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[Vanshilar]

Well the flares probably help, even if a little bit, and the fighters themselves as well, as extra targets that distract the enemy ships so that more Harpoons make it through. The SD fight definitely goes faster than without, i.e. 10 Buffalo2's with Gladius do better than 15 Buffalo2's without fighters, even though the former is 6 supplies to recover instead of 4. So it's worth it. To what extent, I'm not sure. One benefit of fighters is that you the player can direct their damage, since the AI does not necessarily aim their weapons at a target even if you have it on an "Eliminate" command (i.e. even if you order a ship to "Eliminate" a cruiser right in front of them, they might decide to fire their weapons at some frigate far away). So the Harpoons are less "directed", but the fighters will generally go to whichever target you ordered to Eliminate. In this case this allowed me to focus fire on the Executor more effectively to ensure that it's already fluxed out by the time it got into range.

Yes Converted Hangar does mean a lot of crew is required, along with Militarized Subsystems. In theory I could probably s-mod Militarized Subsystems, but for testing I assumed no s-mods. Hence the Valkyries. Poor them. Realistically I think the first s-mod would be ECCM anyway. Not sure what the best second s-mod would be. Heavy Armor?

The poor frame rate is just because I'm playing on a computer that's over a decade old, I don't think it has anything to do with the game. It's why I use my phone to record the video instead of using screen recording software, which would make the game run even slower.

Yeah I didn't go for Converted Hangar because I thought the increased DP also meant more supplies, count toward the XP bonus, and so forth. Now that I know about it, I sort of want to redo the playthrough going for CH as well. It's nice because there are actually multiple fighters that could work there, so I have options. Using the leftover OP on stuff like Tactical Laser was always a bit of a waste, since it didn't really contribute much.

For missiles, Harpoons work best but other missiles can sort of work as well. In the playthrough, I sort of start by assuming that I can take on roughly 1x my fleet's DP in terms of the enemy fleet before the battles start taking a long time due to shortmanning (part of the reason why I evaluated ships based on their DP is this also gives me an idea of how big an enemy fleet I can take on based on my current fleet), but as I get EMR, etc., I can then start taking on around 2x my fleet's DP. Part of this is also that initially the missiles I find may not be Harpoons. Ultimately they end up being Harpoons but along the way my fleet used all sorts of different missiles, Atropos, Annihilator Pods, whatever I happened to find.

The Dragonfire in theory could do more DPS than the Harpoon Pod (averaging 400 DPS compared with the Harpoon Pod's 333 DPS) but in practice doesn't seem to hold up as well, at least against the SD test fleet. Not sure if it's due to soft vs hard flux. Also possibly that the Harpoon Pod, being 2500 range, makes it less dangerous for my ships since it hits enemy ships from that much farther out.

[low]

Good news, the Buffalo autofit the pirates tend to use has Reinforced Bulkheads, so it's a guaranteed drop. Spacer start, I've done one Dead Drop and from then on was only doing bounties and contact bounties.

This is my fleet at Sep 1,c. 206

On Sep 1 specifically I'm missing a couple harpoons still, the bounty is done after I fitted the rest. No Falcon in the salvage.



Colossus seems to be strictly cosmetic. The Enforcer is from a military contact also.

[close]

The Enforcer bounties in the early game sometimes have PD+ level 5 officer and flak cannons so they are quite a bit scarier than others and you need something else to convince it to fall over.
UPD: Hubris keeps getting the best of me. The 150 DP bounties, to my 8-10 Buffalos and 40 DP of I'm not even sure what, don't instantly fold and I lose ships.

Afraid of the Devil

 The Devil

[close]

Had to do this combat two-part, retreat, leave and re-engage, thus no Falcon again. Single Reaper and 2 LMGs on the Gremlin enough to dissuade 78 DP of pirates from munching on some hulls, though I think this was already reported. I'm using Talons in CH. Broadswords seem substantially better.

First Combat

[close]

Re-engage

[close]

[close]

Late UPD: Here's a combat against a 200k League deserter. I mismanaged my Ventures and they were really late to the rollout, unloading their Harpoons very late, though I did my best to stall the rest of the fleet. The officers are both Missile Spec mercs, the one in Falcon has PD+. The top damaging Gremlin was AI-piloted, I only set the eliminate order. I think if I click the Ventures first and then the rest of the ships they should get frontline spots thus being in more relevant positions. I don't have Unstable Injector on them, so perhaps a fit issue. I've also tried this fleet against a 300k Diktat deserter, just to see the Broadsword damage, but I'm afraid the numbers are not of too much use due to the prolonged combat.

