Boron weapons status effects: do they work OOS? Police Force

[MakerLinux]

I'm in the very late game and assembling some police force to patrol my sectors. I came up with the idea of using a boron Thresher as leader with the main gun being an M Ion Atomiser Mk1 and turrets M Arc Turret Mk1, and the four subordinates being Takobas with proton barrages. I thought the status effects of slowing the enemy ships would be ideal against pirates, because the first hit from the leader would slow the usually agile pirate ship and then my takobas would switftly end its existence.

However they have been performing much worse than I thought they would OOS. The Takobas barely land a hit and when they do, it does very low damage. The hit from the Thresher doesn't seem to have an effect at all, sometimes just after the hit the pirate ship easily runs away from my squad. Did I assume it wrong that the effect would work OOS? Should I change my squad composition? If so, what do you guys suggest for a good police force?

[Alan Phipps]

OOS is more a total damage delivery spreadsheet exercise than of combat, weapon and turret tactics. I would go with whatever patrols and loadouts allow best for alpha strike (near) kills and not worry too much about special effects from guns or turrets (or missiles).

I find this the case when say a Hydra gun/turret loadout that devours Minotaur Raiders IS has trouble even in consistently reducing the shields of one OOS.

[MakerLinux]

Thanks, so indeed the status effects don't work OOS. Any suggestion for an effective squad formation for police? Including weapon loadouts.

[LameFox]

I tend to go with fast corvettes, e.g. kuraokami or katana, or fast frigates if they're not available. I'll have some heavy-hitting ones for destroyers and some with medium weapons for smaller ships. 4-5 has been enough to clear pirates without incurring losses in my experience. IIRC 5 is the max number of ships a destroyer will spread its damage to in low attention so maybe that's partly why.

[Sutopia]

Turrets are only effective IS as they suffer significant hit chance penalty oos.

Any corvette + heavy fighter (preferably 4 guns) will do fine. Blast mortar away. It’s ironic that IS and OOS strength seem to be the complete opposite, ships that are too sluggish to be effective IS are the most effective OOS due to their maneuverability disadvantage being mostly ignored in the calculation.

[Phezzan]

I think the OOS damage formula is an ideal place to apply a small neural net.
Once trained the neural net could be extracted and simplified into a set of (probably still complex) damage formulas

The upside to this approach is that it's entirely data driven
Basically you would build a toy universe (one sector) where a large variety of combat scenarios are spawned in sequence.
In each scenario In Sector combat is run, and each weapon accrues 'damage dealt' history:

• weapon stats (ID, hull/shield dmg, tracking speed, projectile speed/size, projectile specials (guided, beam, eng disruption, knock-back, shield penetration, DoT, AoE)
• attacker status (PegasusV allRound3 / allRound2 / par3 3star)
• Target status (Hydra travel3 / combat3 / boron3 5star - {x,y,z (Relative Position) - x,y,z (target velocity)})
• outcomes: list of target relative hit vectors or miss,

compile those events into a training set, and the neural net will 'learn' a formula

Of course future processors will accelerate evaluating that formula... could be leveraged by AI pilots to forecast damage (if I stay here I'll get blasted -> boost away)

[MakerLinux]

Thanks! That helped a lot. I'll create a better build now.