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Same rules apply in every PDX game: throw more at them. Counters/weapons help edge out an even match but even with a poor counter you'll still win if you mob the enemy.
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Oct 28, 2017 06:38
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Baron Porkface posted:What enemy fleet is this best against? If my enemy counters this, what should i do? There is no counter. There are only two defences, shield and armour. And that counters both. The main problem can be considered 'getting them in the first place', given it means following multiple weapon tracks. I believe Plasma doesn't specifically require Lasers, though. Bloodly fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 06:48
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Arc emitters are very strong against high evasion targets since they literally never miss, but that is only relative to amount of damage you need done as well. Arc emitters work really well against other players evasion corvette/cruiser builds, but suffer against high HP targets like lots of the crisis stuff because they don't simply do enough damage per shot when they can RNG all the way down to 1 damage per hit. Targeting issues like mentioned also probably don't help this. When the contingency got swapped from emitters to lances it probably helped a lot of goons running with stuff like corvettes/destroyer/cruiser/battleship mixed fleets, since arc emitters are far more effective X slot weapons against evasion based defenses then sheer EHP like all battleship builds. Alternatively, all battleship builds still leverage all long range weapons against the crisis fleets which usually still have a mix, so you still have some advantage there too, so long as you aren't really outnumbered (which is generally always bad except in the perfect counterbuilds). AE fleets tend to have titans as damage sponges and lots of X slotters, so they actually are best countered by lighter ship builds than all BBs (even then BB will work fine too in most cases). Kinetic artillery/Giga cannons are generally the best for long range fighting since it has the best range and has bonuses against both defense types, but it misses significantly against decent evasion so you need a critical mass of guns so that even missing 40-50% of the time you are still killing lots of targets in that 80-110 range gap right at the start of an engagement and by the time the medium slot weapons and strike craft get involved you've already put down a lot of damage. I'm not sure I've used lances recently, I'll have to try those again. Mazz fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 06:59
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Baron Porkface posted:What enemy fleet is this best against? All fleets. Baron Porkface posted:If my enemy counters this, what should i do? Build more ships.
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Oct 28, 2017 07:20
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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When is it a good idea to use bombers?
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Oct 28, 2017 09:35
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If you're going all battleships, some portion of your fleet should have a PD/carrier deck in the middle slot instead of another artillery deck. I tend to just sick fighter/bomber in those 2 slots. Fighters and bombers seem to move the same way at the same speed when unmodded, so having both has its advantages since they are better at separate things. Fighters are additional PD and work better against smaller ships, while bombers are one of the best anti-large weapons in the game when they actually get through and attack. I don't normally have strike craft at all if I'm going all cruisers since I build them to jump in close when possible, to negate X slot heavy opponents. Mazz fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 09:43
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HOW do you even survive as an inward perfection empire with a big neighbor? I just got steamrolled in a really good game even though I was at twice my fleet limit...I only had 4K ships to their 7k and even with a station behind me I still lost. I had better weapons but worse shields and armor. It might have helped if I had gone full shields, since they just had red lasers, but with closed borders I couldn't get an idea of what they were going to throw at me until it hit. And without defensive pacts I was a sitting duck, even though I was superior in tech and fleet power to all the other surrounding empires...is this because they were a hive mind?
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Oct 28, 2017 11:26
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2nd game ever, and thanks to this thread's advice and some luck, I've secured a Domination victory after winning a one empire war for independence from my Fanatic Materialist AFE master, which I started a few months after the end of the Contingency Crisis, which, to be fair, the AFE overlord was extremely helpful for picking up the slack the other empires couldn't.  Lots of amazing victories and heartbreaking defeats in this game.Fleet comp was roughly : For each 1 battleship with Tachyon lance, kinetic artillery with supplementary plasma throwers Have 2 Neutron torpedo cruisers with bomber hangar bays, supplemented with plasma throwers, Guardian PDs, and flak artillery Have 1 Plasma thrower cruiser with central bomber hangar bay, with Guardian PDs, and flak artillery Mix well, serve at medium range to save the bombers some flight time while still giving the battleships room to fire the big guns. With that much PD, missiles and fighters were nearly completely neutered. Cruisers serve as an excellent screen for the battleship firing line. Looks cool as hell too. Contingency spoilers: With this comp in the final fight of the crisis, I lost all of 2 cruisers to the smaller guns on the AI cores, I believe the hostile fighter/missile swarms did literally zero damage. 560 of the fighters/bombers died to my PD though. Artificer fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 11:28
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Wizz, weird QOL suggestion. When you click on an unexplored system, could you make 'survey system' the default action of science vessels with 'move' being an option you have to choose from a dropdown? I can't think of many situations where I'd want to move a science vessel into a system but not survey it. It should still skip any unexplored systems between it and the target system, but that's one less mouse click / potential miss-click in the early game.