The Bounty, Sep c. 207

[close]

On the Falcon 80% of the damage is done by Harpoon Pods, on the Buffalos around 30-50% total damage is done by the Broadswords to the enemy shields. Though, again, it took a while.

[basileus]

Thanks for sharing the timestamp on your progress, low.

There's a lot of great theory-crafting that takes place on the forums, but I'm never sure when the results may be over-fit to using the console/simulator.  Insignificant sample sizes non-withstanding, it seems that Vanshilar is onto something, as those results look highly competitive with my own strategy.

[Vanshilar]

Okay doing some more testing on this, a problem with Harpoon spam is that the enemy ships tend to back off when they see a bunch of missiles heading toward them. I mean that's logical, that's what I would do too if a bunch of Harpoons were heading toward me, but it means it's hard to finish off ships, especially the faster ones and/or the ones in the back of the enemy fleet. This was one of the challenges of minimizing the battle completion time against the 73-DP pirate test fleet, because the SO Eradicator would just back off the entire time.

So it turns out that one way to make sure that the enemy fleet doesn't do this is to...use and abuse the disengage battle option. So your fleet ends up near (but not at) the bottom, moving upward, while the bulk of the enemy fleet spawns below you, and a couple of enemy flanking frigates would spawn at the top. The main enemy fleet would thus be squeezed between the bottom map edge and your fleet so that they can't back up as much, plus you get to launch your Harpoons as they're still warping in.

This makes Harpoon spam much more efficient. Generally speaking, in normal battle it looks like Buffalo2 Harpoon spam with Gladius can take on enemy fleets of around 2x their base DP (i.e. Buffalo2 counting as 4 DP each even though they have Support Doctrine and Converted Hangar with Gladius). So the 73-DP pirate fleet needs around 9 Buffalo2 (36 DP) to beat, even though you can technically do it with 8 Buffalo2 (32 DP). Similarly, 15 Buffalo2 (60 DP) can take on the 116-DP Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty.

With the disengage option, the 73-DP pirate fleet can be beat with just 6 Buffalo2 (24 DP), and the 116-DP Sindrian Diktat fleet can be beat with just 10 Buffalo2 (40 DP). So this method lets the Buffalo2 fleet take on enemy fleets of up to around 3x their base DP. The disadvantage is that your entire fleet will spawn and thus you'll have to pay for the entire fleet's recovery cost in supplies, but being able to take on up to 3x your fleet's DP (and thus get more XP bonus, etc.) is probably worth it. Also, since the enemy fleet spawns near you, you'll really need to have the Gladius or some other fighter (Broadsword/Thunder) to hit their shields and screen you fleet to help tank, since they'll start off close to you. In these fights, another advantage of the Gladius becomes clear: along with LMG, they also have IR Pulse Laser (High Delay), so they provide *some* amount of anti-hull damage besides Harpoons, when you need to finish off a target between Harpoon waves.

For disengage, it's better to set the fleet doctrine to cautious (the most timid possible), because you don't want the Buffalo2 to advance on the enemy ships, but keep their distance. They'll tend to try to ram enemy ships anyway though.

Also, even though the whole fight will take longer according to Detailed Combat Results, the actual "main" fight is over pretty quickly, maybe around 30-50 seconds into the battle, depending on the enemy fleet. But it'll end up taking around 80-120 seconds overall because once you're done with the main fleet, you have to then move your fleet up to the top to engage the flanking enemy frigates. But at that point it's really just mop-up.

I've also tested this against a 149-DP Hegemony deserter bounty fleet (163.5k credits). Beating it in regular battle is very difficult using 15 Buffalo2 (60 DP), but fairly easy with 20 Buffalo2 (80 DP). Beating it using disengage with 15 Buffalo2 (60 DP) is pretty straightforward.

So thus far it seems to hold up that you can beat deserter bounties up to around 3x your Buffalo2 fleet in DP (4 DP each) if you're using disengage, and up to around 2x your Buffalo2 fleet in DP if you're using normal battle. It'll be interesting to see how hard of deserter bounties can a Buffalo2 fleet beat. In 0.95.1a, max deserter bounties (>300k credits) got up to around 500 DP or so (for Tri-Tachyon, the others got up to around 400 or so, although my data was limited); this implies that in theory you would need around 170 DP or so of Buffalo2's. In practice though that's too many ships so some of the ship slots would be filled by Falcon (P)'s or Gryphons or other ships, plus the maximum fleet size for disengage is 150 DP so it'd have to be under that. I'll have to collect some data on deserter bounty fleet sizes in the current version.

