Problem with mid-late game ships desgin

[UG]

I'm having problems with ship design and I'm not able to make ships fast enough and with enough power. I have completed UV and plasma research up to level 2. As a drive I have neutron flux torch. What advice or what ship designs do you recommend?

[LorDC]

Drives: you want either Inertial Confinement or Z-pinch reactors and drives. Or AAPCD if you can afford it. Rest is just trash. Either in terms of performance or price.
Guns, you need at least 2 particle defense turret per ship (on dreads add 2x 60cm uv phasers), and fill rest with biggest coils you have. Maybe mix in few ships with plasma guns to kill light targets. Lasers are only useful for bombardment and killing stations.
At least 25 front armor to survive lasers, bump it up to 55 if you can to survive plasma.
Put all ships into a wall (high or great if you have a lot of them) and don't do any maneuvers. Watch ayys kill themselves against a wall of kinetic slugs.

[UG]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Drives: you want either Inertial Confinement or Z-pinch reactors and drives. Or AAPCD if you can afford it. Rest is just trash. Either in terms of performance or price.
Guns, you need at least 2 particle defense turret per ship (on dreads add 2x 60cm uv phasers), and fill rest with biggest coils you have. Maybe mix in few ships with plasma guns to kill light targets. Lasers are only useful for bombardment and killing stations.
At least 25 front armor to survive lasers, bump it up to 55 if you can to survive plasma.
Put all ships into a wall (high or great if you have a lot of them) and don't do any maneuvers. Watch ayys kill themselves against a wall of kinetic slugs.

Thank you, i will try with this configuration.

[UG]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Drives: you want either Inertial Confinement or Z-pinch reactors and drives. Or AAPCD if you can afford it. Rest is just trash. Either in terms of performance or price.
Guns, you need at least 2 particle defense turret per ship (on dreads add 2x 60cm uv phasers), and fill rest with biggest coils you have. Maybe mix in few ships with plasma guns to kill light targets. Lasers are only useful for bombardment and killing stations.
At least 25 front armor to survive lasers, bump it up to 55 if you can to survive plasma.
Put all ships into a wall (high or great if you have a lot of them) and don't do any maneuvers. Watch ayys kill themselves against a wall of kinetic slugs.

How can I not do maneuvers?

[LorDC]

Originally posted by UG:

How can I not do maneuvers?

Just do not do anything and wait until ayys come to you. Works in 95% cases.
The only things you may want to do are:
a) Boost all of your formation forward in case of something like a single dreadnought that is too slow to come for you himself.
b) Or padlock some lone gunship that managed to fly through you formation.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Drives: you want either Inertial Confinement or Z-pinch reactors and drives. Or AAPCD if you can afford it. Rest is just trash. Either in terms of performance or price.

Don't you think that "having problems with ship design" while being in possession of the Neutron Flux Torch it's very probable that the same problems will be with suggested by you drives? NFT is one of the best drives and I have no idea why you consider it "trash" when its fissile consumption can be greatly alleviated by ISRU.

BTW, I also don't know why you think that allowing 2g CRUISE acceleration in case of the Pion Torch Drive doesn't find its unique uses despite its cost - to me it's as well certainly not "trash". I could also name earlier drives, as eg. the Advanced Pulsar, that you can even win the game with so they are also certainly not "trash".

Originally posted by LorDC:

Put all ships into a wall (high or great if you have a lot of them) and don't do any maneuvers. Watch ayys kill themselves against a wall of kinetic slugs.

While it might be easier your losses will be unacceptably (to me) high when fighting against similar amounts of ships even now. It might work in 95% cases only if AI still prefers very small fleets which I think is not the case, already. Soon, when AI is better at using missiles, your sluggish wall of PD will be entirely annihilated in such conditions.

[LorDC]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

Don't you think that "having problems with ship design" while being in possession of the Neutron Flux Torch it's very probable that the same problems will be with suggested by you drives? NFT is one of the best drives and I have no idea why you consider it "trash" when its fissile consumption can be greatly alleviated by ISRU.

