The Orky guide

Ummm.... what are you doing with your orky? You know about micro?

Those are interesting tests you've run;  they are handy benchmarks.  But one of the biggest dangers of Orkies is how upgrades and reinforcements make the fight harder while you are in the middle of it.  The deadliest Orky is not the most upgraded one, but the one you barely have enough ships to kill.

In my experience, micro with the Orky is hardly worth the time. It buys 5% more survivability at best. Below is a primer on the maneuvers I know of. If you know of more effective ones, let us now, preferably with a pair of comparison fights (with and without your bag of tricks to compare the results.) 

There are two reasons to maneuver the Orky: increase your firepower by exposing all 4 sides (by default 4x4=16 banks) to the enemy ships, and decrease theirs, by reducing the time when they can fire at you. Alas, the Orky by default already fires with 3 of the 4 sides, so you don't gain a whole lot in the first department (theoretically it's 25%, but in practice it's usually less.) (Update: this statement is very wrong, the firing graphics of the Orky are horribly misleading relative to what the logic of the game processes as damage; I'll make another post on this issue.) And because the Orky moves slowly relative to the turn rate of most ships, it's hard to gain a lot of time outside their guns. (I've seen one "pro" trying to run away with his Orky from LFs in a straight line. That was completely lulzy, as it has no effect whatsoever given that even a space snail will catch up with it.) So, this what works, albeit only marginally:

• Run-through aka the Berserker maneuver. (Just made up this name, it's not something anyone is expected to have heard of.) This a standard tactic vs LFs with anything and it denies them shooting time while they turn. You basically run at the enemy formation and continue through it, rather than away from it. (I'll post some comments on the effectiveness of this in my LF simulator thread. I've actually done some testing to quantify the effectiveness of run-through with and without the nearly optimal target selection algorithm but in Cobalt vs. Cobalt fights; as a teaser, if you combine both, you can win a 6 vs. 6 Cobalt fight with only one loss, and even that one is nearly avoidable. But the Orky can't bolt through the enemy formation at anywhere near the speed that an LF/Cobalt can.)
• Sudden stop. (I have a nickname for this one too, but it's not sexually correct, so I won't post it here.) Accelerate to full speed, wait for the pursuing LFs to accelerate to about their top speed (which they reach whey they cover about half the gap that gets created when you bolt with the Orky) then stop suddenly (by hitting the red button or using a kb shortcut, if you created one for it). Some LFs will overshoot the Orky and get shot by the front guns. This is tricky to time well however (takes practice), but you only need 4 guys to overshoot to get full benefit (unless you have extra banks researched). This maneuver exploits the fact that the Orky can decelerate a lot faster than it can accelerate. The best outcome for the sudden stop is when most of the enemy formation overshoots your Orky, but his only happens when they are in a really tight pack; it's the best outcome because you deny most of them fire time (like in the run-through) and you don't have to turn to follow with another run-through. The ideal time to do that is just about when those that have overshot your Orky have turned back enough to shoot at it; don't start the follow up run-through before they've turned enough to shoot, they actually gain shooting time if help them by staring early. If most of the pursuing (LF) formation didn't overshoot the Orky on its sudden stop, it's best to continue instead with the next maneuver.
• Power slide, aka the Michel Jackson maneuver. This exploits the fact the Orky can actually move sideways, albeit very slowly. (It seems all ships can do that thanks to non-zero maxAccelerationStrafe, but I don't know of a practical use for it on other ships; it seems it's what kicks into gear when ships want to avoid bumping into each other in a cluster.) Typically you use this maneuver when the sudden stop maneuver fails to produce a significant number of targets (either because your luck is that they all/most bump into the Orky's long spikes or your timing was worse than the half-second [might be less] precision it takes to pull off a successful sudden stop with appreciable overshoot). What you do then is move the Orky in a direction about 135 degrees (that's 45 backwards) from your previous vector. The Orky will both turn and slide whey you pick such a vector making some LFs that are close to the big spikes to creep/slide into the range of the front-central guns. When this maneuver finishes, you're basically in a position to execute another run-through. If you plot an 180-degree path (instead of the somewhat sideways 135-degree one) the Orky will just turn, but won't slide sideways at all, so you'll lose a bit more fire time for the front guns. The sliding aspect is probably the most negligible part of this whole set of maneuvers though.