Along with that, thus far this is testing pure Buffalo2's without a player-controlled flagship. In practice, the flagship would help the fleet contribute a lot more damage. I'm not exactly quite sure how disengage fights would play out with a flagship. Guess I'll have to find out.

I put up a video of 10 Buffalo2 with Gladius (40 base DP) beating a 116-DP Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty fleet here, so you can see how to do it:



Edit: From testing, it seems like the max 150 DP limit to use the disengage option *does* use your actual recovery cost, not the base amount, so using CH *does* count against that. So for purposes of staying at 150 fleet DP or below to use the disengage option, the Buffalo2's with SD and CH Gladius do count as 6 DP instead of 4 DP.

The Enforcer bounties in the early game sometimes have PD+ level 5 officer and flak cannons so they are quite a bit scarier than others and you need something else to convince it to fall over.

Yeah one thing nice about Gladius is that it'll serve as distraction plus drive up enemy flux, allowing more of your Harpoons to get through.

Late UPD: Here's a combat against a 200k League deserter.

183 seconds seem a bit long for this fight. By that time the Buffalo2's are out of Harpoons so the fleet is more or less running on fumes. The Ventures can actually launch their missiles very quickly, due to Fast Missile Racks, so it's okay if they're behind the Buffalo2's and Falcon (P)'s in starting their Harpoon spam. But yeah it looks like there might not be enough missiles if the battle lasts that long.

[Brainwright]

Honestly, this looks like a different sort of combat to what we usually see in Starsector, where a fleet is built to eliminate the opponent on sight instead of the usual shield tanking combat.

It's interesting, and I wonder if other civilian ships could be made to accommodate it and make disengage fights slightly more possible.

[PixiCode]

This is some nice data! Lately I’ve been thinking of optimizing the early game around leveling up officers and the player character asap, how does buffalo spam affect exp compared to spending a little extra time getting a player afflictor and some kites to level stuff up?

I’ve been meaning to try out exp maximized strats sometime soon.

Slightly unrelated, I disagree that the ‘strongest’ (killing them faster?) player endgame fleets are missile spam fleets. but it’s a very interesting thing to think about. If we still had 0.95 or 0.96 squalls I’d feel that way, but eh. I’m not saying anyone is wrong exactly, I just have an extremely high opinion of a SO hyperion build spam with some player ship piloting to skew the speed even more. I wonder what combo would be fastest.

[Thaago]

I've had a bunch of fun playing around with BM II's. My biggest issue is finding BMII's and the right weapons/hullmods! It certainly took me far longer than you, which was an annoyance, but that was just bad luck on my part I suspect.

There was a bit of a duality going on in terms of early game progression: on the one hand my bonus XP in battle was great compared to my usual "grab officers and start levelling them, put them on random destroyers I find" kind of play. I think that's mainly just not grabbing any officers, they are such XP hogs in terms of the calculation. The fights that I could win were extremely fast - enemies too large for the fleet were a headache but I could usually use player piloting on my pirate afflictor with fighter cover to pull off some wins after the missiles ran out. The logistics of the buffalo swarm were rough in terms of crew and fuel, holy crud. Not insurmountable, but just expensive and I couldn't refuel well for out-core work at small places.

The missiles running out making the fleet's effectiveness drop off a cliff after the initial punch is also a big problem because I had trouble judging exactly what I could take, and made some mistakes that forced me to retreat. This was a me problem in terms of judgement, but for an ironman playthrough it did cause some, uh, excitement.

My actual progression of killing power was quite slow because of the difficulty in acquiring the right equipment, and because 4 DP * 2 (impressive you got it up to 3 with the retreat strat, that's great thinking!) is still only 8 DP per ship that it can handle, roughly. Grabbing random "decent" destroyers/frigates and throwing weapons on them is less DP efficient/XP efficient, and less decisive in battle, but I can build the fleet far faster and its cheaper to run. There's a paradox there in that I can kill bigger fleets, faster, and in some ways cheaper, but at the same time less efficiently in terms of both DP and experience gain, which is lower.

With an early game phase/wolf pack I think I can handle more than 2:1 DP against me without problems, but the battles take a lot more time and give paradoxically less bonus XP despite the longer odds, because officers. I think I'm going to start a new vanilla game with this in mind and take a log of the campaign playthrough, like you included in the initial post, to try to get comparison dates and comparison DP counts.

