Figuring out Auxiliary combos

[Veristek]

Hey all,

I'm trying to figure out a good combo for auxiliary slots. I have shield capacitors, the two crystal armors (infused and forged), and regenerative hull tissue. I ran into an Enigmatic Fortress and worked my way thru the event chain and saw the 4 different tech rewards (only get 1 of the 4). I had a save from before finishing the Fortress mission so I reloaded and looked at each of the different techs. I noticed that the Engimatic Decoder and Encoder are auxiliary slots.

So I got to wondering, what would be a good auxiliary combo with all these options? Stuff like:

Capacitor + Capacitor
Capacitor + Crystal plate
Capacitor + Encoder
Crystal plate + Crystal plate
Crystal plate + Encoder
Encoder + Encoder
And so on.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[Veristek]

No comments or suggestions?

 

[Promethian]

Edit: I have learned that the encoder is calculated in the worst possible way instead of in an actually useful way. This makes most of my post useless and the encoder effectively the worst possible pick from the Enigmatic Fortress. Read on if you like but anything referencing the encoder is coming from a mistaken premise.

So first things first. Capacitors are your god. If ever in doubt, go with capacitors. They are a huge change in the relative power of fleets. Its a significant gain in effective health during combat.

That said the Encoder is interesting and is most likely worth using in some circumstances. First to establish some mechanics. Evade is effectively subtractive of a weapons accuracy. Tracking negates evade but will not increase the base chance to hit. So a 90% accuracy weapon that fully negates evade still has a 10% chance to miss. If the weapon has say 50 tracking and is attacking a 60 evade 90% minus 10 is 80%. So chance to miss bumps up to 20%.

Corvette has 60% base evade. Thrusters and sensors cancel each other out. Advanced/Sentient combat computer gives 6%. Procog computer gives 11%. Small weapons have 70% tracking (strongest, some have less). So against small weapons a Corvette will gain either 11% more missed attacks against itself with the most common combat computers or 15% with precog. The real value will come in against big weapons when you are knocking 15% chance to hit off weapons with only a 20-30% against corvettes. Late game when cruisers and battleships become more common the Encoder becomes really good for Corvettes. I'd even say better than a capacitor because Corvettes have the weakest potential shield regen.

So what about bigger ships? Large weapons tend to have 5% tracking. Battleships have 5% evade. Nothing gained from combat computers. The math is easy here. Each encoder is 15% evade. That is effectively 15% less damage taken from large weapons. Unfortunately for battleships even doubling up will do literally nothing for you against M and S weapons. But M and S weapons also have weak armor pen when they have it. If you are against an opponent with little armor penetration an armor build with double encoders would be good. But outside that situation I'd go with double capacitors for the large amount of effective mid battle health recovery.

This should be enough baseline to figure out the numbers for yourself for cruisers and destroyers. All the numbers are on the wiki.

 

[moyang]

Encoder doesn't add 15% to evasion, it adds 15% of evasion from ship design(base+computer+thrusters). So never use it on battleships.
e. g. Cruiser+precog computer+impluse thruster with 2 encoder gets (10+5+9)*1.3=31.2% evasion, not 54%. (10+5+9+15*2)
One good thing about decoder is it's considered as ship's base evasion, so any evasion buff will be applied after encoder.
e. g. If you have +20% evasion from admiral, the said cruiser will have 31.2*1.2=37.44% evasion, not (10+5+9)*(1+0.3+0.2)=36%.


My suggestion:
Don't use Corvettes or Destroyers, they are just bad.
For Cruisers, it's better to spam armor and use only 1 shield. So capacitor won't do much. Use crystal plates.
Cruisers might benefit from encoder evasion if you can stack evasion modifiers high, but most of the time it's not worth it since their evasion isn't high enough to be meaningful.
For Battleships, I use 2 capacitors or capacitor+plate according to my ship's power usage. Decoders might be useful if you're using tachyon lances, but I always used Arc Emitters so I never tested that.

 

[MrParadux]

For Cruisers, it's better to spam armor and use only 1 shield. So capacitor won't do much. Use crystal plates.

Is this that useful though? In my games the AI seems to love spamming plasma weapons.

 

[Summin Cool]

Does capacitor still enable shield regen in combat? I've always thought it overpowered for what it does.

 

[Promethian]

Encoder doesn't add 15% to evasion, it adds 15% of evasion from ship design(base+computer+thrusters). So never use it on battleships.
e. g. Cruiser+precog computer+impluse thruster with 2 encoder gets (10+5+9)*1.3=31.2% evasion, not 54%. (10+5+9+15*2)
One good thing about decoder is it's considered as ship's base evasion, so any evasion buff will be applied after encoder.
e. g. If you have +20% evasion from admiral, the said cruiser will have 31.2*1.2=37.44% evasion, not (10+5+9)*(1+0.3+0.2)=36%.


My suggestion:
Don't use Corvettes or Destroyers, they are just bad.
For Cruisers, it's better to spam armor and use only 1 shield. So capacitor won't do much. Use crystal plates.
Cruisers might benefit from encoder evasion if you can stack evasion modifiers high, but most of the time it's not worth it since their evasion isn't high enough to be meaningful.
For Battleships, I use 2 capacitors or capacitor+plate according to my ship's power usage. Decoders might be useful if you're using tachyon lances, but I always used Arc Emitters so I never tested that.

