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[Hiruma Kai]

Yes I did some testing with Converted Hangar. The best one ended up being Flash, which I afforded by removing Missile Autoloader (which really only gives 4 Harpoons for 12 OP) and changing two of the Harpoons into Harpoon (Double)'s. This actually gave the fastest runs, with a 41-second completion using 10 Buffalo2's (when the fastest was 43 seconds without using CH), and which was also one of the completions where my fleet took 0 damage. However, it's a bit difficult to price in the DP increase of the CH fighters, plus there's also the little problem of figuring out how to get a bunch of Flash LPC's in the early game...

I never looked into the tournament scene so I have no idea how well the Buffalo2 performs in it. Did people try Buffalo2 with mass Harpoons linked to PD to force them to fire? Something like Harpoon/Flash should do pretty well I imagine. I'll have to post a video of that against the pirate fleet.

I'm amused that the best fighter is one you've got to have Ordos on farm for in order to have sufficient numbers on your Buffalo.

As for tournaments are AI vs AI with no orders, so there's no human issuing eliminate orders, or orders to keep ships together, or to herd enemy ships into a ball while you surround them. And obviously no flagship.  So while missiles were in fact quite strong in the format, it was possible to have opposing players with sufficient PD (or alternatively enough projectiles/missiles in the air), speed, and shields to blunt the initial massed harpoons, and then devolve into smaller engagements.

Once the fleets split up, speed and ability to vent shields quickly tends to become a more important parameter than in a player controlled fight, traits which Buffalo mk2 lack.  Normally, a wider a fleet has an innate advantage due to spreading damage on multiple shielded ships which back off while fresh ships come forward, but that strategy isn't open to typical Buffalo fleets.  So, do buffalos do enough damage to reduce enemy ship count enough they can clean up at the end against hand designed player ships expecting missile and fighter spam?  Also, a lot can depend on the tournament fleet build constraints.  Sometimes its credits, sometimes its DP, sometimes you have duplicate ship limitations or number of ships of a certain size limitation.  I would Buffalo Mk 2 (with flash bombers) to do better in a credit limited tournament than a DP limited one, given Flash bombers are most likely undercosted in terms of credits, given you can only sell them, not buy them.

This circles back a point I've seen you make in the past, that there is not necessarily a stable equilibrium in ship designs when both sides of the fight are hand tuned.  Although, given you like testing different fleet configurations, tournaments might be something to try out, given once you submit, no more changes, so somebody will by definition win.  Just requires downloading the AI battles mod from the discord tournament chat channel.  Don't have time now, but could try throwing your Buffalo Mk 2 against some fleets next weekend.  However, as you noted, pure long range harpoon spam has issues finishing off ships.  Now imagine trying to finish off an opposing fleet where every ship is moving at 160 or more speed (i.e. a typical SO destroyer), before your harpoons run out.

[Thaago]

Oh, the speed thing! As a semi-related addendum, it took me quite a while to get ECCM running on my BMII try, and the difference in effectiveness is massive. I had some instances where without the fighters (talons in my case, no gladius to be found) I would have been in deep trouble because of several hounds (random SO variants) that could kite away from non-boosted harpoons with ease. Truly a required hullmod for the spam to be effective against frigates.

[Tranquility]

I will say that I find it amusing to see Buffalo Mk. II's and their Harpoon/Gladii spam wiping the floor against much stronger fleets, especially given how easy these converted freighters are to acquire in the early game. That said, I think what puts a damper on this fleet composition are the fuel and crew costs, with the 2 fuel/LY and 40 + 40 + 20 required crew making Buffalos very costly at any given DP (e.g. for 40 DP, 10 Buffalos is 20 fuel/LY and 1000 crew, whereas 4 Hammerheads is 8 fuel/LY and 200 crew). Although Buffalos definitely look worth it from a bounty-hunting perspective (by being able to quickly take on high-value bounties in less time and effort), I feel their high logistics costs would impede their use in early-game exploration and smuggling, where fights are likely either trivial (via Derelict drones) or avoided altogether (e.g. not getting caught out by patrols, scavengers, or Remnants). Since my prefered early-game strategy is to rush the Galatia questline and explore for loot and colony candidates, and my piloting skill is good enough to carry most early-game battles, I mainly stick to using frigates due to their 10 burn speed, lower sensor profile, and cheaper logistics.

...

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...!)

...

Currently, I am running a SO, 3x Heavy Blaster Hyperion fleet with Officer Training and Support Doctrine (so 9 officered Hyperions, including myself; 7 unofficered Hyperions; and 4 unofficered Afflictor (P)'s) for my second vanilla playthrough. While I am overall impressed with their ability to clear most fleets with little micromanagement, I still think they're a little overrated.

First, even with Reckless personality and Full Assault, I found that Hyperions are just subpar at staying on-target since they often unnecessarily teleport or run away from their targets. Therefore, they spend a significant amount of their time loitering around, dodging missiles, or shooting down fighters - all of which aren't exactly productive when it comes to killing enemy ships. Consequently, battles still took a while to finish. When I tested my Hyperion fleet with DCR enabled, battle times against a double Ordo were somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 seconds - nowhere near the 172 seconds reported by DCR in Vanshilar's 3 minute double Ordo showcase. Yes, mercenary officers could be used here to improve the battle times, but, given the outsized impact of officers on bonus XP calculations, the advantage these officers could provide is probably not worth the trouble of going through officer RNG and constant skill respecs.

Second, their limited CR time and high CR deploy cost means Hyperions are ill-suited for multi-fleet or back-to-back fights - a double Ordo, for example, often ends with Hyperions veering around 40-50% CR, which then goes down to unusuable CR in the aftermath. For farming purposes, this means Hyperions are basically incapable of doing consecutive double Ordos without either waiting several in-game days or docking at a port to repair the Hyperions back to full strength. As such, I'm pretty sure typical Ordo-farming fleets like capspam or missile/ballistic spam are more suitable for repeated Ordo grinding.

Lastly, Hyperions still struggle against DEM-heavy fleets and heavy Low-Tech fleets from Persean League and Hegemony crisis fleets, respectively. In those cases, I was forced to carry with my Hyperion flagship against either faction (the Hyperions could not deal with the carriers and armored bricks fast enough before falling to attrition) and, in the PL's case, had to isolate the Grand Armada by itself just to have a fighting chance. Meanwhile, the Onslaught capspam I ran on my first playthrough easily took on - and won - multi-fleet battles against either faction without needing any flagship support at all.

