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Poil posted:Is there a point in putting armor and shields on battleships? They hang at the back and everything that specifically targets them one shots them anyway and if they get under fire from nearby ships you're screwed regardless. They're real expensive to replace, so I'd prefer for them to live long enough to jump out of a bad situation.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:48
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Poil posted:Is there a point in putting armor and shields on battleships? They hang at the back and everything that specifically targets them one shots them anyway and if they get under fire from nearby ships you're screwed regardless. Once you unlock the tech, you can cap armor on a battleship with enough slots left over to put on a couple of shields for shits and giggles. The real 'strategy' with battleships is that they need to be in a fleet composed only of battleships. If its a mixed fleet they'll all eventually blob up in melee, but if its pure battleships they'll stay at a distance. So you'll basically want a battleship fleet in back and a separate cruiser fleet to engage and tie up the enemy in a brawl.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:08
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Jenny Angel posted:Anyone got some good names for a theocratic oligarchy? I'm going to be playing my first game of this starting tomorrow in a multiplayer game with a friend who's much more experienced and who's gonna show me the mechanical ropes, but I'm still looking for a bit of inspiration on the flavor of my guys. I know I'm using the adorable snapping turtle portrait and calling them the Terapyne, and I know they're Egalitarian/Xenophile/Spiritual with a dominant faith that they believe mandates them to spread kindness and prosperity and paradise throughout the galaxy My non dickhead religious empire is generally called the Reach of Light with their backstory being that they think their star is a portal to the afterlife, which sets them up nicely for either peaceful religious expansion or crazy crusading. They work well if you make their ship prefix something that describes a ship and then pick the name pack that just names everything <proper noun> the <adjective> cos it sounds like they're all named after mythical figures. Also gives you an excuse to go with some fun thematic ship class names too.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:22
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Whoops sorry yall
Jastiger fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Jun 12, 2017 |
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Jun 12, 2017 21:23
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Mondian posted:Once you unlock the tech, you can cap armor on a battleship with enough slots left over to put on a couple of shields for shits and giggles. The real 'strategy' with battleships is that they need to be in a fleet composed only of battleships. If its a mixed fleet they'll all eventually blob up in melee, but if its pure battleships they'll stay at a distance. So you'll basically want a battleship fleet in back and a separate cruiser fleet to engage and tie up the enemy in a brawl. This. Always stagger your engagements in Stellaris, don't just doomstack and then wonder why all of your poo poo dies when the fleet gets jumped. Incidentally, this method is also how you ensure that any XL slots you use actually do something, since people still don't seem to get that the things actually have a defined firing arc (and a charge time in the case of energy-based ones) so the closer your Battleships are to the fight, the less likely it is they'll actually manage to fire that Tach lance off, leading to those same players calling them useless garbage because they don't understand the firing mechanics.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:26
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Poil posted:Is there a point in putting armor and shields on battleships? They hang at the back and everything that specifically targets them one shots them anyway and if they get under fire from nearby ships you're screwed regardless. Put them in front and have your other poo poo follow them in. Easily done by simply splitting the fleets into two with all battleships in one and mixed garbage in the other on follow. Battleships are far and away the biggest chunks of EHP you can get and having them get shot at with 90%+ armor is preferable to getting your other stuff blown away while they creep into range.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:27
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Grand Fromage posted:The Unbidden, the Only Crisis, appeared right next to my homeworld but apparently I accidentally had already made an Unbidden-killer navy because they seem completely inept against artillery ships. It's going better than I expected, I took out all their roaming fleets and now am just staring at that half million power one in the home system. I actually think Sector are very good for the amount of micro they reduce but some people 
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Jun 12, 2017 22:59
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The only fleet decision that matters is naming your first carrier-class 'Galactica'
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Jun 12, 2017 23:00
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Is there a way to actually set engagement tactics beyond just "all battleships are artillery, everything else is point-blank range"? There's a load of real expensive technologies like torpedos and stuff in there that seem mostly fuckin' useless when every battle is just all your ships kamikaze charging the whatever it is at top speed Not in the base game, but there is a mod that lets you give ships custom AI behaviour by giving them different combat computer modules: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=790455347
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Jun 12, 2017 23:08
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That used to be in the base game. Any idea why they removed it for Utopia?
