Mathematico advanced mechanics guide

How some targeting work and how to abuse it!
Alright so for main bank, it goes something like, of all the ship in range, which one you have the best damage against and out of those which one jumped first, for other banks ( think flak, sb,illums, capships, titans and vets (kinda)) it ignores the damage type and just shoot at whatever is in range then, whatever jumps first.

Some example shall we:

• let say you have LF + vets vs flak, and everything is bunched up in close quarters, IF you jump in the vet first then LF, and then engage, the flak will shoot their foward bank (1/4) to vets, and their other side(3/4) to vet also, however, if you jump in lf first in the grav well, the foward bank will shoot at vet(1/4), because of damage type targeting, but the side and back banks(3/4) will shoot at lf! So in the 2nd case your lf will tank 3/4th of the damage, making your vets survives much longer.
  
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• You are going to fight a Vasari sb, with 3 marza and 100 lrms, if you jump in marza first then the lrm, the main bank will shoot at whatever but the extra 3 bank will always shoot at the marza! it will leave your lrms mostly intact.
  
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• You are facing illums + malice as advent and all you have is a bunch of vets and scouts. Well jumping in the scout first will force the illums to shoot at them with the side bank for (1/2) their dps no matter what, and your vets will survive much longer, it will also force malice to target the scouts since malice always target ships that jumped in first in range of the cast. Since advent scouts are much tankier than vet, its a very good trade to do.
  

Alright what about vets you might ask, well they are kinda the same as flak but not at all the same.

Vets damage bank kinda act like 4 primary foward banks that can't make up their minds they also rotate on themselves, they also have different damage types to complicate things! GENERALLY vets will follow the targeting I explained earlier, SO what ever jumped first will mostly be targeted by vets side bank, but its not guaranteed like flak or sb, (also not all vets behave the same, tec vets seems to behave differently, no clue why). But vs vets you will mostly want to jump in whatever is the tankiest thing you have in your fleet. Most of the times you might want your capship to tank for some flank vet damage, giving your vets a huge advantage vs your opponent!

https://youtu.be/m8agLMSZ230

If I were to ask you the dps of that sb lets say vs lf (damage coefficient is 1), what would you answer?


164 ish? 650 ish? 820 ish? 984 ish?

164 is just wrong, as for the other 3, it could be all 3, but when I took the screenshot it was 820.

So whats going on?

The tool tip just tells you the dps per bank, it doesn't tell you how many banks there are however, which can be a little misleading.

Here the sb has 164/4(side) dps per bank on one side and 5 banks so 164/4*5 is the dps of one side, and there is 4 sides on a starbase the total dps is just 164*5.


This upgrade increase dps by 10% and add another bank on sb

A base sb of any kind has 4 banks per default and well 4 sides, so the tool-tip matches the dps per side, more out of coincidence than anything else, cause it doesn't work anymore after that upgrade.

Another way to increase bank is the last vasari pact, which increase banks nr by 1 on sb and titan, so a sb can get up to 6 banks! WOW. What about capships? well they start with 1 bank so if you add one more...
Damage doubles!
Is that reflected on the tool-tip? Not at all !

Another quiz! Which titan has the most base weapown dps?




Obviously you guessed correctly the Eradica! Cause it's so obvious from the tooltip, the Eradica has around 460 base dps vs 350 ish for the Ragnarov.
What's going on? Ragnarov goes pewpew on smaller amounts of banks than the Eradica simply.

Because I love this ship and do not want this to go unnoticed, the Solanus (the starship with FIVE branch) is the only frigate with multiple banks, it has FOUR banks.

Finally don't think your sb is a titan killer because of it's huge dps.

Banks cannot shoot at the same target, as for sides, beside geometry nothing prevents it!

Pretty self explanatory, the dps listed on the ships in game is multiplied by the coefficient in the table here in function of the damaged ship.

https://youtu.be/_6yPGghAOzM link in case the preview doesn't work.

Fleet comp as TR for 5s (works for anything that resemble 5s balance)

The number in () I will write is the theoretical or practical cost efficiency of each ship/fleet composition, it's the sqrt version of my spreadsheet which is basically the cost efficiency of one fight, if you take that number ^2 it's the cost efficiency over an infinite fight. In a real game you want a number in between the two but closer to the sqrt version + you can ever go wrong with the sqrt version.

A bold O means that the jump order matters! the first ship in the composition is the order you should jump them.

Underlined means what I would generally recommend.

First and foremost we never build flak EVER, the reasoning being that they get hard countered by every lf, massive (1.75 vs tec lf) and literally nothing counters lf as hard as lf counters flak. Now, maybe your opponent doesn’t know how to deal with flak (jumps lf in first to tank flak side bank) but if they are that bad you shouldn’t need to build flak. Now that’s out of the way.

It assumes you opened either marza, akkan, kol or sova too I guess. And that you read the targeting portion of my guide.

Generally for every composition if you have LF jump them in first.

2 main ways to increase your cost efficiency are savage (1.33/1.15(sqrt)) and pirates (1.7/1.35(sqrt)). Pirates are insanely cost efficient compared to everything else, there isn’t a single ship that counters them outside of abilities like marza ultimate or titan aoe.
Their weakest matchup is vs tec HC and it’s still positive! with around (1.02) theory and about (1.1) practical. They are theory (1.2) vs A LF (1.6) vs illums for example and have a variety of useful abilities. You can easily manipulate the targeting since pirates all have the same armor type to make the pirates hc survive last (their most glass cannon ship by far) usually add 5-10% to their theory cost effectiveness because of that.