[Vanshilar]

Honestly, this looks like a different sort of combat to what we usually see in Starsector, where a fleet is built to eliminate the opponent on sight instead of the usual shield tanking combat.

Well the way it works is that missile spam cuts down on that initial enemy fleet very quickly, leaving just some stragglers or, in the case of longer battles, some reinforcements. For a big battle, the enemy starts off with 240 DP while you have 160 DP or 200 DP with Best of the Best, so you're at a numerical disadvantage. So it's best to cut them down quickly so that you're the one with the numerical advantage. Generally speaking for my double Ordos fights, once the initial enemy fleet is killed, I'm really dealing with only around 80 DP's worth of enemy ships at any given time, with the rest caught up in moving from the spawn point toward the front lines. Even though Harpoon spam may not last the whole fight for a big battle, they help you achieve this goal very well for longer fights, which makes them very effective, by making the rest of the fight go more smoothly.

In this case (earlier, smaller battles), Harpoon spam itself will largely kill the enemy fleet without having to have a secondary battery of ballistics, etc., to finish them off. The Gladius, to the extent that it can pick off enemy ships (via its IR Pulse Laser (high delay)), is pretty much all that the fleet has other than Harpoon spam, but that's sufficient here because the big ships will die in the main enemy fleet and then there's usually only frigates left.

Shield tanking combat, where the two sides are exchanging fire and driving up each other's flux, is inefficient because any hit you take on your shields is decreasing your own ability to fight, when you want to maximize that ability to fight to finish off the enemy fleet quickly. So it's best to kill them before they get a chance to hit you. That's why long-range missile spam (Squalls/Harpoons, with some Locusts) paired with long-range ballistics (Mjolnir, Hephaestus, HVD, etc.) is so successful.

This is some nice data! Lately I’ve been thinking of optimizing the early game around leveling up officers and the player character asap, how does buffalo spam affect exp compared to spending a little extra time getting a player afflictor and some kites to level stuff up?

I’ve been meaning to try out exp maximized strats sometime soon.

Officers are pretty bad for XP gain, especially early on. The XP bonus is based on the ratio of the enemy fleet's DP versus your fleet's DP, with some calculations and modifications for stuff like d-mods. For this, your officers count as 7.5 + 3.75*level DP, so a level 1 officer counts as 11.25 DP and a level 6 officer counts as 30 DP. Your player character counts as well, so at level 15 your player character is contributing 63.75 DP to this calculation.

So unless the officer contributes more to your fleet than the equivalent DP's worth of combat ships, it's better to get more ships. In this case a Buffalo2 is only 4 DP, and there's no way an officer will buff it more than several more Buffalo2's. You could get almost 3 Buffalo2's for the DP cost of one level 1 officer, in terms of the XP bonus. So yeah, early on officers are a bad deal.

That's partly why I go for Support Doctrine early on, because they give the ships some of the benefits of officers, but without any cost to the XP bonus. I don't switch over to my endgame fleet with officers and such until I'm level 15, have a full 240 DP fleet, and am preparing to take on [REDACTED].

Slightly unrelated, I disagree that the ‘strongest’ (killing them faster?) player endgame fleets are missile spam fleets. but it’s a very interesting thing to think about. If we still had 0.95 or 0.96 squalls I’d feel that way, but eh. I’m not saying anyone is wrong exactly, I just have an extremely high opinion of a SO hyperion build spam with some player ship piloting to skew the speed even more. I wonder what combo would be fastest.

Nah Safety Overrides in general and the SO Hyperion in particular are extremely overhyped, i.e. a lot of vocal posters will claim that they're very strong, but never present any evidence to back it up. Ever since I started doing systematic, standardized testing of ships and fleet compositions back in version 0.95.1a several years ago, Safety Overrides ships and fleets have always scored terribly. For example in 0.95.1a, against double Ordos, the SO Hyperion got up to 168 DPS for 15 DP (11.2 DPS per DP), while the Gryphon did 372 DPS for 20 DP (18.6 DPS per DP), some 66% better on a DPS per DP basis. So for example, 5 Gryphons costing 100 DP would do slightly more DPS against double Ordos than 11 SO Hyperions costing 165 DP.