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Oct 28, 2017 11:44
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I just kicked their asses in an independence war and the Watchful Regulators come knocking on my door demanding that I become their satellite again? What gives?
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Oct 28, 2017 12:14
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Artificer posted:I just kicked their asses in an independence war and the Watchful Regulators come knocking on my door demanding that I become their OK again? What gives? StealthArcher posted:"WE DIDNT LOSE WE NEVER LOSE!" They scream as their empire shrinks into a corncob
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Oct 28, 2017 12:25
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I wonder how hard it would be to create a new fallen empire, because I really like the idea of an "ascended hive mind" that's fighting a foreverwar in the shroud and looking outwards for exo-galatic threats. While being on good terms with biological life who know better then to poke around in the darkness of the mind, looking for whichever flavor of space satan to enter into a pact with. Authoritarian or Xenophobic Spiritualist? It doesn't like you. Enter into a pact? That's a threat. Trigger the End of the Cycle? It awakens far more powerful then others since you just forced its mind back to the material plane.  'scool with robots and hive minds 'tho. Neither cant threaten to bring the Doom of the Universe!  
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Oct 28, 2017 12:59
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Improbable Lobster posted:I wish we had a bit of control of positioning after the battle actually starts I had a bad time with this earlier. Attacking that Robot FE that has just one inhabited solar system on a ringworld, and my fleet engaged the enemy fleet, killed about half of them got them to low life. Then they got distracted by a nearby fortress, and took that down to low health. Then they got distracted by the other fortresses, and ran around getting them to low health. And so, even though I had a fleet more than big enough to deal with the problems if they were either on top of each other or sequential, the fleet got spread out everywhere and (in reloading a save, and running the battle again to see what would happen) got wiped out doing basically nothing past the initial burst even though the fleet strength was theoretically higher than the FE's.
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Oct 28, 2017 13:15
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One of the ship behavior mods allows you to tell ships to flank when battle starts. I haven't really found it that useful, though, because it typically results in a large opening phase of the battle when a good chunk of my forces are taking a big circular path to the sides of the enemy fleet and not firing, while all of the enemy fleet is.
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Oct 28, 2017 13:17
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@wiz - any chance we could have another sector resource resource extraction option? (IE, 25/50/75/90)
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Oct 28, 2017 13:59
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I think it'd be nice if there were more art assets for Fallen/Awakened Empires. It's a tad incongruous for every FE to have the same style of ships!
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Oct 28, 2017 15:03
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gowb posted:HOW do you even survive as an inward perfection empire with a big neighbor? I just got steamrolled in a really good game even though I was at twice my fleet limit...I only had 4K ships to their 7k and even with a station behind me I still lost. I had better weapons but worse shields and armor. It might have helped if I had gone full shields, since they just had red lasers, but with closed borders I couldn't get an idea of what they were going to throw at me until it hit. Probably not because they're a hive mind unless they're a devouring swarm. You do have to be aggressive about expanding, because fleet capacity is a lot tougher to come by. The +15% fire rate traditions in Harmony and Supremacy are really good pickups early as well. Though it sounds you just got rolled by an Advanced Start, sometimes there isn't too much to do about that.
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Oct 28, 2017 16:33
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Is there no way for me to disable sector AI? Trying to setup a reserve for my bio trophies, but the sector AI keeps building farms even with all options turned off.
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Oct 28, 2017 16:37
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PittTheElder posted:Probably not because they're a hive mind unless they're a devouring swarm. You do have to be aggressive about expanding, because fleet capacity is a lot tougher to come by. The +15% fire rate traditions in Harmony and Supremacy are really good pickups early as well. Is there some way to turn my empire militant?
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Oct 28, 2017 19:15
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Yeah, open the factions tab, embrace your militarist faction if it exists. Alternatively, if Pacifism is your lowest supported ethos, embrace anything and you'll drop Pacifist. Be warned that doing so will invalidate the Inwards Perfection civic, and if you have opened the Adaptability or Purity tradition trees they will transmute into the far worse Diplomacy and Supremacy trees.
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Oct 28, 2017 19:23
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Fray posted:So, 60% off Stellaris on steam. How is the game nowadays? I've been doing the usual "wait until it's good" Paradox thing. Good - the DLCs give it more depth, and the mod scene is quite robust. If 4x is your thing, you'll get your money's worth, especially at 60% off.
