LOL it already has several ones but OK.

Yes, this results clearly shows flak is so OP I can't help myself but cry.

Can you do a test like this with LRM and Cobalts? Not microing the LRM's just letting them fire at will, but moving the attacked Cobalt behing the LRM's line? This is not an uncommon setup in a fleet battle, one cannot micro every unit he owns. I wonder what will be the difference to a setup where LRM's are microed as well.

Yes my initial feeling were like this, while this garda tactic sounds good on paper, but any better player will try to counter their movements, and there goes the advantage of flak. I think this is the main reason Flak spam is not viable online, along with the high cost of a Garda and the longer build time, and of course reduced strength against singular objects.

One thing you have to remember is that flak only gets exponentially more O p as fleet suply increases

I wish I could give you negative karma for this comment, even though I gave you [positive] karma elsewhere more than once IIRC (https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/user/3020178).

It takes a fair bit of work to do these fights according to a less-than-trivial maneuvering [and targeting] plan. As it should be plain obvious by now, there is a high variability in outcomes depending on the relative maneuvering of the two forces, even when starting with exactly the same OOB. It's probably one of the reasons why the previous results on this topic have been mired in controversy. I've not seen the maneuvers [and especially the counter-maneuvers] discussed in this depth before, nor have I even seen replays where someone tried to play both sides in non-trivial fashion [as opposed to leave one side for the AI.]

I'm also going to remind you that I've stayed away from this flak controversy until yesterday or so. I generally don't believe that simply repeating opinions is particularly helpful, so I prefer to post only when I have some [preferably new] facts. Ideally, such facts should be easy to reproduce by someone else [in science in general, and although this is just a video game, and with the risk of sounding pompous, the scientific method applies to testing hypotheses in it as well.] Now if you want to disprove one [or more] of the experiments I've done, you're welcome to post your own recordings.

Yea I've witnessed that shift-queueing move orders for a group of gardas is very ineffective and barely any better than just parking them on top of the enemy and letting them sit. They move along the planned route very slowly, often stopping completely at any given waypoint, whereas if you issue each move order manually as the gardas reach each waypoint, as opposed to shift-queueing them all, they can move more or less continuously. This does require you to pay more or less constant attention to the fight in order to pull off, which is not an issue in SP, but would be a handicap in MP. However cobalts have the same requirement if they are to counter the tactic, so it kind of balances out.

The barrier to Flak usage in online games is their research requirement and higher production costs, not the capacity for cobalts to still beat them with proper micro. It would be interesting to see what happened if Flak was able to be produced without research, such that they could be spammed from the start like LFs, and whether or not MP players would develop proper LF counter-micro as a response...... but ofc we will never know.

Sarcasm detected?! Well, the Cobalts were "barely microed" [perhaps an unfortunate expression on my behalf] by splitting their fire in pairs. This indeed qualifies as "barely" [in terms of effort involved] when just 4 Cobalts are present. But the number of orders you'd have to issue grows linearly with the Cobalts fleet [thanks to the poor interface for target management that Sins provides], whereas the Gardas can be moved as a group regardless of fleet size [and the Gardas seem to require no targeting orders to be effective, at least at the scale I've tested so far]. With the default/AI focus-fire strategy for the Cobalts, a quick guesstimate is that the their firepower would be effectively half of what I achieved in test 2 for a large time interval [until they are cut down to 2 Cobalts]. Since the default focus-fire requires even less effort to test [vs. pre-plotted Garda paths], I've done such a test; let's call it test 4. The outcome of test 4 is that the Cobalts lost and 2 Gardas survived in good health. (Normally I don't bother uploading fights that require little work because everyone can try those quickly, but given how controversial this flak topic is, I've uploaded my test 4 to http://www29.zippyshare.com/v/48194013/file.html, just in case.) The outcome of test 4 is thus far closer to test 1 than to test 2, so while "barely" applies to the level of work needed to split the fire of 4 Cobalts [in test 2], it surely does not apply to the impact this simple order has one outcome of the fight! Unfortunately, the Sins interface does not allow such "split fire" order to be easily given to a large[r] group of ships.