Tr V Tr (Tl too I guess)

Monovet -> monovet(1) or mono lf (1.52) or lf vet (1.55 O)

If you have more income you can just go monovet yourself, the fleet trades the fastest that way and you will keep map control if your fleet is bigger. If that is not the case tho, you can either go mono lf or lf vet, lf vet O is just better than mono lf but you need to make sure you keep the order right otherwise it's massively worse, also having some vets to debuff for the marza can be helpful, it will also help you when pushing to snipe constructor or colo frigates for neutral control, it’s also much harder to micro that mono lf. You typically want to tank with akkan here, tank with marza when fleets are small/lvl is low.
VS TL here, the difference is that mono lf will struggle way harder and your vets are about 2% more dps than theirs.

Mono Lf -> Mono lf (1) , not much to say here, Vet counter lrm just as hard as lf counter vet, and lrm don’t counter LF hard enough anyway, it's not worth it until the fleet are huge but you aren’t in early game anymore! Here it’s mostly a battle of wit and for map control (build some vets for neutrals etc), micro is also pretty negligible. Getting savage first here is definitely a win condition when pushing.
Mono LRM -> Mono vet (1.5) nothing to say here.

Lf vet O -> mono lf (1.2) or lf vet O (1), now mono lf in theory beats it but 0.2 extra usually isn’t enough to fight the map control deficit. ALWAYS TANK WITH CAPS in lf vet vs lf vet

LF LRM O -> Lf vet O (1.1) however if LRM LF O -> Lf vet O (1.4) and about (1.3) if random. Lf vet only slightly wins in theory if the opponent respects the jump order also it forces the opponent to reinforce with lrm while you reinforce with vets, so the longer the fight goes the better for you, if they reinforce with lf their jump order will be screwed and will eventually end up in a lf vs lf fight, however if the fleet gets too big and high tech, the Lf vet will eventually be the worse fleet so you wanna be trading here or teching up as the lf vet side.

Any composition with flak, build 1 lf for every flak and jump the lf in first, will never fail and for the rest of the composition follow the guide.

Early Pirates/hc -> overwhelm with whatever you have, just kill factories/culture and builders. If you don't have a fleet to overwhelm cause you ecoed, vs hc you want hoshis t5 with culture and or your own hc. vs pirates if you ecoed just get your own pirates.

Usually to convert your advantage no matter what you have, you want to get savage and or pirates.

Tr vs AR/AL

Generally no big difference vs either, vs AL be wary of pfp vs AR be wary of wail.

When you have a dunnov you want to hit as many ship as possible (vets), ships early in the jump order (lf illums etc) AND THEN only if you can do it also hit the progen, do not emp the progen if it won’t hit ships!

Mono vet -> monovet(1.02) or mono lf (1.54) or lf vet (1.57 O) yeah so advent vets are tiny bit worse than yours and it gets better for you with upgrades, each odd progen level tripples-ish it’s malice damage so you wanna trade very decisively or kill the progen (marza), before it gets too high level or you are super ♥♥♥♥♥♥, tanking with the akkan here is especially good, the akkan has (12% + more ehp than progen) the progen and marza have almost the exact same tanking power but advent vets are more glass cannon so in a capship trade there is a big chance the extra marza dps won’t be enough and you will get screwed. Alternatively getting a dunnov lvl 3 will absolutely crush the advent here. If you play lf vet O, your lf will tank the vets and the malice you can try splitting them to avoid the malice. Your vets will take almost no damage here.

Mono lf-> mono vet (0.61 yikes), mono lf (0.92), so here you are pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ no matter what, it’s pick your poison. If you play mono vet you have to outplay them hard to have a chance and use your map control advantage to rush savage and or pirates. Killing the progen early is pretty essential, if the progen hits lvl 5, you will straight up lose 20 vets per lf you kill. If you play mono LF you are hoping you can get savage with defensive advantage without being too behind, if for some reason you can’t get savage, getting a dunnov 3 is another way to increase the cost efficiency of your fleet. LRM DO NOT WORK EARLY GAME, a) they only have (1.03) vs advent lf but advent lf have better upgrades so lrms straight up lose vs lf. On top of it, advent vets are even better at killing lrm.

Mono illums -> mono vet (1.4), if they get their progen high level + a lot of illums you are dead but until then easy counter, discords do be annoying here too. Keep trading or use the opportunity to rush pirates or to get dunnov(s).

Lf vet O -> mono lf (1.15) or lf vet O (0.95), now mono lf in theory beats it but if they reinforce with lf it will slowly fall back to lf vs lf which they should have played in the first place /shrug. Akkan is especially strong here. Use the opportunity they are playing a stupid composition to try to get tech out.


LF illums O -> monovet (0.5-0.8) mono lf (0.7-0.9), lf vet O (varies a lot from 1.1 to 0.7)
Now here if the fleets are small lf vet O will do the trick, however if the fleet gets big with high malice, you have no chance. So you want to get savage and keep trading ! or survive until pirates.

Scout vets O -> monovet (0.9 ish)- mono lf (1.7)- lf vet O (1.3). yeah so here there is no way they are playing that if you are playing mono lf, but just keeping in mind lf will bypass the scout tanking and go straight for vets so that's pretty nice.