Now hear me out, I must defend the Orbital Trash Disposal. It should be ranked higher just because the satisfaction one gets knowing you are transforming their planet into a global San Francisco.
If you become the crisis and stay at tier four all of your ships from cruisers down except the frigate cost only a static amount of minerals that never changes no matter what you put on your ships. This reduces special resource cost for your fleets to a stupid amount thus allowing you to field really whatever you want without killing the bank.
@@trevonhood297 Good question you don't move onto the next tier till you A have the menace built up & finish the special research for that tier so you simply never finish the research thus you stay at tier 4 forever.
It's worth noting that a Colosus can refit itself, so you can design it with a generally useful aura, and then refit it in a few weeks during a war - you don't have to "guess" that a niche aura would be useful when you build it.
Cruiser available yes/no? If no spam vettes. If yes: spam cruisers. Are BS available Y/N? No? Look up Cruisers. If yes spam BS. Are you cosmogenesising? If yes go escort battlecruiser and laugh at the spaceborne peasantry
26:14 I think this can be great on Titans or Jaugernauts! You don't build many of them, and can get 100% shield hardening while leaving A slots for other things.
Honestly I don't think they are too good for juggernauts, because the maximum amount of shields it can have are still kind of low compared to hitpoints, so hardening of any kind never seemed to useful on it for me
It's important to note that Artillery combat computers cause issues with X slot weapons. The ship will turn around and no longer shoot at hostiles, which can lead to a very frustrating battle.
@@rob3at896 Artillery is still the best choice because it greatly helps the alpha strike and line has the problem of letting close range ships catch up with them. You just need to be careful with not going 100% into the traditional X slot + all L slot battleship. And ideally support with either some cruisers to deal with smaller ships or carrier battleships - anything smaller still is not worth it in singleplayer except for corvette screen fleets in very niche situations like high level Contingency.
41:40 Secret callout! I really appreciate these videos. Even with 2k hours in the game it can be difficult to analyze some of the games mechanics and how they interact with one another. Thanks for putting in the work and providing such great info.
38:20 I very definitely listened to the whole video. Yep, I agree with the stuff that was said earlier in the video and know all about it. When you said that thing about the stuff in B tier it was very insightful. I did leave a like as well
Small points for ancient suspension fields and other good archaeo-tech modules: they're excellent for juggernauts. You can get 100% shield and armor hardening on it with that build which makes them a pain to kill. And since you can only build 1* the minor artifact cost is not a problem really. *GDF and federations can also have juggernauts, but that's still only a maximum of 3 so the point still stands
i think the best use of cloaking in combat is to get past empires your not at war with who may be in the way of an empire you are at war with.. (for me this usually happens if my enemy was cut in half by another empire and only part of their territory is reachable from my territory. jumpdrives dont always reach across the territory so i grab a few cloaked fleets to strike the seperated systems)
Something I discovered is that defense platforms can be badass, but you need several types: design four-arm one with energy weapons, one with missiles, one with kinetics, and another with point defense. You'll build them in groups of four, and you'll be covered against different threats. Pirates hate that.
The reactor boosters are a godsend in the early game if my reactor tech is behind my weaponry tech and I have a strong alloy economy. Or maybe I'm just OCD and don't want frankenships with older tech components to save on power generation. Also, here's a scenario where orbital bombardment damage increases might be worthwhile - if you create a series of small fleets with orbital bombardment specialization, you could speed up the rate at which you exterminate all pops of multiple worlds at once if you wanted to turn them into fresh tomb worlds.
I prefer shields over armor for several reasons. 1) Shields are cheaper with Alloy cost as the Strategic resources are peanuts. So can field more ships at less cost. 2) The hardening items help negate some of the shield penetrating weapons damage. With 3 of them you can get 75% shield hardening and if you get Leader with the +20% hardening trait(forget name) you'll effectively have 95% hardening. 3) Repeatables is the key. In Physics you have only 4 repeatable which are 2 for energy weapons, 1 energy production, and 1 for shield HP. I don't tend to use energy weapons and my economy doesn't need better technician energy production. The result is repeatable shield continuously once I get to the endgame. My ships after all the modifiers often have more HP in shields than any AI empire in their combined Hull/Armor/Shield HP. Even rival some of the 25x Crisis fleets in HP. Where as armor is Engineering which has to split it's time on repeatables with Kinetic and Explosive weapons depending on which I'm going for. Also can often run into Mineral shortages so might do a few repeatables on miner production depending on how my economy is going. Meanwhile Fighters repeatable is in the Social tech line which also doesn't have much else competing for it's attention which I why my ships tend to be heavily shielded carriers. I still use some slots for armor as there is power limitations but overall because of the repeatable even on ships that have half armor and half shields slots the total amount of shield HP on the ship is often larger and only grows more so as the game progresses with repeatable to the point in one game I had well over double the shields HP on a ship that was half and half in terms of modules.
Thanks again! Love your vids :) You're not only teaching me (e.g.) which defenses are best, but you're also teaching me how to think about the game in a more holistic sense, which I appreciate.
Shield Generators are actually good on Juggernauts, because they have a big base amount of shielding (10000 or something iirc). And they have so much power, that you can get quite a bit of mileage out of +10% Shielding. (With 100% Shield Hardening from Largen Ancient Suspension Fields it is basically unkillable.)
The real hidden powerhouse on Juggernauts is regenerative hull. Base hull is something like 100k. Add in something like 30k armor from all T5 armor and even the 1/10 regen in combat is huge with 4 of the modules.
