Ask Specs Anything November 16, 2016

Give us Valiant! Or Give us Death!

by Specialist_AKA_Specs

Most of the questions I get throughout the week center around ship builds, and I have tried not to share those as I want the people that ask me to have their builds unique and only to them. A different thought occurred to me though as I go through my questions through the week and almost all of them are centered around building a fleet for a particular task. Sharing that knowledge should help more than one person and while cooking cutter builds suck in the short term the long term the game seems to be rewarding that thought process. So this week as almost all the questions are on the Valiant I want to go into the building aspect more than the initial posts I presented prior to this article you can find here. I will present you with three distinct builds that have found a way into my personal base defense. I will also share my latest base layout that has held up quite well so far and the most recent video of base hits on my base.

First things first 

I hope those that have been reading me from the beginning did the VXP builds for this coming weekend. I know those new to the blog might not understand what that means so here is my VXP build. You do the Hull, Hull streaming 3 (Special that increases map speed and can be retrieved through level 51+ Cargo) and a thud 1. This build allows you to get at least two hulls built, three or four if you have the tokens before the VXP weekend. You will just send the ship to die as many times as you can from Friday morning until Saturday night. Without coin I use four Salty dogs during that 36 hours and get as much rank as possible usually around 70%.

Slow’em Down Valiant

The first Valiant build I want to discuss is the D33-D(R) and ballistic build. This build will be in the front and one of the first ones the attacker encounters. If you have it next to some more that can dish damage it will give your turrets time to land hits, and also weaken them enough as they get to your better damage dealing ships. You would use either the D33-D or the D33-DR depending on your technology you have. I left one special blank in case you want something else, I put evade upgrade there for now.

Valiant D33-DR

Bash’em Valiant

Now this version is the Missile DPS build. It is designed to meet them as they round a corner and will provide you with a second damage type in the guard. I recommend you use the best missile you have available. For this build, I used the Blade missile, but any missile can help you here, and some might like the Torrent, Scoria, Switch Blade or Trident.

Valiant Blade 

Melt’em Down Valiant

The last one in the build for this week is the Scattergun Valliant. This Valiant is designed for the finishing kill. If they make it through your guard and are heading to the outpost, this is there to help stop them. I used the Calamity in my build I am sharing, but any other Scattergun can help here. You could do half Scatter and half Reciprocator if you wish to get a balance in damage types you are putting into the base.

Valiant Calamity

The most important thing to take into account is that the base turrets and your defense fleet complement each other. It is much easier to customize the defense fleet, so I suggest you put in the turrets you like, or deal the best damage. Then customize the defense fleet to be different damage type and force the attacker to think about your base. IF your base turrets are mostly Ballista and Executioner, then you will want some explosive, corrosive, concussive on your defense fleet. The more damage types you can cover the better success, you will have against attackers. That is the most important lesson that every pirate should learn.

Base Layout as of November 16, 2016

I created that layout specifically to take advantage of the valiant and the aura it provides with the boost to reload and damage to others in the fleet. It still requires two thermal ships for sub prep protection but it does pretty well as of now. It does require the newer turrets with the range to reach the channel. I have Ballista, Dead Eye Executioners, Blunderbuss, 2 Draconian Scatter guns, Glacial Turret, ColdSnap, Mini-Gun, and 2 Draconian Coaxial turrets (to help thin missiles some)

Latest hits on my base

Sir Valiant the stout!

Valiant looks great on paper, how does it hold up in the game?

By Specialist_AKA_Specs

The raid is well underway, and I am sure many have been wondering if I was full of it with my piece on why I think the Valiant should be a priority. While I do not have much to go on yet, only found one base with the hull and I built three myself to try to get some testing. I am pretty happy with what I am seeing.

I am going to present to you a video with my base hit on the base I found with Legend Ranked Valiant with the Calamity as a lead ship. The second video is going to be the hit on my base with my unranked Valiants.

In the first portion of the video, you see that I could not outrange the Valiant with the Calamity. That tells me that while the range is not correct in base view, once you enter battle it is the 102 that I expected to see. You also see that once I got into range, it melted me in a hurry. That is what we are hoping to see, and yes it means that it is going to be harder to take bases with this hull and weapon combo.

In the second portion of the video, you see that he approaches my defense fleet in a hope to pick off my one Vanquisher. Once that is gone, he can get by the corner much easier. That gave my Turrets time to finish him off which is what I intended. The claim could be made that he stacked them to attack and if he sent one at a time, he might have faired better. That is fair, and hopefully, someone will do that soonish so I can video it. The last guy that did that to me did get to the OP, but his fleet died before he got me 100%.

