So where can I read about the meta which informs these tier decisions? Assumptions about the fleet compositions are what make large slots weapons bad. I understand it's because of torpedoes that deal extra damage to them, but are torpedoes worth it to run against smaller ships or is this just a "if the opponent has intel on you/has the time to refit you are in for a world of hurt"?
@@ruukinen They're mostly up to strat, but he usually use peer advices and hang in very proficient discord. So yeah, if Strat stays it's good, it's at best a tier above/under, nothing major. -edit: he rated the bubble weapon too low tho, the Cordileptic drone civic makes it very strong.
@@Regunes Sure, but I want to read about the meta around this tier list since I don't have the context to know why something was placed somewhere on the list. For obvious things like PDs being woefully undertuned and downright buggy, I understand that it's bad -> because it just is. But something that looks reasonable is at best C tier here and I want to understand why.
I’ll be honest I don’t like the Mets at all man it the disruptor torpedo cruisers I have don’t actually kill the ships they just force disengagement all the time which leads to tons of battle where I don’t kill a single ship but I win and it’s frustration but my artillery battleships tear apart fleets and cause war exhaustion I just have a hard time seeing this as Mets especially when no retreat exist
This is true but also keep in mind that armor now provides more hit points than shields of the same size and tier so even AI ships will almost always have more armor than they have shields. So you'll still tend to get more value from anti-armor weapons than anti-shield.
@@robguy8501 I definitely see more shield slots than armor when used by AI. They even throw on shield capacitors almost all the time as their aux slots.
Yeah, my single player experience says that auto-cannons are broken OP compared to everything else. Then again, my ships are all significantly faster than the AI's. Maybe if I committed to not using any short range weapons and I tried kiting, I wouldn't have any and they wouldn't get to use theirs instead of the current situation where both sides shoot eachother point blank. Torpedoes are hot garbage because of their short range. The AI's will never reach my battleships, and me fielding some just means sacrificing whatever cruisers they're on.
@@vgalis I also find torps underperform against AI, mostly because they field so many small ships to an irrational degree. FEs which have bigger ships have way too much point defense for torps to get past either.
@@vgalis "Yeah, my single player experience says that auto-cannons are broken OP compared to everything else." They are also great for inflating your numbers to give you more diplo weight and making the AI more willing to become your subject and stay loyal
One way the devs could change Energy Siphon is to make them actually siphon energy and add it to your ships shields. If the ship that is siphoning is already at full shields then a nearby friendly ships shields will be refilled instead. This could combo well with a fleet build that only runs penetrating weapons like disruptors or torpedos etc. Basically becoming a vampire fleet build.
When I first started playing Stellaris back in 2018, I thought that's how these weapons worked, and thus loved to use them thinking that way. Only to find out that it was very much not the case and stopped using them promptly. I mean, like, it's literally IN THE NAME, Energy "Siphon", if maybe they added an energy cost per ship tied to the reactor, making long term battles costlier for ships with less energy surplus, but instead the energy siphon (and other possibly new weapons they could add) would negate that, allowing you to run ships with just barely positive net energy. I think that'd be a cool idea for the future, similar to how supplies/oil works in HOI4 or energy in any other space game with ships like SPAZ.
You forgot to mention how powerful disrupters and nano missile cloud launchers are against fallen empires. Also I am genuinely afraid of crisis empires now. They used to be just a meh level threat before I knew the minor artifact cost was 0 for menacing ships.
A note. Silas proved that flak/pd have NO target prioritization. So if you are using my carrier design (hangar core rather than carrier, only carrier front) with 7 swarmer's and 2 strike craft per: you are almost guaranteed to negate pd damage to the missiles as each pd has to target randomly between 7 missiles and 16 strike craft. And that's only the first wave. Since they stick with the same target until it dies or leaves range, which advanced strike craft basically never will. Essentially strike craft eventually negate pd.
WHAT, no way... so they're actually worse than i thought lmao alrighty people that see this, please put down the PD/Flaks 1 Tier BELOW what was shown in the Video...
Autocannons S Tier in psychological warfare It inflates your fleet power so much : with 15k alloys year 2230, I have 25k fleet power missiles/torpedoes, or 40k fleet power autocannons/plasma. Great for freaking out neighbors and getting free vassals.
@@Strategiser2 Man, my dumbass was using autocannons just for the reason until I started getting crushed by weaker fleets and was wondering what the fuck was happening
Nobody mentioning that fact that Cloud Lightning is a "space fauna" weapon so it could be buffed throu Cordyceptic Drones civic which makes it slightly better
Yeah just reading the stats, I couldn't see why it would be so inferior to matter disintegrators. But then again, I haven't played Stellaris in a year, so...
Abilities in classic wow are similar. Yeah you get more damage but the mana cost makes them useless because as much as devs do try, sometimes they just don't anticipate what will actually happen in a real game.
I stopped playing stellaris months ago but this is still epic content, I remember the olden days back when i could make some battleships with neutron launchers and vaporize the enemy in seconds edit: oh god the ships use actual strategy now?
Yeah artillery death balls no longer work. They all actually obey the range requirements of their weapons and battle computers now, meaning that you have to actually plan around their movement patterns.
Note: auto cannons are great if your enemy isn’t checking your ship designs as they make your fleet power insane. This is good vs ai or against players who can’t tell your bluffing. However if you are in pvp and don’t have great encryption they can be very disappointing.
They're also good against AI because the AI still uses shields. As long as you have something else to break through armor as you close to range, they're still great because of the absurd base damage and bonus hull damage.
@@superskrub4209 I never bought into the neutron BBs... I always stood firm by Tachyon, Kinetic + Plasma BB's, Kinetic + Plasma Cruisers, Half Kinetic+plasma destroyers & Half PD+antifrig destroyers, then Full PD/dogfighting frigate screens. In perfect mathematical ratios of 2 cruisers, 4 destroyers & 8 frigs per every BB. It hasn't failed me yet (granted I haven't played in this new update yet) Edit: I will also point out that this force structure is designed to do one very specific job- Kill all shields and as many of the enemy as possible through sheer kinetic dakka before the plasmas get into range to mitigate enemy force impact - then for the destroyers & frigs (mostly frigs) to be cannon fodder while plasma dakka is added to the mix to shred the enemy. Scouting is KEY for this tactic- as starting an engagement in close range is the death of your fleet.
Same. I kinda understand it because I learned about the damage boosts to various weapons vs different ship sizes beforehand, but it’s still intimidating. Like, Disruptors are now the pinnacle of weapon tech??? What??!
