Ship Weapon Slot Mysteries

[Kalemenos]

It's my first game using ship design instead of leaving it to AI: huge learning curve, but very rewarding. Thanks to the on-line videos and articles so many of you have put time in, I really found them incredibly helpful.

So I'm tinkering with this battleship:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2955647661

1. There are 9 weapon slots at the top and nine on the bottom which are blank squares and I can't use them. Is there any way to "activate" those squares? How?

2. I noticed a FE had sizes I don't have on their battleships (H,X, and G to be precise). Can I upgrade the size of the weapon slots?

3. I want to fill all the slots with the best stuff, but I can't because I go beyond my power limit. Does ship "power" ever max out? In this example, earlier I had obtained a Curator and my research went through the ceiling (yay), so I'm wondering if I maxed out my power: a Dark Matter Core that gives 2000. But am I forever limited to that 2000?

[Twogs]

1. No, these are just the upper limits, some sections/ships might have 6, but not the battleship you see here. It is a purely UI thing, it is just displayed like that.

2. H is Hangar which requires fighters to be researched and then it is a section for cruisers and battleships. X is heavy weapons (spinal mounts), also a special section for battleships. You will see the research required (as the weapon has the X symbol, too). And the G is Torpedo, again a special research path. Sections only for Frigates and Cruisers

3. Power is supposed to be a limit, obviously. If you can just put everything you want, why have power in the first place? There are reactor boosters for the A slots though.

[Kalemenos]

Twogs, perfect, just what I needed to know, thanks for taking the moment to explain. Cheers!

[Kalemenos]

I also discovered that if I click at the top of the various sections, my options for slots changed, and then I got some of those slot sizes I hadn't seen before. Fun trying out new fleet builds on Awakened Empires, a real schooling in ship building!

[CrUsHeR]

If you design a ship, make sure to read the tooltips of the weapons first.

In your screenshot, the battleship uses a mix of missiles, disruptors, autocannons, plasma and lasers.
So let's try to imagine what happens if this ship approaches an enemy ship.



First thing to fire are the missiles. These would pierce the shields and damage the armor, but because it is only one missile, it will likely get shot down by PD defenses anyways. So one weapon we can scratch from the list.

Next to fire are the lasers in the L-Slots. These deal -50% damage to shields, so they are highly ineffective. Shields even regenerate during combat.

Then it depends on the ship computer. Does it have an Artillery computer? Then no other weapons will fire, because the ship maintains max range.
If it has a Line computer, it will advance to 50 range.

Assuming the enemy ship doesn't approach any further, this means that only the Laser in the M-slot will now also start firing. The Autocannons, Disruptors and S-Plasma only have a range of 30 so these will not fire a single shot.

If the enemy ship approaches below 50 range, the rest of the setup is still a desaster. The Disruptors will deal some very minimal hull damage barely enough to slowly grind down a corvette. The Plasma will join the Lasers trying to get through the shields, but with -75% efficiency. Just the Autocannon will finally start dealing some effective shield damage, and yet again it is alone on the job.



So from the theoretical numbers, a fleet of this battleship design would probably lose a battle against balanced battleships even if you would outnumber them 10:1.

[Kalemenos]

Didn't think of any of that. I was trying the approach of designating various weapons to deal with the various defenses: shields, armor, and hull. It seems like most of what you say revolves around ranges. The idea of range never even occurred to me. Thanks for the tips!

[CrUsHeR]

Before patch 3.6, there was a lot more freedom in which weapon combos could be viable.
The typical endgame fleet would be Battleships with a Giga Cannon and Neutron Launchers, plus a Titan with additional Neutron Launchers. But other mixes could work as well, like Arc Emitters or Strike Craft.

Now with the weapon component changes, basically everything is designed in a way that it doesn't have synergy. Or the ship behavior plainly prevents ships from doing their job (battleships never firing their X-slot because they never stop fleeing and such).



The one setup which always works for me:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2899720030

So the Whirlwind Missiles and Strike Craft both pierce shields. and directly work on armor/hull. If the target has shield hardening, they still work together to beat the shields first.

Since your fleet only consists of this weapon type, they can effectively overwhelm any PD / Flak defenses the enemy fleet can typically have.

It has active PD defenses to shoot down missiles, and your strike craft does attack enemy strike craft. So if in doubt, you'll have more of both than the enemy.

Ships with torpedo weapons shouldn't even come close, and even then your ships retreat faster than torpedoes can fly.

The artillery computer gives bonus range, and causes your ships to retreat to max range when enemy ships close in. And all your weapons can fire in every direction.
In fact your ships spread out in a circle, making it extremely hard for enemy ships to find a target. For that reason any modifiers adding speed and weapon range are godly for this setup.



All in all this is the best allround ship which works in any given situation.

