This comment is one of the worst I've ever seen... Nobody forces you to go to social media to check what has been done. In life, you can also do it by yourself you know? 99% of players are not even aware there is a comprehensive game manual that would answer 99% of the queries they have. They go straight to YT instead.To what end? You guys do this constantly, thinking that being intentionally vague and opaque about your game somehow equates to greater engagement. It doesn't.
You release these undocumented mysteries thinking it will result in some great "A-ha!" moments on the part of the player base at large. Instead, only a very small number of the player base typically deconstructs or solves your "puzzles" in a matter of hours or a few days (and you always underestimate your players and seem surprised they figure it out so quickly, yet you go and do it again and again).
Then, through social media, it becomes common knowledge, negating your claim of "wanting us to experience it for ourselves". That claim only applies to about a dozen players in the vanguard of solving the "mystery" who then post their results for all to see. Then the rest of the current players all get the memo and have incorporated the new functionality or new reveal into their play without having "experienced it for themselves" (defeating your stated goal).
However, social media being the here-today-gone-tomorrow phenomenon it is, new players who join the game after the reveal has faded into Internet obscurity just wind up frustrated and confused due to the lack of in-game documentation. Now they have to go search for it. Which means, while they're searching, they're not playing your game. Brilliant move!
It's a common criticism repeated over and over again on the Esub-reddit where such complaints aren't so easily removed: "Why doesn't the game tell me how to do XYZ?" I'm not talking overarching hand-holding here; instead, it's the little things such as simple ship functions for which there's no documentation, instruction, nor tutorial. It leaves new players unnecessarily frustrated and perplexed with the same questions about the most basic of functions asked over and over and over again on a daily basis.
Or the other complaint: "Why do I (the new player) have to open half a dozen browser windows' worth of YouTube tutorials and 3rd-party websites just to discover basic stuff about the game that should already be included in it?" Even a simple roll-over / mouse hover pop-up tutorial mode that tells players what each menu item in their ship does would be a huge improvement. I know it's too late in the game to ever see that happen, but let's not add to the existing confusion with yet another undocumented ship function.
The game is already complex enough as it is; no reason to artificially make it more so. Yet here you are adding another "Figure it out yourself because we couldn't be bothered to write two sentences about how Supercruise Overcharge works". That doesn't draw new players in; that turns them off to the game. It's not binary; there's plenty more to the game to draw them in. But once so drawn in by the immersion and beauty of Elite
Basic Documentation 101. And, no, the Codex doesn't cut it; it's not broad enough nor granular enough and it, too, is yet another buried resource one has to go digging through to find anything relevant versus placing the explanation at the first point of contact (i.e. player hovers over or highlights ship menu item, pop-up tells them what that menu item does; once they feel they've become familiar with all the controls and menus they can simply turn tutorial mode off). You're sitting on this gold mine of a game, yet repeatedly undermine your own product by making it less accessible to new players than it has to be.
Why the big mystery? No one cares about the mystery. They care about being able to purchase and equip a module to their ship that will (hopefully) greatly reduce their boring Supercruise transit times. Why not just give them the information they need to make that happen rather than burying it behind the excuse of, "There are some things we want you to experience for yourselves." Like what? Eats up your fuel at a greatly accelerated rate? Using it draws the Thargoids' attention to your ship? Use it too long and its integrity degrades? Etc., etc., etc. Those are fine; players can discover those for themselves. But not telling us how it functions, how to activate it, its perfomance stats? What purpose is served withholding that information?
And, no, I'm not a new player; I've put 11,000 hours into the game. But I'm very active on the E
Update 18.02 | Wednesday 10th April
- Thread starter Paul_Crowther
- Start date
One is on Biweaves the other has a 5A, never indulged in PP as all that interested me were the modules and I felt it wrong to just play it for the rewards so no Prismatics.Depends on the build, the classic prismatic with SCB-s plasma Ferdie (I'd wager about 70% of all Ferdies out there are some variation of this) will not run on armored power plantsOf course if you use biweaves and MC-s or frags you can get away with whatever.
Powerplay modules belong to the tech brokers anyway, or to their associated engineers. They never made much sense as rewards for PP. But hoping that they actually might become available some other way in PP2 is probably too much hoping. I remember very well how it took a year to collect all the powerplay modules into my arsenal, because of the stupid wait time.
