Is corvette spam still the meta

[Seldkam]

Title. It's what pushes me away pretty much every time I play, but I like to jump back in every year or so

[HappySack]

Why does it matter? unless you're some kind of multiplayer "leet" tryhard that can only gain satisfaction from playing against other people.

[Seldkam]

I'll take that as a yes, then? And no I don't play multiplayer.

[King Harold]

No, I think all ship types are viable.

[Geoff]

Originally posted by Seldkam:

I'll take that as a yes, then? And no I don't play multiplayer.

It does seem they're more interested in making small ships relevant in the late game than they are in liberating players from the need to keep building small ships by the time they reach the late game (you'd think fighter craft could handle it, but apparently not).

[Roadie]

All ship sizes have their place in a fleet, except for maybe Destroyers (which are basically a stopgap artillery ship until you get Cruisers).

In a complete fleet, corvettes are for anti-missile/fighter, doing chip damage on shields and armor, and for firing missiles (also just fodder to keep fire off your bigger ships). Frigates are dedicated Torpedo ships. Destroyers kind of fill a small missile screen role. Cruisers are the gunships and torpedo craft that keep the heat off your most important ships: the battleships. Battleships are the heavy hitters especially once they get spinal mount guns, and they're also robust fighter carriers.

You need ALL your ship types in a fleet.

[Malkuth]

No, is the answer. All corvette fleet will get you killed in late game. Now the king is cruisers.

You can get buy with an all corvette fleet, but your loses will be great. I tend to still build 1 fleet of all corvettes though when I have only a little room left for fleet cap. They do very well mixed with a very beefy station.

[★REM★]

Originally posted by HappySack:

Why does it matter? unless you're some kind of multiplayer "leet" tryhard that can only gain satisfaction from playing against other people.

This is quite wrong, if you play at higher difficulties th ship setup and fleet composition matters.

[Jimmy Hunter]

Battleship X-weapon mixed with Battleship Strikecrafts with Titans will still destroy AI fleets left and right. Corvettes are still awful once Destroyers come around with their early game L-weapons, and Crusiers can compliment your Battleships with L, Point Defense and Strikecrafts. Then there's Frigates that just kind of "exist". They're way too squishy and tend to get sniped out before they get in range with their Torpedoes to do serious damage to larger ships.

But at the end of the day, the AI sucks at designing ships and if you manage to get enough Intel on them, you can hard counter with any type of fleet that can gear up with what they're weak too.

[ShinZed]

I don't use corvettes after I get cruisers. They just die too quickly to be worth it even with 90% evasion. Then you have to build more and wait for them to rejoin the fleet.

Long range battleship or cruiser fleets are less likely to take casualties so they're my go to in late game.

[Red Purger]

It really depends. Pretty sure Corvette spam is hard countered by Fighters and disruptor cruisers. I once saw a massive corvette fleet get effortlessly smashed by a fleet of cruisers using only disruptors.
The downside of corvette spamming is that if you don't annihilate the enemy fleet in seconds, you lose half your ships. I've also seen people lose wars because their entire corvette fleet went MIA after a bad fight, and they forgot to set a retreat point, so the enemy player rushed their homeworld and bombed it into the ground before they could get the fleet back, which made them go bankrupt.

Honestly I don't really subscribe to the meta. I usually roleplay, and will also design my fleets for roleplay purposes. I like how my fleets look with a ton of variety. I like how the battles look with tons of different ships flying around doing different things. I think if you are playing multiplayer, you can't just play a specific strategy. You have to observe what your opponent is doing and predict/adapt to them.

[Legiondorf]

I want to test some new metas but lack of sale on last two dlcs is holding me up for new campaign - Paradox dlc sale please!!!

[al_x_ator2411]

I don't own some of the last DLC (especially the one with cloaking). Therefore I'm not sure how many new mechanics regarding the ship META were added after Overlord. So my opinion might be based on an older version of the game.

In my last two campaigns (from the start of the new year until now) very small ships (especially frigates) proved a liability after mid game. Like someone already said they are too squishy which leads to unnecessary losses and quick accumulation of War Exhaustion.

It does seem that, until you get X-slot Battleships and Titans, Cruisers are the new META. They can get L weapons, torpedoes, crafts, and antimissile and anti-craft components. Or an all M tier weapon build to fill with swarmer missiles or disruptors.

So I fill a fleet full of Cruisers (of various builds) and just add in a few Destroyers to top off the fleet naval cap. Losing 1-5 Destroyers after each big battle is a lot more manageable than losing 10-25 corvettes/frigates.

[Xaphnir]

Jump back in every year or so? When do you think corvette spam was the meta?

[Seldkam]

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Jump back in every year or so? When do you think corvette spam was the meta?

I'm not gonna lie dude, I don't remember lol. It's also entirely possible that it never was-- I am a pretty casual stellaris player so I don't have any way of gauging if that was correct or not.

[Salv]

Against vanilla AI, corvettes are not meta per se, it's disrupters. They got buffed through the roof since the ship rework and the vanilla AI does not understand how to invest into armor hardening to defend itself. In fact, the ship load outs it uses often seem completely random and are not efficient at all against much of anything. You can absolutely stick with pure disrupter corvettes and win your wars, even against GA AI, however I wouldnt recommend sticking with corvettes after you unlock destroyers. The AI likes to makes lots of beefy starbases with defense platforms stacked with things like autocannons and hangers that will cause corvette fleets to take huge attrition loses even if you win the wars. This will leave you constantly starved of alloys replacing your corvettes.