The best defensive system setup I've gotten was an early game worm in a checkpoint system. Combine that with a citadel armed to the teeth along with all of the black holes in the system, and it becomes a death trap that enemy fleets cannot escape from. And that's even assuming they dare to attack you, unless the system is also in a conventiently placed nebula.
I have found that crisis fleets b line for nearby military fleets. So if you cloak you can easily avoid unwanted conflict when trying to snipe crisis stations or unbidden anchors.
I couldn't thank you enough for videos like this! I've been playing since the very first versions but took some time off, so this is helpful. Especially about how shields and armor has changed, I remember it being the complete opposite lol
My only major comment is that Armor Hardening isn't really S-tier, because there's so little that penetrates armor that you don't really need it. A single advanced module will protect you from Disruptors well enough, and you can use an auxiliary module slot to get around the lack of regeneration. Similarly, Shield Hardeners should be a tier A, simply because there are more weapons systems that ignore shields. Armor is effective against missiles and fighters out of the box, so unless you're fighting the Unbidden, it's just better. For shields to really be worth it, they need a couple of buffs - reduce the power consumption and give a small innate degree of hardening to all shields that increases with tech, but still requires a Shield Hardener or two to really max out. Shield Hardening also needs to reduce Shield Nullification, so Pulsars and Zroni Storm Casters can be countered instead of turning your defenses off like a light switch. As it stands, the only larger hulls - Cruisers and larger - have the slots to make use of shields and the Shield Hardeners they need to actually function, and that still requires some archaeotech so you can use Shield slots for the extra 15% hardening. But if you replace those slots with Armor, an armor regen module, and a single advanced armor hardener, you're probably better off, and with a lot less hassle.
I wonder if giving shields, or armor too, a larger innate hardening that decreases with current HP% could be interesting - could make other hardening sources also descale too, which I think makes penetration weapons have a nicer balance and mix better with other weapons. Would also work pretty well thematically I think.
For titan auras, I generally run three different titan builds with the shield, fire rate, and disengagement modules and then put each in a fleet and have those three fleets fly around as a battle group. Only late game obv but gives me tons of flexibility in each of my battle groups and also makes for a wicked combo on enemy fleets
Anti-Disengagement can help you get better kills (= more war exhaustion inflicted), but takes longer to kill (so you might suffer more losses / economic cost and war exhaustion on losses you do take).
@@sylvie_v2 generally by the point in the game where I can run three titans per battle group, I don’t suffer any losses and my economy can replace anything I do happen to lose. I’ll admit I don’t play very high difficulty but mostly cause I’d die early game. Point being that the anti disengagement just makes the war over faster for me by making sure more of them die and the extra burden on my side is negligible
Regeneration is always good. Especially since it heals armor and hull as well while on the move. This means with just one click you can sum up the battle (replace lost ships) and move on to the next system. And it's even better thr better armor and armor hardening you have. Also with masterful crsfzers you get additional % for every armor produced.
Orbital bombardment has some place, just not something you want on the main attack fleet. To get the most out of it, simply create a small fleet that dedicates itself to 'scouring of worlds,' and have it tag behind the main fleet. No longer do you need to park the main fleet to weaken a world for your armies, they can move on to the next target while your dedicated Orbital Bombardment team mops up.... Of course, obsolete once you get assimilate nanites and all become .... me.
I thought the chances to evade increases the number of rolls the game does to see if you evade, working like advantage in D&D. Combined with evasion buffs, that actually is kinda ridiculous amount of increasing to your evasion, because it effectively forces the enemy to reroll 5 more times against your evasion. It becomes way better the more evasion you have. However I don't know if that's how it actually works.
Nope. Think of it this way. Each 5% evasion lowers the DC needed to evade by one, Each5% tracking is a +1 to their DC. Covettes start at 60% so unmodified an 8 and they're fine. Battleships are base5% so a nat 20 is the only way they can evade and the tracking of sensors often means even that isn't enough.
Not sure if you mentioned it, but shields do have the advantage over armour if you are in a fast-paced war, as the shield will recover in a few days, whereas the armour and hull take a month and the fleet must remain idle at a friendly starbase. I know that recently captured starbases and outposts repair, but that is only after a bit (a month?), but if you need to keep moving, you can end up with ships that are low armour and hull running into fresh fleets. kind wish that you had to go to a friendly starbase to repair fleets, rather than outposts, or that shipyards increased the speed of repair. it would force the players to have to consider their wars a little more
CORRECTION: i just looked it up, regenative hull tissue does regen armour and hull by 5% and 10% per day, not .5 hull per day. Nanite does 15% and 20% per day as well
Has anyone ever tested how boosts from things like the trash module interact with reductions from things like the Unyielding tree? It might possibly have some niche use bombarding planets with the max 98% bombardment reduction.
I think the problem with the mark of the whisperer is that by the point you have it, you ate already able to get 90% evasion corvettes without using any A slot at all, so it's pretty much useless, especially compared to normal afterburners who at least add speed
I would put Munitions plant in C because you can swap to it when you need to, also bonus orbital damage actually increases the cap of the amount of orbital damage does, not get quicker to the max amount Say 100 naval cap deals 1% each day With +30% it will deal instead 1.3% The cap is 3.3333 from just having 100 naval cap, so with this 30% bonus you deal a whole 3.33*1.3=4.333
Me splitting my defensive slots evenly between shields, armor and hull so while they aren't as good against any one weapon type they have no particular weaknesses that can be exploited either:
It´s really a Science in itself and almost a Core Mechanic it seems. I just got into it myself after 100 Hours of the Game and Holy... The Difference is like Day and Night, starting from early Game with putting Afterburners on your Ship which Autodesign doesnt do. 40% Speed for your Ships for 20 something Alloys and not just in Combat but also traveling on the Map.