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Oct 28, 2017 20:26
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I wanna capture a citadel by smuggling a single Godzilla into the hangar bay
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Oct 28, 2017 21:32
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Finally saw a campaign all the way through Victory Condition and Crisis. Played as the Silicron, a robot empire with mineral and research civics, and had some good luck with early game resource/planet availability and tech picks. The xenophilic pacifists to my northwest and hive mind to my southeast were both friendly enough, and defense pacts saw us all through the early stages of the game without conflict, so I was able to really focus on expansion and snowballing my incomes. Once I had managed to eke out a slight advantage over the militant isolationists to the west (which everybody hated), I waged a successful campaign of persecution and picked up some pretty choice planets. +100% habitability was huge for making all this work. As the early game came to a close, a few more small conflicts with unfriendly neighbors saw me securely establish myself as a dominant power in the galaxy. Moving into the mid-game, I decided I no longer needed the help of my pacifist & hive mind friends, and decided to strike out on my own. This decision nearly proved disastrous, the second I was flying solo a group of threatened neighbors declared war. I could take any of them on solo no problem, but they were on opposite sides of my empire, which now stretched almost entirely across the east-west axis in the northern section of the galaxy. I was trying to play whack-a-mole and it wasn't going my way. Finally I gave up on any hope of playing defensively, and committed to blitzkrieging down their core worlds while just eating the resource loss from my own occupied planets. It was hairy for a minute, but I managed to get a positive warscore and end the conflict with a few gains for myself. By now, everyone in the galaxy recognized that I was a pretty bad hombre, but I had just managed to secure the truce with the largest faction opposing me, and was able to blitzkrieg my way through some of the lesser powers in my way, expanding as aggressively as I could with great success. At this point the dice just kept coming up Silicron. Even the advanced start empire felt the wrath of my lasers. And then the FE woke up. Three things happened in rapid succession. I ding'd a complete traditions tree, and took +33% damage to FE/AE. I completed research giving me one more ascension perk, and took +200 to fleet size. And finally, the FE decided that I needed to be brought to heel. This was was the most critical moment of my empires ascension to galactic dominance. I had every single world churning out kinetic artillery destroyers, plasma cruisers, and plasma battleships as quickly as my income would allow. The AE slowly spread from the south, conquering my planets one by one, completely unchallenged. I blew right past my already impressive fleet cap, watched my energy income slip further and further into the red, watched my mineral output fall more and more as my planets were taken over. As the negative warscore balance crept higher and higher, as my energy reserves dipped lower and lower, and the hated enemy got closer and closer to my core system, I realized it was time. I was utterly convinced this was the end of my dominance. All I had managed was a 160k stack against their 220k. Even with +33% damage, I was coming up short, but I couldn't wait any longer. The battle was joined just a few star systems away from my starting planet. Imagine my surprise when the space debris settled and I still had a 50k stack left against their retreating 22k. A quick repair and reinforcement later, I beelined for their homeworlds, and with my upper hand managed to claw my way back from the edge of despair and end the war on my own terms. Silicron supremacy forever. Another few decades of genociding entire sectors of the remaining empires and expanding my borders. My borders touched in the south, completing my big blue donut. The victory screen flashed. Another decade went by. My galactic government was alerted to the mysterious presence of a ghost signal weaving its way through our FTL communication networks, but we were unphased. We were unstoppable. The contingency was activated, but their sterilization hubs fell quickly under the crushing might of endless waves of carrier battleships and plasma cruisers (lol beat the contingency with plasma). I might finally be not completely terrible at this game. Only took me 100 hours. And a seriously lucky early game.
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Oct 28, 2017 21:54
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DrHammond posted:
Congrats!
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Oct 28, 2017 21:58
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PittTheElder posted:Yeah, open the factions tab, embrace your militarist faction if it exists. Alternatively, if Pacifism is your lowest supported ethos, embrace anything and you'll drop Pacifist. Cool, thanks! I'll give that a try. My most recent game is going really well because I'm boxed up on the galactic rim by two fallen empires, leaving me with just one direction to expand but very little access to other normal empires. Hilarious.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:01
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I don't know how terrible this is, but I've been having a lot of luck with mostly missile fleets. Neutron Torpedoes + Marauder Missiles + Whirlwind for PD screening on a mix of Battleships/Cruisers seems to be outright shredding fleets with significantly higher fleet strength.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:11
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Can Hive mind get psyonics now?
