Crisis? Nip them in the bud as soon as they spawn. Doesn't matter if you have to declare war on half the galaxy just to get to them. If Dimensional Thingies: Refit fleets for anti-shield. If Discount Store Tyrannids: Refit fleets for anti-armor and anti-hull. If contingency: Downgrade all fleets to non-AI combat computers. If by the time the Crisis spawns you don't have control of at least 1/4th of the galaxy (either through conquest or a Federation of which you are an absolute leader) you're playing Stellaris wrong. Edit: Don't worry about having to declare war on other empires just to get to the Crisis. Get the Crisis weapons, refit your fleets with those and wipe the rest of the galaxy with them . Edit II: Set war strategy to "Hit and Run" to minimize losses in case you get caught with you pants down.
@@DeltaPi314 As soon as they spawn? If you can delete Endgame Crisis as soon as they spawn you're playing Stellaris wrong. ;) Good luck nipping their starting 5-8 million strength fleets (x25) as they spawn (in 2300). :)
@@DeltaPi314 Just be strong enough to ignore the crisis and let the rest of the Galaxy be eaten up by whatever crisis spawned. This post was made by the inward perfectionist gang.
@@DeltaPi314 "If by the time the Crisis spawns you don't have control of at least 1/4th of the galaxy (either through conquest or a Federation of which you are an absolute leader) you're playing Stellaris wrong." or you are in a MP match with about 12 players of pretty much equal skill
I find that fighting crisis ships to be similar to fighting the wild mobs, just scaled up. Pirates/Marauders = Contingency Void Clouds = Unbidden Amoebas/Crystals = Prethoryn But yes, I am interested in seeing your designs.
@@clefsan I may be wrong but I think the idea is that the greater engagement range on a single ship simply allows the fleet to trigger combat earlier when pursuing enemy fleets.
@@zentonil ah, ok. that makes more sense than one non-fleet-aura-ship magically giving an effect from its equipment to the fleet. thanks for the explanation :-)
After hearing Montu talk about how MP games never use armor, I want to run a Tall void dweller empire, inhabiting exclusively pulsar systems. Play defensively, make those shields totally useless. Make it the most horrifying war of attrition you could imagine. My absolute favorite place to put a chokepoint starbase fortress is in a pulsar systems; and fit it with specially made defensive stations that use all armor and anti armor and hull weapons. Those babies can hold out against fleets that would normally be twice the fleet strength, easy.
Pulsar chokes are incredible whether in SP or MP. Oh man, the second or third time I played I was almost disappointed because the main route into my empire had a Pulsar choke that I fortified (with special defense platforms that had no shields, only armor) and then the Unbidden spawned. They got utterly shredded without even a chance.
From my POV not using armor is the dumbest, dumbest thing to ever do. I've once had a game where I dealt with the unbidden (aka just shields and hull) I was badly prepared because I failed a lot of stuff early on. BUT. A carrier fleet with a quarter of fleet power of the crisis one demolished it, tho with serious casualties but the power was something a 50k crisis fleet and my ships with a 15k fleet. Strike craft pierce shields and if there's no armor then they deal heavy damage to hull because bonus damage. It's like using a x20 disruptor that also has sniper range. I really wanna play a game of MP and face those shield only people just to demolish them with strike craft
Wow these are hyper optimised monsters. I just obliterated twice the fleetpower in AI fleets with these things witout a loss. Using Starnet AI. Thank you.
I noticed that you missed one thing about arc emmitors in your testing video: they prioritize attacking the most powerful ship first, unlike all other X slot weapons. So against AI empires and especially fallen ones they might be much more effective than the others.
Carriers. I love them I always use a mix of carrier battleships & carriers (or one of them is a line ship. It's not optimal, but I damn like it) And yeah. A crisis guide would be useful
have you ever tried playing with the NSC2 and kurogane ship mods? just started a game with those 2 mods a few days ago and got to the Escort Carrier. lots of fun ship design options - Escort Carrier has 2 middle sections and one option for them allows, I think, 5 fighter squads per section - and the kurogane shipset has amazing looking models :-)
Thanks so much for your support! It's really uplifting to hear that this video helped! If anything changes with the Stellaris balance, I will also update this video
Hey, man. Would you consider uploading a spreadsheet or something with the suggested designs for each ship size? Something handy we can keep open or print out during our matches, for quick reference. It’d also be nice to have some reference for what designs to build when you’re nowhere near endgame tech, in case we get attacked early and need to muster up a fleet of plasma launcher corvettes or whatever. Thank you for the great content and dedication!
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for but he did make a basic colour-coded excel spreadsheet on his Ship Design Analysis Guide: ruclips.net/video/cuN7juxTp9c/видео.html Take a screenshot at 1:30 for a quick reference.
Unbidden go full kinetics and shields try to outrange them whenever possible, targeting grid juggernaut helps alot when taking on multiple fleets at once. Contigency Hull damage Arc emitters cloud lighting full shields. Praethorn most of thier stuff bypasses shields so full armor and 1 shield slot full energy weapons and lots of picket ships, try to grab scourge missles.
The unlock of the spinal mount battleship really is the Dreadnought of space warafre. From the moment they are launched all other battleships are made obsolete overnight. Buuuuuuut I do like me some weird "pre-dreadnought" designs like the battleship with the mediums and the single hanger-bay.
The problem is, that when you're going with tech around battleships, you've got X weapons as an option almost immidietly, especially if you're running economy to sustain major tech and fleet buildup. Before that point tho, if you're lucky enough to have battleships, 2L lasers, 4M kinetics 1H strikecraft, 1L laser, OR full L slots with replacing first two with gigacannon the very moment it appears (which means second aproach is better considering time and cost of upgrades)
Love these guides! I'm still gonna be an rp weirdo who puts whatever suits the empire I have in mind into the fleets, but it is always good to know what theoretically is best in slot
@@jacksons9546 True, you don't speculate on obtaining dragon scale armor or crystal-forged plating (as opposed to crystal-infused plating), but once you have them, it'd be nice to know if it's something useful. The same goes for sapient vs. precognitive combat computers - if you have both, which one is better in which design?
I try to have a well-rounded fleet: a few carriers, some kinetic weapons battleships, some energy weapons battleships, a few close combat cruisers with plasma cannons and such, point defense destroyers, and then a number of missile / torpedo slinger corvettes. And as I never play multi-player, I don't care about "cost-effective".
@@blahmaster6k Not everything; they are very slow. Late game you'll want to use other ships just to apply pressure while your battleships move in for the kill and remove starbases.
