Craver Ship Design Help

[Kyo]

Any experienced players? All I see is extremely old guides, when everything worked differently.

Up to date designs and information about ship/fleet setups? Where is it?

Would love to learn more, but I seem to be probing in the dark hoping to get lucky, which is a bit sad.

[Sloan]

Originally posted by Kyomaku:

Up to date designs and information about ship/fleet setups? Where is it?

hotkey F5

[Kyo]

If you're trying to be useless, at least make it funny

[Sloan]

Originally posted by Kyomaku:

Would love to learn more, but I seem to be probing in the dark hoping to get lucky, which is a bit sad.

Equip ships with weapons to your taste and resources.
Is there the best possible "kinetic"? Equip her. And use the appropriate combat tactics cards for close range. Look at the design of your opponent's frigates. do they have lasers and armor? answer them with better kinetics and energy shields.
Your ships of the starting design will come in handy in the middle of the game as kamikaze scouts

[💖 Officer Hotpants 💖]

This is advice for every species but I typically split up the heaver ship classes (hunter and dreadnought/carrier) into specialized beam & kinetic designs. Allows me to make them individually stronger as I can equip them with just the one relevant damage booster (freeing a slot) and double down on that damage type to squeeze all the extra power I can out of them while still maintaining balanced fleets (just fill them with roughly even numbers of both types). As well as allowing me to form specialized fleets as necessary.

The one exception is that, when playing races with more weapon slots to work with, I may toss a flak module for safety's sake. Otherwise the early defender class gets loaded with flak & flak boosters to serve as cheap missile & squadron defense.

As for support modules, repair mods are usually a safe bet. Especially the flotilla-wide ones. They're individually weaker than the equivalent single-ship versions but they stack. Pop them on the smaller ships and they can add up fast.

[Kyo]

What about the missiles, then? They have generally much higher DPS and are long range, but considering you can build anti missile guns against them, how good is it to use them?

It's obv different vs AI and player, not sure how well the AI defends vs missiles.

[Freny]

1) Missiles are pretty useless, 1 module of bullets cancels out 2 modules of missiles at long range. Swarm missiles help "distract" bullets, but missiles overall is a bad tactic.

2) The way the combat system was designed in this game, bigger ships > small, and Bombers > All because Fighters don't work and are useless. Thus, end game is Carriers full of bombers and stacked on bottom lane.

[Kyo]

Lol I see, I'll stop using missiles and just use the strongest projectile that is not a missile.

Then do you perhaps have Ship / Fleet setup suggestions for Cravers specifically in early mid and late?

[💖 Officer Hotpants 💖]

I use swarm missiles to cover for fighters but that's about it. Occasionally I'll plop some missiles into a spare slot just for a bit of variety but I find missiles are borderline useless past the early game unless you spam whole fleets of missile boats.

[climbingeastofwinter]

It can be useful to have a generalized fleet to intercept any attacks in a given system, and some smaller specialized groups of ship designs that you can swap in and out after you're relatively confident you won't be attacked to whip up a fleet that counters whatever your fleet is likely to be matched against when they attack.

Missiles are a solid choice if your opponent doesn't have sufficient kinetic weapons to counter them; once a given lane is emptied of opposing units, your ships in that lane will fire at units in other lanes from long range regardless of what range they've close to in their own lane, assuming you're on auto resolve, or you're watching the fight but your ships haven't moved to a position where their weapon firing arcs don't cover any opposing units. I think. I mostly leave it on auto resolve (no watch) because I suspect it doesn't care about firing arcs as much in that mode.

[Kyo]

If that long range thing is true, then that really sucks, cause the main weapon I used was short range and terrible at long range...

[Khodos]

Happy to show you one of my best race/fleet set ups