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Thanks for these tests! I did my testing with 1.8.0 and there might have been some changes regarding targeting or some other in-combat behaviour, although none were mentioned in the patch notes. (Except downgrading the damage of Flak Cannon.) Another possible difference is that your leader might have spawned with trait(s) that affect combat, but mostly I'd suspect that for some reason the bombers of DFoD just behaved more rationally in your tests.
That is precisely why I used a machine empire so there were no modifiers whatsoever affecting the fleets. Maybe you performed your tests with a different game speed? I did mine on fastest; so while the game slows down to a crawl anyway, maybe the speed setting affects combat calculations. Or maybe they really changed something in 1.8.2 which could explain the difference.
Anyway, I tested a few more offensive loadouts. One of those failed horribly so I'll get it out of the way:
As one may have guessed, this design does not generate enough missiles to overcome enemy point defense. All missiles are pretty much shot down as soon as they are launched. The one battle I did with it using 281 ships was a landslide victory for the Doomfleet.
The other designs capable of defeating the Doomfleet at around 406,500 minerals are the following:
GloatingSwine suggested testing this loadout. Straightforward, Giga Cannons to strip shields, Plasma to destroy hull. Used 278 of those costing 406,436 minerals.
I haven't actually done the proper Lance/2Plasma/2KA in this test series with 90% armor defensive setup (I used Gauss instead of KA), so here it is. I want to point out that due to power constraints I replaced one capacitor with regenerative hull. This should not affect the survivability of this design noticeably as crystal plating would do, I hope. Used 274 for 406,616 minerals.
I suspect that you're better off not bringing any missiles on the A-242, so I wanted to test a design with bombers only. Defensive setup to match the other designs, power generators scaled down to reduce costs. Allowed me to put 340 of those into their fleet for 406,640 minerals.
Lets see what difference the presence of point defense makes. 321 ships costing 406,386 minerals.
Instead of the third bomber an arc emitter. I could have put more expensive power generators into the design to power a second capacitor, but instead opted for a regenerative hull over the second capacitor for the same reasoning behind the 422. 316 ships at 406,376 minerals.
With point defense. 307 for 407,376 minerals.
Let's see what happens if the battleship design brings as many missiles as it can fit. Used worse sensors because of power since tracking should not affect missiles, if I'm not mistaken. Used 276 costing 407,100 minerals.
So, together with the results of my previous tests, the average number of ships lost and their worth in minerals is;
Lance: 51 - 74,154
Giga: 51.4 - 74,735.6
Emitter: 56.6 - 82,296.4
NoXL: 55.6 - 80,175.2
A-242: 91.6 - 136,026
A-242 d: 89 - 114,899
The clear winner here is Lance with 2 Plasma and 2 KA. As I suspected, the missiles in the A-2*2 design do not contribute anything to its damage output and one is better off not putting anything but an arc emitter with two bombers on it (or rather, you're better off using direct fire designs - both for efficiency and game tick rate). Using PD seems to be slightly better on it. Missiles can work but are not worth it.
I'm going to test which ratio of Plasma and KA is best and than look into the auxiliary and defensive setup a bit more.
When the bombers go sight seeing to the edge of the system, do the Fighters go with them? Because if so, that would definitely explain a lot of the difference in missile effectiveness we're seeing.
Even more testing: Based on my previous findings I wanted to see which ratio of Plasma and Kinetic Artillery performs best and whether Tachyon Lance is really better than Giga Cannon against the Doomfleet. The base loadout I used is the following:
Full armor, two crystal plating, no shields on the defensive side. I made this choice because KA requires more energy than plasma and I wanted all tested ships to have the same defensive setup. I'll call the designs {L,G}n, where L means Tachyon Lance, G Giga Cannon in the XL slot and n is the number of slots occupied by plasma instead of KA, so the design pictured is L0.
