The first and weakest reason I have is that the speed of completing a battle isn’t the only metric possible to grade the quality of a ship. I’m ignoring the idea of sub-240 DP for this not because I think that’s ‘wrong’ or ‘right,’ it just makes grading things simpler. There’s ease of setting up the strategy, the ease of executing the battle with minimal losses, the speed of completing the battle and the endurance/total ships it can destroy.
There are so many problems with this. First, other than the 3rd one, what does any of this have to do with "How do I kill capitals and cruisers quickly and efficiently?" which is what I was responding to? The subject here is whether or not capital spam is the fastest way to kill capitals and cruisers and you're bringing in some vague "quality" metric of a ship. Second, there's no particularly intricate strategy here -- as seen in my videos, I basically spread my ships out in a line, surround the enemy fleet in a U-shaped formation, and then gradually work my way up to the spawn point and/or until the enemy fleet is dead. This isn't rocket science. I'm talking about a simple, single metric and you're bringing in all sorts of other metrics which you make no effort to actually provide any information about. How do you propose to measure or evaluate "ease of setting up a strategy" or "endurance/total ships it can destroy?"
The ease of execution requires piloting a Doom - easy for you and me, but not everyone may manage that or even enjoy that,
No, I don't buy this logic, for multiple reasons. First, arguing that results are "only because the player is using ship X" is a bad path to go down in terms of discussion, because that can be said of
any testing or battle comparison, unless the player is testing a no-player flagship fight, which is demonstrably worse than one where the player pilots a ship. As soon as we go down that path, then
no testing result can be extrapolated beyond the test itself, if it can be invalidated by someone making that claim. If you don't buy this, then state a testing methodology that is simultaneously immune to someone saying "it's only because the player is using ship X" and also immune to "well no player flagship was used so we already know the results are suboptimal and not that relevant."
Second, how I use the Doom is fairly straightforward to do and doesn't require that much practice for any reasonably competent player, i.e. one that's expecting to fight the most difficult content currently available in the game.
Third, I don't pilot the Doom particularly well; I make mistakes in pretty much every fight, obvious in my videos, and the fleet as a whole (as well as my testing times) needs to be forgiving enough to account for that. I don't bother to try to practice for split-second timing or perfect placement or whatever, I'm more interested in fleet composition and so forth. I'm pretty sure that a better player could easily post better times than me.
Fourth, regardless of the player flagship, the point is that the same testing methodology is used regardless of which ship is being tested. So all of them will benefit more or less the same.
and I don’t know if you ever tested the endurance of the fleet.
Why would I bother, especially when high-endurance fleets tend to have pretty slow rates of killing enemy ships?
I’d say it wins as best for practical campaign use, but I’m not sure it wins in raw power (endurance). That’s probably good enough to call it the best for most people. But since it’s a single player game the ‘meta’ needs to have what the goal is established
So you're arguing for people to consider the endurance of a player fleet, and yet you admit that it's less practical. Then why is it a useful metric, i.e. why should somebody care about it? You have to go through some contortions to get more than 3 Ordos to attack you at once in the first place, so triple Ordos is already the realistic limit that any player fleet has to be able to do. I do double Ordos because I already get pretty close to +500% XP bonus at double Ordos, so I don't see much reason to bother with triple Ordos. To me, how a fleet performs against double Ordos is the most useful to know.
The second reason I disagree is that the Doom is player piloted.
Doesn't matter here, the player-piloted Doom is being used for all ships being tested. I'm not using the Doom as an exemplar of a cruiser, I'm using it as the flagship for the fleet alongside whatever ship is being tested.
The third reason I disagree is that the Gryphon is a missile ship. Missiles inherently ignore allied collision, again ignoring the big weakness that Cruisers have that hold them back. Heron and Mora do too but carriers got other issues hehe. FalconP also fits this bill but isn’t the Gryphon so I guess it isn’t spoken about as much nowadays.