Alright, extended sidebar then -KWS is where module grade really matters--lower grades have lower power draw, but also range. Which one you choose depends on your power budget. And I personally find the 20...30% payout boost worthwhile, but then I do long RES sessions where I get ~20 mil for the controlling faction and the extra ~5 mil is always nice, especially if I'm still boosting my reputation in the neighborhood and the whole mission stack pays 10...20 mils (and I may go for reputation reward for even less credits). Handing in is no longer a problem, you can hand in any bounties anywhere, no need to seek out specific systems where the faction is present or deal with IF. Plus there are mission-specific utilities that more specialized builds use: ECM was made useful for evac ships in thargoid war, manifest scanners, point defence, heat sink launchers, caustic sinks etc.
Without engineering nothing would be different: grade A for most things, grade D for weight weenies, grade B for gonkers. Engineering gives you options for tweaking these three module grades for specific needs--not all builds are following "The Meta".
There's quite a lot of variety and special use cases once you stop blindly following "The Meta".
I use all 3 power plant options depending on ship. An FDL or a Vulture requires overcharged PP and my prismatic Cutter has one too; Courier and AX builds need low emissions; armored is for general use on ships that can fit big enough PP. And then there are special spicy combat builds that benefit from overheating the ship
Power distro: weapon focused is useful for laser mining and specific AX builds. My Phantom uses stripped down experimental because the PD of that ship is so absurdly oversized that the faster charge rate of super conduits simply doesn't matter.
Sensors: light weight D for most non-combat builds; long range D for most combat purposes; light weight A for speed focused combat builds.
Armor: I went for lightweight, layered plating reactive on my Chief for more speed. Lose ~10% raw integrity compared to deep plating, but higher resistances of LW make up for it and mobility is important. Some use thermal resistant on reactive. Niche use cases, but it's good to have the option.
You can downgrade the KWS to save on power, but the point is moot because the value proposition isn't there. The extra credits you get don't even amount to drops in the well compared to what you earn through stacking massacre missions (which to my ken should be worth well north of 10-20 mil for a full stack?) - or any other of the various efficient methods of credit-generation; for a combat focus it's not worth the significant drop in potential shielding. Reputation gain is earned faster/easier by other means and the bounties you accrue aren't for 'local' factions anyhow.
Certainly, when looking at the Thargoid game the entire picture changes in terms of the considerations to weigh.
And sure, sans Engineering the net diversity would hardly increase, but my point is it doesn't really increase either - things just get homogenized in other ways.
"The Meta" is not a curse word, incidentally; and if you are blindly following then that already rules out what you're doing being "Meta". The term means "most effective", which necessitates weighing & considering the options available to you to make an informed and rational choice. That includes recognition that the game's structured the way it is with clearly defined "best options", and not in a manner that everything is balanced and every alternative is equally interesting (one of my hopes being that someday we can see something closer to that ideal).
FDLs and Vultures do not at all require 'Overcharged' powerplant, with good power management and priority settings:
Low Emissions is rather a matter of "nice to have if you don't need power for shielding" - which happens to apply to both 'courier' and 'AX' things, usually speaking, but can situationally apply to the Python & Krait due to them having oversized powerplant classes.
The 'spicy combat builds' revolving around Thermal Conduit aren't exactly commendable unless you are really yearning for testing your limits of fine-tuned control constantly & the intimacy of your knowledge with the rather obtuse heat mechanics in the game - which, if you take the time to investigate, will demonstrate Overcharged PP isn't necessary or even helpful to that purpose (rather, it can make it harder to accomplish consistently), owing to the way WEP & heat management interact.
WEP-focused only has niche uses for specific min/max mining setups - it's just not necessary in a Python/Conda/Cutter, especially against the benefits of retaining the other distro benefits of CE, particularly if you like being able to defend yourself from the pirate spawns. Certainly, Phantom is a unique case of only 4 hardpoints and enjoying a massively outsized distro - but the benefits of 'stripped down' are flatly worthless (about 0.003% improved agility for a combat fit, based on a quick rough check on edsy); you may as well apply K.I.S.S. principle and enjoy trying heavier-draw weapons instead (like the Azimuth modified plasma chargers).
Similarly, light-weight A sensors genuinely has negligible benefit for "speed focused combat builds" - at best, maybe a 3% improvement in agility - unless you're very specifically trying to min/max boost speed in an Imperial Courier that happens to retain some combat ability, which is already consciously dispensing with doing the most effective thing for combat.
Ditto again for armor & the actual amount of "speed" benefit you get, again around 3% improvement at best in exchange for much higher proportions of lost effective armor value. Putting thermal resist on the bulkheads is a waste of materials compared to HD and shoring up resistances using the smallest available HRP slot, as you will net higher effective overall armor values that way. Here's a Chieftain setup I've used, for comparison's sake: https://edsy.org/s/vf1ggBx
Yeah, I think the powerplay 4-week timegate is pretty dumb. But at least it's passive and not a grindwall.
