Make no mistake everyone, this is not true when an outpost/starbase is not involved in the fight.
Yes Coordinated Fire is pretty nice, but let's not make the mistake of obsessing about one single slide.
Galaxy Wing = Attack Pattern Omega
Steamrunner Wing = Torpedo Charge (Seems likely; flavor strongly implies Steamrunner Wing's increased crit rate is limited to frigates.)
Spearhead < Sensor Pickets (as I said)
If we look at battles not involving fighting around an Outpost or Starbase
Base Strike has: Coordinated Fire
Decisive Battle has: Feints, Battle Bridge Link, Vanguard, and Auxiliary to Shields
Pretty sure those four together are better than Coordinated Fire.
No, they are not.
Coordinated Fire alone kicks the crap out of the rest, but Battle Bridge Link is also
far worse than the combination of Steamrunner Wing and Nor Battle to the Strong. I also disagree that Steamrunner Wing is the same as Torpedo Charge, the wording seems quite clear.
On an Excelsior-A +1L is 10% increase in durability. On an Ambassador it's 6.25%. A Rennie, 11%. On a Miranda-A, 20%. Auxiliary to Shields counter-intuitively benefits frigates more than larger ships, but frigates are the ships that don't want their evasion or D cut, especially with Feints depending on D score into the Heavy Metal phase. It depends of course on the degree of loss, but let's say 5% evasion, -1D. It could well be -2D though. That's about a 5% increase in Excelsior-A durability, 6.25% to Ambassador, 6.28% to Rennie, 6.9% to the Miri-A. I doubt the Mirandas or any other frigate will take that since we need their D score, so I'll call it a capship and cruiser buff.
So overall, Decisive Battle is looking at a loss in crucial areas including:
- Large loss to fleet value
- Large loss to targeting priority
- Large loss to crit chance
Meanwhile, it has:
- Large gain to vanguard
- Gain to scouting
- Approx 6% to capship and cruiser durability
And obviously when defending a Starbase (an activity we
expect to be doing in the opening phases of the war we expect to be fighting), all of this goes out the window in favor massively of Base Strike, as it does when attacking a starbase or outpost.
It's impossible to say for sure which doctrine is better for battle because there are too many techs without numbers attached. But counting the C+L target priority against Decisive Battle when the by far the worst target priority (starbases/outposts) belongs to Base Strike is more than just a bit silly. And you are overvaluing attack patterns/target priorities/tactics, those don't require the doctrine to be active so we can eventually gain access to all of them and our commanders cherry pick the best ones. We don't even necessarily have to wait until after we finished our chosen doctrine if there is something worth rushing.
I would look at how the tactic is described to determine where our commanders will use it, and compare that to where we
want a target priority to be used. I see very few situations where we want to focus down enemy capital ships, and it's actively detrimental in many situations as cruisers are the better target, in almost every heavy metal phase actually. I
can see situations where when fighting over an enemy installation, we'd want to attack the installation, especially given the big buffs we'd have to doing so.
On the other hand basically every situation where we shoot a ship that is damaged already is a good one for us.
