Hodyn Ok, here it is.
The Fool's Gambit MK2
Stats
Mass: 3537.0 Tonnes
Crew: 728 Souls
Value: 2,982,400 C
Background
I had a few theories that I wanted to test in the past week and so started working on this last night. Basically, the theories are:
- Cost efficiency of ships increase as size increases to a certain point, then decreases rapidly after that.
- Quantity has a quality of its own, numbers can beat quality if done correctly.
- AI targeting can be exploited to force ships to shoot in certain directions to your advantage.
- Modular weapon addons can be effectively used both for cheap additional firepower and to waste a volley or two of enemy fire.
- Firepower must be localised for maximum efficiency.
- Cost efficiency of ships
As the size of a ship grows, its effective firepower is only able to increase linearly due to the limited surface area of the ship, but the mass and cost increases exponentially, especially so due to protecting the ship. Firepower is cheap, but protecting against firepower isn't. Because of that, as ships get larger they get less effective, thus ships over a certain size can be beaten by a swarm of smaller ships that individually cost a fraction of the large ship AND still be cheaper than the large ship overall. I've often observed this when pitting multiple well designed small ships vs a more powerful and well designed large ship.
- Quantity vs quality
Since smaller ships are more efficient than massive ships due to the surface area to volume ratio, a larger amount of firepower can be gathered and focused on smaller ships. This means that the swarm of smaller ships can hold a lot more firepower than a single large ship, and whenever you lose a small ship, you only lose a small fraction of the swarm's total firepower, while on a large ship, you'll not only lose the firepower, but often a hole would appear in the defences that can and will be exploited by attacking ships to send wave after wave of fire into the hole to tear apart the delicate internals.
Also, with more ships, you have a greater chance of getting some of them behind an enemy ship. This is extremely important when facing 'optimised' ships which focus the majority of their defences to the front, so one or two firepower heavy small ships has a chance to do a disproportionate amount of damage to the rear and even score some reactor chain explosions.
- AI targeting
Since the tournaments rely on AI, it can be exploited due to the AI's rules/programming on what to shoot at. The AI loves to target exposed reactors, so if you add a reactor in front of your ship but off to one side, the AI will often target it early on in the engagement. This can be used to avoid the intial 'alpha strike' where all weapons are on full ammo/energy and just need a target to shoot at before becoming depleted. The more shots that is directed away from your ship initially, the longer your ship can last as no amount of (vanilla) shields can withstand a wall of electrobolt fire.
- Add on weapon modules
As an add on to using an exposed reactor, I often found that the AI may not always target the exposed reactor first, especially when it is off to one side, but will quickly become one of the next few targets to shoot at, so it still does save your ship from some firepower. Since you have a reactor out there that isn't always going to die on the first volley, you might as well add a bunk and several electrobolts/lasers to it so it can shoot. Since it isn't going to last very long, there isn't a need to worry about reloading so you can extend it as much as you want to gain that edge in the initial exchange of fire that can be critical to winning a fight. A laser with crew costs 3,083 C, an electrobolt costs 4,083 C, so stack away for some serious up front firepower.
- Localised firepower
One downside to a swarm is that the firepower can become spread out and thus make it nearly impossible to blast through a wall of shields. Thus, each ship needs a minimum level of firepower that is sufficient to punch through a wall of shields stacked side by side with reactors behind them immediately. Otherwise, they'll not be able to penetrate while the superior firepower of the larger ship grinds them all into dust.
What I found was that somewhere in the region of 6-8 electrobolts and 4-6 standard cannons are sufficient to punch through and damage/destroy the weapons positioned just behind the shield. However, it is not enough to immediately take out the shield generator directly behind them, so I went with a heavier build. Also, all that firepower is useful and needful when the ship get into the rear of the enemy ship where sometimes you only have a short period to punch through any shields and armour to cause as much destruction as possible. I went with 8 electrobolts, 8 standard cannons and 2 small lasers, but I still found that not enough. Large cannons had nice penetration once it got past armour and shields in the rear but did not have sufficient firepower for the initial face off so I left it out.
All in all, @Teg's Triple Exodia was a tough ship to beat and using all these theories I've managed to beat it with this set up by getting the ships to first concentrate firepower to blast his front Exodia to bits, then in the resulting split up, there is an extremely high chance of one or two Shredders (the individual ships) going around the rest of the Exodias, blasting through the Exodias from the sides and rear. This often relies on my Fool's Gambit breaking into the individual ships before the Exodia's split down the middle or win by sheer frontal firepower and shields.
On my very first trial run I was able to achieve about a 70% win rate with a cost of around 2.6 mil, but as I added on and tweaked stuff to improve the win rate, it actually dropped down to as low as 40% at certain points until I managed to get it right. On my last set of trials, pitting them together for 20 trials (10 on each side) resulted in 19/20 wins. In total it took me over 10 hrs just to get everything right.
Kudos to Teg for making such an efficient ship!
