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[Cryovolcanic]

I'm on my 3rd vanilla run of Starsector and I always want to go SD/DO, but inevitably get distracted by shiny things like level 7 officers and the Sentinel ships. This time I'm going SD to start (I usually go Navigation 1-->DO level 6) because I want to have helpful skills for fighting sooner.

This post is mostly me thinking out loud. I am not calling for buffs or nerfs to these skills--I am mostly appreciative that they exist because they unlock a "zerg rush" playstyle which I enjoy.

--

Support Doctrine - assuming an extreme case of SD w/ no officers vs. normal 6/3 officer fleet

1) SD is an overall +25% increase in fleet power, assuming a baseline of level 4 officers with no choice in the skills. SD's -20% DP cost means you can deploy +25% more ships, in whatever composition, which in theory leads to a +25% increase in damage dealt, flux, etc.

2) Is that better than deploying a normal amount of ships with 6/3 officers? My impression is that it isn't (would love to hear others' opinions). My guess is that going from a level 4 officer to a 6/3 officer on each ship in the fleet, or 6/3 officers plus AI cores, is more than a 25% overall increase in fleet power. Reasons for this:

2a) A lot of power in Starsector is about multiplying and stacking bonuses. Having the perfect officer for the perfect ship with the perfect combination of S-mods can lead to effectiveness beyond the raw numbers (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts).

2b) Elite fleet configurations benefit more from unique drops (Zig, Sentinel ships, omega weapons) than spam configurations, since the uniques are limited in quantity.

2c) Some of the skill changes in 0.97a may benefit elite configurations more. Although SD was buffed with a 4th skill (and a good one), it's possible that officers were buffed more. Although they went down from 6/4 to 6/3, elite skills are better and Cybernetic Augmentation with a 5 red/blue/green build is basically like 2 more skills.

2d) On the point of stacking bonuses, BotB is extremely good and combining it with SD locks you out of significant investment in the blue tree. There are 2 skills in Tier 3 blue that help spam fleets. (No idea if they are better than BotB).

2e) In SD's favor, it's very good for boosting early-game XP gain. Vanshilar posted some very effective Brawler LP Support Doctrine fleets in the past.

---

Derelict Operations

This is a skill that can be min/maxed, either by rerolling or consoling the perfect D-mods, and it also has a differential impact on different styles of ship. It lets you field 42% more ships, once you have 5 dmods and -30% DP.

1) Assuming you don't console in the perfect dmods, on average, how much does a random set of 5 dmods reduce a ship's effectiveness? Comparing say Degraded Shields vs. Hardened Shields, Reinforced Bulkheads vs. Compromised Hull, and Heavy Armor vs. Compromised Armor, it seems like the median d-mod is worth about half of an S-mod. There are a couple that are worse (Faulty Power Grid and Structural Damage), and then several that don't affect combat statistics. So with 5 d-mods, let's say 1 doesn't affect combat, and 4 do, on average a DO ship effectively loses 2 s-mods worth of power, or 40 OP for a cruiser? As a very rough calculation, is that a reasonable baseline to start?

If the average cruiser has ~150 OP, you get to field 42% more cruisers, but each cruiser loses 40 OP worth of power, you are going from a fleet of 200/20*150 = ~1500 OP worth of power to a fleet of 200/14*110 = ~1571 OP worth of power. I have seen other posters suggest that DO is a 5-10% increase in overall fleet power so my reasoning seems to be roughly in-line with that. Is it fair to say DO is NOT a 42% increase in fleet power? Where would you put it?

Having played with DO a lot, I can say that my midgame junker fleets certainly do not feel very strong. I think all of the little penalties and not having S-mods adds up.

2) Obviously, DO benefits some compositions more: missile spam (unaffected by Dmods), High tech (don't care about armor or hull much), and Converted Hangar spam. Maybe the fleet power increase goes from 10% to 20-30% in near-ideal conditions. Perhaps appropriate for a capstone.

