Tesseract Ordo, or perhaps one of these specialized human bounty fleets, because I don't have time this holiday period to get to one the campaign way.  Or maybe someone knows the function calls to spawn Tesseract + Ordo fights in Console Commands?  If not, we'll just have to disagree in our assessments of my personal flying capabilities, as I think my success rate would be quite good against a Radiant heavy ordo, a fighter spam fleet or even a phase fleet.

Radiant doesn't change things much, mostly because that means there are 20 DP fewer elsewhere on the field.  Which means I get to isolate the Radiant and bring an extra 2 Medusa along for the fun compared to the Nova.  Doom plus at least one other ship can tag team a Radiant down very comfortably.  To be honest, 4x Radiant would probably be quite easy, given that is like 2 Monitors, 3-4 Medusa, and 0-1 Omens per Radiant.  Just need to distract with monitors and pull them away, surround, disable with ion, and kill.  I can just chill in the back with my Doom.

The crazy thing about a wolfpack Support Doctrine fleet is you outnumber the enemy, instead of like every other officer limited fleet where it is always the other way around.  It suddenly means your ships don't need to be able to survive two on one.   They just need to survive one on one (Monitor vs a Nova or a Tesseract).  Some of them even end up one on two (I've got two Medusa for every single Harbinger a phase fleet might bring).  Or one on six in the case of Radiants.

This is what I'm talking about. There are major drawbacks in your fleet composition, and if you run into a well designed enemy fleet that counters them, you will lose or nearly so. You need every advantage you can get when going against such fleets.
Your skills are part of the problem, you require helmsmanship even though it's barely useful. If it wasn't required for system expertise, and or officer management and best of the best was swapped, you would be able to afford to get BOTB, s-mod one of you hullmods, and have enough OP for more PD, Hardened shields if the Medusas already don't have them, or reinforced bulkheads so that the monitors don't get instantly popped when their shields go down.

I didn't require helmsmanship.  I actually forgot to swap it for Elite Impact Mitigation, because I was in a rush.  Even without that skill, it would have been fine.  The three key skills for a Doom are Elite Field Modulation, base Systems Expertise, and Phase Coil Tuning.  Everything else are just nice to haves for the Doom, especially for a support Doom as I was flying.

System Mastery on a Doom does in fact turn it into fleet scale fighter killer.  Besides any given Monitor's shields really don't get stressed when there are 8 of them.  I attach screenshots of the builds.  Which looking at I made a number of mistakes.  Should have used front shield instead of extended shield for example, to save an OP for flux dissipation.  But I literally slapped the fleet together with Console Commands in a few minutes, and the fight was no where near close.

At the end of the day, I find System Expertise more valuable to the fleet than Best of the Best, not to mention I value my time a lot more than to go grind in an actual campaign for another 27 story points (even if it really is only 13.5 more because of the XP bonus return).  As it was this was already a little over how many story points I would naturally earn on the way to level 15.  56 vs 54 + 7 + 16 = 77.  I would never bother earning 104 story points in a real campaign.  20 over is already pushing it.

I simply don't need the 3rd s-mod for this fleet to work.  And that is build diversity.  Turning every single fleet into a triple s-mod fleet is the opposite of diversity.  To promote diversity, you make other skills which are not up to the right power level more valuable, not make every single good build in existence take this one skill.  If my assessment were that not taking Best of the Best was literally a mistake and that every build absolutely must have it to work, then instead of moving it lower in the tree, I'd be advocating for its removal and change the game so its effects were default.  Alternatively, reduce the effectiveness of the skill (or replace it entirely) and change the overall difficulty level down.  However, that is not my assessment.

You seem to think I was fighting on the very edge for survival and any change in conditions will doom the fleet (pun intended), but it was done in a quick and sloppy way, in a single take, with fairly light orders to Monitors to eliminate targets I wanted distracted.  In addition to the not perfect builds, I forgot to change my doctrinal setting to aggression 3, so all those SO Medusa?  They were only steady personality and let enemy ships live longer than they really needed to.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[kenwth81]

This is why I think you're trolling. I'm trying to increase the total number of viable or efficient builds, not decrease it. Likewise, I never said to make the game harder.
It could just be your grammar making me mistake why you're trying to say, however.

Disagreeing is not trolling. I consider falsely accusing someone of being a troll disrespectful and offensive, potentially defamatory and slander, my good sir.

[FooF]

This idea is only half-baked but I wonder if Combat Skills wouldn't be more attractive if Fleetwide skills were less instantly effective. This ties into an idea I've had for awhile that is essentially a very much watered-down version of Starship Legends.

