How to best kill your enemies - ship and fleet design help

[dynalon]

Since today is break day between my family's christmas celebrations, I would like to think ahead a few days to New Year's Eve and figure out how to make the prettiest fireworks in the sky without becoming a twinkle in the sky myself.

Or, less silly: Please help me finding effective default ship and fleet designs. Which probably boils down to two questions:

• Is there a preferable ratio Corvette : Destroyer : Cruiser : Battleship : Titan? Do all hull sizes fill useful niches or is it better to only build some of them?
  
• What are the best weapon combos? Large Kinetic weapons (Giga Cannon and Kinetic Artillery) plus small/medium Energy weapons (the Plasma weapons in particular) seems like an obvious combo, but is it better than just go full penetration (Arc Emitter and Disruptors) or very missile-, torpedo-, or fighter-heavy?

Of course, things change if you know specifically what you're going up against - shield or armour focus on the enemy, what kinds of weapons they use... - but I'm rather curious if there's already an established best "all-around" fleet comp.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

In Stellaris ii's always better to customize fleet to your target than run with all-around designs. Especially if you're aiming for kill rate you'll need very specialized fleet.

As rule of thumb mono-fleets are better than the ones with mixed ships at killing enemies. Apparently this is because of the targeting logic where different ship types tend to always pick different sized targets, but with full battleships they concentrate their fire better. All battleships with X- and L-slot weapons is very solid meta fleet, which relies on its ability to shoot the targets from a far. These fleets are especially useful against Crisis and AE, which have no corvettes.
Another a little more rare fleet type is only corvette, either with torpedoes or autocannons. These fleets are fast, can be maxed for evasion and can be paired with a battleship fleet as escorts.
Destroyers and cruisers are a little more situational. Destroyers can do PD role. You can also have pretty good punch to go with your battleships in a destroyer with L-slot weapon, artillery computer and tracking module.

Generally any balanced shield-armor ratio works against AI, which does not specialize that much. However you got to specialize your armor against the crisis.
As the non-crisis AI jas balanced defenses, it's actually pretty hard to hard-counter them. Avoid strike craft, as 2.2 AI puts flak in basically all of their ships.

You really cannot have both, maximized kill rate and balanced all-around ship. Maximizing kill rate means building somehing that completely counters their build. Those sort of fleets might be invincible against one AI but fail hilariously against the other.

 

[djmatipl]

In Stellaris ii's always better to customize fleet to your target than run with all-around designs. Especially if you're aiming for kill rate you'll need very specialized fleet.

As rule of thumb mono-fleets are better than the ones with mixed ships at killing enemies. Apparently this is because of the targeting logic where different ship types tend to always pick different sized targets, but with full battleships they concentrate their fire better. All battleships with X- and L-slot weapons is very solid meta fleet, which relies on its ability to shoot the targets from a far. These fleets are especially useful against Crisis and AE, which have no corvettes.
Another a little more rare fleet type is only corvette, either with torpedoes or autocannons. These fleets are fast, can be maxed for evasion and can be paired with a battleship fleet as escorts.
Destroyers and cruisers are a little more situational. Destroyers can do PD role. You can also have pretty good punch to go with your battleships in a destroyer with L-slot weapon, artillery computer and tracking module.

Generally any balanced shield-armor ratio works against AI, which does not specialize that much. However you got to specialize your armor against the crisis.
As the non-crisis AI jas balanced defenses, it's actually pretty hard to hard-counter them. Avoid strike craft, as 2.2 AI puts flak in basically all of their ships.

You really cannot have both, maximized kill rate and balanced all-around ship. Maximizing kill rate means building somehing that completely counters their build. Those sort of fleets might be invincible against one AI but fail hilariously against the other.

yea... but you know how long take in 2.2 upgrade ship or re-fitt? With big fleet sometime better destroy ship and build new...

You need information what setup use enemy, shield, armor, PD, missile and upgrade ship to counter them. Don't know one setup good for all enemy empire but im pacifist and most of my game trying finish with no war or minimum war.

 

[Naeven]

If I only use auto-best templates and want to research as few weapon techs in the early-mid game as possible, what is “best” all-around weapon line to go for in this case?