---

Performance of spam fleets in 0.96a

Both SD/DO spam fleets and elite quality fleets were viable against endgame enemies. However, the strongest fleets in 0.96a were quality fleets:

1) For endurance/crushing 4+ ordos, it seems officered capitals did the best--giving the largest amount of DP multiplied by officer skills. Legions (Draba/CapnHector/Jang) did the best under AI control, with no DO. DO was required for the really high-cost ships like Paragons.
2) For kill speed, Vanshilar's officered Onslaught/Conquest/Gryphon did the best, also no junkers.
3) For AI kill speed, Draba's Gryphon spam fleets were impressive, both with and without SD/DO.
4) For the <75 DP challenge, well, DO was used to just get under the limit. But a bunch of strategies (SCC/CapnHector/Hiruma Kai) were viable. Obviously no SD here.
5) CapnHector and Tranquility did use spam fleets against Ordos, but usually they were only able to beat 1-2 ordos, and pretty slowly at that and with significant losses. CapnHector's Venture spam was hilarious and awesome, but that was mostly about taking a mediocre ship and making it (barely) endgame-viable. I think Tranquility did SD/DO fighter spam, but lost a significant amount of Moras and the fight took forever.
6) Jang was able to kill Ordos using 11 officered Moras as well, without SD or DO.
7) I didn't see anyone try say, 11 SD/DO Legions against Ordos. But that would have been the next logical thing for someone to test.

---

In conclusion, SD and DO together let you field a 77.5% larger fleet. But I think it's very hard to build an SD/DO fleet that is 77.5% stronger than a normal fleet with quality ships and officers. It mostly makes spam fleets of mediocre ships (e.g. Mora and Venture) viable. There's probably more to discover in optimal compositions for SD/DO (Rugged Construction SO Grendel?) but I think stacking 6/3 officers, S-mods, and pristine ships leads to a >77.5% increase in power.

Thanks for reading this long. What do you think?

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

Spoiler

I'm on my 3rd vanilla run of Starsector and I always want to go SD/DO, but inevitably get distracted by shiny things like level 7 officers and the Sentinel ships. This time I'm going SD to start (I usually go Navigation 1-->DO level 6) because I want to have helpful skills for fighting sooner.

This post is mostly me thinking out loud. I am not calling for buffs or nerfs to these skills--I am mostly appreciative that they exist because they unlock a "zerg rush" playstyle which I enjoy.

--

Support Doctrine - assuming an extreme case of SD w/ no officers vs. normal 6/3 officer fleet

1) SD is an overall +25% increase in fleet power, assuming a baseline of level 4 officers with no choice in the skills. SD's -20% DP cost means you can deploy +25% more ships, in whatever composition, which in theory leads to a +25% increase in damage dealt, flux, etc.

2) Is that better than deploying a normal amount of ships with 6/3 officers? My impression is that it isn't (would love to hear others' opinions). My guess is that going from a level 4 officer to a 6/3 officer on each ship in the fleet, or 6/3 officers plus AI cores, is more than a 25% overall increase in fleet power. Reasons for this:

2a) A lot of power in Starsector is about multiplying and stacking bonuses. Having the perfect officer for the perfect ship with the perfect combination of S-mods can lead to effectiveness beyond the raw numbers (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts).

2b) Elite fleet configurations benefit more from unique drops (Zig, Sentinel ships, omega weapons) than spam configurations, since the uniques are limited in quantity.

2c) Some of the skill changes in 0.97a may benefit elite configurations more. Although SD was buffed with a 4th skill (and a good one), it's possible that officers were buffed more. Although they went down from 6/4 to 6/3, elite skills are better and Cybernetic Augmentation with a 5 red/blue/green build is basically like 2 more skills.

2d) On the point of stacking bonuses, BotB is extremely good and combining it with SD locks you out of significant investment in the blue tree. There are 2 skills in Tier 3 blue that help spam fleets. (No idea if they are better than BotB).

2e) In SD's favor, it's very good for boosting early-game XP gain. Vanshilar posted some very effective Brawler LP Support Doctrine fleets in the past.

---

Derelict Operations

This is a skill that can be min/maxed, either by rerolling or consoling the perfect D-mods, and it also has a differential impact on different styles of ship. It lets you field 42% more ships, once you have 5 dmods and -30% DP.

