I'd like to bump this thread and flag the paralyzer targeting priorities. Am currently trying out the paralyzers on a 2HW game, and I'm finding that they are concentrating fire too much on single targets, leaving a lot of ships un-touched and resulting in very heavy attrition.
Will check this explicitly in a test later, but in a fleet-combat situation, I would always prefer the super-aggressive option of 1 ship-1 target (at most 3 ships - 1 target) so as to minimise effective enemy fire-power.
Thanks.
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EDIT: I'm inspecting the targeting patterns closely at the moment... Using a double-cap of paralyzers on either mark-I or mark-II. /THese are some of the observations...
(1) 3 attempts. When I send it into a wormhole by itself, they seem to actively attempt to paralyse all of the ships around a guardpost (under 20). I cannot test this for larger cases since they don't last long enough .
(2a) Attempt 1. When using them to defend a wave attack interspersed a group, they instead tend to focus fire on
a few ship...
(2b) Attempt 2. When using them to defend a wave attack as a separate group, their initial shots will paralyses a collection of ships (reaches the maximum of 3 minutes on some, less on others). However, after the first one or two volleys they still switch towards focus firing one or two ships.
(2c) Attempt 3 and 4. They seem to be intent on keeping some ships at max paralysis and gunning down others regardless of paralysis
The above behaviour leaves much to be desired. A cap of 160 paralysers stuns on average ~10 ships maximum in a given volley and leave the rest to slaughter them. In my assessment this leaves them as practically useless - why would I want to have 10 out of 100 bombers permanently paralysed at 180 seconds while the other 90 kills my CC?
No, I would rather have 100 of 100 bombers paralysed at 18 seconds each. For the ship-type to
function at all it must remove a significant number of ships from the enemy arsenal on a cap-for-cap basis.* On this point, using the cap of 3 minutes is a limit for retargetting is a mistake. Arguably, a paralysis that lasts slightly longer than the reload time of the firing ship is the maximum, since this always leads to stun-lock. For a ship that has less HP than an
engineer, less than a third of fighters, and regularly facing many hundreds of ships I must demand no less. I'm pausing that game for now pending paralyzer changes.
For higher marks, instead of increasing paralysis time I would recommend decreasing reload. That is
paralysis x8 for all marks and reload time of
9-Mark seconds. Shot-numbers are the prime limitation to the effectiveness of paralysers, not paralysis time. I'm excluding increasing number of shots for now (very unbalancing).
A maximum of two shots should ever be applied by paralyzers per target, since most of them will survive that 8 seconds for the next shot. Therefore, the ship targeting logic should say:
If ( target-paralysis < 9 sec. ) shoot target, else Find next target in list.
If all targets in range are paralysed >= 9sec or non-paralysable, then obey normal logic. Alternatively, shoot target with smallest paralysis time remaining (possibly a calculation that's more expensive than its worth).
* Possibly 1/2 to 2/3 to possibly 3/4 of a cap of similar enemy ships per cap of paralyzers. I don't know where a convenient break-point would be, but the paralyzer's natural counter are ship-types with higher caps than it anyway. From experience enemy fleetships prioritise paralysers above most of the fleet, which is pretty bad.