With all the data showing that SO fleets are terrible against Ordos compared with other ships and fleet compositions, the claim then changed from "SO is overpowered" (as a general statement) to "SO is overpowered everywhere except the endgame" which conveniently was where the actual data was collected. Of course nobody who claimed that SO was overpowered has ever presented an actual demonstration, i.e. "here is an example enemy fleet, here is an example player fleet using SO, here are the combat results of that player fleet against the enemy fleet, showing that SO is better than other possible fleet compositions" to back up their claims.

Whereas my claims regarding the combat balance of different ships and fleets have always been backed up by "if anyone disagrees with these results, they are free to produce their own player fleet and show that it can do better than my results", and I include explanations and videos of how it was done so that anyone who wants to can see if they can improve on it. (It's easy enough to Console Command whatever player fleet you want to test.) After all, it's entirely possible that I'm getting bad results with SO simply because I as a player don't really know how to use it. So it's an opportunity for those who keep claiming that SO is overpowered, i.e. that it needs to be toned down, to put their time where their mouth is and show their superior game knowledge by posting an SO fleet that backs up their claims. But quite tellingly, no one ever has.

You can look through all the past discussions about Safety Overrides to see this. You will not find a single example from the "SO is overpowered" posters demonstrating that this is actually the case, despite a lot of general claims made about it.

It doesn't mean that SO has no use; SO is useful in niche applications like getting objectives or pursuit battles. But as a general fleet doctrine, it's nowhere near as good as other fleet doctrines, which are nowhere near as good as long range missile/ballistic spam.

Now that I'm doing testing on the early game, it's looking like missile spam is stronger than pretty much everything else, including SO fleets, for the early game as well. This is thanks to the Buffalo2, although other ships like the Falcon (P) and the Venture also fare very well. You can see from the completion time vs player DP graph just how much better missile fleets are compared with SO fleets, using the LP Brawler and SO Hyperion as examples (they are typically the most oft-cited examples of SO). These results are for a fairly early game enemy fleet (a 73-DP pirate fleet), but I've tested the Buffalo2 fleet up to a 270k-credit 364 DP Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty and it still handles it fine, so the player can actually use a Buffalo2 fleet quite far into the game.

I've had a bunch of fun playing around with BM II's. My biggest issue is finding BMII's and the right weapons/hullmods! It certainly took me far longer than you, which was an annoyance, but that was just bad luck on my part I suspect.

Well I just go around the different markets in the core, as well as looking at pirate fleets, for the Buffalo2's. I didn't find them that hard to get, but I kept moving around the core so I went to a lot of markets. That may also be why I found the hullmods so quickly. For the Harpoons, I find that oftentimes there'll be nothing and then I find a bunch of them at once, so I think it's better to stock up on Buffalo2's first in anticipation of a batch of Harpoons. The Buffalo2's can be effective with a bunch of different missiles anyway, just that Harpoons work the best.

The fights that I could win were extremely fast - enemies too large for the fleet were a headache but I could usually use player piloting on my pirate afflictor with fighter cover to pull off some wins after the missiles ran out. The logistics of the buffalo swarm were rough in terms of crew and fuel, holy crud. Not insurmountable, but just expensive and I couldn't refuel well for out-core work at small places.

The missiles running out making the fleet's effectiveness drop off a cliff after the initial punch is also a big problem because I had trouble judging exactly what I could take, and made some mistakes that forced me to retreat. This was a me problem in terms of judgement, but for an ironman playthrough it did cause some, uh, excitement.

Yeah early on I didn't leave core at all (until that SD fleet), unless you count the Alpha cache, so it was easy to pick up crew and have enough fuel. For the missiles, the testing was done assuming upgraded Buffalo2's (full Harpoons, ECCM, EMR, MA, and nowadays, Gladius), so you'll have to weight them at a discount if that's not what you have. Realistically I sort of estimate that each Buffalo2 starts off by being able to take out around its own DP in terms of the enemy fleet, then up to double or triple once upgraded. The testing is with no player-controlled flagship but for the playthrough I'm actually using a flagship Wolf with 2 AMSRM's, plus the initial Hammerhead from Tetra, so there's some anti-shield out in front which pairs really well with Harpoon spam.

My actual progression of killing power was quite slow because of the difficulty in acquiring the right equipment, and because 4 DP * 2 (impressive you got it up to 3 with the retreat strat, that's great thinking!) is still only 8 DP per ship that it can handle, roughly.