25:20 Funny thing that, I don't know if they changed it in 3.9, but in 3.8 I had thought it worked the way you described it here too - that archeotech ascension increased it by 60%. I don't know where in the line of communication of the devs or the fans the error occurred here, but it's not a 60% increase. The tooltip in the timestamp says +750 and then +450 from the perk. This is in fact not 1200 as if you added it up, but is a total of +750, since the +450 was already added to it. Without the ascension perk it's +300 or so, and if you play around and add/remove the armor ingame, you can confirm this via total shield value changes. The wiki page says 60% increase probably because the author thought the 450 was the 60% increase on top of the base value of 750. Since we can obviously tell without complicated math that a +450 increase from 300 shield value is not a "60%" increase. So it's not "the same power requirement as a hyper shield for nearly the same shield" , it's "the same power requirement as a hyper shield for around 60% the value".
I did a little experiment with cloaking last night. +7 overall. infiltrated a fallen empire, parked four fleets of mixed disintegrator and torpedo corvettes right underneath their fleet and starbase. declared war and decloaked. popped em all with minimal losses. so. declaring a war with a cloaked fleet in their territory does not make your fleet mia. thoughts?
Thank you Montu for this List.. i usually dont ever change the combat computers of my ships for everything smaller than cruiser :D gotta have to think about that... now it would be really cool if you could combine this video and the weapons tier list and show some blueprints of ship designs...
Does Picket tracking help with shooting down fighters and missiles? If so having a few set up to take those down before they get to your arty ships might be an idea. If they cannot hurt you you will win.
Secret Callout! Thanks for the updates. The games as a service makes your videos essentiell. Other older strategy games that i used to play one playthrough every year- like Pax Imperia or Civilization series- you could use the strategy from previous runs and know they worked. With Stellaris that's not the case. Every patch turn some mechanic upside down. I like both approaches but its a bit negative when you dont touch the game for 1-2 years. Also a question that has been on my mind the last days. Has the best version of Stellaris already been? (Overall balance and fun)
I find the only time i seriously use line combat computers is when i use a full neutron build to melt the scourge. I feel like the line ship should have been slightly higher but it is understandable that it isnt that strong.
@montu re "Chance to hit" - if the formula I saw is correct, I think you're mistaken about it's lack of usefulness. The formula I saw was: `total chance = (accuracy - (evasion - tracking)) + chance to hit` (with some clamping added to avoid any intermediate result go outside 0-100). in other words, it's still helpful even if you have 100% accuracy, as it can make up for lack of tracking. e.g. 100% accuracy + 10% tracking + 10 chance to hit vs 50 evasion would yield a total chance of 70% vs. 60% without the +10 chance to hit.
Auto is fine until mid game unless you really rush weapons tech. It will sometimes do stupid things (unnecessary modules), but until you have the ability to use more weapons, it’ll be okay.
Dark consortium agenda gives you a random dark matter tech research option. The council position gives you oodles of dark matter. This means you can be using dark matter tech LONG before you could ever defeat a fallen empire. I find the civic useful for the whole game. Early game you sell it to boost your economy. Later you can sell it in stacks of 500 to get the energy to Terraform planets. You can run the physics research agenda for most of the game and later you get advanced dark matter tech options. I had dark matter shields before I had lvl 2 regular shields 😂
Yep, watched this all the way through. I love making ships loaded with whirlwind missiles and fighters, running long-range computers with tons of afterburners. The AI has a hard time doing anything about that at times! :)
It gets even stronger if you use the nsc mod because you get to choose a behavioral combat computer that controls how it moves without overriding the stat bonuses from the other combat computer. So you can force your fleet of missilevettes to circle the enemy at 100 range. It's awesome and so busted. The ai can barely figure out what to do
For how the game runs (unless you play pvp for some reason), I feel like these tier lists would work better in a spectrum instead of a flat rating. Like early game evasion modules may be better than late game ones or other similar modules.
I think it's important to note that only a few weapons actually have armor penetration, notably strike craft and some missiles. Therefore I'd personally rank the reactive armor lower, as it's an auxiliary slot with a pretty good but niche use.
As a brand new player, I am proud of myself for disregarding the Crystal Infused Plates in my most recent game. They just didn’t really give me the protection I wanted and I had alloys to spare on Armor
They're for corvette since you can't increase the hull. The idea was for the time if you are hit by anything it will kill the corvette. Shield only work in the practice of regeneration. And weapons who deal higher damage to armor do not gain this advantage to hull. If they make weapons super accurate the shield will not regenerate, the hull will not regenerate. You didn't have any armor since you had hull to protect against and then it would slowly regenerate.
What do you feel about pairing pulse armor with MINOR shield hardening? Such as putting up one suspension field or putting up a single Hardener? If your percentage of armor + hit points is roughly inverse to the shield strength that would be the appropriate amount to maximize efficiency with minimal input. But that is getting into deep theory crafting and putting much more thought into it than a simple review would be and would legitimately be a short video on it's own to discuss that effectively I imagine.
You forgot to mention that the black matter weapons, engines, reactors and shields could also be obtained through the black matter breakthrough agenda.