I’ve been using plasma line so far and it seems to work decent. And Engineering research seems more busy in general so weapons from blue tech also seems like a good idea.

 

[roman566]

Arc emitter and neutron launchers. Works on everything standard AI throws your way. Go to the wiki to read about best weapons against FE and crisis.

 

[Naeven]

I will check that, thanks!

 

[Nakkivene]

I think Corvettes usually run torpedo/autocannon or autocannon/plasma. They're cheap, fast and good but always take some casualties.

Battleships I believe run arc emitter/cloud lightning or Giga Cannon/Neutron launchers? They aren't cheap or fast but often don't suffer any attrition.

The other shiptypes seem to be unloved. Both destroyer and cruiser can equip L slot weapons to take out starbases with no losses. I haven't found a practical use for them other than that. I did beat the tempest and khan at the same time with torpedo/fighter craft cruisers and later the prethoryn, but I was just trying to figure out if somehow the new economy would make them feasible. They took way too many losses and I'm sure basic artillery battleships would have taken none in those stacks.

 

[permeakra]

If I only use auto-best templates and want to research as few weapon techs in the early-mid game as possible, what is “best” all-around weapon line to go for in this case?

I’ve been using plasma line so far and it seems to work decent. And Engineering research seems more busy in general so weapons from blue tech also seems like a good idea.

I like to go disruptors and cloud lightning. But disrupts are hidden behind blue lasers, cloud lightning is available only through studying void clouds, and, weirdly, I have to study plasma line to get arc emitters.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

If over half of enemies total HP is from shields/armor, then arc emitters, cloud lightning and disruptors become very good. They work especially well against fallen empires, the contigency and unbidden. However, when running this build use ONLY these full penetration weapons. Your goal is not to touch armor/shields at all. Any non-penetrating weapon on a disruptor fleet is probably worthless.

 

[BarnCape]

Get battleships. Battleship only fleets. Get cloud lightning. Spinal mount, focused arc emitter, 4x cloud lightning. Bottom row mix armir and shield. A slots 2x afterburners. Try to grab any admurals w engineer skill for auto repair. 2 fleets of these (2x 21 100k fleet power) are enough to take out FA, as long as you dont fight entire FA 300k fleet plus deathstar at once. But usually FA splits their fleet so 2x of these fleets are enough to wipe out single 90k FA fleet, they die before they could fire 2nd volley

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

I wonder if fleet capacity should be measured in ships, rather than points.....

 

[Noble713]

The other shiptypes seem to be unloved. Both destroyer and cruiser can equip L slot weapons to take out starbases with no losses. I haven't found a practical use for them other than that.

I'm starting to use groups of Neutron Launcher/autocannon cruisers with 1-2 PD-equipped cruisers mixed in. This is only viable late game for me so far, as I'm essentially an AE (I already conquered an FE) and the poor AI of the other races hasn't kept up either technologically or in fleet capacity. Max-tech cruisers are fast, quick to build, and still tanky enough to steamroll weaker opponents with negligible losses. I THINK they will be a cost-effective ship type for vassalizing my neighbors, while I continue to stack up a big battleship fleet (mostly with Focused Arc Emitters) for squaring off against the other AE. I have no intentions of throwing these cruisers into that war, unless absolutely necessary, but I get tired of constantly replenishing my corvette screens and I have resources to spare so I can afford to spam cruisers. I'll keep some big torpedo corvette groups for the 1-5 MAJOR fleet actions I expect against the AE.

 

[permeakra]

I continue to stack up a big battleship fleet (mostly with Focused Arc Emitters) for squaring off against the other AE.

AEs have ships that can one-shot BSs and their fleets have all-around balanced weapon composition. You should plan for heavy losses in a fight with them, and tearing them from distance is not an option, unfortunately, they have enough long-range weaponry and some close-quarter fighting ships.

Some time ago, meta against FEs was to use corvette swarms, dunno about now.

 

[Elordis]

Current SP meta is something like:
1) Mono-corvette fleets at the beginning.
2) Switch to GK+NL mono-battleships when available.
3) Switch to AE+CL mono-battleships after 5 or so repeatable techs.
Corvettes are better than battleships in s single combat but in the long term take way more losses and thus eat a lot more alloys.