@@blahmaster6k Maybe, but it just doesn't "feel" right to have a fleet consist of nothing but battleships. Capital ships should have escorts. I honestly wish Paradox would change fleet combat to encourage balanced fleet building. In Hearts Of Iron 2 (the last one I played), I recall fleets had a combat malus applied to them if the ratio of capital ships to escorts was skewed too heavily in favor of the former.
I like to spam what I call Venator battleships and Bellona cruisers. All with hanger bays, it absolutely shreds the crisis. It also shreds other players quite easily, so much so that it sometimes causes some players to lag so much they die. Though of course I still have an artillery ship, and a sacrificial corvette fleet to soak most of the pain. Though the difference between our designs is that I play spiritualist, and use the Psi-shields.
Thank you again Montu, as it turns I been using these builds as well. I usually do a mix of artillery battleships with carrier cruisers and slowly replace the cruiser with carrier battleships as they are destroyed. I didn't know of the just have 1 ship with the carrier role trick, very sneaky and useful
My standard endgame BS fleet doctrine is the classic broken setup of the "T-34": use Spinal, carrier, and whatever's left for the hull segments, and mount 1x focused arc emitter as well as 1 neutron launcher/1 scout squadron if you have the extra alloys for them. Fill the ship with the best crystal platings you can find, which will cost about 9 crystals in total. Put the best accuracy and tracking accessories on the ship, as well as a warp drive. Put the best you can find for all of the other slots, but use the arty computer instead of the others, and use the cheapest reactor possible. For the thrusters, if you want your ships to go faster, use T3 thrusters, but the best thrusters are actually the T1 ones (the ones you begin with) in battle as you need your battleships to approach the opposing fleet as slow as possible to abuse the extra range from the arc emitters. In total, a BS with this setup costs about 600 alloys in total, allowing you to spam BSs as quickly as possible, and since x slot weapons do about 90% of the damage in battle, this setup is actually much more efficient than your normal BS setup in PVE, as at the same cost this setup contains a lot more x slots than its counterpart. To further boost performance, use a juggernaut with the range aura to further increase the range for the BSs, and do the synthetic ascension to get the range buffs from being a synth and using the synth combat computers. In combat, I have successfully beaten a 7M fleet with my 2M blob with this setup, with zero losses. This is seriously broken. Since arc emitters ignore shields and armor this setup is basically insanely good against everything except corvette swarms, which Is why I suggest the scout squads and the neutron launchers. In 3.4 the health regen Is Also insanely broken, making star crackers the most OP ships in stellaris. about 20 of them can completely crush any crisis at 25x simply because they can regen all of the damage from the crisis fleets.
This is now the #1 thing I will rush for in any game, knowing that nothing can resist its power. Don't do this In pvp though, they'll use destroyer blobs to counter this tactic if they've seen it
You're forgetting one crucial thing. By the time battleships are viable to mass produce, you can generally just pump out enough alloys to go 3/3 on armour/shields without denting your economy
One thing i would like to point out regarding Armor is the Regen factor i run 4 Armor 2 Shield 2 Regen(A) with Titan with regen field and admiral with Regen too your armor and hull are both regenerating even during combat, it provide the fleet with alot of sustain combat and back to back fighting capability.
What always worked well for me was putting one design with void beam (when I get to have it) in my fleet to strip away shields really fast. I am reasonably happy with results.
I'd say, if you talk about anti-crisis options, maybe also include Fallen/Awakened Empires. After all, these also vary among each other, but every type of FE has its own pre-determined set of weapons and defenses they use, they do feature repeatables, AEs and WiH are considerable late-game threats that can hit earlier than a crisis but hit pretty hard and sometimes it might also be useful to kill one for the tech options, as you get DM Reflectors and Reactors out of it.
If you're going to be doing crisis designs, and if you're up for it, i would love to see the best designs for beating each leviathan, and when is the earliest you cant beat them (ship type/ship amount/tech(weapon tiers)/first possible year). Cheers for everything you've so far! Its been a joy to watch, only criticism try not having blunt cuts at the end (no outro)
8:00 So what this means is since you have one ship with an increased engagement range it will start fighting with enemy fleets that are further away and of course bring the rest of its fleet with it. For a second I thought you meant each individual ship in the fleet would get the engagement range bonus. So really good for pursuing since you'll have fewer enemy fleets leaving the system just as yours is closing in. But don't Titans do that too since the perdition beam has a range of...basically an entire system? Edit: just remembered I run my titans with the carrier computer to keep them way the fuck away from everything cause they take forever to build. Also I only play single-player for the record.
I usually build battleships with nothing but the Focused Arc Emitter. Slowest speed, no shields. all crystal platings. One of these flying arc emitters only costs about 500 alloys, and I can mass produce them endlessly. I call them T34
Considering repeatables, why wouldnt you focus entirely on energy weapons tech-wise? It seems so wasteful to try and grind both when you could be using the engineering to pump armor values and strike craft. Actually crunching the numbers would be difficult, but from a overall empire tech perspective, just maxing energy weapons is far more effective.
Because giga cannons are so powerful out of the box that most of the time you have no time or need to get the repeatables and make the tachyon lances more powerful.
1. If you are going up against balanced ships (About equal shields and armor, and not low enough hull to make Arc Emitters viable): Giga Cannons plus Neutron Launchers are a better combo than Tachyon Lance plus Kinetic Artilleries. 2. Paradox was at least so clever to put energy weapons and the shields that counter them (well, not counting the bypass weapons) and the kinetic weapons and the armor that counter them in the same tech trees respevtively. Meaning that while you have an easier time boosting energy than kinetic weapons, so do you and others have an easier time boosting shields than armor. 3. Most players tend to put way more shields than armor on their ships, if they even put armor on them, because armor costs more resources than shields (and excess power doesn't really do much) So unless maybe you specifically set yourself a hard Prethoryn Scourge as goal (For which Tachyon Lance + Neutron Launchers and Armor should be the best choice) I see no reason to ignore kinetic repeatables.
the cost of getting to gigas is a bit smaller than it looks, as you'll just incidentally get quite a bit of kinetic tech just from ai empire / pirate debris. tech costs scale up quickly, too, so teching all the way up to gigas doesn't cost many repeatables anyway.
You mention several times things that work before repeatables. It would be nice to see a guide on what to do when repeatables kick in, and when to change.
It’s an interesting and useful guide for new players. From an fanatic imperialist point of view though there is only one class of ship that one requires in the end - the colossus. They can’t build a war fleet if they don’t exist. *small print disclaimer* Warning the colossus does not work against against war fleets and is unable to even touch a station. *even smaller small print disclaimer* Warning does not work against a crisis.
I usually have a 4 to 1 ratio. So for every 4 gun battleships I have 1 carrier battleship. I actually often equip a Tachyon lance to my carriers as combined with the gigacannons of the more numerous gun battleships they can take out all but the most fortified starbases without even slowing down or taking any fire which allows them to essentially rampage through the enemy territory without taking any attrittion.