BTW, I also don't know why you think that allowing 2g CRUISE acceleration in case of the Pion Torch Drive doesn't find its unique uses despite its cost - to me it's as well certainly not "trash". I could also name earlier drives, as eg. the Advanced Pulsar, that you can even win the game with so they are also certainly not "trash".

Both NFT and PiT are way too expensive for practical use.
Also, the topic is about mid-late game ship design. So, I wouldn't suggest Adv Pulsar to guy who has NFT, Plasma and Phasers.

Originally posted by Pawleus:

While it might be easier your losses will be unacceptably (to me) high when fighting against similar amounts of ships even now. It might work in 95% cases only if AI still prefers very small fleets which I think is not the case, already. Soon, when AI is better at using missiles, your sluggish wall of PD will be entirely annihilated in such conditions.

Dunno, what "unacceptable losses" are you talking about. In my last run I lost less than 10 or so ships total over the course of a campaign. Three dreads in a final fight against ayy fleet with more than double fleet power and four times more ships than me. (Oh, and third of my fleet were useless bombardment lancers.) Rest - cheap destroyers in defense fights here and there. You seem to underestimate strength of a fleet-wide PD-coverage. When ships can cover for each other (as is the case with particle PD and 60cm phasers) they can tank absolutely enormous amount of kinetic and missile fire.

[Premu]

The Pion Torch has one very specific use: For the shuttle transporting you councillor to the Kuiper Belt for the final mission. Otherwise the fuel costs are too high to be in any way practical to be used for your combat ships.

Besides Advanced Antimatter Drive, the Daedalus Torch is a great late game drive as well. You need quite a lot of luck to get it, though.

For the midgame I also recommend the Z-Pinch drive. It has decent enough performance, especially if you research the more powerful reactors for it.

[Fezix93]

Use your mid-game ships primarily as mobile defensive emplacements to defend the inner planets and your stations. Their purpose is to hold off alien/npc expansion long enough for you to continue your weapons and drives research until you get to the antimatter drive. There is a temptation to start sending ships to attack throughout and through the asteroid belt because the mid-game drives are when you start being able to put high deltaV on your ships, so it looks like they can start going places.

The problem is most of these drives are either terrible at combat, or are incredibly resource hungry. Sizable fleets using these drives travelling long distances or constantly engaging in combat will quickly eat up your mined resources. Instead, you want to use these ships to defend your interests from enemy attack and bombardment only, while you maintain large scale control over Earth's nations.

Once you unlock the antimatter plasma core drives, you now have the ability to travel far distances quickly and have enough fuel for combat, and refilling your fuel tanks won't consume the bulk of your resources. From there you get the advanced antimatter drives, which increases your range and traverse speed even more, to the point where it only takes a couple months to go from the inner planets to Pluto.

As for weapons, at this stage in the game you pretty much want each ship with at least one PD turret, a plasma battery, and a phat coil on the nose. Have a couple utility ships carrying marines for base assaults, a few missile boats to nuke alien motherships and landing craft, and a few bombardment ships with lasers. That should get you through most offensive assaults.

If it took you too long to get good resource management, you may notice massive enemy fleets that contain hundreds of enemy ships. For those you'll need to win through attrition, and you'll need to design a ship that doesn't require lots of resources to build so that you can throw a fleet of them at the alien armada to take out several of their ships and rebuild these sacrificial ships faster than the aliens can replace their ships. For these, the mid-late game engines work well, because they are powerful enough for combat, but since it is a one-way trip, their awful fuel efficiency won't be able to bit you in the butt

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Both NFT and PiT are way too expensive for practical use.
Also, the topic is about mid-late game ship design. So, I wouldn't suggest Adv Pulsar to guy who has NFT, Plasma and Phasers.

In what way they are impractical? Building or using?
1. NFT can be used even to build large fast and maneuverable combat ships and their parameters and utilization is only slightly worsen by the necessity of using ISRU.
2. PiT is not too expensive for small ships. Examples of practical uses (small ships with over 1g cruise acceleration and thousands km/s DV) :
- fast councilor transport
- fast colonizer (I used it in that role in my recent game with 10 units (gram?) of antimatter created per month)
- fast reaction force (small highly maneuverable very fast fleet) for emergencies (however, there is still a bug with shortest ETA possible that limits usefulness of such a force)

Adv Pulsar was only mentioned there for showing that you should perhaps be careful with naming something "trash" if you can win the game using it.

