I think that's mostly because the notion of a "High Tech Fleet" isn't real.
It just means filling out the player fleet with ships that are High Tech. Player fleets that use primarily High Tech ships tend to not fare so well compared with player fleets filled with Midline ships, for example. (I haven't experimented as much with Low Tech fleets, but they seem to be in between High Tech and Midline in performance.)
This isn't actually a thing in the game. There is no faction that fields such a thing. The closest thing, Tri-Tach, still fills out the lineup with phase ships and Brawlers, which, even though made blue, are technically midlines.
I'm not talking about how difficult they are as an enemy to fight against, I'm talking about how effective they are within the player fleet, under AI control (i.e. not as the player-controlled flagship). High Tech has some ships which perform nicely as skirmishers and flankers, but as a whole they don't perform well when the player bases the fleet around them.
Lol high tech weak 
https://imgur.com/a/lpS9XGk
That thing 1v2 Onslaughts in simulation in 2 minutes.
Sim Onslaughts might be useful to try out builds, but are a terrible way to evaluate a ship's performance against campaign fleets. You will never encounter an Onslaught by itself "in the field", plus you don't see how the ship performs when there are multiple opponents, when the ship may get surrounded, etc. I mean, some of the frigates can solo kill the sim Onslaught without issue, you just need a ship that's fast enough to get to its backside.
Sorry, but trashing poor pirates and Tri Tach doesn't count as a good measure. It is the strongest tech atm by far, and it's not even close.
I typically use double Ordos to measure player fleet effectiveness. The best High Tech fleets I've seen pale in comparison to Midline fleets against Ordos. Again, if you think High Tech fleets are good, then post a video of it against (double) Ordos and/or post the Detailed Combat Results screenshot of the battle to see how it measures up.
- Saving best for last. Hyperion is insanely good. Even after repeated hits with a nerf bat to its face it still can solo an Onslaught in under 20 seconds. Field a bunch of these guys. Autofit "Strike". Go fight. Open map. Select a few in groups and send them after enemy capitals. Congrats, you won. They will pressure Radiants to run and hide like little ***. Amazing ship you can fit several types of. Great with SO, not so great without it.
Nah Hyperions are pretty mediocre to terrible, as I stated above. Their greatest asset is that in AI hands, they generally won't die, since they can teleport out at will. But they won't really do all that much either other than harass and blow up some smaller ships. So you might have a couple of them as flankers, but then LP Brawlers, even with Support Doctrine (i.e. without dedicating an officer to them), perform much better pound-for-pound.
If you have a fleet of Hyperions, it'll look like there's always something going on. But if you focus on any one Hyperion, you'll see that it spends about 3/4 of the battle not firing at anything. It spends a lot of time away from combat, only occasionally running in, even when the officers are set to "Reckless" and when you spam "Eliminate" commands on them to try to make them go in more.
Take for example the flagship Onslaught XIV + 3 Conquest + 2 Gryphon fight whose results I posted
here. The fight took 233 seconds so assuming 45 seconds for the fleets to get to each other in the middle of the map, there was 188 seconds of actual fighting. During that time, the Conquests on average fired 363 Mjolnir shots each, or around 181 shots fired per Mjolnir weapon slot. With Armored Weapon Mounts providing an extra 10% fire rate, this comes out to around 124 seconds of time spent firing, so each Mjolnir was firing around 66% of the time.
If we take the same fight but put in 8 SO Hyperions with dual Heavy Blaster plus Heavy Machine Gun instead of those 3 Conquests (flagship Onslaught XIV + 8 Hyperions + 2 Gryphons), running it a few times, the fastest was 363 seconds for a completion. Hyperions take around 25 seconds to reach the enemy, so that's 338 seconds of combat. Each Hyperion on average fired 170 Heavy Blaster shots and 566 HMG shots, so that's 85 shots per Heavy Blaster mount. Over 338 seconds of combat, that comes out to...25% of the time. The stats for HMG is worse, at 21% of the time. (The reason for the difference is if a Hyperion fires its load and then jumps out, the Heavy Blasters count as firing for the whole second until their cooldown is over, while the cooldown for HMG is a lot shorter.) This is with the Hyperion officers all being set to "Reckless" (compared with "Aggressive" for the Conquests) and with me constantly spamming "Eliminate" commands on them as fast as my command points would allow, to get them to fight more often.