It’s hard to compare weapons that come at different stages of the game on different slots. Especially with the computer targeting priority rework. Disruptors or swarm missiles are S tier in the sense that they have a huge window of opportunity. But they can be crushed later pretty easily. The main issue is that counters are not in the same tech tiers mainly due to flak PD being inefficient. A massive buff to PD and a lower tier proton launcher would alleviate the need of BB artillery mid game.
If only schools taught lessons and did lectures in this style, hahaha. I love this sort of content, thanks! I'll refer to this video specifically if I need to rank my available weapons in a game
Strat, unironically this is a really useful breakdown of each weapon. Have not played Stellaris in over a year and this is quite a bit different from the previous "meta" and applications for weapons are different.
Dont forget you can get tier four auto cannons and flak batteries from defeating the scavenger bot, if you got one near your system early game you can skip the lower tier techs and jump strait to them. The system that the scavenger bot is in also provides a small trickle of nanites as well
I heard a while ago, that the disrupter is amazing, expect that it sucks. It does little damage even to the hull, and it's only strength comes from triggering disengagement. You end up losing more ships then the opponent even when they all are forced to disengagement. But the major counter to them is no-retreat, since you don't have the emergency ftl you'll outdps the opposing ships and end up killing almost all of them.
It doesn't matter much that it does "small" damage, that damage bypasses armor and shields entirely, removing a big chunk of hit-points that other weapons would have to get through before hitting the hull, in addition to hull damage in the game reducing fire rate just as a cherry on top.
Glares have the same range as art so technically if you want your titans to actually use all their weapons, glares are actually pretty good. This is pretty much a choice between safer titans or more firepower.
I to this day wish we can get a complete rework on how weapon slots work. So maybe instead of something like a Battleship only being able to have preset slots. Have it so a battleship has "2000" room on it. A large weapon would add something like '400' Giving you another 1600 room to add stuff. But if you wanted a Battleship that carries only S-Class weapons. Then you would have something like a '160' or '200' cost instead. But something like an X weapons slot would cost '600-800' pts. Then it would change per ship type. A Titan would be able to carry a lot more. Like 4000-6000, a Juggernaut around 8000. Corvettes would have something around 800 I imagine, Destroyers 1200, Cruisers 1600. Cause I really love the idea of a fleet of ships that can have specialties. Like if you wanted, you can make a Battleship equipped with nothing but missiles. I love the idea of specializing. Since Stellaris likes to follow a lot of Sci-Fi things. I can easily see a giant behemoth with nothing but the power of missiles as an actual ship in a fleet.
Thanks for the video, super cool and informative! but me and my friends just play way to casually to min max all our ships. we still use psionic shields or the shield aux buffs. hell.. I often still just use rail guns and plasma.
The thing about the void beam is that its an energy weapon anti-shield. When all energy weapons are usually anti-armour, its not really relevant till super late game but if u r spamming energy weapon repeatables it might be useful
Could you do a video for ship designs against the AI? I’m not one for multiplayer as I like making my pops happy and role playing, so AI opponents are rampant for me
Just make disruptor corvettes they stomp everything except static defense For starbases/defense platforms just use naked carrier cruisers to take them out while your corvettes chill 1 system away Then work towards arc emitter bships to kill the FEs
Hey one thing i never quite got when watching these various stellairs combat guides is: Is this meant to address human PvP play or representative of how the AI builds fleets. Like if i booted up the game now will the AI only be putting armor on their ships? Which meta is this discussing?
It's focused on PvP, though a lot of stuff still applies. AI fleets are a lot more scattered/random and have builds that don't mesh well with each other. AI also likes shields a lot, so most of the top weapons get even better against them.
*Shakes Head* *Sigh* "We don't want everyone to use Battleship Fleets with Neutron Launchers at the end of the game. So we're going to redesign combat by making Neutron Launchers to be the same as Torpedoes and we're going to take the Torpedo Boat and make it its own class of ships, Frigates! To make sure that Battleships are easily countered, Torpedoes will do scaling damage verses the size of the target, larger the target, more damage they take!" This is what happens folks when the only thing upgrading weapons technology does is increase damage. This is also what happens when you want your early game fleets to be exactly like your end game fleets. They introduced Torpedo Boats, Frigates which only had torpedoes, to force the players to play the game _as_ the designers intended the players to play the game, instead of realizing that the balance of the game was hard coded to be broken as the way they designed combat was counter to their design goals. Why did the players prefer Neutron Launcher/Kinetic Artillery battleship fleets? Because the high alpha damage and range of "Artillery" weapons. While the reload speed is low, researching enough reload speed boosting technology makes such slow to reload/charge weapons economical. But, the technology tree favours Energy weapons usage because Physics research is limited to 5 options, and one of those options can only be researched 5 times, thus the option to increase Damage and Reload Speed will _always_ be available to be researched for Neutron Launchers. While the Material Tech Tree covers, Armour, Ballistic Weapons (reload and damage), Defence platforms (armour and damage), Missiles (reload and damage), planetary building speed (can only be researched 5 times)... The other effect of this results in Tychon weapons being so powerful, as their damage increases, their recharge rate is improved... and they can blast All they had to do was... make missiles so much more effective by increasing their range as you upgrade them, _and_ increase their acceleration as you also learn new drive system. It makes zero sense to have your Marauder Missiles to have the same range and have the same speed as your Fission Missiles... while your fighters on the other hand have their speed increased as they improve. At the start of the game, Nuclear Missiles are unchanged... but at the end of the game, with all technology researched, Marauder Missiles are 10x faster, and have 3x the range. Multiple salvos of Missiles will reach the enemy well before fighters are even able to arrive. The other issue is... why do ballistic weapons have their projectiles arrive at the same time as Lasers? Lasers travel at light speed... ballistic weapons _can't,_ especially during the early years, as kinetic weapons are bound by E=MC^2 limitations... the energy required to have their projectiles travel at relativistic speeds exceeds their power plant's energy out put. Thus... at some point, ballistic/Kinetic Energy Weapons will become obsolete. Paradox Interactive Arctic should just accept this... that Kinetic Weapons and Fighters will become obsolete as they can no longer do the task that are required of them. I can go into more detail, but I'm not going to waste my time on that here, until a person requests my balance rework, lol.
Paradox 3.7 ancient weapon logic: yap I know the minor artifact is more rare than rare resources but I still make them a lot more expansive on weapon costs and only give you a cap of 3000 to restore them. Also most of those ancient weapon didn't better than normal tier 5 weapons. BTW The ancient armor even with ascension perk(1020+450+450 = 1920) is even worse than dragon armour + dark matter shield((1680+2220)/2 = 1950) BTW2 Ruination glares is still bad because the ion cannon itself is a joke. You see, it deals lots of damage which means it only good at against battleship and titans, but wait, we have proton launcher! which has almost same range to ruination glares and also good at against battleships, and you can put 4 of them on a single platform now, with almost same cost of alloy to a ruination glares ion cannon, you can have 3-4 full proton launcher platforms and they only cost half of defence platform caps as ion cannon cost 8 for each. Hope they rework this and make me have a chance to build a protoss golden armada with minor artifacts may need to gather half of century but still worth it.