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Jun 13, 2017 00:00
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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misguided rage posted:That used to be in the base game. Any idea why they removed it for Utopia? There has never been any variation in base game. It's always been as it is now.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:04
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To be fair being able to hit someone from farther away than they can is a cornerstone of warfare.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:05
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Palleon posted:There has never been any variation in base game. It's always been as it is now.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:07
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misguided rage posted:You used to be able to put any combat computer on any ship, ie. bombardment or rushing in or whatever. Did those just not do anything? They gave different stat bonuses but the actual AI governing the ship behaviour didn't change.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:14
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Poil posted:Is there a point in putting armor and shields on battleships? They hang at the back and everything that specifically targets them one shots them anyway and if they get under fire from nearby ships you're screwed regardless. the better question is "is there a point to battleships when destroyers exist" the answer is no 
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Jun 13, 2017 00:31
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And how do you reach such a conclusion? I ask honestly.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:45
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Idk how many times it has to be repeated but all the ships types work if you build them correctly, there's no one particular best. A full fleet of battleships with fire rate buffed arc emitters poo poo all over evasion corvettes which poo poo all over artillery destroyers which wreck whatever else, etc. If you are militarist you should stack fire rate and just use artillery BBs or DDs against most poo poo since you'll do incredible damage before things like plasma or torpedos start firing, swapping to arc emitters against evasion heavy enemies since arc emitters do not miss, ever, regardless of evasion. If you are spiritualist you should build for evasion and stick with cruisers and corvettes because you can get like 90%+ evasion with a good Psyker admiral. You can also mix together a fleet of every type of ship with each doing what they do best and it will work too. Literally any of these are good against the AI in all but very particular cases, and almost always there is an upper limit to what quantity disadvantage you can pull off without losing so much as to stagnate. It's somewhere around 3x-5x your fleet power depending on exact matchup. In the early/mid game just have better tech, numbers, or bait the AI into something dumb or you'll lose. That's pretty much it. Mazz fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 00:49
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Bloodly posted:And how do you reach such a conclusion? I ask honestly. battleships should never be tanking fire, so their extra low slots are mostly useless. since XL weapons aren't great (even if used correctly in separate staggered fleets), destroyers are just more efficient both in minerals and fleet cap space
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Jun 13, 2017 00:55
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But a fleet of battleships with giant fuckoff tachyon lasers lancing poo poo from across the entire system is cool as heck!
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Jun 13, 2017 01:20
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I had Battleships tank other Battleships while my Cruisers did the actual work. Pretty sure Battleships focus other Battleships and Cruisers especially if they have XL weapons.
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Jun 13, 2017 01:50
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The problem here is that to get equivalent fleet strength with your sperg fleet of lesser ships you need to build a bajillion of them and that makes one giant blob that's about a lightyear wide and has all sorts of logistical problems in actually getting all those ships at the ends to engage with the enemy simultaneously, so you need to split it up and that's just even more micro and not everyone has supercomputers that can handle thousands of individual ships so its easier for like 99% of people to just build like 50 battleships and 100 cruisers and call it a day. Even if you're some tryhard competitive (lol in this game) mp player doing mass naked corvettes the real fight will be over way before you've really researched any late game techs anyway. Yes, your post is technically correct, but in this game where it seems lots of players don't even want to bother touching the ship designer I don't know why you'd advocate such a strategy.
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Jun 13, 2017 01:59
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I have a super hard time with ship building and such in this game. I'm just at the point where I have destroyers and corvettes. I think perhaps I'm too early to be worrying about ship designs? Do I want to use medium guns on my destroyers or stick to all small guns? I think I'm too early-game to warrant torpedos but point defense seems like it might be useful against all these dumb missiles I keep getting blasted with. I'm researching flak guns now - they seem good. On the Ascension trait side of things I unlocked the one that gives me +20% borders as I thought that was pretty useful (it was). I'm struggling on what to do with my second point. Ideally I'd use it to unlock Mind Over Matter but I haven't been able to research the required tech yet (I'm fanatic spiritualistic). Should I just spend my point on something like the "5 more planets" thing, or is there a better tier one ascension perk I should unlock? Alternatively, should I just bank the thing until I get to research the prerequisite technology to learn Mind Over Matter?
