X-Verse Fleet Fest I

[Cpt.Jericho]

Nah, I think I'll pass. Don't want to fry my CPU. Tried that fleet and it was no fun to watch. 2-3 fps!

[Gavrushka]

I think before too long it may be worth you setting up a rule discussion thread for XFFII - I keep seeing it popping back up on this one!

I never appreciated the Value of PACs as a weapon until this thread and I am, in my game, re-arming all my fighter wings with PACs now and selling the PRGs.

[Alex Vanderbilt]

Why not? PAC were always the best Fighter weapon. They are not as power-hungry as HEPTS, but still rather powerful; the range is only ~500 m shorter, but the fire rate higher. Furthermore, in TC they got even more strength which makes the HEPT almost obsolete, as well as any other weapon for fighters.

AV

[Spitzeuk]

For me the PACs on the Solano are the only choice, been using them on my Solanos for the past year.

PRG: similar DPS to the PAC and a better hit rate due to faster projectile, but at 3-4 times the cost mean its not a contender. Just look at Le Baron's fleet of Solanos, ~60 mil for the hulls, ~114 mil for the PRGs!
Still would be nice to see Le Baron go up against a PAC Solano spam fleet just to see if I'm not talking out of my proverbial.

MDs: Only slightly cheaper than the PRG means you're still paying more for weapons than hull. Very small range and similar projectile speed to the PAC means your Solanos with these may spend more time on collision avoidance than actually shooting.
Unless your entire fleet is fielding these, using them IMO is pointless. Say 5 Solanos take a M6 down to 1% hull before dying. Any other ship attacking the M6 now needs to take down all the shields if they don't have MDs.
X2-Eliah is, however fielding pure Solano MD firepower so if you count his TMs as mere damage soaks then you may as well not even be using shields.

And that's why my money is on X2-Eliah to win the tournament. (Not just because the spam will destroy TJ's frame rate and render Eliah's enemy paralysed )

[Gavrushka]

Apparently PRGs miss due to the small projectile size and speed - even when they hit!!

My first fleet was 374 Harriers with Mass Drivers - Unfortunately my computer melted trying a few test battles then the rules got changed banning it anyway.

[ChairborneRanger]

PRG: similar DPS to the PAC and a better hit rate due to faster projectile, but at 3-4 times the cost mean its not a contender. Just look at Le Baron's fleet of Solanos, ~60 mil for the hulls, ~114 mil for the PRGs!

Still would be nice to see Le Baron go up against a PAC Solano spam fleet just to see if I'm not talking out of my proverbial.

I did the next best thing and put Le Baron's Solanos against Killjaeden's Slugworm Zephyrus. That was effectively PAC vs PRG. Not only that, but the slugs outnumbered the Solano/Helios and averaged about 3 times the shielding. Granted the slugs are bigger targets.

Two things really:

1. The PACs were landing hits on the Solanos, but not enough to take them down quick enough. The PRGs, on the other hand, chewed up a slug in about 15 - 25 frames (at about 5 frames per second)

2. Both fleets scattered on the start. Neither had scanners of any kind and as Merdocharr and I have said, this is likely the reason. The fleets deploy about 15 to 20 km away from each other and naturally spread out in a disc of ships. The facing sides of the disc always see each other and engage while the far facing sides wander off into the cosmos.

In the end though I think only 20 or so Solanos died and even most of the Helios survived. If the Solano's had maybe... 3 x 5MJ or even 1 x 25MJ I think it would have ended much differently. Shame I didn't get to watch most of it since my beast of a machine was pulling around 5 - 10 FPS in the thick of it. I had to face my ship away and go have a smoke while it played out

[Cpt.Jericho]

2. Both fleets scattered on the start. Neither had scanners of any kind and as Merdocharr and I have said, this is likely the reason.

That's not the reason! Neither Spitzeuk nor me had any extentions installed. I did run a test using EJs fleet against mine, spawning my fleet as Xenon and had only 2 Discos wandering off (you might have seen the phenomenom in Xenon sectors when a pretty clever N rushes at 5km distance by). Even in the official battle against Spitzeuk 61 of 64 ships did engage directly.
I even did testing at 30km distance and still the majority of those ships I spawned went to attack and only a few dispersed. No matter what class.

Edit: You had more than 3fps? You seem to have a pretty neat rig

[EmperorJon]

Yes, but did your fleet include any capital ships?

[Cpt.Jericho]

Er, yes, 3 to be excact or did you mean someone else?

[imperium3]

The success of the PAC spam fleets is starting to worry me...

(though since the ones facing me are mounted on iguanas FFS, that's not so bad!)

[NUKLEAR-SLUG]

Also, it looks like PAC's are the way to go en masse - cheap and effective.

That's what I meant a few pages back. The two Solano swarms we've got currently are packing weaponry that doesn't maximise their potential. Swap out the mass drivers for much cheaper PACs for example and you gain both range and spare money to buy even more Solanos with.

Worst case swarm scenario I can think of would be Solanos packing quad PACS. I'm suprised noone else thought to do it though perhaps that's just down to the general low regard for the effectiveness of PAC.

[Killjaeden]

Just limit shiptypes for the next FF.
One Shiptype can't be used more then 30 times (fighters) 5 times (corvettes, TM, M8 ) and 2 times (capital).
e.g. if you want 50 mambas you have to take 30 vanguard and 20 raider
If the ship doesn't have more variants you can't take more then 30.

and an overall shiplimit for each type.
80 fighters
15 big-class (M8, M6, TM)
2 caps

that's what I meant a few pages back. The two Solano swarms we've got currently are packing weaponry that doesn't maximise their potential.

