Double Lumberjack
Quite possibly one of the most annoying Galleons in the game, this ship is a powerhouse but ultimately a flawed one. One competent lumberjack can easily suppress a balloon, and a godly lumberjack can suppress two balloons. At the range at which you engage at with this long range of a galleon, you've got time. Throw an H flak or Hwacha and you still have the enemies bouncing on the floor but you gain the ability to kill them too.
Vs. most builds I never understood the double LJ galleon. Having a fast buffed-charged HF finish, especially against pyramidions, is absolutely game-changing. If you watch old Paddling recordings you will see how utterly they cleaned up with it during their peak. No galleon play has come close to that standard since.
Vs. double junker (
if you insist on taking a galleon, which is an inherently disadvantaged vs, say, cover sniping junkers), I understood the double LJ approach, since getting that flak hit in is exceptionally difficult if your opponent junker is simply pulling behind cover every time the armor goes below 1/3rd or the balloon pops, and likewise having your balloon down on a junker is a highly disruptive event. However, in the Mandarins' experience, the superior disable-piercing-explosive combo of the artemis/hades would almost always eventually overwhelm a galleon, especially if that galleon was static. The
only real chances for a galleon were typically 1) corner-camping in Dunes or 2) getting a positional advantage through an unexpected flank, but even these strategies would work less than half the time.
Now to pick your brains, how about a double merc pyra, that is a common enough build and seems to do a good enough job, it has shatter for disable and piercing for taking down the hull, and ultimately can ware down the hull enough for a kill, i would love to hear your thoughts on this?
On Dunes, vs a passive opponent, it has a good chance of working. But any creative use of cloud cover or terrain will make it very difficult to work (GwTh are probably the best example of how to work clouds/terrain on Dunes).
On other maps, where there is more cover, it becomes an increasingly difficult build to work vs. an experienced opponent (I should note that all of my judgments here are assuming that all combatants involved are experienced).
Two gunners. Diminishing returns.
Or one, most of the time.
A lumberjack merc flak is probably the best and most versatile build at longrange.
That certainly was the case before they chopped the lower arc off the merc, but nowadays that complete lack of downward fire is painfully easy to exploit. The merc nerf was probably the biggest single hit the galleon ever took, as it forced galleon crews to re-train for hades, one of the toughest weapons in the game to use effectively (and even at the maximum end of the skill spectrum very difficult to a) fire from a galleon and b) use against ships with smaller hull profiles, such as junkers).
The dual lumberjacks ability to pop the enemy balloon so fast gives you the ability to kill enemys much closer to you.
I don't entirely see how having two LJs is qualitatively different from having two light carronades, which you poo-poo above. A good Lumberjack gunner, with a buffed weapon, can in theory take down the balloons of two ships with a single Lesmok clip (as buffed Lesmok requires two hits to kill a balloon assuming no repairs, with a clip size of four shots). Is it really worth losing the insta- or semi-instakill potential of a competent Heavy Flak gunner? In the Ducks, we always try to use the minimum necessary amount of force to accomplish a certain job, thereby leaving the possibility open for the application of a different type of force (so, for example, in the case of the Mandarins we found that the combined fires of 4 artemises did 90% as effective a job as the fires of 6, leaving us with 2 extra weapon slots for piercing damage which we used for Hades - in my opinion, a game changer)
I wont compare that to a dual carronade cause the higher rate of fire of the carronade leads to a much faster pop of the enemy balloon.
Depends on how good your LJ gunner is. It is worth nothing that one's perception of the efficacy of 1 vs 2 LJs, or 2 vs 3 artemises, is highly dependent on the skill of one's gunners.
Artemi Junker
With those its similiar. Yes you sacrifice alot of different dmg types. But you also get a much fastened ability to do what you want. That can count alot. Usually 3-4 is all you need thats true.
The decreased effects are sometimes higher than expected.
I think the same basic analysis applies here with the LJ galleon - vs. all ships apart from a junker, you are better off with a hades on the bottom deck. Vs. a junker, due to the relative difficulty of getting the armor break, you're probably just better off with one more artemis. But that necessarily must lead one to ask oneself if ranged engagements vs cover-sniping junkers are the way to go about things, and if you're not better off dumping all those artemises for something entirely different.
Thus double H.Flak could kill everything. An advantage.
At the unjustifiable cost of losing the armor strip and balloon pop of an LJ.
I still very much feel that our choice of ships was the correct viable counter at the time...
You guys had the right idea with the balloon popping, but generally junkers have a serious advantage over pyras, so (typically) double junker will win out over double pyra, all other things being equal. Puppy Fur and redria are one (extremely) strong example to the contrary, but with pyras' huge hull profiles, weak armor, blind spots, and slow turning radius, they simply present way too many weaknesses to exploit if your piloting isn't picture-perfect.
Support ships
Sammy and I have argued about this endlessly (and I think we eventually reached a happy medium towards the end of our time as a team), but my feeling on the ubiquitous "support ship" is that you really can't afford to have one if you only have 2 ship slots - hence Sammy's emphasis below on our typical lack of specialization. As omniraptor put it in a post long ago, why have a hero and a sidekick when you can have two heroes? That's why I've always steered clear of team compositions that involve "support" or "set-up" ships. It's kind of depressing, really, since it slashes the
really effective range of builds that can be fielded, but you have to play the game the way it is (unless you want to be an airship Quixote, which is cool too, but not for me).
Oh and as for the "need" for an explosive weapon... Rams (;
If you miss a pyra ram against a competent opponent, you will pay for it. In most cases with the destruction of your ship.
But most of the time, muse has designed its guns to be effective by themselves. One flamer is enough to cause chaos, one mortar is enough to kill a ship, one hwacha is enough to disable a ship, etc.
That depends how you define "effective". For me, "effective" was winning matches, which is getting five points, which is getting five kills, which is getting five finishes preceded by five armor breaks. Obviously, there's more than one way to skin a cat here. To me, "causing chaos" with a flamer isn't effective per se because it's typically not sufficient to achieve those aforementioned goals. Necessary depending your build, perhaps, but not sufficient. It has to exist in conjunction with some other combination or weapons or factors, such as goomba stomps, sandwich rams, a mortar, whatever. That's why in my opinion guns are never really effective "by themselves", either singly (obviously) or in excessive combination. So I generally take a fairly dim view of double- or triple-weapon builds of whatever sort. And this is the way that things should be, if Muse has balanced their game properly, which I think they are slowly but surely achieving.
