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Author Topic: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.  (Read 1033 times)

majk

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Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« on: February 22, 2025, 10:26:21 PM »

I had to get some planets before i could even pretend to have money for the upkeep but with those two skills there is nothing in the game you can't handle.

With almost 50% dp discount you can get 10 onslaughts deployed and the game turns from tactical combat to execution squad with Orc level of dakka.

Don' t sleep on DO. Just because your ships are hot pieces of garbage does not change the fact that two ships will easily clap one of their kind.
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Bungee_man

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2025, 11:55:51 PM »

I wonder what the optimal DO+SD setup is. You're not bringing in officers (for SD's sake), and there isn't really anything in Industry that helps you much aside from DO, but you can get two flagship skills on the way there.

I'd think maybe:

Leadership (5 points): You don't get anything from CM or WT, so it'd be Crew Training and Tactical Drills at tier one unless you want carriers. Then you're left either a carrier skill or one of CM or WT (which will only apply to your flagship, providing almost nothing). After that, you have officer training and officer management, neither of which is useful to you, so maybe you take another of those less desirable tier one skills before taking Support Doctrine.

Industry (5 points): None of the first 3 affect combat, so you can take any of them. In  tier 2-4, you need a total of 3 more skills, so you may as well take Polarized Armor and Ordinance Expertise for your flagship, if you're getting one. Derelict Operations is the remaining skill.

Your remaining 5 points have to go somewhere. Your three options are to go Combat and get a useful flagship to support your fleet, go Technology and try to buff up your ships further, or double down on Leadership and get BOTB. You could technically also double down on Industry, but managing HR and DO would be too obnoxious to deal with. Option 3 gives you an extra S-mod for every ship, which is appealing, but you're spending three of your five skill points and only really getting that out of them. If you don't want a flagship that badly, and you don't want to go BotB, your option would be Technology.

Technology (5 points): Neither tier one skill affects combat, so you'd take either. Tier two provides two flagship skills, but if you want to slightly buff your fleet, elite GE and a kite flagship gets you that. You've got three skills left, so you can go with Electronic Warfare to hammer enemy range with all the ships you're deploying and Flux Regulation for an across-the-board buff to your fleet in tier four. Neural link is counterproductive here, and PCT will have some issues with the D-mods. For the fifth skill, CA isn't useful here, so Automated Ships is the play.


As for ships:

Carriers get some pretty rough D-mods, so you want something that can survive that. I'd get the two carrier skills in Leadership, and use Legions, maybe XIV, to limit the significance of D-mods reducing fighter range.

Since fighters and missiles compound in usefulness as you have more of them, as do aggressive ships like the Legion, I'd consider a monofleet. That said, Automated Ships lets you supplement your Legions with some similarly-aggressive Remnant ships. Radiants are 60DP, but SD gets you to 50, and you get to 32 after 5 D-mods, letting you field four of them with only minor CR reductions. What that'd look like is 128 DP of Radiants, plus five XIV Legions, with 12DP left over for a flagship, which would let the player bring in an 11DP Sunder (which synergizes well with the Legions, doesn't need a lot of skills to do a good job, but really does benefit from Ordinance Expertise and player control).

I might've made some kind of mistake in how things stack, but does that sound reasonably ideal? Five XIV Legions loaded with missiles and fighters, four Radiants, and a player Sunder to exploit openings and apply pressure.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2025, 12:00:31 AM by Bungee_man »
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Void Ganymede

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #2 on: February 23, 2025, 05:26:49 AM »

I wonder what the optimal DO+SD setup is. You're not bringing in officers (for SD's sake), and there isn't really anything in Industry that helps you much aside from DO, but you can get two flagship skills on the way there.
Industry has +2 burn for civilian ships.

Okay, okay, hear me out!

- DO+SD maximizes the amount of Automated Ships ships you can field. Automated Ships are badass and extremely efficient on the campaign map.
- Automated Ships are reckless. This might fine while you're rolling for D-mods but they should really escort something sane.
- Escort Package is cool. It effectively gives cruisers and destroyers a capital ITU when escorting a capital.
- At this point you've got 5 points each in green/blue/yellow trees and can't get flagship wrecking ball combat skills.

So if the capital's mostly there to discourage reckless AI from suiciding it can be something funny like an Atlas Mk.II or Prometheus MkLudd.

- With Gunnery Implants and all the blue/yellow flux and venting skills you can get a solid dakka Atlas Mk.II going. Your missiles and gauss cannons won't crunch through armor like a combat build would... Buuut you can get Neural Interface *and* fit under the 50DP instant transfer limit! So you get AAF resets via Neural Interface and two artillery Atlases worth of map presence. Plus, burn 20 fleet with no hullmods needed.
- If you instead want to lean into fleet maneuvers, 2x neural linked Prometheus Mk.IIs with escort fleets let you be the hammer *and* the anvil. DO fits them under the 50DP instant transfer limit so you can reset your burn drive to double it up! You probably want auxiliary thrusters and built-in reinforced flux conduits. The trick to burn drive kiting in capitals is being liberal with venting to 0 and toggling hold fire to get that 0% flux turn rate bonus. Your flagship damage won't be oppressive but hammer barrage/phase lance EMP/HIL/maybe gigacannons can make it fun and decisive. Also, still a 20 burn fleet.
- Alternatively an Astral flagship with a pile of Remnant escorts should be fun. You can pick up full carrier skills in the green tree and go ham with fighter/bomber loadouts of your choice, either deleting capitals that can break your escorts or swatting small ships on the edges until your escorts can swarm the capital center.
- Finally phase flagships are stronk enough to not require red skills. If you don't want to fly an escort capital without quality of life agility/speed skills, you don't *have* to.