In normal fight, i agree. But every shipamount of 200+ wrecks any PC (non-multicore application ftw *sigh*) and therefore all actions are limited.

E.g. if Eliah would fight against me he would propably win because
a) md do direct hull dmg, hull doesn't regenerate
b) cockpitweapons seem to get a higher cpu-cycle priority then turretscripts-> in a very laggy environment they (turrets) have a disadvantage
c) with each cycle not shot the shields regenerate -> PAC lot less of an advantage
==
in a not-so-laggy environment however i have 480 double-PAC turrets which is the equivalent of the same amount of MK2 fight drones with 300MJ shields each

Well it perfectly shows that TM are underpriced and i would suggest a set price of base+2m for the next FF

The Iguana Spamlist is well... don't think it's really efficient just because they are cheap they are not effective. slow turnradius, horrible weaponenergy, bad shields etc.

[ChairborneRanger]

2. Both fleets scattered on the start. Neither had scanners of any kind and as Merdocharr and I have said, this is likely the reason.

That's not the reason! Neither Spitzeuk nor me had any extentions installed. I did run a test using EJs fleet against mine, spawning my fleet as Xenon and had only 2 Discos wandering off (you might have seen the phenomenom in Xenon sectors when a pretty clever N rushes at 5km distance by). Even in the official battle against Spitzeuk 61 of 64 ships did engage directly.
I even did testing at 30km distance and still the majority of those ships I spawned went to attack and only a few dispersed. No matter what class.

Edit: You had more than 3fps? You seem to have a pretty neat rig

I'm sticking with my theory based on the fact that EJ's fleet all had scanners, and to compensate for your lack of scanners, his spitfyres are so fast, they close into the 10 km default scanner range quick enough to alert everything but the far discos.

A few other things I noticed about the TM (and potentially the TS spam) is that they enjoy ramming things. Just for grins, I put Killjaeden's Slugs against 2 Tyr loaded out with all MAML. They managed to splash about 70 of the Zephyrus but once their shields were dropped they got TM rammed to death in what seemed like a matter of seconds

I'm also fairly disappointed about the low missile fire from the AI. A few M7Ms with holds full of flails would quickly put an end to this spamming tomfoolery. I'm going to try setting up some M7Ms manually with player set 100% missile fire and see how they do against one of the solano fleets

As for my rig, I just upgraded for my birthday last week:

Core i7 950 3.07 GHz stock clocked with an H50 Corsair water cooler
Asus P6T Deluxe v2 X58 mobo
6 x 2 GB DDR3 triple channel RAM
GTX 480 Nvidia w/ 1.5 GB DDR5 RAM
GeForce 9800 GTX w/ 512 MB RAM (old card running in PhysX mode)
Corsair 128GB MLC Solid State Drive
Seagate 500GB x 2 running in RAID0
Win7 64 pro

[X2-Eliah]

So you're suggesting M7M/Flail spamming to counter fighter spamming?

Honestly, it will have more or less the same negative impact on framrate.

[ChairborneRanger]

So you're suggesting M7M/Flail spamming to counter fighter spamming?

Honestly, it will have more or less the same negative impact on framrate.

Not as bad as you would think. 3 Ares w/ 1000 flails each obliterated over 120 PRG armed Solanos (without scanners so only about 2/3 of them engaged) before one of them succumbed. The only problem was that I had to make them player owned, the solanos were xenon, and even with their missile fire rates set to 100%, they still wouldn't get "angry" until I set their turret commands to "Attack all enemies". After that they went buck wild with the missile spam. My frame rates were in the solid 30s, but they better be for the money I spent on those upgrades.

I'll rant about the scanner thing tomorrow. It's 5AM eastern and I'm starting to fade out.

[Killjaeden]

AI doesn't spam flails /missiles in general.
Therefore that hole thing won't work, and i think it's better like that, because M7M missile spam isn't any better then fighterspam.

[Cpt.Jericho]

I'll rant about the scanner thing tomorrow. It's 5AM eastern and I'm starting to fade out.

Rant as much as you want My next fleet won't be equipped with these anyway. Your theory is a fine example of thorough thought. But it does not holds against the things I actaully saw: According to you the SFs came in quick enough to trigger all my ships to attack. However: 2 Disco went astray anyway - and 42 + all other ships went directly rampage on those SFs; Ds drawing first blood actually. Never underestimate the firepower of 168 IREs
However: Pleasant dreams!

[Triaxx2]

I think my suggestion to eliminate congestion in XFF2 is two brackets. One for fleets under one hundred ships, and one for fleets of one hundred plus. This lets the spammers play, but doesn't interfere with the other fleets.

[Cpt.Jericho]

But if you split it up you get 2 competitions. And the main problem would stay in the 2nd: low framerates.

[Gavrushka]

I really wish TJ would start up a rule thread for XFFII - There's a lot of ideas in here that are going to get lost/forgotton about otherwise.

I would love to see the following:

A budget of about 400,000 to allow for better usage of capital ships.

A strict total ship limit and with no more than say 30 m5-m3.

Someone to look at a combat script that gives both sides precisely the same behaviour and makes sure ships don't go for a wander.

A statue of me, the almighty Gavrushka, to be built outside of Egosoft HQ.