Ancient Pulse Armor (and other ancient armaments) are impractical.

[Exzenosis]

When needing to mass produce fleets to fight enemies with and quickly replenish, it's best to rely on something solid like Alloys or even some of the rarer resources since those are relatively inexpensive (the highest you'll see in a big fleet size is roughly ~200 per one resource).

With a mid-game fleet of 110, needing to upgrade my ships with just Ancient Pulse Armor costs well over 1.2k minor artifacts, per fleet. And while I won't complain so hard if it wasn't for the fact that in auto-best ship designs; APA seems to trump Lvl 5 Armor & Shields outright or being exactly on par (if not a little worse depending on how you weigh uneven armor/shield ratios) that the weights of which to choose favor APA.

A singular corvette with 3-APAs costs (ignoring alloys) 22.8 minor artifacts; who in their right mind would invest in that for even one ship? Not even big ships are worth it with their hefty 80 per Cruiser built, not even the Battleship is expensive with their 72 per build, but at least the Battleship's ratio of Alloy to Minor Artifact, it seems somewhat reasonable.

To factor in my machine empire that has maxed out alloy production well over 1K and will continue to rise, here is the cost of my ships using APA with the MA ratio to show what I mean.

Corvette; 216.6 Alloy / 22.8 MA = 9.5 Alloys per MA
Destroyer; 429 / 48 = 8.9
Cruiser: 891 / 80 = 11.1
Battleship: 1559 / 72 = 21.7 (Now for whatever reason, the game doesn't want APA on my Battleships while the rest do).

Now, again, this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Minor Artifact production really doesn't get any higher than say exotic resources like Rare Crystal or Volatile Moles (and in fact, you can fabricate those easy compared to Minor Artifacts). Ancient tech is impractical because it's just too expensive, even for a sidegrade.

[Sedmeister]

I got caught out by this today. Discovered APA. Awesome.

Accidentally wandered into a system with loads of those crystal shard ships. Fleet got shredded and I had to rapidly rebuild my fleet. I didn't realise that the artifact cap was quite low.

I think they need to rethink artifact economy. Maybe, like other rare resources, make it so you can buy them once you can produce them? Or at the very least, set the cap much higher otherwise after battles, like you said, the bottleneck will be artifacts.

[Dustreaper]

I feel it's fine but the problem is you will get stuck with fleets that aren't full because you cannot afford the artifacts. If it was seamless like a battleships with 2 designs and if there isn't enough resources to will fall back to the other that would be amazing. I don't expect to field my entire nation in ancient artifacts because that's unrealistic even from a lore perspective it needs to be limited. But the way it is now it adds so much micro to fill up your fleets with them. Like click reinforce then see you cannot afford it al manuallly remove the artifact battleships and add normal one for every fleet feels painful to me every engagement.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

i use one module at a time on things that are not called battleships or carriers thus don't get spammed

if i somehow got too many i'd slowly upgrade the cannon fodder

[Gunlab]

Think the point is that u make 1 or 2 fleets thats AWSOME. I always have make Vanilla (alloy) Battleships my main stay.

[Vovarush]

BUT MUH MENACING SHIPS (they do have those modules for free)

[Bedge]

So basically what you are suppose to do is not use artifact stuff on anything below cruiser

[Sola Di Ryuvia]

If you have enough passive relic earned it really isn't that bad tbh. I had multiple fleets all using relic armor instead of shields or armor and they ended up shredding everything in their way even enemy fleets way above their power. They used Relic beam weapons and Relic armor only till i obtained the relic shield as well.

[mss73055]

These weapons are way expensive and there's only one decent one.
+ Relic point defense is 20% better than T3 and a lot more expensive

- Relic fighters are about T2 and a lot more expensive
- Relic lasers are 10% worse than T4 and a lot more expensive

-- Relic swarmer missiles are 50% worse than T1 swarmers and a lot more expensive
-- Relic gauss guns are about T2 coil guns and a lot more expensive


^and this is with ascension perk. I'm sorry, this is jaw dropping garbage.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

relic PD can counter the relic swarm putting one on your ship makes it mathmatically as strong as 10 normal PD
Relic swarm fits in S slot making it fantastic to ruin enemy PD
Relic gauss is legitimate garbage, 50% accuracy? wtf **i did try to make this work stacking as much accuracy as possible, it didn't**
Relic fighters + some normal artillery = a fun combo, Relic fighters **melt** corvettes and woe to any corvette that puts on shield hardening when the swarm missiles come knocking
Relic Lasers can wreck through heavy armored ships that the AI uses, however i never bothered to slot them as i'd prefer longer range weapons in every slot.

Relic X slot is meh since most enemy AI ships are heavily stacked on armor now
Relic Titan beam is interesting since its range is reduced

my preference to battleship swarms with some supporting carriers to screen out destroyer/corvette swarms means its relatively easy on the relic uses when my battle ships are basically normal, but my carriers get some of the fun things. - i'll toss on an armor or shield upgrade for the battleships provided i don't have psychic / dragonscale/ darkmattershields

all in all theres the new hardening mechanic

[Cinnamoon_dragon]

I noticed this when I had about 90,000 alloys, but the shipyard wouldn't let me build new ships. I had the Rubricator that allowed me to generate 600 artifacts per use but even that was not enough to create a fleet that could compete in size with the fleet of the crisis empires. To be honest, I never looked into the component classes and their differences, because this part of the game with the editor seemed too boring to me and crushing the enemy with a primitive military mass has worked just fine so far.
I like your avatar with Jack Frost by the way

[Ryika]

The only real change that needs to happen in my opinion, is that the auto ship builder should not include items that require minor artifacts in its designs.

[Exzenosis]

Originally posted by Crescidious:

So basically what you are suppose to do is not use artifact stuff on anything below cruiser

Basically what Ryika is proposing on why I've got a rod up my ass over it.

Originally posted by Ryika:

The only real change that needs to happen in my opinion, is that the auto ship builder should not include items that require minor artifacts in its designs.