In terms of using Giga Cannons to strip shields, that's cool and all...but I much prefer to tech rush the shit out of energy weapon damage. Against players, sure, their shields effectiveness will likely increase faster than the damage of your weapons, so especially against multiple players you will need to be smart, but against the AI and their incredibly slow research, I managed to get my Tachyon Lances to the point where they would 1-shot a Battleship with shields. Very fitting for an empire a decided to call The Reapers while using the Necroid ship set.
I will say I like supplementing this fleet with missile cruisers, Missile cruisers with devastator torpedoes, scale pretty well into the late game. Especially because of the alpha strike potential. Being able to do instant hull damage can be nice. it’s not as effective against other players, but against the AI who almost never run point defense it’s pretty all right.
I still say cloud lightning is amazing against corvettes, and with repeatables, amazing against anything under a battleship. If only it had better range...
I think that better variant for weapons would - Focused Arc Emitter and Cloud Lighting - they just ignore all armor. If you occupy an enemie's station, it will save it's armor and shield.
Wild, I make these exact two ships everytime I play. That’s very affirming to see other people do it too. I wasn’t sure if it was actually as effective as I assumed, or if it was just the sheer number of them. I typically run late game fleets of only battleships, with one titan to each fleet. And then I keep a juggernaut nearby for healing hull damage. I’ll leave the juggernaut behind to bombard planets with high defense. Also I usually play with mods which add extra weapons in, which is always fun.
You are terrible, I have lots of work to do and you get me wanting to play more Stellaris! Very helpful stuff, I might even get brave enough to play multi-player!!
I have a terrible strategy in game but it looks cool. I have a simple strategy, corvettes 25% with PD, 75% autocannons, everything else is swarm missles and strike crafts. Missle with destract enemy PD and the missles and strike craft ignores shields destroying armor. If I start to lose or they get too close, I disengage out and my second fleet waiting in the system behind me warps in and engages.
Unbidden - full penetration Prethoryn - either full anti-armor (Neutrons + Tachyon Lance) or air superiority through strike craft That being said, Corvettes are excellent against the crisis because they are easy to replace and war exhaustion isn't a thing.
Hej, fantastic series and testing/results presentation! Could you do a small video on the perspective of ship effectivness when taking in consideration fleet capacity or build time? In my games, most of the times, by the time I unlock battleships I don't have any economy/resources issues, so my main considerations are fleet capacity, mainly command points in fleets and time to build...!
I'd definitely be interested to know more about building for the crises and for fallen empires. As is in my current games I tend to lean on energy weapons to free up my engineering research and mix armor with my shielding to reduce energy upkeep cause I pour out alloys.
This might be a bit much hit defense platform and jugfernaught and maybe menacing ship designs. Also testing some of the oddball weapons and defenses you only get form wierd events or space creatures.
Another easy way to fix the 0% base tracking problem is adding 1 Titan with +10 tracking aura to the fleet :) Or, also if you are lucky enough to get Enigmatic Decoder it is super good.
I'm curious as to how the design would change with say, x number of science points spent in each field. Like.... if I only had 1 million physics and 1 million engineering research, what would the best result be? Considering that physics will always give you speed, damage and shields since you can basically run it dry of other techs, how would that balance out against engineering and it's more random tech results since you can't really fully empty the list the same way. Would be a massive effort to find out for sure, but it'd be interesting to see. Fantastic vid as always!
I think the battles need some work. Like a way to give commands during a fight, extend the duration, maybe some events like bording or reactor failures? The neutron launcher is also to strong, there have to be a counter to this like a special kind of flak or a uncertain field or intercepting armor. Also armor should be much more resistent to regular fire like lasers and canons but more expensive, while shields better for defense against physics based weapons.
@@BlackSabbath628 Even if you assume that the neutron launcher just shoots a bulk of pure neutrons at you - it still has mass and can can be redirected.
So I actually think Armor is actually fantastic in the mid game, the ship becomes more alloy intensive but they have distinct advantages over shields; most kinetic weapons become significantly weaker vs armor, plasma/lasers do significant armor damage but im not advocating dropping shields, strike fighters (ie most starbase bastion's weapons), Null Beams (actually very powerful on corvette/destroyer fleets, but relies on RNG to get). Generally I believe the best practice though with armor is to have a design with crystal plating, and one with armor instead; Retrofitting your fleet and doing the +25% Armor HP boost edict can offer a huge boon during a war as it is far quicker and more tactically flexible to upgrade a fleet than it is to build one from scratch and you're not running into fleet cap issues.
In my opinion all long range weaponry must have some drawbacks, for example, even more energy and rare resources cost, forcing you to make them glass cannons and significantly increase pressure on your economy, that would bring some balance, also reapetables should be spread out differently so combining different types of ship would make sence, it's boring to always go for artillery meta
As someone who likes to play (and sometimes win) against x25-difficulty-crisis with mods that allow all three crisis to appear at once, I still prefer by far the arc weapons that ignore defenses. Don't get me wrong, those builds are creative, but still. Maybe against other players it makes more sense, in battles against absurd numbers of ships instead of toughter targets, I don't know.
This video is lean and informative. Wonderful presentation. Compressed and concise, just excellent. I'd have liked some further explanation about the weird/sneaky computer trick (where you set one battleship to carrier and yet the whole feet benefits from both artillery and carrier combat AI); is it a bug?
I go for afterburners for most situations because usually I try to not engage in risky combat in the first place, and stomping down weaker empires requires speed.
You know.. for repeatables.. I focus almost soly on energy weapons. Mainly because u have 9 ish engineering repeatables an only five. So I'm garenteed to see all my energy tech upgrades over my engineering allowing for faster research
I am still partial to carriers with arc emitters and disruptors. A titan escort with a carrier computer gives an engagement range of 500, so your fighters hit at the same time as the arcs open up. The titan WILL die every fight so uh....make spares.
Montu, thank you for these videos. I have been running the same fleet load outs since 2.2 and was really due an update. I play mainly massive cooperative multiplayer and I have seen my fellow players mostly go with corvette swarms and was wondering if my fleet load out designs were falling behind the times. I mainly like building super strong economies and cannot waste much time worrying about fleets when there is no immediate military threat. Could you perhaps comment here or in a video about a good generalist mix of corvettes, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships in a generalist fleet? I mainly go with a ratio of 8x corvettes, 4x destroyers, 2x cruisers, 1x battleships, and 1 Titan per end game fleet (example: 32 corvettes, 16 destroyers, 8 cruisers, 4 battleships, and 1 Titan). Should I scrap this and just got with all battleships in the end? Thanks!
