*** warning - long post ***
If you want to beat the Mothership we should not be taking it on going after its strongest points which is firepower and armor. Go after its weakness which is lack of speed - stay at a distance and keep moving to avoid its fire, and
I have the proof as well (EndlessInfinity is going to hate me).
I ran many runs of these encounters against the real Alien Mothership from tournament 1, and both the normal AI and flanking AI that Mr_Wizard created as testing Motherships for this tourney.
I ran each of those Motherships against 8 of each ship posted here.
I can give detailed results if somebody really wants them (8.5 hours of encounters run so far - so I believe I have some significant facts). I timed each to see how fast the ships lost or won against the various Motherships.
I know that some ships are designed to be part of a fleet and not supposed to be used as a stand-alone ship, and I am only going to go over the ships that had some success vs. at least one version of the test Motherships by themselves (8 of themselves, of course).
While I started out running 5 tests each, I ran out of steam (c'mon, I spent 8.5 hours already running these matches, plus time setting them up and recording results). So some matches I only ran 3 matches each, and for the Mothership tests ships for this tourney, I only ran one each so far, but the results line up with the higher runs and I didn't see any behaviour to suggest more runs would be any different. I will run more tests eventually.
Time to kill in brackets()
VS. real Mothership Tourney 1
SolsticeH2 - 1 kill (8:35), 2 stalemates, 2 deaths
Dread Bringer - 2 kills(11:15,10:30) and 3 stalemates
Citrus - 5 wins (3:00,2:33,3:24,2:26,6;15) - note the quick times (mostly due to Mothership suicides)
KeepAway2 - 1 win(13:26), 2 stalemates (think with different set of AI ranges would win all encounters, more on that below)
Cricket - 3 wins(6:22,6:04,4:06)
VS. Mothership test Tourney 2 normal AI - only 1 run so far each ship
Turtle Mk 2 - stalemate (which is its purpose)
Citrus - 1 win(4:07)
Cricket - 1 win (7:38 )
VS. Mothership test Tourney 2 flanking AI - only 1 run so far for each ship
Turtle Mk 2 - stalemate (which is its purpose)
Citrus - 1 win(3:03)
Cricket - 1 win(6:53)
I generated all encounters (wrote a quick program to make all matches start the same) so they all are on a 4096x4096 sandbox, same starting locations for all ships.
The Citrus is better than the Cricket at this because the Cricket can get locked into a sandbox boundary easier than the Citrus. Run these encounters to see how fast a Citrus can beat the Motherships, you don't have to download the actual ships, the encounter files contain the ship information.
Citrus vs. Mothership1
Citrus vs. Mothership2 normal AI
Citrus vs. Mothership2 flanking AI
Note that I have the same ship except for AI range ( I was testing to see what range worked best ), so you will see Citrus 800 all the way to Citrus 625 as ship names/AI range.
What I think are the key points to putting together a fleet that will destroy
any Mothership
- good speed and decent acceleration
- flanking AI
- AI range 600-800 (and the ships must all be different AI ranges - critical to not stalemate)
- two Lancets on each ship
- any weapon that can reach the Mothership from the range we are staying at (remember that if flankers get behind a target they dart in to closer range)
If in my tests I had 8 versions of KeepAway2 with different AI ranges, I think it would have also defeated each Mothership regularly as well (just not nearly as fast as Citrus does).
I welcome any comments, or points that you might think that I have missed (after you run the encounters ).