So if you use 8 SO Hyperions with 2 Heavy Blasters and a Heavy Machine Gun, it really amounts to 4 Heavy Blasters firing nonstop and 1.7 HMGs firing nonstop. Whereas if you use 3 Conquests, it amounts to 4 Mjolnirs firing nonstop
and 4 HVD's firing nonstop (they also spent around 2/3 of the time firing)
and 3 Squalls firing nonstop (they really did fire nonstop during that fight)
and 2.7 Locusts firing nonstop. Along with Harpoon spam during the early parts of the fight. Plus some minor contributions from the other weapons. So the 3 Conquests end up totaling 2809 DPS or around 936 DPS each during that fight. By comparison, the 8 Hyperions totaled 1505 DPS or around 188 DPS each. So the Hyperions get a 20-second head start (since they can teleport and they did have Systems Expertise), but after that, a single Conquest is outputting as much damage as roughly
5 Hyperions. Of course, a Conquest only costs 40 DP and one officer, while 5 Hyperions costs 75 DP and 5 officers.
This comparison might be a bit unfair since the Conquest is perhaps the strongest ship I've tested in the player's fleet when controlled by the AI, so pretty much every other ship is going to pale in comparison. But the main point is, other than the whiz-bang factor of seeing the Hyperion jump in and out all the time, it isn't really all that effective at actually killing enemy ships.
Man you need to make like a blog where you post all your fleet tests. It's just a huge waste of information otherwise.
I
could, but I don't really see the point. Yes, I have lots of battle results saved on my computer. For each fight I'll take screenshots of the Detailed Combat Results for the entire fleet, as well as the fleet setup (all the ships in the refit screen as well as officer setups as well as my character skills), and some other notes, and a lot of them go into a spreadsheet with the results. For Starsector version 0.95.1a I took a total of 11362 screenshots covering at least 272 fights (those that were put into a spreadsheet, there are a lot more which weren't), some of whose results I posted about, such as
here and
here. For Starsector version 0.96a, I took a total of 6502 screenshots covering at least 278 fights (again, that's just those that were put into a spreadsheet, a lot weren't). Just looking quickly through the 0.96a spreadsheet, I tested Conquest (of course), Gryphon, LP Brawler, Manticore (P), Executor, Onslaught XIV, Apogee, Legion, Legion XIV, SO Aurora, SO Eagle, Atlas2, Venture (P), Eradicator, Eradicator (P), Champion, (non-SO) Eagle, Prometheus2, Pegasus, and at least a couple of others that didn't make it to the spreadsheet (such as the Astral, which I know I tested but guess I didn't put it into the spreadsheet) against double Ordos.
I used to post the results and also discuss my testing methodology, but there's really not much point since it's never led to any fruitful discussion. It basically just leads to a lot of low-quality sniping, i.e. saying "you're wrong" with poorly-thought-out and shallow reasons given, if at all, essentially low-effort ****-posting. Nobody has ever tried to say "you're wrong
and here's better data to support my point" i.e. to improve on the methodology, nor generated their own data to augment the results. In most games where the goal is to decrease some enemy's points of some sort (hit points in many games, but shield/armor/hull here), measuring how quickly you can decrease those points, i.e. damage per second (DPS), is pretty simple to understand and noncontroversial. In most such games, comparing weapons or characters or parties based on how quickly you can defeat the enemy, i.e. time-to-kill, as well as by DPS, is pretty simple to understand and noncontroversial. Apparently that's not the case here. So I'm not going to bother with the "long form" posting of getting into detail about how the testing is conducted, my reasoning behind each of the steps, etc.
