Why does OSP almost always win

[Sandbag (Cam)]

Had the game for about two weeks. 90% of the matches are OSP victories. Most recently faced 25 OSP ships... can an ANS fleet even bring enough ordinance to sink that many ships? It would have to be guns- the OSP pd in swarms with those numbers are impenetrable

i love the game but i feel like most of the game's features are meaningless when OSP can field numbers like that, set a single waypoint to vector into ASN fleet and win every time

[Name]

I do feel like there is strong bias towards OSP. It’s very difficult to play against them. Missiles cost a ton of points to be effective and the odds of them hitting with the insane amount of cheap pd they get are slim.

Railgun, beam cannons, they all seem meh. The cannons are alright.

The 3k multi lobby budget is highly favored for OSP

[Tempest Fox3]

In short they don't.

I imagine most people haven't really adjusted their fleets to counter OSP tactics yet. OSP fight entirely differently to ANS.

Vauxhalls counter basically everything OSP can field but I still don't see that many people playing Vauxhall fleets. OSP can field a lot of numbers sure, but most of their ships are super fragile and die to a light breeze.

Use EWAR more too, OSP have a hard time with Blankets and Hangups due to weak coms (most ships only have CR10) and their radars have no Burnthrough.

[Morvana]

OSP is hard to play for new players, but with a bit of experience I think it rapidly become the oposit.

The OSP gives you very good tools usable easily when you have some experience (autoloaders, mines, rockets...) and ANS players need a lot more experience to perfectly use their own specific tools to their full potential (mastery of EW and hybrid missiles mainly).

So I think you have something like this:
-At low level ANS > OSP
-At Medium level ANS < OSP
-At high level ANS = OSP.

[ボスコチャン]

I started the game playing OSP and while they can throw alot of ships at a target in almost every battle ive played usually ends in OSP loss. Either by cap or getting gunned down. OSP ships are pretty great but fragile as hell and cant take much damage long term, I find that a bit of ewar and a faster paced strategy can take out OSP ships with ease. But i could be wrong

[Firestorm🗿]

Perceptions are skewed rn bc all the experienced players are playing the brand new faction a lot more than playing ANS. Much effort was made to make ANS V OSP balanced, however this naturally does not account for skill level.

[Peenarse]

I see a lot of people saying how fragile OSP ships are yet it really does not play out that way. On paper they might be, but in practise the size of their interior and how spread out their components are means that they take a lot of beating to effectively knock out. Friend of mine recently had one of his line ships tank 6k damage with no grey components, and dish out 30k using 450s. That's battleship numbers with a boat that cost him 1400 points.

Redundancy is huge in the OSP so even if they do not equally match up ship-for-ship (though that's debatable too in some cases) they never need to.

And for sure the sensors and jamming mismatch might make some difference if the OSP didn't have access to all ANS hardware with their "obsolete" Ocellos.

I also think it's worth noting that while people say that ANS players have to learn to adjust to the OSP (which is a fair enough point) - surely OSP players would also be having to learn how to use this unfamiliar loadout? So you'd expect to see problems on both sides, but you rarely do. Only times I've seen OSP lose games has been when ANS has brought exclusively light ships (Vauxhall and smaller).

[Tuna]

Originally posted by Peenarse:

I also think it's worth noting that while people say that ANS players have to learn to adjust to the OSP (which is a fair enough point) - surely OSP players would also be having to learn how to use this unfamiliar loadout? So you'd expect to see problems on both sides, but you rarely do. Only times I've seen OSP lose games has been when ANS has brought exclusively light ships (Vauxhall and smaller).

This absolutely is happening but it isn't obvious. ANS players are bringing builds they designed to fight ANS versus OSP and are dying a lot for it. Meanwhile OSP players are building totally new designs.

Sometimes absolute random noise is better then trying to guide something, this is whats happening here. The flexibility of OSP builds and with people actually trying new stuff is resulting in builds that are better then the ANS builds people are just slightly modifying and then taking into versus OSP, rather then building ground up.

When OSP loses a match people just go "ah well I dont know what im doing", when ANS loses people go "Wow OSP OP" because OSP is the new thing. On the ANS v OSP fight night the score was fairly even, with one of the sets (EU) being 7:3 in ANS favor. Thats not "OSP almost always winning" thats pretty clearly them getting destroyed. The end result was 11:10 in OSP favor after all the games were said and done, thats pretty even in the end.


OSP ships are fairly tanky, but they are "fragile" in that they really dont have a way to prevent damage. ANS can fully screen via EWar and long range high alpha missile strikes. OSP basically has to get into your face to do the same and take a lot more hits doing so if ANS is playing their cards right.

[Tuna]

Originally posted by Ghojo:

Beams - which usually are a death sentence because you will get shredded before you can get in range.

Or missiles - which are often useless unless it's a good S3, because OSP has so much PD coverage.

And on the EWAR front I don't really see ANS being that much better really. The small map size and the games spotting system pretty much counters any advantage the ANS really has in jamming & sensors.
It would be a lot different if the maps were much larger in size, but they aren't, even the mod maps.

This is just not true, there is very little OSP answer to beamstones pushing under jamming, I've run it several times on public lobbies since the update dropped and actually haven't lost once. Unless they have a missile tub with ARAD/HOJ OSP just does not have a way to deal with 4-6 blanket jammers with some hangups thrown in to silence any scouts.