But like I said, the effect of all this maneuvering work is pretty minimal with the Orky. Finally, picking targets for the Orky is almost completely pointless in a fight against an uniform bunch of enemies as you can't realistically manage the mitigation of pack of 40+ enemies in real time and most of the Orky's guns will still shoot at whatever they want. I din't get any results above statistical noise in trying any sort of fire disciple with the Orky. So, how do you micro the Orky and how much does that buy you (in terms of extra ships you can handle at any given upgrade level)?

Actually, the maneuvers above work far better than I gave them credit, but only when enemy formation is large, above 50 ships or so. In my 3-health-upgrades Orky vs. 80 Disciples I lose with some 50 Disciples remaining if I don't maneuver as per above, but I win with my maneuvers!! This seems to be mostly because the sudden stop works increasingly well against large formations, which orverflow around the big spikes, but when the enemy formation goes below 40 most if not all of them bump in the Orky on the sudden stop. I've made some recordinsg and will be posting the shortly (initial save game + two recordings, one with maneuvers and one doing none.) I'll also have to look at them in the dev exe to see effective dps. The initial save game was made with the dev exe, but then I played in the normal exe [mainly because my dev exe seem not want to record any enemy ships in that setting, only some Orky moving, LOL.] Uploaded now to http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/20646987/file.html

So, what have you done to account for Vasari repair bays and prog shield regen?

Also, almost all skilled players know cobalts kill orkies better than disciples.

Use mines, nooblords.

I'll write a more elaborate/4noobs version of this (in the top post) later/tomorrow, but here's a quick update on the Orky maneuvers:
- the winner is "flower power" which simply means to position the Orky in the middle of the enemy formation and just keep it there with strafe movements. To get Orky positioned for flower power use a ramming/run-through of their formation followed by a sudden stop in their midst or let them chase the Orky and cause them to overshot by a sudden stop. In the best case scenario you scatter the enemy fleet both above but especially below the Orky. Flower power can turn worse than the next contender (180s, discussed below) if all the enemies end up above because Orky's banks (especially the side ones) have some blinds spots there. The simplest fix for this unfortunately involves the controversial z-axis movement, although it's only a slight movement, popping the canopy of the Orky upward through the enemy formation. I call this souped up version "flowerZ power" and it's simply the best maneuver I found.
- a close contender for flower power is to run back and forth making 180-degree turns with straight movement spans in between. But for optimal results you have to tune the length of the straight runs in relation to the speed of the pursuing fleet in order to cause overshoots at the turns, which are basically flower-power situations, albeit temporary ones. For LFs, the optimal run length between the turns is about two grid diagonals. The 180s maneuver does a bit worse than flower power even in its best execution (I could muster), but is generally easier to pull off close to its maximum potential (with a uniform enemy fleet anyway) and requires less attention.
- a slightly simplified and combined version of these two I called "flower park" (or maybe I should call it flower bed), is basically is just two 180s. The end result is 3/4 flower power which last quite a while (the Orky tilts backwards if left to his own devices in a flower power setting, so its rear bank won't have targets.) Because this maneuver doesn't have that many turns to average your luck against, the variability in outcome seems higher than in continuous 180s.

I have tried quite a few other cookie cutter maneuvers, all of which do worse than the above three, e.g. triangles, pentagrams, squares, etc. (including varying their sizes); squares in particular, will get the Orky destroyed when it could win! I'm uploading some recordings, which should be self-explanatory... Here are some brief and incomplete notes on these:

flowepower:- true dps (seen via dev exe) climbed steadily to over 560 and stayed there for much of the fitght! hull only dipped to 3.6K. The fight was also over quite fast.

triangles:- the larger ones basically do about as well as my more laborious manual efforts from the previous post. Which is to say no to so well compared to the newer alternatives. Hull went under 2K.

squares:- epic fail, lost.

large 180s (3 diag long):- true dps stabilized around 460-470. hull dipped a bit under 3K.

small 180s (about 1.25 diags long; any shorter and the Orky basically refuses to move, considering itself already there.) There is only a bit of overshoot here, most the Disciples just turn, but 3-4 of them sometimes overshoot. true dps stabilized around 380. hull dipped under 1.5K.

medium 180s (a bit shy of 2 diags long.) Consistent overshoots with about half of the Dispsicples, so the turns were basically all flowerpower style. Oddly, true dps only got to about 450. But the overshoots apparently affected the Disciples' firepower a fair bit, beacuse Orky's hull dipped under 3K. This is basically a good compromise between reliable outcome and not much micro; the paths are easy to plot.

flowerpark (two 180s, and then left Okry to its own devices/AI).
Strangely enough, it did surprisingly well. It basically tilted almost all the way "flat on its back" and shot with 3 banks most of the time with a true dps of around 470. Hull dipped to about 3.3K.

flowerpark2: did a rerun, to see how much luck affects this one. Quite a bit, it seems.

manual again: Tried to combine the best of run-through and flowerpower. Hull got to hull got to 3.5K, so still worse than pure flowerpower.

flowerZpower: added uppward Z-maneuvers to break up formation in the blind spot. Hull only dropped to about 4.5K!