In Singleplayer, missiles (and whirlwind missiles) are the way to go, as you'd only need to research one weapon to counter and beat the AI fleets, giving more room to tech rush. This can result in Spiritualist Clone Army-empires finishing Mega-engineering around year 2245 or even earlier, if you play your cards right (and the rolls are not ass). With gigastructural engineering, this tactic can possibly allow you to complete an entire Alderson Disk before 2300, and I had a couple Gaia segments in mine. For those who don't know, that requires a ludicrous amount of tech and alloys.
The frostpunk soundtrack bruh. My heart poor giga canon. I'm not sure which weapon I prefer... I guess I'll try out swarmer missiles. I used to go heavy strike craft but swarmer missiles sounds fun. Is there anything I should not forget when using missiles? I know quantity is a quality on its own and to keep an eye out for counters.
Disruptors, Cloud Lightning and Arc Emitters........ best combo I've seen in current Meta. I had an AI with a 300k total fleet power declare war on me, I had 70k total fleet power at this point. With the edict combat boosts, this became 80k Firepower..... I had one fleet get cut off from safety because of exit point positions, and at 40k fleet power, in the adjacent system, I saw 90k Fleet Power over 2 fleets coming this way. My fleet was also heavily damaged as I'd just taken down a Bastion with (to the AI) 30k fleet power, but came out to me, as a 20k fleetpower..... where do the AI get these ridiculous bonuses I must ask.... anyways, using the Starbase to tank the initial attack, my fleet waded in...... it was a case of needing to survive long enough to hit FTL retreat, yeah, I'd lose my fleet for X number of days, but I'd have a fleet of some description. I slowed the game down to maximise my chances of hitting retreat..... and I was left in complete and utter disbelief........ 90k fleet GONE, and my 40k Fleet, now down to about 35k..... still sitting there, extremely battered, being held together by duct tape..... 100% Shield/Armor ignoring weapons..... The AI never goes super heavy on Crystal Plating it seems.
Could you make a video to combat computers? As i kinda dont really get when to use Artillery, line or Picket. There are also Questions like "Do all of my guns even fire if they have different range and i use the Artillery one" or "is there and impact on functionality if i use different computers in teh same fleet". Would be appreciated
@@Strategiser2 After 3.6 there is rule of thumb: armour module of a certain level gives around the same hp as shield module of the next level, with change. Small armour lvl1 gives exactly the same as small shield lvl2, but small armour lvl2 gives as much as small shield lvl3, plus 5 HP.
@@Rybakov22 true, this is the more specific answer, but the whole "armor has +50% effect this patch" is easier for new players to understand, since Neutrons got nerfed they're a really good option now
I knew console was about half a year behind in updates, but this really feels like looking into a different reality. Armour meta! Swarmer missiles! Disrupters! Cloaking! What the fuck happened here!? In all honesty, I'm tweaking and bouncing off walls wanting to switch to PC for this game.
Disruptors, Void Cloud Lightning and the Arc Emitter do scale with Energy Damage and fire speed aswell right? So eventually with enough repeatables these weapons become the strongest ones in the later stages of the rage, since Armor and Shields will also keep scaling up but hull will not.
A bit late, but federation fleet and custodian fleet have no upkeep. Mercenaries are also a good way to skip on upkeep. Meaning you can field the nano-missiles on the cheap.
I will still never even research disruptors and nobody can stop me!! But seriously, swarmer missiles FTW!! Also can’t help but see all the meta jokes to the old weapons tier list that came out way too late
I'm gonna speak out against our lord and savior Nanomissile. The one advantage disruptors have, even on Nemesis ships, is the low tracking of the missiles. I don't play multiplayer, but it's possible that just throwing disruptor corvettes at the Menacing-Corvettes and praying to RNGesus may win you the day.
Just realized that I somehow got the tech of "ancient refinery" on my game, which PRODUCES ancient artifacts. So yeah, I basically have an infinite supply of the King of weapons
Average damage doesn't take in account for what they are hitting so a early exotic gas find and edict run is 25% more laser damage if you have this you can run 3 lasers 1 being the Energy siphon, blue, red, or what ever you have for laser. The damage rolls are 5-16Kin So shield damage is +3-8 = 8-24 energy damage. 25% from edict 10-30. 8-21Siph with the 100% increases to shields. 8-21 + 8-21 = 16-42. +25% 20-52 per hit. Now this tier 1 kin which you will probably have 2 or 3 so you will have to break those numbers down to see when its better to go over to Kinetic. But edicts are a thing for them as well just depending on what falls on you mining lasers are also laser. So 1 edict that covers 3 weapon types.
You end the video very cool... also thank for weapon tier - looking to return to game for sometime now, so gonna need to relearn how to make a good ship... again.
I just realised while watching the Cloud Lightning bit that theyre NOT the same. We probably look at avg dmg too much. Ship 'fire-rate' buffs reduce the 'cooldown' (CD) of the shot by a flat %. So for example +10[%] fire-rate reduces the CD of Cloud Lightning by 0.715[s] and the CD of Disrupters by 0.340[s], making the average dmg of Cloud Lightning higher than Distrupter with any kind of +% firerate buff. Theyre ALSO higher range so same thing for +weapons range buffs. ALSO only 11 crytals and less power upkeep. so basically theyre not the same. but then again theyre also a large slot weapon so idk. Was gonna do the actual math but when I came back from doing groceries I forgot I was gonna do the math and now I cba anymore :D So there you have it.
ALSO: Cruisers carry 0.75 Torpedo's per naval-cap point and Frigates carry 1 Torpedo per naval-cap point. Cruisers carry 1.5 more 'chaf (or missiles)' though. (its the same ratio but flipped)
Genuinely helpful content for me, someone whose head spins at the combat rework, so thank you! Im still sad Battleships were made so comically vulnerable though I also miss my funny arc emitter disruptor spam fleets that I used to troll shieldmaxing FEs with in SP
I play stellaris primarily with auto upgrade. After 3000 hours in the game I simply do not give a shit about the minute increases in the ship designer. The new dlc makes playing the game infuriating, as the auto upgrade will always pick the artifact weapons, despite being garbage and costing more artifacts than I can ever make. My choice now being to either cheat, sit there for months to build a single corvette, or bite the bullet and spend an hour or so getting the stupid artifact weapons off my ships. At least you don’t have to click the boxes one by one now though
"minute increases" is not exactly a good description of it, generally even simple changes can make large differences in fights. Auto design has always made bad choices, the archeo weapons are the least of it in my eyes, that at least has the indirect upside of making people briefly take a look at the designer. The issue you have isn't really the fault of the archeo weapons, it's just auto design showing its faults, as it sees them as better than what you have based on their stats/tier. On another note, not entirely sure why you went to a weapon guide to say you don't give a shit about this stuff.