1) Assuming you don't console in the perfect dmods, on average, how much does a random set of 5 dmods reduce a ship's effectiveness? Comparing say Degraded Shields vs. Hardened Shields, Reinforced Bulkheads vs. Compromised Hull, and Heavy Armor vs. Compromised Armor, it seems like the median d-mod is worth about half of an S-mod. There are a couple that are worse (Faulty Power Grid and Structural Damage), and then several that don't affect combat statistics. So with 5 d-mods, let's say 1 doesn't affect combat, and 4 do, on average a DO ship effectively loses 2 s-mods worth of power, or 40 OP for a cruiser? As a very rough calculation, is that a reasonable baseline to start?

If the average cruiser has ~150 OP, you get to field 42% more cruisers, but each cruiser loses 40 OP worth of power, you are going from a fleet of 200/20*150 = ~1500 OP worth of power to a fleet of 200/14*110 = ~1571 OP worth of power. I have seen other posters suggest that DO is a 5-10% increase in overall fleet power so my reasoning seems to be roughly in-line with that. Is it fair to say DO is NOT a 42% increase in fleet power? Where would you put it?

Having played with DO a lot, I can say that my midgame junker fleets certainly do not feel very strong. I think all of the little penalties and not having S-mods adds up.

2) Obviously, DO benefits some compositions more: missile spam (unaffected by Dmods), High tech (don't care about armor or hull much), and Converted Hangar spam. Maybe the fleet power increase goes from 10% to 20-30% in near-ideal conditions. Perhaps appropriate for a capstone.

---

Performance of spam fleets in 0.96a

Both SD/DO spam fleets and elite quality fleets were viable against endgame enemies. However, the strongest fleets in 0.96a were quality fleets:

1) For endurance/crushing 4+ ordos, it seems officered capitals did the best--giving the largest amount of DP multiplied by officer skills. Legions (Draba/CapnHector/Jang) did the best under AI control, with no DO. DO was required for the really high-cost ships like Paragons.
2) For kill speed, Vanshilar's officered Onslaught/Conquest/Gryphon did the best, also no junkers.
3) For AI kill speed, Draba's Gryphon spam fleets were impressive, both with and without SD/DO.
4) For the <75 DP challenge, well, DO was used to just get under the limit. But a bunch of strategies (SCC/CapnHector/Hiruma Kai) were viable. Obviously no SD here.
5) CapnHector and Tranquility did use spam fleets against Ordos, but usually they were only able to beat 1-2 ordos, and pretty slowly at that and with significant losses. CapnHector's Venture spam was hilarious and awesome, but that was mostly about taking a mediocre ship and making it (barely) endgame-viable. I think Tranquility did SD/DO fighter spam, but lost a significant amount of Moras and the fight took forever.
6) Jang was able to kill Ordos using 11 officered Moras as well, without SD or DO.
7) I didn't see anyone try say, 11 SD/DO Legions against Ordos. But that would have been the next logical thing for someone to test.

---

In conclusion, SD and DO together let you field a 77.5% larger fleet. But I think it's very hard to build an SD/DO fleet that is 77.5% stronger than a normal fleet with quality ships and officers. It mostly makes spam fleets of mediocre ships (e.g. Mora and Venture) viable. There's probably more to discover in optimal compositions for SD/DO (Rugged Construction SO Grendel?) but I think stacking 6/3 officers, S-mods, and pristine ships leads to a >77.5% increase in power.

Thanks for reading this long. What do you think?

[close]

SD works with automated ships. A Nova is reduced by 8 DP, from 40 to 32 and gets a weaker free gamma core that doesn't count towards the automated ship points cap. You can have 4 Novas for 128 automated ship points. Which should mean they have 94% CR assuming you have crew training.

You can have 4 super Auroras running around instantly killing everything they look at. Given the right setup new SD is equal to pure quality builds.

Currently doing it in my latest run, well three because I'm piloting one of the Novas, all of my 8 officers are level 1 until I finish grinding XP for my last officer. I can already fight a max sized Ordo and win without losses.

Edit: After leveling up my officers, and giving my ships their last s-mod, I just solod the TT event on Nortia. Seven merc fleets in total, plus three patrols for over 1000 DP, it was 960 the last time I checked, and I killed well over 100 DP before the end. I forgot to check my final score at the end as everything was barely scraping by on around 15% CR.

[mark.sucka]

Personally SD/DO is my preferred playstyle.