On the other hand, a problem I've seen with pre-plotted/queued movement orders for Gardas [both in tests 2 and 4] is that they fairly consistently [not always but around 50% of the time] overshoot their turning waypoints. And when they overshoot, the Gardas overshoot by a lot, one grid length or so, which in this fight is basically 100% more travel than plotted. This makes the Gardas' rear guns less effective in tests 2 and 4. It's more or less the same effect on Gardas firepower as if the Cobalts were bolting away when blindsided, but instead caused by the Gardas own movement [bug]. Seeing this issue in test 2 is what inspired me to make the Cobalts bolt when blindsided in test 3, particularly because the bug doesn't affect all Gardas in synchrony. Most of the time, a part of their formation goes into the wild overshoot while the rest moves as planned, so you can get some visual comparison of the difference in firing volume between the two cases. Insofar, I have't found a workaround for Gardas' queued movement bug other than not giving/queuing more than one movement order for the Gardas [which was done in tests 1 and 3]. So, may the ship movement bugs ever be in your favor. But even with this unexpected "nerf" for the Gardas, microing the Gardas well isn't a lot of work and the amount of micro work required for Gardas' movement stays constant with the increase in their fleet size.

While I haven't found a non-manual workaround for Gardas' troubles with following a queueud flight plan, it seems to be less of an issue in scaling up than the trouble I'm going to have telling lotsa Cobalts what to [not] shoot at. I hope the Gardas will also sorta focus fire (by default) in the larger scale, reducing their effective firepower unless microed in that regard as well.

If you want to take things personally, that's your choice....

You are welcome to do all the tests you want, however I will remind you that the realities of competitive play are very difficult to replicate in "tests", especially when it is only one person...

In reality, each "player" is controlled by one person...while this person does not have the difficulty in controlling multiple "players" in game, they also do not have the luxury of pausing the game...one person cannot realistically model micromanagement and assess its difficulty in implementation when playing as 2+ "players" and using the pause feature...I have personal experience with this as I have done dozens of simulations with my own personal mod that makes significant changes to the combat counter system -- no matter how meticulous you are, the results you get when trying to do it alone and the results you get when having a friend help you are staggeringly different....

Additionally, your fleet sizes are very small and thus relevant to only a very narrow range of all gameplay possibilities...it would be incredibly rare for 4-5 frigates to be fighting another 4-5 frigates for a noteworthy amount of time without any capital ships or reinforcements...at such small sizes, the importance of passive regen rates and shield mitigation mechanics of individual ships become incredibly exaggerated...these effects become marginalized with larger fleets and thus you can get some very odd and unintuitive results when you involve so few ships....

Another issue with your test is that you are doing a fleet supply comparison...it has already been established by multiple people that on a per fleet supply basis, flak frigates can be made to win...you offer nothing new by confirming that result...what has also been discussed and brought up by multiple people is the complete irrelevance of such tests...fleet supply comparisons are grossly unrealistic when comparing flak to LFs...that you openly acknowledge this yet still do a fleet supply test is rather puzzling...

There are many advantages LFs have over flak that only an actual game will capture:

1. Cost -- You can do the theoretical cost comparison, and doing so will of course significantly reduce the number of flak ships...however, an important consideration is that LFs cost no crystal while flak do...in the very early game, when you only have your HW and maybe the roid/moon connected to it, your typical income rates highly favor credits and metal over crystal (you can use the planet entity files to confirm that average metal count from asteroids and moons is much higher than average crystal count)...LF spamming needs you to only sell crystal while flak spamming may cause you to have to sell metal in order to buy crystal...this favors LFs significantly until you have several planets and your metal/crystal income rates are comparable...even then, LFs are still cheaper overall and will still be highly favored....
2. Research -- because flak require a tier 2 research, you can't even start the research until you have scuttled your cap factory and then finished your 2nd lab...by the time you will be able to start building flak, your opponent will already have a significant advantage over you in fleet size...at the very least, this will force you to build some LFs until you have the research...
3. Production speed -- flak build much slower per fleet supply than LFs...even if you somehow completely dismiss the cost discrepancy, the LF spammer is still going to have a larger fleet based on this stat alone....
4. Focus Firing -- Because LFs can focus fire, they are significantly better at kill capital ships, structures, and starbases...if you try flak spam and come against a Vasari player, they will roll over you so fast since you will have nothing to drive off their capital ship or stop their starbases...even against TEC or Advent, the other player will have a much greater advantage in driving off your cap, sniping your construction frigates, and destroying your factories...

There is a reason why no skilled people spam flak to counter LF spamming...it's because it DOESN'T WORK....even Sinkillr himself spams LFs online instead of building flak, which should show more than anything that the strategy is not valid....