There's not much reason to use a prismatic shield on a Vulture, though. Prismatic is good for maximizing the most shielding possible from the smallest available slot on trading/mining builds, or very niche-focused Assassination/CZ-clearing builds; in all other cases bi-weave passive regen is better, bearing in mind all the hitpoint inflation you achieve by combining shield boosters, GSRPs (albeit Vulture rarely has much spare power for these), SCBs, and Engineering that all improve the things that Prismatic gives you but without such heavy costs of power + weight - while Bi-weaves (and fast regen/lo draw, depending on distro size relative to shield gen) are the only way to achieve a higher passive regen rate.
70% increase in voucher values (that I got today) is significant. I'll have it, thankyouverymuch. And massacre stacks are not north of 20 mil if you're just starting out in an area. No-one forces you to use a KWS, but saying that using it is wrong is ridiculous. If you want to take it to the logical conclusion: no combat other than Orthrus-swatting at spire sites has a worthwhile value proposition.
642 MJ raw with high resistances, effective 5600 points of hull under it and two MRP-s that my Chief has combined with high mobility means I don't care about the extra 160 or so MJ of raw shield a fourth booster gives. Guardian shield reinforcements are more effective on hybrid hull tanks with high resistance but low base MJ shields than heavy duty class A shield boosters, anyway.
I like combat.
I never said that.
Most effective (whatever that means in different contexts), not most fun. I like big cannons and dumbfire rockets. They're fun. I know beams'n'multis are more effective--I don't care. I giggle like a maniac when I get that one good shot that takes the power plant from 100% to 0% or semi-accidentally shoot the thrusters, the FSD and the shield generator out in a pirate ship trying to make a run for it.
They do if you want to put more power hungry weapons, Guardian shield boosters/MRP-s and in case of Ferdie prismatic shield on them.
My Vulture:
My Ferdie:
These two simply won't work without overcharged power plants, no matter how you try to optimize and min-max them.
Not with the prismatic shield.
That's what I said--mining setups.
If by "agility" you mean turn rate, then 3% of that is small. But a few m/s of speed here and there add up. 2 km of sensor range difference is situational--doesn't matter much if you duel a single ship; matters more in a CZ or RES. Horses for courses. Normally I use long range D, but I consider light weight A for some situations.
10 m/s on my Chief and the lost raw armor is negligible. As I said, a few m/s here and there (lightweight vs. reinforced life support, E vs A shield booster, HD vs. LW armor) add up: 520-something m/s vs 540 m/s is a noticeable difference.
Not the optimal choice, no, but still a valid choice for some people, so...
No. It means "beyond". As in: Not just considering the in-game things, but also paying attention to what players think or do besides playing. Hence, "the meta" refers to the most popular/"conventional"/"orthodox" player behavior.
Which is frequently not the most effective, but merely something that works quite well for little effort. And in any well-balanced PvP game, playing a dedicated counter-the-meta strategy will be more effective than playing the meta, if/while a single meta exists. (By definition of well-balanced.)
Backronyms involving "effective" or things done by Mark Zuckerberg are besides the point.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine.
My favourite:Backronyms involving "effective" or things done by Mark Zuckerberg are besides the point.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine.
I'm
So
Meta
Even
This
Aphorism
Making your ship's defenses weaker for a drop in the bucket's worth of profit, in a game state where credit generation is already trivial through several means - including massacre mission stacks - is an objectively unoptimal choice for combat. Whether that is wrong depends on your personal identified priorities.70% increase in voucher values (that I got today) is significant. I'll have it, thankyouverymuch. And massacre stacks are not north of 20 mil if you're just starting out in an area. No-one forces you to use a KWS, but saying that using it is wrong is ridiculous. If you want to take it to the logical conclusion: no combat other than Orthrus-swatting at spire sites has a worthwhile value proposition.
642 MJ raw with high resistances, effective 5600 points of hull under it and two MRP-s that my Chief has combined with high mobility means I don't care about the extra 160 or so MJ of raw shield a fourth booster gives. Guardian shield reinforcements are more effective on hybrid hull tanks with high resistance but low base MJ shields than heavy duty class A shield boosters, anyway.
I like combat.
I never said that.
Most effective (whatever that means in different contexts), not most fun. I like big cannons and dumbfire rockets. They're fun. I know beams'n'multis are more effective--I don't care. I giggle like a maniac when I get that one good shot that takes the power plant from 100% to 0% or semi-accidentally shoot the thrusters, the FSD and the shield generator out in a pirate ship trying to make a run for it.
They do if you want to put more power hungry weapons, Guardian shield boosters/MRP-s and in case of Ferdie prismatic shield on them.