Ultimately, I'd say, in terms of double-Ordo-capable fleet compositions, the only apparent advantages of SO Hyperion spam are their incredible ease of use and their frigate-level logistics and sensor profile (if you ignore the supply maintenance costs, that is). Otherwise, any other double-Ordo-capable fleet composition would scale better against most end-game fights and are more flexible against any enemy fleet compositions.

[Vanshilar]

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?

That's a good question. It's a bit involved to try to model the resource consumption, since there are multiple parts to it. You have the supply and crew salary cost which is on a per day (or per month) basis. You have fuel cost which is only while in hyperspace and is on a per light year basis. So if you're traveling more, naturally your fuel cost is higher, but if you're spending more of your time within a system, then your supply/salary cost is higher. And if you're fighting, you have to consider the supplies for deployment, and possibly crew loss as well.

Then there's also that the bigger your fleet, the less XP bonus you get and the slower you level, so there's an incentive to keep it small (even aside from the supply/salary/fuel cost). Also, there's the actual human player time to consider as well. So there are multiple quantities which the player is trying to maximize or minimize.

There isn't a single formula for all this since each player has their own preferences for what they consider important. However, we can take an example using the level 4 Sindrian Diktat deserter bounty. For that one, my fleet was 2 Shepherds, a Valkyrie, a Wolf, a Hammerhead, a Falcon (P), and 7 Buffalo2's, with some d-mods sprinkled in the fleet. The bounty was 5.4 light years away from my staging area (Salamanca in Yma). I had 885 crew even though the fleet only needed 785 crew. Based on this fleet:

* The bounty was 153k credits.
* I gained 222 supplies, 221 fuel, 33 heavy machinery, 347 metal, and 14225 credit's worth of weapons from the fight (including salvaging the debris), plus 7554 credits from the fight itself.
* It took 9 days one-way to reach the fleet from my starting point (and presumably the same on the way back), consuming 24 supplies and 168 fuel, so that's 48 supplies and 336 fuel in total. The total salary cost for the 18 days would be 5310 credits (assuming 30-day months).
* The cost to recover after the battle was 44 supplies (thanks to d-mods).
* So, my total expenditures was 92 supplies, 336 fuel, and 5310 credits.
* Thus, my net for this bounty was +130 supplies, -115 fuel, +33 heavy machinery, +347 metal, +14225 credits' worth of weapons, and +155244 credits (bounty + fight - salary), along with +319322 XP (which includes the SP bonus).

Out of that, the 115 fuel at 25 credits a pop amounts to 2875 credits. Considering that the extra supplies etc. that I gained could be sold at nearby Qaras (which has a shortage of them) would net me an overall total of over 200k credits gained for the bounty, the ~3k in fuel cost is pretty much negligible. While it means you do have to pay more attention to fuel than otherwise, the actual cost is fairly low. Overall my total expenditures in upkeep amounted to around 23k credits when I pulled in over 200k credits. Even if you add in an extra Phaeton or whatever the upkeep is still going to be small compared with what you take in.

Maybe one might think the upkeep is still too high. Well, if you work out the math for the upkeep (supplies + crew salary + fuel cost) of other ships, even if you assume the Buffalo2 is using Converted Hangar and Militarized Subsystems (so, 100 crew), then from the time vs DP graph, if you put in any other ship with the same upkeep, you will end up with either a longer battle time (which also means increased chance of one of your ships dying), or less XP gained, or both. Given that credits are much easier to come by than XP or player time, I think the upkeep is the least important thing to worry about when it means more XP and faster (and easier) battles.

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!).

Yeah part of the impetus for doing this testing is to investigate just where the point of catastrophic failure is, since it's more relevant for a missile-based fleet than other fleets. The goal is to find the time vs DP graph for multiple fleets to get an idea of just how big a Buffalo2 fleet you'd need to handle each enemy fleet, as guidance for whether or not the player should go after a given enemy fleet.

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.

Funny thing, later on, I always put High Resolution Sensors on my Atlases for the extra sight range in the campaign. Don't know if it's just me.

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.

This will almost certainly be to use Support Doctrine while you're fighting regular faction fleets, then when you're getting ready to take on [REDACTED], get some officers, keep them at level 1 while they gain enough XP to max out their levels (to whatever you want), then level them up all at once as you switch to your [REDACTED]-farming fleet.

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 -

That's only if 6 * the biggest ship's DP is bigger than your fleet's DP. This basically only applies if you're using ships like [BROCCOLI REDACTED] or Paragon or something, otherwise your fleet's normal DP is bigger and is the one that gets applied. This was meant to tank the XP gain of players who tried to solo the game in a big "hero ship". A bit unnecessary since even those ships perform better if there are little ships around them helping out.

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.

If you're relying on faction fleets, you'll likely have to pull in multiple fleets. Faction fleets, at least in terms of bounties in 0.95.1a (I haven't catalogued them in more recent versions), only got up to around 500-750 DP in terms of the XP bonus calculations. Divide that by 6 for +500% XP bonus and it mean your fleet's DP for the XP bonus would need to be around 83-125 DP. Your player character always counts, so once you are at level 15 you'd have to subtract 63.75 DP from that. This leaves very little DP for ships and almost certainly means no officers.

Hence Ordos fleets are generally your best bet for XP gain, since they average around 1100 DP for XP bonus purposes, so you have 183 DP to work with or 367 DP if you're going after double Ordos.

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.

Along with Omens, I've thought about Dooms using purely mines, which is basically the same idea. Never really took the time to test them out though, especially under AI control. The calculations don't round until near the end, as far as I'm aware, so they would be worth 1.5 DP for XP bonus purposes as long as they have no weapons.

D-mods also make the ships cheaper in XP DP, so that's an advantage that the Buffalo2 has, since a lot of d-mods don't really affect its combat potential.

I'm not sure which is fastest to get yourself + 10 officers to maximum levels and was just curious.

The officer(s) that join you in battle get the same base XP that you do, split amongst all of them. So if you get 100k XP, if there's one officer then he gets 100k XP, if there's two officers then each get 50k XP, etc. So it's basically "free" once you want to have officers.

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.

If you're talking about fighting a lot of Remnant DP, those are actually endurance battles for which SO is not suited. That would be something like the Big game hunting thread by chandl34 which got up to 2349 DP in a single round, or 10 Ordos (3740 DP) over multiple rounds by Sinigr, There are a number of ships and fleets that you can use for them; I never got into that very much except for my 5-Ordos run because I don't have the patience for them. They take a long time to do heh.