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Oct 28, 2017 22:18
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Doesn't negative energy kill your energy weapon damage?
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Oct 28, 2017 22:25
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Oh hey is an FE awakening event different from a regular crisis? Will one of those trigger too i.e. contingency, scourge etc. now I kicked the AEs?
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Oct 28, 2017 22:30
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Arglebargle III posted:Doesn't negative energy kill your energy weapon damage? If you run out of energy credits (0 balance), it "will cause a critical resource shortage that reduces the output of minerals, all research, ship and army build speeds, ship shields and weapons damage by half. Additionally, colonies in the process of establishing themselves on new worlds will halt their progress and the output of robotic pops will be reduced by half." -Stellaris Wiki But having a negative energy flow won't do anything bad as long as you still have credits in storage. E: Surprise Giraffe posted:Oh hey is an FE awakening event different from a regular crisis? Will one of those trigger too i.e. contingency, scourge etc. now I kicked the AEs? Correct. Awakened FE's and "The War in Heaven" are not end-game crisis.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:32
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Arglebargle III posted:Doesn't negative energy kill your energy weapon damage? If you run stockpiles to 0. Negative monthly income is fine if you're trading for energy.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:32
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Where do missiles, swarm missiles, and torpedos fit into the combat ecosystem?
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Oct 28, 2017 22:53
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Baron Porkface posted:Where do missiles, swarm missiles, and torpedos fit into the combat ecosystem? Energy torpedoes like the Neutron torpedoes are quite good, since they're immune to PD. None of the other empires in the two games I've played had particularly stellar success with the other types of missiles though. Edit: The fallen empire who I beat up for independence just won a war against a smaller neighbor and vassalized and humiliated it....but it also gave me a system with a colony on it? I wasn't even in the war and I'm not on good terms with either combatant. Oh my god it must've had giving me, its previously favorite satellite, the system in its war demands since that war started before my war for independence. Oh my God the warscore system is *busted.* Artificer fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 22:59
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DrHammond posted:If you run out of energy credits (0 balance), it "will cause a critical resource shortage that reduces the output of minerals, all research, ship and army build speeds, ship shields and weapons damage by half. Additionally, colonies in the process of establishing themselves on new worlds will halt their progress and the output of robotic pops will be reduced by half." -Stellaris Wiki One thing I think would be interesting is if the game simulated a kind of war economy, whereby fleets cost way more to deploy than they did to keep moored at a base. To the point where having your fleet on deployment is difficult and where you put your fleet bases matters a lot. It does it a bit at present but I've never found it hugely prohibitive. You could have other options, like the mineral wealth edict or an edict which drains a lot of influence but reduces fleet operating costs, but ultimately it'd be interesting if wars were on more of a timer before your economy crashes. Especially offensive ones, make ships cost more upkeep the further from your borders they go too. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Oct 28, 2017 |
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Oct 28, 2017 23:10
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OwlFancier posted:One thing I think would be interesting is if the game simulated a kind of war economy, whereby fleets cost way more to deploy than they did to keep moored at a base. To the point where having your fleet on deployment is difficult and where you put your fleet bases matters a lot. It does it a bit at present but I've never found it hugely prohibitive. Fleets are more expensive when they're moving then when they're parked. There's even starport upgrades that reduce upkeep for orbiting ships.
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Oct 28, 2017 23:22
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Baron Porkface posted:Where do missiles, swarm missiles, and torpedos fit into the combat ecosystem?
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Oct 28, 2017 23:30
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Poil posted:I've been trying out a couple of swarm missiles on half my cruisers and while I don't know how much PD the enemy used they sure tore them a new one. Yeah, swarm and whirlwind missiles are very good as a one-off medium slot on cruisers and battleships. They're an excellent way to both thin out corvettes and distract PD if you went heavy on strike craft.
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Oct 29, 2017 00:43
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Improbable Lobster posted:Fleets are more expensive when they're moving then when they're parked. There's even starport upgrades that reduce upkeep for orbiting ships. Yes I know I said as much, my point is that it doesn't have as much of an effect as I would like it to.
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Oct 29, 2017 00:58
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You get a 25% discount for docking ships, 35% if you have Crew Quarters on the starport. I think 50% total through a combination of tech/modules would make more of a difference, mostly to help with overbuilding a defensive fleet for pacifist empires.
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Oct 29, 2017 01:09
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I'm in a losing fight against the Scourge and I'm just praying the Shroud sends me a solution... This is my first spiritualist run through and it has been a wild ride.
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Oct 29, 2017 02:41
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