Well, it's one thing to consider the most effective weapons in theory. However, when actually playing, focusing all the tech on one single type of repeatable is a lot more powerful than splitting weapon type IMHO. Typically before the crisis comes I always get at least 30 stacks of repeatable for both damage and fire rate and at that point the weapon I am focusing on (kinetic, to be precise) just obliterate anything in my way. I also prefer shields because they a) uses physical research, which allows me to focus all my engineering research on weapon research and b) they regenerate and can be boosted by shield capacitor. Now, this means that my fleets are extremely vulnerable in systems that negate shields. However, in all other cases, they are the most effective defense mechanism when factoring in the amount of repeatable that can be done. Enemy anti-shield weaponry simply won't matter.
Does it matter if your artillery battleships get caught at the entry point into a system? Like, a swarm of corvettes or destroyers just waiting for them at the entrance and pouncing on them before they can leverage their advantage of long range?
Yes, which is why you mix in carriers. Also don't forget the difference in fleet strength. Long range is nice, but players will camp hyperlanes to stop you from using it against them.
I prefer going full energy weapons late game so I can dedicate my engineering repeatables in armor and mineral output, while focusing on energy weapon damage.
I tend to play with NSC and I like to go neutron launchers and giga canons but to deal with corvettes I prefer to put in a couple of battleships with the X slot and the rest sections that have nothing other than small and point defense slots. I honestly don't care for strike craft so I almost never use them. Just one or two of those can clear out all but the largest corvette swarms. I also don't play multiplayer so take that with a grain of salt. But sounds like it would work in multiplayer to me.
Me: (watches this video after having given all his battleships heavy armour instead of crystal plating) Welp, back to the upgrading board for me, then...
Ok, so from this logic I have many questions, listed below. I am new to the game and I want to get the space combat down well. atm I play primarily coop but fighting against players will inevitably happen and I want to be prepared. I also come from Supreme Commander and Warcraft 3, which have rock-paper-scissors balance for factions and units and they both have tech tiers as well, similar to ship classes. 1) With this setup, is the implication that other classes are mostly obsolete by the point that you can get all these weapons? I know bigger ships are slower and take longer to travel through systems so wouldn't the BS fleet be slow as hell? 2) The armor has been rebalanced I think and now crystal plating does cost alloys, I haven't tested how much better it is though. Also, wouldn't it be detrimental to have no armor since when the hull starts tanking, the ship's specs start to fall with it and rather quickly? 3) Corvettes/destros seems like a cheap meat shield and would be wasted DPS. Does that still hold? 4) What would the comp be if cracking heavily fortified starbases? 5) Does the carrier BS voidcraft do any damage to bigger ships or are they primarily for defense against small ships? Also, at what point in the game does strike craft become obsolete, if any? My current (newbie) fleets use all four classes with the following roles: - Torpedo Corvette as an anti-ship ship - Picket corvette as anti-missile/torp, not too many (1:10 ratio with torps) - Destro as primary picket ship to close the distance, max evasion - Artillery cruisers until BS is available, primary focus on anti-shield weapons so the smaller ships can deal dps - Carrier Cruisers until BS is available, always strike craft and flak but I can swap over to PD - Missile cruisers for more torp/missile cancer, not a high number but I keep them even in lategame - Artillery BS for obvious reasons but I read that FAE is the meta though that post may be outdated. Either way, I understand the logic that you show here and I already follow most of it - Carrier BS for fighting smaller ships that get close, both the bow and the center sections have hangar bays. I do not use a lot of them and I set the computer to carrier on all
I use exclusively Missiles, Fighters, Disruptors, and Arc Emitters. I always scout the map to try and find the Hell's Maw or whatever for the Cloud Lightning. It's interesting that missiles never hit your best designs. If it's meta to never build armor and to fill up on shields, then my ships always hit only the Hull itself.
Could you do a video of carrier bs vs artillery bs. I heard people say carrier is better and others artillery’s better. A video of the two fighting in a mid size battle to compare would be nice
I don't understand why armor raises upkeep so high, especially energy upkeep. My intuition says that magic energy shields should be the one more expensive to maintain
Yes I'd love a crisis guide that would be perfect to top off the series. Maybe also a defense platform guide ?
Crisis? Nip them in the bud as soon as they spawn. Doesn't matter if you have to declare war on half the galaxy just to get to them.
If Dimensional Thingies: Refit fleets for anti-shield. If Discount Store Tyrannids: Refit fleets for anti-armor and anti-hull. If contingency: Downgrade all fleets to non-AI combat computers.
If by the time the Crisis spawns you don't have control of at least 1/4th of the galaxy (either through conquest or a Federation of which you are an absolute leader) you're playing Stellaris wrong.
Edit: Don't worry about having to declare war on other empires just to get to the Crisis. Get the Crisis weapons, refit your fleets with those and wipe the rest of the galaxy with them .
Edit II: Set war strategy to "Hit and Run" to minimize losses in case you get caught with you pants down.
@@DeltaPi314 As soon as they spawn? If you can delete Endgame Crisis as soon as they spawn you're playing Stellaris wrong. ;)
Good luck nipping their starting 5-8 million strength fleets (x25) as they spawn (in 2300). :)
100%
@@DeltaPi314 Just be strong enough to ignore the crisis and let the rest of the Galaxy be eaten up by whatever crisis spawned.
This post was made by the inward perfectionist gang.
@@DeltaPi314 "If by the time the Crisis spawns you don't have control of at least 1/4th of the galaxy (either through conquest or a Federation of which you are an absolute leader) you're playing Stellaris wrong."
or you are in a MP match with about 12 players of pretty much equal skill
I find that fighting crisis ships to be similar to fighting the wild mobs, just scaled up.
Pirates/Marauders = Contingency
Void Clouds = Unbidden
Amoebas/Crystals = Prethoryn
But yes, I am interested in seeing your designs.
Never even considered swapping just one carrier to have the longer engagement range, great tip! Love the videos.
did I understand it right that switching the computer on one ship would give its bonus to the whole fleet? O.O didn't expect that
@@clefsan I may be wrong but I think the idea is that the greater engagement range on a single ship simply allows the fleet to trigger combat earlier when pursuing enemy fleets.
huh, scout ships lol
@@zentonil ah, ok. that makes more sense than one non-fleet-aura-ship magically giving an effect from its equipment to the fleet. thanks for the explanation :-)
After hearing Montu talk about how MP games never use armor, I want to run a Tall void dweller empire, inhabiting exclusively pulsar systems. Play defensively, make those shields totally useless. Make it the most horrifying war of attrition you could imagine.