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.)

Actually, my 3-minute double Ordos is just this fleet (i.e. going for raw speed, fastest completion time according to Detailed Combat Results), which assumes 240 DP player fleet, level 6 officers, and no restrictions other than no Omega weapons. (Something like mass Resonators and AMSRM/Cryoblasters or something would be kind of unrealistic heh.) So what I ended up with was player-controlled flagship Doom, two Conquests in the middle acting as the main tanks and pincers, Gryphons around them for the Squall/Harpoon spam, and then a couple of LP Brawlers to pick off stragglers so that I don't have to send the main ships after them. Technically "double Ordos" is a bit vague since full Ordos fleets can spawn with all sorts of sizes, from around 300 to around 470 DP each, averaging a bit less than 400 DP. So it's more accurate to say that, assuming 45 seconds of initial travel time before the two fleets meet each other, this fleet can take out 361 DP per minute of Ordos ships (to prevent people from gaming the term "double Ordos" to pick two very small Ordos fleets to fight). If you can beat this rate with an SO fleet, or any other fleet, really, that's be great to see.

I created this fleet using Console Commands; how hard it is to actually acquire this fleet is immaterial. Although, there's nothing special about it that would be hard to get. The Zig is in every playthrough so that's perfectly allowable, but Omega weapons depend on the playthrough and hence I didn't use them.

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.

That's the second link, which is indeed about how to farm Ordos at near +500% XP. It's not the fastest in terms of raw completion time, but it's the fastest in terms of XP gain per minute. I think since then I've also toyed with using Neural Link to get rid of one of the officers for more XP bonus, but also locks me into flagship Onslaught instead of Doom. I've also toyed with level 4 officers instead of level 5 since the 5th skill doesn't really contribute that much to the overall DPS. Since the fleet kills double Ordos (and by extension, nearly everything else) so quickly, another way to get more XP is to kill my ships until they get Unreliable Subsystems, since they got plenty of PPT, and d-mods decrease the XP DP cost of ships. So there are a couple of ways to increase XP gain further that I didn't really touch on but that more or less forms the basis for the fleet.

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,

Well it's for testing purposes so just create it using Console Commands rather than try to get it in a playthrough. When I tested SO Hyperion spam (and others) I just increased the officer limit in settings.json and copied a bunch of officers by editing the save file to not have to deal with mercenaries nor leveling up each officer with the correct skills. The saves that I use for testing are a different set than the saves I use for my actual playthroughs.

though saying that if Derelict Operations was maximized with support doctrine

Derelict Operations *was* one thing that I didn't use, mostly because I don't think it's particularly realistic to get the exact 5 d-mods that affect your ships the least on all your ships in an actual playthrough. I mean it's technically possible but not realistic. It's possible that I can improve on the time using it but I never bothered to try.

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?

Actually one of the things on my list of things to test is Fulgent with Harpoon spam, because it also has a medium energy with coherer so there might be something there to back up the missiles.

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.

Well generally speaking, close assault roles become pretty suicidal past the early game, because the enemy ships will heavily punish any ship that gets into range. You can see even against the 73-DP pirate fleet, the LP Brawler and SO Hyperion took a lot of damage compared with other ships, even though it's just some d-modded pirates. So even though SO doubles flux dissipation, most of that goes into absorbing damage, not dealing damage.

Even worse, since incoming damage is in the form of hard flux, the ship has a limited amount of flux before it fluxes out; flux capacity rather than dissipation starts becoming the limiting factor for SO ships. So you're having to put OP in a lot of different areas to make it work.

Now, the player can certainly do well with SO ships, because the player is much better than the AI at battlefield positioning and gauging when to take damage on shields versus armor/hull. But once it gets to how good SO is in the hands of the player, then the proper comparison is with other ships that the player could use, and in that case, I'd say it's phase ships and certain other ships (like the Onslaught) that perform the best.

Anyway, though, if you're able to make SO perform well against double Ordos, or any other enemy, really, I'd like to see it.

I'm amused that the best fighter is one you've got to have Ordos on farm for in order to have sufficient numbers on your Buffalo.

Yeah, me too although that was against the d-modded pirates. Against the SD test fleet (and probably every other fleet from there on out) the anti-shield fighters i.e. Gladius, Broadsword, Thunder have performed better, probably because the enemy fleets have more shields to go through. Gladius is the cheapest and it has IR Pulse Laser (high delay) for a bit of weak anti-hull damage so it has tended to work the best.

So, do buffalos do enough damage to reduce enemy ship count enough they can clean up at the end against hand designed player ships expecting missile and fighter spam?

Yeah I figure offhandedly a good counter to Buffalo2 Harpoon spam with be Enforcers with 4 (Dual) Flaks, a Heavy Mauler, and 4 Harpoons of their own. But then that raises other issues. It's probably good against Harpoon spam but not much else, so it'd likely lose to something else. But that something else would likely lose to Harpoon spam. So you end up with the tournament winner being based more on just how the fleets were seeded initially, i.e. luck, as opposed to the knowledge and skill of the players in setting up their fleets. So it ends up not being a good way to "measure" how good players are at crafting their fleets, especially when there are fleets which are "all or nothing" like Buffalo2 Harpoon spam, when it really comes down to luck.

A couple of other ships could possibly do well in terms of missile spam. The Venture actually does pretty well, because Fast Missile Racks really puts a lot of Harpoons out on the field quickly, as does the Falcon (P), and Gryphon obviously. I think it'd really depend on what the tournament rules are. Don't think I'd have the time to look into it though.

Oh, the speed thing! As a semi-related addendum, it took me quite a while to get ECCM running on my BMII try, and the difference in effectiveness is massive. I had some instances where without the fighters (talons in my case, no gladius to be found) I would have been in deep trouble because of several hounds (random SO variants) that could kite away from non-boosted harpoons with ease. Truly a required hullmod for the spam to be effective against frigates.

Huh I didn't notice, but I got it in June in the first playthrough and May in the second one, so I got it fairly quickly so it didn't matter. On the other hand, since I pilot a Wolf I probably just hunted down any stray frigates myself anyway so it didn't matter too much.

