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[Killer of Fate]

Vanguard is the best ship in the game confirmed.

You joke, but it’s a very good ship early on. It just falls off hard once you start facing Cruisers that it can’t face tank. Versus Frigates and Destroyers, it’s stellar.

I bet it still gets annihilated by DEM

[Thaago]

For player piloting I'm finding the Harbinger to be the best. Better than Doom even, but I suspect that might be a skill issue on my part as people report doing things with it that I can't in a Harbinger. I can't just rock up and 2 shot a Radiant in the H like the 8x amb doom can, but at the same time I'm so much faster in the H that I can get a lot more smaller kills, faster, with no ammo constraints. I'm still working on it. There are lots of other good player flagships too.

For the AI: Phase ships (afflictors in particular) are excellent in AI hands when given frequent orders and supported by the phase skill (phase ships on an assault (right click assign on a capture or give an actual assault for other ships to go too) or eliminate command have entirely different movement logic than normal, it seems). The AI works with the triple phase lance Harbinger, but I have not tested it extensively enough to know if it is good enough to be worth the extra DP as I've been flying it myself.

For lower micro, stack up on the missiles in groups linked to guns: Conquest, Gryphon (Legion too, though not quite as good!). See a bunch of Vanshillar's posts for builds and lots of data! These are probably much better than phase, but I don't have numbers to say how much. The Conquests back up missile spam with long ranged guns to pop smaller targets that might evade squall/locust/harpoon spam.

Would phase on top of conquests work even better? I'm not sure as my phase testing was part of a high tech themed playthrough. The 50% damage boost from afflictors is certainly attractive as a support to missile spam and they are very efficient in killing stragglers. Plus having a phase component makes the AI ball up, which is not a winning strategy for fighting Conquests!

Onslaughts, Executor, Legions, and Eradicators are all good for their costs. The Onslaught especially in player hands, the Legion/Executor especially in AI. Sunders make great fire support escorts if not going missile spam (which is better) as with escort package they have incredible range. Medusa make great distraction tanks with moderate firepower - more like hypermobile and decently armed Monitors that don't work via being outside AI expectations, rather than being firepower based.

[Void Ganymede]

A weird option nobody's mentioned is Neural Link. Hear me out:

Combat skills run means you're maximizing amount of Ship buffed by them. Not amount of DP buffed, amount of Ship buffed. Even though it taxes your OP and limits you to 50DP for instant transfers, 2x25DP worth of two smaller ships brings more flux, armor, speed, guns, and area control than 1x50DP.

Plus you get insane ship system resets, which with a lot of difficult micro makes Harbingers/Eradicators potentially the final boss flagships of the game. Plus combat skills take elite points, which brings Cybernetic Augmentation's juicy fleet-wide bonus. And neural linked phase ships are amazing at all stages of the run, in addition to already being some of the highest impact flagships in the game!

The maximally-cursed version of this is 2 Dooms worth of player mines combined with instant swaps (for even more mine recharge) via carefully-rolled D-mods. Utterly absurd levels of mine spam and map control. It's even a question what 8 ships would even be able to keep up with such shenanigans?

- It's tempting to say a Hyperion Wolfpack, but ideally you'd get more kinetic pressure, missiles, and Broadsword flare spam?
- Kinetic-heavy Salamander-studded burn driving Low Tech death balls would be great and take up space cleared by mines.
- A full on 3x Heron carrier group + fighter uplink would be fun to see, though who knows if it'd get 60dp worth of value these days. Flare spam is Good when combined with missiles, though.

[Comrade_Bobinski]

Thank you all for your inputs.

I'm definitely going to try a neuralink duo of phase ship for me to pilot. Eradicators, Gryphons and a conquest or two shoold be good for the rest. If I find particulary good build or fleet comp while playing I'll update this post. 

[Beep Boop]

For player piloting I'm finding the Harbinger to be the best. Better than Doom even, but I suspect that might be a skill issue on my part as people report doing things with it that I can't in a Harbinger. I can't just rock up and 2 shot a Radiant in the H like the 8x amb doom can, but at the same time I'm so much faster in the H that I can get a lot more smaller kills, faster, with no ammo constraints.

