And even player piloted afflictors can struggle against campaign high tech bounty/tri-tach fleets or redacted fleets. I wouldn't solely rely on it in an iron man run, for example. However, they also are very intolerant of player mistakes. If Afflictor is SS, why isn't the typical combat portion of a fleet 100% afflictors for most players? Or put another way, why do you have an Odyssey in your campaign fleet? Simply for variety, or perhaps it fills a combat purpose that a vanilla afflictor simply can't?Īn Afflictor can be an amazing ship in player hands, depending on the player and the situation. Two paragons, one player piloted, other with a hand crafted officer, probably can defeat every vanilla fleet 1 on 1 (fleets ganging up is a different matter). 15 afflictors (120 DP) deployed at once does not defeat every enemy vanilla fleet in the campaign, nor does it defeat 3600 DP worth of enemy ships (say 60 paragons?). Since the AI is not that good at piloting afflictors, I feel the 30-40 ratio is misleading. Default settings guarantees you can deploy 120 DP worth of ships in any given fight in the campaign. I'll also note quoting a 30 or 40 ratio in terms of DP only really matters when you're deploying more than one ship at a time and hitting the DP cap. Such a swap would have less impact against a capital. Simply swapping in Xyphos for the talons and dropping stuff that never actually connected with the afflictor would likely have resulted in a completely different result for the afflictor. I feel like there's a number of human piloted capital ships that would have had no problem with a pirate falcon fleet using only pilums and talons. That someone else can utilize them and win a contrived scenario that's technically achievable will not make me yield an SS ranking for it. I don't like frigates, I don't like phase ships, I hate the playstyle and limited PPT that accompanies both. You could post a video of an Afflictor soloing a star fortress, that won't change a thing. Even forgetting that this isn't actually a Vanilla Afflictor, which IIRC changes some weapon mounts for more flexibility in addition to across-the-board stat boosts, though I can only actually see 3 AMBs for sure and so can't tell if you actually got any use out of that part with this particular build) It's genuinely difficult to make out what's going on design-wise since the video resolution is not so hot, but a maxed player skills would appear to change the original scenario a bit, no? The Falcons seem like they'd require 2 barrages of those AMBs without maxed skills if I've done my napkin-math right, which would mean you'd have at-best run out of ammo by the 15th Falcon without them (if PPT didn't get you first, without Combat Endurance skill), and of course that requires going heavily into combat skills with all the opportunity costs that entails.