For the first part, individual ships earn XP and veterancy. I'll probably start another thread regarding this and how envision the mechanics but suffice to say, you'd have Standard, Experienced, Veteran and Elite levels. As the ship gains veterancy, it gets small combat buffs from a small pool of options tied to its hull size, tech type, hull type, and ship system (generally in that order). Officers and their skills overlay on top of veterancy buffs but are independent from it (capstone Combat Skills might require level 3 veterancy). Leveling up your ships means they are more effective than baseline but even Elite ships with a ton of fleet skills are not substitutes for high-end Officered ships.

How this plays into the Leadership Tree is that Leadership skills give bonuses based on ship veterancy. Crew Training, for example, gives 5/10/15/15*% CR based on ship veterancy level. Coordinated Maneuvers gives 60/80/100/100*% of its speed bonus based on veterancy, and so on. (* because Elite ships only count as 1/2 their full value against the 240 DP or Flight Deck limitations). The capstone skills could remain unchanged but I imagine there could be some interesting bonuses that tie into veterancy levels. One caveat is that I don't see Logistic ships needing Veterancy so Leadership skills essentially work as they do currently for them. If you want to try fly your Buffalo into battle, be my guest, but I don't recommend it!

This has a two-fold effect on Skills. First, Combat Skills feel more competitive earlier. +10/20/30% Damage from Target Analysis looks a lot sexier, relatively speaking, than +3/4/5/5*% damage from Tactical Drills spread over 3-4 ships. That is to say, Combat Skills are immediate, impactful upgrades while Leadership skills have to build slowly over the course of the game. In some ways, this is a significant nerf to Leadership early and a slight buff in the very late game, though most/all your ships will need to be Elite to reap the benefits. Obviously, a lot is tied to how quickly ships gain veterancy. I imagine it would take longer to get an Elite ship than getting an officer to Level 5, since every ship you to deploy into combat is diluting the XP gain.

Second, along with veterancy, even if you don't get any Combat Skills, your flagship is still growing in power somewhat. It won't be anywhere near a Level 6 officer with skills but it won't feel completely behind the curve when facing off against "regular" opponents that aren't Elite. For me, there's a hollow feeling if my flagship just gets left in the dust so any kind of power progression, independent from Combat Skills, would be helpful. It's not a "Combat Skills should be earned by doing combat things" skill system but it's a nod toward having some stability in your fleet or growing with the ship you're piloting in a natural way.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

Spoiler

For the first question, mercenaries are a repeated skill point investment, and I frequently need those points elsewhere, even when I'm grinding ordos for skill points. Likewise, I frequently use 1 mercenary on a civilian grade hull ship to act as a reinforcement. What that ship is depends on the run.

Fair enough.  Everyone values story points different based on their in game goals.

For BOTB, you need the 240 DP limit for fighting ~1,000,000 bounties and multiple ordos. The exception is five capital fleets specifically designed to fight at 200DP. Even then you can only fight two ordos max, or you need auxiliary ships to cap points.

Can a support doctrine ship handle double its DP in everything? As that is my requirement for good loadouts for OM fleets. From everything I've seen, the answer is no, losing the third s-mod, or paying 8 skill points kills fleet effectiveness.

Why do you need 240 DP and BotB to fight Tesseract bounties?  I just slapped together a support doctrine fleet and beat one with only 220 DP deployed on the very first try (although, I did lose an Omen and a Medusa - on the other hand, they are cheap to restore).  See attached screenshots.  The fight was never in doubt, given 8 officered Monitors as the front line.  Just base 8 level 5 officers with 1 elite skill (field modulation), plus player with 7 combat skills in a Doom (mostly for clearing the fighters at the end).  Support doctrine is almost tailor made for frigate/destroyer wolfpacks.   Although, I need to remember to change Doctrine aggression to 3 or 4 when using SO ships, since they defaulted to Steady in this particular fight, which is less than optimal for SO ships.  But still worked fine.

Here we go.
DO costs five skill points, while this is fine for a capstone, and it is a capstone, but it is locked behind 4 skills, only two of which may be useful for a rather limited number of builds. While yes 340 DP deployed all at once is huge, it weakens the ships massively to the point where it can't handle 240 DP or more of enemy ships that have level 6+ officers and three S-mods, i.e. a ~1,000,000 bounty.
Which means on average you lose three skill points for it, in return for a fleet that is far weaker than SD or OM.
It's not worth it unless you are using 1 or 2 ships for niche story point farming builds.

I'm pretty sure there are also examples of derelict operations fleets beating stuff here.  CapnHector even has a derelict operation fleet with only 66 DP deployed killing a double Ordo.  You can see it in: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27808.0.  I'm pretty sure if you scale that up to 240 DP, it will have no problem farming a double Ordo or farming Tesseracts.