Made it to the callout, maybe a tweaking of things is in order again. Would be interesting to see different bonuses or negatives on different things. Maybe armor reduces speed or evasion, hull has no such problems and energy requirements adjusted so that ship design is more thoughtful. Possibly include a “one of a kind” slot style so that multiple afterburners isnt the only thing to do early. I feel if things had real impacts (energy wepoms costing less alloys but sign more energy, fighters increasing time to jump away, just lots of small tweaks around the edges to freshen up the Armor is stonks meta we now have. 2 cents
I love to play around with cloaking, to fly your 2nd fleet around a other fleet and drop out cloak and hit em in the back is just the best, just have to not decloak a mega swarm of corvettes (800+) at the same time on top a other mega cluster of ships, as it always crash my PC :)
min 41 still here, wow so much has changed in Stellaris its astonishing like you take a break for half a year or a year you come back and its a whole different game! But still one of paradox's best games to date.
Could you do a play-through so we can see how you build up your colonies and build your ships? The videos are very informative but I don't see any recent playthroughs.
Well yes, but it's important to note briefly for those that might not know, that the advanced combat computer is always just straight up worse than either the sapient or precog.
@@MontuPlays So maybe be more consistent about each component in this way?)) Besides i don't think ranking battle computers has any practical sense.Maybe swarm and torpedo only - as they could be effectively used for same type of ships. Others components relevant nearly only for specific types of ships or ship section builds. Generally early game battle computers "worse" than late only because they in middle and late game haven't nearly any practical use due to domination of large ships. But at the same time late types of battle computers are useless(rather don't exist) in early game because all you have is Corvettes, Destroyers and maybe early Cruisers.
A few notes : Where is my boy picket combat computer !!!!!!!!! !! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! !! ! ! !! Dark matter shields *can* be better than psionic shields because they have a better hp/power ratio, and for example I can outfit corvettes (or destroyers I forgot) fully with dark matter shields but not psionic shields, reducing the overall amount of shields (you get 1 extra slot of armour though, but in my case I was fighting the unbidden and I needed maximum shields) Also on juggernauts what I like doing is putting 7 of the ancient yellow shields (to get 100% hardening) and fill the rest of the ship with shields and shield capacitors. Sometimes I do the same for Titans, but it depends Suggestion for next video : best defense platform builds
Now hear me out, I must defend the Orbital Trash Disposal. It should be ranked higher just because the satisfaction one gets knowing you are transforming their planet into a global San Francisco.
Thanks Admiral Pelosi!
I build a couple bombardment fleets with it, and use them to trash worlds while other fleets abduct pops
SS tier
100 corvettes or 13 battleships is the max orbital bombardment damage so a cheap fleet of corvettes is great for bombardment actually.
No your talking about the poop cannon.
If you become the crisis and stay at tier four all of your ships from cruisers down except the frigate cost only a static amount of minerals that never changes no matter what you put on your ships. This reduces special resource cost for your fleets to a stupid amount thus allowing you to field really whatever you want without killing the bank.
How do you stay at tier 4? In my experience someone somewhere is going to pick a fight
@@trevonhood297do not under complete the special project
@@trevonhood297 just dont research the special project for 5, you dont have to advance a crisis level if you dont want to
@@trevonhood297 Good question you don't move onto the next tier till you A have the menace built up & finish the special research for that tier so you simply never finish the research thus you stay at tier 4 forever.
Don’t become the crisis! Become peace. Liberal Xenophile is a must, and a decentralized Galactic Senate as well!❤️🥰😍🥺❤️
Maybe the best defense is the xenos we purged along the way
Nobody will shoot you if nobody dares too get anywhere near your forces
Kinda the thought of the target acquisition array. What's dead cannot shoot you, so that counts as defense :-)
No Xenos can destroy us WHEN WE GET THEM FIRST
That comment made me laugh, perhaps harder than it should have, thank you.
It's worth noting that a Colosus can refit itself, so you can design it with a generally useful aura, and then refit it in a few weeks during a war - you don't have to "guess" that a niche aura would be useful when you build it.
41:40 secret callout! I've been watching your content for a year and you've made me enjoy stellaris so much more with your helpful videos!
Great to hear from you! I hope you enjoyed this video as well
Oh and found it helpful!
please do a fleet composition video please. These vids you make are most excellent, now you must teach us more.
Absolutely!
What I do when I unlock all ships is put the three last ones and the titans.
Cruiser available yes/no? If no spam vettes.
If yes: spam cruisers.
Are BS available Y/N? No? Look up Cruisers.
If yes spam BS.
Are you cosmogenesising? If yes go escort battlecruiser and laugh at the spaceborne peasantry
This made me really think about my ship builds. Watched all the way through
26:14 I think this can be great on Titans or Jaugernauts! You don't build many of them, and can get 100% shield hardening while leaving A slots for other things.
Honestly I don't think they are too good for juggernauts, because the maximum amount of shields it can have are still kind of low compared to hitpoints, so hardening of any kind never seemed to useful on it for me
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023you also get daily shield recovery though
Well shields will have decent regen. Would have to somehow math it out if the regen would be worth it or not.@@hanneswiggenhorn2023
It's important to note that Artillery combat computers cause issues with X slot weapons. The ship will turn around and no longer shoot at hostiles, which can lead to a very frustrating battle.
I have not noticed this in my battles. My Artillery Battleships shoot just fine.
Firing arc on most L slot .. The enemy ship is kiting you. Try some M slot missiles or L lasers, carriers, or a mixed fleet
So if you do want to use L and X slot artillery weapons, would you still run artillery computers or something else like line computers?
@@sylvie_v2 Kinetic artillery doesn't have a firing arc and is way better than L lasers or plasma.