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Jun 13, 2017 02:12
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In the early game you're only shooting at smaller ships with high evasion rates, you want to stick to mostly Corvettes with small guns. As for Ascension perks, don't take +5 core systems unless you hate yourself enough to think more micromanagement is a good thing. Mastery of Nature or whatever it's called is next level good; if you don't like that just take +10% Research Speed.
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Jun 13, 2017 02:42
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:In the early game you're only shooting at smaller ships with high evasion rates, you want to stick to mostly Corvettes with small guns. Thanks - sounds like I should take Mastery of Nature (my second Ascension perk). When Mind over matter becomes available, take that one, right? Guess I'll have to bust into sectors now. I found a planet with two of those resources that give piles of power.
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Jun 13, 2017 02:54
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Yeah, take the psionic ones as soon as you can.
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Jun 13, 2017 05:50
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, take the psionic ones as soon as you can. Given the importance of the early game and how modest the benefits of Mind Over Matter are, there's an argument to be made for doing the psionics perks at perk 3 and 4 rather than 2 and 4. Take something more immediately beneficial at 2.
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Jun 13, 2017 05:54
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Mastery of Nature saves so much research time and minerals + energy that I always take it as my first choice. It's really nice being able to colonize anything and just not needing to worry about what kind of crap is sitting on the tiles, and how long you need to wait to draw the right cards to clear them.
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Jun 13, 2017 06:21
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Thanks everyone. One more ship building question. When cruisers appear torpedoes become a good idea, right? I'm trying to figure out what exactly in my fleet composition has been letting me take on equivalent power fleets that have cruisers (I still only have destroyers) but come away with only minor losses. I'm mainly using the second tier of kinetic weapons on my corvettes and destroyers but I have some special versions of each that have torpedoes and point defense, respectively. It sounds like psionics might not be that great after all? If Mind Over Matter isn't that great is Transcendency worthwhile?
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Jun 13, 2017 06:32
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The Shroud is awesome, definitely worth it. Non-energy torpedoes are terrible, just use your kinetics.
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Jun 13, 2017 06:35
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Mondian posted:The problem here is that to get equivalent fleet strength with your sperg fleet of lesser ships you need to build a bajillion of them and that makes one giant blob that's about a lightyear wide and has all sorts of logistical problems in actually getting all those ships at the ends to engage with the enemy simultaneously, so you need to split it up and that's just even more micro and not everyone has supercomputers that can handle thousands of individual ships so its easier for like 99% of people to just build like 50 battleships and 100 cruisers and call it a day. Even if you're some tryhard competitive (lol in this game) mp player doing mass naked corvettes the real fight will be over way before you've really researched any late game techs anyway. Oh don't get me wrong, I build battleships and strictly battleships because I stack fire rate and have never lost a late game engagement besides one time I pissed off 3 fallen empires and an awakened empire all at once whose 12 fleets promptly destroyed all my spaceports so my fleet got whittled away. I'm just really tired of people coming in here and saying "this is the best build, all others are poo poo  " when literally ALL of them work if you actually do like a minimal amount of critical thinking and build to your strengths of whatever ethics/civics/whatever you have picked. The only thing that doesn't work is missiles because missiles are terrible. If you get enough of them hell they could even work. If you're playing competitive MP games I get the feeling actual ship design is gonna matter a lot less then who snowballed the fastest. Mazz fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 07:00
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binge crotching posted:Mastery of Nature saves so much research time and minerals + energy that I always take it as my first choice. It's really nice being able to colonize anything and just not needing to worry about what kind of crap is sitting on the tiles, and how long you need to wait to draw the right cards to clear them. Basically the current system of blockers is boring and I hope they do something interesting with it. I haven't bothered with mods so I dunno if this is something that could be added by players.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:32