There are a few more experiments in the archive, which don't yet have notes. Here's the download link: http://www63.zippyshare.com/v/98469764/file.html

And by the way

This is a myth. Two tests in that archive show that 64 Cobalts perform on par with 80 Disciples (the Orky beats them with a similar amount of damage sustained, using the 180s maneuver); these two are equivalent fleet supplies. Maybe if you throw in capital ships there's a difference because of varying abilities etc., but pure LF fleets turn out to perform as their theoretical value indicates (1 Cobalt = 1.25 Disciples).

I think this gets perpetuated because TEC players who find themselves head to head with a new Orky usually have a Marza with them, which really outshines the Progen for Orky killing.  Also Disciples often suffer a bit more attrition because they are more fragile so the Cobalts "feel" superior because they can sometimes avoid losses, but as you say, there should be more Disciples to begin with, so it pans out. 

50 Cobalts+Marza (300 supply) vs. Orky http://www.mediafire.com/?3g40yyo2cv43a4x   43 cobalts+Marza survive... (265 supply)

62 Disciples+Prog (298 supply) vs Orky http://www.mediafire.com/?37dqqbqv9w9i0nj    29 disciples+Prog survive... (166 supply)

Not doubting you, but you've duplicated the same link for the Disciples+Prog; the one for Cobalts+Mazra is actually missing both here and in the mythbusters thread. So there's nothing to compare ATM. Also the two initial save games would also be useful (if you still have them) as different maneuvering can sometimes make a huge difference.

Should be fixed.

Thanks. A quick observation is that the Mazra had its abilities with autocast enabled (radiation bomb, incendiary shells), while the Prog did not and its abilities were never fired manually during the fight either. Faster kill -> fewer losses. To stack the odds even more, TEC had four levels of hull research completed, four levels of armor, and three levels of lasers research with the 4th completing early in the fight (that's effectively 20% more fleet), while Advent had none of that. Another issue is the poorer maneuvering/positioning of the Orky in your TEC fight. Only the front banks fired at the Cobalts most of the time, while in the Advent case 2-3 sides fired at them. The effective DPS in the dev exe went to 500 for the Orky in the Advent case, but only to about (Let me see if I can upload some screenshots to illustrate this.)

I've done a somewhat fairer test (no TEC upgrades, no abilities, 1-up SB hull): 35 Cobalts survive in one test run and 34 in another, albeit with three more nearly dead (less than 100 hull): so 31-35 surviving  Cobalts is fairer bracket. This is still better than what the Advent managed in your test, but less astounding. Recordings: http://www17.zippyshare.com/v/14862866/file.html

Anyway, here are a few more comments on the recordings posted by sinkillr/Hydraling. (Dev exe screenshots to accompany the analysis are at http://imgur.com/a/xD9uF#0.)

• Advent fight: The Orky did a very good run initial run-through and turned 180 in a "flower power" situation (4x3+1 banks blazing, only one on the prog side). Then it started to lay back in a "flower park" position (because of no orders), with 3 sides (12 banks) blazing at the Disciples. About when then 2nd run-through order was given to the Orky (which was actually cancelled), its effective DPS had reached 500, and the Disciple count was down to 48; Orky had about 2600 hull left (at max mitigation, of course) at this point. Alas, as it had no orders, it continued to lay back and so the rear banks lost all targets. It also twisted a bit, so only one of the left banks fired at Disciple, while another started to shoot at the Prog for a while, but then started to twist in the opposite direction so brought two more left banks on the Disciples (one still fired at the Prog). Effective DPS hovered between 480-500 all the way to Orky's demise.
• Now for you TEC fight: the initial approach was crooked, so Orky only fired its front and left banks, but none of its the right ones, reducing firepower initially to 2/3. The turn was also worse because only two sides fired at the Cobalts (different ones thanks to rotation, but still only two because of the failure to scatter the Cobalt formation on the initial approach). And after that the Orky just parked there with 4/0/4/2 banks firing. True DPS barely reached 400 as Orky's health went under 2300 (incendiary shells, rad bomb also contributed) but I think mainly because all 50 Cobalts are still in action (nearly 793 max hull with their upgrades and with an armor of 5, which gives about 990 effective hull). The initial firepower is preserved for way longer. Also, because of the failed initial run-through of the Orky, the Cobalts didn't lose any firing time, they basically turned with it. The Orky only manged its first round of kills as its health went under 1000, true DPS briefly reaching a peak of about 410. And then it died. As you can see, the fortuitous accumulation of various factors can make a big difference.