@@rob3at896 Artillery is still the best choice because it greatly helps the alpha strike and line has the problem of letting close range ships catch up with them. You just need to be careful with not going 100% into the traditional X slot + all L slot battleship. And ideally support with either some cruisers to deal with smaller ships or carrier battleships - anything smaller still is not worth it in singleplayer except for corvette screen fleets in very niche situations like high level Contingency.
Admiral Montu, the galactic imperium will take your advice too hart
41:40 Secret callout! I really appreciate these videos. Even with 2k hours in the game it can be difficult to analyze some of the games mechanics and how they interact with one another. Thanks for putting in the work and providing such great info.
38:20 I very definitely listened to the whole video. Yep, I agree with the stuff that was said earlier in the video and know all about it. When you said that thing about the stuff in B tier it was very insightful.
I did leave a like as well
The best defence is a good offence, the enemy fleet can't harm your fleet if its dead
Small points for ancient suspension fields and other good archaeo-tech modules: they're excellent for juggernauts. You can get 100% shield and armor hardening on it with that build which makes them a pain to kill. And since you can only build 1* the minor artifact cost is not a problem really.
*GDF and federations can also have juggernauts, but that's still only a maximum of 3 so the point still stands
Danke für deine Videos. Du sprichst einen für mich leicht verständlichen Dialekt so dass ich die volle Länge überstehen kann. Liebe!
i think the best use of cloaking in combat is to get past empires your not at war with who may be in the way of an empire you are at war with.. (for me this usually happens if my enemy was cut in half by another empire and only part of their territory is reachable from my territory. jumpdrives dont always reach across the territory so i grab a few cloaked fleets to strike the seperated systems)
For defense fleets of cheap torpedo boats waiting in ambush at a station, were the fleet jumps in.
Something I discovered is that defense platforms can be badass, but you need several types: design four-arm one with energy weapons, one with missiles, one with kinetics, and another with point defense. You'll build them in groups of four, and you'll be covered against different threats. Pirates hate that.
Fantastic! I have been waiting for this. Trying to figure out what was better - various plating, hardeners, capacitors etc was driving me nuts.
Shield Caps are nice against Crises that optimise shield-only fleets.
The reactor boosters are a godsend in the early game if my reactor tech is behind my weaponry tech and I have a strong alloy economy. Or maybe I'm just OCD and don't want frankenships with older tech components to save on power generation.
Also, here's a scenario where orbital bombardment damage increases might be worthwhile - if you create a series of small fleets with orbital bombardment specialization, you could speed up the rate at which you exterminate all pops of multiple worlds at once if you wanted to turn them into fresh tomb worlds.
I prefer shields over armor for several reasons.
1) Shields are cheaper with Alloy cost as the Strategic resources are peanuts. So can field more ships at less cost.
2) The hardening items help negate some of the shield penetrating weapons damage. With 3 of them you can get 75% shield hardening and if you get Leader with the +20% hardening trait(forget name) you'll effectively have 95% hardening.
3) Repeatables is the key. In Physics you have only 4 repeatable which are 2 for energy weapons, 1 energy production, and 1 for shield HP. I don't tend to use energy weapons and my economy doesn't need better technician energy production. The result is repeatable shield continuously once I get to the endgame. My ships after all the modifiers often have more HP in shields than any AI empire in their combined Hull/Armor/Shield HP. Even rival some of the 25x Crisis fleets in HP.
Where as armor is Engineering which has to split it's time on repeatables with Kinetic and Explosive weapons depending on which I'm going for. Also can often run into Mineral shortages so might do a few repeatables on miner production depending on how my economy is going. Meanwhile Fighters repeatable is in the Social tech line which also doesn't have much else competing for it's attention which I why my ships tend to be heavily shielded carriers.
I still use some slots for armor as there is power limitations but overall because of the repeatable even on ships that have half armor and half shields slots the total amount of shield HP on the ship is often larger and only grows more so as the game progresses with repeatable to the point in one game I had well over double the shields HP on a ship that was half and half in terms of modules.
Shields also have less upkeep cost than armor. And they don’t take months to repair, which is forever in a war.
Watched the whole thing. You broke down all the changes in an efficient manner. Thanks for all your hard work!
Thanks again! Love your vids :) You're not only teaching me (e.g.) which defenses are best, but you're also teaching me how to think about the game in a more holistic sense, which I appreciate.
Shield Generators are actually good on Juggernauts, because they have a big base amount of shielding (10000 or something iirc). And they have so much power, that you can get quite a bit of mileage out of +10% Shielding. (With 100% Shield Hardening from Largen Ancient Suspension Fields it is basically unkillable.)
The real hidden powerhouse on Juggernauts is regenerative hull. Base hull is something like 100k. Add in something like 30k armor from all T5 armor and even the 1/10 regen in combat is huge with 4 of the modules.
@@robguy8501 Yeah, that is also pretty strong, true true!
"if you go on long range mission and won't be able to repair"
So most wars and crisis battles XD
The best defensive system setup I've gotten was an early game worm in a checkpoint system. Combine that with a citadel armed to the teeth along with all of the black holes in the system, and it becomes a death trap that enemy fleets cannot escape from. And that's even assuming they dare to attack you, unless the system is also in a conventiently placed nebula.
Thanks for this video! I had been struggling to get my defensive set up right, and this really helps!
I have found that crisis fleets b line for nearby military fleets. So if you cloak you can easily avoid unwanted conflict when trying to snipe crisis stations or unbidden anchors.
As a new player I really appreciate your videos. Bravo!
Welcome aboard!
Thank you for the in-depth breakdown on each component. Very helpful
Thank you for this List. Your arguments are fair and understandable.
Onemkre tier list watched. I would have never played this game without you, thanks !