Here's the thing; high level officers and pristine ships are the best way to extract the most amount of value per DP.  And if by character level 15, you've got all the perks related to maxing the #, level, and elite skills of your officers, AND you've had the fortune of finding all 4 L7/E5 sleeper officers in your seed, AND you've spent all your story points building out your team with mentoring & elite skills for officers (which could require 30 or more points to adjust personality and/or elite skills selected to your needs), you could conceivably have a fleet of 4 L7/E5 officers and 6 L6/E3 officers.  And in most normal engagements, you would have the better officers by a good margin, and thus be entitled to 60% of battle DP distribution.

The problem isn't the 95% of battles that fit this mold.  The problem is the other 5%.  The battles where you are facing off against 14 integrated alpha cores in a remnant fleet.  The battles where 3 fleets of pirates attack you, and you learn the math that 30 * L5 officers gives a better value than your 10 * L7/6 officers.  Where there was zero, ZERO possible way for you to win the DP distribution.  And now you're facing a stacked deck; the enemy can field 50% more DP than you can, and you're obligated to go on the offensive to capture points just to get some of the DP and hopefully bring yourself to neutral.  And that's not your only challenge.  You've banked your money on 10 super ships winning the battle.  And with SD you could have had all 30 of your ships basically acting as a L3/E0 officer.

You're asking "by the math".  So let's do the math.

As a level 15 captain, you can pick up Derelict Operations, Crew Training, and Support Doctrine, plus one of either Best of the Best or Automated Ships.  You can even get Officer Training and Officer Management along the way, allowing you to carry 10 max-level officers, park them in your atlases or prometheuses, and still benefit from them helping your DP distribution while not negatively impacting the DP savings DO/SD offers, if you REALLY feel you need that extra DP % allocation.

So let's take a hypothetical battle, 30 eradicators versus 30 eradicators.  The enemy's commander dumped all their stats into combat skills, and is basically a L14/E5 officer.  They also have 12 L6/E3 officers (they cheat), the other 17 ships are left without officers, and all their ships are pristine.  Your dumped all your stats into leadership & industry, and are useless in combat.   You have no officers, but SD makes it so all your combat ships basically have L3/E0 officers.  You've got DO, and all your ships are 5 d-mods, 3 of which impact combat performance, 2 of which are logistical (50% more fuel, 50% more crew & supplies, 2x more crew, weaker burn drive, etc).

In the above example, the enemy has 1x L14/E5 officer, 13x L6/E3 officers, and 17x L0/E0 officers.  That averages out to just below L3/E1.5 for each ship.  And with 240 DP, they can field 10 eradicators.  All your ships benefit from SD, basically having a L3/E0 officer.  With 160 DP, and your ships only costing an effective 56% of base DP, you can field 12 eradicators.

Their 10 versus your 12.  Let's dig deeper.

Officer skills basically add an extra 12 OP hullmod to the ship, twice that if the skill is elite.  Eradicator has a base of 150 OP.  I said the average mix for the enemy yields an average L3/E1.5 officer for their ships.  So those skills add on average an extra 54 OP worth of value to the ship, so their eradicators are roughly 36% stronger than base.  You, having SD, basically have a L3/E0 for every ship, which adds an extra 36 OP of value to each ship, so your eradicators are basically 24% more powerful than base.

The enemy ships are pristine, so get a 100% power multiplier (no minus).  Your ships have 3 combat d-mods, each roughly detracting 10-20% from one specific area of a ship's combat capabilities (20% worse armor, 20% worse hull, 10% worse weapon range, etc.), out of an average of 12 possible combat d-mods.  Let's say the worst possible, 20% malus each, times 3 out of 12 combat d-mod areas, so 20% x 25%, or a total of being a 5% weaker ship than pristine.

Enemy ships are 1 x 136% (officer power) x 100% (pristine) = 136% as powerful as base.
Your ships are 1 x 124% (officer power) x 95% (d-modded) = 118% as powerful as base

In sum; enemy fields 10 ships at 136% power, which feels like the power of 13.6 Eradicators.  You field 12 ships at 118% power, which feels like 14.16 Eradicators.  SD/DO wins versus the enemy's uber-combat fleet leader and cheaty large amount of officers. 

