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Thanks!
How do you usually fit your frigates and destroyers before researching cruisers?
Thank you again.
I tried playing a new game today and messed around the ship design screen. Not so hard and I´ve done a lot of things!
Honestly, set all ship designs to manual, and if you have any medium/large-sized ships like medium explorer ships, just set the whole hull to obsolete until you actually have a need for the extra hull space. Build non-combat ships you want to spam like crazy to be as economical as possible - you're going to be using some of these ships for a hundred years, but the maintenance cost of a ship has a base value of ~5% of its original build cost, so you're going to pay several times the original build cost just in maintenance of any ship you're not going to send into combat over time...
As for other tips:
1. Look at the maintenance costs while you add or remove components. Note that most components don't list an actual price, but they require specific materials, and those materials have a price (it can be partially affected by supply, so if you have a shortage of something, it starts to cost more), and that price determines the maintenance value. When you research an "upgrade" tech where it's something like "proton engine (v3)", those cost the same as lower-tech parts, but the "acceleros engine" will cost several times as much as the proton engine (v3) - this is why there are techs that upgrade older equipment even though it seems like a technological dead-end - you generally want cheap but functional stuff for your non-combat ships. You can cut the maintenance costs of your civilian ships down by two thirds just by not letting the automation go for medium or large sized ships that don't have an actual advantage over the small ships... The exceptions are for whatever components are critical to a ship, including hyperdrives, which are critical to all ships. Paying more to get a ship there on time is always worth the added price.
2. Look for maintenance saving equipment. This is mostly the entertainment center - add this to absolutely every ship besides your smallest vessels that absolutely can't squeeze in 10 more size. It literally pays for itself, especially on common ships like construction, exploration, and hauler ships. Getting techs that upgrade command centers, crew quarters, and entertainment modules all improve maintenance costs, but only one of a type of module matters. (I.E. two crew quarters doesn't give you double the discount.)
3. Maximize the components that actually matter to that kind of ship. Freighters need cargo capacity, your most efficient hyperdrive (go for the fuel-efficient hyperdrive line to save basically an entire reactor you don't need to add just to power the more expensive hyperdrives), an entertainment module, and the most basic stuff that can make the ship functional. Things like engines don't matter so long as they have any functional engines (proton drives are fine) - they're going to spend 99% of their time in hyperdrive, anyway. Put everything you can into cargo capacity, because that's the freighter's ONE JOB. Don't bother making a medium freighter if its ratio of cargo capacity to maintenance costs isn't higher than the small freighter - often the freighters can't even fill their cargo holds, anyway. A passenger liner that has twice the passenger modules will make twice the money from tourists, while filling its hull with weapons it never uses just costs you money for no return.
4. Similarly to the above, note that there is only one slot that fits a large mining engine, but more than one small mining engine in a mining station. I fit one large engine and three small engines in my large mining station design, which means it mines 2.5 times as fast as the default design. (Just realizing this part alone instantly solved my caslon shortage...)
5. If it's not a combat ship, it doesn't need weapons or top-of-the-line armor. (Some ships might need ion shielding if you're going into nebulae, though.) A simple deflector (v2) weighs less and is much cheaper than later shields, and ultimately, you can save enough not heavily protecting your ships to afford to replace the ones you might occasionally lose, while arming your freighters isn't going to save any of them from even mild pirate attacks, anyway.
6. Set non-combatant tactics (in the buttons up top) to something like "enemy nearby" or "enemy in same location" and they will do the one thing that actually protects non-combatants - running from enemies before they come into range.
7. Haakonish actually have a really great tech in high-capacity fuel tanks they get very early. If you're not haakonish, find an empire that is, then steal their fuel tank tech with spies. (You can steal it even if you can't research it.) These cost as much as basic fuel tanks, but store 150 caslon, which is as good as the first tier of large fuel tanks (tier 4 tech, IIRC) but costs the same as the tier 1 tech fuel tank. Two fuel tanks are enough for most ships once you have the efficient hyperdrives, although you can put three on the explorers.