The game isn't so hard that you need the absolute strongest possible fleet to beat the end game challenges, at least in this iteration.

About Support Doctrine, I think its biggest issue is that you start with 8 officers. You can avoid putting your officers on your biggest ships where they will have the most impact, but SD is not a good enough reason to do so. Your average officered ship only needs to be of 15 DP to comprise half of your force at max deployment cap of 240. If you use stronger ships, don't start with 240 DPs or have more officers, there's even less of a reason to use SD.

Well, that just makes it encourage fleets with less than 15 DP average per ship.  Like destroyer/frigate wolfpacks, which you don't generally see otherwise, because of that base line set of officers.  A high tech pack of Medusa, Omens, and Monitors will be well below that average, for example.  But it is a perfectly workable setup with Support Doctrine.

[close]

Yep sorry about that, his post was directly above your fleet post which when combined with him saying he already did it easily got me confused.

Yea, I forgot that the AI loves to focus fighters on the player, so if you deploy yourself first, and then your fleet, you can kill a good chunk of the fighter spam. Assuming of course there's nothing that will prevent a Doom from doing so. It will still be a problem during the second wave, but nowhere near as bad as I was thinking.

Heron's and broadswords with ion beam or tachyon lance support are the main concern for monitors, but that supporting weaponry mostly won't be present in a pure carrier fleet.

Overall, it's better now that I think about it than when I first looked at it.

I don't have a save currently with a harder Tesseract Ordo, I've either beaten them in the saves already, or haven't been playing long enough to get a bounty for them. I think I have a world seed for a harder one, assuming that's how it works but I'm not sure. You can ignore Tesseract bounties, and accept them when they show up later, and I did that once but I can't remember if it had the same fleet loadout. The hardest one I beat was during my Scarab/Medusa/Odyssey run which had a Radiant.

Yep, system expertise is absolutely mandatory when piloting a doom. Which is why I said you require helmsmanship. You could have swapped it for impact mitigation, but you still would require 4 combat skill total for the capstone. Which is annoying when you don't need 4, and weird given the AI captains don't need 4 and can use any skill related to combat to count towards the capstone.

For the Medusas, s-modded extended shields are probably the correct call for two S-mods. As long as the AI doesn't mess up its shield direction, which is less likely for destroyers, you get to protect your engines for the same shield arc as frontal shields. Whereas with frontal shields, you get a minor shield efficiency increase, in return for the constant risk of flameout.

I'll agree with your last point about how every fleet doesn't need three s-mods. That being said, there are still times when fleets should have access to it, but can't due to how the lower tier personal skill work.
For your build however, this isn't an issue. If you needed either of the industry personal skills, you could drop one of the tech personal skills and flux management.

Out of curiosity, have you tried this fleet loadout without the monitors? Is there anything that can even replace them? The closest is probably system expertise, polarized armor Centurion.

This is why I think you're trolling. I'm trying to increase the total number of viable or efficient builds, not decrease it. Likewise, I never said to make the game harder.
It could just be your grammar making me mistake why you're trying to say, however.

Disagreeing is not trolling. I consider falsely accusing someone of being a troll disrespectful and offensive, potentially defamatory and slander, my good sir.

I really shouldn't comment on people's grammar before I quadruple spellcheck. Whatever, it's quoted now.

I was partially assuming, and partially asking because it sounded like you were putting words in my mouth, but I wasn't sure due to not fully understanding what you were trying to say.

Given you didn't take the chance to clarify and ended your reply with "my good sir." I'm going to safely assume you're doing just little bit of light trolling. Carry on.

[Hiruma Kai]

So I went and checked Rayan Arrayo (High priority contact) in my longest running test save, and turns out the next mission he had on offer was a 700k fighter focused bounty, so I guess we kind of are in luck for testing.  It is not a full million credit bounty, but it is at least in the same family.  10 minutes later with Console commands and I had a support doctrine fleet setup, with only minor variations (tweaked the Monitor setup, removed the light mortar, switched to front shields, and 3 more vents).

Decided to try it the dumb way, simply deployed 158 DP, grabbed waypoints, deployed full 238, hit full assault.  No finesse, no orders, no trying to player tank the fighters, just see what happens in a giant furball.

Lost a single Medusa because we pushed the enemy fleet to the top, and a Legion, Mora, and Astral decided to deploy right on top of it.

Typical Medusa had 5-10 fighter kills, generally more with Heavy blaster than Ion pulser.  Doom had 110 fighter kills with mines and another 25 with Ion pulsers and Burst PD combined.