While I again had each design fight the Doomfleet five times, for this test fleets always consisted of 250 ships. I felt that a ship:ship comparison is better in this case than a mineral:mineral one. KA is more expensive than plasma; 250 L0 or G0 cost 373,000 minerals and L4 or G4 cost 367,000. So the more plasma you put into the slot, the more ships you can bring within the same budget. After each battle against the Doomfleet this is the amount of remaining ships per fleet:
L1 and L2 performed equally well, so since L2 is cheaper, it's the best. There's also a spike at G2. I tried to replace one of the KA with a Gauss Cannon; the resulting fleet had 173.4 ships remaining on average. So against the Doomfleet, the best weapon setup is still one Tachyon Lance, two Kinetic Artilleries and two L plasma. Since all FE/AE designs use the same defensive setup (except Xenophobes, which trade one shield capacitor for thrusters), this result should hold against "regular" FE/AE fleets as well.
Probably using the same sort of event trigger that spawns the current Doom Fleet but with a crisis fleet instead.
You can event force the crises but making them engage with consistent forces is somewhat annoying. (Particularly Prethoryn)
My prediction is that on a battleship that GC/4L Missile design that failed against FE ships is very powerful against all crises, as only the Contingency has any PD at all and that's only one per large ship. Against Prethoryn it might be worth swapping some of the missiles for Medium ones to hit their small ships which have 79% base evasion.
There may be some question as to whether bringing PD is useful against Prethoryn, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the combination of 20HP and 80 Evasion on Scourge missiles makes it questionably effective in any reasonable volume.
Probably using the same sort of event trigger that spawns the current Doom Fleet but with a crisis fleet instead.
You can event force the crises but making them engage with consistent forces is somewhat annoying. (Particularly Prethoryn)
My prediction is that on a battleship that GC/4L Missile design that failed against FE ships is very powerful against all crises, as only the Contingency has any PD at all and that's only one per large ship. Against Prethoryn it might be worth swapping some of the missiles for Medium ones to hit their small ships which have 79% base evasion.
There may be some question as to whether bringing PD is useful against Prethoryn, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the combination of 20HP and 80 Evasion on Scourge missiles makes it questionably effective in any reasonable volume.
Eh, that still means that 2x flank artillery will hit 70% of shots, at an average of 2 damage per shot, 3 shots each / cycle, at a range of 30, missiles move at 12 distance units / cycle, this gives us 3 cycles between engagement and hit. this means an average of 25 damage between engagement and hit. Or to simplify, a ship with flak artillery PD should be able to deal with one missile per three cycles. With a cooldown of 5.25s, we can extend this to two missiles in a fleet vs fleet loadout. that comes out at an average of about 140 damage prevented per 6 cycles, as to whether that's worth 12 minerals... dunno.
That said, My bets for the top designs for crisis events:
vs Prethoryn: Tachyon forward, Either a hanger core with medium marauders and a fighter hanger or a Carrier core with small marauders, flak artillery, and two fighters, and a broadside aft with medium maruders would be ideal. Mix of armor and shields
The contention isn't that it "beats shields", AI trash doesn't beat anything, just that it is worse against armour and so if you use high armour designs you take less casualties and can beat larger opposing fleets.
The (weapon) design "beats shields" means "if two fleets with this weapon loadout were to fight each other, one with armor and one with shield, then the shielded fleet would be beaten". It's just another way to say "better against shields than against armor". Apparently it's not as intuitive as I hoped.
Also, the AI has a group of relatively fixed layouts it uses. It will always use energy torpedo corvettes as soon as it unlocks them (no AP), it has two destroyer designs of which is is much more likely to use the one with all PD modules, six cruiser designs, and about five battleship designs one of which is super rare. Against those designs, armour is better.
Anyway, I know you keep saying that but I've not yet seen any test results supporting that claim and so I did my own testing. Obviously testing all of these claims individually takes forever, so this is what I did: I generated a huge galaxy with 12 empires. I used "research_technologies" for all empires right at the start. Then I used "mature_galaxy" to simulate the same galaxy at 2300.01.01. In that state every empire had generated a fleet including battleships, I made a screenshot of all 12 battleship designs (see below) and rebuilt them in a test game. That gave me 12 randomly generated battleship designs as used by the AI.