The LF player will amass a larger fleet than you and even if you somehow were able to go toe to toe with them in a fleet battle, their LFs will have a huge advantage in being able to drive off your cap and destroy your structures....if someone somehow magically was able to have as much flak as I do LFs in terms of fleet supply, I would just go hit their factories and focus on their cap, and I'd take less losses doing it than if the enemy was able to focus fire on my ships with LFs....

Finally, rushing LRFs and flak is almost as bad as spamming flak....LRFs are much slower than LFs or flak, which allows your opponent to run their fleet around and destroy structures...if you do this on ICO, your opponent will run circles over you and eventually roll you....

Oops multi-post

What I've seen is rather different, the Gardas sometimes move too fast an oveshoot their waypoints by a lot. See my post right above. Note that ships in Sins (regardless of type) won't reach their top speed if the waypoints are too close together. Without a recording and/or more details I'm not sure what you were doing and seeing. You can see the actual speed in the dev exe; it's in the "Entity Info" menu [c] under the option "Show Physics - Velocity" [j].

 

The effect that I'm seeing is that they overshoot and then sit still forever since they have to make such large turns, or as you described, they just move very slowly in general and do not accelerate to their top speed. I have utterly failed in all attempts to get a group to move at a "smooth" pace, with a consistent speed and no sitting still while turning around, using shift-queue orders.


I'm probably going to do a full scale fight with actual production (not spawns) on my "Quick Frontliners" map with one side pumping LFs and the other rushing for Gardas... at some point. Those extended plays vs. self with full econ are quite time consuming to make, something like 3x-4x the recorded time. Never mind that the longer one plays, the more likely it is for the recording to end up borked.

 

That should be interesting, I'm not brave enough to try to simulate actual games yet lol. Like you mentioned by expectation is that in a very small map where you can jump to the enemy territory so fast it is not going to work...... while 1 Mil lab is a sunk cost basically since you need to get the fleet supply upgrade anyways, you're looking at the resource cost for an additional Mil lab and the garda research, which is enough that your opponent will have at least 3-4 more cobalts than you before even accounting for the higher production cost of the gardas themselves. Those extreme early game numbers are going to be all important in such a small rush-based scenario. Trying to tech up to even this small extent would probably work better in a scenario with larger territories, so that players cannot rush as quickly.

 
If you want to take things personally, that's your choice....

You are welcome to do all the tests you want, however I will remind you that the realities of competitive play are very difficult to replicate in "tests", especially when it is only one person...

In reality, each "player" is controlled by one person...while this person does not have the difficulty in controlling multiple "players" in game, they also do not have the luxury of pausing the game...one person cannot realistically model micromanagement and assess its difficulty in implementation when playing as 2+ "players" and using the pause feature...I have personal experience with this as I have done dozens of simulations with my own personal mod that makes significant changes to the combat counter system -- no matter how meticulous you are, the results you get when trying to do it alone and the results you get when having a friend help you are staggeringly different....

Additionally, your fleet sizes are very small and thus relevant to only a very narrow range of all gameplay possibilities...it would be incredibly rare for 4-5 frigates to be fighting another 4-5 frigates for a noteworthy amount of time without any capital ships or reinforcements...at such small sizes, the importance of passive regen rates and shield mitigation mechanics of individual ships become incredibly exaggerated...these effects become marginalized with larger fleets and thus you can get some very odd and unintuitive results when you involve so few ships....

Another issue with your test is that you are doing a fleet supply comparison...it has already been established by multiple people that on a per fleet supply basis, flak frigates can be made to win...you offer nothing new by confirming that result...what has also been discussed and brought up by multiple people is the complete irrelevance of such tests...fleet supply comparisons are grossly unrealistic when comparing flak to LFs...that you openly acknowledge this yet still do a fleet supply test is rather puzzling...