8. For some very basic stuff, just remember to have energy collectors equal to or greater than your static power consumption. They don't provide power to anything else, but they prevent your ship from consuming fuel just sitting still. Likewise, make sure your ship's reactors cover the hyperdrive, or you have a serious cut to the speed of the ship.
9. Use the "copy as new" button instead of "upgrade". This means the old version isn't marked obsolete. Use "edit" and look at the top-mid-right, and set the "upgrades to" to "none" until you're ready to actually set what that ship type should upgrade to. This lets you manually control these things and actually build some specialized craft (like space stations for nebulae that don't have shields in a place that constantly drains shields). You can do this to have, say, one line of small explorer ships that only has the quicker "scanner" exploration and then another line of small explorer ships that has the surveyor type, so that all your explorers aren't spending five years searching one small moon, only to say there's something still there they couldn't find while there's habitable planets still undiscovered in the same system...
10. Be careful when you allow the game to retrofit automatically. That generally means "as soon as there's any spare money in the budget and the current job is done" even if it's an explorer ship that just spent 3 years flying to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, having just gotten back out there from the last time you had an explorer ship upgrade. (Your private sector also dumps all its money into retrofitting as soon as you upgrade any civilian ship design.) You might want to set those to manual retrofitting only, and just look over the explorer ships for what needs upgrading from time to time.
Wow. I did not know this. Even went to designer to check and this works. I've only ever put the Entertainment modules on stations.
Tonnage is usually pretty tight on combat ships, but could definitely use this on civilian ships, though probably at a cost to range or cargo space due to slot limits.
My only tip would be look at the default retreat settings for combat ships. Default is usually to retreat if "20% of non-defence components are damaged", but that could include the reactor, leaving you stranded, so safer to set it to "Shields below 20% or armour below 50%" or even "Shields below 50% or any armour damage". This way you ships will leave the battle and if you have damage control they'll repair themselves and at the very least their shields will recharge.
This is a treasure trove of tips! Thank you, sir!
For PD, note that there's a special PD that is a "point shield generator" or something like that unlocked off of shield research. This is the only PD that is effective against direct-fire wepaons!. Note that you still want other PD (like the buckler or beam-based PD) to protect you from fighters, however.
For formations, note that the computer-based formations (like everything else automation) is garbage. Don't use picket ships or anything like that, it just prevents you from focusing firepower and puts your most vulnerable ships in the most direct line of fire.
I personally micromanage any combat that's even remotely close. I use what I call the "grinding wheel" tactic that I've used since Homeworld and games like Nexus: The Jupiter Incident that always seems to work in space games; Basically, watch what ship is taking a beating, then manually order it to move back behind other ships so that it's at long range. If you run your ship behind some of your other ships, ally PD will blast those projectiles coming by out of space to cover your retreating unit. The enemy will start targeting a closer ship of yours, instead, while forgetting the retreating ship, which can just come back in and fire away until the enemy decides to target it again, hopefully after it's had some time for shields to recharge. Doing this, you can ideally keep your whole fleet's shield recharge rate working to your advantage instead of just one ship's whose shields are being overwhelmed. (At higher techs, you can even have a shield recharging specialist ship behind the frontlines you can have power-recharging shields.) As you start to reduce enemy numbers by focusing fire (make sure to manually focus fire on a single ship at a time) until they're either disabled or trying to jump to safety (in a close battle, let them jump to safety - you want to focus on reducing incoming fire as fast as possible), you keep your numbers the same as theirs starts to decline. I've won several battles where I was seriously outnumbered without losing any ships (or even taking damage my damage control couldn't repair) by simply cycling ships back as they started to take fire.
