How to Deal w/ Fanatic Purifiers in Early Game?

[Dragatus]

Fanatical purifiers favor kinetic weapons and defensively they have a slight preference for shields over armor. You can check that out on the wiki page on AI personalities: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/AI_personalities#Regular_empires

Design your ships to have more armor than shields and maintain a balance between kinetic and energy weapons. If one is more advanced than the other, lean into the advanced one. For example if you have Railguns and Blue Lasers you'd want to use more of the former, but if you have Railguns and X-Ray Lasers you'd want to use more of the latter.

At equal tech level energy weapons are a little better than kinetic ones because they're better at focusing fire on damaged enemy ships (they prefer shooting ships that have already lost their shields) and perhaps more importantly, starbases get bonus armor so energy weapons are better at killing them, which makes them better for pushes into enemy territory.

There is no special point to equipping corvettes with one type of weapon and destroyers with another unless you're going to keep the fleets separated and run them against different targets. But if you'll stick them into the same fleet, then just make both designs balanced between energy and kinetics. In fact, if you have destroyers you'd probably want to stop making corvettes. Even better is if you can wait until you unlock cruisers. Carrier cruisers cause a revolutionary in military technology when they first become available and if you can afford to turtle behind your starbases you'd best wait until you research them before investing more alloys into ships. If you must build ships before that, build destroyers.

Also, once you have a fleet that you think can take them on, try to be the aggressor and invite friends. It will give them someone else to shoot at. Another trick is that if the enemy is affraid to attack your starbase + fleet, you can move your fleet to a system next door and park it right next to the hyperlane entry/exit. Then if the AI falls for it and engages your starbase you can jump in with your fleet.

And speaking of starbases, you did equip them with hangars, right?

 

[klingonadmiral]

Design your ships to have more armor than shields and maintain a balance between kinetic and energy weapons.

Properly designed ships can not overcome the +33% - +43% fire rate of Purifiers.

 

[hart30]

Not to forget that since 3.3 the purifier ai goals for component techs in their tech tree and in general designs its ships better. The old "counter fleet design" tactic is losing more and more of its benefits since u cannot see the enemy fleets ship designs anymore and since 3.3 only reliably works on fe or crisis fleets, which always have the same designs.

 

[Franton]

1. other empires
You write that others are not willing to agree on a defensive pact, but if they are friendly they can still help with your economics: Find beneficial trade deals, e. g. trade surplus CGs and food for alloys. If you can trade food at a rate of 6 to 1 and CGs at 3 to 1, that's still better than selling it on the market and then purchasing alloys. And if the empire is friendly, they may be willing to trade for as little as 2 food or 1 CG per alloy - I do that all the time! As a side effect, after several decades of trade, relations typically improve so much that you can make any treaties and pacts you want.

2. research
You said RNG hasn't been kind. Therefore I suggest to prefer the strongest weapons you have, rather than mixing types. E. g. tier 2 lasers are always preferable to tier 1 kinetic weapons, if that's all you have in that area! Apart from that, you clearly don't research enough. I don't play beta, but in live i typically hit 1K research before 2250. Even with unity/sprawl changes, it should be possible to get at least half as much.

3. keeping strong neighbours at bay
your best hope to survive a war against a strong empire is not getting into one! I don't know about beta, but in live the aggressive empires pick their targets by looking at their respecitve fleet power. The actual equipment isn't taken into consideration, so if one empire maintains a fleet of 200 corvettes without weapons and the other 100 corvettes equipped with tier 4 stuff, it will attack the latter. I don't suggest you should build empty corvettes, but it may be worth preferring a cheap build over an expensive one, if it means you can afford to build more of them!
Anyway, you don't need to be stronger than the aggressive neighbour, you only need to be stronger than it's weakest other neighbour(s)!

 

[DeanTheDull]

Fanatical purifiers favor kinetic weapons and defensively they have a slight preference for shields over armor. You can check that out on the wiki page on AI personalities: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/AI_personalities#Regular_empires

Design your ships to have more armor than shields and maintain a balance between kinetic and energy weapons. If one is more advanced than the other, lean into the advanced one. For example if you have Railguns and Blue Lasers you'd want to use more of the former, but if you have Railguns and X-Ray Lasers you'd want to use more of the latter.

At equal tech level energy weapons are a little better than kinetic ones because they're better at focusing fire on damaged enemy ships (they prefer shooting ships that have already lost their shields) and perhaps more importantly, starbases get bonus armor so energy weapons are better at killing them, which makes them better for pushes into enemy territory.