I will say that I find it amusing to see Buffalo Mk. II's and their Harpoon/Gladii spam wiping the floor against much stronger fleets, especially given how easy these converted freighters are to acquire in the early game. That said, I think what puts a damper on this fleet composition are the fuel and crew costs, with the 2 fuel/LY and 40 + 40 + 20 required crew making Buffalos very costly at any given DP (e.g. for 40 DP, 10 Buffalos is 20 fuel/LY and 1000 crew, whereas 4 Hammerheads is 8 fuel/LY and 200 crew).

Perhaps 40 DP of Buffalo2's has a higher upkeep than 40 DP of Hammerheads, but if 40 DP of Buffalo2's can do more, then you can use less Buffalo2's to do the same thing as the Hammerheads, making the upkeep lower. The upkeep of ships should be compared based on equal capability, not equal DP. From the completion time vs DP graph, thus far the Buffalo2 is the furthest bottom and left out of all ships thus far tested, meaning that less DP of them can finish the enemy fleet in less time than others, so less DP of them should be used comparison with other ships. I haven't tested Hammerheads yet though, although I don't really have any particular instinct as to what build might work the best for them in the early game.

[PixiCode]

If you're talking about fighting a lot of Remnant DP, those are actually endurance battles for which SO is not suited. That would be something like the Big game hunting thread by chandl34 which got up to 2349 DP in a single round, or 10 Ordos (3740 DP) over multiple rounds by Sinigr, There are a number of ships and fleets that you can use for them; I never got into that very much except for my 5-Ordos run because I don't have the patience for them. They take a long time to do heh.

Hehe ye that’s about what I meant, though I’m familiar with 240 combat DP deployed in 1 battle. Thanks for reminding me there’s also clears that use more than 240 DP, I always forget u.u

the highest 0.97 clear with that set I’ve seen was around 2,300 DP. iirc in 0.95 SO Hyperion spam used to be capable of that (as well as a few other builds) but the delicate machinery nerf and the introduction of apex have kinda countered that strategy. Despite being an endurance test, they were just able to kill so fast back then that they outpaced their ppt running down. A lot of the other 0.95 240 DP builds got nerfed by nova and the EBC buffs. Radiant builds might surpass onslaught XIV too, I know scc got close to or even surpassed that with a 240 radiant neural link setup. Onslaughts compete so hard because of the new storm needler working so well on onslaught against remnant. Though after seeing the Sinigr run I suppose I can add another 240 DP clear on. I feel like reality disruptor hard carried that though, curious if it can get past 2,300 DP without any omega stuff. Still, that's very impressive! Really, it was very high synergy idea using HSA Tachyon paragon buddies to pair with a Reality Disruptor, making it impossible for any Remnant to escape the short range beams.

Then there’s another person I know who does 3,600 DP record of ordo all in one battle which includes sending in a wave of 16 SO hyperions then a wave of XIV onslaughts, he has the battle log screenshot of the win though doesn’t post videos or many details who knows. Says it’s 16 so hyperion, then 6 xiv onslaught.  The other one I mentioned earlier had a video though, so I just refer to that. It’s my specialty of 240 DP max anyway so I’m more comfortable with it hehe

Really, it’s 100% possible to make a closer range attack fleet that doesn’t use SO and isn’t ‘suicidal’. Medusas, auroras, omens, scarabs, technically Hyperion (not SO) but I haven’t tried using those yet, Shades, Afflictors, Hammerheads, Sunders, all to varying effectiveness (medusa and aurora fare the best) but SO is better than all of them neither are ‘meta’ or whatever, but I’m sad SO makes every ship boil down to spamming the same exact weapons because the huge flux dissipation makes the same build on every ship the best way, and it also precludes using certain fleet strategies due to the PPT constraints. Also, SO does make a ship deal bigger damage indirectly, because you have much higher flux dissipation to shoot more weapons, either things that cost high flux or just more weapon uptime overall. In the context of a fleet consisting of many close range ships,when you use SO either always in their face or you’re playing wrong since ppt is typically the limit, and if you’re not using SO that’s also ‘wrong’ since it’s not as strong most of the time. This isn’t a set rule though, and I’m just complaining because I think SO Is lame basically, hehe.

Anyway I’ll start testing a SO-centric fleet and get an answer for you on what times I get. I say SO centric because there’s a chance I may use a little DP of ships that are not SO, such as phase ships with phase anchor without SO, or even a retribution. What limits should I use? I assume no Omega weapons and no Zig. I'll probably post my results in a new thread so that it doesn't derail this one too much, unless you'd prefer it to be posted here or somewhere specific, then I can post that somewhere specific, instead. So far, I've managed to kill 791 DP of ordos using 14 SO Hyperions, 1 LP Brawler, 1 Harbinger and 1 Afflictor P in 4.4 minutes, in my very first rough attempt and I have a lot more tests to go, like reducing it to 400 DP so that it's a more accurate test of speed of 'small' ordo battles.  though I was phased a lot so I do not know if the phasing is counting that time. Need to work at the strategy a bit more to see how it works.

[Thaago]

...

That's only if 6 * the biggest ship's DP is bigger than your fleet's DP. This basically only applies if you're using ships like [BROCCOLI REDACTED] or Paragon or something, otherwise your fleet's normal DP is bigger and is the one that gets applied. This was meant to tank the XP gain of players who tried to solo the game in a big "hero ship". A bit unnecessary since even those ships perform better if there are little ships around them helping out.

...

Oh wow, I never knew that! I think I probably run into this all the time and didn't know it, as I often will be using something like a destroyer + a few frigates with 1 low level officer in early game, and the destroyer's 60 is bigger (or if I'm in a Harbinger, 108).

If you have the time, do you think you could write up a post detailing the experience calculation? I think you might be the person with the best understanding of it, and I'd like to add it to the wiki so that it becomes community knowledge.

[PixiCode]

Oh wow, I never knew that! I think I probably run into this all the time and didn't know it, as I often will be using something like a destroyer + a few frigates with 1 low level officer in early game, and the destroyer's 60 is bigger.

If you have the time, do you think you could write up a post detailing the experience calculation? I think you might be the person with the best understanding of it, and I'd like to add it to the wiki so that it becomes community knowledge.

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=26566.0

Tada, he’s ahead of you hehe.

[Thaago]

My search-fu is weak, weak! Thank you for the link.

[Edit] I've edited and added the details to this page here: https://starsector.wiki.gg/wiki/Experience

[AttitudeJacket]

Is there a TLDR of all of this? Buffalo mk2 good?

[PixiCode]

Is there a TLDR of all of this? Buffalo mk2 good?