I couldn't thank you enough for videos like this! I've been playing since the very first versions but took some time off, so this is helpful. Especially about how shields and armor has changed, I remember it being the complete opposite lol
My only major comment is that Armor Hardening isn't really S-tier, because there's so little that penetrates armor that you don't really need it. A single advanced module will protect you from Disruptors well enough, and you can use an auxiliary module slot to get around the lack of regeneration. Similarly, Shield Hardeners should be a tier A, simply because there are more weapons systems that ignore shields. Armor is effective against missiles and fighters out of the box, so unless you're fighting the Unbidden, it's just better.
For shields to really be worth it, they need a couple of buffs - reduce the power consumption and give a small innate degree of hardening to all shields that increases with tech, but still requires a Shield Hardener or two to really max out. Shield Hardening also needs to reduce Shield Nullification, so Pulsars and Zroni Storm Casters can be countered instead of turning your defenses off like a light switch.
As it stands, the only larger hulls - Cruisers and larger - have the slots to make use of shields and the Shield Hardeners they need to actually function, and that still requires some archaeotech so you can use Shield slots for the extra 15% hardening. But if you replace those slots with Armor, an armor regen module, and a single advanced armor hardener, you're probably better off, and with a lot less hassle.
I wonder if giving shields, or armor too, a larger innate hardening that decreases with current HP% could be interesting - could make other hardening sources also descale too, which I think makes penetration weapons have a nicer balance and mix better with other weapons. Would also work pretty well thematically I think.
Oh I'm watching all right. its intesting to see how this has shifted so much from the past.
For titan auras, I generally run three different titan builds with the shield, fire rate, and disengagement modules and then put each in a fleet and have those three fleets fly around as a battle group. Only late game obv but gives me tons of flexibility in each of my battle groups and also makes for a wicked combo on enemy fleets
Anti-Disengagement can help you get better kills (= more war exhaustion inflicted), but takes longer to kill (so you might suffer more losses / economic cost and war exhaustion on losses you do take).
@@sylvie_v2 generally by the point in the game where I can run three titans per battle group, I don’t suffer any losses and my economy can replace anything I do happen to lose. I’ll admit I don’t play very high difficulty but mostly cause I’d die early game.
Point being that the anti disengagement just makes the war over faster for me by making sure more of them die and the extra burden on my side is negligible
I like using this strategy as well.
41:40 secret callout, been watching you for a long time Montu :) First comment I think though.
Secret callout unlocked. Thanks for this list Montu, that really helps! ^^
I am a absolute addict to the regeneration armour. Secret shout out if you know you know
Regeneration is always good.
Especially since it heals armor and hull as well while on the move.
This means with just one click you can sum up the battle (replace lost ships) and move on to the next system.
And it's even better thr better armor and armor hardening you have.
Also with masterful crsfzers you get additional % for every armor produced.
Auxiliary Fire Control being that high is WILD.
Orbital bombardment has some place, just not something you want on the main attack fleet. To get the most out of it, simply create a small fleet that dedicates itself to 'scouring of worlds,' and have it tag behind the main fleet. No longer do you need to park the main fleet to weaken a world for your armies, they can move on to the next target while your dedicated Orbital Bombardment team mops up....
Of course, obsolete once you get assimilate nanites and all become .... me.
I thought the chances to evade increases the number of rolls the game does to see if you evade, working like advantage in D&D. Combined with evasion buffs, that actually is kinda ridiculous amount of increasing to your evasion, because it effectively forces the enemy to reroll 5 more times against your evasion. It becomes way better the more evasion you have.
However I don't know if that's how it actually works.
Nope. Think of it this way. Each 5% evasion lowers the DC needed to evade by one, Each5% tracking is a +1 to their DC. Covettes start at 60% so unmodified an 8 and they're fine. Battleships are base5% so a nat 20 is the only way they can evade and the tracking of sensors often means even that isn't enough.
Not sure if you mentioned it, but shields do have the advantage over armour if you are in a fast-paced war, as the shield will recover in a few days, whereas the armour and hull take a month and the fleet must remain idle at a friendly starbase. I know that recently captured starbases and outposts repair, but that is only after a bit (a month?), but if you need to keep moving, you can end up with ships that are low armour and hull running into fresh fleets.
kind wish that you had to go to a friendly starbase to repair fleets, rather than outposts, or that shipyards increased the speed of repair. it would force the players to have to consider their wars a little more
You can still use regenerative hull or a admiral with mechanic.
Also living metal or even nanite repair systems.
@molybdaen11 it is still so slow though. It's like .5 armour per day, rather than the percentage that shields get
CORRECTION: i just looked it up, regenative hull tissue does regen armour and hull by 5% and 10% per day, not .5 hull per day.
Nanite does 15% and 20% per day as well
@@Volcarion The 0.5 is during the battles because it's only worth 1/10th.
I watched the whole thing, got dinner ready and watched. Hoping to see what your fleets look like since that old video from a couple years ago.
Has anyone ever tested how boosts from things like the trash module interact with reductions from things like the Unyielding tree? It might possibly have some niche use bombarding planets with the max 98% bombardment reduction.
I think the problem with the mark of the whisperer is that by the point you have it, you ate already able to get 90% evasion corvettes without using any A slot at all, so it's pretty much useless, especially compared to normal afterburners who at least add speed
Made it to the secret callout! Thanks for your hard work Montu
26:33 For shield hardening you don't need that much, as long as most of the shields are gone before the hull breaks it does not matter.
