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The specific stats on weapons changed with the updates but the general ways to go about things have not really changed so even outdated guides would work, just not necessarily the specific parts about what weapon is the absolue best at everything.
This guide should work fine:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=911980839
The thing to remember is that if your ships are favouring a specific type of weapon (or defenses) they will have an easy time against some fleets and a harder time against others.
The default of "auto-best" tends to make sure you can hit both shields and armour fairly well and that you have a good balance between those defensively as well, which means your fleet will be average against everything.
In short, though, kinetic slug throwers are high damage weapons that are especially effective against shields but do reduced damage to armor. Lasers tend to perform more predictably and perform better against armor than shields. Armor is more expensive than shielding, but doesn't have a power requirement so depending solely on armor as a ship's defense would free up power for stronger weapons (which probably is only an issue in the early game before you get very powerful reactors). Shielding regenerates quickly between battles on it's own without the aid of docking at a station, and a fleet with heavily shielded ships may be able to survive multiple engagements better than a fleet with ships depending on armor or just hull to survive. Missiles are fairly powerful but individually they are pretty easy to shoot down and don't track very well, meaning they don't counter the evasiveness of smaller craft, although they have limited retargeting ability, and tend to bypass shields. Interceptors are extremely good damage-per-second on top of possessing shield bypass and being very effective against armor, but they can be shot down by point defenses and they also do very little damage but very quickly, which means larger weapons systems with front loaded damage may be able to first strike their carriers before they are able to engage and make up the difference with their increased rate of damage dealing.
So, depending on the configuration of the enemy fleet, the location of your engagement (i.e. neutron stars reduce sublight speed 50% and increase the amount of time spent at any given combat distance by a considerable margin, pulsars completely negate shielding for all forces in their systems), and other factors, you may not need to match an opposing force in fleet power in order to achieve your goals for an engagement. Read up on the system as you play.
You're completely missing how weapons affect enemy retreat chance (hint: weapons with most damage per shot are the best, with single exception of Arc Emitter & Cloud Lightings).
But ofk if you're playing on small maps it isn't important. I find it's most important on large maps playing genocidal empires vs whole world - when I really don't want nasty aliens to recover their fleets after battles rapidly.
Manual planning can create fleet with special weakness/strength. For example you can spam torpedo corvettes which gives you easy win even against stronger fleets, if they got no PD. If they got PD however, then they lose badly.
Probably most important part is at the end-game crisis. Unbidden for example use shields ONLY. So you can spam all the kinetic weapons, torpedos, and missiles in the world for some serious advantage.
In general there are 4 ship types. Or you could say meta.
Battleships equipped with giga cannon+neutron launchers.
Cruisers equipped with medium gauss cannons, lasers, and picket computers.
Corvettes equipped with gauss cannons, and lasers/plasma.
Destroyers filled with PD.
Battleships counter the Cruisers. They got bigger range, damage, and defense.
Corvettes counter the Battleships. Battleships tracking is low, and overshooting the Corvettes.
Cruisers counter the Corvettes. Cruisers' picket computer+medium weapons negate the Corvettes huge evasion. While they also got much greater defense in the old fashioned way.
PD Destroyer is all about countering enemies with missiles/torpedos. Those stuff can do wonders, but they can be HARD countered. Like if enemy spams missiles, then a full PD fleet can beat them 1 to 10.
Keep in mind that the rest are soft counters. So you aren't going to beat a twice larger fleet even, if you are supposed to be counter it. AI uses balanced stuff, and in my experience Battleship+Cruisers are enough. 2 Battleship for each Cruiser.
I also use an extra Destroyer fleet with artirely stuff in lategame. I call it rapid deployment fleet. It's puspose is to take out undefended systems quickly as possible. Their power is low so, if enemy comes in with big fleet, then they just run.
Special meta: Cloud Lightning. Not sure, if it's still works. It had the best mineral/fleet power ratio, and the worst fleet number/fleet power ratio. Technically the repeatable techs were meant to make those the strongest, but even 50 repeatables weren't enough to beat other metas in equalized fleet numbers.
Not without torpedoes against Arc&CL battleships.
They don't. Best counter for corvettes is destroyer with NT+whatever. Cruisers main weakness that they will be wiped by BB long before they able to "counter" corvettes.
What you mean by it?
thnx for that big post i will try like you say