Abridged version is;

Harpoon spam is early game king. You don’t even need officers to make it work.

Buffalo2 is the most DP efficient way to get many harpoons on the battlefield in the early game, and also possibly the easiest thing to acquire many of.

You can use it to fast track to level 15 and generally kill high paying bounties while you explore.

[Vanshilar]

Hehe ye that’s about what I meant, though I’m familiar with 240 combat DP deployed in 1 battle. Thanks for reminding me there’s also clears that use more than 240 DP, I always forget u.u

Yeah I suppose to a certain extent I don't think it's as noteworthy if the player fleet isn't restricted in size. I mean if the player uses say 1000 DP to kill 3000 DP I don't find that as interesting as using 240 DP to kill 1200 DP.

the highest 0.97 clear with that set I’ve seen was around 2,300 DP. iirc in 0.95 SO Hyperion spam used to be capable of that (as well as a few other builds) but the delicate machinery nerf and the introduction of apex have kinda countered that strategy.

I'm not aware of any Hyperion runs that could kill that many, although it was probably possible. Instead it was stuff like this in 0.95.1a where 9 (modded) Hyperions killed 1131 DP's worth of Ordos in 621 seconds (battle size decreased to compensate). One might be tempted to say that means 16 Hyperions could kill the same amount in about half the time, but no -- one of the Hyperions was player-piloted and did about 1/3 of the total damage, so adding more Hyperions wouldn't increase the damage by as much as that implies (not to mention, would mean a bigger battle size where the player's impact is smaller), and it was a modded run.

Then there’s another person I know who does 3,600 DP record of ordo all in one battle which includes sending in a wave of 16 SO hyperions then a wave of XIV onslaughts, he has the battle log screenshot of the win though doesn’t post videos or many details who knows. Says it’s 16 so hyperion, then 6 xiv onslaught.  The other one I mentioned earlier had a video though, so I just refer to that. It’s my specialty of 240 DP max anyway so I’m more comfortable with it hehe

Well then that's really two different player fleets, totaling at least 480 DP -- first SO Hyperions (to help capture objectives) and then Onslaughts. It's hard to then disentangle the contributions of each ship since the Onslaughts rely on the Hyperions to encircle the enemy fleets at the beginning (so that they don't get flanked) while the Hyperions rely on the Onslaughts to do a lot of the damage.

Really, it’s 100% possible to make a closer range attack fleet that doesn’t use SO and isn’t ‘suicidal’. Medusas, auroras, omens, scarabs, technically Hyperion (not SO) but I haven’t tried using those yet, Shades, Afflictors, Hammerheads, Sunders, all to varying effectiveness (medusa and aurora fare the best) but SO is better than all of them neither are ‘meta’ or whatever, but I’m sad SO makes every ship boil down to spamming the same exact weapons because the huge flux dissipation makes the same build on every ship the best way, and it also precludes using certain fleet strategies due to the PPT constraints.

Sure, you're free to come up with whatever fleet you'd like. I don't buy the "SO means ships use the same weapons" excuse because the other excuse is usually "well if your SO results aren't good then you're not building them right". If SO means players naturally end up using the same weapons, why would players using different (i.e. wrong) weapons be an excuse for why SO doesn't do well in standardized testing? (Note: an actual example build i.e. "this SO build works really well" is never presented, just the claim that it must be because the SO build used for testing wasn't good.)

For at least up through double Ordos, PPT isn't an issue, since the battles are only several minutes long.

Anyway I’ll start testing a SO-centric fleet and get an answer for you on what times I get. I say SO centric because there’s a chance I may use a little DP of ships that are not SO, such as phase ships with phase anchor without SO, or even a retribution. What limits should I use? I assume no Omega weapons and no Zig. I'll probably post my results in a new thread so that it doesn't derail this one too much, unless you'd prefer it to be posted here or somewhere specific, then I can post that somewhere specific, instead.

Sure, you can use whatever fleet you'd like. Sure not all ships need to have SO, it's whatever makes the fleet the most effective; as you can see in my 3-minute double Ordos, the flagship is actually a Doom and there are several LP Brawlers supporting it from the sides, even though those ships are not long range missiles/ballistics. But if you're trying to showcase SO then SO should obviously be a significant part of the fleet. (I do wonder if the 3-minute Ordos time could be beat if I replaced the LP Brawlers with Buffalo2's based on this thread, although I probably won't have time to try it out.)

I think the limits would be:
1. Vanilla obviously, any mods used must not affect actual game mechanics.
2. Max total 240 DP of combat ships deployed (not chain deploying different ships).
3. Vanilla battle limits of max 400 battle size, 30 max ships in fleet, level 15 player character, etc.
4. No Omega weapons. I think it's too hard to set limits on them for testing purposes since their availability varies by playthrough. Maybe that could be revisited in the future (some of my results do change once you allow for Omega weapons) but that's more to prevent degenerate fleets like Buffalo2 spam with mass AMSRMs and Resonators or something.
5. Whatever ship you can get in vanilla is allowed. If you want that Zig, sure. Same with (non-Omega) weapons, hullmods, etc.
6. Generally speaking, no deaths. Though I think that's more of a "any ship that dies contributes 0 DPS for the rest of the fight" thing than an actual requirement. If the fleet is relying on multiple deaths, that's usually not a good sign as to its viability. Again it's more to prevent degenerate fleets than anything else.
7. I generally don't use Derelict Operations, because the chance of actually getting the "right" 5 d-mods for all of the ships in the player's fleet is astronomically small. Also, I'm not convinced that DO is better than CA now anyway.
8. All enemy combat ships must die before you exit the battle. (Should be common sense. However, against non-[REDACTED] the enemy ships will sometimes retreat instead. In my testing I usually count that as a fail i.e. doesn't count if they successfully retreat, and even when the general retreat is called I still chase them down until they all die before exiting the battle to see the battle completion time. The exceptions were the obvious civilian ships like the Drams in the 73-DP pirate fleet.)

I think a lot of this stuff is fairly common sense, if you build it to a different set of requirements then just say so. The goal is to minimize battle completion time as measured by the Detailed Combat Results mod. As I mentioned "double Ordos" can vary significantly in size so I actually look at DP killed per minute, assuming an initial 45 seconds of the fleets moving toward each other before they start hitting each other. (Technically, faster ships like SO Hyperions reach enemy ships within something like 20 seconds of the start of battle, but whatever.)