My Vulture:
My Ferdie:
These two simply won't work without overcharged power plants, no matter how you try to optimize and min-max them.
Not with the prismatic shield.
That's what I said--mining setups.
If by "agility" you mean turn rate, then 3% of that is small. But a few m/s of speed here and there add up. 2 km of sensor range difference is situational--doesn't matter much if you duel a single ship; matters more in a CZ or RES. Horses for courses. Normally I use long range D, but I consider light weight A for some situations.
10 m/s on my Chief and the lost raw armor is negligible. As I said, a few m/s here and there (lightweight vs. reinforced life support, E vs A shield booster, HD vs. LW armor) add up: 520-something m/s vs 540 m/s is a noticeable difference.
Not the optimal choice, no, but still a valid choice for some people, so...
If you like combat, you can absolutely use it to gain faction Reputation rep quickly, but using a KWS is not going to do anything measurable for you to that end against simply completing assassination & massacre missions, preferable with bonus rep as an optional reward - again, the amount of bonus credits you net is a mere drop in the bucket and that goes for contributions towards faction rep by way of profit.
More shielding is more shielding - always reliable, protects against all forms of damage, passively regenerates, prevents module damage, it is always the better choice over more armor (assuming a normal combat scenario where shielding is not bypassed). You don't need to overinvest in armor if your shields never go down in the first place, and can treat it instead as a safety blanket if things go wrong.
GSRPs merely make shield boosters more worthwhile because the additive boost feeds into the multiplicative bonus that boosters give - it's not true that it's "more effective for hybrids", unless you're strictly looking at proportions and not comparing the end total.
You've neglected to include the SCBs in your comparison. Your setup is extremely vulnerable to PAs and ramming damage - only 962 against over 3400 (which is around a 350% decrease, if we're still looking at proportions) against absolute & non-weapon damage.
The grand total of effective damage-type protection you have is also less - 7411 against 9525 effective hitpoints against kinetic, 8118 against 10,972 for thermal (we can disregard explosive because missiles are the only explosive damage and deal such little damage they're more of a threat to your external modules than your survival, but the results are similar), and this is before any reckoning of the value of passive regen from the shield generator over time which has a larger worth when the 'cup' of total raw MJs for it to refill over time is larger.
You did bring up "meta" in a negative connotation, and this is a common enough sentiment I see shared that it is worth commenting about.
If you are consciously choosing "more fun" over "more effective" - as is entirely your own prerogative - it must still be acknowledged. Being 'more effective' remains 'more fun' for obvious reasons for many players.
I will remind you, the original discussion here was not about your fun, but about the effectiveness of optional & utility mount outfitting options, as well as the "additional options" presented by Engineering.
Beams & MCs are most certainly not 'more effective' on their own. Railguns & cannons, and even dumbfire missiles if you are using a ship you can adequately control the engagement distance with, are plenty effective owing to that ability to quickly take out internal modules. Railguns just have ammo consumption issues, mostly requiring use of "plasma slugs" & a ship with sufficient fuel capacity (in my experience, 16t of fuel per plasma slug weapon to have about the same ammo duration as a corrosive MC). Cannons & dumbfires only have mild ammo consumption problems - negligible if you make sure to hit your shots consistently (use of the high yield special also aids in internal damage consistency), but that can be easier said than done unless in a highly maneuverable ship, especially in the dumbfire's case.
Neither of your ships require Overcharged powerplant.
Let's look at your FDL (which ironically looks like a blindly-copy-pasted PvP FDL to me):
- Guardian MRP is a waste of power, the only reason to use one is to protect against AX special attacks and you only need 1 for that, two MRPs is absolute overkill with your armor values this low. Even a full hull-tank Anaconda in PvP does not need more than two MRPs.
- FSD can be safely left on priority 5 in most cases, depending on how risk-averse you are. Cargo Hatch can definitely be left powered off or put on priority 5.
- Flow control on shield boosters can be a decent way to save power with minimal loss in shielding, especially on resist-focused boosters.
- LR1 is plenty range for most cases and uses a lot less power than LR5, with the obvious drawback of 3600 max range for poking/aggro purposes against the full 6000. Most of your fighttime, especially with so many PAs, are going to occur well under that distance.
- Hi-cap on the shield generator significantly increases power draw and not usually for significant gain You can instead use lo-draw for easier distro pressure (significant in PvP too), or fast charge; on ships with a PD that is the same size or smaller than the shield generator, you want lo-draw regardless because without it you need more than 2 pips in SYS to maintain passive shield regen.