There is no special point to equipping corvettes with one type of weapon and destroyers with another unless you're going to keep the fleets separated and run them against different targets. But if you'll stick them into the same fleet, then just make both designs balanced between energy and kinetics. In fact, if you have destroyers you'd probably want to stop making corvettes. Even better is if you can wait until you unlock cruisers. Carrier cruisers cause a revolutionary in military technology when they first become available and if you can afford to turtle behind your starbases you'd best wait until you research them before investing more alloys into ships. If you must build ships before that, build destroyers.

Also, once you have a fleet that you think can take them on, try to be the aggressor and invite friends. It will give them someone else to shoot at. Another trick is that if the enemy is affraid to attack your starbase + fleet, you can move your fleet to a system next door and park it right next to the hyperlane entry/exit. Then if the AI falls for it and engages your starbase you can jump in with your fleet.

And speaking of starbases, you did equip them with hangars, right?

To build on this, the two best military weapon techs for your corvettes and destroyers in the early game are Tiyanki Energy Syphon and Mining Drone lasers. These are a bit RNG, but more about exploration than tech draw. Once an option, they're guaranteed options until you research them.

Energy Syphons are the best anti-shield weapon until about tier 4 gauss weapons, with a 200% anti-shield bonus and a higher base damage than the gauss line until you're into the strategic resource tiers. Mining lasers are roughly equivalent to tier 2 plasma weapons, with a trade off a less armor damage for greater hull damage that's better for killing starbases and killing ships without withdrawal. Both of these are a single tech, as opposed to spending multiple tech cycles in investment, and the unlocking of mining lasers also enables tier 2 engines for speed/evasion buffs as well for a very solid physics/society/engineering cycle investment.


Between these weapons for knockouts, and starbase defenses, you can get a strong alloy-attrition efficiency advantage on the Genocidal empires, especially if you can get a FTL blocker on a pulsar star system that blocks shields. At that point, a pure armor/mining laser corvette/destroyer swarm will annihalate any given Purifier AI force, even without fighter bays.



Early alloy attrition of a purifier AI- getting them to run low on alloys before they can build overwhelming fleet sizes- is a good way to manage the threat. A few early defensive wars will prevent them from stockpiling the alloys to become truly dangerous, and if you can get them low enough it can work to your advantage instead in conquering their developed systems and colonies. A purifier who can't build the economy or the economic stockpile ceases to be a meaningful threat, so early alloy attrition is quite good.

 

[DeanTheDull]

1. other empires
You write that others are not willing to agree on a defensive pact, but if they are friendly they can still help with your economics: Find beneficial trade deals, e. g. trade surplus CGs and food for alloys. If you can trade food at a rate of 6 to 1 and CGs at 3 to 1, that's still better than selling it on the market and then purchasing alloys. And if the empire is friendly, they may be willing to trade for as little as 2 food or 1 CG per alloy - I do that all the time! As a side effect, after several decades of trade, relations typically improve so much that you can make any treaties and pacts you want.

To build on this-

At strong cordial relations, AI will often trade resources at the base value, with modifiers based on degree of positivity and the strength of their surplus. Ergo, a 2-trade value CG can be traded for 2 minerals, even though a CG costs only 1 mineral to make. This means if you can get just one friendly-neighbor to trade at 2-to-1 CG-to-mineral ratios, you can make industrial districts basically self-funding for scaling alloy producing for fleets.

You can even use it to replace your need for miners/farmers/technicians, if you can trade CG from dedicated CG worlds to cover imports of raw materials.

 

[Shark7]

I will start this off by saying I don't know what others experience has been...

I generally load up on Disruptors as soon as they become available. Simply put, the shields and armor on the enemy ships won't matter if I can get 100% penetration on both (essentially bypassing them).

I'm surprised I've not seen anyone mention this yet, so I'm wondering if there is a reason I'm not aware of? I'd certainly like to know, since I seem to be doing ok with this strategy.

 

[Franton]

To build on this-

At strong cordial relations, AI will often trade resources at the base value, with modifiers based on degree of positivity and the strength of their surplus. Ergo, a 2-trade value CG can be traded for 2 minerals, even though a CG costs only 1 mineral to make. This means if you can get just one friendly-neighbor to trade at 2-to-1 CG-to-mineral ratios, you can make industrial districts basically self-funding for scaling alloy producing for fleets.

You can even use it to replace your need for miners/farmers/technicians, if you can trade CG from dedicated CG worlds to cover imports of raw materials.