I also created a 422BB design with shields and then the same design with 90% armor and no shields. Then I removed their weapons, these were to be my test-dummies and I've upload these designs too.
Below I've tested t6 to t11 (6 out of 12) against both the shield dummies and the armor dummies, measuring how long it would take a 100 stack of the respective design to kill a 100 stack of shield / armor dummies. These are the results (battle duration in days):
As you can see, only design T10 killed shielded targets faster than armored targets and it uses an arc emitter and two bomber hangars (full details below).
Then there's a design that's almost as good against shields than it is against armor, design T9. It uses a giga cannon, two bomber hangars and mostly kinetic weapons otherwise. Still it's better against armor than against shields.
The other four designs do significantly better against armor than against shields, especially the designs without arc emitters and bombers.
If you think that this is a distorted sample you're welcome to run the others as well. I've looked through them and I expect one of them to beat shields (T3) and two to be close but better against armor (T0 and T2).
Until then I conclude that out of 6 randomly chosen AI empire battleship designs shields counter 4 and do slightly better against 1 of the remaining 2. There is 1 design that counters shields. This points to shields being better than armor against regular AI empires.
What about pre-pure Battleship levels, though? Most of the time, the AI does not use pure battleships. I usually see them have around a 1:1:1:1 ratio, and a lot of the early game fights are about that.
Or, like, one shield+cap with the rest being armor? Since that gives you the benefit of regenerating shields to screw with targeting AI, while armor lets you tank hits?
And actually, I've gotta say, I feel like armor loadouts should have regenerative hull tissue auxiliaries. I don't know if it would make much of a difference due to targeting AI, but almost every Space Creature drops it in debris, it seems like, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume as standard for armored loadouts.
Or, like, one shield+cap with the rest being armor? Since that gives you the benefit of regenerating shields to screw with targeting AI, while armor lets you tank hits?
AFAICT AI fleets are something like 1:1:2:3 when left to their own devices, with all of the corvettes being energy torpedo and most of the destroyers being PD.
I continued my tests to find the best defensive setup; mostly to confirm the superiority of armor against FE/AE and whether bringing shields is worth it. For that I extended the event for spawning the Doom Fleet of Doom so one can generate separate fleets of 60 Escorts, 30 Battlecruiser and 1 Titan of each FE type, which I define to be a "standard FE fleet" since, minus the Titan, it seems to be the most common fleet power FEs spawn with.
I tested the following designs based on the number of shields they bring, cutting down on armor to support the increasing power demand:
I tried to keep excess power low so the designs are as cheap as possible because I did a minerals:minerals comparison. I also used regenerative hull tissue because you do not have access to crystal hull in every game; just keep in mind that the zero and one shields designs may perform slightly better with it.
In the first step I determined the minimum mineral threshold to defeat the Doomfleet using the unshielded design. 200 of those lost while 210 won handily, so I considered 283,500 minerals to be a good enough benchmark. Since the Doomfleet is essentially four standard FE fleets, 70,875 minerals should suffice to defeat single FE fleets. Surprisingly, unshielded ships worth about 71,000 minerals were unable to consistently beat the Fallen Machine, Spiritualist and Xenophile fleets so I increased the benchmark arbitrarily to 100,000 minerals.
The tests therefore had 74 0S, 67 1S, 66 2S, 65 3S and 64 4S designs fight three times against a standard fleet of each FE type. Average loss against each FE type in ships and minerals:
The best defensive setup against every FE type, losing the least amount of both ships and minerals, was the design with one shield. Additionally, the hardest type to beat was the Spiritualist fleet because of their reliance on missiles, so bringing a few point defense focused battleships, preferably A-202, may be worth it, though I did not test that. The next hardest to beat were the Xenophiles. Xenophobes did better against more shields while the Machines did slightly better against armor. Materialist fleets were the easiest to beat.
