Arc Emitters insanely powerful vs Corvettes

[Wyrm]

I've played quite a while now with a hive-minded insectoid species slowly consuming the galaxy and was doing quite fine until an enemy showed up with a battleship-fleet and squished my corvette-fleet (I've limited myself to only build corvettes). The initial fight I destroyed all his ships except the battleships. Then his 15 battleships started a blockade of my homeworld. No proble, corvettes are quick to rebuild and I have quite a large empire so I spit them out at quite a pace without straining the economy too much.

So, now I launched an attack with 120+ corvettes, half with autocannons and half torpedonboats with Neutron torpedoes.

I figured such a fleet should wipe the ass with 15 battleships, but quickly realized that they're equipped with Arc Emitters and dual shield capacitors. So the battle ends with me taking out 3 battleships and my fleet wiped out. 120 ships could only take down 3 battleships.

I realized the arc emitters have 100% tracking and ignore shields and armor, meaning my corvettes are completely defenssless and he kills them of several at a time while my corvettes seem to spread out all firepower across his fleet instead of concentrating fire, so his shields keep recharging.

My main problem now is that I haven't got tech to even build cruisers, so I have no counter against this fleet except spam it with insane amounts of corvettes that will be butchered...

*sob* and I was enjoying this round so much...

Oh well... I will not give up, but if someone have any bright idéas, I'm all for.

 

[chegitz guevara]

So you just need another 500 corvettes.

 

[Gyrvendal]

Seems you got out-teched pretty badly in this one. I mean he has battleships and arc emitters and you don't even have cruisers?
Anyway I would recommend regular torpedoes over proton torpedoes because regular torpedoes have a bonus against armor and ignore shields (at least they do in my modded game, I haven't played vanilla in forever).
Regular torpedoes should hard-counter the battleships just as hard as the Arc emitters hard-counter the corvettes so you should be able to win this one unless he adds a bunch of new screens to his BB fleet.

Edit : You should also use plasma instead of auto-cannons if available. Your fleet has zero armor piercing which is the main reason it can't hurt the BBs IMO

 

[Scourgeclaw]

Destroyers with Large weapons. Lots of them.

 

[bitmapmedivh]

Seems you got out-teched pretty badly in this one. I mean he has battleships and arc emitters and you don't even have cruisers?

Edit: Nevermind, misread.

 

[Rios_]

The main problem I can see from your description is that your weapon choices are suboptimal for dealing with battleships. You've picked options with next to no armour pen and lots of shield bonuses, which leads to the problem you described, the ai splits its fire over multiple ships to knock out shields but instead of following up on it by damaging hull it picks another ship with shields. The shield damage modifier outweighs the "keep shooting the same target" modifier, so damage only goes to hull slowly. You would have had the same problem with a non arc thrower battleship, but it would have been less one sided because of tracking/evasion.

Build ships that have some armour pen weapons. Plasma combined with gauss/disruptors/neutron_torps works, or just lots of standard torpedoes (assuming no PD that is). Sure, three of the BS's will kill a corvette every eight days, but that's not enough to deal with the numbers you can bring.

 

[ramius3443]

Arc weapons are very handy for taking out unbidden (skips right through their shields) and corvettes. They are so insanely overpowered in comparison to those two that it's almost like Paradox designed it explicitly as a hard counter.

I rather like it. Corvettes are stupidly OP

 

[Held der Arbeit]

That's the point though...

They are meant as an incentive against the corvette spam we had in 1.0. where corvettes where technically superior to battleships

 

[The_Red_Star]

Arc emitters are the hardest counter to corvettes that battleships have.

That they shitstomped your fleet is not only unsurprising but it's the whole point of arc emitters. You're not supposed to be able to win against battleships with arc emitters via corvette spam in a remotely cost or time efficient manner. And if the enemy's fleet production capabilities are anywhere near yours, you are supposed to lose the war of attrition if you go for max-corvettes against an enemy cranking out Arcships.

 

[Space Chicken]

You only had 120 vs 120 fight (fleet cap) with bad weapons. You would either need bigger fleet than enemy or better weapons.

 

[Promethian]

The reason your weapons spread evenly is because you used a pair of anti shield weapons. Weapons are coded to favor hitting what they are strong against. If you had used plasma instead of autocannons you would have done much better. Going for disruptors (pre-req for energy torp) when you already had kinetics was a bad choice.

 

[Ixal]

Finally something that makes you use other ship types besides corvettes.

 

[sorina]

Well, most ppl i read about built mixed fleets. I dont know why you would do that. Simply build BS Half Arc Half Megacannon, be careful with jumping (directly jumping into another Fleet is really bad) and you mostly wont lose a single ship, despite the Corvette nerfe it has always been - Range < All. So to say, yes Arc emitters Burn away small ships without breaking a sweat. That tactic is for example very effective against Unbidden ships, because their greatest weakness here is they have fewer Ships per fleet, and mostly before they can even Fire at you, their fleet simply dies

 

[The Founder]

So, now I launched an attack with 120+ corvettes, half with autocannons and half torpedonboats with Neutron torpedoes.

I figured such a fleet should wipe the ass with 15 battleships, but quickly realized that they're equipped with Arc Emitters and dual shield capacitors. So the battle ends with me taking out 3 battleships and my fleet wiped out. 120 ships could only take down 3 battleships.

As one Battleship costs 8 Naval cap but a Corvette only one, it was a 120 NC vs 120 NC battle. And you picked the weapons and ships poorly:
Battleships have strong natural armor. That makes Kinetic weapons a poor choice to field in the first place. If you face armor, use energy. And that is before you consider that the small slot Corvette guns are extra poor agaisnt large, armored targets regardless of type. You attacked heavy armor with the smallest, least Armor Penettrating weapon in the game
Arc Emitters are indeed designed to counter corvettes. Indeed they are bad at pretty much everything else - but that they can do good.