There are many advantages LFs have over flak that only an actual game will capture:


Cost -- You can do the theoretical cost comparison, and doing so will of course significantly reduce the number of flak ships...however, an important consideration is that LFs cost no crystal while flak do...in the very early game, when you only have your HW and maybe the roid/moon connected to it, your typical income rates highly favor credits and metal over crystal (you can use the planet entity files to confirm that average metal count from asteroids and moons is much higher than average crystal count)...LF spamming needs you to only sell crystal while flak spamming may cause you to have to sell metal in order to buy crystal...this favors LFs significantly until you have several planets and your metal/crystal income rates are comparable...even then, LFs are still cheaper overall and will still be highly favored....
Research -- because flak require a tier 2 research, you can't even start the research until you have scuttled your cap factory and then finished your 2nd lab...by the time you will be able to start building flak, your opponent will already have a significant advantage over you in fleet size...at the very least, this will force you to build some LFs until you have the research...
Production speed -- flak build much slower per fleet supply than LFs...even if you somehow completely dismiss the cost discrepancy, the LF spammer is still going to have a larger fleet based on this stat alone....
Focus Firing -- Because LFs can focus fire, they are significantly better at kill capital ships, structures, and starbases...if you try flak spam and come against a Vasari player, they will roll over you so fast since you will have nothing to drive off their capital ship or stop their starbases...even against TEC or Advent, the other player will have a much greater advantage in driving off your cap, sniping your construction frigates, and destroying your factories...

There is a reason why no skilled people spam flak to counter LF spamming...it's because it DOESN'T WORK....even Sinkillr himself spams LFs online instead of building flak, which should show more than anything that the strategy is not valid....

The LF player will amass a larger fleet than you and even if you somehow were able to go toe to toe with them in a fleet battle, their LFs will have a huge advantage in being able to drive off your cap and destroy your structures....if someone somehow magically was able to have as much flak as I do LFs in terms of fleet supply, I would just go hit their factories and focus on their cap, and I'd take less losses doing it than if the enemy was able to focus fire on my ships with LFs....

Finally, rushing LRFs and flak is almost as bad as spamming flak....LRFs are much slower than LFs or flak, which allows your opponent to run their fleet around and destroy structures...if you do this on ICO, your opponent will run circles over you and eventually roll you....

Please. No one ever said anything about "ICO-viable" strategies against "competitive" players. Setting up a strawman to try and knock down...... another typical under handed tactic of the Anti-Flak Lobby.

Some more tests. Today we send the Advent into the Frigate Deathbattle Arena

5 defense vs 5 disciples

Flak wins with 2 ships left alive. I believe this is due to my micro improving since my initial cobalt vs garda tests. I just ran my defense vessels through the disciples over and over, then circled them when it got down to 2 because they would both turn in the same direction, allowing me to "blindside" them more or less indefinitely and rather easily.

5 defense vs 3 ilums

Very easy flak win.... there are 4 still left alive, albeit one only has 60 hull remaining. I didn't do any micro really I just parked the fleet on top of the ilums so that most if not all of their banks could fire and let them go at it. As RespawnedTitan mentioned flaks have a more efficient firing strategy compared to other ships' auto-attack because they split their damage, one of the ilums only had 30 something shield mitigation when it was about to die.

5 defense vs 7 acolytes

I got to use this same group of flak for the next test without killing and respawning... because they won with no hull damage

5 defense vs 1 aeria (bombers)

The aeria amusingly runs out of SC and antimatter with about 300 hull left and all 5 Flak still alive. Attempts to run away or micro the aeria prove fruitless.

12 defense vs 1 Prog

8 defense left with full hp when the prog dies. Again run-through micro is needed to make the Flak fire properly but it's not particularly difficult.

5 disciples vs 3 illums

Only one ilum dies, the other two have full health. Just like flak, they can use run-through micro while still firing at the LFs from behind them. Unlike Flak they have a very long range so they can run far behind the enemy and still fire, "blindsiding" them for even longer than flak. They do win with 4 more fleet supply left over compared to the Flak..... which is pretty darn awful if you consider that ilums are supposed to hard counter LFs, and LFs are supposed to hard counter Flak!

5 disciples vs 7 acolytes

Only one disciple dies. Meh.

5 disciples vs 1 aeria (fighters)

Two disciples die before the aeria goes down.

12 disciples vs 1 prog

The prog takes this one very easily, I have it at colonize at level 1 but after killing the 7th frigate it leveled up and I gave it malice set to autocast. By treating it like a big flak and running it around the disciples I was able to prevent some of them from firing. The prog wins with about half its hull left.

3 ilums vs 6 acolytes

One ilum dies, another has about half health. Once again corvettes proving to be not much of a "counter" to LRF. Notably this result is not much different from Shrikens vs Javelis.