I'd also recommend making some ships equipped to board. Early on, you can actually get some good tech just boarding pirate ships and stealing their tech by setting the stolen ships to be taken to the breakers. Look in your national policy settings, and under "military" there are options for "immediately scrap for cash", and you can make a profit off of any ships you steal and then just blow up. (It's stupid they give you money for letting them explode when they already have a system for retiring a ship that they could just relabel "scrap" and use as-is, but whatever...) Early on, you can set up an escort/fast escort with two assault pods, an ion weapon, a PD, a shield and armor, then have it charge in to capture once an enemy's shields are down. Note that the assault crew doesn't need to survive - the assault pods just regenerate from nothing after 20 seconds. You typically need at least two ships' worth of boarding parties to take on any but small craft. You can also outright steal the entire private sector of an enemy empire like this, then upgrade their stations to make them your own model for cheap. Stealing caslon mining stations in enemy territory is particularly useful. Early on, pirates will have better tech than you (they can even show up in cruisers), so if you steal some of their ships, sending them to the breakers (or even just using ships bigger than you can currently produce outright) is a good way to bootstrap your military early on.
Remember that if a ship is "[Disabled]", it might need a construction ship to come along and repair it, and if you set construction ships to "auto-salvage", they will follow around and repair things as well as pick up all those bits of debris that fly out of destroyed ships. (In particular, look for things like super capacitors, which are boxes with bright glowy bits on them, or reactor cores, or computer cores - those can sometimes have special rewards like maps or even technologies like the diplomatic techs for that race. Cargo pods can also contain resources, especially if you blew up a freighter. If there was an admiral/general onboard a ship, look around, and there's going to be an escape pod - pick this up before anyone else does, even if you have to manually order a military ship to do it. This contains their admiral/general, and you can either recruit them or ransom them back to the empire they belong to for a ton of goodies.)
- Always use damage control/repair bots. It matters a lot.
- If you can squeeze in a medical bay this can also help reduce incoming damage. This should be secondary though.
- Use two types of weapons at least, make sure they synergize well with what you want them to do. For example, kinetics with missiles.
- Don't hesitate to escort spam if you need military ships but can't afford larger hulls. They hold their weight, are cheap and quick to produce, and have very higher countermeasures (keeps them from being hit). They're pretty much the kings until everyone gets to tech5 or so (targeting system improvements).
- Put targeting and/or countermeasures on all your ships. It matters much more than you might think.
- Use fusion instead of quantum reactors. Quantum reactors have terrible fuel consumption, it will make things difficult for your fleets when they need to move significant distances. (use quantum on stations instead)
- Equinox hyperdrives are the fastest default drive out of the 4 available at that tier. At some point speed matters more than anything else.
For civilian ships_
- Use countermeasures. Targeting doesn't matter as much, since they're mostly going to be running from combat.
- For freighters put multiple cargo holds and fuel tanks in them, especially if you signed a trade agreement with someone far away from you.
For stations_
- DPS weapons are generally better, since you will eventually need to deal with enemy fleets attacking your worlds. Using long range weapons to help deal with pirates is viable, but the stations still need ships doing their jobs.
- Use hangers liberally. Once you get enough strike craft in the air it is more effective than any weapons on board the stations.
- Use quantum reactors for stations. There is no reason not to in this case.
- Mining stations can have MULTIPLE small mining engines. This can help if you're having resource shortages. That's also why mining stations have such large hull space.
- Putting a small mining engine on a space station can also help with certain resource shortages, especially on newly founded planets.
While I haven't done testing on all this, fighters are a massive money pit if their ship construction costs are to be believed. Basically, four fighters are worth as much as one escort, but an escort is much more powerful, much more survivable (which means you aren't constantly recurring those costs to rebuild them), and even more importantly can actually move between systems or locations on opposite ends of a system to protect more than one.
Pirates attack when they have a "strength overmatch" in strictly local terms, so even if you build a mining station with weapons, the pirates will just send more ships to attack it and the mining station will be overmatched anyway. It honestly makes more sense to have some escorts or frigates set to guard the sun with an engagement range of "this system", then leave some "undefended" mining stations around so you get attacked by pirates too few in number to actually fight off the reinforcements. I just give mining stations some PDs and low-grade shields to survive the 10 seconds it takes the reinforcements to show up.
There is never a reason to use quantum reactors; they simply suck and you spend more money to waste more fuel. Remember that 90% of your stations are never going to see combat, so any money spent on defenses for them is just lighting your money on fire for no benefit.