Null Void Beams deal a whopping 51.7 average damage to Shields vs 28.575 from Railguns. They're nearly double the damage against shields so if you run into someone or something that uses shields, you won't need more than 1 Null Void Beam per ship which is how they make up for Railguns which you might otherwise need to double up on. Now I haven't played the new patch, but calling them a "Bootleg level 3 Railgun" is hardly apt. All that being said, they also count as Energy Weapons and we all know when it comes to repeatables, you'd rather be in the Physics department than Engineering.
Yes, of course, shields are useless. We take the shield from the technologies of the archeotek. We make 60-75% of the hardness of the shields. This can be done very early. In combination with archeotech rockets, this is a very evil combination. On battleships and titans, you can achieve 100% shield hardness. The fleet becomes dramatically more tenacious. There is a problem, it takes a lot of digging, but starting on a relic world you will often provide yourself with everything you need. Starting like this, guaranteed worlds with ruins and very often excavation sites. And, yes, after 2400 it becomes difficult to maintain the fleet, but, there are alternatives and the cost in artifacts can be reduced by sacrificing some of the hardness. The biggest problem with shield builds is storm and pulsar. Place some more armor and make it hard too. In the end, it all comes down to finding out what kind of weapon your opponent has and optimizing your build for it. Also in the very late game, after learning a bunch of replays, the combination of artillery and lasers starts tearing. The number of hp of missiles and fighters does not increase. They become easier to knock down.
In one of my game i switched all my weapons on my fleets to Archo cannon,,,, i did not see that they missed 50%, now i get why i lost most of my fleets
The machinegun aka autocannon is bad because it is short range weapon but good against shield not armor, and the shiedl is the one who will be drain first in the battle.
In my games, neutron launchers are still good late game. they deal a ton of damage vs preythorn/contingency. vs contingency you’d put kinetic artillary on your BBs and neutrons on your cruisers. vs preythorn 100% anti armor weapons. Unbidden you could still use them if you’re not going full piercing since they do so much vs hull once KA/GC melt shields.
The old Arc Lightning meta was to use naked battleships. No other weapons, no armor, no anything. Even the lowest tier engines to actually slow them down. All in all very cheap ships. Had been better than everything at 30+ repeatables because the fight changed to "who can oneshot the enemy fleet first?".
Looks like I use E and D weapons the most often in the beginning of the game. The flak is not the best but it is better than rail guns in the beginning, and universal. I often use mining lasers and siphone before tier 3 weapons. Why? Did you see the price? My intial corvets are usually flack + lazer because flak is better then railgun. and sometimes I use siphone with medium lazer on second tier ships.
AI is scuffed and it depends on their "Personality" look it up on the Wiki here: stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/AI_personalities it shows the AI Ship Composition depending on their "Type"
I still use shields. What am I going to do with all this extra reactor power, especially on larger ships? Besides, If everyone is kitting anti armor, it's effectively an uno reverse card. But I play single player anyways, MP is for minmaxing sweatlords.
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4:40 is that music from frostpunk?
yes!
So where can I read about the meta which informs these tier decisions? Assumptions about the fleet compositions are what make large slots weapons bad. I understand it's because of torpedoes that deal extra damage to them, but are torpedoes worth it to run against smaller ships or is this just a "if the opponent has intel on you/has the time to refit you are in for a world of hurt"?
@@ruukinen They're mostly up to strat, but he usually use peer advices and hang in very proficient discord. So yeah, if Strat stays it's good, it's at best a tier above/under, nothing major.
-edit: he rated the bubble weapon too low tho, the Cordileptic drone civic makes it very strong.
@@Regunes Sure, but I want to read about the meta around this tier list since I don't have the context to know why something was placed somewhere on the list. For obvious things like PDs being woefully undertuned and downright buggy, I understand that it's bad -> because it just is. But something that looks reasonable is at best C tier here and I want to understand why.
Imagine 1 year ago telling a chadcannon + neutron launcher player that they would be dethroned by torpedo + disruptor users.
Exactly what just happened to me.
I’ll be honest I don’t like the Mets at all man it the disruptor torpedo cruisers I have don’t actually kill the ships they just force disengagement all the time which leads to tons of battle where I don’t kill a single ship but I win and it’s frustration but my artillery battleships tear apart fleets and cause war exhaustion I just have a hard time seeing this as Mets especially when no retreat exist
@@kainwittrig2180If you play defensive end it is especially useful if you have a fallen empire, hive mind or advanced empire next to you.
People beware: this is mostly catered for mp.
AI ships still use a lot of shields.
This is true but also keep in mind that armor now provides more hit points than shields of the same size and tier so even AI ships will almost always have more armor than they have shields. So you'll still tend to get more value from anti-armor weapons than anti-shield.
@@robguy8501 I definitely see more shield slots than armor when used by AI. They even throw on shield capacitors almost all the time as their aux slots.
Yeah, my single player experience says that auto-cannons are broken OP compared to everything else. Then again, my ships are all significantly faster than the AI's. Maybe if I committed to not using any short range weapons and I tried kiting, I wouldn't have any and they wouldn't get to use theirs instead of the current situation where both sides shoot eachother point blank. Torpedoes are hot garbage because of their short range. The AI's will never reach my battleships, and me fielding some just means sacrificing whatever cruisers they're on.
@@vgalis I also find torps underperform against AI, mostly because they field so many small ships to an irrational degree. FEs which have bigger ships have way too much point defense for torps to get past either.
@@vgalis "Yeah, my single player experience says that auto-cannons are broken OP compared to everything else."
They are also great for inflating your numbers to give you more diplo weight and making the AI more willing to become your subject and stay loyal
One way the devs could change Energy Siphon is to make them actually siphon energy and add it to your ships shields. If the ship that is siphoning is already at full shields then a nearby friendly ships shields will be refilled instead. This could combo well with a fleet build that only runs penetrating weapons like disruptors or torpedos etc. Basically becoming a vampire fleet build.
that's actually a really cool idea
It also makes it worth getting since energy siphons are pretty pointless
That's the way I thought it was when I started playing. I was pretty disappointed when I realized it was basically worthless.
Way, way back when I stared playing that's what they did based on description.
