Endgame ship/fleet designs?

[DarknessLord]

I'm at 2057 as the resistance. I had a really good time playing this game and am looking forward to coming back down the line and see what the devs do with it, but I have never been a fan of the ship combat or the ship designing in its current form.

I have most of the tech and can easily research the stuff I don't have.
I have pretty much everything in order except that I need to clear the system of most of the alien fleets.
The problem is all my ship designs suck and need both massive numbers advantage and me manually controlling them in order to take down the aliens.

Does anyone have any good ship designs that i can just spam out to get this done?

[ExavierMacbeth]

Hmm might be easier if you shared one of the loadouts you consider "suck" so people can help you advise. I am not sure how many people are in the endgame stage to be honest.

Personally I am I think in the early 2050s myself and while I have Advanced Antimatter Plasma, I only have Triton Pulse as my closest fusion option so my responses might be less than what you are capable of. Though I can make ships with the delta to go anywhere, just haven't seen a need (Exodus doesn't have an objective to wipe the aliens out as an endgame).

That said I am trying to approach the doomstack issue in my game & so far the best option I have seen is to build lots of Cruisers armed with 2x Nose Phasers, 1x 2 slot Plasma (Mk2s but thats because I actually do need to save my exotics), 1x Phaser PD, and then as much armor as I can stick on the nose (with maybe 10-20 on sides/aft) without dropping my cruise speed below 40-50miligees. Then just spam my own doomstack & use High Wall formation so all the plasma cannons come into range at the same time :P

I don't trust autoresolve or AI control so I would probably still launch the battle and then just let the wall drift into the enemy without touching anything unless there happens to be something I need to specifically focus fire on (The AI sometimes like to go suicide speed and ram which makes those priority targets).

Any ships larger than that would take more economy to build and would probably work the same assuming you can build faster than the AI.

An alternative I was considering also is a mass of nuclear torpedo armed Monitors or Frigates to send on suicide surface bombing runs to try & take out the alien's ground bases. Orbitals would be harder, but the Aliens do have an economy... remove their fuel supply & it will probably give them issues :P

EDIT: Also if your computer can handle it, you can also go into the game options and turn up the number of ships allowed in combat. Lots more to render but will put alot more guns on the field for mutual slaughter :P

[DarknessLord]

Sure thing
This is the ship I have been trying to use thus far.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2877079409
I am not sure what exactly sucks about it only that I have definitely lost battles where i had 2x the ships and 3x the fleet power on auto resolve.

[VoiD]

Weird, I've been consistently killing bigger fleets with mine, and I barely, if at all, move them in battle as I hate this control system.

What exactly is killing you? Lasers? Plasmas? Kinetics? Missiles?

If the issue is Lasers or Plasmas you just need better armor, having about 40+ everywhere should make you pretty much imune to energy weapons (except point blank lasers).

If you're losing to kinetics or missiles you clearly need more PD, no armor can help you against those, and dodging is too annoying to even attempt, make a habit of having at least 1~2 PDs in every ship and make a few battleships with nothing but Laser Engines (possibly an extra battery too) and 1 slot nose and hull lasers EVERYWHERE, just leave them on default behavior and never set them to target anyone, so they will just keep shooting down bullets and missiles from a long distance, if anything gets through the Great Wall (good fleet formation too btw) of lasers then the ship's individual PD should kick in, as a single heavy caliber projectile can be enough to 1shot even the biggest ships.

It's also not a bad idea to have a lightly armoured ship, like 40/30/30, of the destroyer (2PD 1 nose cannon) or corvette (1 PD 1 small cannon) class with good engines to rush ahead of the formation then turn around and start dodjing random ♥♥♥♥♥, it will probably get destroyed, but it might waste most of the enemy's alpha strike so it's worth it.

As for weapons I've had great success with them all, coilguns are an absolute menace, specially the bigger ones that require multiple PD shots to stop, and are too fast for large ships to dodge, but they require a great hail of bullets to be worth using, so lancers and Titans are ideal for those, I'm trying out plasmas too now, they don't hit nearly as hard as coilguns, but they always land their shots and there's nothing the aliens can do about it, until they start bringing out some ships with 35+ armor they are going to get destroyed by those nasty nose heavy plasmas, so they might be even better, at least on Tier 3, missiles still work, but they either need to be mixed in with several ♥♥♥♥ multi-missiles, or a hail of bullets, it takes a single good torpedo hit to kill even a mothership, the problem is getting past PD.