Thank you for these vids, please keep investing the time in making them
I would put Munitions plant in C because you can swap to it when you need to, also bonus orbital damage actually increases the cap of the amount of orbital damage does, not get quicker to the max amount
Say 100 naval cap deals 1% each day
With +30% it will deal instead 1.3%
The cap is 3.3333 from just having 100 naval cap, so with this 30% bonus you deal a whole 3.33*1.3=4.333
Interesting data, had a few points I had missed. Well played.
i love these videos! one thing i would like to see is a ranking for early/mid/late game
Me splitting my defensive slots evenly between shields, armor and hull so while they aren't as good against any one weapon type they have no particular weaknesses that can be exploited either:
I just auto upgrade all my ships, had no idea people had metas for this
It´s really a Science in itself and almost a Core Mechanic it seems. I just got into it myself after 100 Hours of the Game and Holy...
The Difference is like Day and Night, starting from early Game with putting Afterburners on your Ship which Autodesign doesnt do.
40% Speed for your Ships for 20 something Alloys and not just in Combat but also traveling on the Map.
Missiles. And torpedoes. Negates most AI fleets.
25:20
Funny thing that, I don't know if they changed it in 3.9, but in 3.8 I had thought it worked the way you described it here too - that archeotech ascension increased it by 60%. I don't know where in the line of communication of the devs or the fans the error occurred here, but it's not a 60% increase.
The tooltip in the timestamp says +750 and then +450 from the perk. This is in fact not 1200 as if you added it up, but is a total of +750, since the +450 was already added to it. Without the ascension perk it's +300 or so, and if you play around and add/remove the armor ingame, you can confirm this via total shield value changes.
The wiki page says 60% increase probably because the author thought the 450 was the 60% increase on top of the base value of 750. Since we can obviously tell without complicated math that a +450 increase from 300 shield value is not a "60%" increase.
So it's not "the same power requirement as a hyper shield for nearly the same shield" , it's "the same power requirement as a hyper shield for around 60% the value".
I did a little experiment with cloaking last night. +7 overall. infiltrated a fallen empire, parked four fleets of mixed disintegrator and torpedo corvettes right underneath their fleet and starbase. declared war and decloaked. popped em all with minimal losses.
so. declaring a war with a cloaked fleet in their territory does not make your fleet mia. thoughts?
Whenever I try to sneak into a fallen empire they discover my ships Instantly.
Thank you Montu for this List.. i usually dont ever change the combat computers of my ships for everything smaller than cruiser :D gotta have to think about that...
now it would be really cool if you could combine this video and the weapons tier list and show some blueprints of ship designs...
Can we have the 3.14 version of this + the Mutations for Space Fauna please? 🥺
Does Picket tracking help with shooting down fighters and missiles? If so having a few set up to take those down before they get to your arty ships might be an idea. If they cannot hurt you you will win.
Secret Callout! Thanks for the updates. The games as a service makes your videos essentiell. Other older strategy games that i used to play one playthrough every year- like Pax Imperia or Civilization series- you could use the strategy from previous runs and know they worked. With Stellaris that's not the case. Every patch turn some mechanic upside down.
I like both approaches but its a bit negative when you dont touch the game for 1-2 years. Also a question that has been on my mind the last days. Has the best version of Stellaris already been? (Overall balance and fun)
I find the only time i seriously use line combat computers is when i use a full neutron build to melt the scourge. I feel like the line ship should have been slightly higher but it is understandable that it isnt that strong.
Thank you so much, you literally taught me how to play this game!
41 minutes in. You are awesome. Great information!
The problem with regular armor is that many weapons like plasma, lasers and missiles deal additional damage or ignore it outright.
Following the shoutout...
I always forget that 'chance to hit' and 'accuracy' are the same thing. Ty for reminding me...
Thats so stupid tbh. All these patches and updates and they're not able to change a text file for the wording being coherent.
you should do a video on design from menacing ships.
also, gonna ask, but a video on NSC2 (or 3 when it releases) could be cool.
I love the subspace snare. Really should be s tier because it lets yoh wipe an entire fleet out or nearly completely before they can jump
Yeah those bastards love to run and lose basically no ships when I have them completely outgunned
@@cirkleobserver3217 ever since the combat ai rework I've only ever used the snare exactly for that reason
@montu re "Chance to hit" - if the formula I saw is correct, I think you're mistaken about it's lack of usefulness. The formula I saw was: `total chance = (accuracy - (evasion - tracking)) + chance to hit` (with some clamping added to avoid any intermediate result go outside 0-100). in other words, it's still helpful even if you have 100% accuracy, as it can make up for lack of tracking. e.g. 100% accuracy + 10% tracking + 10 chance to hit vs 50 evasion would yield a total chance of 70% vs. 60% without the +10 chance to hit.
I wonder how well the auto ship builder is
Don't do that... for the love of any deity you hold dear!
@@MontuPlays hm, missile fleets it is then!
Good old missiles, nothing can beat that!
@@MontuPlaysmmm, i love the autobuilder missile + tier 1 mass driver and shield + self regenerating hull corvettes.
Auto is fine until mid game unless you really rush weapons tech. It will sometimes do stupid things (unnecessary modules), but until you have the ability to use more weapons, it’ll be okay.