My absolute favorite place to put a chokepoint starbase fortress is in a pulsar systems; and fit it with specially made defensive stations that use all armor and anti armor and hull weapons. Those babies can hold out against fleets that would normally be twice the fleet strength, easy.
That's evil, love it
MP players would probably just refit their weapons for anti-armor after first loses though
Pulsar chokes are incredible whether in SP or MP. Oh man, the second or third time I played I was almost disappointed because the main route into my empire had a Pulsar choke that I fortified (with special defense platforms that had no shields, only armor) and then the Unbidden spawned. They got utterly shredded without even a chance.
@@TempestLM yeah but that first loss is a massive disadvantage which you can capitalize on.
From my POV not using armor is the dumbest, dumbest thing to ever do. I've once had a game where I dealt with the unbidden (aka just shields and hull) I was badly prepared because I failed a lot of stuff early on. BUT. A carrier fleet with a quarter of fleet power of the crisis one demolished it, tho with serious casualties but the power was something a 50k crisis fleet and my ships with a 15k fleet. Strike craft pierce shields and if there's no armor then they deal heavy damage to hull because bonus damage. It's like using a x20 disruptor that also has sniper range. I really wanna play a game of MP and face those shield only people just to demolish them with strike craft
Wow these are hyper optimised monsters. I just obliterated twice the fleetpower in AI fleets with these things witout a loss. Using Starnet AI. Thank you.
I did have the advantage in positioning and they where carriers but still.
I noticed that you missed one thing about arc emmitors in your testing video: they prioritize attacking the most powerful ship first, unlike all other X slot weapons. So against AI empires and especially fallen ones they might be much more effective than the others.
Carriers. I love them
I always use a mix of carrier battleships & carriers (or one of them is a line ship. It's not optimal, but I damn like it)
And yeah. A crisis guide would be useful
have you ever tried playing with the NSC2 and kurogane ship mods? just started a game with those 2 mods a few days ago and got to the Escort Carrier. lots of fun ship design options - Escort Carrier has 2 middle sections and one option for them allows, I think, 5 fighter squads per section - and the kurogane shipset has amazing looking models :-)
@@clefsan I definitely gotta have a look at that!
Thx for the suggestion
this battleship design video was actually the one that i was most confused before watching the video so thankyou it helped me immensely
Thanks so much for your support! It's really uplifting to hear that this video helped! If anything changes with the Stellaris balance, I will also update this video
Hey, man. Would you consider uploading a spreadsheet or something with the suggested designs for each ship size? Something handy we can keep open or print out during our matches, for quick reference. It’d also be nice to have some reference for what designs to build when you’re nowhere near endgame tech, in case we get attacked early and need to muster up a fleet of plasma launcher corvettes or whatever.
Thank you for the great content and dedication!
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for but he did make a basic colour-coded excel spreadsheet on his Ship Design Analysis Guide: ruclips.net/video/cuN7juxTp9c/видео.html
Take a screenshot at 1:30 for a quick reference.
I'd like a crisis ship design. Or maybe designs since there's multiple ones.
I just go full kinetic every game since I always get the unbidden anyways. Then I beat their shields like a drum
@@albertsovenskiy6140 Huh. I always get the Contingency.
Unbidden go full kinetics and shields try to outrange them whenever possible, targeting grid juggernaut helps alot when taking on multiple fleets at once.
Contigency Hull damage Arc emitters cloud lighting full shields.
Praethorn most of thier stuff bypasses shields so full armor and 1 shield slot full energy weapons and lots of picket ships, try to grab scourge missles.
The unlock of the spinal mount battleship really is the Dreadnought of space warafre. From the moment they are launched all other battleships are made obsolete overnight.
Buuuuuuut I do like me some weird "pre-dreadnought" designs like the battleship with the mediums and the single hanger-bay.
The problem is, that when you're going with tech around battleships, you've got X weapons as an option almost immidietly, especially if you're running economy to sustain major tech and fleet buildup. Before that point tho, if you're lucky enough to have battleships, 2L lasers, 4M kinetics 1H strikecraft, 1L laser, OR full L slots with replacing first two with gigacannon the very moment it appears (which means second aproach is better considering time and cost of upgrades)
Love these guides! I'm still gonna be an rp weirdo who puts whatever suits the empire I have in mind into the fleets, but it is always good to know what theoretically is best in slot
What about if you aren’t really concerned about cost effectiveness for armor and you have dragonscale armor tech
Dragonscale armor is a huge toss-up. No guarantee you get the drake and are able to kill it and research in time
@@jacksons9546 I know but I’ve managed to get it in this run
If you have excess resources then it may be better to just build more ships
Dragonscale isn't that great. Remember more ships = more dice = more things will hit.
@@jacksons9546 True, you don't speculate on obtaining dragon scale armor or crystal-forged plating (as opposed to crystal-infused plating), but once you have them, it'd be nice to know if it's something useful. The same goes for sapient vs. precognitive combat computers - if you have both, which one is better in which design?
I try to have a well-rounded fleet: a few carriers, some kinetic weapons battleships, some energy weapons battleships, a few close combat cruisers with plasma cannons and such, point defense destroyers, and then a number of missile / torpedo slinger corvettes.
And as I never play multi-player, I don't care about "cost-effective".
Well rounded fleets are always the best option. You can divide them and create new fleets that suit your purpose at any time.
Mono battleship fleets are all rounders - they're simply the best at everything except for piracy suppression.
@@blahmaster6k Not everything; they are very slow. Late game you'll want to use other ships just to apply pressure while your battleships move in for the kill and remove starbases.
@@blahmaster6k Maybe, but it just doesn't "feel" right to have a fleet consist of nothing but battleships. Capital ships should have escorts. I honestly wish Paradox would change fleet combat to encourage balanced fleet building. In Hearts Of Iron 2 (the last one I played), I recall fleets had a combat malus applied to them if the ratio of capital ships to escorts was skewed too heavily in favor of the former.
I normally keep two fleets of corvettes to work as clean up, and hunting down weaker ships.
I like to spam what I call Venator battleships and Bellona cruisers.
All with hanger bays, it absolutely shreds the crisis. It also shreds other players quite easily, so much so that it sometimes causes some players to lag so much they die.
Though of course I still have an artillery ship, and a sacrificial corvette fleet to soak most of the pain.
Though the difference between our designs is that I play spiritualist, and use the Psi-shields.