At any rate, I'm still continuing with player fleet testing, mostly against double Ordos but playing around with several other enemy fleets as test fleets, such as the Persean League blockade fleet with the stipulation that the player fleet has no officers (but relying on Support Doctrine) and no s-mods, since I had a lot of fun with that. Basically to simulate that the player fleet is still a work in progress when the crisis hits instead of double Ordos where it's usually expected that the player already has full officers and s-mods, etc.
The method of comparison is still looking at minimizing time to kill the given test fleet, but nowadays I'm looking at a lot more metrics. Enemy DP killed per minute, DPS of each ship and of each weapon, flux used for each weapon (and thus, damage per point of flux), uptime of each weapon slot (how often each weapon was firing compared with how long the fight was), etc., and really looking at the entire cycle time of getting into weapon range of an enemy ship, firing at it, killing it, dissipating flux, moving into weapon range of the next enemy ship, etc. Part of the reason why I think Midline is the strongest right now is because long-range missiles (Squalls, Locusts, Harpoons, etc.) and long-range ballistics means that the time it takes for the ship to switch from one enemy ship to the next is very short -- it's much faster to swing the weapon (and the ship) around than to physically move the ship to the next enemy ship. High Tech really falters on this, with or without SO -- the speed doesn't overcome the weapon range advantage that Low Tech and Midline have. Note that for High Tech, the Paragon is often mentioned as being effective, but it's really fighting using High Tech weapons but fighting in a Low Tech style -- low speed, long range. Similarly, the Retribution is basically fighting in a High Tech style (high speed, short range), which leads to its problems in effectiveness.
The fastest fleet against double Ordos that I tested in 0.96a was flagship Onslaught with full Gryphon spam. That got up to around 281 enemy DP killed per minute. Right now I'm testing a fleet that is
roughly 20% faster, with less damage taken. It's not just slightly stronger than Gryphon spam, it's
significantly stronger. The star of the show is still the Conquest, but the other ships in the fleet work to make it (and each other) that much more deadly. It's really about the synergy between the different ships in the fleet and having them work well together the best, each able to cover up the weaknesses of the other ships and magnify each other's strengths.
It'll take me a couple of months before I post about it, because 1) I'm still trying out how to make it work better and 2) I'm away and won't be able to test for another month or so (my Starsector time is very "bursty" due to RL, where some months I get to spend more time playing, and other months very little or none at all). But there is some concern that once I post about it, it may lead to one or more of the ships being nerfed, simply because they'll seem so much stronger than what I've seen posted about on the forums. There's no magic in there, not even player skill for the most part (in terms of how the player controls the flagship), it comes down more to how the fleet is constructed and how it gets around the different issues that each ship has.
So I'm curious if there's anything out there that I haven't looked at. Maybe the fleet is powerful simply because I've spent some time looking at the Conquest and figuring out how to maximize its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses (i.e., maybe it could be done with other ships as well, and the Conquest just happens to be the one I studied). Maybe the Conquest really is too powerful and needs a meeting with a nerf bat. I don't know. But what I can say is that anyone who thinks a ship that is not the Conquest is really strong should post a video of it in action (or Detailed Combat Results screenshot), preferably against (double) Ordos, and doubly so for any ship that is not Midline. Although I can say upfront that if it can't beat Gryphon spam, it's not going to be stronger than this fleet.
I will try playing with it, but tbh it's never like "omg enemy has Omens!" but if they have Hyperions, you will quickly feel their presence up your ass.
Eh I'm seeing this confusion multiple times in this thread. There's looking at the effectiveness of a ship
when controlled by the player (i.e. good weapons/skills/etc. and hopefully good control) versus
when in the player fleet but under AI control (i.e. good weapons/skills/etc. but mediocre control) versus
as part of the enemy fleet (i.e. mediocre weapons/skills/etc. and mediocre control). Generally people are talking about ships when in the player fleet but under AI control. How good or bad they are in enemy fleets tend to have little bearing with how good they are in the player fleet, and even less to do with how good they are when the player is piloting them.
Truly, stellar work. Lots of food for thought here.
Yeah I accidentally hit "Post" halfway through and don't see a delete button. Don't know why this forum doesn't have one. Oh well.