This is your FDL with Armored + Monstered powerplant: https://edsy.org/s/vl8z2sm ; it could go down to Thermal Spread if you opted for Specialized SCBs instead or making more tradeoffs from the above list.
This is your Vulture with Armored + Monstered; I also opted to use this as an example of when Mirrored + 1 kinetic HRP pulls ahead of Reactive + 1 thermal HRP (it's a question of how many HD HRPs you are stacking in total, as the boosted resists causes the value of Mirrored + Kinetic to pull ahead): https://edsy.org/s/veJAAYo . I will acknowledge you cannot go Thermal Spread here without giving up your choice in weapons.
Seems like I can optimize and min/max to make them work without Overcharged just fine!
I'm going to have to beg to differ that 3% change in top speed (the proportion is the same regardless of whether you look at turn rate or top speed, because the relevant modifiers affect both equally) is going to matter against the much higher boost in survivability.
"Valid" and "optimal" are two different discussions. One is objective, one is not. Again, owing to the original subject matter of this overall discussion, I'm interested in the objective matters at hand.
Last edited:
If "meta" is to be viewed in this light, then truely, most players are getting it wrong.No. It means "beyond". As in: Not just considering the in-game things, but also paying attention to what players think or do besides playing. Hence, "the meta" refers to the most popular/"conventional"/"orthodox" player behavior.
Which is frequently not the most effective, but merely something that works quite well for little effort. And in any well-balanced PvP game, playing a dedicated counter-the-meta strategy will be more effective than playing the meta, if/while a single meta exists. (By definition of well-balanced.)
Backronyms involving "effective" or things done by Mark Zuckerberg are besides the point.
Sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine.
Informed choices will always be better than blind acceptance that something is the 'right' choice. As you say, one will never arrive at fully & successfully making the necessary considerations, if you afford too much of your attention to what other players think & do (and not putting in the effort).
I do wish that someday the ingame tools are better at giving players the pertinent info they need (as edsy does a wonderful job of representing) - and that we do get a better-balanced future. Someday, perhaps.
In most PvE combat there are rapidly diminishing returns from more defense...so much so that unless I'm fighting Thargoids, there is no practical difference between some of my medium and large combat vessels if I do nothing to them other than strip the shielding off. With just the armor schemes the ships have anyway, my CMDR's combat endurance in most CZs or mission is limited more by ammunition, or even my real-world physical endurance as a player, than the durability of the ship. If anything I'll kill things faster if I'm not required to manage SYS as much and have more pips available more often for WEP.
My CMDR's 'cargo' Corvette has ~6k hull integrity, 50% hull resistances, and functionally infinite MRP integrity (I repair it during combat with an AFMU)...along with four PDTs, two ECMs, and two heatsink launchers. I can be carrying 540 tons of cargo and take a detour to do two or three back to back high CZs, then dock with all the cargo intact and the hull over 70%. The 'combat' loadout has a big biweave, two A7 SCBs, and five shield boosters, and will never need to use an SCB charge in most PvE engagements...but it doesn't kill anything any faster and doesn't last any longer, unless I want to synthesize or risk a repetitive stress injury.
Shield from GSPRs is not amplified by shield boosters, it's a flat value added after others are calculated.
Last edited:
Sure, PvE is only so threatening unless you deliberately go chasing after adversity; the emphasis weighs on attrition & endurance much more heavily. Personal skill will of course enable you to accomplish more with less, but taken equally that can be discarded as an objective consideration for outfitting ships.
It's not like utility mounts or optional mounts grant you extra ammo duration (with the sole exception of fuel tanks for plasma slugs), so may as well focus those on the benefits that enable more combat situations.
In terms of enabling personal endurance - having "more shielding" also feeds into that, by not having to sweat your SYS micromanagement all the time. I do enjoy using lo-draw even on ships with outsized PDs for the reason you point out - but that too can still be an objective consideration rather than personal, in terms of enabling more PD pips for WEP/ENG more often.
Regarding GSRPs - I meant the resistance values from engineered SBs & the translation into effective MJ totals, I should have been more correct there.
The overall point being, GSRPs are still plenty valuable all the time - for "shield tanks" and "hybrids" alike, as well as small ships & large ships.edit: Of course, all these objective considerations hinge around what every individual's identified priorities are, and how to weigh these considerations is up to everyone to make for themselves. I just take the view of informed choice being an enabler for making those decisions.
Last edited:
If my ship is survivable enough, it's survivable enough. And, by your own logic: more money is more money. Why should I leave 10 million credits per a good RES session on the table?
If the opponent can't get my shield down in a fight, the shield is strong enough and more shield is not needed.
I don't ram (generally); pirates don't ram. PA-s are easily dodgeable beyond 1000m or so. Biweave high mobility hybrid hull tanks don't need SCB-s anyway.