When I first started playing Stellaris back in 2018, I thought that's how these weapons worked, and thus loved to use them thinking that way. Only to find out that it was very much not the case and stopped using them promptly. I mean, like, it's literally IN THE NAME, Energy "Siphon", if maybe they added an energy cost per ship tied to the reactor, making long term battles costlier for ships with less energy surplus, but instead the energy siphon (and other possibly new weapons they could add) would negate that, allowing you to run ships with just barely positive net energy. I think that'd be a cool idea for the future, similar to how supplies/oil works in HOI4 or energy in any other space game with ships like SPAZ.
You forgot to mention how powerful disrupters and nano missile cloud launchers are against fallen empires. Also I am genuinely afraid of crisis empires now. They used to be just a meh level threat before I knew the minor artifact cost was 0 for menacing ships.
i mean crisis empires were strong before...now they're genuinely unstoppable if the galaxy doesn't work together lmao
@@Strategiser2 or you can help them :)
@@Strategiser2 had a devouring swarm become the crisis. Literally took the entire galaxy 20 years to stop them.
@@VORASTRA like "I don't need to win, I just need you (all) to loose!" energy.
@@Dreagostini when you have fallen empire with your ethic, it's not bad to help them win in war in heaven
I was confused when weapons in stellaris got reworked, but after watching this video I am now even more confused than I was before.
LMAO
A note. Silas proved that flak/pd have NO target prioritization. So if you are using my carrier design (hangar core rather than carrier, only carrier front) with 7 swarmer's and 2 strike craft per: you are almost guaranteed to negate pd damage to the missiles as each pd has to target randomly between 7 missiles and 16 strike craft. And that's only the first wave. Since they stick with the same target until it dies or leaves range, which advanced strike craft basically never will. Essentially strike craft eventually negate pd.
WHAT, no way...
so they're actually worse than i thought lmao
alrighty people that see this, please put down the PD/Flaks 1 Tier BELOW what was shown in the Video...
Autocannons S Tier in psychological warfare
It inflates your fleet power so much : with 15k alloys year 2230, I have 25k fleet power missiles/torpedoes, or 40k fleet power autocannons/plasma. Great for freaking out neighbors and getting free vassals.
that is true, but their combat power is questionable lol
especially when armor got significantly buffed
@@Strategiser2 Man, my dumbass was using autocannons just for the reason until I started getting crushed by weaker fleets and was wondering what the fuck was happening
For anyone reading this later on, note that the insane fleet power inflation Autocannons gave (x3 above intended) got fixed in patch 3.8.3!
@@Bluewolf128x lol thanks!
I wish event weapons are more useable, it feels like most issues with event weapons are the same as the previous tier list.
yep, unfortunately they didn't get changed much or at all...
Consider: ESC Next
1 day till mining drill and energy siphon will be S tier
"Thank you for coming to my ted talk on why Become the Crisis is banned"
Nobody mentioning that fact that Cloud Lightning is a "space fauna" weapon so it could be buffed throu Cordyceptic Drones civic which makes it slightly better
Yeah just reading the stats, I couldn't see why it would be so inferior to matter disintegrators. But then again, I haven't played Stellaris in a year, so...
20 minutes of listening to Spongebob talk about space weapons. A+
In no other game that I’ve ever played has an ‘upgrade’ made my asset weaker. This is such a unique phenomenon to Stellaris 😂
Abilities in classic wow are similar. Yeah you get more damage but the mana cost makes them useless because as much as devs do try, sometimes they just don't anticipate what will actually happen in a real game.
I stopped playing stellaris months ago but this is still epic content, I remember the olden days back when i could make some battleships with neutron launchers and vaporize the enemy in seconds
edit: oh god the ships use actual strategy now?
Yes its rock paper scisor now
Yeah artillery death balls no longer work. They all actually obey the range requirements of their weapons and battle computers now, meaning that you have to actually plan around their movement patterns.
Note: auto cannons are great if your enemy isn’t checking your ship designs as they make your fleet power insane. This is good vs ai or against players who can’t tell your bluffing.
However if you are in pvp and don’t have great encryption they can be very disappointing.
They're also good against AI because the AI still uses shields. As long as you have something else to break through armor as you close to range, they're still great because of the absurd base damage and bonus hull damage.
I haven’t played stellaris in a bit and I figured this could help me learn the new weapon meta
I feel like a scared old man, fearful of new technology
Same, but I'm happy I can finally use something other than neutron BBs after a few years
@@superskrub4209 I never bought into the neutron BBs... I always stood firm by Tachyon, Kinetic + Plasma BB's, Kinetic + Plasma Cruisers, Half Kinetic+plasma destroyers & Half PD+antifrig destroyers, then Full PD/dogfighting frigate screens. In perfect mathematical ratios of 2 cruisers, 4 destroyers & 8 frigs per every BB. It hasn't failed me yet (granted I haven't played in this new update yet)
Edit: I will also point out that this force structure is designed to do one very specific job- Kill all shields and as many of the enemy as possible through sheer kinetic dakka before the plasmas get into range to mitigate enemy force impact - then for the destroyers & frigs (mostly frigs) to be cannon fodder while plasma dakka is added to the mix to shred the enemy. Scouting is KEY for this tactic- as starting an engagement in close range is the death of your fleet.
Same. I kinda understand it because I learned about the damage boosts to various weapons vs different ship sizes beforehand, but it’s still intimidating. Like, Disruptors are now the pinnacle of weapon tech??? What??!
It’s hard to compare weapons that come at different stages of the game on different slots. Especially with the computer targeting priority rework. Disruptors or swarm missiles are S tier in the sense that they have a huge window of opportunity. But they can be crushed later pretty easily. The main issue is that counters are not in the same tech tiers mainly due to flak PD being inefficient. A massive buff to PD and a lower tier proton launcher would alleviate the need of BB artillery mid game.
If only schools taught lessons and did lectures in this style, hahaha.
I love this sort of content, thanks! I'll refer to this video specifically if I need to rank my available weapons in a game
Something I had just found out two days ago is that if you're a scholarium you can get the preythorion scourge strike craft from caches
Strat, unironically this is a really useful breakdown of each weapon. Have not played Stellaris in over a year and this is quite a bit different from the previous "meta" and applications for weapons are different.
never expected frostpunk ost and pvz ost to be in the same video
Dont forget you can get tier four auto cannons and flak batteries from defeating the scavenger bot, if you got one near your system early game you can skip the lower tier techs and jump strait to them. The system that the scavenger bot is in also provides a small trickle of nanites as well
Frostpunk OST "The City Must Survive" in the background?! He timed the most hyped part of the song perfectly with the SS tiered missles! Gigachad!
That Frostpunk OST Hits Hard.