The main thing with the Harbinger is that while it's very good at performing a targeted killing on a particularly annoying target like, say, another phase ship, even the Ziggurat, it doesn't have the combat endurance in terms of PPT and Ammo Capacity (only two small Reaper slots) to stay relevant in a lengthy battle. Being able to burn three phase lances to hull at will is cool and all, but like you noticed, it's just not ENOUGH alpha. And the Doom tends to otherwise have better battlefield control, something I sorely miss even in the Ziggurat. Every time an enemy tries to run away from your forces, it's hilarious as hell just to go NOPE, press F, and watch as his escape is cruelly denied. It doesn't even have to be YOU that he's trying to escape from, you can nope him even while you're occupied fighting something else, as long as it's happening within mine range. You just don't that that from anything else.

I'm definitely going to try a neuralink duo of phase ship for me to pilot.

Honestly, Neutralink Phase Ship Pairs isn't amazey, because now you're burning PPT down on both your rides, and the moment you bamf out of one ship, the AI takes it over and immediately begins doing something stupid with it because the AI cannot phase ship. OPS+Neutralink Kite with Neutralink Radiant is where it's at, if you're going to neutralink things, because this means YOU get to PERSONALLY fly the majesty of a Radiant with full skills that DOESN'T have its CR utterly crippled.

[Megas]

Neural Link Harbinger is okay.  Neural Reset makes its system usable.  Waiting for a system recharge is horrible, but Neural Reset usually fixes that.  Wished Harbinger did not need Neural Link (bypass recharge delay) and Systems Expertise (more range) to fix its otherwise broken (non-functional) system.

As for Radiant, I like Neural Link Afflictor (either P or standard) and Radiant duo.  Start with Afflictor, do things with it (like cap a point and maybe AMB some nearby target), then switch to Radiant and have my Afflictor-necro curse its target.  Also, Neural Link resets Amplify Damage Entropy Amplifier, and I have exploited that.  I do bring more than one Afflictor (at least two) because one is not enough.

Before I get Radiant, I sometimes Neural Link into other Automated Ships.  In my last game, my first Remnant ships recovered were Fulgent and Apex, and I wanted to drive them personally.

[Thaago]

...
The main thing with the Harbinger is that while it's very good at performing a targeted killing on a particularly annoying target like, say, another phase ship, even the Ziggurat, it doesn't have the combat endurance in terms of PPT and Ammo Capacity (only two small Reaper slots) to stay relevant in a lengthy battle. Being able to burn three phase lances to hull at will is cool and all, but like you noticed, it's just not ENOUGH alpha. And the Doom tends to otherwise have better battlefield control, something I sorely miss even in the Ziggurat. Every time an enemy tries to run away from your forces, it's hilarious as hell just to go NOPE, press F, and watch as his escape is cruelly denied. It doesn't even have to be YOU that he's trying to escape from, you can nope him even while you're occupied fighting something else, as long as it's happening within mine range. You just don't that that from anything else.
...

I think we might be talking about very different builds, or different game versions? I've never put reapers on a Harbinger (why would I waste a phase slot on so little damage? Maybe on a spare afflictor slot but even there that's not very good for the number of DP an afflictor costs to deploy) or run out of PPT, including long fights (double ordos, double high level bounties, etc). In terms of alpha, a triple phase Harbginger has 3750 damage before skills and can repeat that every roughly 2 realspace seconds with phase anchor. It's a lot of damage. In terms of killing large ships - yes, it can very easily. It just can't 2 shot a radiant! (It takes a few passes or an ally nearby).

On the other hand, its half the DP, so the fact that I'm still doing better with it than the doom in terms of DP killed tells me I'm not a very good doom pilot yet!

[Void Ganymede]

Beam Harbs need 9-10 skillpoints to come online. If you do the math on effective anchored flux regen when phase-dancing properly, a linked pair puts out more real-time DPS than a Radiant.

[SCC]

For player piloting I'm finding the Harbinger to be the best. Better than Doom even, but I suspect that might be a skill issue on my part as people report doing things with it that I can't in a Harbinger. I can't just rock up and 2 shot a Radiant in the H like the 8x amb doom can, but at the same time I'm so much faster in the H that I can get a lot more smaller kills, faster, with no ammo constraints. I'm still working on it. There are lots of other good player flagships too.