If my ship is survivable enough, it's survivable enough.
Yeah, I threw that together years ago in about 3 hours (including engineering) during the Jupiter Division CG to fight off 'Vettes in CZ-s during that particular event. Followed the best practices and recommendations available on the web at that time and didn't think too much about it. It did its job then and I haven't touched this build since, other than putting in a prismatic shield. I don't like FDL (except it's aesthetics) and I don't fly one.
Glaives make GMRP-s less desireable, they only supposedly protect against lightning attack which is easy to avoid. But by your own logic: more protection is more protection, so GMRP-s are it for non-AX combat if they fit within the power budget.
I wouldn't call using fast charge instead of high cap on prismatic and flow control instead of super capacitors on shield boosters min-maxing, but whatever. Looks like doing overall compromizes to fit within certain design criterias and performance requirements you personally deem important—exactly the process I use for my ships—but whatever.
So ultimately they're just on-paper theoretical musings about ideal conditions and performance, that can be safely set aside for real world applications? Just like 140 dB SNR in a DAC is must-have on paper but made completely moot by 30 dB noise floor of real world living rooms and 110 dB maximum SPL of loudspeakers? And at the end of the day you should choose what does the job considering the mission at hand and prioritizing different on-paper performance metrics according to what you actually need. Got it.
That's not my logic. More money is not more shielding, more shielding is more shielding. More shielding is more valuable to a combat-purpose outfit - especially, as I'm now repeating for the third time, when the credit benefit serving as the only upshot for taking a KWS is objectively negligible. If you choose to take it, you are doing it for fun. That's fine if that is your choice, but it should be recognized that it is not a practical one, whether it be for the stated purpose of combat or the sake of profiteering.
More shielding means you can get away with engaging more & bigger targets more often and more frequently throughout a combat session. It means you can utilize ramming attacks more often, as well as survive more frequent ramming & just damage in general from opponents. It means (as has already been pointed out) you don't have to spend as much time micromanaging your SYS distro pip pressure from moment to moment. There's much more to it than just "can 1 opponent take down my shields", especially when combat rank gain demands extreme quantity.
NPCs do ram, it depends on the ship they use. NPC Federal Assault Ships, in my experience, are the most common offenders. Ramming is called the "class 5 hardpoint" for a reason, it can be very effective in quickly dispatching your opponent - if you can safely take the downside of self-damage. Ramming a ship to take down its shields and then instantly chunking its powerplant to secure a rapid kill is a common advanced combat technique. Do not undervalue the worth of ramming, as a player who prefers not to ram most of the time myself.
PAs and ramming can be anticipated and avoided, but it's better if you don't set yourself up so that even taking one or two of these hits is a significant problem. Sitting outside of 1km all the time is a bad thing for optimizing your own damage output in most cases, especially where non-hitscan weapons & successfully rapidly destroying internal modules is concerned.
SCBs are an incredibly high boost to overall survivability, which again for the reasons already aforementioned, is an enabler to do more things in combat. Ignoring that at your own peril is, again, a choice you can make and that is fine, but it should be recognized it is not a practical one.
Remember, the original premise here is Djvortex's statement about "where you have to weigh the pros and cons of each type of module" - and your own claim that "for combat ships I don't think anyone ever uses anything else than D-rated HRP-s and MRP-s," which is why I am stressing these things about optional slot modules to make clear why that statement is incorrect. If you've deliberately 'settled for less' in your personal efforts for ship optimization, that does not make it so that everyone else does the same as you, or that there aren't considerations that are worth making about the things you've disregarded.
Part of why I am stressing these points is that you are stating things as though they are 'absolute facts', when that is not the case - whether it be misinformation or lack of full consideration.
It is amusing to me that you'd willingly bring up a copy-paste "meta FDL" in a discourse about not obeying the meta, but I'll let that slide as I feel I've illustrated my point about how even the "internet meta" itself is not really correct.
The lightning attack is the one reason to use a GMRP. It's not "supposedly", you can ask the AXI community and about why they include this information on their wiki - including about why there is no additional benefit to having more than a single GMRP. This is well-established fact, to be absolutely clear: there is no benefit to investing power in a GMRP outside of Thargoid encounters, and absolutely none to investing in multiple. If you have spare power, there are many other better ways to use it.
"Min maxing" by definition means considering all aspects of the ship at once, not only certain values in isolation. If you are deliberately sacrificing the only way to improve your ship's thermal efficiency (which, again, also interacts with your WEP output, it's not just about heat level) just for the sake of a minor amount of extra MJ's that you are already egregiously inflating by other means, you are not "min maxing" your ship. You may be outfitting your ship according to your own personally identified priorities, and that is perfectly fine, but you ought to do so while informed of all the possibilities and potential values you can attain.