Thanks. Solid list, long-time player. it's still hard for me to believe that disruptors are actually good now.
Strat making a tier video.
Stellaris devs: "And I took that personally."
I heard a while ago, that the disrupter is amazing, expect that it sucks. It does little damage even to the hull, and it's only strength comes from triggering disengagement. You end up losing more ships then the opponent even when they all are forced to disengagement. But the major counter to them is no-retreat, since you don't have the emergency ftl you'll outdps the opposing ships and end up killing almost all of them.
It doesn't matter much that it does "small" damage, that damage bypasses armor and shields entirely, removing a big chunk of hit-points that other weapons would have to get through before hitting the hull, in addition to hull damage in the game reducing fire rate just as a cherry on top.
Glares have the same range as art so technically if you want your titans to actually use all their weapons, glares are actually pretty good. This is pretty much a choice between safer titans or more firepower.
Was not expecting the Frostpunk music
Gonna do a reverse psychology and fit all my ships with shields in multiplayer
My man out there quietly putting "The city must survive" as background thinking we wouldn't notice, well played
I to this day wish we can get a complete rework on how weapon slots work. So maybe instead of something like a Battleship only being able to have preset slots. Have it so a battleship has "2000" room on it. A large weapon would add something like '400' Giving you another 1600 room to add stuff. But if you wanted a Battleship that carries only S-Class weapons. Then you would have something like a '160' or '200' cost instead. But something like an X weapons slot would cost '600-800' pts.
Then it would change per ship type. A Titan would be able to carry a lot more. Like 4000-6000, a Juggernaut around 8000. Corvettes would have something around 800 I imagine, Destroyers 1200, Cruisers 1600.
Cause I really love the idea of a fleet of ships that can have specialties. Like if you wanted, you can make a Battleship equipped with nothing but missiles. I love the idea of specializing. Since Stellaris likes to follow a lot of Sci-Fi things. I can easily see a giant behemoth with nothing but the power of missiles as an actual ship in a fleet.
6:58 you actually can make a battleship with 4 M slot disruptors in the middle and don't put the fighter if you didn't research it.
Thanks for the video, super cool and informative! but me and my friends just play way to casually to min max all our ships. we still use psionic shields or the shield aux buffs. hell.. I often still just use rail guns and plasma.
The thing about the void beam is that its an energy weapon anti-shield. When all energy weapons are usually anti-armour, its not really relevant till super late game but if u r spamming energy weapon repeatables it might be useful
Arc emitter on carrier battleships is actually quite strong. Fighters count as bypass weapons too, yk.
I'l be honest: I didn't expect to get hit with The City Must Survive.
Could you do a video for ship designs against the AI? I’m not one for multiplayer as I like making my pops happy and role playing, so AI opponents are rampant for me
Just make disruptor corvettes they stomp everything except static defense
For starbases/defense platforms just use naked carrier cruisers to take them out while your corvettes chill 1 system away
Then work towards arc emitter bships to kill the FEs
Frostpunks OST does the work.
This man got a personal vendetta against Bubbles
Is this equally relevant in singleplayer? Hilarious video, well done.
yes, it is
@@Strategiser2 Wonderful :D
Hey one thing i never quite got when watching these various stellairs combat guides is: Is this meant to address human PvP play or representative of how the AI builds fleets. Like if i booted up the game now will the AI only be putting armor on their ships? Which meta is this discussing?
I always wonder that myself. Not that it matters, I use NSC with BSB and a few balance patches so these tierlists are always useless to me anyways.
It's focused on PvP, though a lot of stuff still applies. AI fleets are a lot more scattered/random and have builds that don't mesh well with each other. AI also likes shields a lot, so most of the top weapons get even better against them.
*Shakes Head*
*Sigh*
"We don't want everyone to use Battleship Fleets with Neutron Launchers at the end of the game. So we're going to redesign combat by making Neutron Launchers to be the same as Torpedoes and we're going to take the Torpedo Boat and make it its own class of ships, Frigates! To make sure that Battleships are easily countered, Torpedoes will do scaling damage verses the size of the target, larger the target, more damage they take!"
This is what happens folks when the only thing upgrading weapons technology does is increase damage. This is also what happens when you want your early game fleets to be exactly like your end game fleets.
They introduced Torpedo Boats, Frigates which only had torpedoes, to force the players to play the game _as_ the designers intended the players to play the game, instead of realizing that the balance of the game was hard coded to be broken as the way they designed combat was counter to their design goals.
Why did the players prefer Neutron Launcher/Kinetic Artillery battleship fleets? Because the high alpha damage and range of "Artillery" weapons. While the reload speed is low, researching enough reload speed boosting technology makes such slow to reload/charge weapons economical. But, the technology tree favours Energy weapons usage because Physics research is limited to 5 options, and one of those options can only be researched 5 times, thus the option to increase Damage and Reload Speed will _always_ be available to be researched for Neutron Launchers. While the Material Tech Tree covers, Armour, Ballistic Weapons (reload and damage), Defence platforms (armour and damage), Missiles (reload and damage), planetary building speed (can only be researched 5 times)...
The other effect of this results in Tychon weapons being so powerful, as their damage increases, their recharge rate is improved... and they can blast
All they had to do was... make missiles so much more effective by increasing their range as you upgrade them, _and_ increase their acceleration as you also learn new drive system. It makes zero sense to have your Marauder Missiles to have the same range and have the same speed as your Fission Missiles... while your fighters on the other hand have their speed increased as they improve.
At the start of the game, Nuclear Missiles are unchanged... but at the end of the game, with all technology researched, Marauder Missiles are 10x faster, and have 3x the range. Multiple salvos of Missiles will reach the enemy well before fighters are even able to arrive.
The other issue is... why do ballistic weapons have their projectiles arrive at the same time as Lasers? Lasers travel at light speed... ballistic weapons _can't,_ especially during the early years, as kinetic weapons are bound by E=MC^2 limitations... the energy required to have their projectiles travel at relativistic speeds exceeds their power plant's energy out put. Thus... at some point, ballistic/Kinetic Energy Weapons will become obsolete. Paradox Interactive Arctic should just accept this... that Kinetic Weapons and Fighters will become obsolete as they can no longer do the task that are required of them.
I can go into more detail, but I'm not going to waste my time on that here, until a person requests my balance rework, lol.
16:22 This is unequivocally the funniest moment of the Home Alone series, thank you Strat, for including it. I love you.
Paradox 3.7 ancient weapon logic: yap I know the minor artifact is more rare than rare resources but I still make them a lot more expansive on weapon costs and only give you a cap of 3000 to restore them. Also most of those ancient weapon didn't better than normal tier 5 weapons.