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Mazz posted:Oh don't get me wrong, I build battleships and strictly battleships because I stack fire rate and have never lost a late game engagement besides one time I pissed off 3 fallen empires and an awakened empire all at once whose 12 fleets promptly destroyed all my spaceports so my fleet got whittled away. Yes and no. Yes. Ramping up your ability to build ships is much more important than the relatively small difference between bad ships and good ships. You don't have to touch the ship designer at all to beat the game on hard. No, there are clear best builds: naked vettes, flak cruiser spam, screened artillery. The difference between them is efficiency, and as you turn up difficulty or do more self-sabotaging things (like playing as a purifier), efficiency becomes more and more important. Stellaris is a compound interest simulator: all those 0.5%s add up.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:37
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What are naked corvettes? Does flak even do anything if you're opponent doesn't have small ships/attack craft considering it will never get in range? Isn't it 1 large mount per destroyer? How is that cost effective to a BB's 5 in this scenario? What do you do when your opponent just retreat jumps away every time you get in range for everything besides your "artillery destroyers" to shoot? From max range (110) to mid range (60), there is a good 15-20 second gap where my entire fleet is firing to maybe 1/3 to half of yours. In that time my ability to FTL retreat is nearly done, meaning I can jump away at this point with minimal losses, generally 0-2 battleships per jump. How gigantic is your fleet with all these screening ships, whats the composition? Have you ever actually tested this poo poo beyond single player? What difficulty? If you're going to throw around things like they are cold hard facts provide some evidence please, as this is exactly what annoys me every time this poo poo comes up. Prove me wrong. I have no problem agreeing with you if you actually back poo poo up appropriately. Here's a screenshot of me and another goon testing evasion corvettes vs battleships with stacked fire rate, armor to ~89%, shields+capacitors and arc emitters + 4 kinetic artillery. Result: I didn't lose a single loving battleship to 1200 corvettes.  Arc emitters had 100% hit rate against Corvettes with ~95% evasion. The kinetic artillery had a hit rate of 3%. The 100 cruisers did surprisingly little damage given that they had the unbidden energy weapon on medium mounts, the corvette evasion was too high. EDIT: VVVV All that I agree with, I'm more just arguing that this "one perfect build" thing needs to die. The game isn't that rigid if you are playing it well. Especially with other people doing the same. Mazz fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 07:42
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MP is a different beast. You can do pretty much anything and win SP by just kicking the AI around like a dumb puppy, but in MP you actually have to use competent fleet compositions and refit them according to the enemy fleet's loadouts. In MP you have to keep tabs on what the enemy is doing, and make sure that you have a fleet that can at least delay long enough for you to get a proper refit going to be able to counter them, and you also have to make sure that they aren't just giving you bad intel and refitting their fleet into what you're countering. It's mind games all the way down, and if you slip up and they wardec you and then slam into your fleet with something that hard counters what you have, you're hosed. Closing borders is super important against other players, because they can just run a construction ship or a science ship into your home system and stare at your outfitting, refit their poo poo, and then wardec you before you have time to respond. Keeping them guessing means they either have to take a gamble on what your loadout is, or they have to make generalized builds that will do okay versus any given composition that you have. Flak cruisers and naked corvettes only work if the other person is playing completely detached from their fleet's ship designer and just autobuilds whatever the gently caress the game pumps out. Building thousands of corvettes takes time, and by the time you get that done they can slam corvette killer loadouts onto their fleet and stomp you for your efforts. MP also has the factor of players hopefully staying on top of what is happening in the galaxy. If you have one player snowballing then his neighbors need to put him down by burning his infrastructure and forcing him to devote his resources towards fleet building and military technology. Fighting a two front war in Stellaris against people who understand how to retreat or attack at appropriate times is a horrible loving experience, and shifting allegiances to take down the top dog means that you really shouldn't be able to snowball unless someone makes the mistake of being passive and letting the hyperexpansionist aggressive powerblob do whatever without ever contesting them until it's too late. Keep construction ships and science ships out there and observe other people's wars, even if you aren't getting involved, to watch what tech other players are focusing on. Ask people who are in a war for info if you can't slip a ship in, because they will most likely be willing to give stuff about the other person's fleet just out of spite. MP is basically if you just defaulted everyone to be a hegemonic imperialist regardless of ethics while ignoring everyone else's ethics too. Roleplaying goes out the window for the sake of slamming spaceships into other spaceships while slinging insults at the other players in the general chat. Commoners fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 08:08