Bonus - you only have to research repeatables for strike craft and explosive weapons, so you can fully focus on shield repeatables in the physics department. Combined with the fact that these weapons only require very little energy, it becomes the absolute king setup with the Psionic Shields (which can normally only be equipped if you also possess Dark Matter Power reactors)

[Kalemenos]

Wow, scary ship! My last game I was just learning how to design ships, I'm just starting a new game and putting more thought into it - you've revolutionized my thought process on it, so thanks again.

Some on the net say that the combat computers don't work like they're bugged or something. They'll see their fleet charge in without stopping, and assume the "retreat to long distance feature" is not kicking in. But it sounds like you would disagree and have success with them. I'll gamble on them doing what they say.

I don't recognize that icon for your ship's computer - that eye or whatever in glowing cyan. Mind if I ask what that is? Also - forgive me for being annoying - how did you get a screenshot of just the window of the BB?

[Elitewrecker PT]

That's the psionic computer.
There's also the synthetic/AI computer that has a red brain icon.
Those are the final tiers.

[CrUsHeR]

That's the precognition interface (artillery) you get from Psionic ascension, same like the psionic shields. I think the regular sapient artillery computer is actually better due to higher range increase.

IIRC the artillery ship computers malfunction if you use the spinal weapons, or anything with minimum range / firing arc. This ship has full 360° coverage though, and you can watch the ships fly back and forth as needed.

Also the carrier ship computer was broken in the 3.6 release, having the ships charge into melee range. Not sure if this was fixed (never used it)

The screenshot is simply cropped from the vanilla interface in 4K

[Mazey]

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

Before patch 3.6, there was a lot more freedom in which weapon combos could be viable.

That's a very unfair way of putting it.

The key thing is that an individual ship needs to be specialised. You can still have significant weapon diversity, it is just that the diversity needs to be spread across your fleet on different ships, not on just one ship.

Battleships and titans will happily fire their X slot, if the advancing ships are occupied by a corvette swarm and so don't advance.

[CrUsHeR]

Corvette swarms you have to replace after every battle; or the artillery battleships which no longer have an effective energy artillery weapon since the launcher became (crappy) torpedo weapons.

Show me any ship build, fleet composition, i can explain why they are junk. Only thing which always works is the battleship posted above. Likely they'll rather nerf that instead of fixing the broken/useless other weapons.



Just one example - make a fleet of 20 WW/Hangar battleships. Then add 4 cruisers with armored torpedoes. Just a couple of cruisers won't hurt, right? Lots of damage against large targets...

But in reality, as soon as combat starts, it goes *boom* and the cruisers are instantly dead.

Then you can iterate that downwards - put destroyers in to protect the cruisers, boom all destroyers dead, then the cruisers follow.

And every slot which isn't a battleship reduces your firepower and durability (point for point in fleet cap), and the ww/hangar battleships already have absolutely minimal losses on their own.

Lastly as explained, if you are going towards endgame, you research repeatables.
With 2 different weapon types, you could have 20 levels in each after X years.
With 4 different weapon types, you may only have 10 or so levels. So each of the weapons would only get a 50% bonus instead of 100%.

[Wraith_Magus]

It's annoying that the neutron launchers for some weird reason were made to fit into "torpedo" slots (in spite of being instantaneous and not being treated as a missile), but they're not crappy at all. In particular, against heavy targets like stations, titans, and battleships, they can do x33 damage, x17 damage, or x9 damage, allowing torpedo cruisers (set to artillery) to be devastating against larger targets, and neutron torpedoes often rival giga cannons, lances, and artillery for most damage in my damage reports. (Frigates certainly suck, though. The power cost of neutron launchers is so high that you can't have shields on any frigate using them without making that your only auxiliary slot.)

[Mazey]

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

Corvette swarms you have to replace after every battle; or the artillery battleships which no longer have an effective energy artillery weapon since the launcher became (crappy) torpedo weapons.

Show me any ship build, fleet composition, i can explain why they are junk. Only thing which always works is the battleship posted above. Likely they'll rather nerf that instead of fixing the broken/useless other weapons.



Just one example - make a fleet of 20 WW/Hangar battleships. Then add 4 cruisers with armored torpedoes. Just a couple of cruisers won't hurt, right? Lots of damage against large targets...

But in reality, as soon as combat starts, it goes *boom* and the cruisers are instantly dead.

Then you can iterate that downwards - put destroyers in to protect the cruisers, boom all destroyers dead, then the cruisers follow.

And every slot which isn't a battleship reduces your firepower and durability (point for point in fleet cap), and the ww/hangar battleships already have absolutely minimal losses on their own.