LvL 3 marza with lvl 2 incendiary and lvl 1 rad can solo un upgraded orky

 lel

Yes, but the two sinkillr/Hydraling tests used a 1-upped Orky (6K hull), although in the TEC fight he posted the Orky hull upgrade finished just as the first shots were flying (though apparently before any of them landed, so that issue didn't seem to affect the outcome relative to the Advent fight he posted, where the Orky was upgraded with a bit more breathing space before the fight began).

Oh, and Prog + 62 upped Disciples (2 labs, so +20% guns, +20% shields, +10% hull) kill the 6K/1-upped Orky with zero losses if the Prog uses Shield Regeneration and has full AM reserves (shield restore fires 4 times during the fight). But you have to play the Advent manually, because the AI is completely incapable of using that ability properly (only uses it once after the Orky dies, LOL.) The Orky is a bit hampered in positioning by the fact that the AI played it, but keep in mind that SR is an uncapped AoE so even if the Orky had fired at more ships simultaneously that would not have affected the result because those ships would have their shields restored too...

Replays at http://www53.zippyshare.com/v/75583653/file.html. I've also included in that archive two replays in which the AI was playing the Advent; both exhibit the single, silly casts of SR at the end.

This should give a hint at the effect of Prog SR, which Seleuceia asked about above. A wider range of tests is needed though, because this fight could have been won by the Disciples alone with ease (and some losses).

In a very early test I posted only in the mythbusters thread, the regen bay didn't seem to help the non-upgraded Orky much; it still died to 40 Disciples whether they shot the bay first or at the Orky. I didn't save replays back then and my memory of that is foggy with respect to details. Needs more up-to-date tests with good maneuvering included.

I've done a bit more testing with repairs/regen.

I was curious if the 2-hull-ups (9K hull) Orky, which can handle 60 Disciples (240 fleet supply) but dies to 70, can take on 50 disciples +Prog (=250 fleet supply). It can't; the Prog uses shield regen like 7 times, and wins with 21 Disciples still alive, but these were the +20/%+20%/+10% guns/shield/hull Disciples.

Finally, adding two repair bays to the Vasari side was a tiny bit more interesting. If the Advent fleet (same config as above) shoots at the Orky all the time, it eventually loses, but it takes an insane amount of time for the Orky to kill the Prog. Self-shield-repairs on the Prog plus the fact that the Orky can use at most two banks (that is 1/8 of its total firepower) on the Prog; and you need continuous manual positioning to keep the Orky at 45-degree angle for that, otherwise its firepower vs. the Prog goes down to a single bank with its default behavior... On the other hand, if the Advent fleet shoots at the repair bays first, these go boom in seconds, even though they can repair each other. There's basically no difference in losses on the Advent side then, they win as if the bays aren't even there. You'd probably need to spam like 5+ of these underpowered Vasari repair bays to make a difference if the Avent player targets them first, and that's already unreasonable from a cost perspective.

This is probably going to be my last post here for a while. I find the various bugs related to recording and save games pretty off-putting at the moment even for practice/study stuff like this... 

A few more test I ran... Can you save the 2-hull-ups (9K hull) Orky from the Prog + 50 Discs by adding a Vasari level 2 cap ship, on top of 3 repair bays? (The Prog was level 2 too.)