Sourcing remnant ships is easy. You can start with an SO Lasher with 5 points in blue then red to pick up useful hullmods. Grab free frigates, suicide frigates to grab destroyers. Fulgents are high value due to their +200 range bonus on non-beam weapons getting scaled by +60% from ITU + capital Escort Package. Apex can also do this but you'll need to run converted fighter bays if your flagship's a carrier to keep them from stealing your carrier skills bonuses.

Sourcing the capital anchor is harder, however keep in mind that Colossus Mk.III is a cruiser. They're decent value early game raider ships and make a passable carrier. Mining lasers going into ballistic slots also beef up their early game survival.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2025, 05:50:03 AM by Void Ganymede »
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happycrow

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #3 on: February 23, 2025, 08:56:56 AM »

Or, hear me out...
DO plus HR. Who needs to waste time defending a dodgy colony for forty grand a month when you just hoover up every derelict in the game and sell them off as soon as they're cherry again? It's not a predictable fleet, and that may put some people off, but who cares when you're Jon Starsector's Classic Car Warship/ Archeotech Emporium with a stable of flash and/or trash ships to choose from numbering in the dozens you can cherry-pick for any particular need, letting your fleet composition manage whether you clean up the capitals or leave them in Pather Condition?

I won't say it wasn't a very different playstyle, but it was a super chill playthrough. Pairs well with Jon Starsector, Jolly Space Renegade.
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TheMeInTeam

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #4 on: February 23, 2025, 09:07:29 AM »

You can put officers in smaller ships that only get 30% discount but give you the leadership scaling bonuses, and still spam big ticket items with support doctrine.

Another obvious candidate for this setup is missile spam and/or fighter spam.
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TheLaughingDead

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #5 on: February 23, 2025, 09:56:40 AM »

Honestly if you are putting officers in frigates then let them go without D-mods as well, just have an elite squad of wolfpack frigates with a fleet of absolute trash in their wake! That would actually be pretty cool, get a pirate fleet kind of aesthetic going :D
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Thaago

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #6 on: February 23, 2025, 10:03:26 AM »

You can put officers in smaller ships that only get 30% discount but give you the leadership scaling bonuses, and still spam big ticket items with support doctrine.

Another obvious candidate for this setup is missile spam and/or fighter spam.

That's a good point: a phase swarm with wolfpack doesn't benefit much from a 3rd S mod, and it loves having cover from lots of fodder being around. Ditch any larger phase ships, go like 4/4 shade/afflictor, spend the rest of the 180 DP on SD/DO? Also activates coordinated manuevers for everything. For maximum RP use the pirate variants of the phase ships, though they aren't as good.

The player could fly one with the blue/yellow skills (maybe drop ordnance expertise, it doesn't do much for them, but the others are solid, could drop gunnery), it would just take a lot more skill than normal to not be using elite field modulation. With this hypothetical setup, I might drop the tech capstone in favor of that 1 combat skill. Maybe also squeeze in combat endurance?
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Lawrence Master-blaster

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #7 on: February 23, 2025, 10:41:20 AM »

With almost 50% dp discount you can get 10 onslaughts deployed

That's over 150 fuel/ly
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Sandor057

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #8 on: February 23, 2025, 12:58:18 PM »

With almost 50% dp discount you can get 10 onslaughts deployed

That's over 150 fuel/ly

Buy Sindrian
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Phenir

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #9 on: February 23, 2025, 01:20:10 PM »

With almost 50% dp discount you can get 10 onslaughts deployed

That's over 150 fuel/ly
This is the thing I dislike about DO and SD. You get a bigger fleet but that also comes with increased logistics costs. At least with DO you get a huge maintenance reduction but supply is still an issue with SD and fuel is crazy with either and especially with both. None of the other capstones have this kind of downside issue, they are all purely upside (other than opportunity cost).
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Void Ganymede

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #10 on: February 23, 2025, 01:26:02 PM »

All the more reason for double neural linked Prometheus Mk.II as your flagships. Be the fuel tanker!
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TK3600

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #11 on: February 23, 2025, 03:08:50 PM »

Have you tried combo with automated ships and spam Bastion with it? Absolutely glorious.
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Bungee_man

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #12 on: February 23, 2025, 03:53:33 PM »


- Automated Ships are reckless. This might fine while you're rolling for D-mods but they should really escort something sane.

I think they follow your established doctrine unless they're officered (and they won't be, per SD).
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Void Ganymede

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #13 on: February 23, 2025, 05:09:03 PM »

I thought the Automated Ship hullmod overrides it, not the officer. Easy to check, brb...
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Phenir

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Re: Derelict Operations + Support doctrine are hilarious.
« Reply #14 on: February 23, 2025, 05:23:59 PM »

Automated ships are always fearless, which is somehow distinct from reckless. Only unofficered non automated ships follow your doctrine.
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