Originally posted by LorDC:

Dunno, what "unacceptable losses" are you talking about. In my last run I lost less than 10 or so ships total over the course of a campaign. Three dreads in a final fight against ayy fleet with more than double fleet power and four times more ships than me. (Oh, and third of my fleet were useless bombardment lancers.) Rest - cheap destroyers in defense fights here and there. You seem to underestimate strength of a fleet-wide PD-coverage. When ships can cover for each other (as is the case with particle PD and 60cm phasers) they can tank absolutely enormous amount of kinetic and missile fire.

You, on the other hand, certainly overestimate strength of a fleet-wide PD-coverage, perhaps because you haven't seen an opponent that knows how to properly use missiles and maneuver (AI is still bad at it) - you probably missed this post and it might be revealing: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1176470/discussions/0/3767858179328362719/?ctp=4#c3757726349612485720.

Any PD coverage can be overwhelmed with missiles (even when creating dense swarms is removed from the game as I suggested in my bug-report - it will be just not as easy and safe as it is now) by a determined opponent and I think AI even now is much better at doing so than in the past. This is why I wonder what is the version of the game you base your observations on?

Yes, by "unacceptable losses" to me I would eg. mean loosing those 3 Dreads - they would be so unacceptable that I wouldn't even build them :) I prefer using highly maneuverable smaller ships (up to Destroyer) as they have better survivability, are much faster to build (so you have better fleets sooner) and in formations can defeat practically any fleet (it will be much more difficult when AI starts actually using formations, though - currently (0.3.76), any large fleet can be easily defeated in detail during combat by a highly maneuverable formation).

[UG]

In my case, NFT was too expensive. I made a good fleet but after the first supply I ran out of fissiles. PiT I don't understand what it is.
Now I'm trying with Helion Drive but the ships don't have good stats. What would be the desired stats on Cruise acceleration, combat acceleration and delta-v? And what can each one be used for?

Regarding the fleets, I mainly use frigates, I don't know if I should use other types of ships. In these I usually put light coil cannon mk3 as a nose gun. and the 2pd

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

with 10 units (gram?) of antimatter created per month

Antimatter units are the same as the others. So one unit is 1 dekaton (10,000 kg).
The units listed for natural antimatter collection are NOT that though. If you mouse over it it'll tell you, and iirc it's micrograms per year.

Originally posted by UG:

PiT I don't understand what it is.

Pion Torch. The one that uses ungodly amounts of antimatter.

[noobermenschen]

Originally posted by LorDC:

Drives: you want either Inertial Confinement or Z-pinch reactors and drives

Just learned tonight that my Triton Pulse ships will not upgrade to Zeta Helion even though both are Z-Pinch. That was disappointing. Not sure what to do with my 90 destroyers and battleships, now obsolete but still quite powerful:

1) Upgrade them with Stabilized Flow reactors which will save a bunch of weight and marginally improve performance (though they will still have ♥♥♥♥ combat acceleration) and keep them as defense fleets.

2) Gradually scrap them as my Helion ships complete (as resources allow) and collect the salvage

3) Send them 20 at a time to tai-atari that 80+ ship armada at 21 Lutetia and go out in a blaze of glory, taking as many ships with them as they can.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by noobermenschen:

Just learned tonight that my Triton Pulse ships will not upgrade to Zeta Helion even though both are Z-Pinch.

Note that the reason for this is because Triton Pulse is a Reaction Products drive, whereas Zeta Helion is a Hydrogen drive.
That said, Triton Pulse can upgrade to Firefly. I think.

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by UG:

In my case, NFT was too expensive. I made a good fleet but after the first supply I ran out of fissiles.

This is why you should arrange things as to be able to resupply by ISRU.

Originally posted by UG:

Now I'm trying with Helion Drive but the ships don't have good stats.