BTW The ancient armor even with ascension perk(1020+450+450 = 1920) is even worse than dragon armour + dark matter shield((1680+2220)/2 = 1950)
BTW2 Ruination glares is still bad because the ion cannon itself is a joke. You see, it deals lots of damage which means it only good at against battleship and titans, but wait, we have proton launcher! which has almost same range to ruination glares and also good at against battleships, and you can put 4 of them on a single platform now, with almost same cost of alloy to a ruination glares ion cannon, you can have 3-4 full proton launcher platforms and they only cost half of defence platform caps as ion cannon cost 8 for each.
Hope they rework this and make me have a chance to build a protoss golden armada with minor artifacts may need to gather half of century but still worth it.
In Singleplayer, missiles (and whirlwind missiles) are the way to go, as you'd only need to research one weapon to counter and beat the AI fleets, giving more room to tech rush. This can result in Spiritualist Clone Army-empires finishing Mega-engineering around year 2245 or even earlier, if you play your cards right (and the rolls are not ass).
With gigastructural engineering, this tactic can possibly allow you to complete an entire Alderson Disk before 2300, and I had a couple Gaia segments in mine. For those who don't know, that requires a ludicrous amount of tech and alloys.
The frostpunk soundtrack bruh. My heart poor giga canon.
I'm not sure which weapon I prefer...
I guess I'll try out swarmer missiles. I used to go heavy strike craft but swarmer missiles sounds fun. Is there anything I should not forget when using missiles?
I know quantity is a quality on its own and to keep an eye out for counters.
always engage in long range, close range is not Missile's strong suit
Disruptors, Cloud Lightning and Arc Emitters........ best combo I've seen in current Meta. I had an AI with a 300k total fleet power declare war on me, I had 70k total fleet power at this point. With the edict combat boosts, this became 80k Firepower..... I had one fleet get cut off from safety because of exit point positions, and at 40k fleet power, in the adjacent system, I saw 90k Fleet Power over 2 fleets coming this way. My fleet was also heavily damaged as I'd just taken down a Bastion with (to the AI) 30k fleet power, but came out to me, as a 20k fleetpower..... where do the AI get these ridiculous bonuses I must ask.... anyways, using the Starbase to tank the initial attack, my fleet waded in...... it was a case of needing to survive long enough to hit FTL retreat, yeah, I'd lose my fleet for X number of days, but I'd have a fleet of some description. I slowed the game down to maximise my chances of hitting retreat..... and I was left in complete and utter disbelief........ 90k fleet GONE, and my 40k Fleet, now down to about 35k..... still sitting there, extremely battered, being held together by duct tape..... 100% Shield/Armor ignoring weapons..... The AI never goes super heavy on Crystal Plating it seems.
Could you make a video to combat computers? As i kinda dont really get when to use Artillery, line or Picket. There are also Questions like "Do all of my guns even fire if they have different range and i use the Artillery one" or "is there and impact on functionality if i use different computers in teh same fleet". Would be appreciated
Wait, shield suck now? I feel very confused in this update.
indeed, armor got buffed by a WHOPPING 50%
if Pre-Rework the armor was 1000, After-Rework it's now 1500
@@Strategiser2
After 3.6 there is rule of thumb: armour module of a certain level gives around the same hp as shield module of the next level, with change. Small armour lvl1 gives exactly the same as small shield lvl2, but small armour lvl2 gives as much as small shield lvl3, plus 5 HP.
@@Rybakov22 true, this is the more specific answer, but the whole "armor has +50% effect this patch" is easier for new players to understand, since Neutrons got nerfed they're a really good option now
I love how ancient macrobatteries are just straight up IoM macrobatteries.
I knew console was about half a year behind in updates, but this really feels like looking into a different reality. Armour meta! Swarmer missiles! Disrupters! Cloaking! What the fuck happened here!?
In all honesty, I'm tweaking and bouncing off walls wanting to switch to PC for this game.
Disruptors, Void Cloud Lightning and the Arc Emitter do scale with Energy Damage and fire speed aswell right? So eventually with enough repeatables these weapons become the strongest ones in the later stages of the rage, since Armor and Shields will also keep scaling up but hull will not.
I like how the Frostpunk OST is just being played in the background
If you pick up the scavenger civic you can also bypass minor artifact costs on ships.
A bit late, but federation fleet and custodian fleet have no upkeep. Mercenaries are also a good way to skip on upkeep. Meaning you can field the nano-missiles on the cheap.
I will still never even research disruptors and nobody can stop me!! But seriously, swarmer missiles FTW!!
Also can’t help but see all the meta jokes to the old weapons tier list that came out way too late
that's what 1 month of production time does to you...
slow descent into insanity
After hearing you talk about the nano missile cloud i already want the sequel to stellaris in 2 minutes
11:24 that hold up sound effect was so unexpected that i died laughing
Wait what happened to shields? Last time I checked no one was putting armor on their ships?
Thought my playlist was still playing in the background,
They clowned neutron launchers HARD
Hearing THE CITY MUST SURVIVE while strat rambles on about nano missiles hits hard
This man's got a wacky voice and I love it.
My man really using pvz theme song for the intro.
I'm gonna speak out against our lord and savior Nanomissile. The one advantage disruptors have, even on Nemesis ships, is the low tracking of the missiles.
I don't play multiplayer, but it's possible that just throwing disruptor corvettes at the Menacing-Corvettes and praying to RNGesus may win you the day.
Just realized that I somehow got the tech of "ancient refinery" on my game, which PRODUCES ancient artifacts. So yeah, I basically have an infinite supply of the King of weapons
Average damage doesn't take in account for what they are hitting so a early exotic gas find and edict run is 25% more laser damage if you have this you can run 3 lasers 1 being the Energy siphon, blue, red, or what ever you have for laser. The damage rolls are 5-16Kin So shield damage is +3-8 = 8-24 energy damage. 25% from edict 10-30. 8-21Siph with the 100% increases to shields. 8-21 + 8-21 = 16-42. +25% 20-52 per hit. Now this tier 1 kin which you will probably have 2 or 3 so you will have to break those numbers down to see when its better to go over to Kinetic. But edicts are a thing for them as well just depending on what falls on you mining lasers are also laser. So 1 edict that covers 3 weapon types.
You end the video very cool... also thank for weapon tier - looking to return to game for sometime now, so gonna need to relearn how to make a good ship... again.
ON THE GOD-EMPEROR
STRAT PUT WEAPONS TIER LIST
THE EMPEROR BLESS
I just realised while watching the Cloud Lightning bit that theyre NOT the same. We probably look at avg dmg too much.
