So glad we've reinvented the Corvette Swarm meta while trying to "solve" the current one.
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You don't usually build your fleet specifically to deal with one type of enemy though.Good tests, but I gotta say, running 2:1 shields:armor when your enemy is using missiles+ disruptors is a "braindead AI can't design ships" level mistake. Ripping every shield off those battleships in the first test would make them stronger just because of the excess power bonus.
Your point about the problem with converting tracking bonuses to be percentage-based makes sense, although I'd be tempted to normalize the bonus to a bit higher than it is now (perhaps twice as much; +30% if it used to be +15) since the median weapon in the game has way less than 50 or even 45 base tracking (among normally-researchable weapons, only autocannons, small disruptors, flak, and strike craft ever get above 50% tracking). In other words, your current approach not only removes the tracking bonus from big guns, it nerfs tracking across the board - even for small guns that are supposed to be good at it - because nothing starts with 100 tracking so +15% will always be much, much less than +15. By normalizing it upward, tracking bonuses would still be meaningful on smaller guns though not on big guns, the way that evasion bonuses are currently meaningful on small ships though not on big ones. Even at +30% though, the best researchable medium weapon for tracking - the disruptors - would still only gain +10.5 (70% as much as it would under flat +15), which seems like about the most you'd want to nerf medium-weapon tracking.
You don't? I sure do! Harder now with it being so tricky to get military intel high enough (before mid-game) for reports on their ships, but I have absolutely always been a proponent of knowing what I'm fighting and countering it. It's not like refitting takes *that* long.You don't usually build your fleet specifically to deal with one type of enemy though.
Well this thread title says to do exactly that, that XL and L only will crush everything else. Of course I'd build a more rounded fleet with some hangar ships and torpvettes (because PD prioritises strike craft, so they synergise well) accompanying the artillery, but I'd still put 1/3rd to 1/2 shields on them because most enemies are not torpvettes. The point of those tests is to show that "XL and L only" has a glaring weakness, even if you give them free tracking with a Titan.You don't? I sure do! Harder now with it being so tricky to get military intel high enough (before mid-game) for reports on their ships, but I have absolutely always been a proponent of knowing what I'm fighting and countering it. It's not like refitting takes *that* long.
Besides, there's "I don't bother countering enemy builds" and then there's "I build trivially counterable builds and go all surprised pikachu when the enemy tears me a new one using one of the only ~3 viable late-game fleet compositions". Like, at a minimum, run balanced shields and armor if you don't know what you're facing, and seriously consider either running a hangar (for PD and anti-corvette) or running armor-heavy / adding plating (if you've got the good stuff) unless you're deep into repeatables. In this specific situation, even if you don't know that the enemy has missiles and disruptors in particular, you should have known they have a corvette-heavy fleet - by this point in the game your starbases should have a sensor range of at least 5, even if you have no intel at all - and corvettes (with their ability to mass autocannons) are hell on shields even when they aren't skipping them outright. To run a shield-heavy, no-cloud-lightning, no-hangar fleet against a corvette swarm is... well, Stellaris-AI-level design thinking. Actually, even the AI is sometimes better at counter-building than that.
What percentage of fleet cap do you think should be carriers or torpedo corvettes?Well this thread title says to do exactly that, that XL and L only will crush everything else. Of course I'd build a more rounded fleet with some hangar ships and torpvettes (because PD prioritises strike craft, so they synergise well) accompanying the artillery, but I'd still put 1/3rd to 1/2 shields on them because most enemies are not torpvettes. The point of those tests is to show that "XL and L only" has a glaring weakness, even if you give them free tracking with a Titan.
Lately it's been all carrier battleships with spinal mount bows & arty sterns, plus torpvettes, and then artillery battleships with the tracking Titans. Used to do arty battleships plus carrier cruisers with picket computers & short range weapons to screen missiles & shred corvettes, but that was more for the high tracking weapons because strike craft were bugged at the time AFAIK. But the AI is so bad at tech this patch that I only really care about how it performs against FEs and the Crisis at that point. Never played MP.What percentage of fleet cap do you think should be carriers or torpedo corvettes?