The damage spreading is somewhat known. Anti-Shield weapons have that property. Weapons with bonus vs Shields (like Kinetics) might be accidently considered a shield-breaker.
And with the Neutrol Torpedo, you have the longer cooldown.

My adivse is to field 2 Plasma/1 Disruptor on those Corvettes. Disruptors can drop the shields. Plasma burns through armor. It is still an uphill battle for the corvettes (small guns vs BB, and the BB has Arc Emitters) but it should be a lot closer.

I realized the arc emitters have 100% tracking and ignore shields and armor, meaning my corvettes are completely defenssless and he kills them of several at a time while my corvettes seem to spread out all firepower across his fleet instead of concentrating fire, so his shields keep recharging.

My main problem now is that I haven't got tech to even build cruisers, so I have no counter against this fleet except spam it with insane amounts of corvettes that will be butchered...

You can not dodge, armor or shield yourself agaisnt Arc Emitters. How about just HP tanking them?

Destroyers have reasonably high HP/Naval cap. And if you add stuff like extra-HP plating or HP regeneration, you should be okay.
And they can carry a large/medium gun. 1 Disruptor, 1 Plasma. Would propably make the disruptor the Medium gun.
Circling around the foe is no longer a viable tactic, now that the Windup bug for XL weapons was fixed.

 

[Wyrm]

I have only researched kinetic weapons, so I have to go with what I have so far.

Destroyers could be reasonable until I manage to research cruisers.

For the future I will probably keep using my corvette-spam as the major part of my fleet and then field some battleships for the heavy slugging.

I had hoped torpedo-boats were more useful against battleships though.

 

[The_Red_Star]

I have only researched kinetic weapons, so I have to go with what I have so far.

Destroyers could be reasonable until I manage to research cruisers.

For the future I will probably keep using my corvette-spam as the major part of my fleet and then field some battleships for the heavy slugging.

I had hoped torpedo-boats were more useful against battleships though.

Torps are terrible in general, they're way too easily intercepted by PD. Energy torps are somewhat better as they're uninterceptable though. But they're really slow projectiles.

 

[Rios_]

SNIP


You can not dodge, armor or shield yourself agaisnt Arc Emitters. How about just HP tanking them?

Destroyers have reasonably high HP/Naval cap. And if you add stuff like extra-HP plating or HP regeneration, you should be okay.
And they can carry a large/medium gun. 1 Disruptor, 1 Plasma. Would propably make the disruptor the Medium gun.
Circling around the foe is no longer a viable tactic, now that the Windup bug for XL weapons was fixed.

The problem with destroyers is while you double the HP you half the evasion. Suddenly medium weapons are fully negating your evasion and even large guns have 40-50% chance to hit, which makes them much squishier then any other ship in the game when actually shot at. You can get away with it in mixed fleets as targeting priority on them tends to be very low (Position in the fight combined with target weighting for weapon size and distances means they generally only get shot at when there is nothing else bigger on the field), but in fleets with only them and corvettes or just destroyers that all goes out the water and they die very quickly. Any gains you have from being able to fit larger guns with more armour pen is more then offset by the attrition.

 

[The Founder]

I have only researched kinetic weapons, so I have to go with what I have so far.

Destroyers could be reasonable until I manage to research cruisers.

For the future I will probably keep using my corvette-spam as the major part of my fleet and then field some battleships for the heavy slugging.

I had hoped torpedo-boats were more useful against battleships though.

Kinetics used to be quite a bit OP in 1.4.
But they seem to perform a lot worse in 1.5. It seems as if energy might be the better choice against the AI overall. I had to learn that in two lost games.

Energy Torpedoes are only good vs shields. And they trade higher Alpha damage for longer recharge times compared to disruptors. They propably did no relevant damage past shields. They overkilled the shields. And then did nothing to keep it down as the other shoots hit.

A lot of consideration has been put into ship and weapon balance way back. And now it really is starting to show it's effect. I wrote something about what I thought was the planned balance back before 1.3. It mostly held true until today:
http://www.stellariswiki.com/Ship_designer#Design_Ramifications

The problem with destroyers is while you double the HP you half the evasion. Suddenly medium weapons are fully negating your tracking and even large guns have 40-50% chance to hit, which makes them much squishier then any other ship in the game when actually shot at. You can get away with it in mixed fleets as targeting priority on them tends to be very low (Position in the fight combined with target weighting for weapon size and distances means they generally only get shot at when there is nothing else bigger on the field), but in fleets with only them and corvettes or just destroyers that all goes out the water and they die very quickly. Any gains you have from being able to fit larger guns with more armour pen is more then offset by the attrition.

No ship would ever be a perfect match. But focussing on dealing with the XL slot as first priority is usually a very good idea.

You will not get out of a fight without getting shoot at, taking damage and loosing ships. You can just look where the strenght of the weapons lie, and try to find the one ship/gun combo that is as soemwhat effective counter.

 

[balmung60]

Energy torps are somewhat better as they're uninterceptable though. But they're really slow projectiles.

No they aren't - all non-missile weapon are instantaneous and despite the name, energy torps aren't missile weapons in any way. Their shots may have different graphical speeds, but a laser, a gauss cannon, and an energy torpedo fired at the same time from the same distance all do their damage at the same time.

 

[The_Red_Star]

No they aren't - all non-missile weapon are instantaneous and despite the name, energy torps aren't missile weapons in any way. Their shots may have different graphical speeds, but a laser, a gauss cannon, and an energy torpedo fired at the same time from the same distance all do their damage at the same time.

Ah, then why do they always seem to disappoint me deeply as weapons then though?