Sentinel Frigate Spam

[RCIX]

Check the Gamma Theta system in my save (Control group 1 is there) and you'll see that there are a whopping 65 sentinel frigates in that system. Methinks this needs to be fixed?

[x4000]

Nope, that can happen.

[RCIX]

Hmm, seems odd considering they're really weak at that point...

[x4000]

I posted about this in another thread -- but actually, they are strong again by that point, because there is a cap on how weak they can get.  So, they are best at 2, or something like 30+.  With 80-some there, they are quite formidable as a group.

[raptor331]

can you show me the link, I am very interested in how it works.

[Lancefighter]

I dont suppose you have a graph, or function that I could graph, showing the sentinel frigate/zenith bombard damage curves?

[eRe4s3r]

According to the tooltip they do all only 25% damage if you have 4+

Given their low damage and high energy requirement, this means they are essentially better snipers... and just as useful ,p

They do have a lot of HP's though...

However, that they are effective in numbers isn't really true, that would assume that they are all shooting at 1 target - which they don't. So their lower damage is spread more evenly, meaning you will be hard-pressed to loose anything against them.

Also there is the matter of damage boosting

if you have 2 ships each doing 200k damage at 100% - having them together means 95% damage - 190k - a 5x damage boost means though 950k damage for EACH of them

If you have 6 ships each doing 200k damage at 25% - means 50k damage, damage boosting them means 250k damage for each of them

So 2 ships would have done 1900k Damage - but 6 ships would do 1500K damage (which means its best to send in 2 Zenith Core electricity Bombers and never more than that ,p)

6 is their build limit by the way. For Sentinels because of their low damage, their damage output actually is at all times pretty meh...

[HellishFiend]

Yeah, Sentinel Frigates need a boost. During early beta they did 5 times as much damage, which was admittedly overpowered. But since the nerf, their cost/benefit ratio is too low.

[raptor331]

Yea, however the advanced onboard warp system is useful for saving knowledge

[Kjara]

Err, are we talking about the same unit?  Sentinel Frigates for me (mk1) do 2k damage, have a cap of 16 and have a penalty of .6(and a min of .06).

They also seem a bit broken .

They went for me 100%->60%->30%(huh?--rounding error?--should be 36%)->20%(Should be about 21 or 22%)->15%(should be ~13%)

Also-- other rounding errors:
1 Does 4k(fd mode) to a sniper --This seems right
2 Does 2398 (should be 2400)
3 Does 1198 (should be 1200 for 30% or 1440 for 36%)

Edit:(I support a general buff of them though, they take 10k energy, and have the firepower of ~10 sniper turrets?).  If nothing else, reduce the energy cost to about 5k?

[eRe4s3r]

Blah i give up, i suck at math today especially..

Someone explain to me how many of these ships i should have in a fleet.

[orzelek]

From what I remember for these - 2 is correct number. And make them target enemy snipers as favorite - they are useful then even.

[x4000]

If you are the player, I believe the ideal number is two.

Then, based on my spreadsheet, the collective efficiently gradually drops until it hits the 0.06 cap at around 8 ships, where it bottoms out.  Then it starts gradually creeping back up again until it reaches the same total damage output as 2 ships at 20 ships.  So, 2 sentinel frigates will do the same as 20, in other words.  Then, beyond 20, the gain is always a net positive, so as long as the AI has 2 or fewer or 20 or more, they are in an ideal zone.  But, the shots of the sentinel frigates are individually weaker when they have something like 65 ships, which makes it so they are not instantly killing your ships too easily -- nice for you as the player, but also reasonably effective for the AI.

For them, having 65 ships is the equivalent of firepower of about 3.9 sentinel frigates with no penalty (so, the attack power of a single sentinel on one planet x 3.9).

Regarding the rounding errors, those are just fixed-int-math precision errors, not much I can do about those.  People complained about those with the autocannons, too.  It does make them a hair less predictable if you are trying to spreadsheet them, but they are consistently applied in the game so that works well enough for purposes of the game.  The basic issue is that for these float-type math operations, it only has 3 decimal places of precision because of the non-floating-point number type I have to use for both speed and cross-CPU consistency with the game.  That low of a precision does not cause issues often, but with this sort of math it does lead to mildly wrong (but consistent across CPUs, again) results.

[eRe4s3r]

But the player can only build 16 sentinel frigates.. so that means there is never a reason to build more than 2. You can't really use them for much besides lugging them around with your fleet, and when you do you get 2 ships with 2300dmg each (which i am going to call kindly "underpowered" ,p)

Bringing more with you would be a net-loss, unless you actually start loosing but then 16 20 or 600 sentinel frigates won't save you either ;p

This is completely different than the Zenith Core E-Bomber - which is an awesome piece of hardware (2 get 95% damage, max is 6..) and with 150k damage, a damage boost makes them the deadliest weapons in the game.

So my point being, sentinel frigates are vastly underpowered and vastly wasted when the ai spams them. Because it doesn't give the AI any combat ability, they are long range - like snipers, annoying, but you can actually ignore them entirely and just outproduce the losses.

[x4000]

Sentinel Frigates probably do need some work on their base damage output, I'm not disputing that.  And, for a human player with a single-planet start, yes there's never a reason to build more than two for a single planet.  Honestly, these are meant to be used more on defense than offense (or just two on offense, anyway), since they are sort of like super-snipers that can help keep your system clean.  I think that the percentage changes on these is right for what their purposes is -- but, the base damage output is probably not what it should be.