I've been running some fleet testing to try changes to tracking and in my baseline testing the artillery battleships straight up annihilated a traditional combined fleet (25% fleet cap per hull type). It performed several times worse than any of the mono fleets did individually, including the terribly performing mono cruiser fleet.
Evasion still got cap at 90% and iirc even 90% evasion corvette still got reliable hit by BB.What about simply boosting evasion more-or-less across the board? The amount of tracking that can be added is pretty tightly limited -- you can only reliably get +25, and that requires a Titan. Give all ships more evasion, so that L and XL weapons have significantly worse DPS even against battleships than the 'equivalent' in medium weaponry. In exchange, they still have the monster alpha.
Evasion still got cap at 90% and iirc even 90% evasion corvette still got reliable hit by BB.
Yes and no; corvettes can still evasion tank pretty well, though you will take some losses. They just don't have the ability to resolve a fight decisively the way a battlewagon line can and (for a variety of reasons) will take more outright losses in combat than a battleship fleet does.
With 75% effective evasion against top-level sensors, if I understand things correctly, kinetics have a zero chance to hit without some kind of targeting boost. Energy weapons, with a baseline accuracy of 90%, do much better with a 15% hit rate. And penetrators have 100% accuracy, so that's 25%. So evasion taking rides a real knife edge and depends a great deal on exactly what the opfor is carrying; even a single AFC or a precog computer can chop a corvettes EHP in half or more.
But corvettes aren't the thing at issue here: the goal is to make Ms more competitive with Ls, and the way to do that while retaining the general structure of weapon sizes and tracking is to shift that balance point for destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, such that an M weapon can hit for full accuracy but an L one only at a substantial penalty. As a bonus, destroyer evasion going higher might address their tendency to die like flies as soon as cruisers and battleships come online.
Auxillary fire control and the titan tracking aura are other ways of making battleships more effective at hitting corvettes. In my testing, even without a titan, the artillery battleships running giga cannon/neutron launchers can kill autocannon/plasma corvettes at about a 1:1 alloys ratio. Torpedo corvettes fare a bit better, but they get slaughtered by any fleet running point defense or strike craft.
I would be careful about increasing destroyer evasion too much, because they would probably be very strong if they could regularly hit the evasion cap (they already can under rare circumstances).
I entirely agree that M slots need some sort of reason to exist, I'm just not sure what an elegant solution would be.
Can someone link or explain why a horde of corvettes doesn't overwhelm battleships? Corvettes have ridiculous levels of evasion, no? Shouldn't that allow them to dodge a lot of the attacks the battleships make on the first attack wave?
Because of how works evasion versus the rest of the stats which increase the chance to hit.
To be simple : even with 90% evasion the enemy can have a crazy high chance to hit your Corvettes. Since battleships X slot has at least 150 range it can easily fire few times before your Corvettes are in range.
Oops, that's what I get for posting on the forum not fully awake. You can definitely put the AFC on anything, but I can't imagine regularly putting it on anything smaller than a cruiser, so it ends up being a straight up free hit chance for bigger ships.I *did* specifically mention the AFC, although that's a bonus that works for everybody (except penetrators) against everything, not just corvettes. But otherwise, yeah. I'm not saying it's necessarily the best option or even one that would fix everything, I just think it's the most trivial to try out and I think it would help. Another option would be to reduce the range disparities between Ms and Ls, probably by scaling down the advanced components increased range. Kinetic Arty and Etorps double up or more the range of any medium weapon with the sole exception of Matter Disintegrators. And MDs happen to be basically the only medium weapon I'd consider running if I had a choice, because they give you baseline L weapon ranges (better than, even) coupled with M slot tracking and huge bonuses to effective DPS against hull and armour, where it matters most.
They're still not as good as KA/ETorps IMO but they are, unlike your other options, not outright terrible in comparison.
Can someone link or explain why a horde of corvettes doesn't overwhelm battleships? Corvettes have ridiculous levels of evasion, no? Shouldn't that allow them to dodge a lot of the attacks the battleships make on the first attack wave?