While Buffalo2 spam can only handle up to around 2x or possibly 3x of their DP (4 DP each) before they run out of ammo, they can do it far faster than other ships at the same DP, and other ships also have a limit to how much they can shortman as well. For example, testing with the 73-DP pirate fleet, I couldn't beat it with any less than 6 LP Brawlers (36 DP), because with 5 LP Brawlers (30 DP) at some point one of the LP Brawlers get jumped by the SO Eradicator (P) and dies (whereas 6 or more seems to be enough where it won't jump in as frequently and/or I can get reinforcements to jump it in turn). I mean in theory I can send one LP Brawler to distract it while the other 4 take care of the rest of the fleet, and then have all 5 gang up on the Eradicator, but then that takes up a lot of time.

The goal isn't really to see how small of a fleet I can get away with. Referring to the completion time vs fleet DP graph (attached is an updated one), as the player fleet gets smaller, the time it takes to kill a given fleet starts increasing asymptotically toward infinity. The goal is more to identify the "knee" of the graph where this occurs for different ships, and try to stay at or above that knee so that I can do the fights quickly and efficiently. For the Buffalo2, this "knee" occurs at such a low total DP value that yes, while the fleet will fail catastrophically if you go below this point (try to tackle too large of a fleet), if you had used any other ship, they would either also fail catastrophically or take a really long time to complete, in which case it's not a good idea anyway. And of course in practice, I'm not using a pure Buffalo2 fleet but have some anti-shield ships out in front which makes the Buffalo2 Harpoon spam a lot more effective.

Also, I think there's a bit of an expectations thing too. The Buffalo2 is a destroyer but only has the cost of a cheap frigate. So if you're looking at your fleet of Buffalo2 and mentally thinking of them as "well I have a bunch of destroyers and they should be able to take on destroyers/cruisers" it ends up being really easy to overestimate their abilities. But if you mentally consider them as another 4 DP frigate like say a bunch of Cerberuses (Cerberi?) then it's easier to estimate how big an enemy fleet they can take on.

Now, looking ahead, I found a 270k-credit 364 DP Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty in one of my saves, complete with 2 Executors. Testing out Buffalo2 spam against it, 30 Buffalo2's with Gladius (120 base DP), no smods and no officers but using Support Doctrine, the fleet can take it out in 136 seconds, with some of them running out of missiles (but other ones still firing). So it's close to that knee but not at the point of catastrophically failing from lack of ammo. This is just using regular battle without any disengage shenanigans. So as the enemy fleet gets bigger, the Buffalo2's actually become more efficient (can take up to 3x their base 4 DP even using regular battle), likely because the enemy fleet is more dense so the Harpoons have a higher hit rate from having another enemy ship in range when the initial target dies.

By comparison, 10 Gryphons (200 base DP) with the same conditions took out the same fleet in 129 seconds, and 8 Gryphons with Gladius (160 base DP) with the same conditions took out the same fleet in 149 seconds. So the Buffalo2 is around 50% better than the Gryphon from a DPS/DP perspective. However, the Gryphon benefits more from officers, is a lot more survivable, has a lot more longevity, and can fill out the DP max without hitting up against the 30-ship limit. So at some point it becomes better to switch over to Gryphons (and other ships like the Conquest). Until the player hits that point though the Buffalo2 is looking really hard to beat.

[Beep Boop]

The question is, how many of the Buffalos DIE in the process? Remember, in a real fight in the campaign, where things are costing you money, it doesn't matter how fast you beat the enemy. You have to defeat all enemy ships, while they only have to kill one and you have lost the fight.

[Rusty Edge]

Losing frigates or destroyers is really not a big deal, you can usually salvage them again. And even if you can't you can always buy/salvage it later and still come out on top. In Iron mode it can hurt a lot more, but recouping your losses is just part of the game.

Really you can even recover from losing a couple cruisers or even a capital here or there, but I don't blame anyone for reloading at that point.

And personally, when I play I see taking losses as making the game more immersive. All other fleets lose ships in battle. If I am such a perfect captain that no battle REALLY threatens me, why am I even fighting in the first place?

[Vanshilar]

The question is, how many of the Buffalos DIE in the process? Remember, in a real fight in the campaign, where things are costing you money, it doesn't matter how fast you beat the enemy. You have to defeat all enemy ships, while they only have to kill one and you have lost the fight.

None. The enemy fleet doesn't get a chance, because until the Buffalo2 runs out of ammo, the enemy fleet is under constant Harpoon spam + Gladius swarm. You can see in the combat results how little damage the Buffalo2 fleet takes, even against the 364 DP Sindrian Diktat deserter fleet.