I thereby conclude my tests by stating that the most efficient setup against FE/AE are battleships with Tachyon Lance, two KA, two L Plasma, maximum armor and as many shields as one can fit while maintaining 90% damage reduction through armor. Considering FEs do not get Titans, a decent estimate for beating non-awakened FE fleets in an actual game should be 60 1S ships, probably less.
Something to keep in mind are the tests conducted by moyang, see here, suggesting that for the auxiliaries decoders from the Enigmatic Fortress are best-in-slot, followed by crystal hull. So, based on availability, its 2 decoders > 2 crystall Hulls > 2 capacitors. The reason for decoders being so good is the fact that FE ships enjoy high evasion; therefore the Precog Interface should be the best combat computer.
In (final) conclusion, if the stars align and you get all the necessary components and have no armor increasing modifiers so far, this should be the best design against FE/AE:
Edit: Forgot that dragonscale exists, so an even better "Stars Align" design is possible. Still, if you get armor high enough through resources and repeatables, put more shields on it.
I use energy weapons only in lategame because of repeatable researches. I was curious about which loadout would be better against contingency, so I tested it.
I tested with this loadout and switched out plasmas to disruptors. Builded 200 battleships fleet against 5x strength contingency in hard difficulty. (+1000% bonus)
Had to build huge fleet because I don't know how to add repeatable techs with console.
Results:
4 plasmas / 0 disruptors: lost about 115 ships
3/1 : lost about 75
2/2 : about 85
1/3 : about 100
And 3/1 but with Focused Arc Emitters: about 125
Conclusion: Use tachyon lance, 3 plasmas and a disruptor against contingency.
Edit: I tested again with level 30 repeatable techs, ships look like this. Since I don't research shield harmonics in real games, I equipped only 2 shields and it was roughly about the same with real game ones.
Anyways I used 50 ships this time, this means lower HP but more firepower compared to vanilla 200 battleship fleet.
In this test 2/2 setup did better: They won all battles, with 35 losses. 3/1 setup lost a battle, and average loss when they won was about 38.
Other setups just lost the battle.
Maybe it's because disruptors are better for escorts? Dunno...
gives you all the technologies (and I assume you already know that much). However, 'param1' is either 0 (= "normal" tech only" or 1 (= "normal" tech + creature techs such as crystal plating and enigmatic encoder) and param2 is the number of repeatable techs (the same level for all repeatable techs, can't pick just some of them). So for example, "research_technologies 0 5" would give all the "normal" techs and five levels of all the repeatable techs and "research_technologies 1 0" would give all the "normal" techs and creature techs, but no repeatable techs.
Please don't do any tests over this but I was wondering given a Battleship fleet like this does the evasion from the Space Amoebas event do anything or am I better off taking the extra EC generation result?
I know Battleships have bad evasion but many big weapons aimed at them also have bad tracking so does it make a marginal difference?
Please don't do any tests over this but I was wondering given a Battleship fleet like this does the evasion from the Space Amoebas event do anything or am I better off taking the extra EC generation result?
I know Battleships have bad evasion but many big weapons aimed at them also have bad tracking so does it make a marginal difference?
Evasion +% bonuses are applied as a percentage of ship's base evasion(evasion from components), so battleship will get +0.7% evasion from that +5% bonus. (14% from base 5+ thruster 9, 14*0.05=0.7)
So evasion% bonuses are worthless then. Good to know. >.> Though you're better off taking it anyway, I think; there's a bunch of anomalies that give cosmic Ray catalysis, other than amoeba.
So evasion% bonuses are worthless then. Good to know. >.> Though you're better off taking it anyway, I think; there's a bunch of anomalies that give cosmic Ray catalysis, other than amoeba.
I am not sure if there are any other events that give "cosmic ray catalysis". There are other anomalies that give "enhanced solar power" which is an identical 5% bonus but with a different name. I checked through console commands and the two seem to stack.