Ship 'fire-rate' buffs reduce the 'cooldown' (CD) of the shot by a flat %. So for example +10[%] fire-rate reduces the CD of Cloud Lightning by 0.715[s] and the CD of Disrupters by 0.340[s], making the average dmg of Cloud Lightning higher than Distrupter with any kind of +% firerate buff.
Theyre ALSO higher range so same thing for +weapons range buffs. ALSO only 11 crytals and less power upkeep.
so basically theyre not the same. but then again theyre also a large slot weapon so idk. Was gonna do the actual math but when I came back from doing groceries I forgot I was gonna do the math and now I cba anymore :D
So there you have it.
ALSO: Cruisers carry 0.75 Torpedo's per naval-cap point and Frigates carry 1 Torpedo per naval-cap point. Cruisers carry 1.5 more 'chaf (or missiles)' though. (its the same ratio but flipped)
Only one question: what does the Cordyceptic Drones civic do to the tier of Amoeba Flagella, Swarm Strikers, and Scourge Missiles?
hmmmm, hard to say
probably up by 1 tier since the damage is increased so significantly
@@Strategiser2 That's about what I was figuring. Gratzi.
Really nice video, will you do one for other ship components as well?
Genuinely helpful content for me, someone whose head spins at the combat rework, so thank you! Im still sad Battleships were made so comically vulnerable though
I also miss my funny arc emitter disruptor spam fleets that I used to troll shieldmaxing FEs with in SP
Goated RUclipsr. I really enjoy your Video Style and Humor
I play stellaris primarily with auto upgrade. After 3000 hours in the game I simply do not give a shit about the minute increases in the ship designer.
The new dlc makes playing the game infuriating, as the auto upgrade will always pick the artifact weapons, despite being garbage and costing more artifacts than I can ever make. My choice now being to either cheat, sit there for months to build a single corvette, or bite the bullet and spend an hour or so getting the stupid artifact weapons off my ships. At least you don’t have to click the boxes one by one now though
An hour? It'd take less than a minute to replace the archaeo slots with equivalent regular weapons.
Can't stand this noob energy, that's just hurts.
"minute increases" is not exactly a good description of it, generally even simple changes can make large differences in fights. Auto design has always made bad choices, the archeo weapons are the least of it in my eyes, that at least has the indirect upside of making people briefly take a look at the designer. The issue you have isn't really the fault of the archeo weapons, it's just auto design showing its faults, as it sees them as better than what you have based on their stats/tier.
On another note, not entirely sure why you went to a weapon guide to say you don't give a shit about this stuff.
Okay, thumbs up just for using the Frostpunk soundtrack.
Null Void Beams deal a whopping 51.7 average damage to Shields vs 28.575 from Railguns. They're nearly double the damage against shields so if you run into someone or something that uses shields, you won't need more than 1 Null Void Beam per ship which is how they make up for Railguns which you might otherwise need to double up on. Now I haven't played the new patch, but calling them a "Bootleg level 3 Railgun" is hardly apt. All that being said, they also count as Energy Weapons and we all know when it comes to repeatables, you'd rather be in the Physics department than Engineering.
Yes, of course, shields are useless. We take the shield from the technologies of the archeotek. We make 60-75% of the hardness of the shields. This can be done very early. In combination with archeotech rockets, this is a very evil combination. On battleships and titans, you can achieve 100% shield hardness. The fleet becomes dramatically more tenacious. There is a problem, it takes a lot of digging, but starting on a relic world you will often provide yourself with everything you need. Starting like this, guaranteed worlds with ruins and very often excavation sites.
And, yes, after 2400 it becomes difficult to maintain the fleet, but, there are alternatives and the cost in artifacts can be reduced by sacrificing some of the hardness.
The biggest problem with shield builds is storm and pulsar.
Place some more armor and make it hard too.
In the end, it all comes down to finding out what kind of weapon your opponent has and optimizing your build for it.
Also in the very late game, after learning a bunch of replays, the combination of artillery and lasers starts tearing.
The number of hp of missiles and fighters does not increase. They become easier to knock down.
How dare you attack our beloved Bubbles!! Exterminate. EXTERMINATE!!
In one of my game i switched all my weapons on my fleets to Archo cannon,,,, i did not see that they missed 50%, now i get why i lost most of my fleets
The machinegun aka autocannon is bad because it is short range weapon but good against shield not armor, and the shiedl is the one who will be drain first in the battle.
So disrupters are the reason wars have been taking me twice as long
speaking of archeoengineer. is it an ap from the first contact dlc ? because I've never seen it appear in any of my games
it's from the Ancient Relics DLC
@@Strategiser2 damn, guess I somehow keep on missing it.
In my games, neutron launchers are still good late game. they deal a ton of damage vs preythorn/contingency. vs contingency you’d put kinetic artillary on your BBs and neutrons on your cruisers. vs preythorn 100% anti armor weapons. Unbidden you could still use them if you’re not going full piercing since they do so much vs hull once KA/GC melt shields.
When you talk about the "meta," are you referring to multiplayer, or what the AI tends to do in a single player game?
autocannons on corvettes with afterburners, they're gonna be close range anyway, so unless they have corvettes kiting nothing can get away
It's honestly unexpectable for your crew to take 22 DAYS to launch another volley.
Finally a weapons guide in stellaris I can understand
That's my boi!
The old Arc Lightning meta was to use naked battleships. No other weapons, no armor, no anything. Even the lowest tier engines to actually slow them down.
All in all very cheap ships.
Had been better than everything at 30+ repeatables because the fight changed to "who can oneshot the enemy fleet first?".
Looks like I use E and D weapons the most often in the beginning of the game. The flak is not the best but it is better than rail guns in the beginning, and universal. I often use mining lasers and siphone before tier 3 weapons. Why? Did you see the price? My intial corvets are usually flack + lazer because flak is better then railgun. and sometimes I use siphone with medium lazer on second tier ships.
7:28
Remembering all the times I've raided pre-FTL civs. I'm a monster
that frostpunk ost do hit different.
And here I am with just equal Lasers and Railguns, then again, I haven't played in years.
Now I don’t normally like videos but this one will do
my first question why ain't there point defend strike craft for carriers and bombers and fighters
@strat does the AI follows this armor meta or is this just for multiplayer
AI is scuffed and it depends on their "Personality"
look it up on the Wiki here: stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/AI_personalities
it shows the AI Ship Composition depending on their "Type"
thanks! if possible do a ship formation tier list as for the period of the game is running (starter, early mid and late)
would be a good help
I still use shields. What am I going to do with all this extra reactor power, especially on larger ships?
Besides, If everyone is kitting anti armor, it's effectively an uno reverse card.
But I play single player anyways, MP is for minmaxing sweatlords.
10:50 unexpected Factorio soundtrack. Wow.