dropped from the showdown was Rusty / TimeManipulator who has not logged into the forum since March and last updated his ship log at the beginning of November last year.

in his place, i made a (hopefully) one-time exception to my open forum sourcing policy in order to include data from Taylor Swift (SuperStar), a relatively fast-ranking, heavy npc.ing build. points in his favour were that he maintained everything in a google doc that he was willing to let me access AND the fact that he had kept his log with an entry every week since April 2012.



so, like a said, a relatively fast-ranking, relatively high-deck build, matching icky for those categories. and despite all those decks, still doing relatively well in the minimum hits to disable category.



and who said there was a problem with high-level PvP ? Taylor Swift has managed to maintain a 5 kills per rank average through the last 200 ranks up to rank 1740. guess someone knows how to play the game.

giving credence to his contention that AP/hr is the only key stat worth worrying about, you can see his power and toughness both looming over most of the other ships. exceptions would be Golgotha's toughness which comes from the lower deck count damage cap, while elerian matches him on toughness ... but at a much lower rank. the question with elerian is whether he can maintain that kind of power through the next 1000 ranks ... which we may have to wait until the year 2050 to find out



a killing beast indeed ... you can see Taylor Swift's big PvP surge at rank 1200.





tis very clear whenever Taylor Swift switches out of excavator, eh ? but look at that arti / planet stat !

anyway, i think that fleshes out the ship log showdown quite nicely and gives players quite a few different standards to measure themselves up against.

senatorhung's analysis: ship log showdown !; SSB strategy;
Ancient Untouchables AU Leadership

id like to say thank you for the periodic updates, its nice to see how things progress in a more graphical format, i find mysel flooking back here from time to time even if theres no new update, just to cover-to-cover the thread so to speak to see where everyone is / has come from in that point in time.

I agree with you. It's nice to see the growth of people laid out in graph form. Especially since some of the graphs also allow you to compare without rank involved either, nice to see where you stand growth wise compared to other ships you want to be like in the future

Thank you for all your work senatorhung!

to elerian and moonlitwalk (and all the other ship log providers) ... thanks for posting your ship logs ... without that data, there would be no analysis

if you ever have any thoughts about comparing something that isn't reflected on the existing charts, feel free to make the suggestion !


hmm ... i am not sold on the Talth side of things. i had originally planned to go down that route earlier, but the more i thought about it, the more i realized that i was already focusing on taking arti-oriented planets already. plus the Talth chain imposes a heavy xp (and ranking) burden ... some of my favourite bt targets are low-ranked Talths who sped thru that chain before toughening up their ship. hence my detour to Kronyn and Mylarai to set up my project planets to eventually transform them into C 17x/22x/17x. the only advantage to going Talth early that i can see is to build up some planets to sell for ctp to buy one of the few natural dysons that pop up occasionally.

i am doing comparatively well at my rank compared to where you were at my rank, (as are many of the showdown pilots - see lower left of the 5th 'artifact' chart) but you did it in a MUCH shorter time frame (as shown on the upper left days played on the artifact chart). i think the bigger advantage comes from running with higher scan. when you were at rank 804, you had a base scan of 5061 with only 6534 scans performed. my current rank 807 stats are 1786 base scan with 22213 scans performed. you didn't pass that scans performed figure until rank 1621, when you already had over 150k AP/hr.

obviously we both buff up for scan runs, but you scanned your dyson at rank 1028 with a base scan of 7203, and within a month you were scanning at over 10k scan, with not much change in your scan rate. your 2d big jump at rank 1505 had you scan around 770 planets and you took 2 of them ... for a jump of over 13k in AP/hr. so i think finding (and TAKING) nice arti planets (either ones scanned yourself or shared via legion alerts) played a big part in your rise to your current lofty position on the artifact per planet chart.

i think the final takeaway is that scanning until grey with lower than 10k scan is not very effective. my current mylarai explorer is helping a bit on the scanning part, but the taking part is where i will still struggle as my base attack as a SSB can not compete with the base attack that comes from a LSB build. but with no challenge, there is no fun

senatorhung's analysis: ship log showdown !; SSB strategy;
Ancient Untouchables AU Leadership

I think a player's goals should really determine their playstyle, not the other way around. My primary focus in GL is climbing the medals board, which (to me) shows the most well-rounded ships in the game. But in acquiring all those medals, I found myself PVPing a ton, which (at the time) really changed my playstyle. And since the PVP medals are very tough to achieve, once I got the top medals, I just kept on PVPing, as it was part of my normal gameplay.