I haven't even talked about how you can spend all your story points building s-mods into your ships instead of mentoring / changing officer personality / picking elite skills of officers.  You could have added an extra 20 OP per s-mod to your cruisers ships by doing this, and now your 12 eradicators feel like 17.

I also haven't talked about Best of Best.  Grab that skill, s-mod in your 3rd hullmod to your ships.  Now you get 200 DP, which allows you to field 16 eradicators, each with 3 s-mods, a L3/E0 "officer", and 3 combat d-mods, in total having the effective power of nearly 25 base eradicators.  Versus the enemy's effective power of 13.6.  You're nearly twice as powerful, and you haven't even started capping objectives yet to be able to send in more ships.

The real beauty of all this is attrition.  Focusing on super-elite officers, you're banking on 10 ships being A++ and the other 20 being as good as can be with nobody piloting them, which is "C+".  So you deploy your 10 best ships at the start of the fight, but as you lose some or exhaust PPT and need to withdraw, what's left are ships without officers that are like 50%+ weaker than your best ships.  This creates a snowball or cascading effect, where you lose some of your initial A++ ships and have to replace them with C+ ships, and it all starts to go downhill real quick.  With SD/DO, all your ships are like A-, the first 10 ships you send in are just as powerful as your last 10.  Not only does your opposition degrade while you stay just as powerful, but if you can cap some objectives you can become even more powerful and accelerate the enemy's rapid decline.

And have we talked about how you're saving $20-30k+ a month not paying the outrageous salaries of a roster of 10 max-level officers?  You can drag along 2-3 paragons for that much money.  No seriously, with the officer savings and the fuel & supply savings from the industry tree, you can run 30 cruisers for the same cost as you might otherwise have paid to run 30 destroyers.

[Zaizai]

Everyone is going really really technical so I'll say my experience in a short and easy way: 
Derelict operation has been so much fun. 
I recovered the onslaught, falcon, enforcer and legion that work with AI cores, and they receive a huge bonus from DO. I usually have an odyssey as flagship and I always struggle because I want some other capital to act as anchor point, as frontline, while I flank, but my points are so low that I can't field enough ships not to get surrounded...now with DO? FIELD ALL THE SHIPS. I became the one who surrounds. I'm zerging my way to victory while still enjoying my non d-modded odyssey/fury. 
In my usual playstyle I usually do the bulk of the damage while the fleet is set to defend a point so they don't get surrounded, but now suddenly I can afford to have mayhem, go full assault and in the chaos, freely move with my Odyssey finding the most impactful places to be. Now I just need to get me a perfect d-modded brick from the church

[FooF]

All the math really boils down to one simple equation: can my fleet outflank their fleet. The AI hates being outflanked and having more ships, forces even "super ships" (i.e. high level officers) to act cautiously. When I did a SD/DO run a few playthroughs back, I fielded a Legion, 3-4 Cruisers, 18 Destroyers, and 4 Frigates and mopped the floor with most everything. Quantity had it's own quality. This was before the current patch and SD is now stronger.

There are other pieces of this playstyle that also still give you a huge advantage vs. even a "standard" pristine setup. 1.) You still have an elite core. You can take Officer Training on the way to Support Doctrine, giving you Level 6 officers with 2 Elite Skills. You can still concentrate a lot of extra bang-for-your-buck on key ships. 2.) You don't care about losses. D-mods actually help you field more ships. 3.) Assuming you go 5 points into Leadership and Industry (and picked up Ordinance Expterise), you still have 5 skills leftover for the Flagship (probably 4 since Level 1 Navigation is pretty huge). So, your Flagship isn't being neglected either. 4.) Salvaging enemy ships with a bunch of D-mods is actually the preferred method of ship acquisition, which also happens to be the easiest method of doing so.

The playstyle is just really robust, once you tailor your fleet toward it. I don't think it's the "best" way, per se, and I haven't tried it against Double Ordo farming but it's still very strong.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

All the math trying to calculate "skills" is fundamentally flawed because there is only one SD skill every ship can benefit from, and that's Combat Endurance and it's 15% CR bonus.

If you, say, SD-spam Gryphons then three out of four SD skills are practically meaningless.

[Cryovolcanic]

@eert--I didn't think of Novas, definitely going to try a 5/5/5 green/blue/yellow build with AI ships and see how they do.