Remember, you said this: "These two simply won't work without overcharged power plants, no matter how you try to optimize and min-max them." That statement, posed as absolute fact, was not correct. I was able to optimize them in such a way that they would work perfectly well without overcharged power plants. I am simply aiming to broaden your considerations of what's possible.
And no, this is not at all "just on-paper theoretical musings about ideal conditions and performance", you are incorrect about this as well. The loadouts I've shared with you are ones I've used across multiple long 4+ hour stretches of combat sessions, where I've fine-tuned and refined all of my loadouts, and taking the time outside the game to learn the nitty gritty details, in order to achieve optimal setups for efficient, enjoyable, practical combat rank gain & capability in all non-thargoid combat scenarios, where each and every "on-paper metric" has been realized in actual practice in recognizable and measurable ways.
That's what you would be doing if you were to actually "choose what does the job considering the mission at hand and prioritizing different on-paper performance metrics according to what you actually need" for outfitting a combat ship - fully considering all aspects, including thermal efficiency, ammo duration, potential effective shielding against multiple damage types, adequate hull & module protection against quantified threats to them, efficient use of all available module slots, efficient usage of all available power, effective power priority management, optimal damage output, damage types & delivery methods accounting for enemy movement/projectile time/chaff spam/need to destroy internal modules, optimal maneuverability (all aspects of this effectively being one thing as it's all determined by the same multiplier, as already mentioned), and I'm probably missing a couple variables on top of all this.
Try visualizing optimal outfitting of your ship as a radar chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart - you can absolutely deliberately decide to neglect or not maximize the potential of that list of the various aspects that would go on that chart, but by definition the moment you do so, you are no longer "min-maxing" and what you are doing is no longer "optimally best" for any given task, with consequences that are tangible and measurable in actual practice.
I say this often when regarding this game - in Elite, the numbers do not lie.
Last edited:
Correct. More money is more money.
If the Elite level 'Vette or 'Conda with SLF can't get through my shield before I finish them off, it's good enough. It's not only shield strength, but also the function of your ship's size and mobility. 'Vette needs more shields than Chief or Vulture.
Not intentionally, no. They do whatever they can to avoid collisions. The rams they do are accidental.
So is there any good reason to use E-rated HRP-s or MRP-s? That was my point: E-rated HRP-s and MRP-s are heavier and offer less protection, they might as well not exist at all.
10% more protection is 10% more protection. If I have power to spare, I'll use GMRP-s.
You did it by lessening shield strength, which funnily enough contradicts your own claim:
As I have already stressed more than enough, in this case the "more" in "more money" is so negligible that for all purposes of consideration, it is not worthwhile. Especially for a combat ship. There are too many alternatives to improving your money-generation in this game that do not involve gimping your combat ships needlessly, and too many better uses for spare power, for the KWS to ever be a practical choice.
Dealing with 1 single lone Elite 'vette or 'Conda is not anywhere near enough to do anything appreciable, due to the way Elite has structured combat so heavily around high quantity. You need to be able to deal with multiple opponents in rapid, continuous, steady succession, whether it be a CNB or a CZ, and whether your goal is rank gain, missions (for credits or otherwise), or CZ-clearing. Attrition is the name of the game, especially owing to the enormous amounts of hitpoint inflation present.
Sure, size and mobility also matter, but that's not the point that was being addressed there. You can't change your size (ship kits have no hitbox), and you can only affect mobility meaningfully by using the best possible thruster multiplier (which applies to all aspects of mobility equally at once), as the only time weight reductions make a meaningful difference is when you deliberately make mobility the point of the loadout and put all other considerations as secondary (as in, racing builds) - in short, meaning you always use Dirty Tuning Drag Drives.
That leaves Shielding as the sole thing in the "size/mobility/shielding" trifecta of considerations here that you can optimize and improve and tweak to eke out as much potential as possible.
If you wish to believe NPCs do not intentionally ram you, I'm not about to go to any special lengths to dispel you of the notion (all these walls of text are already getting excessive); nonetheless through much experience, I know better: it varies based on the ship type. Some do indeed behave in the manner you describe of avoiding collisions, but others (the Federal medium ships being the most obvious example, should you wish to do your own investigating) do use ramming behavior offensively.
Regardless, the high spike damage potential of a ramming incident - going either way - remains a major point of consideration for optimizing shielding.
