Refitting to the current threat is definitely the way to go in Stellaris. That said, I kind of hate when unlimited refitting is a thing in these games. Much more interesting in something like Rule the Waves where you just can’t realistically swap out some of the main things, and have to decide whether to build new or keep investing in marginal upgrades for increasingly outmoded ships.
No, I never mix ship sizes, I keep corvettes with corvettes, I never use cruisers or larger ships for swarm, you want ranged fire, if you do so with carriers, they will keep range, so much that they can actually take out starbases without getting shot at. This works well, mixing order types, will always make a mess of things .
It would be nice if the roles worked together in a fleet. Oh well, I will do that from now on. Too bad it doesn’t sync fleet jumps if multiple are selected.
Carriers are still pretty bad unfortunately. A bunch of Battleships with all L slot Neutron Torpedoes or Kinetic Artillery (with the +tracking computer) and a small force (10-20) of L/PD destroyers absolutely dumpsters everything. Once you know what the crisis is you can swap either to full kinetics or neutrons. With one of those titan tracking auras and the tracking positronic AI computers, and two of the +hit accessories you’ll never miss anything but corvettes, and even evade capped corvettes will only dodge maybe half the shots, and get 1-shot by neutron torpedoes.
I’ve messed around with virtually every composition but that one seems pretty definitively the best in my experience.
Edited to add: an XL slot on the battleships is better if you are fighting fewer, stronger ships (stuff that takes multiple neutron torpedoes to destroy, like Fallen Empire ships) or something like a Leviathan. But in most situations two L slots are better.
Would love for them to fix it so ships in the same fleet do what their role says. Swarm ships would charge in, picket ships screen the long range folks, and the line/arty/carrier guys sit back at their desired range.
I remember MoO3 had a similar kind of fleet comp thing.
Hmm. I mostly stick with swarms of smaller ships. I rarely every build the mega ships. I am not sure even how to evaluate the performance of ship types. I figured that lots of little ships beat bigger ones.
Here is my theory which Ill try not to make too confusing.
Take a fleet of 100 small ships that do 100 pts of damage each.
Take a fleet of 10 ships that do 1000 pts each.
Each fleet does 10k DPS.
Small ships have 100 hp, large ships 1000hp.
When a small ship gets hit by 1000 damage, it dies. However, 900 dps is wasted on overkill, so effectively the larger fleet did only 100dps to your small ship, not 1000.
Sure you have to replace ships, but they are cheap ships and fast to build.
I think early in Stellaris’ life cycle corvette swarms were definitely the way to go; high evasion meant they’d outperform a battleship on an even-pip basis. Nowadays you can get tracking boosts on battleships which can mitigate that and I think some L slot weapons will effectively one-shot a corvette which sways things more in their favour. You mention overkill but don’t forget that once a ship is gone you’ve lost that DPS for the remainder of that battle; rebuilding a corvette is indeed quick but not instant.
Anyway, I’ve certainly observed a corvette fleet losing to a roughly equal mixed fleet (since the AI doesn’t really ‘do’ battleship only fleets) enough times to believe you can’t get away with corvettes alone any more. They’re still highly mobile in the strategic sense though so still worth building on that basis.
I’ve largely settled into having a corvette fleet, mixed fleet favouring close/mid tactics and a carrier/artillery fleet on a 1:1:1 ratio as giving the ‘best’ results though, as ever, I feel Stellaris really suffers from the aforementioned ‘furball’ effect. Which makes it near impossible to tell.
Battleships aside, Titans are definitely worth the space just for the buff/debuff they provide, don’t overlook them.
Not even considering the fact that your first volley of neutron torpedoes will greatly outrange the corvettes which will get 1-shot. Sure, you can evade cap them so that only 50% or so of the torpedoes hit, but the battleships have 6 each. There are surprisingly few wasted shots because non-missile damage is dealt when the weapon is fired rather than when the projectile impacts. So all those guys are doing zero total damage. You get 8 corvettes per battleship, but they ought to beat the 5-6 that actually make it into firing range.
Prior to end-game tracking computers and the titan tracking aura there is definitely a window where corvettes can be hard to counter, though.
The AI is unsurprisingly as terrible at designing ships as it is at playing the rest of the game, so unless you are playing some competitive MP match I’d just build whatever you find most aesthetically appealing.
After this many years the AI can’t build ships properly?? I would think that this would be pretty easy to bake into the game - cost/damage analysis and perhaps a racial preference.