Damn that hurts them a lot. That is what I get for assuming it would actually be something useful. Completely non-functional A slot for anything but corvettes.

 

[moyang]

Is this that useful though? In my games the AI seems to love spamming plasma weapons.

Yes, armor is better even against medium plasma. (which has 60% armor penetration)
Maybe not against large plasma or tachyon lance(which have 80% and 90% armor penetration respectively) but there aren't mant of them.

 

[Badesumofu]

I just use capacitors in every Aux slot. Shields are very strong at the moment, and even if you don't have much actual shield, capacitors are still very useful for their ability to regen shields during combat.

 

[Torakka]

Generally, if you want to minmax, you should build a fleet of battleships and battleships only. Then you want at least one Shield Capacitor to enable shield regen in combat. Filling the other aux slot with capacitor too is quite safe bet, but Enigmatic Decoder (the +5% chance to hit & +5% tracking one) might be an interesting alternative too, altough I don't know if anyone has done any rigorous testing about that. Crystal Plate is worse than Shield Capacitor, at least as long as you have enough power to run the capacitor without adding reactor. (This concerns the possible second capacitor, you always want at least one.)

EDIT: Of course, the capacitors are useless without any shields, but you generally want to have shields unless you really know what you are doing and are specializing against some particular enemy.

 

[moyang]

I ran some test, and it looks like Decoders are exceptionally good for battleships. https://imgur.com/a/s405l

 

[Torakka]

I ran some test, and it looks like Decoders are exceptionally good for battleships. https://imgur.com/a/s405l

Wait, not only is it a good idea to replace one capacitor with decoder, but it is good idea to replace both of them? That's a really interesting find! Could you try the same tests with slightly smaller fleet of your own to see if the same holds true even for pitched battles?

 

[moyang]

Wait, not only is it a good idea to replace one capacitor with decoder, but it is good idea to replace both of them? That's a really interesting find! Could you try the same tests with slightly smaller fleet of your own to see if the same holds true even for pitched battles?

Tested with 40 ships - 2C fleet lost 22.4 ships, 1C 1D lost 18.6, 2D lost 9.8

Tested with 35 ships - 2C fleet lost all 5 battles, 1C 1D lost all, 2D lost 3/5 battles and lost 28, 30 ships when they won.
Decoder fleets inflicted more damage even when they're losing.

I ran some other test and found out capacitor is worse than 2x +5% hp crystal plate. (Tested with 50-ships fleet.)
They lost average of 4 ships, this is better than 1C 1D but worse than 2D.
Fleet with 2x +10% hp crystal plate lost 3.2. Still worse than 2D.


TL;DR: Capacitor is bad on Battleships, use crystal plates. Use enigmatic decoders if you get them.

 

[DeadEyeTucker]

Wow, very interesting, moyang!! I would think Capacitors would be useful on battleships as they are very easy to get armor capped so they would get more shields than cruisers and what not.

As someone who is also lost on what Aux's to use, when do Afterburners and Regenative Hull Tissue ever get value? I presume ABs would be great for a close range doctrine, but I can't ever see when Hull Tissue would be good. Maybe if you have no decoders and no crystal plates?

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

I ran some test, and it looks like Decoders are exceptionally good for battleships. https://imgur.com/a/s405l

I've never been able to understand why everyone used to think that enigmatic decoder is bad. It is rather obvious pick for a battleship which is going to shoot from the distance anyway.

 

[Badesumofu]

To be fair that ship design is going to benefit a lot from tracking. I'd be interested to see that test with Swiss Army Cruisers.

 

[moyang]

To be fair that ship design is going to benefit a lot from tracking. I'd be interested to see that test with Swiss Army Cruisers.

In my tests they didn't do well. They lost 58 of 97 ships, while Torpedo Cruisers lost only 16 of 97 ships. (I didn't used aux slots in this tests)

I've never been able to understand why everyone used to think that enigmatic decoder is bad. It is rather obvious pick for a battleship which is going to shoot from the distance anyway.

Now it's obvious in hindsight.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

In my tests they didn't do well. They lost 58 of 97 ships, while Torpedo Cruisers lost only 16 of 97 ships. (I didn't used aux slots in this tests)


Now it's obvious in hindsight.

Actually, I argued for it long before your tests.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-the-enigmatic-decoder.1030756/#post-22989800

Well I use it on my battleships and it seems to be a good component. More accuracy is fine and enemy fleet do not usually come close enough to damage my BS anyway.

And the encoder is for corvettes obviously.

Why do everyone complain about them so much?

 

[Veristek]

Hmm, so it seems like 2x decoders are best for battleships. 2x Crystals if you don't have Decoders.

What about cruisers? Decoders, Capacitors, Crystal Forged Plating, or other combos?

And what is the Swiss Cruiser? I've been running with cruisers equipped with 6 medium plasma cannons, backed up by battleships with 1 tachyon lance + 4 kinetic artillery.

 

[Torakka]

And what is the Swiss Cruiser?

This thread has a lot of useful discussion about ship designs and combat in 1.8. It is quite long, but I really recommend reading all the posts there.