For the bigger fleets, I make sure to have some Buffalo2's target the threats with their fighters (so that the threats don't have flux to be a threat), and I move the frontline Buffalo2's back when some start getting too close to the enemy ships.

The testing is assuming no player-controlled flagship. In the actual playthrough I use the starter Wolf as flagship as well as a Hammerhead in the front so there's even less chance of any Buffalo2's dying.

[basileus]

Does the Buffalo herd require topping off on fuel and supplies when returning to the core?

I may be persuaded that the Buffalo Mk 2 is the king of the early game with the caveats that you're playing in a small sector without any plans at colonizing.  I am less confident that the gains in DPS efficiency outweigh the loss in economic and exploration efficiency to the extent that it is a clearly superior option.  DPS may be a less appropriate KPI for the early game than the late game.

The Buff 2s are 2 fuel/ly with a 30 unit tank.  So 10 of them, a fuel tanker, salvage rig?, and some cargo capacity...  That's quite a logistics tax.  Is it so obviously better to kill things 15% faster if your overhead is 20% higher?  You might need to perform 20% more bounties in order to develop colonies to the point that credits are trivialized.  Plus, since your fleet operates at a stark resource deficit, it leaves a lot less freedom to divert for exploration in promising systems or unexpected mission/bounty offers while under way, unless of course you're piling on even more logistics ships for an even bigger economic efficiency tax.

[Thaago]

Right, when missile spam fleets win, they win. It's a very safe strategy as long as the user is judging fights correctly (which I was not!).

... Also, I think there's a bit of an expectations thing too. The Buffalo2 is a destroyer but only has the cost of a cheap frigate. So if you're looking at your fleet of Buffalo2 and mentally thinking of them as "well I have a bunch of destroyers and they should be able to take on destroyers/cruisers" it ends up being really easy to overestimate their abilities. But if you mentally consider them as another 4 DP frigate like say a bunch of Cerberuses (Cerberi?) then it's easier to estimate how big an enemy fleet they can take on. ...

This was my issue for quite a few early fights! Took some getting used to. :p

I'm in progress on my phase run and taking data. My dates won't really be comparable to yours because I did some long explorations out of the core (I enjoy doing it plus it makes a lot of money going back from the bounties at the far ends), but hopefully the battle DP and experience percentages will be interesting.

[Void Ganymede]

Early-game civilian-grade hulls also benefit massively from Industry.

Your combat prowess is offset by low speed and massive campaign map signature radius. 20 burn mitigates that, free Emergency Burn solves it. Oversized ships with High Resolution Sensors (Circe/Colossus are cruisers, Atlas MkII are capitals) are also helpful.

[PixiCode]

This is some nice data! Lately I’ve been thinking of optimizing the early game around leveling up officers and the player character asap, how does buffalo spam affect exp compared to spending a little extra time getting a player afflictor and some kites to level stuff up?

I’ve been meaning to try out exp maximized strats sometime soon.

Officers are pretty bad for XP gain, especially early on. (snip)...

Actually, that wasn't what I meant. I meant for leveling up both yourself and all your officers to the maximum. An EXP maximized strategy of leveling up both yourself and officers in the quickest amount of overall combined time. I've learned a little bit more about how EXP works since I made that post. Haven't tested too much Player + officer exp maximization yet so this is all theoretical. It would probably have to involve some sort of Afflictor P/Afflictor strategy, since the ship with your highest DP in your fleet provides a huge debuff to how much bonus EXP it can earn, supposedly - the goal is to get as close to the max of 500% bonus modified EXP in this strategy's case, with as high of a base exp as possible. Things like star forts, big pirate fleets, deserter fleets, maybe the respawnable Sindrian/Lion's Guard fleets would come in clutch here, unsure. I would probably put all officers into Omens with 'no weapons' (Still has their EMP arc emitter though...) which makes the omen count as if it was only worth 6/4 = 2? (rounded up? unsure) DP for EXP purposes, and then myself in an AMB/Reaper Afflictor. The Omens run around as a pack doing naughty Omen stuff, killing frigates and destroyers while distracting bigger targets, then I go around and destroy the bigger ships. Potentially, 10 CH Logistic ships could make for a good pick, too, like perhaps 10 Phaeton CH or Colossus CH. With the Civilian tag, they go down to low DP values as well, and with some S-mods could hold lots of fuel/cargo, doing double duty. Alternatively, the fastest way to level up officers could be to get to level 15 then get some 10 level 1 officers and babysit them in some big battles while you solo the enemy in a Doom or Retribution or Afflictor or something. I'm not sure which is fastest to get yourself + 10 officers to maximum levels and was just curious.