Similarly, OSP PD isn't good, I'd say its actually pretty garbage. OSPs sole advantage is in the softkill game not hardkill. Their defender analog is more innacurate and burns more ammo per kill, their stonewall analog uses the rebounds targeting style that is really inefficient for something with an autoloader, and their aurora analog has a 1km range and a really long cooldown. The one thing they are good at hardkilling is, funny enough, size 3s, since their low numbers means things like the P60 can actually defeat them. My primary anti-OSP fleet uses S2s as its primary weapon and I regularly rack up multiple kills on things from shuttles all the way up to container freighters all with the same, 6 point S2 missile fired in groups of 4. Its not uncommon for my Raines to out damage my teams battleships (seeing as they all get themselves killed usually) at a fraction of the cost.

ANS v OSP in the data I've seen have a nearly 50/50 win rate, its just about perfect. Clearly it isn't "all do more or less badly". I suggest you reexamine your builds or play style for versus OSP if its giving you significant troubles.

[Festivefire]

OSP missiles suck, and their line ships when armed with kinetics, also suck. The only thing I have issues with against OSP ships are those damned plasma weapons.

[Firestorm🗿]

Originally posted by Festivefire:

OSP missiles suck, and their line ships when armed with kinetics, also suck. The only thing I have issues with against OSP ships are those damned plasma weapons.

Clearly you have not been introduced to the glory of the triple 450 liner fleet with rapid cycle cradles. That ♥♥♥♥ routinely scores damage values that make gun battleships look weak.

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by Tuna:

When OSP loses a match people just go "ah well I dont know what im doing", when ANS loses people go "Wow OSP OP" because OSP is the new thing. On the ANS v OSP fight night the score was fairly even, with one of the sets (EU) being 7:3 in ANS favor. Thats not "OSP almost always winning" thats pretty clearly them getting destroyed. The end result was 11:10 in OSP favor after all the games were said and done, thats pretty even in the end.

I don't have a dog in this fight as I am completely unfamiliar with this game, just pointing out that purposefully cherry picking a small part of a data set that conforms to what you want it to, especially when the greater dataset contradicts it, and pretending it means something is faulty reasoning.

[Firestorm🗿]

Originally posted by Gracey Face:

Originally posted by Tuna:

When OSP loses a match people just go "ah well I dont know what im doing", when ANS loses people go "Wow OSP OP" because OSP is the new thing. On the ANS v OSP fight night the score was fairly even, with one of the sets (EU) being 7:3 in ANS favor. Thats not "OSP almost always winning" thats pretty clearly them getting destroyed. The end result was 11:10 in OSP favor after all the games were said and done, thats pretty even in the end.

I don't have a dog in this fight as I am completely unfamiliar with this game, just pointing out that purposefully cherry picking a small part of a data set that conforms to what you want it to, especially when the greater dataset contradicts it, and pretending it means something is faulty reasoning.

It's not cherry picking data, it is drawing on what data is actually available. Everything else is lived experience and both things line up pretty well.

[Tuna]

Originally posted by Gracey Face:

I don't have a dog in this fight as I am completely unfamiliar with this game, just pointing out that purposefully cherry picking a small part of a data set that conforms to what you want it to, especially when the greater dataset contradicts it, and pretending it means something is faulty reasoning.

As Firestorm said, present me with a different data set and I'll take it into account as well. That fightnight was the only place I saw where we had a large number of people playing a lot of games and recording their results, 21 games is not insignificant in terms of nebulous if you consider thats around 11.5 hours of games (assuming average of 30 minutes) or 7.6 hours with a more conservative 20 minutes per game.

Its the only hard numbers I had to pull from at the time, and lines up quite heavily to my experience in both public games and the games we had as testers.

Cherry picking would be if I intentionally ignored, say, the NA data and only used EU (thus showing 7 ANS wins 3 OSP wins) alone. Instead I included all the data from that fight showing a much more evenly matched ~1:1 game.

And tell me, you see anyone else even attempting to use data here? Its all just experience and opinions at least I tried to back it up lol

[Peenarse]

Not strictly on topic but I'd like to acknowledge Tuna having actually engaged constructively on these threads - I know I've done more than my fair share of complaining about this update here and in other threads (which is a shame because I really *want* to like it more than I actually do).

Back on topic, in regards to the data I don't doubt it for a moment. I'll be first to acknowledge that my comments have only been based upon my own, and those I play with's experience so far.

I get the sense that perhaps some of the feelings of "OSP is OP" are perhaps an extension of the idea that they were sold as something they aren't: an underdog. In fact they seem (again, to me at least) more like the heavy weight in the ring, whilst the ANS is now the plucky lightweight using their clever tools to outsmart the big guy.

[Peenarse]

I guess my issue really is that I just don't find OSP very fun to play against. Since ditching my heavy fleets and going pure frigates and corvettes the win rate is right up in the positive but I find myself just a bit bored by it. Sitting outside sensor range and throwing missiles gets old fast.

But each time I try to go back to a heavy fleet it just gets melted and destroyed in tiresomely predictable ways. Perhaps I've just been super unlucky with the matches I've had but it feels rather like good old fashioned brawling is dead. And perhaps that was intentional, but it's a shame, because it was exciting.