Stellaris Meta Battleship Ship Design - The Machine Age

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Hello, very interesting. The only thing I would like is for you to add an image at the end of each fight showing the configurations and who won and who lost.

I never had the wrinkles to properly build ships. I second the other comment, a little after-battle image would be great. Keep up the good work

I love your ship design videos, keep em coming!

With picket computers and enigmatic decoders to buff the tracking as high as possible, lightning/disruptor/nano cloud missile cruisers could be an interesting build. They’d have the high tracking to take out corvettes and could maybe hold their own against battleships. That combo works great on the fallen empire escort ships that you can get through the crisis tree. Not sure how cruisers would do.

Although I know it is expensive from a minor artifact perspective always wondered who would come out on top between a traditional artillery battleship comp and a ruination beam artillery with two slots of ancient pulse armor with the archeotech perk. I know archeo tech is bad unless you are using crisis to get around the cost but I wish the balance or each individual slot was better to warrant a couple components on each ship.

You mention the variations that could mitigate some of the advantages gleaned from using cloud lightning. However I think anything used to weaken a traditional arty fleet would affect a cloud lighting fleet considerably less. Corvette screens are incredibly cost effective as they take shots that could otherwise damage or destroy our precious BC’s, while also soaking up missiles with a slot of PD. Cruisers with torpedos and missiles/disrupters are incredibly effective at destroying BC’s, assuming they get into range. The thing about these counters however is they’re affected by the switch to cloud lighting even more so than the battlecruisers. Against corvettes cloud lighting is 55% more accurate and can force them to flee in one shot and similar logic also applies to cruisers who can also have quite a bit of evasion.

Is focussed arc emitter better than tachyon lance for the X slot weapon? Especially because it deals additional damage to armour and hull.

Once I have kinetic artillery I normally have neutron launchers as well and I mix artillery battleships with neutron launcher cruisers. Kinetic artillery takes out any shields and neutron launchers take out shields and hull. I only play against the AI and they use very varied fleets these days and often have a large amount of frigates and Corvettes, arty battleships are just not good against those type of fleets. Really do need mixed and varied fleets these days. Those cloud lightning battleships would be great against the contingency but I feel there are better options to take out Prethoryn and Unbidden. Missile cruisers devastate the Unbidden and plasma bats kill Prethroyn fleets very well.

I wonder if the arc emiter is causing the arty ships to not kite as effectively because it makes them turn around.

What do you use to set up the game to test these designs? I know how to use the console commands but setting up a whole game and controlling two empires to fight each other seems tedious.

Nice

I rarely run just kinetics. I pair my kinetic battleships (tachyon lance) with neutron torpedo cruisers to burn through armor and shields both late game. Would be interesting if you did a battleship/cruiser fleet build matchup with the kinetics/neutrons vs all cloud lightning/ disruptor battleship/cruisers

@tachyonlance1969 May want to try this with just medium disruptors. Cloud lighting and medium disruptions have the same dps with only 20 units more range. For any other weapon in the game each step up in size doubles the dps and damage along with increased range. If you use medium disruptors you would double the damage output of the battleship with very little drawback. The other problem with disruptors is they become pretty much useless if the target has any kind of hardening do to their low damage in general.

this confirms 2 things to me, artillery combat computer can easily run into issues with weapons such as X slots that have a limited arc and speed is king when it comes to combat computer AI. the artillery ships would win if they didn't keep trying to pull back and back and back although the range advantage for them is crucial so you can't give up that combat computer. something I think would happen though is the larger these fleets get the better the artillery battleships would be with stronger alpha strikes and the ships at the edge of the formation getting more X slot shots in over time giving the artillery fleet more of an edge over time. something else I'd like to see is how these deal with cruisers because I am very confident cruisers would still beat all these ships.

Why are some ships experienced and others not because this can lead to disparity in results because of combat bonuses form experience and, what do the losses look like because I imagine like disruptors the lighting is not good at actually killing the fleet just making them retreat so while you win the battle you may take more losses.

Where do you get cloud lightning from? Is that a mod?

K. Now do 3 Advanced Shield Hardeners and 2 Ancient Suspension Fields, maxxing out power capabilities with psionic/dark matter/lower level shields, 0 armor and using hull pieces instead when out of power. This is also battleship vs battleship design, which is okay for test sake, but I stick to using artillery as my X slot for blasting through initial shields and large lasers for my Ls since they have no range limitations, do extra damage to the hull when they blow through armor and can deal better with ships that get close. The artillery design would probably beat that design out, but that design will beat your design. Playing the rock paper scissors game can be done all day long unfortunately.

ok is it just me or are science ships slower at the game start because they are slower for me or at least it feels like it and i reinstalled the game to make sure it was not mods

Imo arc emitter + kinetic artillery is just not a good design, especially vs high armour setups. Kinetic artillery needs to chew through shields and armour (which it's not good at) before it can actually usefully contribute to the fight. Most likely enemies will be killed by arc emitters and kinetic artillery damage is just worthless. A better artillery setup would be tachyon lance + kinetic for higher dps and anti armour since you need to deal with all 3 layers of hp anyway. A better (non cloud lightning) arc emitter setup would either be just arc emitter with nothing else for alloy efficiency or hangars + missiles in the other 2 sections, missiles and strike craft at least ignore shields and do decent damage vs armour so they have a better chance of being useful than KA, plus they'll be useful to deal with small ships even if it's not gonna show up in a battleship vs battleship test. Arc emitter + cloud lightning is still good for dealing vs extremely high armor and shields like x25 crisis but mostly because there are no better penetrating weapons to stack on battleships and not cause CL is good.