Anyone have good SD/DO builds other than Gryphon spam? I am focusing on SO Eagles right now. Don't have DO yet but will soon, and will be able to field a lot of 5-dmod ships with SO, 3x HMG, and an assortment of 600 range energies. Also want to slap some fighters on there and see how that goes.

[Brainwright]

All the math trying to calculate "skills" is fundamentally flawed because there is only one SD skill every ship can benefit from, and that's Combat Endurance and it's 15% CR bonus.

If you, say, SD-spam Gryphons then three out of four SD skills are practically meaningless.

This is just wrong.  Damage control and impact mitigation add up to a lot more durability for your ships, not to mention less crew losses when ships pop.

[Thaago]

Helmsmanship is good on everything too to stop ships getting hit in the first place. On the gryphon under discussion it is 9 speed and 50% maneuvering for better torpedo targeting (if going for that kind of build). That's not as impactful as on a frigate, but it is 2/3 of an unstable injector without any range penalty.

Ordinance Expertise good on anything that uses flux. Even on a Gryphon which alongside carriers doesn't really, it saves OP on vents to let it mount a few guns, or is faster shield HP recovery. On more direct combat ships even the nerfed OE is still a strong skill!

...
This is just wrong.  Damage control and impact mitigation add up to a lot more durability for your ships, not to mention less crew losses when ships pop.

I don't believe SD offers impact mitigation, but I agree with you on damage control. The 50% faster weapon/engine repairs can be a lifesaver in addition to the raw HP boost.

[PixiCode]

Though I'm a Damage Control believer, for about half of ships they're already on death's door when their hull is taking damage, limiting its overall combat value.

However, the repair speed bonus is useful for every single ship!

Anyways, about SD+DO builds, here's my opinion.

The player can design a fleet with close to or even slightly above 30 combat ships worth 240 DP in totality. With DP discounts, the player can get the more expensive ships while still keeping to very close to the ship limit. This can create a defeat in detail on the scope of the whole battlemap. While the enemy fleet can outnumber the player 8-1 in totality, the actual participating ships are instead fighting 1-2 or worse, in favor of the player. Bonus points, the enemy admiral AI doesn't seem to consider how to change its play if the player has so many combat ships on the battlemap.

The challenge is to keep any of those combat ships from dying to keep this advantage while killing fast enough to not run out of PPT, which hopefully the DP discount assists with. Pretty much every ship should have CE too, so that's good. With both SD and DO you could have say a ton of SO Auroras mixed with Omens. Could even have nine (8 officer, 1 captain) wolfpack officers on the omens. Like someone else mentioned, you can also use coreless automated ships to stuff as many automated ships into your fleet as possible.

Is this idea better than the 'elite fleet' concept (Officers+Mercenaries/AI cores on every single ship)? No idea. Just giving my thoughts of how to use SD+DO beyond carrier or missile spam.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Between the two, derelict ops has been proven useful by capn hector when beating down insane challenges like 5 ordos, but support doctrine has not really proven itself yet (which is probably why it got buffed). I think the main advantage you get out of support doctrine is being able to field many more ships than what you are normally limited to by your officer limit, which means that the best way to use it is not going to be for the dp reduction (although that effect is nice) but instead by picking ships that actually use all 4 skills and flooding the battlefield with an absurd number of them.


One way I have seen success with support doctrine is by ignoring what I just said and putting all my officers into frigates to maximize the benefits of wolfpack tactics and coordinated maneuvers, then supporting them with apogees that don't have officers. You could have, for example, 10 tempests with officers costing you 80 total dp and performing very well on their own, plus they are supported by 10 apogees without officers who fill up the remaining 160 dp. Ten squalls and ten tach lances will do just fine even without optimized skills. This was of course, just support doctrine and not with derelict ops.

I haven't tried a fleet with both, but I do know that all 4 SD skills are useful on vanguards, and they get down to 3 dp with support doctrine and 5 d-mods. Plus, rugged construction halves the d-mod penalties. You could jam 20 of them for a total of 60 dp and still have 180 to play with. This many frigates would get in the way of your own ships a lot, so you would want to support them with missile ships that can shoot over the swarm. The cool part is that missile ships can stomach d-mods better than other ships, making them a great fit for this fleet. That being said, you probably don't want to run them officerless. You are already getting a lot of value out of SD from the vanguards, while the extra 20% DP saving on your gryphons/pegasi isn't worth missing out on missile spec and target analysis.