I usually measure the player fleet against double Ordos, so the total enemy DP will be in the ballpark of (a bit less than) 800 DP. I usually make some effort for the double Ordos that I test against to match the "average" distribution of [REDACTED] fleets, so it'll usually be 2 Radiants, 2 Novae, etc. (the typical Ordos fleet has 1 Radiant and 1 Nova on average). Realistically if you're trying to juice the numbers by picking some fleet(s) with an unusual ship distribution that is particularly weak to the player fleet, it'll be fairly obvious.

It's probably a better fit for its own thread, since it's obviously endgame-focused as opposed to this thread which is about the early game.

So far, I've managed to kill 791 DP of ordos using 14 SO Hyperions, 1 LP Brawler, 1 Harbinger and 1 Afflictor P in 4.4 minutes, in my very first rough attempt and I have a lot more tests to go, like reducing it to 400 DP so that it's a more accurate test of speed of 'small' ordo battles.  though I was phased a lot so I do not know if the phasing is counting that time. Need to work at the strategy a bit more to see how it works.

I count time using the DCR mod, which measures game battle time. As far as I'm aware, it accounts for phase correctly, so phase shouldn't matter.

Oh wow, I never knew that! I think I probably run into this all the time and didn't know it, as I often will be using something like a destroyer + a few frigates with 1 low level officer in early game, and the destroyer's 60 is bigger (or if I'm in a Harbinger, 108).

Hahahahahaha it turns out, I never bothered to account for that in my Buffalo2 playthroughs, whoops. When I got the Hammerhead at Tetra, my fleet's XP DP would've been 31.49, but the Hammerhead's 9 XP DP (1 d-mod) made it into 54. Whoops. That decreased my XP gain by 71%. Also, I forgot that the Shepherds, despite having the Civilian hullmod, do not actually have the CIVILIAN hint in ship_data.csv, meaning they were contributing the full 3 DP to my XP DP, since they had fighters. So I could've easily put Converted Fighter Bay on them to decrease my fleet's XP DP by around 4 or so.

Similarly, the Falcon (P) with 3 d-mods increased my fleet's XP DP from 74.24 to 87.48 due to the 6 * largest ship thing. So I guess it was actually too "early" for me to use it in terms of the XP bonus, i.e. I didn't have enough Buffalo2's nor enough levels and got penalized by the 6 * largest ship thing.

I'll note I'm not really sure I have my head wrapped around the whole "largest ship" formula correctly, even though it's just a = max(a, min(b, c)). I think the min(b, c) really just means the 6 * largest DP thing applies only up to half of the enemy fleet's DP. In other words, if the largest ship is too large (and thus your XP bonus would've decreased below +100% due to the "largest ship" penalty), it'll actually floor it at +100%. So that actually sets a cap on how much the "largest ship" thing can hurt your fleet, i.e. never below +100%, whereas I had stated it the other way around previously.

By the way the list of ships with the CIVILIAN hint (and thus always counts as 1/4 of their DP, regardless of if they have weapons and/or fighters) is:

Mercury
Hermes
Dram
Ox
Mudskipper
Buffalo (not the Buffalo2)
Tarsus
Valkyrie
Phantom
Phaeton
Salvage Rig
Nebula
Starliner
Colossus (not the Colossus2 nor the Colossus3)
Revenant
Atlas (not the Atlas2)
Prometheus (not the Prometheus2)

All other ships only count as 1/4 of their DP if they have no weapons which also means no fighters (hullmods don't matter, and the Civilian hullmod doesn't given them this property either).

The code for this can be found in impl\campaign\FleetEncounterContext.java, via searching for "public float computeBattleDifficulty()" if anyone wants to take a look for themselves, since the conditions I mentioned were incomplete (and they may have changed since then).

Is there a TLDR of all of this? Buffalo mk2 good?

Generally speaking, my posts, no matter the length, have a pretty simple structure, consisting of a claim or position, then testing (including instructions and conditions for conducting that testing) and/or evidence, then results of that testing and how it relates to the claim or position.

In this case PixiCode has already more or less covered it. I'll add though that as of where the conversation is right now, even though the Buffalo2 is more efficient on a per-DP basis, it also has a higher upkeep on a per-DP basis than other ships. So there needs to be more work done to compare the Buffalo2 relative to other early game ships as to whether or not it's cheaper on a per capability basis than other ships. I think it'll still come out ahead, even if you account for the higher upkeep, but that still needs to be demonstrated. Either way it's a fun way to play the early game, and is much faster than the LP Brawler spam that I used to use and posted about previously.

Also...uh...I'm not sure if I would exactly call it as a fast track to level 15, since I think Tranquility has that beat by miles...but more of quickly and easily acquiring a fleet that can handle other enemy fleets.

[Hiruma Kai]

So, do buffalos do enough damage to reduce enemy ship count enough they can clean up at the end against hand designed player ships expecting missile and fighter spam?

Yeah I figure offhandedly a good counter to Buffalo2 Harpoon spam with be Enforcers with 4 (Dual) Flaks, a Heavy Mauler, and 4 Harpoons of their own. But then that raises other issues. It's probably good against Harpoon spam but not much else, so it'd likely lose to something else. But that something else would likely lose to Harpoon spam. So you end up with the tournament winner being based more on just how the fleets were seeded initially, i.e. luck, as opposed to the knowledge and skill of the players in setting up their fleets. So it ends up not being a good way to "measure" how good players are at crafting their fleets, especially when there are fleets which are "all or nothing" like Buffalo2 Harpoon spam, when it really comes down to luck.

I feel like quad Dual Flaks is going to be a bit too much flux usage.  Each of those is 150 flux/second, with the Enforcer capping out at 460 flux dissipation.  I'd probably put on at most 3.  Alternatively, lean into flux dissipation and go Safety Overrides.  For example, somethimg like two Heavy Machine Guns, an Assault Chaingun, and pair of Dual Flak.  Make it effective at actually dealing shield and hull damage to a larger cross section of opponents.   Throw on some really cheap missiles, and call it a day.

There are 2 to 3 ways I know of how to deal with missile spam in a tournament.  One is speed.  Two is a really heavy PD net.  And three is a bit sneaky and specific to tournament AI play, which is sacrificial frigates.