And to build on this, you can get much better ratios for trading rare resources, provided you have enough planets (and building slots) to produce them: I often trade one rare resource per 20-40+ base resources (It's possible to get 50+ energy, but I rarely need mor energy), or 8-12 CGS, or 6-10 alloys. The advantage of trading rare resources for stuff produced in districts is that you can reduce the number of districts, and therefore sprawl! Given that sprawl is a much bigger factor in beta now, that is something worth considering!

 

[DeanTheDull]

And to build on this, you can get much better ratios for trading rare resources, provided you have enough planets (and building slots) to produce them: I often trade one rare resource per 20-40+ base resources (It's possible to get 50+ energy, but I rarely need mor energy), or 8-12 CGS, or 6-10 alloys. The advantage of trading rare resources for stuff produced in districts is that you can reduce the number of districts, and therefore sprawl! Given that sprawl is a much bigger factor in beta now, that is something worth considering!

To build on you building on me (lol)-

This is more mid-game habitat play, and derives from the base value. Minerals/Food/Energy have base 1, CG base 2, strategic gas/mote/crystals 10. A Industrial district with 2 pops will produce 24 value from 12 CG, but a sinngle pop in the same urban district-enabled slot will offer 20.

When you're trading 1 crystal/mote for 20-40, you're doing the same sort of opinion-and-economy swing that lets CG trade for 2-4+. However, AI is always slow on the refinery path, whereas they will always have some CG production from the homeworld industry. The efficiency consideration will matter based on the input. CG are a base 6 CG for 6 minerals, or 1 CG per 1 mineral, but refineries are 2 for 10, or 1 mote per 5 minerals. Whether it's more effective to trade motes or CG is going to depend on if you can get more than 5x the mineral input in returns.


Which is to say- either way is fine, but Egalitarians really start outpacing authoritarian economies over time, especially when they can get Habitats and Arcologies bonuses as well.



Mind you, Rogue Servitors are the real Kings of the refined good trade meta. 1% biotrophy stacking, 20% complex drone economic policy 'offset' for a -20% menial drone you never use, and 10 CG per artisan drone...

 

[Franton]

I will start this off by saying I don't know what others experience has been...

I generally load up on Disruptors as soon as they become available. Simply put, the shields and armor on the enemy ships won't matter if I can get 100% penetration on both (essentially bypassing them).

I'm surprised I've not seen anyone mention this yet, so I'm wondering if there is a reason I'm not aware of? I'd certainly like to know, since I seem to be doing ok with this strategy.

Disruptor base damage is so low, that both kinetic and energy weapons at the same tier are usually more effective. They're only useful against specific enemys, such as FE fleets ans some Leviathans with very strong shields and/or armor.

The main problem however is that you really need to go either all out on disruptors or other shield/armor ignoring weapons, or not use them at all! Mixing them with ships using other weapons is extremely inefficient, due to the low disruptor damage, and them not contributing to bringing the shields/armor down!

The only somewhat reasonable approach I can think of in early game is using corvettes with missiles and disruptors, against any enemy that prefers shields over armor: since both missiles and disruptors ignore shields, that's one defense to safely ignore. However, if the enemies bring enough PD to the battle, you still have a problem: if the missiles need to overcome armor first, and disruptors don't contribute, then they won't do a lot if most of them are shot down. I once used such a fleet of missile corvettes with disruptors agains void clouds, and that worked reasonably well, because they use shields, but not armor; so both missiles and disruptors directy reduced their hull.

 

[Shark7]

Disruptor base damage is so low, that both kinetic and energy weapons at the same tier are usually more effective. They're only useful against specific enemys, such as FE fleets ans some Leviathans with very strong shields and/or armor.

The main problem however is that you really need to go either all out on disruptors or other shield/armor ignoring weapons, or not use them at all! Mixing them with ships using other weapons is extremely inefficient, due to the low disruptor damage, and them not contributing to bringing the shields/armor down!

The only somewhat reasonable approach I can think of in early game is using corvettes with missiles and disruptors, against any enemy that prefers shields over armor: since both missiles and disruptors ignore shields, that's one defense to safely ignore. However, if the enemies bring enough PD to the battle, you still have a problem: if the missiles need to overcome armor first, and disruptors don't contribute, then they won't do a lot if most of them are shot down. I once used such a fleet of missile corvettes with disruptors agains void clouds, and that worked reasonably well, because they use shields, but not armor; so both missiles and disruptors directy reduced their hull.