Vanguards are pretty much always going to have at least a few losses, but this strategy might prove comparable to the officer focused strategies in overall power. Is it "77.5% more powerful?" Who knows.

[Vanshilar]

All the math trying to calculate "skills" is fundamentally flawed because there is only one SD skill every ship can benefit from, and that's Combat Endurance and it's 15% CR bonus.

If you, say, SD-spam Gryphons then three out of four SD skills are practically meaningless.

Pretty much this. You can't really directly calculate the cost-benefit of SD and/or DO a priori, since there are so many factors that go into it, and there are a lot of interaction effects. Instead it has to come from testing.

I would actually approach it the other way. Take an unofficered ship. Then figure out how much more powerful it becomes with the best set of officer skills (and weapons, hullmods, etc.). Different ships and layouts have different amounts of improvement potential from officer skills. Then figure out how much it improves based on SD skills. The ratio between the two will be a closer estimate of whether or not SD is worth it for a particular ship or fleet.

For 0.97a-RC6, officered Gryphons (level 5, 3 elite skills) seem to do around 420 or so DPS against double Ordos. Doing some quick testing, unofficered Gryphons with SD (flagship Onslaught XIV + 10 Gryphons) seem to do roughly 300-350 DPS, while unofficered Gryphons with SD and DO (flagship Onslaught XIV with 2 dmods + 15 Gryphons with 5 random dmods) seem to do roughly 200-250 DPS. In this case, for DO, the dmods were added via the adddmods command individually to each ship, i.e. it was randomly generated. The player can get somewhat better results by selecting for the "right" dmods (via only recovering ships with the "right" dmods, or blowing them repeatedly until the ship rolls the "right" dmods), but that's a long process and not realistically achievable in normal play.

In 0.96a I did some testing of DO Conquests/Gryphons (flagship Onslaught XIV + 4 Conquests + 4 Gryphons) with random dmods compared with my normal flagship Onslaught XIV + 3 Conquest + 2 Gryphon fleet, and the overall battle times did not really change. However, it requires more officers which drops my XP gain, so I dropped it. But DO with SD (which does not need officers) may be advantageous if it results in a fleet with a "critical mass" of ships, just like mass fighters in previous versions.

And that brings up the question of what metric you're really looking for. Generally I discuss in terms of each ship's overall battle DPS, i.e. the average damage it contributes throughout the course of the battle, measured using the Detailed Combat Results mod. And so I'm looking at the ratio between a ship's overall DPS versus its DP, i.e. DPS/DP. But for my playthroughs I actually look at each ship's DPS compared with how much it adds to my fleet size for XP bonus purposes, which I call "XP DP" (the lower the better), to maximize my rate of XP gain (and thus, rate of SP gain, etc.). In this case, each officer contributes 7.5 + 3.75 * level, so a level 6 officer on a ship adds 30 DP to its DP "price". Thus even though Gryphons are the best pound-per-pound, I use Conquests since they contribute more DPS per "XP DP".

If the fleet is using SD, then it's not really using officers (much), so it would likely work pretty well in terms of DPS / "XP DP". But its overall total power is limited, so it'd probably be better for easier fleets, i.e. most faction fleets up through about single Ordos. So that's a benefit for using SD, and it also works with DO since each dmod makes the ship smaller in "XP DP" by 10% multiplicative (i.e. *0.9 per dmod). A ship with 5 dmods is only costing you about 59% of its usual DP, for XP bonus purposes.

It seems to me like right now SD and DO are fairly well-balanced, i.e. either can be used about as effectively as other fleet compositions. For me personally, my playthrough usually starts with mass LP Brawlers with SD, since I don't have officers at the beginning (and BotB isn't needed yet since the LP Brawlers can work just fine at 40% of battle size and since I don't have the SP yet to put in the 3rd smod), and LP Brawlers are easy to get. LP Brawlers are also very good "out of the box" (unofficered) and officers cost too much in terms of "XP DP" on them. Then I convert to BotB and officered ships for my death fleet during the midgame. In 0.96a my final death fleet was flagship Onslaught XIV with Missile Spec, then BotB, and Hull Restoration (which meant I could use level 4 officers for an extra 5% XP gain since my officers don't have to take CE). In 0.97a I suspect it'll end up being BotB and CA, with Neural Link since I can have one less officer that way (for more XP bonus).