I do not consider myself a PVPer primarily, as I do a fair bit of NPCing also. But in comparison to many of my EotS brethren, I'm my NPC figures pale to theirs.

The one thing that I didn't optimize early on was scanning. I was more focused on improving the planets I had versus finding more planets to invade. There were times where I wouldn't scan for more than a month! But as my ship attack improved, I started scanning more, since I could invade more and better planets. While I don't have any regrets about it, my ship could be even better now if I scanned more back then!

its not as large as you think, my guns are the next thing on my scrap for **ooh shiny** list lowering my overall attack by about 4k ish ( did the math before, too lazy to do it again ) with a high enough APH, the researched mods eventually just become more expensive than they need to be

in fact the only reserched anything im likely to leave on my ship are scan/cloak/hull - and the hull mods are on the chopping block after guns i just dont see anything that would take theri place ( deck for deck wise ).

two months since the last update ... this one includes the interim update from Golgotha as well, so that can be compared with Taylor Swift's. reformatted a few of the graphs so that they scaled better.



not sure if Golgotha's last attack datapoint was anomalous or not ... will have to see where the next datapoint falls. still an impressive number !






in chart 5, we can see that Taylor Swift definitely got a higher AP/hr for the number of days played, but that Golgotha is still keeping up with AP/hr per rank.

you should send message saying update in 1 day or something so we all can update, I dont update my ship log unless something nice has happened to trigger eg new chain, rank milestone, ally/mod maxed/added

I like that idea too. I've been slow ranking a lot the last month, but if the time was coming up for you to update the ship log showdown, I'd definitely update my log.

both of you had updates in august that were included in this one. i don't see the issue. if you make a subsequent update, it will appear in the next edition. i am aiming for one every month or 2 months, depending on my interest and energy, but at this point i don't think there will be too many surprises with each update, barring Taylor Swift coming up with another interesting metric.

here is the latest update after the bane seasonal event. the next one will likely be after the scruuge season, so in early january.

highest % artifact planets, yay!

I'm just going to toss this out there. These charts are so convoluted due to the overload of various ships that it's almost meaningless to look at. I totally think Senator is smart and can do analysis, but you might want to make those more user friendly.

i'm always tweaking these, but i am at a loss as to how you think cutting down the number of ships would be more user friendly. it is the mass of hits that indicates where the 'majority' of pilots lie, and the valuable information is in the results of those that deviate from the norm. most people will pick a pilot to compare themselves with, and seeing how that pilot appears on all the charts can help them make decisions about what to focus on.

i am happy to consider further tweaks, but you have to give me something more substantial to work towards than 'user friendliness'. is there a chart that you find useless ? what chart should i replace it with. is a particular scale not highlighting a contrast as well as it could ? i try to spread out the data as much as i can, but unless you want me to start chopping off extreme values (which i have done previously), i'm not sure what you are getting at.

so, what 'use' are you aiming to use these charts for, that they are currently unsuited towards ?

i will be posting updated charts early in the new year ... so if the ship log ships want their most current data ... you know what to do

and just to note in advance ... Spock for Captain has taken over Joseph4's spot ...

should be updating mine by end of the day

a new year ... a new ship log SHOWDOWN update ! some of the colours have been tweaked in an attempt to enhance visibility. and as previously noted, we welcome Spock for Captain in place of Joseph4.


we can see that elerian has finally decided that he has enough decks, and has turned the corner onto the long stretch to MSB, spiced with a spot of speed ranking. Peticks has doggedly returned to 100% damage cap rating (SSB) status, also assisted by a bit of speed ranking. meanwhile, Spock for Captain is moving the other way, adding decks for some no doubt nefarious purpose. icky is stalking Taylor Swift so closely on this chart that a restraining order may soon be required.