Gryphon is used here on the flanks (to capture the objectives) and as reinforcements. I ended up using them for flankers for testing because frigates have too many issues with the
Eliminate bug where ordering them to Eliminate will sometimes make them back away from the target ship, thus messing up the test and I have to start the battle over.
The reinforcements come in over halfway through, i.e. despite being 17% of the DP, they only do around 5-10% of the total damage because they come in late. They're a minor contributor to the fight.
Meanwhile Falcon, Eagle, Eradicator, Dominator, Apogee, Fury, they all have that key issue I mentioned earlier and that’s the cruisers most people mean when they talk about cruisers. Aurora almost fits this, but it’s a really expensive ship with good stats for its DP so it suffers that issue less than these other cruisers.
People keep making these claims. As I said, I haven't seen anyone give any evidence of it. And I'm not seeing it in my testing. I do make use of Rally Civilian Craft which keeps them in formation better but I tend to do that regardless of ship nowadays because the leash range for the other commands are just so obnoxiously large as to be pretty much worthless.
With all the above in mind, I’d argue your 3 onslaughts vs 5 dominators comparison is just that - 5 dominators and 3 onslaughts.
Yes, that's exactly what I said, to wit:
Testing flagship Doom + 2 Gryphons on the flanks + ships being tested in the middle + 2 Gryphons as additional deploy, against double Ordos
(emphasis added.)
The player fleet formation is that the flagship Doom is in front somewhere (moving back and forth among the enemy ships basically, occasionally backing off to vent), a Gryphon is on the left end and a Gryphon is on the right end, and whatever ship is being tested is in the middle spread out in a line. Then I grab the objectives, 2 more Gryphons are deployed. So this is specifically testing how well the ship performs when it's making up the middle core of the fleet.
And the results thus far are that cruisers are fairly consistently having a slight edge in battle completion times over capitals. 5 Dominator XIV's do slightly better than 3 Onslaught XIV's. I stuck Shield Shunt on the Dominator XIV's and the battle time dropped to 199 seconds on the only run I did with it. I tried multiple runs with Onslaught XIV's (also Shield Shunted) and the lowest I got was 206 seconds. 4 Champions do slightly better than 2 Executors, at 189 seconds versus 194 seconds (the remaining DP was filled up by a 3rd Gryphon on the initial deploy, so one flank had two Gryphons while the other had one). So I'm not seeing any evidence that capital spam is the way to go. Putting one or two capitals in the middle? Sure, that's why I had 2 Conquests in the middle for my 3-minute Ordos run. But spamming capitals? I haven't seen any evidence for it.
Thus far my testing results are:
Time Ships in middle
187 5 Eagle XIV + 1 Gryphon (3 HVD, Heavy Blaster, 2 IR Autolance, 3 IR Pulse Laser, 2 Harpoon)
189 4 Champion + 1 Gryphon (Hydra, HIL, 2 HVD, 4 Tactical Laser)
194 2 Executor + 1 Gryphon (Squall, Locust, 2 HIL, 5 HVD, 4 IR Autolance)
199 5 Dominator XIV (2 Hephaestus, 3 Harpoon Pod, 2 Heavy Autocannon, 3 Light Needler)
206 3 Onslaught XIV (2 TPC, Hephaestus, 2 Devastator (or 2 Hephaestus on the sides, tested both), 4 Harpoon Pod, 3 Heavy Autocannon, 2 HVD, 2 Light Needler)
That's right, back to the OP of this thread, as of right now the fastest completion time I have (other than Gryphon/Conquest spam in various combinations, which come in at 3 minutes or less) is actually a bunch of
Eagle XIV's. That's 5 Eagle XIV's in the middle together in a line, with 2 Gryphons on one end and 1 Gryphon on the other, then adding in 2 SO Gryphons once the objectives are captured. This beat out all non-Gryphon non-Conquest ships in the middle. Legion (not the XIV) should end up in the 190's or so, trying to decide what fighter might best complement Flashes with them.
