I haven't put the Grendel under AI control but I found it fun as a close-ranged SO build. You need all the speed you can get so helmsmanship is a must and building in aux thrusters increases the 0-flux speed boost that's always on with SO.
I didn't mentioned SO, because it is a legal cheat in our game. You can slap it on a bad ship, and it suddenly will become at the very least OK.
It needed a reason to have Distributed Fire Control, but this is a chicken or the egg situation. Because it's a cruiser it can have Heavy Armour of cruiser kind, which is a very large amount. But at the same time it would have cruiser's ITU, which would be a huge range increase. Which would make it kinda straightforward in design. So, Distributed Fire Control... But then maybe it was made a cruiser to have Distributed Fire Control, not the other way around. Cause you don't put ITU on destroyers that often anyway??? So, it would act as just a straight up buff.
Maybe just make it a destroyer and remove the DFC... But, eh... Who cares...
I see this like it has ITU before the release, but then for some reason (being overly powerful, or simply due to inconsistency with the original vision) got DFC, lower DP cost, and Rugged Construction as a consolation prize due it's inability to stay alive in AI's hands.
It doesn't need to be a destroyer to simply get it's ITU back, it will be an another nail in Harbinger's coffin, but what it truly needs to be it is a cheaper gun-oriented Doom analogue. To make Grendel a solid beefed-up cruiser and not just small cruiser wannabe with identity crisis.
Poor bastard? Grendel is an AAF cruiser with five medium ballistics, that converge, with stats of a shield shunted low tech cruiser meant for actual warfare, and phase on top of them. For 18 DP.
Delicious Fire Control at that point is less of a debuff and more of a sign waving a finger, going "tsk-tsk-tsk" and pointing to Safety Overrides.
Why don't we replace his system with a burn drive then? Most of the shieldshunted types we can see in the open nature has it!
On paper 5 medium slots and AAF looks rad, on practice tho it just doesn't work due to it's poor phase stat profile. And as i mentioned above, if SO is mandatory, then the ship has real problems.
What I do not like about Grendel is how AI can act so dumb with it in duels. Makes AI Fury look like like a genius, and AI Fury is awful without the Safety Override band-aid. I do not mind Grendel dying because it has Rugged Construction to mitigate death, but dying because the AI is so incompetent with the ship is frustrating no matter what.
Rugged Construction does not prevent D-mods on 100%, and it is a cruiser, so his recovery will cost player a real coin in comparison to Vanguard, or Cerberus. Without mentioning that Vanguard is simply more potent as a frigate, than
Wendigo as a cruiser. And broken AI on top of that.