So, since I had some time today, I setup the AI battles mod, and gave myself some ground rules.  120 DP, anything non-limited in vanilla goes (Omega weapons, Ziggurat).  I created 3 Buffalo fleets:

Fleet 1: 30 Buffalo Mk II with steady AI, Harpoon Pod, 3 Harpoon MRMs, Tactical laser, Ion Cannon, 2 Mining lasers (all linked in 1 group), ECCM, Expanded Missile Racks, Missile Autoloader, 4 vents

Fleet 2: 13 Buffallo Mk II with steady AI, Broadsword wing, Harpoon Pod, 3 Harpoon MRMs, Tactical laser, 3 Mining lasers (all linked in 1 group), ECCM, Expanded Missile Racks, Converted Hangar, 4 vents
6 Buffalo Mk II with steady AI, Flash Bomber wing, Harpoon Pod, 3 Harpoon MRMs, Tactical laser, 2 Mining lasers (all linked in 1 group), ECCM, Expanded Missile Racks, Converted Hangar

Fleet 3 (119 out of 120 DP):
17 Buffalo Mk II with steady AI, Flash Bomber wing, Harpoon Pod, 3 Harpoon MRMs, Tactical laser, 2 Mining lasers (all linked in 1 group), ECCM, Expanded Missile Racks, Converted Hangar

And then I picked 3 philosophies to try.
Fleet 4: 15 Tempest with aggressive AI, Pulse Laser, Heavy Burst Laser, Swarmer SRM (all separate), Extended Shields, Integrated PD AI, Defensive Targeting array

Fleet 5: 12 Enforcers with reckless AI, Assault Chaingun, 2 Heavy Machine guns, 2 Dual Flak, 4 single Atropos (missiles linked in pairs of 2), safety overrides, 20 vents, 2 caps
2 Omens with steady AI, IR Pulse Laser, Ion cannon, Safety Overrides, Hardened Subsystem, 9 caps

Fleet 6: 3 Onslaughts with aggressive AI, 2 Thermal Pulse Cannon, 3 Devastator, 9 Flak, 6 dual light machine guns, 4 Proximity charge launchers, IPDAI, ITU,  Shield Conversion - Omni, Resistant Flux Conduits, Hardened Shields, Armored Weapon Mounts, Auxilliary Thrusters

Running each of the Buffalo fleets up against each of these fleets twice resulted in the following end results (I just launched and left the computer, and just checked the result at the end):

Fleet 1 beat fleet 4, losing only 6 Bufflaos, and 0 Buffalos
Fleet 2 lost to fleet 4, with fleet 4 only losing 2 Tempests and then 3 Tempests
Fleet 3 lost to fleet 4, with fleet 4 only losing 4 and then 2 Tempests

Fleet 1 lost to fleet 5, with fleet 5 losing 9 Enforcers the first time, and losing 1 Omen and 8 Enforcers the second
Fleet 2 lost to fleet 5, with fleet 5 losing 3 Enforcers the first time, and 7 the second time
Fleet 3 lost to fleet 5, with fleet 5 losing 3 Enforcers and 4 Enforcers.

Fleet 1 lost to fleet 6, with fleet 6 losing 1 Onlsaught, and then 2 Onslaught
Fleet 2 lost to fleet 6 with fleet 6 losing 1 Onslaught both times
Fleet 3 lost to fleet 6 with fleet 6 losing 1 Onslaught, and then 2 Onslaught (and the last Onslaught with only like 10% hull left)

Watching a few of the rounds, I definitely see room for improvements on the non-Buffalo side.  While the Onslaught fleet was losing large fractions of its value, if I switched it up to 6 Omens and 2 Onslaughts (and only bringing 116 DP), repeating one fight each resulted in 1-2 omens going down rather than 1-2 Onslaughts, which in a tournament setting is going to be a much stronger record.  Plus it'll handle non-missile wide fleets much better, with omens naturally escorting Onslaughts, and excess distracting things.  And the Onslaught's Thermal Pulse cannons keep it relevant against a fairly large cross section of opponents, despite everything else dedicated to point defense.

I'll note I've seen players much better at crafting fleets than me, reliably get very far or win tournaments multiple times.  It does come down to a bit of luck, especially under all AI control, but the key is to be just good enough against a wide variety of fleets.  You don't need 100% remaining fleet vs 0% wins against one type of fleet, you just need 10% vs 0% wins against everyone.  There is further tournament specific skills like knowing what little tweaks you can do (first strike missiles linked to PD or is closer missles?, which guns to link where), how various AI choices work (steady vs aggressive vs reckless), and how you do your initial setup, as well as distraction ships.

However, this is admittedly not very relevant to early game campaign play.

[Thaago]

I'm doing a civilian run (because I am scatterbrained and restart too often :p) and gave this one more shot, but I just can't recommend this as a general early game strategy:

While I got 2 BMII's from an early pirate fleet in good condition, and found a bunch more for sale, I cannot find any harpoons! Either small or medium. I checked 17 (yes, really, 17) markets, found a few 2-shot small harpoons and tried to use them, but then just sold the BMII's as not worth it. I found missile autoloader in those 17 markets, but no expanded missile racks, ECCM, converted hangars, or any Gladii (bought a few talons, but could never use them).

Without console commands to do instant location commands for weapons/hullmods, I just can't use this strategy effectively. Regular ships can be used with basically any weapons/hullmods, but these are very specific and that's just a dealbreaker. All this time searching for parts could have been doing bounties and getting normal ships.

[PixiCode]

I'm not aware of any Hyperion runs that could kill that many...

So I tried looking back to find screenshots from the person who REALLY went crazy limit testing Hyperions in 0.95, but I think I basically just gaslit myself into thinking they cleared more than in the past. Sorry for the inconvenience. I swore it cleared up to 2,000 before, but I never got into personally grinding against Remnant.

Also, just because something isn't the literal fastest doesn't mean it isn't a fast way to get to level 15. I just meant that since it requires no officers, you can get yourself to level 15 pretty fast. Overall less effort/skill required too - and I mean that in a 100% positive light. Piloting phase ships to kill star forts is not easy unless you practice at it, especially if you go for a true ironman sort of playthrough.

[Vanshilar]

Watching a few of the rounds, I definitely see room for improvements on the non-Buffalo side.  While the Onslaught fleet was losing large fractions of its value, if I switched it up to 6 Omens and 2 Onslaughts (and only bringing 116 DP), repeating one fight each resulted in 1-2 omens going down rather than 1-2 Onslaughts, which in a tournament setting is going to be a much stronger record.