I am excited for the possibility of this hull, and I hope that as more players get it built, we can see the benefit to our base defense.

The Valiant and You

Why as a low to mid-level player should this hull be your priority?

By Specialist_AKA_Specs

November Raid

The valiant is offered for the November raid and as it is set to begin I wanted to take a moment to share my opinions on this hull and why I love the idea behind it. The hull matches or exceeds weapons on comparable ships with their bonuses. The hull can reach reload speeds and damage boosts that meet or exceeds any attacking fleet. The Valiant hull can be built in numerous ways, alleviating the problems with having to have different ships to fill defense needs. The hull has good deflection and nice armor to hold up to the various threats facing our bases. The weakness of the hull is no thermal, meaning that you need two different ships in your defense fleet minimum. The Valiant is this games Swiss Army knife when it comes to base defense.

I will apologize as I am going to post the full stats for this ship as they are on the forum.

Range Boosts

Take a look at the hull stats. It has range increases for every single weapon. And when the bonus to the range is considered every single weapon is at 100 range, this 100 range includes Concussive and Corrosive. The hull also gets the same range boost to launchers as any Conqueror hull and the Vanquisher. What this means for the small to the mid-level player is that this hull will fill in glaring holes in your base defense with a range of weapons that your attackers have enjoyed. This hull even gives us a range boost on mortars, while not the remote targeting range we get from Harlock Citadel the 10% puts your mortars at 100 and allows you to put this hull behind some front line defenders to deliver a devastating barrage of mortars. The last thing to consider with the range boost is that you can diversify your base defense with a single Defense hull. That diversification can be used to take advantage of a unique ability this hull has, its tactical field.

Tactical Field

The hull has a tactical field that can trigger the different capacitors and batteries we have that boost combat ability. Not only this, but this tactical field gets better when you pair it with other Valiants in the range of 45 range. This boost to capabilities means that your calamity weapons will deliver a whopping 8K of corrosive damage, that does not include the 4K damage from concussive secondary. That damage, when compared to the 1800 deflection on a Harlock Revenge/Revenge fleet, is devastating. And it is delivered at 100 range, meaning that the attacker will get a single volley off before you pound them into the abyss. This tactical field and a boost from other Valiants also means that you can get 50% reload for all weapon types for each one that is triggering this particular field. This one unique ability is why I am recommending that you build three Valiants and get them close enough to feed each other. The benefits of this field help make the Valiant the best choice with any weapon in your arsenal.

More Valiants are your best friend

With the bonus to all weapon ranges, the tactical field aura that boosts damage and grants a reload bonus for the valiant. The fact that the tactical field gets stronger with more Valiants is all critical to the successful defense of your base today. The bonus this hull has meant that it can take the place of your Enforcer, it can take the place of that rocket hull, the corrosive dealing hull. It also allows you to put in your fleet multiple weapon platforms without putting much thought in what weapon works best for the situation you might encounter. Do you want to defend with ballistics? This hull gets 50% range boost (matching the Gamma), and  20% damage and 50% reload. Add the capacitor, and you get an additional 36% damage boost to your cannons. You can do this with any weapon; you are going to meet or exceed the range of your attackers. The deflection and armor are only a boon to your arsenal.

The Valiant has 100K armor takes 3 hours to repair and has deflection against all weapon types we have in the game at this time. Yes, it is weaker against missile and explosive, but with this hull, you can boost countermeasure capacity on the Vanquishers. You are going to want some thermal so why not add a vanquisher or two to the defense fleet so that you can take care of the weakness in this hull? At 100K armor and the deflection of 2500, that means the hull will be much harder to rocket out with Daisy Cutter XL than it was on the Test servers. If an attacker wants to take the time they can of course. But, if they want to waste seven rockets to take out one hull then they want your base. The 2000 deflection to Concussive will come in handy when dealing with the HRevenge/Revenge fleets. It will not be the end of base hitting, but it will make the attacker rethink the farm status of your base with a couple of these in there, and some support thermal and countermeasures, making this one single hull your Swiss Army knife.

Summary

I paint a positive view of this hull. I know this, and that is because I do not subscribe to all the doom and gloom that the forums share with it. I had done some math work and got some answers to questions I had before this article was written. I do believe that if you are low to mid-level, you need to get this hull, even above the Harlock Tideseeker. Even if you do not get the 30 million points for all the new stuff, you can make this hull perform satisfactorily with even Tier 3 and Tier 4 weapons at the 15 million point cost. It has all the pieces to help you stand up to those high levels that come by once a week for their easy ally points. With this hull in your base and some Thermal/Counter Measures, you can make your neighbor look the better target, giving you time to build up and enjoy the game without having to worry about repairing all the time.