OK, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

Are you going lasers or guns (please tell us it isn't mixed)

Unless the enemy is using one-sided defenses (all shield or all armor), or your tech in one of those areas is *VASTLY* better than the other (~3 levels), MIXED IS BETTER! This is true even in 1v1 ship battles, but it is super extra true in fleet battles. Each gun (not each ship!) targets individually, and they'll switch targets to things they can more effectively damage (they're less switchy than they used to be, but still enough to matter a lot).

Suppose you're up against enemies that have 300 shields and 150 armor and 500 hull. Your guns and lasers each do 10 DPS, with the usual modifiers (so guns are 15DPS against shields and 5 DPS against armor, lasers vice versa). You're using standard gunnery corvettes. In a 1v1 battle (all times rounded to a tenth of second as written, but full values preserved so the rounding won't always add up as expected):

• All projectile: 45 DPS vs. shields = 6.7 seconds, 15 DPS vs. armor = 10 seconds, 30 DPS vs hull = 16.7 seconds, total 33.3 seconds to kill.
• All laser: 15 DPS vs shields = 20 seconds, 45 DPS vs. armor = 3.3 seconds, 30 DPS vs hull = 16.7 seconds, total 40.0 seconds to kill.
• 2x laser 1x projectile: 25 DPS vs. shields = 12 seconds, 35 DPS vs. armor = 4.3 seconds, 30 DPS vs. hull = 16.7 seconds, total 33.0 seconds to kill.
• 1x laser 2x projectile: 35 DPS vs. shields = 8.6 seconds, 25 DPS vs. armor = 6 seconds, 30 DPS vs. hull = 16.7 seconds, total 31.2 seconds to kill.

Notice the following:

1. The optimal weapon combination is the mix that exactly counters their defensive mix!
2. Even the suboptimal weapon mix is strictly better than *either* un-mixed option!

This also holds when the enemy is using balanced defenses (in which case you want balanced offense). The only time mixed isn't the best option is if the enemy is using unmixed defenses, in which case the best choice is - as always - the weapons that exactly counter their defenses.

Defense is different; you want to max out the defense that the enemy is weakest against. This can be tricky though; maxing shields requires a ton of power, and maxing armor increases alloy cost considerably (but also frees up lots of power, which slightly increases damage / lets you run a cheaper reactor). Just be sure you know what their offensive mix is before trying this (looking at the battle reports, especially at the percentage of damage each weapon type did to hull, is the best way to measure this).

 

[FinbarFlin]

...And speaking of starbases, you did equip them with hangars, right?

The last purifiers ive met ran the PD corvet layout... can you imagine how useful my hangars where?

 

[HFY]

The last purifiers ive met ran the PD corvet layout... can you imagine how useful my hangars where?

Do AIs respond to your fleet choices in the beta?

Because if I can compel the AI to use PD corvettes... that could be beneficial.

 

[Dragatus]

I looked into the matter and AI does not respond to your fleet choices. PDX did however change the AI weights on corvettes. In the current live patch (3.2) PD corvettes are be used by empires that favored energy weapons, but in the beta (3.3) they are instead used by empires that favor strike craft and those that favor energy weapons will now use interceptor corvettes.

Fanatical Purifiers still favor kinetic weapons, but Devouring Swarms favor strike craft.

Additionally, the preferred design will not be used in all cases. It will be used 98% of the time but the other two designs will be used 1% of the time each. So whenever a FP updates their corvette design there is a 98% chance it will be an interceptor, but there is that 1% chance that it will be a picket ship instead.

Edit: For the sake of completion, Determined Exterminators favor guided weapons (missiles). So in the 3.3 patch every flavor of genocidal has a different preferred corvette type that they use 98% of the time. DEs will use missile boats, FPs will use interceptors, and swarms will use picket ships.

 

[General Waluigi]

Apologies if this disrupts the current discussion, but I have finally disemboweled the Seban Butchers! I would've wiped them off the map, but the war fatigue mechanic caught me right before I was about to land armies on their last planet.
Annoyingly enough, I finally caught up to current (Lv 4) Railguns/Missiles during the war. It definitely helped that they were distracted by their southern neighbors.

 

[Ussnorway]

well done, now put that diplomat to work and get ready for the next 'shit hits the fan' event

 

[Shark7]

Apologies if this disrupts the current discussion, but I have finally disemboweled the Seban Butchers! I would've wiped them off the map, but the war fatigue mechanic caught me right before I was about to land armies on their last planet.
Annoyingly enough, I finally caught up to current (Lv 4) Railguns/Missiles during the war. It definitely helped that they were distracted by their southern neighbors.

One of the best strategies ever, attack when the enemy is busy elsewhere. The forced peace thing is always annoying though. Glad you found a way to to do it.