Yeah by the same token for tournament play it'd probably be better to have something out in front to complement Buffalo2 Harpoon spam, maybe Monitors or anti-shield or something (no idea what's popular in tournaments), since Harpoon spam is overly anti-armor/hull and not enough anti-shield. Buffalo2 are the best per DP of putting Harpoons out in the field (though I think Venture is the quickest at putting them out due to Fast Missile Racks) but it needs to be complemented by something anti-shield and something that can tank damage, in order for the Buffalo2 to stay alive long enough to put all those Harpoons out.

Then there would be some counter to that, followed by the counter of that counter, and so forth. I never got into tournaments because it's really just trying to hit an always-moving target (or more accurately, finding a fleet that maximizes the chances across multiple different targets) so it's difficult to tell if you actually found something "good" or if it just happens to be something that worked well against whoever else just happened to show up, or that particular tournament's fight order or rules, etc. In other words it's harder to make a more general assessment of things.

While I got 2 BMII's from an early pirate fleet in good condition, and found a bunch more for sale, I cannot find any harpoons! Either small or medium. I checked 17 (yes, really, 17) markets, found a few 2-shot small harpoons and tried to use them, but then just sold the BMII's as not worth it. I found missile autoloader in those 17 markets, but no expanded missile racks, ECCM, converted hangars, or any Gladii (bought a few talons, but could never use them).

Huh which markets did you tend to look at? I generally stayed on the east part of the map and had no trouble finding Buffalo2's nor Harpoons in both my playthroughs. Looking through the saves for the second playthrough, for example by May 31 (when I went for the Alpha cache) I had 6 Buffalo2, each with a Harpoon Pod and 3 Harpoon MRM's, my flagship Wolf and a Hammerhead each with 2 Harpoon MRMs, a Falcon (P) with 4 Harpoon Pods and 2 Harpoon MRMs, as well as an additional 16 Harpoon MRM's in inventory. I actually found the biggest bottleneck was having enough credits, since I was going with a "no getting money from trading nor missions" run; I had to skip out on getting Buffalo2's or Harpoons several times due to lack of credits. I basically traveled from Galatia then northwest toward Askonia then northeast toward Alpha site then stopped at Yma before going to the SD bounty fleet, stopping at the markets along the way. I didn't count up how many markets I went by though.

I haven't looked at what determines what ships/weapons/hullmods get sold at each market, i.e. where you should go to maximize the probability of finding whatever you're looking for. That'd probably be useful information for playthroughs like this where you're looking for certain things. Askonia seemed to have good stuff generally. I did find that Harpoons, like probably most weapons, were kind of "bursty": they get sold in bunches, so you'd only have a few, then you'd have a bunch, etc. Also, the Buffalo2 spam does work with other missiles, just that Harpoons are the most effective and so my analysis was based around that. But when getting started I used whatever I could find, keeping in mind that my fleet is fronted by me in a Wolf as well as a Hammerhead, so it wasn't purely Buffalo2 spam.

In the event that it depends on map seed (although I don't see why it would), my map seed is MN-3938223558644461179. It should be vanilla (no mods that affect world generation) and I did the Wolf start with Shepherd, Normal, skipped tutorial. As a check for whether or not the same world got generated:

Spoiler

The Alpha site is guarded by 2 Alpha Core Fulgents, and the loot should be a Resonator, Rift Beam, 2 AMSRM, and 2 Rift Lance.

[close]

Generating a fresh game using that seed, and just using Console Commands to travel to each market roughly retracing how I did the second playthrough, ignoring the military submarkets, what I got was:

Code

Market	Buf2	HarPod	HarMRM	Har-dou	Hullmod
Jangala				4	
Asharu			4	5	MA
Garnir			1	4	EMR
Derink			1		
Ancyra				12	MA
Cruor		7		3	EMR
Volturn	1			5	
Sindria	1	2			
Nortia		5		8	
Umbra			3		
Skathi			6	22	EMR
Raesv		3	6		
Ragnar				5	
Eochu				4	
Culann	1		1	29	
Cethlen				1	
Donn				11	
Total	3	17	22	113	

So at least that path to the Alpha site seems to have a good number of Harpoons. At the very beginning I would also use several others like Swarmers, Jackhammers, etc. Obviously there would be additional ones from battles, and obviously it would vary from run to run. I also came across EMR and MA several times, though I forgot to check for ECCM so not sure if I came across it when I was looking at the different markets.

(There's probably a better way to figure this out, maybe using finditem and forcemarketupdate or something.)

So I tried looking back to find screenshots from the person who REALLY went crazy limit testing Hyperions in 0.95, but I think I basically just gaslit myself into thinking they cleared more than in the past. Sorry for the inconvenience. I swore it cleared up to 2,000 before, but I never got into personally grinding against Remnant.

Well it was probably possible, since ships can last a long time before CR really takes a toll, even with SO. Even if it were, though, there's also the issue of whether or not it's an effective way to do so -- i.e. whether or not the fleet can kill enemy ships at a reasonably good rate relative to other ships.

Also, just because something isn't the literal fastest doesn't mean it isn't a fast way to get to level 15. I just meant that since it requires no officers, you can get yourself to level 15 pretty fast. Overall less effort/skill required too - and I mean that in a 100% positive light. Piloting phase ships to kill star forts is not easy unless you practice at it, especially if you go for a true ironman sort of playthrough.

Yeah each playthrough is basically looking to optimize different things. Phase frigates against Star Fortresses is to reach level 15 in minimum playing time (and likely game time). Buffalo2 spam is more looking to develop a fairly XP-efficient (no officer) fleet that can easily kill enemy fleets. A lot of the testing is assuming no player-controlled flagship, but the fleet is much improved with a flagship and with a couple of anti-shield ships in front. The playthroughs to test this were sort of a maximin scenario, i.e. what's the best that can be done even with significant restrictions (no income from trading, etc.). In an "actual" playthrough I'd go ahead and do some light trading and stuff to make credits quickly to get a bigger fleet more quickly (and trading is probably the fastest way to make credits). So each have their own strengths and weaknesses, depending on what the goal is and what the conditions/restrictions are.

I think it might be interesting to take the Buffalo2 spam fleet and augment it with the phase frigate flagship thing. I mean against a Star Fortress there's no reason I can't have the Buffalo2's tag along; if you drag enough enemy ships in it'd be +500% XP anyway, and as a bonus, the Buffalo2's can probably kill the enemy ships after I finish off the Star Fortress if I want, even though it's slower than just doing the Star Fortress by itself. Add in some light trading and missions to deal with any credit issues and it should be a pretty quick way to get a strong fleet early on.