The Eagle's generous flux means that it doesn't have to back off for flux much, especially when each of them has 3 HVD's and 2 IR Autolances for long-range action, as well as some Harpoons to help kill the initial enemy fleet. If any enemy ships get close, they run into a Heavy Blaster as well as 3 IR Pulse Lasers to make sure their shields go down fast. Realistically though, that didn't happen often; the 5 Eagles on average took less than 8k shield damage and less than 100 armor damage each (and none took any hull damage) across the entire double Ordos fight. With a flux capacity of 14111 each (I only bothered to put 3 points into capacity), they had plenty to absorb any incidental ships that got too close.
The Eagle, being relatively cheap as a cruiser, means that you can have multiple ones with overlapping arcs of fire to support each other. For example, in this case, whatever ships are in the middle are covering a line that is roughly 6000 su wide. 5 Eagles and a Gryphon means 6 ships so they're around 1000 su away from each other. With elite Ballistic Mastery and Gunnery Implants, their HVD's have a range of 1650 su and their IR Autolances have a range of 1550 (they didn't have Advanced Optics), so they can cover each other with a lot of room (550 su on average) to spare, not to mention it's hard for any ship to slip past them. Whereas if it's 3 Onslaught XIV's, for instance, then each Onslaught has to cover 2000 su so they're around 2000 su away from each other. So while they have farther range at 1850 su, and greater firepower individually, they can't cover each other as easily so each Onslaught is relying on being able to take care of whatever clump of enemy ships is in front of it without fluxing out or getting rushed too much.
So yeah. I'm not seeing any evidence showing capital spam as the most effective strategy. Sure, it's probably better to have one or two of them, but beyond that it's looking like it's better to have some other ships to round out the fleet rather than spamming more of them. A line of cruisers will do just fine.
I'll note though as I did above, this is looking at how fast the player fleet kills the enemy fleet. In terms of XP considerations, though, I tend to end up a bit more capital heavy -- flagship Doom, 3 Conquests, 2 Gryphons -- and not max out the officer levels, to maximize my XP bonus. The difference in completion time is small compared with the additional XP bonus I get from one less officer.
Cruiser/capital gap also gets worse when you compare Champion/Apogee to Executor.
Dominator did better than Onslaught. Onslaught, even when shield shunted and set to Reckless, with Auxiliary Thrusters, simply spent too much time turning and not advancing. Dominator turned faster and also had a smaller forward arc to worry about in the first place since there's more of them meaning it didn't have to turn as much.
5 Dominators meant 10 Hephaestus, 15 Harpoon Pod, 10 Heavy Autocannon, and 15 Light Needler. 3 Onslaughts meant 6 TPC, 3 Hephaestus (or you can include the side ones if you want, but in testing they didn't contribute much), (EDIT: also 12 Harpoon Pod,) 9 Heavy Autocannon, 6 HVD, and 6 Light Needlers. So 5 Dominators bring more DPS both in anti-shield and in anti-armor/hull.
Similarly, 4 Champions did better than 2 Executors (note that in both cases, there was an extra Gryphon on one side). On paper the Executor should do more due to the extra medium slots. In practice the HIL being on hardpoints meant they didn't fire as much -- people claim the Dominator's hardpoints make them not work well and yet the Dominator turns twice as fast as the Executor. The Champion's 4 Tactical Lasers also did a significant fraction of the damage, since they could turn quickly. They needed the HIL to break through armor, but the 4 Tactical Lasers did around 3/4 the damage to hull as the HIL. So they helped quite a bit in finishing off enemy ships.
In both cases the difference was slight but measurable; I did multiple runs with both the Onslaught XIV and the Executor and they could never match nor beat the time of the Dominator XIV nor the Champion, even though it was just a few seconds. Whereas for example the best Champion run took 189 seconds but the second best Champion run took 190 seconds.
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Topic: Endgame / Ordo-hunting fleets that use the Eagle? (Read 11936 times)