Thank you again Montu, as it turns I been using these builds as well. I usually do a mix of artillery battleships with carrier cruisers and slowly replace the cruiser with carrier battleships as they are destroyed. I didn't know of the just have 1 ship with the carrier role trick, very sneaky and useful
My standard endgame BS fleet doctrine is the classic broken setup of the "T-34":
use Spinal, carrier, and whatever's left for the hull segments, and mount 1x focused arc emitter as well as 1 neutron launcher/1 scout squadron if you have the extra alloys for them. Fill the ship with the best crystal platings you can find, which will cost about 9 crystals in total. Put the best accuracy and tracking accessories on the ship, as well as a warp drive. Put the best you can find for all of the other slots, but use the arty computer instead of the others, and use the cheapest reactor possible. For the thrusters, if you want your ships to go faster, use T3 thrusters, but the best thrusters are actually the T1 ones (the ones you begin with) in battle as you need your battleships to approach the opposing fleet as slow as possible to abuse the extra range from the arc emitters. In total, a BS with this setup costs about 600 alloys in total, allowing you to spam BSs as quickly as possible, and since x slot weapons do about 90% of the damage in battle, this setup is actually much more efficient than your normal BS setup in PVE, as at the same cost this setup contains a lot more x slots than its counterpart. To further boost performance, use a juggernaut with the range aura to further increase the range for the BSs, and do the synthetic ascension to get the range buffs from being a synth and using the synth combat computers.
In combat, I have successfully beaten a 7M fleet with my 2M blob with this setup, with zero losses. This is seriously broken. Since arc emitters ignore shields and armor this setup is basically insanely good against everything except corvette swarms, which Is why I suggest the scout squads and the neutron launchers.
In 3.4 the health regen Is Also insanely broken, making star crackers the most OP ships in stellaris. about 20 of them can completely crush any crisis at 25x simply because they can regen all of the damage from the crisis fleets.
This is now the #1 thing I will rush for in any game, knowing that nothing can resist its power.
Don't do this In pvp though, they'll use destroyer blobs to counter this tactic if they've seen it
You're forgetting one crucial thing. By the time battleships are viable to mass produce, you can generally just pump out enough alloys to go 3/3 on armour/shields without denting your economy
if you're not denting your economy, you're not producing battleships as fast as you can
@@MontuPlays my early game can be called 'economic freefall'
Yes, please. Do a video talking about fleet designs agains crisis.
Also, a video about defense platforms would be great.
One thing i would like to point out regarding Armor is the Regen factor
i run 4 Armor 2 Shield 2 Regen(A) with Titan with regen field and admiral with Regen too
your armor and hull are both regenerating even during combat, it provide the fleet with alot of sustain combat and back to back fighting capability.
What always worked well for me was putting one design with void beam (when I get to have it) in my fleet to strip away shields really fast. I am reasonably happy with results.
I cant think of a better Intro for this topic. Spot on. Time to purge the xenos.
Yes Yes Yes, love to know more about specific design against crisis
I'd say, if you talk about anti-crisis options, maybe also include Fallen/Awakened Empires. After all, these also vary among each other, but every type of FE has its own pre-determined set of weapons and defenses they use, they do feature repeatables, AEs and WiH are considerable late-game threats that can hit earlier than a crisis but hit pretty hard and sometimes it might also be useful to kill one for the tech options, as you get DM Reflectors and Reactors out of it.
If you're going to be doing crisis designs, and if you're up for it, i would love to see the best designs for beating each leviathan, and when is the earliest you cant beat them (ship type/ship amount/tech(weapon tiers)/first possible year). Cheers for everything you've so far! Its been a joy to watch, only criticism try not having blunt cuts at the end (no outro)
8:00 So what this means is since you have one ship with an increased engagement range it will start fighting with enemy fleets that are further away and of course bring the rest of its fleet with it. For a second I thought you meant each individual ship in the fleet would get the engagement range bonus.
So really good for pursuing since you'll have fewer enemy fleets leaving the system just as yours is closing in.
But don't Titans do that too since the perdition beam has a range of...basically an entire system?
Edit: just remembered I run my titans with the carrier computer to keep them way the fuck away from everything cause they take forever to build.
Also I only play single-player for the record.
the carrier computer also increases the engagement range.
Here in 3.8 😢 Please help a newbie out with an updated guide!
I usually build battleships with nothing but the Focused Arc Emitter. Slowest speed, no shields. all crystal platings.
One of these flying arc emitters only costs about 500 alloys, and I can mass produce them endlessly.
I call them T34
Lol, nice one!
Considering repeatables, why wouldnt you focus entirely on energy weapons tech-wise? It seems so wasteful to try and grind both when you could be using the engineering to pump armor values and strike craft. Actually crunching the numbers would be difficult, but from a overall empire tech perspective, just maxing energy weapons is far more effective.
Because giga cannons are so powerful out of the box that most of the time you have no time or need to get the repeatables and make the tachyon lances more powerful.
1. If you are going up against balanced ships (About equal shields and armor, and not low enough hull to make Arc Emitters viable): Giga Cannons plus Neutron Launchers are a better combo than Tachyon Lance plus Kinetic Artilleries.
2. Paradox was at least so clever to put energy weapons and the shields that counter them (well, not counting the bypass weapons) and the kinetic weapons and the armor that counter them in the same tech trees respevtively.
Meaning that while you have an easier time boosting energy than kinetic weapons, so do you and others have an easier time boosting shields than armor.
3. Most players tend to put way more shields than armor on their ships, if they even put armor on them, because armor costs more resources than shields (and excess power doesn't really do much)
So unless maybe you specifically set yourself a hard Prethoryn Scourge as goal (For which Tachyon Lance + Neutron Launchers and Armor should be the best choice) I see no reason to ignore kinetic repeatables.
the cost of getting to gigas is a bit smaller than it looks, as you'll just incidentally get quite a bit of kinetic tech just from ai empire / pirate debris. tech costs scale up quickly, too, so teching all the way up to gigas doesn't cost many repeatables anyway.
Uh, what are you going to research in the engineering tab? We're not in Civilazation's, we do both all the time
@@thierrygrise254 Armor and strikecraft. Instead of having kinetic upgrades, you just harden your armor.
Ships against Crysis please!
Crisis Design Sounds nice
You mention several times things that work before repeatables. It would be nice to see a guide on what to do when repeatables kick in, and when to change.
Thanks for all Your guides, rly helpfull for new player (1200 h :D)
It’s an interesting and useful guide for new players.
From an fanatic imperialist point of view though there is only one class of ship that one requires in the end - the colossus. They can’t build a war fleet if they don’t exist.
*small print disclaimer* Warning the colossus does not work against against war fleets and is unable to even touch a station.
*even smaller small print disclaimer* Warning does not work against a crisis.
Heres a video idea!
A clear comparison for all Anti- shield weapons, disruptors and Beam weapons (including null beams)
I usually have a 4 to 1 ratio. So for every 4 gun battleships I have 1 carrier battleship. I actually often equip a Tachyon lance to my carriers as combined with the gigacannons of the more numerous gun battleships they can take out all but the most fortified starbases without even slowing down or taking any fire which allows them to essentially rampage through the enemy territory without taking any attrittion.