So, I don't really see a failure mode against fighter spam.

Unfortunately, world seed only affects the double Tesseract fights, it doesn't affect the mid-game spawned Tessaract + Ordo fight.

As for substitutions for Monitors, I don't think there is one.  On the other hand, you can't normally afford to stick your entire officer corp in them as you need some offense, so this is kind of a Support Doctrine or flagship focused only style.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[kenwth81]

I really shouldn't comment on people's grammar before I quadruple spellcheck. Whatever, it's quoted now.

I was partially assuming, and partially asking because it sounded like you were putting words in my mouth, but I wasn't sure due to not fully understanding what you were trying to say.

Given you didn't take the chance to clarify and ended your reply with "my good sir." I'm going to safely assume you're doing just little bit of light trolling. Carry on.

Instead of apologies, you escalate your antagonistic and obnoxious behaviour. I am done with you.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

So I went and checked Rayan Arrayo (High priority contact) in my longest running test save, and turns out the next mission he had on offer was a 700k fighter focused bounty, so I guess we kind of are in luck for testing.  It is not a full million credit bounty, but it is at least in the same family.  10 minutes later with Console commands and I had a support doctrine fleet setup, with only minor variations (tweaked the Monitor setup, removed the light mortar, switched to front shields, and 3 more vents).

Decided to try it the dumb way, simply deployed 158 DP, grabbed waypoints, deployed full 238, hit full assault.  No finesse, no orders, no trying to player tank the fighters, just see what happens in a giant furball.

Lost a single Medusa because we pushed the enemy fleet to the top, and a Legion, Mora, and Astral decided to deploy right on top of it.

Typical Medusa had 5-10 fighter kills, generally more with Heavy blaster than Ion pulser.  Doom had 110 fighter kills with mines and another 25 with Ion pulsers and Burst PD combined.

So, I don't really see a failure mode against fighter spam.

Unfortunately, world seed only affects the double Tesseract fights, it doesn't affect the mid-game spawned Tessaract + Ordo fight.

As for substitutions for Monitors, I don't think there is one.  On the other hand, you can't normally afford to stick your entire officer corp in them as you need some offense, so this is kind of a Support Doctrine or flagship focused only style.

Fair enough, I was wrong. The failure point, if there was going to be one, was going to be due to the Medusas lack of full shield coverage and low armor. Basically, the fighters would chip them to death. At which point you wouldn't have enough firepower to continue the fight.
It looks like the enemy AI made the mistake of focusing too much attention on the monitors which allowed the Medusas free rein, given how little damage most of the Medusas have.
Also, I'm saying this is fine for testing purposes and saying I was incorrect, because while that fleet wasn't a 1,000,000-credit bounty, it did have 16 officers. Which is going to make up the difference in s-mods and officer levels.

As for a substitute for the Monitor's distracting role, maybe a long-range laser Scarab build could work. I've tried short range builds in the past, the AI is too stupid to drop its shield for three seconds to use its system. While not as good as a Monitor's tanking, the ability to annoy enemies from 1650 range may work just as well.

[Thaago]

@Hiruma Kai
Cool fleet! I love 360 shielded Medusas, though I hadn't played around with SO ones too much, that looks neat.

I'm also a bit curious about the officers on the Monitors - do the officers significantly enhance their survival? I'm guessing its that elite field modulation skill interacting with their system to be utterly broken? It seems a bit of a waste of wolfpack compared to putting officers on Scarabs/Hyperions (though Hyperions are DP pricey enough to be cutting into the fleet concept). Then again I'm a heretic who doesn't play with monitors because I don't think they should be in the game. :p

I also like officers on Omens, though I lost my notes on what combat skills effect their ship System. I know that its range and uptime are magnified by system expertise, and I'm 90% sure it is boosted by generic damage boosts + the PD skill for anti missile/fighters, but I don't remember range boosts (either from gunnery or ITU) or if it qualifies for EWM etc (not that I have room on an omen officer for EWM). I do remember my omens could shock things from ridiculously far away when upgraded, but I can't remember exactly what went into it.

[Nettle]

Why do you need 240 DP and BotB to fight Tesseract bounties?  I just slapped together a support doctrine fleet and beat one with only 220 DP deployed on the very first try (although, I did lose an Omen and a Medusa - on the other hand, they are cheap to restore).  See attached screenshots.  The fight was never in doubt, given 8 officered Monitors as the front line.  Just base 8 level 5 officers with 1 elite skill (field modulation), plus player with 7 combat skills in a Doom (mostly for clearing the fighters at the end).

All it tells me yet again is that Monitor should probably get changed at some point, and that Doom is a damn good ship for player pilot, but all of this is already known.