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Mazz posted:What are naked corvettes? Basically, naked corvettes are corvette designs with literally nothing but the bare minimum in T1 equipment, churned out en masse. They are effective in both SP and MP They die easily, but due to the mineral cost of equipment scaling as you tech up, they are incredibly cheap, and their vast numbers make them extremely mineral efficient - they are so cheap you can afford many times more ships than the enemy, and their numbers usually beat any combination of ships (of equivalent or slightly higher mineral cost) thrown at them. This video is a handy introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCddANybN_0 Its extremely likely to be nerfed in a future patch
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Jun 13, 2017 08:30
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They're also slow as poo poo and you can absolutely tear them apart with long range, high accuracy weapons before they even close in to do damage to you. Naked corvettes work just like any other gimmick fleet in this only when the opposition does nothing to counter it. E: The comedy option to fighting them is to just abuse their garbage sublight speed by rolling through the naked corvette user's empire while destroying all their infrastructure to choke them to death under the weight of being way over their fleet capacity. Commoners fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 08:33
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Commoners posted:long range, high accuracy weapons that list consists of flak and arc emitters, and arc emitters both need perfect screening and are pretty crap against anything but frig swarms. (don't use arc emitters.) also you do want to use better engines even on cheapo frig swarms because it's the engines that drive up cost, not accessories the thing about vette swarms is that they're always good. vettes mix with cruisers for short-ranged fleets, and they work as a screen for artillery. you're always going to want corvettes, and cheap crappy ones do just as well as higher tech ones. it's never a bad play.
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Jun 13, 2017 08:45
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Cease to Hope posted:that list consists of flak and arc emitters, and arc emitters both need perfect screening and are pretty crap against anything but frig swarms. (don't use arc emitters.) also you do want to use better engines even on cheapo frig swarms because it's the engines that drive up cost, not accessories You're forgetting the medium mount cloud lightning guns that you get from shooting void clouds, which you would otherwise just ignore unless someone is doing a naked corvette swarm. Corvettes are good for screening and you should always be pumping them while actively in a war from your available shipyards just for the sake of soaking up hits for your bigger ships that actually matter, but if you're using larger ships then it's not a naked corvette swarm anymore. Towards the end game where a naked corvette fleet has the infrastructure behind it to actually show up, corvettes are just ablative armor for the big boys. Most fleets will be shifted towards cruisers and battleships at that point, while maybe having picketing destroyers in the mix. At that point don't even put guns on them. Just make them survivable enough to take two hits and pump those, but the no armor, no shield, minimum gun naked ones are generally just a lovely investment against players who will shift their designs to meet the challenge. Corvettes that you actually equip to be warships instead of ablative fleet armor can be useful for breaking off from your fleet in small numbers to attack infrastructure and keep tabs on what the enemy fleet is doing. Just bust any fortresses or snare stations and let them go hog wild. I totally agree that it is a funny gimmick play that you can make and totally crush other players with, but it requires that they put their heads in the sand and don't respond to anything happening outside their empire. At that point you can do whatever the gently caress silly gimmick you want to them and they'll still end up losing. Commoners fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 09:05
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Commoners posted:You're forgetting the medium mount cloud lightning guns that you get from shooting void clouds, which you would otherwise just ignore unless someone is doing a naked corvette swarm. Cloud lightning doesn't work better than just S-mount rails/lasers/plasma, and it's not something you can count on having. Even flak (which is good) is iffy because it's locked behind the mediocre autocannon chain that may or may not pop up. Don't use corvettes to kill infrastructure. Destroyers with L-mount weapons (ideally kinetic batteries, but boring rails or just whatever you have that isn't short-range, even missiles) do a better job of wrecking spaceports and stations, they're almost as fast, and they're fine if they carelessly jump into a snare as long as they don't end up fighting an enemy fleet without a screen. The main quality of corvette spam is that it requires no effort on your part but requires specific effort (including researching specific counter weapons!) on their part. Even its most mindless counter (full cruiser-with-SM-mounts) requires you to tech all the way up to cruisers and upgrade your spaceports. It's not a gimmick, but all of its various supposed counters are.
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Jun 13, 2017 09:23
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Cloud lightning is much better than other options versus corvettes. Give it a try - the accuracy buff is deceptively strong.
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Jun 13, 2017 12:18
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