With this drive I would strongly suggest to build Corvettes - with it or Zeta Boron they were actually my favorite combat ship (with Coil Cannon and 60cm phaser) and I built them over 300 in my recent game. They can still have good armor while having 4g combat acceleration, over 1500 km/s DV and very good turning rates - so you need highly maneuverable tactic for them but 20 of them can be not just a very effective screen for larger ships (I used 5 pure Coil Destroyers in Great Wall-tight-rear-large-ships formation with them) but they alone can in formation defeat practically any fleet unless they run out of projectiles (that's why they sometimes need Destroyers).

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Antimatter units are the same as the others. So one unit is 1 dekaton (10,000 kg).
The units listed for natural antimatter collection are NOT that though. If you mouse over it it'll tell you, and iirc it's micrograms per year.

This is certainly not true - all antimatter is in the same units (just sometimes piko-units, nano-units, micro-units etc) and this unit is probably not as large as 1 dekaton. I spoke with @johnnylump about it in the past, I just don't remember if these units are grams (very probable).

Edit: Unless you mean the amount of antimatter present within an orbit - this might be indeed in different units (I currently have no access to my computer to check). The amount of natural antimatter trapped there is in the same units as artificially created.

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Pion Torch. The one that uses ungodly amounts of antimatter.

And have ungodly parameters... 2g cruise acceleration of my colonizer - I was even wondering whether or not I should bug-report it :)

Originally posted by noobermenschen:

Just learned tonight that my Triton Pulse ships will not upgrade to Zeta Helion even though both are Z-Pinch. That was disappointing.

There will be some changes to refits in 0.3.77 so perhaps it will be possible, then.

[LorDC]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

1. NFT can be used even to build large fast and maneuverable combat ships and their parameters and utilization is only slightly worsen by the necessity of using ISRU.

Did you file a bug report about ISRU and NFT refueling. Because there is just no way a 0.38 fissiles/month can refuel hundreds if not thousands of fissiles in a 10 day timespan. Not to mention, that limiting yourself ISRU refueling is just way to inconvenient.

Originally posted by Pawleus:

2. PiT is not too expensive for small ships. Examples of practical uses (small ships with over 1g cruise acceleration and thousands km/s DV) :
- fast councilor transport
- fast colonizer (I used it in that role in my recent game with 10 units (gram?) of antimatter created per month)
- fast reaction force (small highly maneuverable very fast fleet) for emergencies (however, there is still a bug with shortest ETA possible that limits usefulness of such a force)

All those scenarios you describe:
a) Extremely niche. Like, you need councilor transport zero to one time per game. And using Pion Torch just saves you two months, which equals to a minute of waiting.
b) Do not fall into scope of original post (mid-late game combat ship design).
c) Are about "I won the game, let me win harder" scenario.

Originally posted by Pawleus:

You, on the other hand, certainly overestimate strength of a fleet-wide PD-coverage, perhaps because you haven't seen an opponent that knows how to properly use missiles and maneuver (AI is still bad at it) - you probably missed this post and it might be revealing: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1176470/discussions/0/3767858179328362719/?ctp=4#c3757726349612485720.

Any PD coverage can be overwhelmed with missiles (even when creating dense swarms is removed from the game as I suggested in my bug-report - it will be just not as easy and safe as it is now) by a determined opponent and I think AI even now is much better at doing so than in the past. This is why I wonder what is the version of the game you base your observations on?

I am always playing on validation patch. AI never tries to bring in any kind of threatening missile spam. So, there is just no reason to talk about "what would you do against gazillion missile 'vettes?" because that will never happen in current patch.

Originally posted by Pawleus:

Yes, by "unacceptable losses" to me I would eg. mean loosing those 3 Dreads - they would be so unacceptable that I wouldn't even build them :) I prefer using highly maneuverable smaller ships (up to Destroyer) as they have better survivability, are much faster to build (so you have better fleets sooner) and in formations can defeat practically any fleet (it will be much more difficult when AI starts actually using formations, though - currently (0.3.76), any large fleet can be easily defeated in detail during combat by a highly maneuverable formation).

Practical difference in survivability and build times are negligible. But heavy wall formations have one unbeatable advantage: zero control required. Which saves absolutely ungodly amount of time and effort.