[PixiCode]

I haven't tried a fleet with both, but I do know that all 4 SD skills are useful on vanguards, and they get down to 3 dp with support doctrine and 5 d-mods. Plus, rugged construction halves the d-mod penalties. You could jam 20 of them for a total of 60 dp and still have 180 to play with. This many frigates would get in the way of your own ships a lot, so you would want to support them with missile ships that can shoot over the swarm. The cool part is that missile ships can stomach d-mods better than other ships, making them a great fit for this fleet. That being said, you probably don't want to run them officerless. You are already getting a lot of value out of SD from the vanguards, while the extra 20% DP saving on your gryphons/pegasi isn't worth missing out on missile spec and target analysis.

What you could do is deploy your XIV legions/pegasi/etc first to draw fire and only a few vanguards to capture points. Then once battle is joined have the rest of the vanguards attack, minimizing the amount of aggro the vanguards take and surrounding the enemy. Hopefully any brilliants, novas or anything else with HIL/tachyon has been suitably distracted by then. The vanguards would keep high value targets from escaping and also mop up any glimmers a lumens at the same time.

[Thaago]

Between the two, derelict ops has been proven useful by capn hector when beating down insane challenges like 5 ordos...

This is true, though it does relate to a pet peeve of mine when it comes to the vast majority of derelict ops videos, builds: somehow every ship has the perfect number of D mods and, sometimes depending on the video, those D mods impact the function of the ships the least for whatever they are designed to do. The videos are fun and impressive, but all the challenge fleets are made with console commands (so the people doing them can work on the challenge, not grind out different fleets over and over).

For DO, this leads to fleets that are honestly better than what could happen in a real game in any reasonable timescale. It's far harder to get the perfect set of D mods than it is to just hit the restore button when something goes wrong! Especially because the ships typically also have S mods - if the player takes a loss and the "wrong" D mods pops up, there is not realistic way to get the ship back to "perfect" (IE the ideal set/number of D mods) condition.

So I'm not really sure its fair to be comparing any skill to the performance of DO from videos where its clear that the skill is being used in a way that is almost impossible in vanilla. Vanshillar's testing below where they are generated with a random set is a much better way of doing that, but even then that is the "right" number of D mods which would be very tedious to do in a real game.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

Between the two, derelict ops has been proven useful by capn hector when beating down insane challenges like 5 ordos...

This is true, though it does relate to a pet peeve of mine when it comes to the vast majority of derelict ops videos, builds: somehow every ship has the perfect number of D mods and, sometimes depending on the video, those D mods impact the function of the ships the least for whatever they are designed to do. The videos are fun and impressive, but all the challenge fleets are made with console commands (so the people doing them can work on the challenge, not grind out different fleets over and over).

For DO, this leads to fleets that are honestly better than what could happen in a real game in any reasonable timescale. It's far harder to get the perfect set of D mods than it is to just hit the restore button when something goes wrong! Especially because the ships typically also have S mods - if the player takes a loss and the "wrong" D mods pops up, there is not realistic way to get the ship back to "perfect" (IE the ideal set/number of D mods) condition.

So I'm not really sure its fair to be comparing any skill to the performance of DO from videos where its clear that the skill is being used in a way that is almost impossible in vanilla. Vanshillar's testing below where they are generated with a random set is a much better way of doing that, but even then that is the "right" number of D mods which would be very tedious to do in a real game.

Put every crew saving hullmod on the ship you want to select d-mods for. Remove all weapons from the ship. Find a pirate corsair. Save. Fight the corsair only deploying the ship to be destroyed, and a ship you pilot that can kill said ship. Kill it, kill the pirates, recover and check the d-mods. If you got one that you wanted, save and repeat. If you didn't, reload.

It shouldn't take more than an hour using this method for an entire fleet. This is also the method used for getting ideal officers. You just max out their XP, save, and then level up.