It is cheaper to have two fission reactors than even a single fusion reactor, there's just a tradeoff in a small loss of caslon efficiency. The overall value difference is questionable and depends on caslon shortages in your empire. A fission reactor costs 76 credits to build, 2-4 credits per year to maintain (depending on how much you reduce maintenance), while a fusion or quantum reactor costs 450 credits to build and 13-20 credits per year to maintain (and again, you're going to keep these ships and stations for hundreds of years.) I'd like to stress you're spending basically SIX TIMES AS MUCH to get less than twice the power output. The only reason to use a fusion reactor is to save on size to power ratio most of the time. On stations, where you're usually not using all your size just to save on maintenance costs, anyway, you have no reason not to use fission or even basic reactors exclusively, because reducing maintenance costs is paramount.
In particular for mining stations, you might have 5 battleships, but you'll have 500 mining stations, and you're going to keep them for several hundred years, so every credit of maintenance you add to your mining stations is burning tens of thousands of credits in the long run. (Yes, that's a private economy expense, but the private economy gives you all its money eventually, so it's not a really major difference.)
And I stress maintenance costs for a reason. See, Stellaris also had this problem earlier on, where they made every tech tier of weapon do something like 30% more damage, but cost 3 times as much because they assumed that you'd just have an economy that was stronger to match as you teched up. This led to players abusing swarms of "naked corvettes" (that is, entirely evasion-focused military ships of the smallest size with no armor or shields to make them cheaper) and just Zerg Rushing the enemy with disposable units being objectively more cost-effective than using higher tech weapons and armor. The thing is, Stellaris actually has a cap on the max fleet size you can support, so getting more power per hull size out of your ships actually matters.
In Distant Worlds, however, there is nothing besides the maintenance costs and how much pathfinding your CPU can handle before spontaneously combusting actually constraining your fleets. Hence, if you can make a ship that is 80% as effective but costs 50% as much by using lower-tech components, then BUILD TWO OF THE CHEAPER, LOWER-TECH SHIPS FOR EVERY ONE OF THE HIGHER-TECH SHIPS YOU'D OTHERWISE BUILD! It's just objectively superior to show up with 160% combat power in two hulls.
There is: you can use a single reactor in many designs with it. It certainly is fuel inefficient, but fuel logistics aren't that hard to overcompensate for. Still, I generally agree that the fusion is better, but quantum is absolutely not without use on ships.
I say with confidence that Caslon isn't hard to handle: there's several ways to make it trivial.
Its the same with quantum engines: less space used, still plenty of propulsion.
Deucalios shields share a similar fate, being quite inferior at regeneration rate (which is a big deal), but they use a lot less power and compensate with higher capacity (these conbined are a big deal too). Perfect for disposable ships.
While it's certainly easy to be swimming in caslon, there are some other knock-on effects on the economy that also need to be accounted for. Basically, just because you have caslon doesn't mean much unless you have caslon where you need it, or that caslon is just "free" because you mined it yourself.
To start with, how about inside your fuel tanks? To compare apples to apples, let's compare tier 3 techs fission reactor (v3) versus the quantum reactor, which consume 1.821 caslon per 1000 energy and 2.522 caslon per 1000 energy, respectively, or, for the same power output, the quantum reactor needs 40% more fuel. You'll notice a yellow dashed line around a ship on the zoomed-out galaxy map. One of my freighters can use a fission reactor (v2) and a callista-dal hyperdrive and get from one end of the galaxy to the other on about 300 fuel contained in two fuel containers. Just changing that out to a quantum drive means I'm consuming 40% more fuel, which means I need to carry 40% more fuel, which means I need to add another fuel tank just to have the same acceptable amount of range. Fuel tanks are size 10, while the size savings of a quantum reactor vs. a fission reactor is only 6 size, so there goes the size savings!