senatorhung continues to collect red badges for super base locks, dominating the PvP kills per rank segment of the chart. on the power chart, moonlitwalk is making a good show of boosting attack power given her limited APH. senatorhung joined the 100 toughness club last month, wth Peticks, Fasious, Philus, elerian, and icky all closing in on 70.


again, icky is shadowing Taylor on most of these charts, with the exceptions of PvP kills per rank and NPC kills per rank, while matching on the PvP / NPC ratio. very sly. however, Peticks and Fasious are also pairing up to tango ... those SSB types are *so* cliquey. elerian trades in some t.o.'s for engineers to help drive his recent speed.rank splurge. Taylor Swift continues to pummel any NPCs that have the misfortune of appearing on his battle tab. Darth Pita has managed the relatively rare task of _dropping_ his NPC kills / day rate. please don't go all mission on us DP !


elerian's crew / rank vs APH plummets down to the norm. the chart on the top right is a closeup of the lower APH section of the top left chart. on the bottom right, we can see that elerian's crew / rank is still tops for his rank, so all that effort at slow ranking was not completely wasted. the coupling pairs of icky / TS and Peticks / Fasious continues to be visible here, even onto the engineers per rank chart. go get a room already !


ah APH, APH ... what Taylor Swift stipulates is the key to success in this game, and he practices what he preaches. unfortunately, not all of us can be as focused as TS on boosting APH daily, so will have to settle for boosting APH per rank. another pair of closeups are provided to peer into those Gordian knots. and presto, no more pair-offs !


the showdown finishes off with a pair of double-wides. widescreen over letterbox pan and scan *every* time, i say ! TS makes every planet put up or shut up, while Peticks continues to perish the thought of picking up any pesky mining planets. meanwhile, poor icky and DP seem to have a hard time finding many of those precious arti planets ... oh woe !

now that the PvP frenzy of the lepus event has been left behind for another year, it's now time for another edition of the ship log showdown !

the roster has been shuffled up and whittled down to an even dozen again after the housecleaning from the first few months of this year. welcome to Maelstrom / TrinityThree on his debut appearance !


The Golgotha machine may have slowed down, but at nearly 500 hits to disable on hull alone, and getting over the 80% damage cap rating threshold ... merda ! what a beast ! Maelstrom is indeed giving the slow.ranking style a nice shine, but is no slouch when it comes to throwing his weight around as seen on the decks chart.


and while Maelstrom's bulky ship might normally attract unwanted attention, he is no puffball on either the power or toughness2 scales, so he can take and give back any punishment he might receive. Golgotha is still the supreme king on the toughness2 scale though, breaching the 200 mark. senatorhung continues his recent killing rampage, increasing his PvP kills per rank to over 10.


on tac officers per rank, Maelstrom is playing with the big boyz like Elerian, Golgotha, and icky. senatorhung is now over 8 PvP kills per day played, so over 3 years of play, that is a lot of smoking hulls ...


Golgotha continues to shine on the crew per rank charts.


with Golgotha switching out of excavator, icky is taking the lead on the arti/hr chart, but on the arti per hour per rank chart, Maelstrom is clearly in a category of his own.


we can see a possible reason for Maelstrom's chart-breaking stats here on the artifact per planet chart. Maelstrom is also competing with Peticks for the lowest %mining and highest %arti.


and to wrap things up, one of my good old combo bar charts makes a re.appearance

top 3 %arti:
- 1. Maelstrom 69.4%
- 2. Peticks 68.7%
- 3. Ganga 67.4%

top 3 %mining:
- 1. Darth Pita 36.3%
- 2. icky 31.4%
- 3. elerian 27.1%

top 3 %research:
- 1. xmoonlitwalkx 34.0%
- 2. Fasious 26.3%
- 3. Darth Pita 26.2%

Thanks man, as always very interesting to read.

The scale on the toughness2 charts threw me off for a bit, but i got my head around it

Its on maelstrom! no one out minimal mining me!