After a bunch more tests I am now confident to declare a certain design "the best" against FEs in 2.0. But first a few general observations regarding fleet design:
- Cruisers, and to some extend destroyers, seem to be trash. Cruisers have no particular thing going for them; everything you can do with cruisers you can replicate on the other hulls and BBs seem to work best with every particular design aside from missiles (because they cannot mount them); here corvettes take the cake. For destroyers the same holds, just not as bad. They can at least hold their ground against FE fleets which cruisers simply can't. The only saving grace of destroyers is the fact that they apparently are pretty decent at taking out corvette swarms according to this thread. But so are other corvette swarms. Thus, based on what I've read so far from others in conjuction with my tests specifically against FEs, I conclude that the best course of action is to spam corvettes until you unlock BB tech, then organize your ships into corvette swarms serving as rapid response strike forces and main fleets consisting of BBs and maybe Titans as moral support.
- 2.0 gutted strike craft.
- Whirlwind missiles are strictly worse than regular missiles and torpedos even in the presence of reasonable PD, whereas regular missiles and torpedos do not seem to differ much against FEs.
- The ratio of armor, shield and hull does matter and should definitely be adjusted according to the opponent.
Getting on then, the best loadouts against FEs use weapons that damage hull directly, that is, Disruptors, Cloud Lightning and Arc Emitters. As outlined in a previous post of mine in this thread , these weapons offer the best kill-death-ratio within the test setting and this ratio is going to be even better compared to other loadouts in an actual game as FE/AE fleets have larger modifiers on shield and armor than they have on hull.
It doesn't really matter how one actually distributes these weapons over the battleships (there are not many choices anyway) as long as Arc Emitters are being used. Despite strike craft being rather bad in 2.0, using the middle section with 4 m-slots and one hangar bay is neither signifcantly better nor worse than using four Cloud Lightning. My personal favorite is AB-4D2V (slightly overhauled notation; briefly explained in the attached excel file together with all test results), that is, 2 Cloud Lightning and 4 Disruptors.
The weapons are very synergetic; the first volley of Arc Emitter fire takes out the first line of incoming Escorts, the survivors are then met with the Disruptors in close range, whereas Cloud Lightning and further Arc Emitter volleys take care of the Battlecruisers. Aside from looking nice, this causes the combat to be rather brief.
On the defensive side one should definitely adjust to the enemy FE. Xenophiles and Xenophobes are best met with more armor than shields (~ 2 shield slots, 4 armor slots) and Materalists and Machines should be met with more shields than armor (4/2 split for Materialist and 5/1 for Machines). Spiritualists are interesting because they use Plasma and stuff that penetrates shields, as such the best defense against them is to stack hull. If no crystal plating is available, one should apparently use 5 shield and one armor slot to at least block the Plasma. Note here that I only tested shield/armor ratios and the full six plating setup, as such there may be sweet spots where swapping in one crystal plating or so is better. Interestingly, even when met with the respective best defense, Xenophobes and Xenophiles are the easiest, Materialists and Machines the hardest to beat.
For the combat computer use Artillery. The accuracy from the Line computer should not affect Disruptors and Cloud Lightning because they already have 100% accuracy and once the range buff actually works, Artillery will be strictly better.
I did not do any tests for the auxiliary slots: The high shield setups require the use of reactor boosters and the downgrading of components when tier 5 power is used and I doubt that the armor focused setups benefit that much from capacitors. Since Aux. Fire Controls just like Line computers do not add anything to the design, the choice comes down to Decoders and Afterburners and I think one wants Afterburners simply for the sublight speed then, especially considering that a single Decoder will only add 5 tracking.
A small caveat regarding the attached test results: All tests where conducted on 2.0.1 which means that the evasion numbers of the BBs are inflated. Though I doubt that it changes the overall picture.
This setup is most likely optimal against the Contingency as well since their loadouts are similar to FE fleets. Against the other crises it would be interesting to test whether loadouts exploiting the shield or armor focus of the Unbidden respectively Scourge outperform direct hull damage.
Lastly, I attached my own version of the Doomfleet event. With fleet_test.0 one can generate a proper doomfleet with five titans, 150 BBs and 300 Escorts distributed evenly over the FE types. Higher numbers (1-5) will spawn single FE fleets of 1 Titan, 30 BBs and 60 Escorts. The mod also includes an altered defines.txt making the command limit irrelevant; though I had to actually replace the defines in the game files to make it work.
... now on to actually playing the game.