In terms of using Giga Cannons to strip shields, that's cool and all...but I much prefer to tech rush the shit out of energy weapon damage.
Against players, sure, their shields effectiveness will likely increase faster than the damage of your weapons, so especially against multiple players you will need to be smart, but against the AI and their incredibly slow research, I managed to get my Tachyon Lances to the point where they would 1-shot a Battleship with shields. Very fitting for an empire a decided to call The Reapers while using the Necroid ship set.
Would like a crisis guide, but preferably also include fallen/awakened empires, grey tempest, and the great khan.
Yes montu, pleeeeease make a crisis guide
Ahh, the GigaChad class battleship. My favorite.
GIB anti crisis + tempest video ^^
I will say I like supplementing this fleet with missile cruisers, Missile cruisers with devastator torpedoes, scale pretty well into the late game. Especially because of the alpha strike potential. Being able to do instant hull damage can be nice. it’s not as effective against other players, but against the AI who almost never run point defense it’s pretty all right.
Yeah, I'd love to see the video for crisis ships.
You then have me who maxes out Corvette evasion and sends repeated waves of Corvettes when I get annoyed with losing fleets of battleships
Battleships, when you absolutely, positively gotta purge every xenos in the galaxy. Accept no substitutes.
I still say cloud lightning is amazing against corvettes, and with repeatables, amazing against anything under a battleship. If only it had better range...
Yes! PLEASE make a crisis guide and maybe Starbase layout and research cap
I think that better variant for weapons would - Focused Arc Emitter and Cloud Lighting - they just ignore all armor. If you occupy an enemie's station, it will save it's armor and shield.
I always go for X front, carrier core, and artillery rear.
Then I make a full carrier version as well.
The unbidden are coming for my ass with a 300k fleet, please drop that video, thanks!
Absolutely would enjoy a crisis video, could even do mid-game ships as well!
Wild, I make these exact two ships everytime I play. That’s very affirming to see other people do it too. I wasn’t sure if it was actually as effective as I assumed, or if it was just the sheer number of them.
I typically run late game fleets of only battleships, with one titan to each fleet. And then I keep a juggernaut nearby for healing hull damage. I’ll leave the juggernaut behind to bombard planets with high defense.
Also I usually play with mods which add extra weapons in, which is always fun.
You are terrible, I have lots of work to do and you get me wanting to play more Stellaris! Very helpful stuff, I might even get brave enough to play multi-player!!
Which color are you using for your ships in these guides? They look great! Thanks for the guide btw it really helps out a lot.
I have a terrible strategy in game but it looks cool. I have a simple strategy, corvettes 25% with PD, 75% autocannons, everything else is swarm missles and strike crafts. Missle with destract enemy PD and the missles and strike craft ignores shields destroying armor. If I start to lose or they get too close, I disengage out and my second fleet waiting in the system behind me warps in and engages.
Unbidden - full penetration
Prethoryn - either full anti-armor (Neutrons + Tachyon Lance) or air superiority through strike craft
That being said, Corvettes are excellent against the crisis because they are easy to replace and war exhaustion isn't a thing.
Hej, fantastic series and testing/results presentation! Could you do a small video on the perspective of ship effectivness when taking in consideration fleet capacity or build time? In my games, most of the times, by the time I unlock battleships I don't have any economy/resources issues, so my main considerations are fleet capacity, mainly command points in fleets and time to build...!
I really hate not putting armor on my ships.
It feels like they are going to battle naked
What is the point of even building a battleship without armor?
I could as well spam destroyers with artillery.
The REAL ship design meta: get all ARMY upkeep perks and use cheapo armies to facetank for your battlefleets. With Flagellating Movement +5% evasion.
I'd definitely be interested to know more about building for the crises and for fallen empires.
As is in my current games I tend to lean on energy weapons to free up my engineering research and mix armor with my shielding to reduce energy upkeep cause I pour out alloys.
Can you do a titan and juggernaut guide next?
This might be a bit much hit defense platform and jugfernaught and maybe menacing ship designs. Also testing some of the oddball weapons and defenses you only get form wierd events or space creatures.
Another easy way to fix the 0% base tracking problem is adding 1 Titan with +10 tracking aura to the fleet :)
Or, also if you are lucky enough to get Enigmatic Decoder it is super good.
I'd be down for the ship designs for crisis situations.
I'd say focused arc emitters and cloud lightning is great cus it completely ignores shield and armor
Yes, the final design you’ll ever need until the blokkats arrive in your galaxy. Hello systemcraft my beloved-
Wait is that a quasarcraft?
I'm curious as to how the design would change with say, x number of science points spent in each field. Like.... if I only had 1 million physics and 1 million engineering research, what would the best result be? Considering that physics will always give you speed, damage and shields since you can basically run it dry of other techs, how would that balance out against engineering and it's more random tech results since you can't really fully empty the list the same way. Would be a massive effort to find out for sure, but it'd be interesting to see. Fantastic vid as always!
I think the battles need some work.
Like a way to give commands during a fight, extend the duration, maybe some events like bording or reactor failures?
The neutron launcher is also to strong, there have to be a counter to this like a special kind of flak or a uncertain field or intercepting armor.
Also armor should be much more resistent to regular fire like lasers and canons but more expensive, while shields better for defense against physics based weapons.
Yeah, neutron launchers are weird. They are clearly projectiles, but they are classified as energy weapons? Shouldn't they be classified as torpedoes?
@@BlackSabbath628 Even if you assume that the neutron launcher just shoots a bulk of pure neutrons at you - it still has mass and can can be redirected.
So I actually think Armor is actually fantastic in the mid game, the ship becomes more alloy intensive but they have distinct advantages over shields; most kinetic weapons become significantly weaker vs armor, plasma/lasers do significant armor damage but im not advocating dropping shields, strike fighters (ie most starbase bastion's weapons), Null Beams (actually very powerful on corvette/destroyer fleets, but relies on RNG to get). Generally I believe the best practice though with armor is to have a design with crystal plating, and one with armor instead; Retrofitting your fleet and doing the +25% Armor HP boost edict can offer a huge boon during a war as it is far quicker and more tactically flexible to upgrade a fleet than it is to build one from scratch and you're not running into fleet cap issues.
Can you make one talking about countering fallen/awakened empires
Me, who in my game has destroyers and corvettes: ooh
Battleship
In my opinion all long range weaponry must have some drawbacks, for example, even more energy and rare resources cost, forcing you to make them glass cannons and significantly increase pressure on your economy, that would bring some balance, also reapetables should be spread out differently so combining different types of ship would make sence, it's boring to always go for artillery meta
As someone who likes to play (and sometimes win) against x25-difficulty-crisis with mods that allow all three crisis to appear at once, I still prefer by far the arc weapons that ignore defenses. Don't get me wrong, those builds are creative, but still. Maybe against other players it makes more sense, in battles against absurd numbers of ships instead of toughter targets, I don't know.