I wouldn't be surprised if for certain fleets Harbinger was simply better, since it's a) cheaper, b) probably better at picking off smaller ships (which may or may not be the point of that Harbinger). Doom is better at duels, but if you aren't fighting 20 Radiants you might have to ask yourself just how useful that dueling is.

This is what I have for current version

[close]

Honestly, Neutralink Phase Ship Pairs isn't amazey, because now you're burning PPT down on both your rides, and the moment you bamf out of one ship, the AI takes it over and immediately begins doing something stupid with it because the AI cannot phase ship. OPS+Neutralink Kite with Neutralink Radiant is where it's at, if you're going to neutralink things, because this means YOU get to PERSONALLY fly the majesty of a Radiant with full skills that DOESN'T have its CR utterly crippled.

Why would you waste your clone on a kite? Paragon + Radiant combo is significantly better. That Paragon is almost certainly not going to die, while giving you the performance comparable to that of an AI controlled Radiant.

[Phenir]

Honestly, Neutralink Phase Ship Pairs isn't amazey, because now you're burning PPT down on both your rides, and the moment you bamf out of one ship, the AI takes it over and immediately begins doing something stupid with it because the AI cannot phase ship. OPS+Neutralink Kite with Neutralink Radiant is where it's at, if you're going to neutralink things, because this means YOU get to PERSONALLY fly the majesty of a Radiant with full skills that DOESN'T have its CR utterly crippled.

Why would you waste your clone on a kite? Paragon + Radiant combo is significantly better. That Paragon is almost certainly not going to die, while giving you the performance comparable to that of an AI controlled Radiant.

Because a kite only costs 2 dp so the radiant only costs 68 dp instead of 126, and he probably has other plans for the remaining 58 dp or just doesn't want to spend that much supplies when the radiant can probably solo. It might be a kite(s) too.

[SpadeDraco]

And controversially, I would say Fury and Shrike. They might become really powerful once the NPC behaviour of plasma burn gets fixed.

I'm kinda meh on the Fury (it should probably be an 18 DP ship). That being said the Shrike has to be one of the most underrated ships in the entire game.

It's one of those ships that's sitting on a knife's edge balance-wise. By default it's on the *** side of the blade, but building a couple hullmods to fix the shield problems turns it into an absolute monster for it's DP value.

[Cryovolcanic]

@Draco - can you say more about effective builds with s-mods and the shield problems? Preferably under AI control?

[Sandor057]

BEHOLD! THE MOST DP EFFICIENT SHIP IN VANILLA:

Spoiler

[close]

THE TARSUS

For just 3 DP you get the most bang for your buck, bar none.

How did I come to this conclusion? Well, if we look for efficiency in DP, we need to check how much of the other attributes 1 DP nets us. So I made this horrible table. It has all ship stats, divides them by DP and voila, you have the most DP efficient ships.

The Tarsus is the ultimate winner with a meager 3 DP. For the most DP efficient combat ship however the humble Kite is in first place, followed by the Centurion, while the most DP efficient Phase ship is the Double Gremlin Grendel.

A disclaimer is in order however:
This is simply a division of stats by DP. Ship systems are not quantified for this in any way, nor are weapon slots, or general usefulness during gameplay. It would get way more complicated if those aspects would also be accounted for. Flight decks are also missing from the calculation.


All in all though, the most DP efficient ships don't seem to be all that great for actual gameplay.

[Void Ganymede]

Grendel is a sleeper.

Between escort package, built-in IPDAI, elite PD officer skills, you can make up for the ITU ban. And then it's an Eradicator, but instead of AAF'd 3med7small it's 5med7small.

More dissipation, phase anchor tricks for weapon cooldown/soft flux recovery, way lower DP, potentially higher AAF uptime if AI doesn't phase the second it pops it!

[Doctorhealsgood]

Honestly surprised by the grendel being a sleeper. It's an amazing ship if you can open a way for them to get close enough. (If you aren't piloting one yourself that is)