Well, yes, any cap ship will do in this scenario, but any (dangerous enough cap ship for the Disciples to pay attention to) besides the Kortul will get killed while buying enough time for the SB (to upgrade itself). The Kortul has the unique ability that it denies anti-matter restoration to the Prog (Disruptive Strikes) and can repair itself (boost its own shields). The Skira does not cut it because it doesn't deny anti-matter restoration. In this fight, the difference between the Prog using only its initial AM (3 restores) and all AM it can regenerate during the fight (something like 4 more uses/casts) has a dramatic impact on the outcome. If you add something 3-4 Vasari turrets (missile platforms) and the Disruptor Nanites research, then the Skira is okay too. Disruptor Nanites is basically the stationary version of the Disruptive Strikes. Its most useful feature (in this context, but probably vs. any capital ship) is denying AM restoration while in combat. Sure, the Prog can run away from turrets to a place where it can start to regen AM (while it can't outrun the Kortul, which is slightly faster than the Prog). Alas, if the Prog does run from the turrets, then it's not protecting the Disciples during combat, and if those run along with it, that buys more than enough time for the Vasari to upgrade his Orky... In this setting anyway. The Marauder doesn't really work. Although it can deny/delay the Prog's effective use of its initial AM stores (via Phase Out Hull) so that the Orky starts killing Disciples earlier than with any other supporting cap ship, that doesn't compensate the Marauder's lack of self-repair ability as far as its own survival is concerned. (Repair bays suck, like I said.) As a bootnote here, the best way to time Phase Out Hull is right after the Prog initiates Shield Regen; that way the Prog spends its AM with little in the way of returns/results; but that requires paying very close attention, because any second lost in casting POH is quite while the SR is ongoing is quite precious. Finally, the Rankulas is indeed a piece of crap. Not only are its cooldowns for repair nanites absurdly long (so the Rankulas basically just sits there, with AM reserves nearly full), but the tiny unit it produces is hard to see, hard to click on (have to use the sidebar) and it usually starts repairing something irrelevant as soon at it comes out; and besides the micromanagement snafus the Rankulas entails, its repair unit is external from the cap ship itself, so extremely easily killed by 50 Disciples. (I think the cooldown for repair nanites should be cut/modded to like 12 seconds for this cap ship to have any worth; they're at 60 seconds in the dev/designer's wisdom or lack thereof. But I don't want to get into this aside any further.)

I think I'm going to try one more round of testing with Advent reinforcements added in, coming from a nearby system and with some kind of Vasari fleet also building; that's going to take a fair bit of work to set up because apparently you can't spawn structures with the dev interface (to quickly set up the Adevent nearby in this case.)

But from the testing I've already done, the Vasari look pretty bad. The main issue is their inability to defend their resources/econ. Orky doesn't buy you that. The repair bay(s) can be safely ignored when shooting at structures with even just the pretty small 250-supply fleet used here [and which can be built in around 15 minutes if everything is timed well, and with ease in 20 minutes]. The 9K-hull Orky amplifies the repair bay effects on itself by its higher armor and shield mitigation, as well just lasting for more than one cast/10-seconds. Alas, the smallish fleet used here is enough to send all the resource extractors and constructor frigates to kingdom come with basically no losses for the attacker. (Constructor frigates in particular die before the repair bay can even cast once on them; that happens because you can't initiate repairs if they're at full hull, and the game engine accumulates pending damage for a while and then suddenly applies all of it. You can see that with the dev exe.) The TEC/Advent fleet can basically rinse and repeat the same econ destruction in all the Vasari systems, plus leave a couple of corvettes running circles to deny (by increasing the time to 10X!) rebuilding of the constructor frigates and the Vasari econ is in Davy Jones' Locker for good or at least a very long time. I honestly don't know what could possibly save them. I'm guessing the Skira is better choice because if upped with fighters at least it can chase down the corvette/rebuild-denial forces more effectively. If you have any suggestions for actually saving the resource extractors, I'd like to hear them. From the recorded games I've seen, mines are too expensive to be cost effective. Rush for Phasic Barrier? Or reintegrating Skirmishers as extra Vasari fleet? LOL. (Don't say corvettes.) Vasari can't build enough fleet to be a threat and up their Orky at the same time, even less so if they need multiple Orkies (upgraded enough so they aren't just XP feed for the Prog+Disciples). Basically, no [semi-]static defenses like an Orky can compete with the offensive abilities of a TEC/Advent LF fleet. The game mechanics are still like in Sins 1.01 as far as defenses are concerned after a relatively low threshold ("critical mass") is reached by the attacker fleet. Sure, the AI is extremely incompetent in dealing with the Orky, so you can (OMG!) SB his howeworld with ease and so the Vasari may look awesome after you pull that (I win as Vasari vs. the AI quicker than with any other race), but after you see a few recorded games of human "pro" players, I find it extremely implausible than any level of skill as Vasari can resist a competent human player (e.g. like sinkillr, UT4, or HuyMac) unless the Vasari gets feed and the other side doesn't etc. Does anyone have any good Vasari replays from "pro" games? I think I'll some sort of rush for PJI too see if at least you can defend extractors at the backwater planets with an Orky at the fronline one[s], but given that the 250-supply Advent fleet can easily thrash 3-4 repair bays with minimal/any losses, I'm not exactly optimistic for the survival of PJIs either.