But hey, let's say you want that equinox drive because "speed is all that matters," and you need the extra power to avoid having to take a second fission drive (which would still be 1/3rd the price and have lower maintenance than the quantum drive.) Well, the base model callista-dal gets 11.3 k distance per unit of energy, or 6214.0 k per unit caslon on a fission reactor v2, while an equinox drive gets 8.24k distance per unit of energy, or 3266.8 k distance per unit caslon... or basically, you're burning twice the fuel to go the same distance, all to go 25% faster. Now you need to add another fuel tank to compensate, so you're even further in the hole on size and also, you're spending more on maintenance costs to do it. (To be clear, though, there is a reason to use the equinox drive for rapid response military units, but it's not a good idea to use the quantum drive to power it.)
But wait! There's more! You see, there's a reason why the US military wants to invest so heavily in electric or other fuel-efficient vehicles, and it's not because they care about the environment. It's because if you want to go somewhere, you need to bring the fuel with you. (This is also why you had a 40 mile convoy stuck outside Kyiv because some countries don't understand logistics...) And if you consume twice as much caslon, that means you need to ship twice as much caslon back to every colony or fueling station. That means you need at least twice as many freighters dedicated just to the job of moving caslon. Even presuming you have no problem sourcing enough caslon, it's still a fact that you're going to need to mine more caslon, and thus set up more mining stations further afield from your main supply lanes and thus spend more time sending caslon back to the fuel stations. And remember - all this time, those extra freighter trips are themselves burning twice as much fuel, so with twice as many trips, those caslon freighters functionally burn four times the fuel because there's twice as many ships burning twice the fuel and possibly going further doing it. Those extra caslon freighters and mining stations all have a maintenance cost associated with them, as well.
Also, go to your economy page, scroll to near the bottom where it says "private fuel" - you're spending twice as much on this than you otherwise would. That's usually a pretty big number, tens of thousands of credits by the time you're unlocking tier 3 techs, and getting to be hundreds of thousands of credits by tier 4. Now, all that money the private sector is spending per year on fuel is money they're not spending on buying more freighters or other ships that run your economy, which get your luxuries delivered, which get your colonies to have higher population growth rates, which get you a larger economy that has a bigger tax base to build more things and grow even faster. (And those ships they could buy would be about 375 credits cheaper and have 12 less maintenance costs, meaning that they could buy even more ships than that... which is a lot when you consider my small freighter costs ~3,200 credits and has a maintenance cost of 122 credits in my current game. That's easily a couple dozen extra freighters per year, and potentially a hundred overall in the long term in savings that can go to bulking up the rest of the economy.)
4X games are ultimately about geometric growth, and having slightly higher geometric growth rates leads to compounding advantages that snowball until you're unstoppable. The difference between 4 and 5% population growth rate doesn't seem like much, but geometric growth rates are a scary thing. The 5% growth rate doubles in about 14 years, while 4% doubles in 17. In 50 years, a 5% growth rate leads to 12.0 times the original size, while a 4% growth rate leads to 7.68 times the original size, and again, ONLY maintenance costs matter as far as how much military you can support, so now you have ~50% more economy to work with, so you have ~50% more military to fight your wars with. Ruthless efficiency is the name of the game, so
And if your fuel network can't even keep caslon on a few stations then quantum reactors on said stations are not the main problem.
Fighters, same deal. Money isn't usually the issue, its raw firepower when an enemy does show up. On stations masses of fighters are worth more than any amount of armaments when it comes to defending the planet itself since fixed weapons have limited range, and inferior DPS to fighter+bomber swarms.
Speaking from experience, swarms of strike craft from orbitals are almost broken powerful against anything but a hive carrier (and even then sometimes).
There is no benefit to quantum reactors on stations that can easily fit fission reactors, especially when you're wasting tons of money maintaining stations that aren't going to fight.
Money ALWAYS matters. Money is the ONLY TRUE CAP ON HOW MANY SHIPS YOU CAN MAINTAIN (although caslon definitely can matter). I can guarantee you that your 12 fighters coming out of a station to defend a sector would get crushed by the 60 destroyers brimming with PD I can afford with my better-managed economy.