3 ilums vs 1 aeria (fighters)

Due to how slow the ilums are the aeria can run away from them and keep them from firing for long stretches of time. It wins without even losing any shields.

8 ilums vs 1 prog

Only 3 ilums are left although they do win. No attempt to micro the prog.

7 acolytes vs 1 aeria (fighters)

The aeria only takes about 50 hull damage before it wins.

17 acolytes vs 1 prog

Since the prog has a strong combat ability against frigates I decided to level it up to 2 and give it malice for this fight. Unfortunately, with only the damage from the capship and its fighters, the malice propagation is not enough to overcome even the flimsy corvettes' shield regen, and does not really do anything. The corvettes still win with 13 left alive, although I believe in shrikens vs Akkan there were 14 corvettes left. So as I predicted there is little difference in the outcome.

As the only guy in this thread with extensive multiplayer experience, I can tell you that flak spam is not only very powerful in 5s games, but the dominant "meta" strategy currently for frontliners. It is nearly impossible to stop once the numbers approach 20+ ships. Mix the flak up with some healers and its GG for the other team. About the only way to counter it is to get heavy cruisers or a titan.

In general, flak spam works when:

1. You have a really good AoE to handle frigates (lvl 6 marza, lvl 5 corsev, titan)
2. You need protection from SC and/or corvettes
3. Carriers aren't an option because you need the firepower ASAP or you need to do a lot of phase jumping

These situations occur every once in a while...hell I've spammed flak a few times to protect my Advent titans...they aren't common though since usually you have a legacy fleet from the early game or carriers will do just fine....most times it happens when a frontliner gets a ton of feed to get a titan or an eco player suddenly decides to titan and fleet...

Stilat, chillax. The only conspiracy here is of the game devs to not fix the bugs with the recording/playback system. (Maybe we should start a thread on that, by the way.) I can find multiple users posts here [besides mine] to attests to bugs like that. I usually delete recordings if they cause minidump on playback [I got a pretty big but not infinite SSD]. My Sins User folder is currently at around 6GB. These things tend to add up; they're poorly or not compressed despite being in binary format.

I [accidentally] posted a bugged recording for example in the Corsev thread (https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/453667/page/1/#3471365) called "crazy salvage2", where the Corsev "stupidly" dies [on playback anyway] without firing a big bang that would have killed the enemy and would have fed Corsev's health, etc., which is of course not what happened when I played it. There's no point in complicating this debate with "recordings" that don't actually reproduce what happened and/or crash. The desync is usually at some user actions, I've noticed. In that Corsev "recording", it just "forgot" to fire another boarding party. My oversight there was to assume that because that recording was short, it would be okay without watching it; turns out that it wasn't.

Based on my previous experiences, the odds of recording extended play vs. self correctly are generally not good. For a game that involves a lot of user actions (and the early econ/colonization/build orders are pretty numerous, and X2.) I guesstimate it takes about 20-30 mins of play for the chance of Sins crapping out on the recording to be around 50%. I've only got one successful 50-minutes recording (posted in another thread) and three failed ones of similar lengths for a full scale game. Totally weird shit happened in the failed recordings like 40[-remaining] strong Disciples fleet stopped shooting at an Orky when it was down to 200 health. And then they just targeted irrelevant stuff while the Orky killed them all. What player would do that? (Remember my comments on the 1st MP recording you/Hyradlig posted? Like so-and-so just left his cap ships sitting there doing nothing for a long time? When that's not what I saw on a 2nd playback... and probably not what happened in the original game either.)

Back to this early flak scenario(s): the play needs to be around 25-30 minutes long for one side to be clearly losing; killing structures takes a while with the early game fleets, even after you quickly eliminate constructors, and each side pumps ships for a while (keeping alive their production facilities as long as they can with twin repair platforms), but the relative fleet strength numbers stay about the same due to losses.

I can probably try to make a another recording. Which of the two scenarios I already described is your favorite for me try again, by the way? Actually, you can have me try a build order of choosing for the flak side, if you're willing to specify it. I think you saw the map I use[d], but if not it's given in https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/455085/page/1.

Respawn try dropping two military labs at the start and rushing LRMs (like in diplomacy metagame). Then switch to flak when the opponent pumps out vettes. Works wonders if starting distance isn't too close (flak+lrm beats LF+vette in every category (cost, fleet supply) besides build time).

Its nice to see one of the hardcore anti-flak party members to renounce their old ways.