Lastly as explained, if you are going towards endgame, you research repeatables.
With 2 different weapon types, you could have 20 levels in each after X years.
With 4 different weapon types, you may only have 10 or so levels. So each of the weapons would only get a 50% bonus instead of 100%.

Cloaked frigates will absolutely annihilate your battleships.

And yes, corvettes have a tendency to die and need to be replaced, that doesn't mean they aren't useful in the battle.

[CrUsHeR]

Originally posted by Wraith_Magus:

It's annoying that the neutron launchers for some weird reason were made to fit into "torpedo" slots (in spite of being instantaneous and not being treated as a missile), but they're not crappy at all. In particular, against heavy targets like stations, titans, and battleships, they can do x33 damage, x17 damage, or x9 damage, allowing torpedo cruisers (set to artillery) to be devastating against larger targets, and neutron torpedoes often rival giga cannons, lances, and artillery for most damage in my damage reports. (Frigates certainly suck, though. The power cost of neutron launchers is so high that you can't have shields on any frigate using them without making that your only auxiliary slot.)

1) These are complete fantasy numbers. The real torpedo/launcher modifiers can be read here:

https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Weapon_components#Particle_Launcher

"2x damage against corvettes and frigates, 3x damage against destroyers, 5x damage against cruisers, 9x damage against battleships"

Means they are still super-bad, especially with the minimum range and firing arc.



2) Delivery method? You have the choice between Cruisers, which get 3 slots of these and the rest are S-Slots, which can only take missiles which are garbage if mixed with non-penetrating weapons. Or you put in any other weapon than a missile, then these slots have 30 range, meaning that the S-Slots or the Launchers can never fire simultaneously.

And the same Cruiser cannot equip Kinetic Artillery, which would be required to beat down shields first on the same distance. If these are on a different ship, it slows down the kill speed even more.

Or you can equip them on Frigates, which have a loss rate somewhere around 90% even if set to artillery. Low evasion, high build cost, minimal power so it can barely equip anything else than armor.

In fact, Corvettes and Frigates are so bad that even if you attack a single Void Cloud with an armada of 200k, some of these always manage to die. Remember these got their hull strength greatly reduced, the research for hulls only adds 10% (used to give something like +500), likewise the crystal plating contributes almost nothing.

Originally posted by Mazey:

Cloaked frigates will absolutely annihilate your battleships.

And yes, corvettes have a tendency to die and need to be replaced, that doesn't mean they aren't useful in the battle.

Literally no enemy in the game uses cloaking. Even if the AI would design such a ship, then its fleets still couldn't cloak because all ships need to be capable of cloaking in order to do that.

[Peter34]

The standard slot sizes are S, M and L.

4 S is equal to 2 M is equal to 1 L, Small, Medium, Large.

One X or Extra-Large slot is equal to 2 L slots, and that's Battleships only, long-range, powerful, but not good at all vs smaller ships, and it usually comes with some big gimps like a limited Firing Arc or minimum Range.

One H, Hangar slot, is equal to one L slot. These launch fighter craft, similar to the X-Wings from Star Wars.

I think one G - Guided (Torpedo or Energy Torpedo) slot is equal to one M slow, and I think one, P, Point Defence (Flak vs Fighters, or Point Defence vs Missiles and Torpedoe but not - I think - Energy Torpedos) is equal to one S slot, but not 100% sure about those two.

Missiles and Swarmer Missiles used to go in the G slot, but after the v3.6 update they go in S and M slots respectively, so G slots feel more specialized - only Frigates and Cruisers can have G slots IIRC.

A slots, Auxiliary, are for "special" modules down below, as opposed to defensive modules in the lower rows which are Shields, Armour and in some cases Hull (Crystals-based), with these being S, M or L usually based on ship size.

Then you have the slots for the... utilities. One FTL drive (this can be left empty, but you save very little by doing so), one Reactor (you can get more Power if needed, by putting Reactor Booster modles in the Aux slot(s)), one Radar module, one STL drive (I don't think you can leave that empty - you'd basically have a kind of Defence Platform if you did), and one Combat Computer module that can't be filled until you invent tier-1 Combat Comptuers.

Combat Computers have both a tier, and a Role. Bigger tier gives bigger bonuses, and Role determines what the bonuses apply to, as well as what behaviour the ship is to exhibit during combat, e.g. what range it "prefers" to be from the enemy.

And then there's Cloaking, which I haven't tried myself yet, since I've been on break from Stellaris for maybe 5-6 weeks, only now returning to the game.

Ship Hull Sections don't always have the exact same "slot weight", but mostly. For instance, one of the two Stern (rear?) sections for the Destroyer gets an extra A slot, relative to the other 2. Same with Cruiser and Battleship.

This seems to be a "compensation" for opting for having smaller weapon slots in the Section, but they have to be regular weapon slots, not P or G ones.