Fleet Comparisons in FSA v2.0

On the Spartan Games Community there's a lot of talk about the new v2.0 rules, fleet and ship stats etc with regard to balance, so I thought it would be timely to update the fleet comparison charts I did quite some time ago for v1.5.

Now this isn't quite as easy as before, because of the variable range bands weapons have, the upgrades available to ships etc, so I just compared base ships to start with, and I'll expand to "best possible" at a later date.

So how do you compare different types of ships? Well to start with, what I did is compare all types of a ship - for instance, cruisers. I got an average of values for each stat DR, CR etc, plus a standard deviation. I then classed any ship in the middle 50% of values as "average", assigned a nominal value of 2, any in the top 25% "above average" value 3, and any in the bottom 25% a value of 1. Those with no value in that category got a value of 0 (this draw a distinction between low values and ships with no value in that area). This is then repeated for every ship type (Battleships, Carriers, frigates etc). So now you get values for all ships in a faction as to whether they are average, below or above. Averaging all the values gives you an idea of how the faction fares in each stat.

Now, because zero values distort things a bit, values like "Shield" don't end up with an average value of 2 overall, so the final result is divided by the average value to normalise the data. You can then graph all of these to create a profile for each race, where 1 is average, below 1 is below average and above is above average - easy.

The first thing I've uploaded here is the "overview" of all 6 core fleets plus the Alliance fleets;

Fleet Comparison

Next is a side-by-side comparison of stats, as it's difficult to compare these profiles with each other in detail. They're paired to make things easier;

DRCR
MvHP
CPAP
PDSH
MnFW

Next up is the primary weapons, which is extended from v1.5 due to the various range bands - no alliance ships in here, just too confusing;

Weapons

Torpedoes get a bit easier, as they're the same 12" rangebands;

Torpedoes

Lastly, there's a comparison of Price and Squadron Size;

Price & Squadron Size

I found the last one quite interesting - obvious things like the Dindrenzi having smaller squadrons of more expensive ships comes out, but how do the others compare? This pulls out that data - will be interesting how that changes with the upgrades...

So there it is. It's not meant to be the be-all and end-all of FSA analysis, but it gives you an overall snese of what the factions are good at, average at, and not so good at. It doesn't mean that a fleet can't do something - for instance it's possible to run an SRS-heavy Dindrenzi fleet, but their low overall FW value means they tend to have less access to wings than other races.

Hope you find it useful!