Fleet Advice, Please (~o-o)~

[Silver Heart TTV]

I finished a run with the UN and beat Cetana at x25. I do feel some luck was involved in my success and so I wanted to ask a few questions that I hope an experienced player could answer, please. I plan to do a run, next with the commonwealth of man.

1) What are the best all rounder designs for ships? I was mostly using dark matter and nanite tech by the end of the game after crushing a fallen empire before Cetana appeared. I've heard murmurs here and there, though, of 'torpedo corvettes' and 'arc emitter battleships'.

2) I've been wanting to increase the fleet power of a fleet tremendously but I've been struggling to even crack the 200k fleet power for a single fleet. Any advice?

3) How do I resist Cetana's overwhelming mommy vibes?

4) Lastly, how do you arrange the structures on your planets by default so there aren't any issues? I've been going with a minimum foundry, artisan, entertainment, police and stronghold structure setup on every world to maintain it and then use the second half of structures for whatever is required for specification.

Thank you for reading.

[Kufesska]

1)torpedo corvettes and arc emitter BS were a thing before patch 3.6

imho most universal and still effective ship builds now:

early-mid game - artillery cc+full missiles+afterburners destroyers/cruisers - will kite and destroy most enemies, except with heavy PD(FE like to have PD), btw cruisers less weak to pd cause of lower cooldown
disruptor destroyers/cruisers - still very effective, but i think paradox gave some hardening to FEs and possibly AI, so you still better check enemy ships loadout

and my favourite for midgame - Ancient Nano-Missile Cloud artillry destroyers
can kite with its range, ignore armor and shield like disruptors but have more base damage and bonus to hull, even smaller cooldown so pd not a big problem
but you need stable income of minor artifacts, best is to have Dyson Swarm on star with MA deposit from Message in the Bottle :)

mid-late game - carrier or artillery battleships
carrier CC can have a bug with preferable range, so maybe you should strip off all weapons with range less than 100
artillery battleships - energy x-slot + full kinetic artillery

late game with strong crisis - only artillery battleships with max damage energy+kinetic repeatables and possible range bonuses

don't know about earliest game(before even destroyers)

torpedos are useful too, but i am not a fan of them, so don't know builds

[Xaphnir]

Originally posted by Kufesska:

1)torpedo corvettes and arc emitter BS were a thing before patch 3.6

Pre-3.6 it was more giga cannon+neutron launcher battleships.

[Kufesska]

2)artillery BS fleets have a lot of fleet power, but fleet power is not always main thing
disruptor fleets can wreck others(without hardening) while having not so big fleet power

for lategame with artilelry BS fleets i usually jsut focus on energy and kinetic damage and attack speed repeatables

[Biggs]

am curious, did you get any lag in the late game?
if so how much? if not how did you not get lag? what is your cpu and ram?

[Kufesska]

Originally posted by Xaphnir:

Originally posted by Kufesska:

1)torpedo corvettes and arc emitter BS were a thing before patch 3.6

Pre-3.6 it was more giga cannon+neutron launcher battleships.

more - yes, even most
but torped corvettes(actually good against artillery BS fleets) and full bypass BS were a thing too
Cloud Lightning used to be long ranged L weapon, nicely paired with arc emitter

[Kufesska]

Originally posted by Silver Heart:

4) Lastly, how do you arrange the structures on your planets by default so there aren't any issues? I've been going with a minimum foundry, artisan, entertainment, police and stronghold structure setup on every world to maintain it and then use the second half of structures for whatever is required for specification.

not sure what exactly do you mean, but for every planet i first build robot assembly(if playig with them), then Autochthon Monument, then holo-theater, later also archaeo building for rare resources

for every basic and advanced resource i have specialised world, for maximum efficiency - a lot of districts of one type, building and orbital ring module to increase basic production

if your pops(factions) are happy you barely need Enforcers, administration building provides enough

holo-theatres(for highly populated planets upgraded) provide enough amenities usually

monuments gives a lot of unity and culture workers increase ethic attraction, with other bonuses from your ethics

i build strongholds mostly on fortress worlds - usually in choke point systems, with ton of soldiers, ftl-inhibitor and shield building, so enemy can't ignore them
or just on some planets with poor size and too low amount of basic resource districts available to specialise them as energy/mining

other building slots use mostly for research labs, sometimes for refineries or unity buildings if feel that i need them

[Guts]

1. I've been using all the weapons that target through shields and armor, and that tends to work very well. They're shorter range and do slightly less damage, but when you rip through HP directly, it doesn't matter. I should mention that you need a ridiculous amount of science to make this work, because you need to be able to keep researching the ship upgrades in order to stay ahead. But I rarely lose ships.

My defence platforms are just a ♥♥♥♥ ton of strike craft. Once again, you need a ridiculous tech level to make this viable, but the defence platform strike craft benefit from both the defence platform damage and strike craft damage research, so they end up snowballing to the point that AI doesn't want to try to fight them. My current game, I have citadels with 500k fleet power.

2. You need to up your research game. Once all techs are researched, the game gives you repeatable techs that give 5-10% bonuses on certain things. This is how you end up with fleets that have more power, despite being at max command capacity. I'm pulling 9k research per month in my current game, and each fleet has about 400k power because I keep researching damage on weapons that I'm using, shield hit points, and armor. The repeatable techs start increasing how much research is needed, so you need to keep expanding your science in order to keep researching fast. Stack as many research speed bonuses as you can. Keep your empire small in order to avoid crippling your research.

3. Be a machine empire gestalt consciousness. Her charms mean nothing to us. We seek only to <error> KEEP ORGANICS SAFE EVEN IF WE HAVE TO IMPRISON THEM ALL TO DO IT <error>

4. Balancing planets is a ♥♥♥♥♥. How you do it largely depends on the type of empire you're running. Never use automatic development, in my experience. In the early game, just aim to have spare houses and amenities, then fix other problems as they arise. Make each planet produce more than it uses, but don't create too many buildings at once, because the building upkeep will drain you if nobody is there to do the job. Later on, you can develop specific planets for specific resources, but your first few planets should be fairly balanced so that you don't lose the game because an enemy decides to take over your generator world.

A nice and easy way to go? Pick rogue servitor with rapid replicator. Having happy biotrophies on your planet increases your stability, which increases your output of jobs by up to 30%. As long as stability remains high, you won't have deviant pops, and you won't have any crime. When you have enough biotrophies to maintain 100% stability, shut off their reproductive rights. This also allows you to get ahead on research, because all your science jobs produce 30% more. The drawback is using energy and alloys to build your population, as well as assembly time. But with good research levels, that won't matter as much.