This video is lean and informative. Wonderful presentation. Compressed and concise, just excellent. I'd have liked some further explanation about the weird/sneaky computer trick (where you set one battleship to carrier and yet the whole feet benefits from both artillery and carrier combat AI); is it a bug?
Well done.
seems like if these ships flew into a system with shield nullification that they’d be paper tigers
Needs an update!
I go for afterburners for most situations because usually I try to not engage in risky combat in the first place, and stomping down weaker empires requires speed.
You know.. for repeatables.. I focus almost soly on energy weapons.
Mainly because u have 9 ish engineering repeatables an only five. So I'm garenteed to see all my energy tech upgrades over my engineering allowing for faster research
The way I play cost is no object. I prefer an economic victory over anything else, so I like the end game designs too
I am still partial to carriers with arc emitters and disruptors. A titan escort with a carrier computer gives an engagement range of 500, so your fighters hit at the same time as the arcs open up. The titan WILL die every fight so uh....make spares.
Yes plz a special anti-crisis ship design plz
Montu, thank you for these videos. I have been running the same fleet load outs since 2.2 and was really due an update. I play mainly massive cooperative multiplayer and I have seen my fellow players mostly go with corvette swarms and was wondering if my fleet load out designs were falling behind the times.
I mainly like building super strong economies and cannot waste much time worrying about fleets when there is no immediate military threat. Could you perhaps comment here or in a video about a good generalist mix of corvettes, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships in a generalist fleet? I mainly go with a ratio of 8x corvettes, 4x destroyers, 2x cruisers, 1x battleships, and 1 Titan per end game fleet (example: 32 corvettes, 16 destroyers, 8 cruisers, 4 battleships, and 1 Titan). Should I scrap this and just got with all battleships in the end? Thanks!
Well, it's one thing to consider the most effective weapons in theory. However, when actually playing, focusing all the tech on one single type of repeatable is a lot more powerful than splitting weapon type IMHO. Typically before the crisis comes I always get at least 30 stacks of repeatable for both damage and fire rate and at that point the weapon I am focusing on (kinetic, to be precise) just obliterate anything in my way. I also prefer shields because they a) uses physical research, which allows me to focus all my engineering research on weapon research and b) they regenerate and can be boosted by shield capacitor. Now, this means that my fleets are extremely vulnerable in systems that negate shields. However, in all other cases, they are the most effective defense mechanism when factoring in the amount of repeatable that can be done. Enemy anti-shield weaponry simply won't matter.
Does it matter if your artillery battleships get caught at the entry point into a system? Like, a swarm of corvettes or destroyers just waiting for them at the entrance and pouncing on them before they can leverage their advantage of long range?
Yes, which is why you mix in carriers.
Also don't forget the difference in fleet strength.
Long range is nice, but players will camp hyperlanes to stop you from using it against them.
i just build laser spinals cause it looks pretty when they go into combat lol
I prefer going full energy weapons late game so I can dedicate my engineering repeatables in armor and mineral output, while focusing on energy weapon damage.
Yes on the crisis please!!!
I tend to play with NSC and I like to go neutron launchers and giga canons but to deal with corvettes I prefer to put in a couple of battleships with the X slot and the rest sections that have nothing other than small and point defense slots. I honestly don't care for strike craft so I almost never use them. Just one or two of those can clear out all but the largest corvette swarms. I also don't play multiplayer so take that with a grain of salt. But sounds like it would work in multiplayer to me.
Me: (watches this video after having given all his battleships heavy armour instead of crystal plating)
Welp, back to the upgrading board for me, then...
Ok, so from this logic I have many questions, listed below. I am new to the game and I want to get the space combat down well. atm I play primarily coop but fighting against players will inevitably happen and I want to be prepared. I also come from Supreme Commander and Warcraft 3, which have rock-paper-scissors balance for factions and units and they both have tech tiers as well, similar to ship classes.
1) With this setup, is the implication that other classes are mostly obsolete by the point that you can get all these weapons? I know bigger ships are slower and take longer to travel through systems so wouldn't the BS fleet be slow as hell?
2) The armor has been rebalanced I think and now crystal plating does cost alloys, I haven't tested how much better it is though. Also, wouldn't it be detrimental to have no armor since when the hull starts tanking, the ship's specs start to fall with it and rather quickly?
3) Corvettes/destros seems like a cheap meat shield and would be wasted DPS. Does that still hold?
4) What would the comp be if cracking heavily fortified starbases?
5) Does the carrier BS voidcraft do any damage to bigger ships or are they primarily for defense against small ships? Also, at what point in the game does strike craft become obsolete, if any?
My current (newbie) fleets use all four classes with the following roles:
- Torpedo Corvette as an anti-ship ship
- Picket corvette as anti-missile/torp, not too many (1:10 ratio with torps)
- Destro as primary picket ship to close the distance, max evasion
- Artillery cruisers until BS is available, primary focus on anti-shield weapons so the smaller ships can deal dps
- Carrier Cruisers until BS is available, always strike craft and flak but I can swap over to PD
- Missile cruisers for more torp/missile cancer, not a high number but I keep them even in lategame
- Artillery BS for obvious reasons but I read that FAE is the meta though that post may be outdated. Either way, I understand the logic that you show here and I already follow most of it
- Carrier BS for fighting smaller ships that get close, both the bow and the center sections have hangar bays. I do not use a lot of them and I set the computer to carrier on all
I think with NSC2 Mod, Dreadnoughts, Titans and the Flagship have something to say about that.
I'm always going for X-lighting and L-Lightning.
Yes, we'd like a crisis ship design.
Crisis and FE designs yes please!
I use exclusively Missiles, Fighters, Disruptors, and Arc Emitters. I always scout the map to try and find the Hell's Maw or whatever for the Cloud Lightning.
It's interesting that missiles never hit your best designs. If it's meta to never build armor and to fill up on shields, then my ships always hit only the Hull itself.
Could you do a video of carrier bs vs artillery bs. I heard people say carrier is better and others artillery’s better. A video of the two fighting in a mid size battle to compare would be nice
Tachyon + Kinetic Artillery are better in actual combat since the Tachyon focus fire ships with low shield
I don't understand why armor raises upkeep so high, especially energy upkeep. My intuition says that magic energy shields should be the one more expensive to maintain
Make one for the endgame crises!! and please include war in heaven some people leave that one out xD