[SCC]

If anything, the more fighters an enemy fleet has, the better Doom becomes. In fact, Remnants as of the current patch are harder to fight in a Doom, because Brilliants no longer bring fighters to the field (and so fighters are rarer). It was pretty amusing to see someone bring up a fighter fleet as a possible counter to a fleet with a Doom in it.

This idea is only half-baked but I wonder if Combat Skills wouldn't be more attractive if Fleetwide skills were less instantly effective. This ties into an idea I've had for awhile that is essentially a very much watered-down version of Starship Legends.

I don't dislike the idea, but it feels somewhat wrong to punish fleetwide skills for officer abundance, when only 3 skills have much to do with them.

[Hiruma Kai]

As for a substitute for the Monitor's distracting role, maybe a long-range laser Scarab build could work. I've tried short range builds in the past, the AI is too stupid to drop its shield for three seconds to use its system. While not as good as a Monitor's tanking, the ability to annoy enemies from 1650 range may work just as well.

That might work with a longer range version of the fleet (Manticores instead of Medusa?), but I'd be afraid the SO Medusa are going to spend most of the time up in front of the range 1000 scarabs, so I'd need to issue some avoid orders in addition to the engage/eliminate orders for the distraction ships.  I'd probably go with Tempest with Ion Beam + other beam to be honest, so if it does get into the rear arc, the ion damage can knock something out.

Also, while a Scarab can absorb a lot of punishment (12,254 effective shield capacity), a Monitor can spike it's tanking up to something like (449*0.65-100)/0.49*10=3915 effective shield capacity *per second* when fortress shield is on.  So a Scarab can do what a Monitor can do at peak, for around 3-4 seconds.  So if things go bad, the Monitor has a lot more forgiveness built in.  So in the sense of a fleet being roughly as strong, I don't think there is a substitute for 8 Monitors.

@Hiruma Kai
Cool fleet! I love 360 shielded Medusas, though I hadn't played around with SO ones too much, that looks neat.

I like 360 shield Medusas with accelerated shields.  For a 2 s-mod version, because of the skimmer, I like the 240 omni-shield version.  My thinking was to leverage a free Combat Endurance on every ship the most, you go to safety overrides.

I'm also a bit curious about the officers on the Monitors - do the officers significantly enhance their survival? I'm guessing its that elite field modulation skill interacting with their system to be utterly broken? It seems a bit of a waste of wolfpack compared to putting officers on Scarabs/Hyperions (though Hyperions are DP pricey enough to be cutting into the fleet concept). Then again I'm a heretic who doesn't play with monitors because I don't think they should be in the game. :p

The officers do significantly improve things.  Consider the two cases:
Without Field Modulation: (449*0.5-100)/0.58*10 = 2146 effective shield damage per second
With Elite Field Modulation: (449*0.65-100)/0.49*10=3915 effective shield damage per second

So that elite skill magnifies their defense an additional 80%, which is one of the biggest relative improvements you can have in the game.  Consider the 5 Plasma cannon Radiant, which can do 3750 DPS sustained (at least while their flux holds out).  The skilled Monitor can tank that indefinitely.  Or at least as long as the PPT and CR holds out.  Which is the other reason to put officers in, is to benefit from Wolfpack tactics +50% peak operating time.  Those SO monitors have 257 PPT. Without an officer and just Support Doctrine, it drops to 198, so it buys an extra full minute of combat time before eating into CR.

The only real counters are shield piercing weapons - although shield piercing depends on flux level, which is almost always low on these frigates - and Harbingers.  Otherwise I can just order one monitor to each enemy capital and not really pay attention.  With 8, I believe there is no conventional fleet it can't tank for at least 8 minutes or so.

[Thaago]

... you know I hadn't done the math before. It is so utterly broken that a monitor can tank a Radiant's firepower.

[Nettle]

It is super unhealthy for the balance and I think Monitor needs to become an enirely different kind of ship. If Monitor defensive stats are to be severely nerfed and the ship is left as it is what you get is 6 DP worth of nothingness, 2 small mounts on a cardboard grade hull.
Centurion is a Monitor done right IMO.

[Hiruma Kai]

Depends on your metrics.  Also, changes to SO could also impacts its maximum tanking by a factor of 2.  Monitors are literally zero offense, so they are in a weird part of the parameter space.

For many fleets which tank well enough already, adding a monitor doesn't actually make it better, as it slows down the killing speed.  And things like Tempests can approximate it with long range beams and harassment orders, using speed and distance instead of much slower damage absorption, at least against conventional human enemies.  They won't work against a Tesseract with a triple speed boost though.