[ExavierMacbeth]

oof... 15/3/3 armor is horrible for late game. Consider that your spinal cannon is doing probably about 26+ damage per hit. Armor is 1:1... so the alien firing the same type of spinal weapon back at you is going to start tearing up your ships innards with the first hit that lands... and if your facing alien plasma cannons, PD isn't going to matter.

You only need about 180kps delta to get from Earth to the Alien Starting Base in the Oort Cloud and you only need maybe twice that again to get home & do combat maneuvering... So I would suggest stacking on alot more armor.... I think my current generation defense ships (don't have the game running atm) have 50/20/20 for armor so they can survive at least a few stray hits... because alien plasma will always outrage human plasma.

Also like I said, I don't trust autoresolve. It can be useful if you exceed the enemies strength by a ridiculous amount, but I am not sure I trust the way it calculates battle damage. I take alot less attrition damage in fights were I just let the two fleets collide than I do using auto resolve. Same goes for AI control in an actual battle.

EDIT: I usually use Cruise Speed as my guide for when I have too much armor. 20-40 miligees might make you slow strategically but its plenty for catching enemies as they enter orbit if your waiting for them. And ridiculous combat speed is only useful if your actually manually fighting the battle... again I am not sure what factor it really plays in autoresolve.

[DarknessLord]

Not really sure what is killing me except my ships will just suddenly blow up.
It might just be lack of armor, I guess, I have no idea how much is "good" so I just let the auto design pick there and it might have undercut me and that might be why?

[ExavierMacbeth]

Originally posted by DarknessLord:

Not really sure what is killing me except my ships will just suddenly blow up.
It might just be lack of armor, I guess, I have no idea how much is "good" so I just let the auto design pick there and it might have undercut me and that might be why?

The design you posted isn't horrible (assuming that nose weapon is either a coilgun or plasma gun... I haven't looked that closly at the graphic for them lol).

But yea I would definitely increase the armor values at a ratio of Nose: 2.5 Sides/Aft: 1 until your Cruise Accelleration gets down to 40miligees OR your Cruise Delta-V drops below 400.

I would also recommend swapping 1 or 2 of the Phaser PDs with the 1 slot Phaser Lasers... That way you have an extended range PD next that can cover other ships in the formation as well as a last ditch "protect me" turret. Will help nullify the massive missile & kinetic storm they throw at you.

The only real threat then is enemy plasma which is the point of the armor :)

EDIT: If your worried about running out of fuel, you can always build a smaller "escort" fleet with a Fusion Platform Kit so that after you blow away the target you can drop an Orbital around wherever your fleet is & spend the 30 days to install a supply depot on it to refuel... Assuming you want to keep pressing forward.

[ExavierMacbeth]

Here you go...
https://imgur.com/a/L3HoaBt

Btw it looks like you had a heavy coil... I don't have the Tier 2 four slot plasma but I could include the Tier 1 so you can see the graphic. I also upgraded the Heat Sink to a Heavy Lithium & swapped the battery out of the 80 GJ Graphene one (I like more power for energy weapons)... and of course I only have Green Phasers instead of UV but it should give you an idea of what to do :P

EDIT: Also you probobly want to use something other than "Transport" for the ship type. Just realized I forgot to set it lol. I usually just use "Defense Bomber" which which IF you use AI control (and probably autoresolve) assumes they will hang back and shoot from long range if possible.

[DarknessLord]

That helps a lot, armor values were almost certainly the issue.
Might need to up production on noble metals to churn out these more armored ships, but that shouldn't be an issue.
Thanks

[VoiD]

Originally posted by DarknessLord:

That helps a lot, armor values were almost certainly the issue.
Might need to up production on noble metals to churn out these more armored ships, but that shouldn't be an issue.
Thanks

Ya, it gets extremely expensive on those, but don't think you have "too many" regular metals or volatiles either, I thought I was safe with 35k metals, then I unlocked tier 3 habitats and now I'm a poor mofo struggling to get off 0, haven't upgraded even half of my colonies yet.

[Captain Alex]

You want Plasma Cannons. They have high damage and unlike guns and rockets they cannot be defended with point defence. The rest you fill with UV Phasers and Point Defence Phasers.

Regarding armor, focus on the front of your ships and put in as much Hybrid Armor as you can afford. I am usually running 20/20/50 but more is always better. My ships will enter in the Great Wall formation and usually shoot down anything before they can even reach my ranks and shoot anywhere else but the front.

To summarize:
Plasma Mk 3 Cannons/Batteries
UV Phaser Cannons/Batteries
Point Defence Phaser Turrets
Hybrid Armor
Protium Inertial Torch
Inertial Confinement Fusion Reactor VII

The rest does not matter too much. Just put in the best (most right) batteries/radiators/utilities, etc.