The AI doesn’t even bother to make sure they have ships anywhere near the person they are about to declare war on. It doesn’t take distance into account when selecting offensive targets, so it will happily path its main fleets multiple years to circle their targets entire space to reach a hard to access starbase, losing the entire war before their fleet ever arrives in the first system.
The AI can’t do much properly. This is the case in all Paradox games, sadly. Just kinda gotta make your own fun.
Do the AI mods improve things (Glavius, or Starnet)?
Maybe it’s differing expectations, but I’ve been happy with the EU4 AI and feel it’s quite good as far as strategy games go. I’m not just referring to it’s performance/competitiveness, but the game provides a lot of interesting systems for you to interact with the AI. The way alliances form and fall apart feels a lot more organic than other strategy games. You might be natural allies due to a shared rival and that alliance might last a century, but once you start competing over the same strategic objectives then they often fall apart. The fact that the AI works in a consistent manner where this can play out in a more believable/organic manner is pretty impressive, IMO.
Stellaris AI has always been at the bottom of the heap, unfortunately. It’s another victim of the massive overhauls the game has seen, IMO. I have to imagine the economic AI had to be rewritten from scratch with MegaCorp and that has impacts throughout the game. And teaching the AI to design competitive ships is tough in a game where the meta shifts from patch to patch, often in unpredictable ways.
Oh I play EU4 more than Stellaris, though I’ve been holding off for the expansion. And the actual diplomatic AI for EU4 is decent and feels believable which is a claim I can’t make for Stellaris. Even with the diplomacy expansion, diplomatic gameplay still feels inorganic and largely meaningless.
If EU4 had two features - a button to have your army chase another army until they intercept it which can be toggled, and another toggle to give over army stacks to AI control which you could designate to seize unoccupied territory so you could focus on only micro’ing your main force and not be moving around a bunch of 1k armies every 10 seconds or whatever, or another control which might just set them to pursue certain AI armies or to intercept AI armies entering a certain region or something… then I’d love the game pretty unconditionally. But we can always hope for something better even when what we’ve got is pretty good.
I don’t love how micro-tastic the wars get from the early 1600’s on. Early on all that stuff is fine but when you’re trying to conquer 100+ provinces at a go that is an ungodly number of unimportant clicks if the war is extremely lopsided, which they often are.
I swear I end up playing Britain half the time just because you get that free PU over France if you can win the 100 years war and you basically don’t have to manage the occupation stuff any more from a very early point in the game.
And I don’t love that the AI doesn’t know how to use Fort exclusion zones, and it does insane things like run to the opposite side of your empire with half their forces, dividing themselves up and turning what should be a hard fought war into a slaughter.
But compared to the problems the Stellaris AI has, that stuff is trivial.
A couple of Ai’s out there, Glavious in my opinion does very little, but might make the empires a bit more competitive lategame. As for Starnet, its like a rabid dog, it will utterly own you, and keep kicking your ass, however say goodbye to any hopes of some diplomatic game, this is best used as an eternal war thing…
Yeah, it’s definitely not perfect. Can you think of other 4X (using that as shorthand for deep strategy games) that has better AI? That isn’t rhetorical, I’m having a hard time coming up with other games where I feel the AI is better. It’s certainly not the Civilization or Endless Legend/Space franchises, that’s for sure, haha!
Sword of the Stars 1 evolved into one of the best 4x A.I.s I’ve seen in a game. Although there wasn’t great diplomacy, the tactical A.I. was very good, countering your weapons and working their way around you defenses. It could even handle multiple jump mechanisms which Stellaris originally tried to copy and then had to dumb down for the A.I.
Yeah, SOTS1 had some great AI, that’s true! It’s a far simpler game in terms of how much the AI had to learn, but in my opinion that’s smart game design.
I’ve been playing Endless Space 2 & I enjoy it, but it’s not the massive 4X game that I want… but you guys are scaring me away from relearning Stellaris.
I also enjoy Endless Space 2, but picked up Stellaris after the recent expansion & patch. I prefer it to ES2. The exploration, pop management, minor civs, planetary governors, etc. all seem better implemented in Stellaris.
The problems I see with it (weird AI and a lingering feeling that fiddling doesn’t matter) I think it shares with Endless Space 2.
Mostly I think it comes down to whether you like ES2’s civs or if you want to design your own.
Haha, please don’t let me scare you away. I actually haven’t had a chance to play the game yet since Federations released so don’t take any of my thoughts commentary on the state of the game as of today. And if you’re enjoying Endless Space 2, whatever complaints there are about the Stellaris AI would be doubly so for ES2.