Regarding E-rated things just in general - yeah, there's no real reason for those modules to exist, on that particular I am in full agreement with you. There's many examples of that throughout the outfitting 'balance' picture that would be worth attention from Fdev. (I'd also like to see the entirely arbitrary lettering of weapons changed to something reasonably intuitive and useful, but anyways)
If you have power to spare, you could:
- use Thermal Spread in place of Monstered on the powerplant (and definitely prioritize using Armoured over Overcharged)
- use a GSRP for up-front shielding that saves you from needing to worry about module damage in the first place
- utilize weapons that have a higher power requirement
- make a more power-hungry choice of utility/shield generator engineering specials
Yes, in the examples I gave you, I did sacrifice some shielding - because as I have already clearly stressed for you, it is worthwhile to consider ALL aspects of a ship at the same moment instead of focusing on only some in isolation, and the examples you gave - because they opted for Overcharged powerplants - opted for a considerably heavy trade-off regarding heat mangement (which for the most part can only be improved by choices made with the Powerplant) for the sake of measurably, relatively small improvements to things that can be improved in other ways if push really comes to shove.
If your goal were really to preserve the shielding amounts you presented while optimizing those ships, I would (and did, in the case of the Vulture) recommend a change in weapon loadout selection, but I opted to preserve that in the examples in respect to your choice to use those weapons with those Engineering options - which also goes to serve my original point, which was that yes, in fact, you can optimize those ships, even the notoriously power-hungry Vulture, without having to resort to an Overcharged powerplant - even while still using the exact same weapon loadout choices, which should normally be a part of making your power-usage considerations.
You see, I'm not going to engage in this pointless argument anymore. It's clear this is a clash of completely different and incompatible views.
Your view is that (defense) raw numerical stats are the most important, if you don't maximize these you're doing it wrong, damned be everything else.
My view is that defenses have to be as good as they need to be, and that need depends on situation. Once your survivability is good enough you can balance other aspects of your fit according to what you deem important for task at hand--speed, jumprange, alpha damage, loitering time, money per hour, low rebuy, whatever. And finally add nice-to-haves--GMRP-s, interdictors, limpet controllers, whatever. Exceptions when you build a ship for an extremely specific task.
In short, minmaxer chasing best on-paper performance vs. practical military application.
Which is far too common in the Elite community. It’s a sign of serial thinking: I will do only this one task, regardless of my long term plans. Meanwhile, they’re playing a game that rewards parallel thinking: I need to get X, Y, and Z. X is most important, but it takes me through Y territory, and Z can pop up anywhere. It’s best to sacrifice a bit X, so I can be ready for Y and Z.
It's only pointless if you make it so. There are a number of errors in your statement here.
Firstly, that is not my view. My view is that optimizing a ship loadout means maximizing its potential in all aspects with minimal drawbacks, taking into account the ways pushing that potential can and cannot be achieved. That is, as I just said previously, not looking at things like effective shielding values in isolation. You are confusing the argument about the merits (or lack thereof) of using a KWS with that of overall optimization.
Secondly, if that is your view, then you are consciously making a selective choice that is not strictly optimal. That in itself calls into question your own assertions about outfitting.
Again, if your identified priorities are met and the means are sufficient to your end - have at it and so much the better! That does not mean it is valid to make hard assertions such as stating that KWS has a practical use case, that optional slots are "simpler" to consider, that (and this one was my mistake in comprehension) people only use HRPs and MRPs in optional slots in combat ships, or that 'beams-and-multis is the only meta-efficient build setup', or that GMRPs have a worthwhile power-usage opportunity cost outside their specific use case - or that any of my assertions is based solely upon on-paper performance as opposed to testing and verifying all my assertions in practice over many long hours (during the excessively long grind to Elite rank, I needed something to do to keep myself occupied).
That all matters in the case of someone else stumbling across this thread via the wonders of world-wide-websearching trying to find the lacking information about outfitting particulars in the game - as well as my own pride, when you assert that my claims are not from a place of real-world practicality.
Something about the Elite community, especially of late, that grinds my gears is the widespread confusion, misinformation, hard assertions, and failure to recognize or acknowledge objective truths about the game, often in tandem with a refusal to think outside the box of what else is possible. I don't mean to bring it to bear on you personally, but it is my motivation when it comes to discussing these topics in depth for the sake of broader understanding.
Funnily, from my point of view it's entirely the other way around here. I see the possibilities and tasks that could be enabled, if one was willing to recognize the objective facts and variables involved to make the correct considerations to do so - because by definition, not doing so is limiting your own potential. It's entirely possible to find a balance between X, Y, and Z, but only if you are willing to make the effort.
Maybe it would behoove the community at large - myself included, even - to carry less negative assumptions, and a little more humility in acknowledging our possibilities.