@@gunster1759picket defense will ruin you. Lost many fleet to pickets
Somehow this lizard makes me press the like button
Dark consortium agenda gives you a random dark matter tech research option. The council position gives you oodles of dark matter. This means you can be using dark matter tech LONG before you could ever defeat a fallen empire. I find the civic useful for the whole game. Early game you sell it to boost your economy. Later you can sell it in stacks of 500 to get the energy to Terraform planets. You can run the physics research agenda for most of the game and later you get advanced dark matter tech options. I had dark matter shields before I had lvl 2 regular shields 😂
Thank you Montuwu 😘
Yep, watched this all the way through. I love making ships loaded with whirlwind missiles and fighters, running long-range computers with tons of afterburners. The AI has a hard time doing anything about that at times! :)
It gets even stronger if you use the nsc mod because you get to choose a behavioral combat computer that controls how it moves without overriding the stat bonuses from the other combat computer. So you can force your fleet of missilevettes to circle the enemy at 100 range. It's awesome and so busted. The ai can barely figure out what to do
The final form of space combat - torpedo spam.
Hey Montu, any chance we will get an updated meta fleet guide any time soon?
For how the game runs (unless you play pvp for some reason), I feel like these tier lists would work better in a spectrum instead of a flat rating. Like early game evasion modules may be better than late game ones or other similar modules.
He does say if it’s useful in early game so I don’t think he should overcomplicate it but I get where you’re coming from
Watched till the call out :)
I think it's important to note that only a few weapons actually have armor penetration, notably strike craft and some missiles. Therefore I'd personally rank the reactive armor lower, as it's an auxiliary slot with a pretty good but niche use.
As a brand new player, I am proud of myself for disregarding the Crystal Infused Plates in my most recent game.
They just didn’t really give me the protection I wanted and I had alloys to spare on Armor
They're for corvette since you can't increase the hull. The idea was for the time if you are hit by anything it will kill the corvette. Shield only work in the practice of regeneration. And weapons who deal higher damage to armor do not gain this advantage to hull.
If they make weapons super accurate the shield will not regenerate, the hull will not regenerate. You didn't have any armor since you had hull to protect against and then it would slowly regenerate.
Watched it all and love your channel. Any plans to add in Console Addition guides?
I really wish there were these types of videos for stellaris console edition
Thank you Montu
I did not realise the crisis strength bonuses were ignored in terms of reductions.
If there's always a secret call out, there's never a secret call out. I might have just posted this as a guess...
What do you feel about pairing pulse armor with MINOR shield hardening? Such as putting up one suspension field or putting up a single Hardener? If your percentage of armor + hit points is roughly inverse to the shield strength that would be the appropriate amount to maximize efficiency with minimal input. But that is getting into deep theory crafting and putting much more thought into it than a simple review would be and would legitimately be a short video on it's own to discuss that effectively I imagine.
That's why you purge the xenos for 100% assured defence.
You forgot to mention that the black matter weapons, engines, reactors and shields could also be obtained through the black matter breakthrough agenda.
Made it to the callout, maybe a tweaking of things is in order again. Would be interesting to see different bonuses or negatives on different things. Maybe armor reduces speed or evasion, hull has no such problems and energy requirements adjusted so that ship design is more thoughtful. Possibly include a “one of a kind” slot style so that multiple afterburners isnt the only thing to do early. I feel if things had real impacts (energy wepoms costing less alloys but sign more energy, fighters increasing time to jump away, just lots of small tweaks around the edges to freshen up the Armor is stonks meta we now have. 2 cents
Secret callout, love these tier lists
I love to play around with cloaking, to fly your 2nd fleet around a other fleet and drop out cloak and hit em in the back is just the best, just have to not decloak a mega swarm of corvettes (800+) at the same time on top a other mega cluster of ships, as it always crash my PC :)
Wish you could remake the video after the changes to ship defenses, Some of the lower tiers have things that are actually really good now!
The perfect way to start my weekend shift at work
min 41 still here, wow so much has changed in Stellaris its astonishing like you take a break for half a year or a year you come back and its a whole different game! But still one of paradox's best games to date.
Could you do a play-through so we can see how you build up your colonies and build your ships? The videos are very informative but I don't see any recent playthroughs.
7:40 Сomparing Advanced computer to Sapient or Precognitive is literally like comparing T3 reactor with T4-T5 reactors
Well yes, but it's important to note briefly for those that might not know, that the advanced combat computer is always just straight up worse than either the sapient or precog.
@@MontuPlays So maybe be more consistent about each component in this way?))
Besides i don't think ranking battle computers has any practical sense.Maybe swarm and torpedo only - as they could be effectively used for same type of ships.
Others components relevant nearly only for specific types of ships or ship section builds.
Generally early game battle computers "worse" than late only because they in middle and late game haven't nearly any practical use due to domination of large ships.
But at the same time late types of battle computers are useless(rather don't exist) in early game because all you have is Corvettes, Destroyers and maybe early Cruisers.
Those who shoot first, often shoot last.
Watch all the way the thru. I have learned why my crystal fit started to suck.
The Domains of Kor'Lan and Tyme Sh'arre thank you for this for this intel.
+1 for the office reference "turn tables"
If you're playing a high crisis run it's more beneficial to stay in advanced combat computer until The Contingency is defeated.
I find picket useful for my destroyers to screen for my line, the stats are just a bonus.
A few notes :
Where is my boy picket combat computer !!!!!!!!! !! ! ! ! ! !! ! ! !! ! ! !!
Dark matter shields *can* be better than psionic shields because they have a better hp/power ratio, and for example I can outfit corvettes (or destroyers I forgot) fully with dark matter shields but not psionic shields, reducing the overall amount of shields (you get 1 extra slot of armour though, but in my case I was fighting the unbidden and I needed maximum shields)
Also on juggernauts what I like doing is putting 7 of the ancient yellow shields (to get 100% hardening) and fill the rest of the ship with shields and shield capacitors. Sometimes I do the same for Titans, but it depends
Suggestion for next video : best defense platform builds