Note, I'd leave all the officers at level 1 in either case, so that they don't eat up too much bonus EXP. Another interesting note, you'll be able to get a lot of nice bonus EXP from mentoring all of these officers since mentoring gives 100% bonus exp. Might help out? You could even wait until you're a bit higher level so that the bonus exp applies when the modified difficulty exp bonuses start running out.

Nah Safety Overrides in general and the SO Hyperion in particular are extremely overhyped (snip...)

SO is overhyped for killing the highest overall quantity of Remnant DP in 1 single battle, that award seems to go Onslaught with some Manticore/Sunder backup and a Medusa. However, for raw speed I feel confident that a min-maxed SO fleet would come out on top. As in, a very unrealistic 'completely completed' fleet of mercenaries, level 6 officers etc, completely ignoring how long it takes to get all of that set up. (I'm not entirely sure what type of SO fleet would be the fastest, exactly, but I'm willing to test it out if this was desired info. However, it doesn't look like this is desired info, because of what I'm going to say next.)

My statement was originally based on your OP, which said this;

I've spent some time in the past several years documenting the combat balance of ships and player fleets with regards to endgame content, primarily using double Ordos as a measuring stick and punching bag. TL;DR - the most powerful player fleets spam missiles and long-range weapons (mostly ballistics), where a big part of the player fleet's effectiveness boils down to how many Squalls and Harpoons it has. This means Gryphons with Squall/Harpoons, Conquests with Squall/Locust/Harpoons/Mjolnirs/HVDs, and so forth, with a player-controlled flagship such as an Onslaught or an 8-Antimatter Blaster Doom taking out key enemy ships to keep the battle flowing smoothly.

Bolded "The most powerful player fleets" for emphasis. I have discussions with a few players for what the strongest "kill everything real fast with minimal effort when min-maxed" fleet is a good amount, so I skimmed the linked thread and didn't feel convinced in the times shown. Now I went and read it a bit more. It looks like the purpose wasn't to make THE fastest non-zig/omega weapon 2 ~370 DP ordo clearing fleet, but a fleet that is both easy to acquire and is the fastest, in that context, at farming 2 ordos. I thought it was like "what's the absolute fastest way to clear this stuff?" not "what's the most reasonable way to quickly farm this stuff?" I actually fully agree, it's much quicker overall to farm creating a fleet like this when you consider the setup time. Endgame optimized SO spam effectively hard requires you to get a bunch of officers, if only so you have TA on it but you probably need others like helmsmanship etc, and further likely requires you to get some mercenaries as well. I think min-maxed 100% 'complete' SO spam would out-speed 100% 'complete' max speed missile spam in clearing out two big ordos of remnant, though saying that if Derelict Operations was maximized with support doctrine... it could be close? Anyway, since I don't think anyone actually cares about that, it's whatever. (Or even 20 Gamma Sentries and then a bunch of SO Ships? By the power of Missile Spam and SO combined...!)

I wonder though, if anyone did tests with 120 automated DP worth of Gamma Core Sentries all with Gorgon missiles for a 'quick and somewhat easy' setup? I'm not saying that's better or worse, just planting that seed of addiction for anyone to try out sometime. I bet it kills the EXP gain and also the alpha core gain, but it would be very funny. That's 20 sentries, so you'd have 10 more ships of space left in the fleet and 180 DP left for conquests and gryphons and the like.

Since you brought it up, I personally don't think SO is particularly overpowered for any particular part of the game, but I think it's overpowered in that it's too good at min-maxing close assault roles. It 'excludes' a lot of build variety due to how good it is on certain ships. It feels like there's no point beyond 'I don't wanna' to use ships like Aurora or Scarab without SO. You could argue the PPT, but then your choices are "Use a different ship, or change your fleet to win faster." And, that's my complaint about SO, besides that maybe it trains bad habits of fleet building for new players, but idk about that one for sure.

You can see from the completion time vs player DP graph just how much better missile fleets are compared with SO fleets, using the LP Brawler and SO Hyperion as examples...

I never questioned that either, because I do think the buffalo2 (or, missiles in general) win out in getting the player to maximum level ASAP. I called it good data! If I felt it was wrong, I would've said something *thumbs up*